The washing line in front of the trees bore a holed sweater, wan tee shirt, encrusted socks and faded boxer-shorts alongside a multi-pocketed, vaguely military pair of trousers, stiff with use, and an Arab burnous whose hood dangled like a head. They hung shamefacedly next to the kids’ togs like those dead crows farmers suspend from barbed-wire fences, stinking and turning slowly to bone. Sarah recalled hanging those same trousers up when he was still in the sixth form, but that was seven years ago. Jamie was twenty-four or twenty-five. It was not her job to remember her stepson’s birthday. Or maybe it was, because Nick never remembered.
Jamie was not visiting. He was staying. Since the girls thought their half-brother was good fun, they were happy. He’d always popped up like that, without warning. This time it was a text message activated only when his father had stood on the chair in the bathroom to check, as he did twice a day. Jamie was not only in the country, and not only in town, he was in a tiny hamlet three kilometres away. Nick and Sarah had to consult a detailed map from a drawer, trying to hide their dismay, their thumping hearts, hoping Jamie had his geography wrong and the hamlet lay at the other end of France or even the world.
‘It’s not in New Caledonia, after all,’ sighed Nick.
‘I don’t believe it, shit,’ Sarah murmured. ‘I was just beginning to relax. This is unbelievable.’ A vague sense of chaos invaded her, the empire’s borders falling to wild hooves.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Nick. ‘He won’t stay long, it’s too remote.’
‘Hooray!’ the girls yelled, when Jamie stepped out of the car an hour later. It had not been easy tracking him down, even in a hamlet. He was dressed in a long earth-brown hooded mantle and carried a huge stained ex-army swag shaped like a sausage; he couldn’t even go round with a rucksack, like everyone else. He had a discreet butterfly tattooed on the back of his neck; Sarah thought it was dirt and tried to brush it off. They laughed. It usually started well, with Jamie.
For the last year, he told them, he’d been part of a Canadian circus without animals. This did not surprise the girls; nothing surprised them about their big brother. They didn’t, however, know he had circus skills, since their father would complain (at bad moments) of his son’s lack of any skills – basic, circus, or otherwise. He was short and wiry with small girlish features, a legacy of his now-plump mother. His hair was still the same, gathered in a plaited knot like those on Germanic tribes described by Tacitus. One of Nick’s colleagues had pointed this out: an Iron Age specialist. Nick had assured him it was an accidental reference.
‘I was a carer,’ Jamie informed them.
‘Of the lions?’
He went pffff, and said: ‘That would’ve been a cinch compared to my job?’
One of the trapeze artists had fallen eighty metres two years ago: he’d swung over the void to meet his performing partner’s firm hands but all he’d grabbed was air, the partner having left a fraction too late. He’d landed the wrong way in the safety net and broken his spine. Jamie had been this trapeze artist’s official carer, running errands, feeding him, washing him, holding the mirror while he shaved, changing him, putting him to bed. The girls were disappointed but their parents were amazed: Jamie had never cared for anyone in his whole life. It was tea-time. They sat around the butcher’s block in the kitchen, enthralled.
Nick nodded. ‘Sounds good to me, Jamie.’
‘It was shit. But we travelled all over the world and that was really agreeable.’
‘Poor guy,’ said Sarah, ‘to go from high trapeze to wheelchair.’
‘Except that he was seriously evil?’
‘Evil,’ Nick sighed, resigned already to Jamie’s high metaphysical colouration.
‘A genius. Like the best and bravest trapeze artist in the whole world, a total perfectionist, always wanting to go that half an inch further? And unfortunately he also happened to be the Antichrist? The accident just made it worse because he couldn’t go anywhere at all and it was like when you married Sarah it didn’t change you one bit.’
His father raised a weary hand. ‘Thank you for that, Jamie.’
‘It didn’t make you worse but it didn’t change anything and I really thought it would? Kind of dilute the dictatorship?’
‘Can’t win ’em all.’
Sarah said she had to give the bedrooms a clean and trotted up the stairs while inwardly shouting abuse. She lay on the bed while the remaining members gave him a guided tour of the house and grounds.
Jamie carried Beans on his back, Alicia and Tammy squabbling over his spare hand. ‘Yeah, it’s fairly phenomenal. I certainly like the fence knocked down like that.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Nick, ‘we’ve the inevitable problem with boars.’
‘As in wild pigs,’ Tammy added, in an eerie imitation of her father.
