The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2 page)

     Actually I don’t know why. I don’t know what a people-skills course is.

     Fat Perez’s apartment was on the rue Malesherbes in Gratte-Ciel. First you rang the bell and he buzzed you in and there was a stink of
bouillabaisse
on the way to the lift, or sometimes green beans, and you had to go up four floors in a creaky old lift, and you needed to pee every time you got in. Fat Perez said it was about feeling trapped.

     —You suffer from mild claustrophobia, he says. —It’s not abnormal, it happens to lots of kids and some grown-ups too, this need to relieve your bladder in confined spaces. Just try to hold on.

     But every Wednesday I still had to rush to pee as soon as we were in Fat Perez’s creepy apartment. The bladder is like a balloon. It’s a
muscular bag
, but it pops if you hold on too long, trust me. Before I flushed the toilet I sometimes went out and put my ear to the door of his living room to hear what they were saying about me. Sometimes they’d be arguing, like they were married. But I could never hear the words properly, even using the glass he keeps his toothbrush in that’s always got gross green gunk at the bottom.

     If you pay someone, they shouldn’t argue with you.

     When I came out, she’d say, See you later, Louis darling, I’ll do my shopping. And then she’d leave so that me and Fat Perez could have our little conversation that cost a whole lot of euros from the cash machine that came from Papa being in the cockpit. Sometimes the stewardess brings him coffee while he is flying. Or sometimes tea but never beer or cognac.

     —How’s life been treating you then, Louis? goes Fat Perez.

     —Papa could get sacked from Air France if he drank beer or cognac.

     Fat Perez is old, probably forty, and he has a big fat face like a baby. If you had a pin you could burst it, and yellow gob would splatter out.

     —Yes. I believe that’s true. Or any alcoholic drink for that matter. They have strict rules for pilots, says Fat Perez. —Now my question, Louis.

     Question One is always the question about
how life is treating me
. But sometimes he doesn’t ask it, he just waits for me to start but that never works because of the secret rule, called Don’t Say Anything, so we just sit there till he can’t stand it any longer. I’m much more patient than Fat Perez, because five minutes is the longest he can do before his chair squeaks, and he doesn’t know the secret rule because I invented it. When he asks me Question One, if I’m not playing Don’t Say Anything, I might tell him Everything’s perfect, thank you, Monsieur Perez. Is your diet going well? Or I might make up a story about school, about fights and stuff. Sometimes there’s a real thing that happened to someone else, but I tell him it was me. He’s such a sucker, because he always believes me or if he doesn’t, he pretends to. Pretending makes him even more of a sucker. It makes him a double sucker. Watch this.

     —Today I got attacked ultra-violently, I go.

   
Squeak
. —Tell me more.

     —In Carpentry. I was making this spiral staircase out of balsa wood, a scaled-down model. Then along came the bullies, eight of them, saying Wacko Boy, Wacko Boy, Wacko Boy. They were all carrying hammers, but one of them, the biggest bully, he had a fretsaw too. He grabbed me by the neck and forced my head into the vice. And then they all got their hammers and started bashing nails into my skull.

     —Ouch, says Fat Perez.
Squeak
.

     What a creep. What a sucker. We don’t even have Carpentry, that’s from the old days when Papa was at school. We have IT instead, that’s much more useful because you can learn to be a hacker.

     —It hurt like hell. And he was just about to saw my head off when the teacher came along. Monsieur Zidane. He’s a football champion too. But the worst thing was, it was me he punished. True story.

     —Why did he punish you, and not the bullies? asks Fat Perez. —Out of interest.

     —Cos bullies always win, and cos my blood made a mess. Football champions don’t like clearing up other people’s messes, when they’ve won zillions of trophies and the World Cup. When I got my head out of the vice, I left a trail of blood all down the corridor and into the toilets. Green blood. That pissed him off.

     —Why green?

     —Because I have leukaemia, and the chemotherapy turns your blood green. Didn’t you know that? I thought you were trained.

