For this, to the bemusement of outsiders (whose scepticism, if they are fools enough to express it, is quickly and permanently silenced) is the site Cole has chosen for the town to bury its dead. A flytip full of fridges.
He ties a kilt of stoat-fur round his withers with a cord woven of virgins’ hair (on and on and on, over half a million words of this shit and counting, the literary equivalent of diarrhoea – once begun, why stop?) and brushes fallen leaves from his white-goods’ lids with a mop made of strips of rabbit fur and on and on and on.
TWELVE
Poppy is afraid to leave her home unattended over the holidays, so Michel and Hanna have arranged to celebrate Christmas early.
I arrive just a couple of hours before Poppy is due. Michel’s mood darkens as we wait for his mother to arrive. ‘The thing about Mum is she’s never here on any proper day. Flag Day, Christmas, birthdays, she’s always a couple of days early or a couple of days late and it’s always by special bloody appointment. Everything becomes about her.’
Michel turns over his resentments like a child sorting through a box of toy cars. Meanwhile Hanna runs after Agnes, trying to contain the whirlwind of the girl’s ‘tidying’. ‘Agnes! Agnes, for God’s sake, I just put that away.’ At the door of the kitchen she turns. ‘Please, Mick, not in front of her. Agnes!’ She swings the door shut, but her voice is hardly muffled. ‘Agnes, what did I just say?’
Michel casts around as though he has mislaid something. Losing one half of his audience has thrown him out of his stride. ‘Fancy an espresso?’
Succumbing to convenience at last, they have bought themselves one of those machines that make thimblefuls of rocket fuel out of pre-packaged coffee cartridges.
Since he embarked on an original film script with Bryon Vaux – they must be on their twentieth rewrite by now – Michel has developed a cast-iron ritual. It’s the only way he can meet his obligations to both Bryon and his publishers, who are still expecting a book a year from him. He writes, long-hand, in the garden or the summerhouse every day. Poppy’s Christmas visit is breaking the habit of many months and he’s as jittery as a chainsmoker attempting a cold-turkey withdrawal.
I’d like to say something to distract him, to take his mind off work, but the first thing that comes out of my mouth is, ‘How’s the film?’
‘Christ.’
‘That good?’
‘We’re gearing up for production.’
(I hide a smile at Michel’s use of the royal ‘we’. Once the cameras start humming, Michel’s involvement will surely be at an end.)
‘You must be excited.’
‘I’m up and down into town, with Bryon Vaux yelling in my ear, typing on-the-fly revisions on the train. It’s a bloody hopeless way of working.’
‘But you must be nearly done if you’re shooting in January.’
‘Are you kidding? Do you know we actually had an executive production meeting the other day about how immersive entertainments should be set out on the page? We’re going to be rewriting this bastard all the way into April’s edit suite.’
The doorbell rings, saving me from any more of Michel’s unbrookable enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get it.’
Poppy is about a foot shorter than I remember, and her skull has retreated from the surface of her skin, her face a mass of lines. I give her a hug. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She pats my back, a bird beating its broken wing, spastic and frightened.
I sit her down in the living room. Michel’s vanished. Hanna tries to usher little Agnes in to say hello. Having chattered non-stop about Grandma’s visit for days, Agnes hesitates, half-hidden behind the living-room door, her smile a moue of shyness. It doesn’t take her long to thaw. A few minutes later she is badgering Hanna to assemble her puppet theatre so she can give Grandma a show.
‘I’ll do it,’ I offer. How hard can it be?
‘No!’ Agnes scolds me. ‘Not that there. That doesn’t go—Not like that! That’s the wrong way round! No!’
Hanna brings in cups of tea and Poppy and I snatch a little conversation between the adventures of Little Red Riding Hood and Mr Punch. Michel has still to reappear.
I try to get Poppy into conversation, but she’s tired and a little bit grumpy and everything seems to be a trial. ‘Oh, the garden! I’ve got no-one to help me, you know.’
Poppy is happiest just listening to her granddaughter, so I leave them to it and find Hanna in the kitchen, still preparing dinner. ‘Dinners,’ she corrects me. ‘I want to get ahead.’
‘I’ll help you.’
Out in the hall, Michel finally greets his mother, with a not-very-convincing show of surprise. ‘I was off in the summerhouse! I didn’t know you were here!’
‘Daddy, come and sit down!’
‘Hang on, love.’
‘Daddy! You’re interrupting the show!’
‘She’s doing a show.’
‘Yes. I can see—’
The door clicks shut, cutting off their conversation.
‘Here.’ Hanna hands me a bag of sprouts. ‘Peel these fuckers.’
‘Is Michel all right?’
Hanna makes a face. She runs water in the sink and drops potatoes into a bowl. ‘We’ve had a bit of a barney with Poppy this week.’
‘What about?’
‘Agnes has a school project for the holidays. They’re supposed to find out what they can about their grandparents. Mick asked Poppy to bring over some stuff about his dad. She said no, that she couldn’t get up in the loft to get it. It was all packed away. And when Mick offered to drive down and help she said she wasn’t interested in a five-year-old’s school project.’
‘That sounds a bit direct.’
‘The thing is, Mick doesn’t have anything of his father’s to show his daughter. Not even a photograph.’
It occurs to me that the video clip of his father’s head being kicked around a dusty parking lot in the middle of a desert must still be floating around in the aether somewhere. Nothing really gets deleted any more. Nothing really gets forgotten.
After dinner, once Agnes is in bed, Poppy digs about in her handbag and hands Michel a cheap plastic wallet. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’ve brought you the photographs you wanted.’
‘Well.’ Michel flicks through the plastic leaves. ‘What is this?’
‘I just brought what I had. There aren’t many. I had a sort-out.’
‘That’s great.’ In silence, Michel turns over the pictures. ‘I’ll scan them and you can take them home with you.’
‘Oh no, dear. They’re yours now.’
‘But you’ll want to put them back in the albums. Won’t you.’
‘I’ve given you the album.’
‘What album?’
‘That album.’
‘This is an album?’
I know what Mick’s getting at. I remember from my time in the bungalow on Sand Lane, Michel’s family photographs were fastened with adhesive paper corners onto the thick black pages of old-fashioned albums. Every photograph had a description written underneath in white ink: Michel’s father’s meticulous signature.
‘Where are the albums?’
‘Oh, they were taking up too much space.’
‘You’ve thrown them away.’
‘They’re not your albums anyway, Michel. They’re the family’s.’ Poppy has a way of talking about the family that makes you forget there’s only her and Michel in it.
‘No,’ says Michel, warming up, ‘they’re not the family’s, because you’ve thrown them away.’
‘They were taking up space!’
Michel flicks back and forth through the wallet – there are barely a dozen snaps in it. ‘How am I supposed to know what these are? Or where they were taken? Who is this here? Christ.’