No Telling by Adam Thorpe

Author:Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446420454
Publisher: Random House

15

Except that there was nowhere to arrive at, in fact: just mud and rubble and dirty smoke.

There was nothing. Or we were in a different place. That’s what it felt like. A completely different place.

The high outside walls had gone; the pine-trees and the prefabricated wing and the big main building itself with its flight of steps had gone; our broken bench and our bicycle assault course and Christophe’s nuclear-powered invalid-chair had gone. Even the Gestapo side-car had gone. Completely vanished. They had all been replaced by a sea of mud.

Huge diggers bumped over the mud, shoving it about. It was like a trick.

I could see washing flapping on washing-lines on the far side where the wall had been. It had hidden people’s back yards. The linen must be getting dirty, I thought.

‘Shit,’ said Christophe, ‘that was a fucking big stone you threw.’

I didn’t laugh. In fact, I wanted to cry.

We asked someone shyly what was going on – going up to this African man in a hard white builder’s hat near a belching fire, and stammering out the question. He had to shout because one of the diggers was approaching. We didn’t understand him, he might have been telling us to clear out.

A tall sign on stilts gave the name of the company and a list of people: architect, site manager, developers, master of works, carpenter, interior fitter, plumber, electrician. The wrought-iron gates were leaning on the wall opposite as if drunk. The fans of cobbles were hidden under mud and rubble so that we couldn’t even see where our secret republic had begun.

‘Open sesame,’ I joked, waving my hands about.

Christophe didn’t respond; the digger was chugging too close for him to have heard, probably. His open mouth made him look mentally retarded, especially with his shaven head. Then he yelled out a swearword, and another stronger one, and flapped his hand in amazement as if the coin had only just properly dropped.

Now we knew what the man with the oily hair and the clipboard and the torch had been doing. There was something sticking out of the mud: it was a big branch off a pine-tree. It was stuck. I got resin all over my fingers, but I tore off a bit with pine-needles on it.

Christophe and I hung about for a while and then went back to my house. The weird thing is, we didn’t talk about the demolition, even though I brought back the pine twig. We didn’t really talk much at all. We just sat in my room, playing tennis with a rubber and our bare palms. I was on the bed, Christophe was on the floor. The rubber bounced under the bed. He reached for it and pulled out the ballet book instead. He made a face at the title.

‘I got it for Carole,’ I said, a bit quickly.

The book fell open at the photograph of the Coppélia dancer, probably because I’d looked at it too much. Christophe whistled.

‘I like your bird,’ he said.

He started reading a page from the Coppélia story in a silly girly voice, kneeling on the rug.

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