Sex and Stravinsky (9 page)

School isn’t actually all that bad because Maggs and Mattie’s bubbly blonde twins are quite good fun and they right away pull up an extra chair for Zoe at their work table. Then they sportingly shout, ‘No room! No room!’ when Sadie tries to squeeze in, because their dad has got them an abridged CD of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, in English, to prepare them for their hosting duties, so they know ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’ off by heart.

It’s only at home time, just when the five of them have hatched this plan to go out together, that Véronique barges in and pulls Zoe off and marches her to a bus stop. Then the bus carries them all the way back to the conifer house, where nobody is at home.

After that, Véronique spends about two hours locked in the bathroom, with wafts of stinky bath-oil smells coming from under the door. Then, once she’s all dolled and spiked up, with lots of make-up, and this really tight skirt that’s making the tops of her thighs squeak together when she walks, and shoes with wobbly high heels, she gets both of them to walk back to the bus stop. All the way, she’s having to stop and tug at the skirt, because it keeps on riding up her bum.

In the town centre, they meet up with three of Véronique’s horrible scary friends, who all stare at Zoe and roll their eyes as if she was either a complete freak or else somebody’s pain-in-the-arse baby sister who’s insisted on tagging along.

‘
J’ai dû l’amener avec moi
,’ Véronique says rudely, without even making any introductions.

They spend the next hour in McDonald’s, mainly in the Ladies’, where they glam up and spike their hair up some more, before starting on Zoe’s appearance, completely ignoring her protestations. They stuff loo paper into her treble-A bra, and stick lots of blusher and eyeliner on her face and then they try to straighten her hair with mousse. Meanwhile, the slimmest of them has helped herself to Zoe’s Moschino jacket, though it’s a bit tight for her under the arms and it’s making a stretchy crease all along the back, below her shoulder blades. The girl just dives out of the way each time Zoe tries to grab it back and all of them have a good laugh.

Then they go to a vodka bar, where they do lots of under-age drinking before going on to this revolting basement club down some broken stone steps, where they smoke like mad and drink some pink alcoholic stuff that comes in cone-shaped glasses. After that they get very pushy and loud, and they start giving grown-up men the come-on.

Some of the men come over and sit down at their table and, suddenly, thank God, they’re all gone – but still with Zoe’s Moschino jacket. Even so, it’s a little while before Zoe realises she’s been abandoned for the evening. She’s been sitting there alone until this lechy guy comes up and she can’t understand what he’s saying, so all she can think to do is to flee back to McDonald’s and seek shelter under the big yellow M. She heads for the Ladies’ and washes her face and drags a comb through her hair. Then she finds the bus stop and heads back to the conifer house – though she hasn’t even got a front-door key in the event of no one being at home.

It’s really hard to see where the bus is going now that the sun has gone down and the distances between the stops are getting longer and longer. She rings the bell suddenly, but it turns out she’s already gone too far. She’s only just begun to realise where she is, once the bus is bowling alongside the woodland at quite a lick. Cold and scared, Zoe remembers the map which is still inside her backpack. She spreads it out on the verge under the light of the bus-stop lamp and, sure enough, there is the housing development, there the street, winding its way more or less against the leftmost edge of the woodland. And here must be exactly where she finds herself standing now. There’s a dotted line showing a not very long footpath going through the wood that will take her right into the back end of the housing development.

Zoe sighs with relief. She’s thinking Maggs was so right when she said that Caroline was brilliant – especially for getting her the maps. And there’s the little torch as well, in case it gets darker along the path. For the moment, the bus-stop lamp is casting quite a bit of reassuring light as she heads off among the trees.

It’s not long, of course, before the woods get seriously dark and the light from the little torch doesn’t spread very far in the circumstances, though a couple of times it stops her from tripping over tree roots and falling down rabbit holes. But the walk is surely taking her much too long – like about an hour, maybe? She begins to realise that she must have got it wrong, because by now she should be seeing the lights from the housing development. In fact she should have managed to walk the distance twice over, whereas all that’s happening is it’s getting darker and darker and, every now and again, there’s a scary sort of night noise that’s like somewhere in the woods there’s an animal murdering another animal. Well, that’s if it’s not the hooded axe-man having a go at a human baby. Oh my God.

