The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (31 page)

     Vaudin made sympathetic noises, but I knew he agreed with them. He didn’t disbelieve the proof, but he was cautious. I considered writing about it in a newspaper, but that would have involved telling more of the story than was wise. There was still a chance that Louis would emerge from his coma. It would be unfair.

     So I kept quiet about it, went on with my work, tended to my bonsais.

     Sophie returned, but she left every weekend to stay with the girls in Montpellier. I didn’t try to stop her. We were coming to a slow rapprochement But it was painful.

Coming back to life can be as slow as dying. Slower. But there have been a few small signs of encouragement in Louis’ progress at the clinic. I still tend towards optimism, still believe just as firmly in the power of hope. I have changed in many ways, since the fire. But on that score, I am the same man. And so – unlike some of my colleagues – I like to think that whatever the evidence to the contrary, in a few months’ time, Louis Drax will have fully emerged from his coma.

     And then I think about the life we will have, far in the future. Yes, I sometimes – often – allow myself to dream about things like that.

     We will make an odd family. Perhaps by then Sophie and I will have reached an understanding of sorts, and be rebuilding a life together. Not the one we once shared, and which I shattered, but a new one, with a new shape and a new voice, new feelings. A wary tenderness. Lucille will still be suffering bad health in the wake of her son’s death, and although she will have come to live in the village, she will have asked Sophie and I to consider Louis our son. When she smiles, which is rarely, you will notice the effort it takes for her to summon the right muscles.

     Sometimes I will even call Louis ‘son’. It will be a joke, but a joke we both need. My daughters will adore him, and come to stay at weekends from Montpellier, with boyfriends in tow, and spoil the kid rotten with computer games, videos, trips to McDonald’s. Sophie will cook huge meals for all of us, just like she used to, and when Louis eats, she will watch him maternally, and I will watch her watching him and think of how precarious life is, how swiftly and irredemably it can be knocked sideways. How there are certain types of pain that never really go away. Certain things that are best left unspoken, even when a boy has started to ask questions.

     Lucille will keep Pierre’s memory alive for Louis, but none of us will talk of Natalie Drax. It will be best that way, if there is a ‘best’ in such circumstances. Louis will know that she loved him. That’s enough. Some memories you do not need. The brain is vaster than I ever realised, its workings more subtle and strange. When a part of you is cauterised, the mind compensates. The weirdest plants are the ones that grow out of ashes.

     Marcel Perez will come to visit once a month, and with his help, Louis will make visible progress. Marcel, Sophie and I will discuss how he is doing, always a little wary, always on the watch for signs that his memory is stirring. For we will be nervous, all of us: nervous that despite all the healing, despite the normality that now surrounds him, the past might find a chink through which to slip, and flood his soul.

Don’t think that I didn’t grieve, when Natalie died. Don’t think that I had stopped loving her. I hadn’t. Even now, I am not sure that she’s out of my system. Maybe that’s what Sophie can see in me. Maybe that’s why we still have separate bedrooms, and why despite the tenderness, the new grace we have learned, she stays watchful.

     Yes, however misplaced they were, the disturbed emotions Natalie Drax stirred in me still linger, still renew themselves in tiny daily stabs of pain and shame and guilt and sorrow. Surely I might have been able to save her from herself? Surely, with the right kind of love, she might have  ...

     —No, Marcel Perez tells me. —She wasn’t cut out for love. Love was never going to bring her happiness. Her agenda was different.

     One day I will be purged. The day will come when I wake up and do not think of her. But in the meantime, the best of her lives on. Her son. Who perhaps one day will be ready to reach out and re-enter the world – a different world from the one either of us knew before, a world where he has a place, and where I will do all I can for him. All, and more. And maybe one day, almost by accident, I will stumble into redemption.

     Let us imagine all that, as we stare at the creature, the two of us. It is a marvel, huge and milky-mauve with long pink tentacles adorned with suckers the size of saucers. It’s in a massive tank, and everyone at the museum seems, like us, to have become lost inside it. It hangs in suspended animation, a thing that nobody had believed in before.

     They once said that sailors invented them, even though the sucker-marks found on whales proved they must have existed in the dark bowels of the ocean. Deep down, they had hidden for years but now here they are, triumphing in the new climate, breeding like no other creature on earth, silent messengers from those shadowed chambers of the world we had imagined eternally locked, remote, unreachable. The miracle is not that we discovered them by breaking into their world, but that – washed-up and dead – they broke into ours.