Jamie shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re the problem for the boars,’ he pointed out. ‘Like, you’re getting in the way of their wildness?’
Nick conceded that Jamie looked better in a beard, despite its gingeriness. It made him look like a musketeer. His exposed ears were small and looked as if they’d been crushed against something: his mother Helena, probably, as she’d never put him down when he was a baby.
‘This is really wild,’ Jamie commented drily, looking at the pool, its crystal-clear waters like pewter in the ebbing light of dusk.
‘Hey, it’s great to see you,’ said Nick, ‘but in fact this isn’t a holiday house. I’m on a paid sabbatical. Sarah and I are working, yuk. We’re going to need quite a bit of help with the kids. So actually it’s good timing, you dropping in like this. Baby Sitters Inc.,’ he added, with a chuckle. ‘Child Minder Corp.’
Miscalculation: Jamie’s face did not fall.
‘Whatever, yeah. I was thinking about families in South America and the extended families thing and how cool they are? And so that kind of fits in. How long are you in residence for?’
‘Erm, nearly five months more.’
Jamie nodded slowly.
‘OK, yeah, that’s a deal,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I like the hills here. I can take the kids up into the hills and have adventures.’
‘Hooray! Hooray for Jamie!’ His seated half-sisters bounced up and down on the sofa.
‘The hills?’ echoed Nick. His face had definitely fallen; he couldn’t help it, the props had slipped away.
‘Or swimming in rivers? I saw this wicked river where you picked me up. This one spot I saw was really wide and deep.’
‘Only suitable in the summer, Jamie.’
He shrugged. He told them about a car crash in Peru involving a llama, with unpleasant details. On his lap was the dried flower with the golden eyelashes that had been nailed to the front door; he’d picked off the petals one by one onto his lap. The girls told him that Jean-Luc had said it was a golden sun, to protect the house and bring good luck. Jamie claimed the flower had fallen off by itself. All that was left by the end was the rustly centre, not like an eyeball or a sun at all.
He threw the petals in the air for Beans to catch. They scattered on the rug.
‘What’s the point of that, Jamie?’ asked Nick, sounding exasperated at last.
‘Your definition of history.’
‘Which one?’
‘The disproof of superstition,’ Jamie sighed, lounging back in the sofa as if he owned it and would not be rising from it for a long time.
Nick and Tammy left the shot-blasted sign on the tree and stacked the remains of the others neatly at the foot, as a subtle gesture of defiance. Then – unusually for him – he took a photograph, not for purposes of juridical evidence but because it looked like an art installation.
He had a splinter in his thumb, from stacking the signs. He tried to press it out as Tammy watched. He also had several splinters in his mind; in the months to come here they would work themselves out, he was sure of it.
They went back into the house. Beans was bouncing a small empty plastic Evian bottle down the stairs and shouting ‘Coco!’ This was because the sound that the plastic bottle made was incredibly like that of a bongo-drum. Jamie had spotted this, after an hour of bong-bong-bonging, and it was then they’d understood why Beans said ‘Coco’ every time she launched the bottle from the top of the stairs. The Congo Bongo Game, Jamie christened it.
He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, retrieving the bottle and taking it up to her over and over for a relaunch. He’d finally relinquished his one set of outrageously dirty and smelly clothes to the washing machine and was temporarily dressed in his father’s scruffiest gear: all-blue denim from Nick’s trendy-lecturer days. The collar rode high on his thin neck and the trousers and sleeves were rolled up at the ankles and wrists. Helena’s four-foot five had roped back whatever tall genes he’d inherited from his father.
He had been assigned the attic to sleep in, at his own suggestion; although it had required a full day of cleaning and sweeping out, laying the dust with sprinkled water and opening the Velux window and rubbing the glass free of the sky’s deposits, he seemed very happy with the arrangement. In a remarkably short time, he was scrubbing the boards.
‘It’s because it’s just for him,’ Nick had said, when Sarah marvelled at the change in her stepson. ‘He’s always pulled his finger out when it’s just for him.’