And she’s no sooner begun to think these thoughts than she can hear kind of heavy-breathing noises following her and she’s much too scared to turn round and look, so she tries to stop breathing for a bit to see if it’s coming from herself. Then there’s something brushing against her leg, and she nearly has heart failure, but all of a sudden she can see that it’s just a dog.

It’s a lovely, waggy-tail, chunky Labrador and it’s very pleased to be meeting her, because it’s sniffing her like mad, and it jumps up and does sloppy kisses on her face. So they sit down together for a minute while she strokes its ears. It clambers all over her, because it seems quite young and bouncy, and it’s soon pestering for them to get up and get going. Or maybe it thinks she’s going to start throwing sticks for it in the dark?

Meanwhile Zoe’s shone a light onto its collar and, as well as seeing that its coat is chocolate brown, she’s noticed that it’s got a phone number and its name on a metal strip. ‘Mimi’! So no wonder it’s being so licky and friendly, because, by now, she must stink of the conifer house, all mixed up with the smell of Maman’s Gitanes. Zoe is so relieved that she’s practically crying with joy and, on top of everything, she’s extra pleased because the dog is a girl.

‘You’re a girl dog,’ she says, and she gives the dog a big hug. Then she follows it, because she’s sure that it’s going to lead her straight back to the house.

But the dog doesn’t take her to the dwarf-conifer house, though they eventually reach a bit of a clearing where she can see a glimmery sort of light. It’s not like electric light at all, and it’s coming from a small wooden hut, which has surely got to be one of the ‘forest hats’ that she’s noticed on the map. Scuffly noises are coming from inside, along with a kind of slurred, drunk-man speech.

The dog trots right up to the hut and scrapes a paw on the wood, but nobody inside seems to hear it. Zoe hesitates, before she draws close up and peers in cautiously at the window, where the scene that meets her eyes is a bit like Pap Meets the Angel of Death in
Huckleberry Finn
, because a thick-set man is wrestling with a boy, and the man is obviously drunk. He’s trying to punch the boy in the face, but all he does is knock over a stool, while a spirit lamp on a small rough table wobbles and rights itself. In the light of the lamp, Zoe can see two empty brandy bottles and a tempting little still life with two apples and a heel of bread, and a clasp knife, and a wedge of cheese.

The man, having lunged at the boy, has lost his balance and fallen to the ground, where he goes very quiet within seconds – in fact, he subsides so fast that she can hardly believe it, but it looks as if he’s fallen asleep. Soon she can even hear the rhythm of his loud snores. The boy rolls him gently on to a sleeping bag and takes off his boots. Then he covers the man with a coat.

After that he turns round. Zoe can see that the boy is tall and that he’s got short, very curly brown hair. It’s slightly chestnut hair, a bit like hers, and he’s even got the same kind of freckles. Only, right now, he’s looking anything but merry.

Then he steps outside to greet the dog and he looks to the left, and sees her.

‘
Je m’appelle Zoe Silver
,’ she says quickly. ‘
Je suis
– um – lost.’ Then she says, ‘
Perdue
?’ and the boy holds out his hand.

‘
Je m’appelle Gérard
,’ he says. ‘Good night. You have hunger?’

‘
Oui
,’ she says, nodding vigorously. ‘I’m actually starving.’

So he goes back inside the hut and gets the bread and cheese and the apples. They seat themselves side by side on a log and munch in silence.

Then he says, ‘
Ne t’inquiète-pas
. I can –
t’accompagner
–
à la
– house? Yes? It is
très facile
.’

‘Thank you,’ she says.

He doesn’t say much on the walk back to the house, except that twice he says his father is ‘
triste
’.

