Touchy Subjects (15 page)

At dinner parties, Sam liked to turn the petty happenings of his working day into funny stories. But never this one. Several times he found himself on the point of telling it—when the harshness of the winter came up as a topic, or provincial policy on housing—but he could never decide on the tone. He dreaded sounding pleased with himself, but he didn't want to beat his breast and have his friends console him, either.

What he would really have liked to tell them was his discovery: that it was all a matter of timing. If he'd been in the full of his health, that day, he was sure he'd have risen grandly to the occasion. His courage would have been instant; his gestures, generous and unselfconscious. Then again, if he'd felt a fraction worse—if he'd discovered that he'd lost his handkerchief, say—he knew he'd have scurried on by. What Sam used to think of as his conscience—something solid, a clean pebble in his heart—turned out to depend entirely on the state of his nose.

Five weeks later the hospital sent his Windsmoor coat back in a plastic bag. It smelt harsh, as if it had been bleached. Sam hung it in his closet, but whenever it occurred to him to wear it that winter, his hand skidded on by.

Finally he gave it to the Goodwill and bought a down jacket, like everybody else he knew.

After a messy ending, the thing to do is to get away. Put several hundred miles between yourself and the scene of the crime. Whether you call yourself victim or villain, the cure's the same: get on a plane.

I flew from Cork to Toulouse and rented an emerald green sports car that cost three times as much as I would have been willing to pay under normal circumstances. I knew that if I sat in some four-door hatchback, my self-pitying panic would well up like heartburn. The thing to do was to pretend I was in a film. French, for preference. I drove out of Toulouse like Catherine Deneuve. I wore very dark shades, a big hat, and an Isadora Duncan gauzy scarf, long enough to strangle me.

My plan was simple. I would spend fourteen days driving through the Pyrenees fast enough to drown out every sound and every thought, and if despite my best efforts there were any tears, the sun and the wind would wipe them off my face. In the afternoons I would find somewhere green and shady to read—at Heathrow Airport I'd picked up a silly novel about Mary Queen of Scots—and then in the evenings I'd round off my four-course table d'hôote with a large cognac and a sleeping pill. I didn't intend to talk to anyone during the next fortnight, so my schoolgirl French wouldn't have to stretch to more than the occasional
merci.

On the seventh day, driving between one craggy orange hill and another, it came to me that I hadn't touched another human being for a week. I supposed my elbow in its linen sleeve must have brushed past someone else's in one of those painfully narrow hotel corridors, but no skin was involved. And, not knowing anyone, I was exempt from all the kiss-kissing the locals did. I looked down now at my hands on the steering wheel; they were clean and papery.

When I stopped for lunch, I remembered I'd finished my book the night before and left it by the bed. Over my espresso I could feel boredom beginning to nibble. No, not boredom:
ennui,
that was the word, it came back to me now. Much more film-starrish. Ennui was about sunshine like white metal and a huge black straw hat and simply forgetting the name of anyone who'd ever hurt you and anyone you'd ever hurt.

The next sign said
C
A
V
E
R
N
E
S
T
R
O
G
L
O
D
Y
T
I
Q
U
E
S
, over a shaky line drawing of a bear, so that's where I turned off the road. To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what trogloditic caverns were, but they sounded as if they might be cool, or cooler than the road, at least.

But after standing around at the mouth of the cave for a quarter of an hour with a knot of brown-legged Swedes and Canadians, I was just about ready to go back to the car. Then the old woman in the jacket that said
G
U
I
D
E
finally clambered up the rocks towards us, and behind her, a straggling crocodile of what I thought at first were children. None of them seemed more than five feet tall, and they wore little backpacks too high up, like humps. When I saw that they were adults—What's the phrase these days?
People with special needs
?—I looked away, of course, so that none of them would see me staring. That was what my mother always said:
Don't stare!,
hissed like a puncture.