Jamie had found a spare mattress under one of the kid’s beds, and within two days had accumulated bits and bobs from here and there: a parachute cloth strung across the middle of the vast room, natural sculptures in found olivewood, interesting stones, old chairs with sagging seats, a broken set of drawers retrieved from the back of the goatshed. Nick had succumbed and bought a cheap paraffin heater in St-Maurice, with the claim that ‘it would be useful anyway’, lugging the heavy flagons of fuel into and out of the car and straining his tender elbow tendons. Although they didn’t say it, he and Sarah were amazed at the attic’s transformation: Jamie had turned it into a cosy den by the end of the week. It already smelt of naughty, smoky, sweetish things over the paraffin. All he complained about was the wind whistling in the roof, because it never made a tune.
‘A natural melody,’ Sarah joked.
‘He’s good at building nests,’ Nick said, when Jamie was out. ‘But they’re always in other people’s houses.’
‘We’re not other people,’ Sarah had pointed out. ‘We’re family. We’re blood. At least, I am by proxy.’
Sarah was at her little desk in the bedroom, writing her journal on the laptop. She had instantly minimised the text when Nick appeared so that all he saw was her screen saver of their girls playing on the beach in northern Portugal last year. Today’s entry was about her secret dip in the pool, which she’d managed to interleave while the rest of her family were on a short walk to pick thyme.
The thermometer in the pool had registered sixteen degrees, well below her bearable threshold. Yet she’d done it. It had snatched the breath from her lungs, replacing it with ice, and guillotined her at the neck with its honed blade, but she’d done it. After a few moments her glaciated body, of which she had lost the sensation, had started to glow, and she’d dipped her head under. It was glorious.
She would try to do it every morning, in secret in case the kids followed suit. Before anyone else was up. Slip out of bed as she was always doing for one of the girls. Her private corner of the day. Ten minutes max. Ten lengths.
It steeled her for Jamie, somehow. If she could ritually immerse herself thus, galvanising her body and thus her spirits, she could even cope with Jamie for as long as he was around.
Nick left and her text leapt back. She finished her piece and lay on the bed diagonally for a read. One consolation of Jamie’s presence was that he could occupy the girls, keep an eye on them if they were near the pool. She was reading an absorbing book on Grotius, Hobbes and Locke by an old and brilliant friend, Jennifer Wiles, who couldn’t have children. She was allowing Jennifer’s elegant chapter on the church debate between political and pastoral power to sponge her worries up when there was a sudden howl from downstairs, an unearthly howl of agony and despair that had her out of the door well before the terrible sound was interrupted by the need for its generator to take breath.
Alicia had stamped on the plastic bottle, which, like a broken violin, now refused to reproduce the sound of Coco’s bongos, Congolese or otherwise. Jamie rescued the situation by taking Beans and going outside and whirling her around by the arms, higher and higher, the leather boots turning and turning on the gravel until they’d worn a hole in the earth beneath.
Sarah recalled something she’d read about unsocketing the arms of a child at the shoulders, doing that. Beans squealed with delight, virtually horizontal, the centrifugal force pulling her little arms dead straight; a small shoe flew off, and Sarah smiled anxiously from the door.
‘Supposing he lets go?’ murmured Tammy.
Jamie found something ‘negative’ about the house, something that wanted to be freed, something trapped and in pain.
‘Negative,’ reiterated Nick, flatly.
‘In pain,’ reiterated Sarah, just as flatly.
‘Really kind of needy, yeah?’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have removed the solar symbol,’ said Nick. ‘Protector against the dark forces.’
‘Can’t have it both ways, Mr Rationalist,’ Jamie said, shaking his head.
‘Maybe I was joking.’
‘Hey, a real cracker.’
‘No jokes in a dictatorship,’ said Sarah, with an ironic lift of her eyebrows.
‘That’s what they say, but it’s erroneous,’ Nick declared. ‘Take Stalin. He used jokes to trap people in queues. Someone would crack an anti-Stalin –’
‘Hey, I like this,’ said Jamie, interrupting as usual.
He lifted the fetish mask off its hook and placed it over his own face. His voice sounded deep and hollow behind and it was creepy; it was nothing like him, even though the mask was small and Jamie’s ears stuck out behind. The fact that he was dressed head-to-foot in Nick’s blue denim, familiar from ten or more years back, made it even stranger. The mask, as Jamie jigged up and down, tried to keep its dignity. The girls whooped and fled temporarily into the kitchen.
‘Thanks, Jamie,’ said their mother, raising her eyes to the ceiling.
The mask looked very fed-up, back on its hook. To make up for his tactlessness, Jamie promised to take the kids white-water rafting.
‘That’s a promise, is it?’ said Nick, cheerily.