Then he says, ‘My father, he is
ne va pas bien
.’ Meanwhile he’s got a much more effective torch than Zoe’s inadequate effort and he’s carrying a stout stick. ‘There is sometimes
les sangliers
,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘Pig?’ he says, so that Zoe doesn’t find out until much later that there are wild boar in the woods, because she’s envisaging the odd friendly Gloucester Old Spot pursuing his cultural heritage as he roots for those Gallic truffles that Caroline’s told her about.

And when they finally get to the house, it’s plunged in darkness. And it’s locked, because by now it’s really late, but Gérard indicates that she should wait alongside the back door with Mimi, while he shins up the drainpipe that gives on to the window of his bedroom. After that, he tiptoes downstairs and opens the door to let her in. The only thing is, she’s a bit surprised to see that he’s not only clutching the T-shirt that says ‘Zizou’, but he’s got
Ballet Class
under his arm.

‘I can read this book?’ he says politely. Then he says, ‘Since tomorrow? OK?’

‘OK,’ Zoe says and the Tall Merry Fellow does a gracious little almost-bow.

‘Visit with me tomorrow,’ he says and he indicates the pathway back towards the forest hat.

Then he’s gone and she creeps, mouse-quiet, into her little boxroom, where she falls asleep, except that, next morning, Véronique has obviously told her mother that Zoe gave her the slip the previous night. So Maman is going ‘
Rant-rant-blah-blah-l’imbécile
’ all the way along the stop-start-lurch-puke route to the tarmac playground, from which – once Véronique’s back is safely turned, and once she has got Maggs and Mattie on side to tell the teacher she’s got ‘
la grippe
’ – Zoe walks straight to the stop where the bus will take her back to Gérard, and the forest hat, and Mimi, and the
très triste
dad, which is where she means to play hookey for the first time in her life.

Chapter Three

Hattie

Hattie Marais has once again fallen asleep with the radio on because Herman is off on one of his business trips. He’s absent quite a lot these days so the all-night radio has become a bit of a habit. She’s also taken to sprawling her little eight-stone person all over the king-size bed. When Herman is there, Hattie sleeps – has slept, now, for eighteen years – in a contained foetal ball, strictly on her own side of the bed, because Herman is quite a light sleeper. He likes a no-man’s-land between himself and his bedfellow, along with one of those fancy mattresses where each side functions independently of the other. My craters are not thy craters.

When he’s at home, he always takes care to let down the Roman blinds that make a blackout between the room and the east-facing veranda where the morning light comes in. But now the same light is dappling her eyelids as it dances through the unveiled French windows, via the hibiscus and the clambering bougainvillea. And she can see the feathery leaves of the flame tree dipping and rising on a light breeze, which has come at last to moderate the sweaty, subtropical heat.

‘See you probably two weeks-ish, Snoeks,’ Herman says – always says – giving Hattie a brief conjugal peck on the cheek before he takes off, carting work stuff, golf stuff, diving stuff; fishing stuff, ski stuff; white-water rafting stuff, riding stuff, biking stuff. Bloke stuff in some form. Business or pleasure? Work hard. Play hard. Herman is very good at both. One of the many pay-offs is that, precisely because Herman is such a bloke, he’s also a bit of a techie, which means he likes high-quality equipment. So whereas Hattie, left to herself, would still be making do with her crackly Roberts radio,
circa
1960, the item now residing in style alongside her marriage bed – Herman’s side of the bed, admittedly – is a superior, multichannelled, digital affair that means Hattie can now punctuate her sleep with impeccable transmissions from the BBC’s Radio 3: snatches of Tom Stoppard interviews; Bach fugues; extracts from Mozart’s letters to his female cousin; reappraisals of Samuel Barber (or was it Samuel Palmer? Lots of it is what she hears in her half-conscious waking moments), even, coming full circle, she listens to the aged Mahotella Queens in conversation with Andy Kershaw. Hattie likes to envisage the Queens in Central London, sitting regally in their Zulu headgear and short grass skirts, in the foyer of that BBC building in Portland Place, with the Eric Gill sculpture over the doorway.