My Chocolate Redeemer (12 page)

‘No!' I put out my hand. ‘She mustn't be touched. She's perfect as she is.'

He stretches out a hand as big as a soup plate and tries to pat me on the head.

‘Poor child!'

I have to move pretty bloody sharply to avoid catastrophe. I mean I spent absolutely hours getting it up this morning, getting it moussed, scrunched, dried and really wild – but fixed. This is not easy without Catherine the Great of Finchley around to lend a hand. And here I am faced with the destruction of my morning creation.

I stress
my
creation, for it is mine. Even as I am yours (whoever, wherever you are), for which you cannot expect flowing gratitude, my ever-present, invisible maker who seems to have made me only to leave me in the lurch. However often I call on you, you remain elsewhere, out of reach and out of touch. Omnipotent you may be. Omniscient, too. But hells bells! Can I rely on you?

The black man and I stare at
La Belle Indifférente
.

‘I don't say she can't be raised, or even that she can't be preserved. I'm saying that if you pulled her up now she wouldn't be with us any more. She'd be something else, which means somewhere else. I want her here, where I can stop and look at her as I pass and pay my respects. So I say leave her be, let her rest in peace.'

He considers this proposition gravely and I get the feeling he's surveying me from behind the black curved screen of glass that hides his eyes. Then abruptly he holds out his hand again. ‘I've been for years an inhabitant of the South of France. Almost long enough to call myself a citizen, but not quite.'

I shake his hand. It's warm, like a glove.

‘Bruin,' he says. Or ‘Bane' or ‘Brown'.

Frankly it might also have been something quite different. Boon? or Brain? Or even Bone? Anyway I settled on Brown – and Brown he shall be. Maybe the acoustic within the small concert hall of my head has not been improved by the constant broadcasts of groups like Giuseppe and the Lambs and the heavy metal lot, like Embolism, blasting away on my earphones. Perhaps moving between English and French all the time has also done damage, maybe linguistic lane-switching hurts the hearing centres of the brain.

My Uncle Claude has these pictures from inside the brain, he carries them around in his wallet and pulls them out and makes me look at them. His tomographs, he calls them. They show a blue oval ocean with red islands top and bottom, left and right. ‘These are electron scans of the brain, Bella – here, look at them!' He holds them cupped in his palm because he knows that they frighten me and he is not really supposed to do it. He does it when no one's about. He did it a lot when I was younger and I couldn't understand what he said about things like positrons. His pictures of the secret life of the brain showed that when you weren't being stimulated in
there
the islands were very small, maybe they disappeared altogether. When you hear something exciting the island on the left gets about as big as Madagascar, but if you are dumb, or not hearing properly, it shrinks to the size of the British Isles. The cards are really greasy because he carries them around in his wallet.

He gets really excited by them. They're his equivalent of the yellow baskets they sent down to pick up the wreck of the
Mary Rose
from the ocean floor. I think he's on to something. Because if you can use them on the brains of living people why not on the dead? Think of the day when they exhume a Neanderthal child from a cave floor. They retrieve the little skeleton buried in a foetal position cradling a deer antler and they find a bit of brain tissue still preserved and they run an electron scan and they say, ‘Look, when this child died the cortex glowed violet and tests on living brains show violet means associations with food, so this little creature died thinking of dinner …' And everyone will fall about with excitement and wonder at the cleverness of it all. But the child who was sick and was given an antler to hold, the light that went out – the grief of those who loved it are gone beyond recall and will not show up in the tomographs.

Anyway, according to Uncle Claude's snaps of the cortex, looking sometimes beats listening. When your eyes are open really wide something like a coral reef is formed around the front of your brain. And I am looking really hard at the black man when we shake hands. He is so grim!

‘You have a name, too?'

It's a heavy face, droopy, round, massive; the nose sits there waiting – with its wide wings like a jet plane on a runway, grounded – even the lips are heavy and dragged downwards at the corners under their own weight. Those lips are overweight. Ears are firm flaps of flesh stuck a long way back. Altogether he is as solid as a tree. A black oak darkening to violet. A very beautiful bruise. Plum dark, smooth as caramel! I lick my lips to let out the words.

