Chapter 6: First Person
The hearing aid made everything sound like it was wrapped in cellophane, and then, on the third day, like it wasn't wrapped in anything at all.
Benoît sat in the back of Friterie Pat with a cone of chips he didn't want and listened to the fridge. He'd forgotten fridges made a noise. This one hummed, high and steady and faintly smug, as if glad someone had finally noticed. The fat fryer ticked as it cooled. Out the front his mother was arguing with the oil delivery man in a French that was ninety per cent Kirkby, and he could hear every s of it.
The aid was a small grey thing behind his right ear with a wire as fine as fishing line. The audiologist at Saint-Pierre, a cheerful woman with a snail tattooed on her wrist, had told him to wear it all day, especially when it annoys you. It annoyed him all the time. Paper bags sounded like gunfire. On the first morning he'd stood in his kitchen in Ixelles and heard the rain on the window and had to sit down, because he'd been playing himself the sound of rain on a tent every night for a year and a half and here was the real thing, with all its top end, and he'd had no idea he'd been missing it.
The medical service had taken a week. The review had taken an afternoon. A six-month trial back in the booth from March, mornings only to start, with the aid and one of the new consoles with the limiter that cut a squeal off before it got to you, and nobody on his right. Nobody had said occupational suitability in his hearing, though he could now, he supposed, have heard it.
Darmanin had sat in on the last part with her fountain pen.
"We have interpreters with hearing aids, Mr Lambotte," she'd said. "We don't have interpreters who lie to me."
He'd told her the rest then, the part he hadn't in Strasbourg: that he'd asked Fran to keep it quiet, on a slag heap in November, and she'd done it because he'd asked. That the numbers had been her idea and the silence had been his. Darmanin had written it down in full.
"I will put that in her file," she'd said, "since she is too proud to put it in herself."
His father came in through the back door from the yard with a cardboard box and set it down between the chips and the ketchup. Jean-Marie Lambotte was sixty-four and built like a post box, with a moustache that had been the same shape since 1979 and hands that had driven trains between Mons and Charleroi for thirty-eight years. He opened the lid. Inside, in tissue paper, was the mask.
It was wax, the colour of skin, with a small neat moustache painted on and a pair of little green spectacles, and it had the face it always had: pleased, a bit puzzled, very calm, the face of a man who'd been told a good secret. Every Gille in Binche wore the same one on the morning of Mardi Gras. You couldn't tell anyone from anyone. That was the point.
"Tu danses?" said his father.
Benoît looked at the mask and said it in French, because it was his father. "Papa. I didn't dance last year because of the ear. It wasn't work. The drums. I thought, if I go out there and it's like the booth—" He stopped. "I was frightened I wouldn't hear them."
His father looked at him for a while with the same calm face as the mask. Then he laughed. It came out of him all at once, a big rusty laugh, and he had to put his hand on the box.
"Tu crois que je les entends, moi, les tambours?" You think I hear the drums? He tapped his own ear, the left, then the right. Thirty-eight years in a cab. Fifty-five carnivals. "Ça fait vingt ans. Je les sens." Twenty years. I feel them. He put his flat hand on his chest, on the breastbone, and thumped it, once, twice, in the rhythm. "Là."
"Twenty years," said Benoît. "And nobody knew?"
"Ta mère sait. Ta mère fait les coups de fil." Your mother knows. Your mother makes all the phone calls.
Out the front, as if she'd heard her name, Pat stopped shouting at the oil man and shouted, "Is he dancing or what?" through the hatch.
"On verra," said Jean-Marie, and winked, and held the mask up to his own face for a second, and took it away again.
"Le masque, c'est pour le matin," he said. "À midi on l'enlève. Personne danse toute la journée avec le masque, fiston. On étouffe."
The mask is for the morning. At midday you take it off. Nobody dances all day in the mask, son. You suffocate.
Pat came through from the front wiping her hands on a tea towel.
"Right, you," she said to Benoît. "You've been sat in my back room for two days looking like someone ran over your cat. Is this the girl? The Manchester one?"
"Stockport."
"Same thing."
"Don't say that to her."
"I'll say what I like when I meet her, which I'm going to, aren't I?" She pinched one of his chips. "Listen, love. Your dad hit me in the head with an orange in 1984 and didn't say sorry for it for six months. He thought it'd look soft. Six months I went round Binche with a bump the size of a satsuma and him pretending it was nothing to do with him." She ate the chip. "Don't be your dad."
