The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

Liz Jensen
is the author of
Egg Dancing
(longlisted for the Orange Prize),
Ark Baby
(shortlisted for the
Guardian
Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize),
The Paper Eater
,
War Crimes for the Home
(longlisted for the Orange Prize),
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
and most recently,
The Rapture
, which was a TV Book Club Best Read. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.

By the Same Author

Egg Dancing

Ark Baby

The Paper Eater

War Crimes for the Home

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

The Rapture

First published in Great Britain in 2004

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2004 by Liz Jensen

All rights reserved

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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408813584

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For Carsten

with love beyond words

‘When we see the brain we realize that we are, on

one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.’

Paul Broks,
Into the Silent Land

WARNING

I’m not most kids. I’m Louis Drax. Stuff happens to me that shouldn’t happen, like going on a picnic where you drown.

     Just ask my maman what it’s like being the mother of an accident-prone boy and she’ll tell you. No fun. You can’t sleep, wondering where it’s going to end. You see danger everywhere and you think,
Got to protect him, got to protect him
. But sometimes you can’t.

     Maman hated me before she loved me because of the first accident. The first accident was being born. It happened the same way as the emperor Julius Caesar. They stab the lady with a knife till her belly pops, and then they yank you out, all yelling and covered in blood. They thought I wouldn’t make it out in the normal way, see. (Also gross.) Plus they thought she would die from it too, like Julius Caesar’s mum, and they’d have to put our dead bodies in coffins, a big one for her and a kid-size one for me. Or maybe they’d put us both in the same one, a
two-corpse
coffin and blah blah blah. I bet they make them. I bet you can order them from the Internet for mums and boys with a special bond. Being born was gross; even if you live to be a hundred years old, you and your maman don’t get over something like that, but it was just the beginning. I didn’t know that though, and nor did she.

     The second accident was when I was a baby. I was about eight weeks old and I was lying asleep in my cot and suddenly I started getting Cot Death.
Got to protect him, got to protect him
, she went in her head.
Don’t panic. Just call an ambulance
. And they told her how to de-suffocate me till they arrived and they gave me oxygen that left bruises all over my chest. She’s probably still got the photos. She’ll show you if you want, plus the X-rays of my cute little baby ribs, all broken and smashed. Then when I was four I had a fit where I screamed so hard I practically stopped breathing for nine and a half minutes. True story. Not even the Great Houdini could do that and he was an escape artist. He was American. Then when I was six I fell on the tracks of the métro in Lyon. I was 85 per cent electrocuted. That hardly ever happens to anyone, but it happened to me. I survived, but it was practically a miracle. Then I had food poisoning, from stuffing my face with poisoned food. Salmonella and tetanus and botulism and meningitis are just some of the diseases I’ve had, plus others I can’t pronounce but they’re in volume three of the
encyclopédie médicale
, you can read about them, they’re gross.

     —Having a kid like me was a nightmare for her, I tell Gustave. Gustave’s an expert on nightmares because his whole life’s one. —Every day, she was thinking about all the different kinds of danger, and how to keep me safe.

     —You’re better off here, says Gustave. —I was lonely before you came, Young Sir. Stay as long as you want. Keep me company.

     I’m getting used to him, but he still scares me. His whole head’s wrapped in bandages with blood on. If you saw him you’d think he was creepy too; you might even die of fright. But you might tell him things anyway, just like I’m doing. It’s easier if you can’t see someone’s face.

     The thing is, I wasn’t to be trusted. Lose sight of me for a minute and I’d get myself into trouble. Everyone said having a high IQ made it worse not better.

     —They say that cats have nine lives, said Maman, —because their souls cling to their bodies and won’t let go. If you were a cat, Louis, you’d have used up eight of your lives by now. One for each year. We can’t go on like this.

     And Papa and Fat Perez agreed.

     —Who’s Fat Perez? says Gustave.

     Fat Perez was a fat mind-reader who wasn’t any good at mind-reading. Maman and Papa used to pay him to listen to me, and get to the bottom of the mystery.
The Strange Mystery of Louis Drax, the Amazing Accident-Prone Boy
. That’s what Papa always called it when he was turning it into a story. But it wasn’t a funny one. It was deadly serious and it drove Maman to
sheer desperation
.