Three or four of the Specials, as I thought of them, had smiles that were too wide. One of them peered into my face as if he knew me. They kept patting and hugging each other, and two men at the back of the group—quite old, with Down syndrome, I thought, hard to tell how old but definitely not young—were holding hands like kindergarten kids. I looked for the leader of the group—a teacher or nurse or whatever, someone who would be giving them their own little tour of the prehistoric caves—but then I realized that we were all going in together.

At which point I thought,
Fuck it, I don't need this.

But we were shuffling through the cave mouth already, and to get out I would have had to shove my way back through the Specials, and what if I knocked one of them over? There was one girl, a bit taller than the rest, with a sort of helmet held on with a padded strap across her chin, as if she were going into outer space. Fits, I thought. We're about to descend into a trogloditic cavern with someone who's liable to fits. There was a balding man behind her in an old-fashioned grey suit. He seemed so pale, precarious, with his eyes half shut. I wondered if the same thing that had damaged their brains had stunted their growth, or maybe they hadn't been given enough to eat when they were children. You heard terrible stories.

As we left the sunlight behind us, I realized that my clothes were completely unsuitable for descending into the bowels of the earth. My sandals skidded on the gritty rock; my long silk sundress caught on rough patches of the cave wall, and what the hell had I brought my handbag for? The air was damp, and there were little puddles in depressions on the floor. Beside the little lamps strung up on wires, the stone glowed orange and red.

The guide's accent was so different from that of the nun who taught us French at school that I had to guess at every other word she spoke. She aimed her torch into a high corner of the cave now and pointed out a stalactite and a stalagmite that had been inching towards each other for what I thought I heard her say was eight thousand years. That couldn't be right, surely? In another twelve thousand, she claimed, they would finally touch. And then she launched into a laughably simplistic theory of evolution, for the benefit of the Specials, I supposed. Her words boomed in the cavern, and whenever she stopped to point something out, we all had to freeze and shuffle backwards so as not to collide. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been at such close quarters with a herd of strangers. There was perfume eddying round, far too sweet, and I'd have laid a bet it came from that girl behind me with the Texan accent.

Basically, the guide's story was that we used to be monkeys— "
Non! Non!
" protested one or two of the more vocal Specials, and "
Si, si!
" the guide cried. We used to be monkeys, she swore—speak for yourself, I wanted to tell her—but then one day we stood up and we wanted to use tools so what did we have to grow?

I peered at her blankly in the half-light. What did we have to
grow?

"
Les mains!
" she cried, holding up her splayed right hand, and three or four of the Specials held theirs up, too, as if to play Simon Says, or to prove their membership of the species. The guide went on to explain—I could follow her better now that I was getting used to her accent—that everything depended on growing real hands, not paws; hands with thumbs opposite the fingers, for grip. She moved her wrinkled fingers like a spider, and one of the Specials wiggled his right back at her. They seemed irrationally excited to be here, I thought; maybe even a big damp cave was a thrill compared to their usual day.

I shivered where I stood and tucked my hands under my arms to warm them. It occurred to me that it must have been a sad day, that first standing up. I imagined hauling myself to my feet for the first time ever, naked apart from the fur. No more bounding through the jungle; now I'd have to stagger along on two thin legs. All at once my head would feel too heavy to lift, and the whole world would look smaller, shrunken.

One of the Specials giggled like a mynah bird, too close to my ear. I edged away from her, but not so fast that anyone would notice. They didn't know the rules, it occurred to me: how much space to leave between your body and a stranger's, how to keep your voice down and avoid people's eyes. They didn't seem to know about embarrassment.

The guide wasn't at all discomfited, either, not even when the Specials let out echoing whoops or hung off her hands. Now she was saying that the cave dwellers only lived half as long as people do nowadays and had much smaller brains than we do. I stared up at the dripping ceiling so as not to look at any of the Specials. Were they included in her
we?
Then the guide asked why we thought people had lived in these freezing old caves. After a few seconds she answered herself, in the gushing way teachers do: Because it was worse outside! Imagine thousands of years of winter, up there, she said, pointing through the rock; picture the endless snow, ice, leopards, bears...