‘You know me.’
‘Your dad’s togs suit you, Jamie,’ said Sarah, in a half-involuntary flash of cruelty.
Jamie studied the rolled-back, frayed sleeves of the denim jacket that had once been Nick’s tenacious lecturing gear. ‘I’m not really struggling,’ he said, ‘to rip ’em off me.’
Waiting every morning in the woods, on the edge, for the last four days, where a clear view of the washing-line at the side of the house opens between the bushes, he has worn a little circle of presence in the dead leaves.
He’s been arriving early because of what he has noted when working here: the Englishwoman hangs out washing in the mornings. Not every morning, of course, but it seems there is always new washing on the line whenever he comes: the miniature clothes of the girls, especially, and now, on the fourth day, some hippy clothes.
He is kitted out in his old frayed hunting gear, a camouflage of green and brown, military-style, a little tight around his waist because he hasn’t worn it for years. He has waited three hours or more each time, settled among the thick arbutus bushes with their shiny leaves. He’s always loved their little round red fruits, hanging like goolies in the white flowers. The local nickname, among his mates at least: goolie bushes. The fruits are sweet and rough in the mouth and he’s gorged himself. They take two years to ripen. He and his father would help pick them for distilling when he was a kid, and the old folk would say, ‘one is enough’. But Jean-Luc was different.
On the first day he stripped this side of the bush, waiting. The fruit went down as easily as when he was a little boy. Back then, Louis Loubert would hold two against his groin, then squeeze them to pulp and squeal and open his mouth wide in agony: a member of the Maquis in the hands of the SS. Louis was OK, back then. But Jean-Luc was always afraid because the others would say they were going to do it to him and for real, one day, just as an experiment. A medical experiment. So when the fruits ripened he always used to be a bit scared, in case it reminded them, and tried to eat them all up before the others remembered.
On the second day, a gusty day without sun which had him shivering a little, his patience was rewarded: but she looked tiny in the viewfinder, and her face kept being covered by the flapping sheets she was pegging out. He dared not approach nearer. And then he had a brainwave, based on experience: he’s responsible, these days, for much of the washing at home. She would have to collect them. He sniffed the air and judged its humidity. The sky was cloudy, the sun unlikely to break through and the gusts now dying down. Five, six hours?
He would come back in the late afternoon, after working on what was overdue at the Dutch people’s place. There was an arbutus bush not five metres from the washing-line, more to the left and on its own: dangerous, on the very edge, but possible. It was overhung by holm oak branches and still in the shadows. He could darken his face with earth. If she spotted him, he would say he was clearing brush.
This is why, when he does return in the late afternoon, he brings the big curved knife with the twine-bound handle. It belonged to his grandfather: the old handle is smooth and polished, the blade-edge nicked with use but as sharp as a razor. His face is soiled, like a soldier’s. He wouldn’t have minded being a soldier, even if his year of military service was not all fun and games. Cleaning out toilets. Squatting in wet trenches in freezing winds.
She doesn’t appear. The air is cool and damp because there are storms on the coast and the wind is blowing up into the mountains. The girls come out on their own, run about a bit, look at the pool, run into and out of the barn. Then he notices a suspicious-looking character, suddenly, at the side of the house. A hippy. There are lots of them in Valdaron, banging on drums and smoking cannabis and having sex everywhere, just like the old times. They must be the second generation and Jean-Luc hates them. This is a young type, in his twenties, dressed in one of those long Arab coats with a hood. A new wave to replace the ones with long grey hair and creased faces. Maybe he’s a hippy Arab.
He thinks, as he watches the young no-gooder loitering at the side of the house, of Madame Sanissac up at Les Pins, who at the age of eighty-five was stabbed to death during her siesta. A passing hippy did it; in fact, he lived in the next hamlet, the one with all the ruins. He tried to burn her body and the smoke got people running, but he’d gone by then. The firemen took ages to come, it was so remote, and meanwhile the neighbours (all three of them) had a job keeping her blazing body in the bedroom under control, because there was no running water and the well was low and the bucket took ages to creak down and up. The room was black, afterwards; even the beams were scorched so badly they had to be pulled out, in the end. Jean-Luc saw it and wanted to be a fireman. And now Madame Sanissac’s house is the Swiss place, done up to the nines with three bathrooms and a jacuzzi and not even haunted. It takes Jean-Luc half an hour to drive up there, but it’s an easy job, keeping the lawn down on the sit-up mower.