His father, behind her, raised his hands in a gesture that meant I am an innocent man.
"Go 'ed," said Pat. "Go and get her."
Her dad's new cast was blue fibreglass, lighter than the plaster, and he'd got Ann from the club to draw a County badge on it in marker pen. He could move his fingers now. He signed with both hands again, a bit stiffly, like a man getting back on a bike, and he'd been making up for lost time all week.
You've not sent it, he signed, across the kitchen table.
The form was still on her laptop. She'd been opening it every evening and looking at it, and closing it.
I've not decided.
You've decided. You've just not told yourself. He pushed his tea to one side so she could see his hands properly. Frances. Listen to me.
She looked at him. Her dad had never once in his life told her to listen. It was always look.
Mrs Hargreaves, he signed.
She didn't follow for a second. Then she did, and her face went hot.
Parents' evening. Year five. Blue cardigan. Teeth like a horse. He did the teeth. She said you talked too much in class and you'd called the dinner lady a fat cow.
I never called her a fat cow.
You called her a fat cow. And you told me she said you were a delight. He sat back. I could lipread that woman from across the playground. I read every word.
You knew?
Course I knew. His face did something complicated. You were nine. Your mum had gone. You wanted me to have a nice daughter, so you made me one. I let you. I took you for chips. He shook his head. I let you ring the gas board. I let you do the doctor's and the bank and the man about the boiler. I let you because you liked it. It made you less frightened. Like when you're little and you hold the lead and you think you're walking the dog.
She didn't say anything. She couldn't have, in either language.
That was my mistake, her dad signed. Not yours. I should've made them do it. I should've made you go out and be rude to dinner ladies. He jabbed a finger at the laptop. I don't need you in Stockport. I've got eyes. I've got the club, I've got the iPad, I've got Kev, God help me. I need you to ring me on Sundays and stop having a face like that.
What face?
That one. He did it. It was a very good impression. You did that face all Christmas, and you did it all January, and it's not because of my wrist.
She put her head down on the kitchen table, on her arms, and laughed into the crook of her elbow, mostly laughing, and her dad reached over with the hand in the County cast and patted the top of her head with it, twice, clonk, clonk, like a man testing a melon.
When she looked up he was signing something else, slowly.
Quiz tonight. You're taking my place on the team. Ann and Maureen are useless at football.
So am I.
I know, said her dad. That's why we always lose.
Benoît saw the pyramid from the train.
The line came into Stockport high over the town on its great brick viaduct, the one Lowry had painted to look miserable, and there, off to the left beside the motorway, in the last of the light, was a big blue glass pyramid standing on its own on a patch of grass like something that had landed. He laughed out loud, and a woman with a buggy moved away.
He didn't have an address. He had Edgeley, and number twelve, and a Deaf man who liked Christmas lights. Up by the football ground a man in a County scarf was locking a gate. Benoît said, "Excuse me. I'm looking for a Deaf man called Brendan who does very good Christmas lights."
"Brendan's lights?" said the man. "Everyone knows Brendan's lights. Fell off his ladder, didn't he. Silly sod." And pointed.
Number twelve was a red-brick terrace with a bay window and an empty hook under the gutter where the lights went. Benoît pressed the bell, and heard nothing at all, and through the frosted glass of the door saw every light in the hall flick on and off, on and off, three times, like a small celebration.
The door opened. A man in a cardigan with a blue cast on his right arm looked at him, and at the bag in his hand, and at the side of his head.
He'd practised on the train, from a video, a nice woman with a fringe. He lifted his right hand and spelled his name, carefully, one-handed: B. E. N. O. I. T.
Brendan Mulcahy watched this with deep interest. Then he took a notepad from his cardigan pocket and a pen from behind his ear, wrote left-handed, and turned it round.
THAT'S AMERICAN.
Benoît looked at it.
ARE YOU AMERICAN?
Benoît took the pen. BELGIAN, he wrote.
Brendan read it, and nodded slowly, and wrote: WORSE.
Then he looked at the small grey thing behind Benoît's right ear, and tapped his own ear, and raised his eyebrows. Benoît nodded. Brendan considered it with a professional eye, gave it a thumbs up, and wrote: SUITS YOU.