I could feel the cold of the gritty floor coming up through my sandals. I tried to conjure up a time when this would have counted as warm. Jesus! Why they all hadn't cut their throats with the nearest flint scraper, I couldn't imagine. Funny thing, suicide; how rarely people got around to it. We seemed to be born with this urge to cling on. Like last Christmas when I gave my brother's newborn my little finger and she gripped it as if she were drowning.

The guide was leading us down a steep slope now, and the Specials swarmed around her. Except for the pale man with the half-shut eyes, who hung back, then suddenly stopped in his tracks so I bumped into him from behind. I backed off, but he didn't move on. I tried to think what to say that would be politer than "
Allez, allez!
" The guide looked over her shoulder and called out a phrase I didn't understand, something cheerful. But the man in front of me was shaking, I could see that now. His head was bent as if to ward off a blow. It was a big balding head, but not unnaturally big. I might have taken him for a civil servant, if I'd passed him in the street, or maybe a librarian. "
Peur,
" he said faintly, distinctly. "
F'ai peur.
" He was afraid. What was he afraid of?

The guide shouted something. My ears were ringing. I finally understood that she was suggesting mademoiselle might be kind enough to hold—what was his name?—Jean-Luc's hand, just for the steep bit. I looked around to see whom she could mean. Then I felt the blush start on my neck. I was the only mademoiselle in sight, kind or otherwise—the Texans having dropped back to photograph a stalactite—so I held out my hand, a little gingerly, like a birthday present that might not be welcome. I thought of taking him by the sleeve of his jacket, the man she'd called Jean-Luc. But he looked down at my hand, rather than me, and slipped his palm into mine as if he'd known me all our lives.

To be honest, I'd been afraid his fingers might be clammy, like pickled cucumbers, but they were hot and dry. We walked on, very slowly; Jean-Luc took tiny, timid steps, and I had to hunch towards him to keep our hands at the same level. All I could think was,
Thank god it's dark in here.

In hopes of distracting myself, I was trying to remember the last time I'd held hands with a stranger. A
ceili,
that was it, with my sister's boyfriend's cousin, and our palms were so hot with sweat we kept losing our grip in the twirls and apologizing over and over. I remember thinking at the time that hands were far too private to exchange with strangers. Those Victorians knew what they were doing when they kept their gloves on.

The Texan family was coming up behind now, their shadows huge as beasts on the cave wall. I could hear the girl giggle and mutter to her parents. My cheeks scalded with a sort of shame. I knew we probably looked like something out of Dickens, me with my big hat and Jean-Luc with his shiny head no higher than my shoulder: a monstrously mismatched bride and groom. Though really, why I should have cared what some small-town strangers thought of me, I couldn't say. The Texans didn't even know my name, and I'd certainly never see them again once we got out of this foul cave. Funny to think I'd come on this holiday to distract myself from serious things like tragetly and betrayal, only to find myself sweating with mortification at the thought that a couple of strangers might be laughing at me.

On an impulse I stepped sideways, flattening myself against the cave wall, jerking Jean-Luc with me. His pale eyes looked a little startled, but he came obediently enough. When the Texans had almost reached us I said rather coldly, "Go ahead," and let them squeeze past.

That was better. Now there was no one behind us and we could go at our own pace. The passage was getting more precarious, twisting down into the hillside. The roof was low; once or twice it scraped against my absurd straw hat. I had to walk with a stoop, lifting my dress out of my way like some kind of princess. Jean-Luc was saying something, I realized, but so quietly I had to bend nearer to make out the words—nearer, but not too near, in case my face brushed his. My heart rattled like a pebble in a can. I hadn't counted on conversation. What if he was asking me something, and I didn't understand his accent, and he thought it was because I didn't want to speak to him?