He grips the brush-knife’s handle as the no-gooder joins the girls in the yard. They appear to know him.
Jean-Luc crouches lower as they pass, their voices like twittering bats, except for their hippy friend. The kids might still be getting kidnapped, though. The hippy might have fooled them, given them sweets. You hear a lot about it on the news, these days. Jean-Luc is on full alert, as if the horns are blowing and the dogs are going mad, out on full stretch. They all go into the house.
He waits until it’s almost dark, then makes his way back through the trees to where he’s hidden his mobilette. All this military-style operation excites him; he’s not too dejected. Staking out in his military togs. Better than watching telly with Maman moaning and shrieking upstairs.
He returns the next morning, at dawn, sure of seeing her now. His heart leaps when he sees the phantom shapes of the sheets through the dark trees. And then it begins to rain. Although the rising sun was a red ball and there were rays at the bottom of it, he didn’t think the rain would blow all the way up here, but it does. She might run out and try to rescue the sheets, but she doesn’t. The rain gusts against his face, pattering on the living leaves and the dead leaves. He shivers, beginning to feel the wet reach his skin. He doesn’t want to be ill. He gives up.
It rains on and off all day. He watches the weather on the telly: little golden suns cover the south, the rain-clouds now over the Alps. His heart lifts. During the night he wets his hand and sticks it out between the shutters: a brisk easterly wind. A drying wind. He hears it skittering along the street like small kids.
He’s waiting again behind the leading arbutus bush. From one side of it he can see a wall of white cotton and the door of the house: from the other, he has a view of the swimming pool, the trampled fence around the seed-bed, the half-uprooted cherry tree and the huge black square in the barn wall where the old doors creaked before someone nicked them: Marcel Lagrange, probably.
The side and rear of the house are tall and full of small windows like prison windows, so he has to be careful of his movements, even behind the goolie bush on the wood’s edge. The brush-knife is tucked away safely under the bush’s lower branches, in case he steps on it. The hippy’s trousers and Arab coat are hung next to the sheets. Perhaps they’ve bumped him off.
Half an hour passes, the sun rising up just clear of the trees. The high clouds are the fish-scale type that mean good weather, and the birds are going mad as if he isn’t there. It makes him want to go hunting again, the way he can lose himself, become like a beady-eyed animal or even a plant, watching nothing but the new light growing on the leaves, so slowly he can’t see it move. Every sound as if it’s not accidental. The ants on their business. The rustlings. The freshness. The little red squirrel not even realising he’s there, snuffling away to itself. He hasn’t done this for years. It’s when he’s at his happiest, he realises. His whole problem was being born human. The breeze bringing smells, including a smell of burnt toast.
Something swoops out of the side of the barn and he realises what it is: the swallow. The swallow’s arrived. It’s come back to the same nest ever since he was a boy, exploring the ruins after the hippies had been chased out. It’s a touch early, this year. It must be twenty-five years old, at least.
Once he watched a hedgehog for hours; he kept so still it sniffed his foot, making little grunts and snorts like an old man. He didn’t find it again.
He shifts to release the cramp in his haunches. No one has yet come into the yard. The house stays silent. Usually, the little girls play in the barn or just in front for a while in the morning and the Englishwoman comes in and out to check, but it’s still too early. It is just like waiting for a rabbit or a boar. He raises the throwaway camera to his face and looks through the viewfinder.
He has never taken a photograph in his life, except once when some hikers asked him to, with their own camera. It’s like a gun: you shoot with it. Without killing anything. This is why he’s wearing his fingerless hunting gloves.
He’s surprised this time when the sheets swell in the little eye, look bigger, although not as big as they would in the binoculars hanging round his neck. His father found them in the woods after the war, a German pair still in their leather case, and only used them when out hunting. Apart from a rainbow effect in one eyepiece that surrounds bright objects like coloured fur, they’re in good condition.
He’s holding the camera the wrong way, that’s why everything’s swollen up. The lens is pointing towards him. The view-finder magnifies the view, in that position. He looks again the same wrong way round and amazingly, as if he’s attracted her, the Englishwoman appears in the little rectangle. She has on a bright yellow sweater that makes her look about nineteen. His heart beats just as it did in the hunt. The sheets hide her progress. He waits for her legs to appear below them. Nothing. She disappears behind the sheets and he waits for her legs to show up, her feet. Nothing.