‘I'm called Bella – Bella Dresseur.'

I rest my pink hand in his black mitt with its long tubular fingers. He beams at me as if the name is an entrancing piece of information.

‘Bella, Bella, Bella! This is delightful. A name quite outside my acquaintance. And you speak such perfect English, if I may say so. My French is non-existent. In my country, in the circles in which I was raised, it was regarded as rather low to speak the language of Molière and Hugo. Can you imagine that? It was our protest against the colonial power.'

There is a curious mixture of styles about Monsieur Brown. He is affable and rather talkative but at the same time he is also somewhat lofty and even haughty. He has a way of cocking his head and nodding wisely as if he can see into your mind and soul, can sum you up with clairvoyant accuracy, as if he knows a great deal about people and ‘reads' them easily.

‘I'm half English. French father, English mother.'

He clasps his hands delightedly. ‘A mixture. Then you will understand. My country is a linguistic record of our conquerors. The Wouff speak some English, a gesture of defiance, since the French took over from the English as our masters and we detested them. The Kanga, naturally speak French like – shall we say like natives? – not because they felt any more kindly towards the French but because the Wouff speak English. And the Ite, well, what would you expect of the Ite? They speak French and English and a smattering of Portuguese picked up in their cocoa dealings. Of course, we all speak our own languages, sometimes numbering five or six different types. Slavery is a fine language school.'

‘But you are, strictly speaking, an African.'

He laughs, a sound of water draining. ‘Bless you, my dear. African? What's that? We didn't know we were anything but ourselves, until you came along and named us. Cape Hottentots, Congo pygmies, Wouff, Kanga, Ite. We had our own names for ourselves until the strangers came and declared, “Let there be Africans” … and there we were! We didn't even consider ourselves black – or even brown, until you told us so.'

‘I'm sorry.' The moment that's out it sounds so silly I laugh. ‘No, never mind. I didn't mean to say I'm sorry. How could I be?'

‘You can feel sorry, if you like.' He is amused. ‘I tell you what – I forgive you! How's that?'

He clasps his hands again, though this time less out of delight than in a kind of summons, as if he expects retainers to come bounding out of the air in answer to his command. When no one comes he starts walking slowly along the lakeside as if it really doesn't matter and it seems churlish not to walk some of the way with him. And so we come to the jetty.

‘I had thought of hiring a rocket boat and taking a leisurely tour of the water, with views of the noble Priory,' says Monsieur Brown, ‘but this may prove difficult.'

A rocket boat? At first this rather floors me. But then I get his drift. The boats the kids use are made of two white metal cylinders which look a bit like missiles. And I take the hint. What he wants is for me to arrange the booking because his French isn't good enough. I speak to old Leclerc the boatman, who pulls one of the boats hard up against the rubber tyres of the jetty.

‘It's called a pedal boat. You sit in it and pedal, as if you were driving a bicycle on the water.'

‘You are a poet,' says Monsieur Brown gratefully. ‘Why do you laugh?'

‘After years in the Midi, I'm surprised you haven't seen one of these before.'

He immediately lifts his chin and stares at the sky in his haughty way. ‘We kept ourselves much to ourselves. We did not mix. Or venture out very often.'

‘Why not?'

‘It was not appropriate. Unpleasant characters lurked as well as honest admirers. One was liable to be accosted, not always for the best of reasons.' He sighed. ‘Jealousy!' He shakes his head and the dark curve of his sunglasses proudly throws back the sun. ‘Shall I step aboard?'

We both stare at his brilliant white shoes. Doeskin, I guess, with golden clasps at the ends of the laces. Without a word he bends down and removes his shoes and socks. Something happens when he takes off his shoes – but I can't put my finger on it. His socks he stuffs into his pockets. He knots the laces and hangs the shoes around his neck and old Leclerc the boatman, with his huge belly and mud-brown skin, hands him down into the boat. Monsieur Brown looks vaguely at the pedals.

‘Is this the engine?'

‘Put your feet on the pedals. Really it's just like a bicycle. That's the way, first your left and then your right.'

He stares admiringly at the creamy, churning wake flowing behind the boat. ‘This is the most enormous fun and so healthy, I imagine.' He is pedalling furiously.