     —Green blood. Leukaemia. Fascinating! Tell me more, he goes.
Squeak
.

     He should be called Monsieur Tell Me More instead of Fat Perez. Or Monsieur Stupid Creep Sucker Arsehole.

     Anyway I can say anything I want, because all feelings are allowed. Children should feel free to express their feelings even if they are negative. The world is a safe place, blah blah blah.

     Ha ha, only joking.

Now pay attention, Fat Perez. My turn to ask questions.

     Question One: Does my mum visit you on her own, when I’m at school?

     Question Two: When she’s telling you things about her and my papa, does your chair squeak?

     Question Three: Afterwards, do you sex each other?

     And if he was there when I asked that, his chair would go:
Squeak, squeak, squeak
. And if Gustave was there he’d say:
Steady on, Young Sir. Don’t waste energy. Keep your eye on the ball.

—We’re going to do something wonderful this weekend, she says. —For our birthday treat.

     We’ve got almost the same birthday, see, just like we nearly had the same death-day when I was born. My birthday is on 7 April, just two days after hers, so we’re sort of twins her and me, we need each other, we’d die without each other. So we celebrate them together, on the day in between. I’m nine, and she’s forty, which is called The Big Four-Oh. Papa comes down from Paris, where he sort of lives now, with his evil mother called Lucille, and I get lots of presents, and one of them’s a new hamster. He’s called Mohammed, just like the last one, and he’ll live in the same cage and poo in the same jam jar as the last Mohammed. I always call them Mohammed because it’s a good name for a hamster, Papa says it’s a dynasty.

     Mohammed the Third came with a book called
How to Look After Your Small Rodent
.

     —Let’s hope this one lasts a bit longer, said Papa. —You can take him with you to Paris, when you come to see me and Mamie.

     But Maman gave him a funny look because Paris is a bad place.

     He’s a pale hamster, his fur’s paler than the last one and his eyes aren’t black, they’re dark red, like they’re bulging with blood. Maybe because he’s scared. The Mohammeds are always scared till they’ve spent a week in their cage and started to learn the secret rules of pet-keeping. Papa calls their cage Alcatraz, which is a film about a prison where they escaped and blah blah blah.

     For Maman’s birthday present, I gave her some perfume called Aura that totally reeked, it was worse than cat pee and a dead rat. Papa bought it at the airport for me to give her. He gets a discount. So it was a present from me but I didn’t choose it and I didn’t pay for it and I didn’t get the discount, I just had the thought.

     —What a nice thought, said Maman, when she sprayed it behind her ears, and she hugged me and hugged me and kissed me and kissed me, and I could hardly breathe I was coughing so much from it.

     It’s the thought that counts.

     In a year’s time I will be The Big One-Oh.

     I didn’t tell her I didn’t actually have the thought, even. I’d forgotten it was her birthday because I was so excited about mine and getting Mohammed the Third. Papa reminded me on the phone and told me to make a card but I was doing a Lego model of a rocket-launcher plus space capsule and I forgot about the card so in the end I just signed Papa’s when he came in his new car that’s a Volkswagen Passat. I used black wax crayon, which is for vampire bats and death stuff and the swastika.

     My maman’s very fragile like glass because her life’s been very hard, Papa says. That’s why she gets headaches and she cries and sometimes screams at me and then says sorry and cries more and hugs me and hugs me and kisses me and kisses me. But Papa’s not fragile. He’s one of the strongest men in the world. If you met him, he might punch you in the face and give you a bad headache called concussion. He’s good at hitting, he could’ve been a boxer but he wouldn’t ever fight dirty, like the man who killed the Great Houdini by punching him in the stomach before he got his muscles ready. Papa works on his muscles at the gym; Pectoral and Abdominal are just two of them but he’s got others too, more than most dads. He could be a Killing Machine if he did the training. He just hasn’t got time to do the training, that’s all. He’s too busy flying aeroplanes. It’s a desk job, he says. The cockpit is a glorified desk. It’s a frustrating life, not as glamorous as you think,
mon petit loup
.