     Hey, Gustave. Listen to what everyone said. Everyone said that one day I was going to have a big accident, an accident to end all accidents. One day you might look up and see a kid falling from the sky.

     That would be me.

Kids shouldn’t make their maman cry, so that’s why I went to see Fat Perez in Gratte-Ciel on Wednesdays. He lived in an apartment by the Place Frères Lumières. You might not know who the frères Lumières were. The frères Lumières were two brothers who invented the cinema, and there’s a museum about them and a fountain in the square and a market where Maman went shopping for salad and tomatoes and cheese. I hated tomatoes so much I was allergic to them. And she went to the
charcutier
to buy
saucisson sec
that me and Papa secretly called donkey dick. While she was shopping, Fat Perez and me, we talked about blood and stuff.

     —Whatever’s on your mind, it’s OK to talk about, Louis. I’m here to listen.

     Quite often it was vampire bats, because I know a lot about La Planète Bleue and also Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire and dead people like Jacques Cousteau and Adolf Hitler and Jeanne d’Arc and the Wright brothers and different diseases and poisons. The world blood-sucking record for a vampire bat is five litres, it sucks it from a cow’s neck or buttock after paralysing it with spit called
saliva
. I could tell Fat Perez anything I wanted, because it was just between the two of us and it didn’t leave the room. The grosser it was, the more excited he got. His leather chair squeaked.

     I always thought that if he ever stopped being all excited by my blood stories, he could just leave a tape recorder in the room with his voice on it saying Tell Me More every few minutes. Then he could go and watch Cartoon Network and spend the money on sweets.

     —How many euros does it cost per time?

     —That’s a question to ask Maman, he says. —Or Papa.

     —I’m asking you. How many per time?

     —Why’s it important to you?

     —Because maybe I could do what you do. Earn some dosh.

     He smiles his creepy fat smile.

     —Would you like to help people, do you think?

     That makes me laugh.

     —
Help
people? I’d like to sit in a chair and say ‘tell me more’ and get zillions of euros for it per time, that’s what I’d like, it looks like an easy life.

     —Do you feel that you’d like to have an easy life, when you grow up?

     —Stupid question.

     —Why is it stupid, Louis?

     —Because I’m not going to grow up, am I?

     —What makes you think that?

     Does he think I’m a total moron? Does he think I come from the planet Pluto or somewhere humans don’t have brains?

     —Second stupid question.

     —I’m sorry if you think it’s a stupid question Louis. But I’m still interested in your answer, he says, with his fat face. —So. What makes you think you won’t grow up, Louis?

   
Don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t say anything
.

     Fat Perez was my biggest enemy but he never scared me the way Gustave does. Gustave’d scare you too, if you met him. Because underneath the bandages he hasn’t got a face and sometimes he coughs so hard it turns into being sick and sometimes I think I’m making him up just for someone to talk to. But if I am, I don’t know how to stop because if someone’s living in your head, how do you get them out?

     You can’t, is how. You can’t, because that’s where they live.

There are laws and you go to prison if you break them but there are secret rules too, so secret no one ever talks about them. Here’s a secret rule of pet-keeping. If you own a small creature, say a hamster called Mohammed, and he lives for longer than a small rodent’s lifespan, which is two years, then you’re allowed to kill him if you want to, because you’re his owner. This secret rule of pet-keeping has a name, it’s called
Right of Disposal
. You’re allowed to do it with suffocation, or with poison if you have any, say weedkiller. Or you can drop something heavy on him, like volume three of the
encyclopédie médicale
or
Harry Potter et l’Ordre du Phénix
. Just as long as you don’t make a mess.

     Visiting Fat Perez was Papa’s idea, but it was Maman’s headache because she was the one who had to take me there. Papa was busy working up in the clouds, saying
cabin crew
,
fifteen minutes to landing
,
doors to manual
and studying pressure maps and going on a people-skills course because–