‘Please, Monsieur, wait until I cast off!' barks old Leclerc. Then he turns to me and says in French, ‘Really, Bella, he doesn't know that he must steer the boat. Show him the rudder. Or better still, go yourself and work the tiller. He will only threaten life and limb otherwise. This one is really more accustomed to swinging through the trees.' And with that the irritable old lizard hands me down into the boat and pushes us off from the jetty.

‘How delightful,' Monsieur Brown beams. ‘You're coming sailing with me? We'll take a turn upon the waters.'

‘I'm going to drive,' I say.

Our turn upon the waters lasts a couple of hours and takes us in a series of shallow circles across the mouth of the little bay sheltered by the headland. We move in and out among the skiers and windsurfers and around the moored yachts awaiting their weekend owners. Looking back across the thick green water I see again how the site of the Priory had been wonderfully well chosen for dignity, concealment and defence, tucked into the shoulder of the hill with the mountains rising behind it, choked with that tough wiry alpine timber that flourishes in these parts. And beyond the nearer mountains, bigger mountains still. Monsieur Brown has a particular eye for the evidences of battles and he points excitedly to the forts, towers and castles to be glimpsed here and there upon the nearer shoreline.

‘This is fighting country?'

‘I suppose so. In fact all this country you see around you here, until about the middle of the last century, actually belonged to Italy and not to France at all. Then during the last war these mountains were full of Resistance people fighting the Germans.'

He waves a large hand. ‘This country was owned only by Italy? Why, my country has had so many owners we lost count. We were pillaged by the Arab slavers, attacked by the Portuguese who shot their way across Africa crazy with dreams about golden cities. We were colonised by the French, sold to the Dutch, lost to the English and they, it is said, returned us to the French in the hopes that this would over-extend their forces, and their empire in Africa might collapse. It is said by others we were returned simply because the English couldn't think what to do with such a small, poor country. Certainly the French did not know what to do with us, so they maintained a loose association before and after independence, believing that they might as well do so in case somebody stepped in. I speak of the days before we had anything, only our cattle and our palm-nut trees. Both those products were dear to our hearts. Oh yes, I speak of a time when dear Uncle Richard, or poor Dickie as he was known far and wide, was leader of our first independent government. May his souls rest in peace.'

‘Souls? How many did he have?'

‘Three, of course. Every man has three souls. There is the blood soul transmitted by the female, which is also the voice, character and spirit of the clan. Then there is the male soul and finally the heavenly soul.'

The three fingers Monsieur Brown holds up to illustrate the Trinity lie like black bars across the sun, their shadows resting on my knee. They really are the strangest fingers, large, tubular and terribly regular. From base to tip they do not taper in the slightest. He is clearly very pleased that I have noticed because he holds up all his ten fingers to the sun and the bars imprison me entirely.

‘Curious, no? Each of the fingers has the same width all the way up and down. Result: I cannot wear a ring. It falls off. This might seem a small thing but in a Head of State it has profound consequences. Our people are in the habit of seizing the hand that steers the ship of state and kissing it. Some are superstitious and would run from the naked hand. For this reason I was made to wear gloves on formal occasions and when pressing the flesh, taking as my model in this the present Queen of England. But, into my gloves were built strategic knobs and protuberances which, to the touch of the uncomprehending, felt like rings. Ah yes, it is very moving to observe the strong need of simple souls for illusion.'

‘Yes,' I say, ‘and very sad.'

‘Sad?' He is amazed. ‘My dear Miss Bella, I can assure you it is not sad – it is essential!'

‘Why? In order to deceive them even further? To make fools of them and laugh at them behind your hand because you know so much more than them?'

It's a mistake to get emotional. It brings on the floods of tears. It doesn't help to weep in a paddle boat. Among other things, it interferes with the essential knee action. To his credit, Monsieur Brown pretends to notice nothing of my distress, and boy am I distressed! He unfolds a huge creamy handkerchief from his pocket with a flap and hands it to me and then, squinting into the sun, he continues as if nothing could be more natural than to be paddling barefoot across a lake with a weeping teenager by your side.