     In his wheelchair, his head clamped in place, wide-eyed and unblinking, Louis stares and stares, so silent and blind and perhaps also so in awe that you can barely hear him breathe. And suddenly it is a stupendous marvel to me that creatures such as this exist, and that alongside, there can be a boy like Louis who might yet come back from that huge and unknown place beneath the surface of things.

You shouldn’t think ‘oh poor Louis Drax.’ Because it doesn’t suck too badly. True story. I don’t mind staying here.

     Lots of stuff sucked before. It’s not easy being a Disturbed Child or accident-prone. Seeing Fat Perez sucked, and Maman and Papa hating each other sucked and school sucked and being called Wacko Boy sucked and even the Mohammeds sucked.

     This doesn’t suck though. See, what Fat Perez didn’t understand is, I never thought hospitals sucked. I just said that. I like them. I like it that people take care of you all the time. I like it that you can just lie there and think and stuff, and you don’t have to worry that they’re fragile or if they’re playing Pretend You Don’t Hate Him. I like it that you can just think about
La Planète bleue
and you can dream about people like Gustave and listen to Pascal reading to you from
Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire
. It’s even better than being asleep because you never have to wake up. All you have to do is just lie there and breathe. You don’t even have to talk. And the bits you don’t like, you can just switch off and sleep through them. I’m good at sleeping through the bad bits. I like Dr Dannachet, I like Jacqueline Duval and Marianne and Berthe and all the other nurses, I like Mamie coming to sit next to me and telling me about all the different dogs she had and what happened to them, and all the places she lived when she was young. I even like Fat Perez coming to visit.

     All my life I have been waiting for this hospital. Nine whole years. Nine’s my lucky number, cos this is my ninth life, and my ninth life is the best one. True story. I could stay here for ever. I don’t need a Papa or a Maman cos I’ve got Gustave and Dr Dannachet. Every night he comes and reads to me. And when when he says goodnight, he whispers, You can wake up whenever you want to, Louis. I would love to take you to Paris to see miraculous creatures pickled in tanks. But he doesn’t understand cos he’s a bit dumb. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that I can already swim underwater, and I can see as many giant squids as I want to, and any other animal or any other thing, anything I want in the whole world. I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want.

     Anywhere in the world, anything.

     You’d have to be mad to swap that for being Louis Drax again.

     That’s what Dr Dannachet doesn’t get. But Gustave gets it. Gustave knows. My choice is I say, no thanks, Dr Dannachet. I like you. I like it here. My ninth life is better than the other eight, I promise you. I’ve been thinking and this is what I think. It’s OK to be here. So I’ll stay put.
If you make a choice, and it’s wrong, you have to live with it. Everyone has to live with the consequences. You chose, Louis. It was your choice
.

     —So is it OK with you if I stay put? I ask him.

     —No. I’m not sure it is, Louis.

     But it’s not Dr Dannachet’s voice. It’s Gustave’s. Papa. I haven’t heard him for ages. I thought he’d gone. He’s very faint.

     —You don’t have to stay, says Gustave. Says Papa. —You can wake up and live. If you want to. Do you want to?

     —No. Maybe. I don’t know.

     He doesn’t say anything for a long time. I can’t see him any more, did I tell you that? Ever since we went to the cave together and he showed me my name and the name Catherine in blood on the wall and unwrapped his bandages so I could see his face for the last time, I’ve lost him. He’s just a voice in my head now, like a dream.

     —It depends how curious you are about what comes next, he says. —There might be good things. You know, by the time I’d been stuck in that cave for three days, I wasn’t curious, I just wanted it to end. It’s different for you.

     —The rest of life might suck, too.

     —It might, said Papa. —And it might not. But there’s a way back, if you want it, you know that.

     —And you?

     —I have to stay here.

     —So you’re dead?

     —I thought you knew. With all the things you know ... all your Amazing Animals Facts and your poisons and the way you follow the instructions when we’re making aeroplanes ... I thought you knew, Lou-Lou. I died in the cave. Think about the world, Young Sir. Think about how it might not suck. But we have to say goodbye now. It’s time.

     And I turn my head to the window. You can feel it getting light outside and you can hear birds. Seagulls. And I know he isn’t lying to me because he’s the only one who never did. And I know something else. I know that one day, if I want to, I can do it. I can take one step forward.

     And then another.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank The Authors’ Foundation and the Arts Council of Great Britain for awarding me grants that allowed me the space and time to write this novel. I am also grateful to Paul Broks for his book
Into the Silent Land
, and to Clare Alexander, Gail Campbell, Polly Coles, Gina de Ferrer, Humphrey Hawksley, Carsten Jensen, and Kitty and John Sewell for their comments, support and advice on the manuscript.