The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (29 page)

     —And then?

     —She wouldn’t. She dragged me right to the edge.

     —Why, Louis?

     —Blah blah blah.

     —What was Maman doing, Louis?

     —It’s allowed you know. That’s what Papa didn’t understand.

     —What’s allowed?

     —It’s a secret rule. It’s called Right of Disposal. But then Papa suddenly jumped forward and grabbed us both and pulled her off me and said no, Natalie, never again. And he shouted at me to go to the car and wait there but just when he said that, she gave him a huge push and he wobbled, just like in a cartoon. And blah blah blah.

     —He fell?

     —It could’ve been an accident. I know about accidents. It could’ve been one, you could’ve thought she was trying to help him.

     —But was it an accident, Louis? asks Fat Perez.

     —It might have been. I could’ve thought it was. I could have.

     —What did you do then, Louis? whispers Fat Perez. His voice is cracking up like an old radio that’s disappearing.

     —I did what she wanted, like I always do. She didn’t even need to help me, not this time. It was easy. I’m always doing it. It’s what I do. But it wasn’t her fault.

     —What wasn’t?

     —What I did. Because I did it myself. I chose it, and she says if you make a choice then it isn’t anyone else’s fault. It’s yours, and you mustn’t go making up stories about it to impress people. You have to live with the choice you made, and you mustn’t ever blame anyone else for it.

     —What did you do Louis? he whispers. His voice is far away and maybe mine is too. Suddenly there’s a pain in my chest, like something’s going to burst.

     —I walked backwards. I counted the steps. It was five steps. It was easy. One two three four five. And then I thought there might be a six but there wasn’t a six. Instead of a six, I fell into the water, and I died.

It was at that moment that Louis Drax stopped breathing.

      I awoke abruptly to the sound of a terrible scream. It was Natalie Drax, who had rushed in with Georges Navarra at her heels. It was complete turmoil. At first I couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on; I was in a sort of paralysis, between the sleeping and the waking state, but I could remember everything Louis had said, and was reeling from it. Louis’ eyes were open. Wide open, just like before. I saw Charvillefort rushing off to get some help, and I saw Jacqueline wheel over a respirator. Charvillefort came back with two more nurses and Jacqueline swiftly connected Louis to the machine.

     —We’re losing him, said Jacqueline. Her voice was calm but I could feel the urgency behind it. —I’m calling Vaudin. I can’t get this thing working.

     —No, said Stephanie Charvillefort briskly. —There isn’t time. Pascal can do it. Can’t you, Pascal?

     —I don’t know, I wavered. I felt strangely distanced from the scene, as though I was still partly inside the mind of Louis, in quite another place. Somewhere shadowed and lopsided and oddly cold.

     —Well I do, said Stephanie Charvillefort firmly. And she slapped me hard – wincingly, shockingly hard – across the cheek. Before I even had time to react, she’d slapped me again on the other cheek, with equal force. I cried out in pain and rage, but the physical insult worked: she’d brought me fully back from wherever I had been. At which point instinct took over. Hauling myself off the bed, I went into overdrive. Louis’ lungs had failed, but as soon as I’d clamped the mask to his face and performed a CPR, punching his chest rhythmically to kick-start his heart and lungs, the respirator took over and did its work. I held his wrist and got his pulse, which gradually normalised. Another night-nurse arrived from another ward, along with a porter, and suddenly the bedside was swarming with people.

     —Where’s Natalie? I asked finally. I had sensed her somewhere to my left as we were stabilising Louis, but I no longer felt her presence.

     —Oh God, said Navarra, wheeling round to face the French windows. They were wide open. Outside, dawn was breaking. A pale, smoky pall hung in the air. She’d gone.

     —Go after her, said Lucille flatly. —Now. You have to get her back.

     —I’ll call for back-up, said Charvillefort, stabbing at her mobile. —She won’t get far.