     Plus you have to be careful about how you drink beer and cognac, you have to do it in secret because nobody’s allowed to know, especially if you’ve been drinking more ever since Disneyland Resort Paris and you’ve gone all weird and angry with your wife and your son who are
innocent victims of your frustration and shouldn’t be blamed for things that aren’t their fault because they’re no one’s fault but your own and you need to face up to it.

     —We’re all going away for the weekend, says Maman.—Out of Lyon, into the countryside. We’ll go for a lovely spring picnic down in the Auvergne, you and me and Papa, we’ll be a family again.

     All smiley with lipstick that’s pink.

     Papa used to fly on international routes but now he just flies domestically. It’s better to fly domestically because that way you don’t jeopardise your family life, that’s the most precious thing in the world. The birthday card I got, it said: To Our Darling Son. And the one him and me gave her, it said: To a Wonderful Mother. When she read it she did something sideways and twitchy with her mouth and she looked at Papa with a weird face and she said, I suppose Lucille chose this? And she put it next to the card from her maman who sent me one too but I’ve never met her cos Guadeloupe is far away where they grow mangoes and exotic fruit and blah blah blah.

     —There’s a wild flower up there, you can find it in the mountains, near Ponteyrol, she says. —It’s called Spring Glory and it flowers in April. We can pick some.

     —What for?

     —To put in a vase. And to give to people, she says—Friends. And she smiles again.

     Maman’s friends keep changing. They keep changing because one day they have a Major Disagreement, and the Major Disagreement is always about me and she has to fire them because she’s on my side, defending me from spiteful people who ask mean questions and say I’m Wacko Boy. That’s what mums are for but it’s very Isolating. My papa has colleagues. They’re other Air France pilots and beautiful stewardesses from other airlines that are rival airlines. And maybe people from the gym. But I bet they think flowers suck. I bet they’ve never heard of Spring Glory. I’ve never heard of Spring Glory. Have you heard of Spring Glory?

     Oh yeah? What colour is it then?

     See? No one’s heard of it. She made it up, to get us out of the apartment. She does that sometimes because she gets all cooped up. Mothers need air and space and freedom. They’re like birds, if you keep them in a cage they go mad. It isn’t just dads that need to fly. Plus they’ve been arguing on the phone.

     —All your fault!

     —My fault? Did you say
my
fault?

     And she’s trying to make everything all right again. That’s what women do.
They do Emotional Work
. If they don’t do Emotional Work he might stay away for ever and drink beer and cognac in bars and plot how to destroy our family with his evil mother called Lucille, who sent me a birthday card with fifty euros in it and a photo of her and Papa when he was a boy with their dog called Youqui who got run over by a tractor. His legs were paralysed so they had to do Mercy Killing. That’s a bit like Right of Disposal but the rules are less fun.

     —Now let’s see, goes Maman. —I’ve packed the suitcase. We’re spending Saturday night in a hotel near Vichy, then we’ll drive back to Lyon on Sunday night. Papa’s got the whole weekend off, so we’re having a bit of a treat. Now, picnic hamper, thermos  ...

     The picnic things all look brand new, maybe it’s part of Emotional Work. I’ve never seen this stuff before, plastic plates and cups and knives and forks, because we’ve never gone on a picnic before. I’ve been on picnics, but not with them. With school. On school trips. If you drop litter you have to go back and pick it up. The teachers get you to sing stupid songs and on the way back, someone pukes in the coach. I see what’s in the hamper when she puts it in the car boot. I lift the lid of the freezer-box and there’s the food, all wrapped in cling film that’s dangerous for children because if you stretch it over your face you look cool like a mega-violent criminal but then you suffocate and die. There’s
pâté
and
saucisson sec
secretly called donkey dick, and Camembert and grapes and a birthday cake from Pâtisserie Charles. Papa comes and looks too.