He takes little crouched steps to the other edge of the bush, where he can see the yard in full.
She’s squatting at the edge of the pool, dipping her hand in from the look of it. It’s too far to take a picture. The sheets clap in a sudden gust and she lifts her head towards him. He stays very still. He’s in the shadows, in camouflage.
He waits for her to come back and take down the washing. She stands by the side of the pool hut and takes her glasses off and puts them down next to a lump of coloured cloth. She puts her arms over her ears as if she can’t bear some noise or other. No, she’s taking off her yellow sweater – it comes off over her head, showing her tummy. And then she pulls off the top, too, which is a dark red tee shirt. And then she unbuttons her jeans, from the look of it, and steps out of them. Maybe she’s a nympho and an exhibitionist and knows he’s here: he saw something on the telly recently about people with strange compulsions.
She scratches her back with both hands and leans forward and her bra comes off, dropped on the little heap of clothes by the coloured cloth that he now recognises as a towel. He turns his head away for a moment, feeling guilty and full of sin, although he hasn’t been to church since he was eighteen.
She’s bending down and lifting each knee in turn: her underpants join her bra. She takes her pulse: no, she’s taking off her watch. He has stopped breathing. He starts again. Her body is paler than expected: from this distance it might be covered in a pale body suit as tight as a toreador’s, she might not be nude at all – except for the two brown eyes on her chest and the spot of black fur below her tummy, which he knows smells gamy because, when he was a kid, the others picked up an empty sardine tin they said smelt exactly like Francine Sellier’s pussy.
She hugs herself in the cool air, turning her back on him to show two white uncooked chestnuts of buttock that, even from this distance, surprise him, because they look bigger than when they were inside her jeans.
He’s sweating, giving off a stink from under his old gear, which itself stinks of boar’s fur and smoke. His frog wants to croak under his trousers but he ignores it. Carefully, silently, as he used to do when out hunting, he backs off into the trees and makes his way round, losing sight of her for a few painful moments, to where the wood turns into bracken behind the tumbled wall.
He uses the standing part of the wall to creep even closer, as far behind cover as he can go, to the wild growth near the back of the hut where the builders dumped their sand. It is mostly spurge here, the heavy-headed type that starts off early and before you know it, before you’ve got used to spring, it’s flowering at the height of your belly. He sees his father towering over a clump of spurge and warning him never to break it, never to cut it or he’d blister and burn on its bitter milk. He was about four or five. He misses his father. He doesn’t like crouching in the spurge, he’s fearful of spurge, but it’s good cover, with its heavy toilet-brush heads, its fat stems full of their deadly juice.
A twig cracks underfoot as he shifts his big boots. He keeps very still, crouched, becoming vegetation, a shadow. Tiny black ants crawl over his boot, following each other up one of the laces and then onto his leg. It’s a good thing his trousers are tucked into his thick socks, or they’d crawl inside. He’s forgotten his brush-knife over behind the washing line.
She’s squatting by the pool halfway up along the side, still holding herself with her arms. She’s definitely naked as Eve. He’s so close he can see a red mark on her back where the bra’s strap must have pressed; a mole above the cleft of her back parts. He hopes the water’s pH levels are not too high or too low.
He turns the camera round to take a picture and she shrinks; what he wants is her face, and he only has the side of her face, the breeze moving strands of black hair in front of it. He is only about five metres from her, but she seems very small in the viewfinder. He thought the camera would have enlarged her, her body being the most important object in the picture. But she stays small.
It isn’t like pictures in a magazine, when the person being photographed is always large and clear. He doesn’t press the trigger.
This is the greatest gift he has ever been given in his life. He is like God, seeing what normal people never see. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes and her pale, crouched body slides into view and obliterates everything else; he closes one eye to stop the rainbow blur covering her skin. The German binoculars are so good he can see a vaccination mark on her upper shoulder, a glint of moisture in her eye. That’s sometimes all you can see of an animal, that glint. She’ll get a cold just staying there, he thinks.
And then she stands up, as if hearing his thoughts. She turns towards him and walks along the edge of the pool in his direction, but looking to the side, at the water. The kitten clinging on upside-down between her legs is very black and has a thick coat. He lowers the binoculars and lifts the camera just clear of the spurge heads and sees her swinging into it and presses the trigger. The camera’s little click scares him, sounding very loud. But she doesn’t have the ears of an animal. Nor the nose. The wind, anyway, is very light at the moment and blowing in his direction. He thinks there might have been a flash when he took the picture, like the flash of sun on a gun-barrel that warns the quarry, but she hasn’t reacted.