     Marcel Perez was sobbing. Jacqueline patted him on the shoulder and spoke soothingly, as one would to a child. But he wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop. His chest heaved and the tears ran. When he looked up at me – why did he suddenly look up? – I saw raw agony. It was like being shot in the heart at point-blank range. I turned away from his directness. It felt too fatal. Lucille sat quietly next to Louis, holding his hand with a stunned look on her face. Both of them were as pale as air.

     Charvillefort made a quick assessment of the situation. She said Natalie would probably steer clear of any roads, which would make the search more difficult, especially with the choking smoke that was beginning to sweep the landscape. The dawn had risen further, a hectic pink smudged with plumes of pewter gas that wheeled their way up the hillside towards us. Quickly, we agreed to go in separate directions. Stephanie would take a car and follow the road to the village. Georges would go on foot downhill, skirting the
route nationale
, and I would head uphill – also on foot – to the edge of the pine forest.

     A car shot up the drive just as we were setting off, then braked hard in front of us. It was Vaudin. He wound down his window and addressed Charvillefort.

     —I’ve just had a call from the fire service, he called. —We’ve got to evacuate the clinic. Then he looked at me. —What the hell are you still doing here?

     —I’ll tell you later, I called, and began to run.

     I kept stumbling. The rough track that led to the forest rim was littered with stones, gravel, shards of olive branch, thistles, bark. The looming smoke-clouds had recast the landscape so that its landmarks – a stone ruin, a lavender field, a pylon – looked displaced. Tricks of the light that made everything splintered and disjointed. I ran on. Steadily I could feel the line between earth and air blurring, merging the elements into one. There was a moment when I thought I saw a fluttering shape but it was gone so instantly that I immeditely doubted it. I scanned the terrain ahead, hungry for a glimpse of her, a sign that she had passed this way. On the lower horizon I saw the distant shape of Georges Navarra running down the slope in the direction of the olive groves to the west of the
route nationale
, but visibility was worsening, and I knew that soon we would be lost to one another.

     The flank of trees lurked squat and dense before me. Within its heart I imagined a bomb, heat mushrooming outwards. Still there were no flames, but the smoke was slewed across the sky, a low-slung pulse that sucked and spat and breathed filth. Then, in my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a shape flit across the line of the trees a hundred metres ahead of me, then disappear. The blood drummed in my ears and I heard my own breathing: a forced, painful rasp. For a moment, the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

     —Natalie! I yelled. My lungs baulked at the effort and I coughed. The smoke swarmed; thickened with black dust. —Come back!

     The figure reappeared briefly from the line of trees. It was her. Although far away, you could see the outline of her face, like it had been cut from paper: a perfect, shocked oval. The shape and colour of terrible innocence. A mixture of feelings – love, distaste, revulsion, pity – rose in my throat like vomit. There was an eternity to that moment, that see-sawing split-second when adoration clung and then lurched, spilling into chaos, rage, hate, anger: the desire to smash and embrace, love and destroy. Betrayal does that. Forces the clash of belief and disbelief. Shows you how worthless love is, when its object is indifferent, ruthless, no more than a machine for surviving.

     She saw me. Turned. And ran.

     Still dizzy from the temazepam and half-blinded by the sting of smoke, I stumbled after her, keeping my eyes focused on her dress, whose paleness flashed among the tree-trunks like a grotesque moth. A creature that I wanted above all to punish, stub out, be rid of for ever. And yes – save. From herself, from the fire, from my own fury. Reach her, forgive her. Understand. Yes, that ruinous need man has to understand.

     I seemed to be sobbing. Vaguely, I registered the whine of a helicopter but there was nothing to be seen in the sky’s dark swirl and I knew it was pointless to call out. I lunged on, tripping and scraping myself, until I came to the line of trees into which she had disappeared. I was sure I would reach her. She had gambled by heading into the flames. She must have thought she could lose me, or that I would hold back, but she had me wrong. I was set on getting to her no matter how close we came to the inferno. My survival felt irrelevant, a small detail in a world where I was just a futile speck.