Her breasts are a lot smaller than in the shiny magazines, where they always look as if they’ve been blown up with a pump until they’re almost exploding; they jiggle up and down as she walks towards his end and then turns her back on him. She crouches down yet again, so that all he can see is the white scuts of her buttocks and the back of her feet pressed against them, a circle of dirt on their heels. He takes another picture, despite there being no face. His hands are shaking so much that, if the camera were a gun, the shot would have missed.
He raises himself slightly to ease the big, swollen frog in his trousers but his foot has gone to sleep and he topples over, scratching his cheek on a dead spurge stem, hard as bamboo.
She doesn’t notice because of the noise she’s making herself, slipping into the pool bit by bit, sighing and gasping with the shock; the high sounds float into his ear like a shared secret, like she’s sharing her secret with him, his ear warming against her lips. He watches her slip into the water, head sticking up above the edge of the pool with a look of pain, both hands raised above the surface until she disappears with a cut-off yelp.
Jean-Luc is happy. He’ll have to wait a few days for the film to be processed – he sent off the camera to the enclosed address – but he’s in no doubt of the triumph of his efforts.
The Englishwoman is like a ghost haunting him in a nice way, and he takes to drawing her in his notepad (the notepad he keeps for his jobs), over and over in blue biro. He draws her special jiggling breasts, the furry kitten clinging on between her legs, her expanding white buttocks released from their jeans. He draws her face crowned with the glittering crown of a beauty queen. He draws arrows to show his love for her, the gush of his ardour sometimes drowning her in seas of biro-squiggles that break the cheap paper of the notepad. Marie, he writes, Marie of the Holy Pool. He draws big fat frogs, croaking in their pools.
Measurements for the Dutch people’s shelves and the Parisians’ watering system and the Germans’ concrete steps into their bathing hut; quantities of compost and grass-seed and liquid feed; algicide and clarifier and shock chlorine; ship-varnish for the Belgian couple’s outside table and lubricating oil for the Danish family’s barbecue set: the history, over several years, of Jean-Luc’s odd-jobbing, all in cash (sometimes not even paid for when some clients’ family crisis takes over), vanishes under these drawings when, because the notepad is full, he runs out of blank pages.
By drawing her, he finds she remains in his head: his queen, his love. Like measurements and quantities and what a client demands in bad French or no French at all.
She smiles at him secretly the whole time. She knew.
He ties the sieve to the baby pram. Bibi and the fish-bone spider are inside the sieve. They’re on the cobweb. One caught, the other in charge.
He decorates the wheels – hiding them, really – with feathers he’s picked up over the years, kept in the box under his bed. He uses the strong glue he bought for mending his boots, so the feathers lie against tiny brown pillows stuck to the rims and spokes of the wheels. Although they no longer move after he’s fixed them with a wire, the wheels still have to be hidden. This is not a pram, he thinks. This is a monument, like the monument to the war dead in front of the church: on which the name of Oncle Fernand has always winked at him, right from when he was a little boy. But never spoken to him like the plaque on the track to Les Fosses, because the monument is not where Oncle Fernand died.
The notepad is full, so all he can do is turn the pages. He can’t draw her on anything else. This is the one and only Bible. He has an urge to draw her on the walls of his room, but the wallpaper is too old and there are hardly any blank parts, so he starts to peel off one strip so that he might draw on the bared plaster, only to find it isn’t bare but painted a sky-blue colour familiar to him from the older people’s houses. He likes this colour. Why did his father hide it?
He begins to strip more of the wallpaper, talking to his love the whole time. She lies on the bed admiring his notepad, stark naked but for her crown.
He ignores the shrieked or moaning demands of his mother through the locked door. It is so pleasurable, peeling the wallpaper slowly so that it won’t tear. Scabs and even large lumps of plaster sometimes come with it; he wishes for more rooms like this. For soon it will be over, as the making of the monument will be over. And it strikes him then, taking a pause to scrunch over the fallen plaster and shout to his mother that he is fast asleep, how like a bird the monument looks, squatting there on the table in its pride of feathers, with its long bare tail ending in a pink hand-grip that he will have to hide too, somehow, in case anyone thinks it is the handle of a toy pram.