     You could see flames now. They shot out from the trees, ribboning across the horizon as though released from a giant canister: a cruel, vital orange. I saw her again, just for a second. She emerged, saw that I was still pursuing her, and was instantly gone, sucked in by the hot forest. Seized by something beyond me, something virulent and wide awake, I stormed into the maw of the heat. The force of it hit my face and made me splutter with pain. To get any closer was suicide, but a kind of madness propelled me on.

     This could not end happily. And yet although every cell in my body told me to turn back then – turn back, save myself, fetch help, let the forest decide her end – I followed her screams and went in. Why couldn’t I leave her there? Why was it that I found myself – by now sobbing hopelessly, my eyes streaming from the smoke – hurtling on like a creature possessed?

     Her screams were one long, high shriek of pain. By the time I reached her, she was a human firework. Her pale dress had turned black and was welded to her body like scorching, textured paint. She spouted flame; it seemed not just to envelop her, but to leap from her. For a second I stood rooted, my eyes fixated on the flaming, mutilated doll that stood before me. She was still screaming, her mouth a wide O of pain. Her whole head was haloed by effervescent flames that darted outwards like shoals of startled fish. Her face, that lovely face. I saw it eaten up, I smelled the stench. I ran towards her, lungeing forward just as she was falling, and caught her burning body in my arms.

     Then, hell.

     Immediately, before I could think what I had done, the fire fused her skin to mine. I tried to cry out but no sound came. I couldn’t shed her. Repelled, and flayed with pain, I hauled her with me across the flaming forest bed. I had no choice.

     I don’t know how far I dragged her, or how long it was before I fell unconscious. You don’t feel your own scorched flesh right away, but you smell it. Our welded bodies – mine still alive, hers perhaps already dead – smelled of charred pork.

—What did she say, at the end? Perez asked me later. —When you reached the stream?

     Because yes, she had spoken. I don’t know how. I thought she was dead. But there came a few words, squeezed out like bile. Her voice tiny and cracked, cooked by the heat.

     —I always saved him, she said. —I never let him die. You have to protect your child. I love my son. I love my son more than anything in the world.

     Her last words before she rolled her scorched eyes to face me. They were blind, boiled in their sockets like white eggs. I remember the need to retch. Holding her foul body in my arms in the muddy water, and turning away to vomit. Then blackness.

You plant a seed thinking it’s love. It’s only when the thing starts putting down roots that you realise it’s not growing the way it should. But by then it’s too late. It has sprouted foliage, blossomed and borne demented fruit.

     What do you do with the sickness in you?

     You can embrace it, make it part of your life. Maybe Pierre Drax tried to do that for a while. But by then there was something else pulling him the other way: the knowledge of what he could have had, what he threw away with Catherine. And the knowledge that his son was in danger. You can run away, to the ends of the earth. Or you can confront your worst nightmare. Maybe that’s what happened on the mountainside that day in June, when the story of Louis Drax had one of its many beginnings.

     A man confronted the truth, and two people paid the price.

I was hospitalised in Cannes with severe burns. When I woke, after three days in Intensive Care, I was in an agony so transcendental that I wondered how I could still be alive, how any human body could bear this much pain. Detective Charvillefort was sitting next to me. Her astonishing eyes looked red, heavy, shocked. I must have seemed like a creature from hell. She told me they taken Natalie’s body – what was left of it – to the morgue. I had been lucky to survive. If I hadn’t stumbled across the stream, if Georges Navarra hadn’t reached me when he did, and dragged me to the field, if the helicopter hadn’t spotted us  ...

     I too would have been burned to a stump.

   
I love my son. More than anything in the world. I never let him die
.

Louis called it Right of Disposal, according to the report that Marcel Perez wrote for the police after Natalie’s death, when he had pieced the fragments together. Louis used to kill his pet hamsters, because he claimed there was a secret set of rules. The rules no one talked about. And under these rules, a pet-owner has the right to kill his pet. If you own it, you control whether it lives or dies. And how. This was knowledge Louis had grown up with because that’s what Natalie believed about her child. His life was property: hers.