He didn't ask him in. He wrote on the next page, in big uneven capitals, and drew a map under it with a cross: DEAF CLUB. QUIZ NIGHT. SHE'S ON MY TEAM. WE'RE LOSING.
He tore it off and gave it to him. Then he wrote one more thing, and held it up, and kept holding it up, and didn't tear this one off.
IF YOU MAKE HER DO THAT FACE AGAIN I'LL HIT YOU WITH MY CAST.
The Deaf club met in a church hall in Heaton Norris on Thursdays, with a tea urn and a bar hatch and strip lights, and it was the loudest silent room Fran had ever been in. Nobody was speaking and everybody was talking. Chairs scraped. Someone banged the table flat-handed to get the next table's attention, and someone else flicked the lights to say the next round was starting, and forty people turned to the stage at once, where a man called Clifford in a Hawaiian shirt was signing the questions with tremendous drama and putting them up on a screen for the slow ones.
The round was Football. They were last.
What year did County last play in the second tier? Ann signed at her, in her big coat, which she hadn't taken off.
I don't know.
Your dad would know.
My dad isn't here.
He sends you so he doesn't have to lose, signed Maureen, who was eighty-one and read every word of every mouth in the room and could tell you afterwards who'd said what about whom.
The door at the back opened, letting in the cold and the car park, and forty people turned round to look, the way a Deaf room did, all at once, with total frankness.
A tall man stood in the doorway in a navy coat, with his hair blown about and a white paper bag in one hand.
Fran put her pen down.
Ann leaned across. Is that the Belgian?
How do you know about the Belgian?
Everyone knows about the Belgian, said Ann. Your dad told the whole bowls team.
He came across the hall between the tables as if the floor were ice, smiling at everyone who was looking at him, which was everyone. At their table he stopped, and didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.
"Hi," he said.
Maureen's eyes went straight to his mouth.
"Don't face Maureen," said Fran. "She lipreads."
"Everything?"
"Everything. She'll have it round Heaton Norris by Saturday."
So they stood by the tea urn with their backs to the room, in the one room in Stockport where spoken English was the private language. The urn hissed. Fran found she was holding a teaspoon and didn't know where it had come from.
"I've got a hearing aid," he said.
"I can see."
"I told Darmanin. All of it. That I asked you not to say anything, and that you didn't because I asked you." He'd gone red along his cheekbones, which she'd never seen. "She's putting it in your file. She says you're too proud to do it yourself."
"I'm not proud."
"You're very proud, Mulcahy. You're the proudest person I've ever met. You'd rather carry somebody than be seen to need a chair."
She opened her mouth and shut it again.
"I'm going back in March," he said. "Mornings. A trial. With a limiter and no one on my right. I told my dad. About last year, and the drums. He's been deaf for twenty years and my mother does all his phone calls and nobody thought it was worth mentioning to me."
"Families," said Fran.
"Families." He took a breath, a proper one, and she watched him decide not to make a joke, which she'd never seen him do either. "On the phone. I said a thing I'd been keeping. I didn't know I was keeping it till I said it. It was the worst true thing I could find, and I picked it because it was true. I'm sorry."
Fran stood and held the teaspoon.
She could feel all the old answers ready in her, lined up, clear and smooth and kind. It's fine. It's sorted. It doesn't matter. She could have said any of them in her best voice, the one for the Commission, and he'd have believed her, and they'd have walked out of here in exactly the same shape as before, her on his left, nobody saying anything.
"It was true," she said instead. "Some of it."
"I know."
"I did like it. Being needed. It's the only way I've ever known how to be with anyone." She was looking at the urn and not at him, and then she made herself look at him. "And I said a true thing back, and that was worse, because I said it in that voice. The one for other people."
"The Commission one."
"I'm sorry."
He nodded. He didn't say it's fine. She loved him a bit for that, right there, by the urn.
"Dad says he could lipread Mrs Hargreaves," she said. "From across the playground. He always knew."
Benoît stared at her. Then he started to laugh, helplessly, with his hand over his face, and she started too, and behind them a table banged, and somebody flicked the lights, and Clifford in the Hawaiian shirt signed something very rude at them from the stage about talking during the quiz.
"I'm not going to do the course," Fran said, when she could. "Not for Stockport. Not because I owe anyone. I might do it one day for me, because I'd be good at it, and because I like being good at things." She put the teaspoon down. "I want to go back to the booth. I like the booth. I want to be live when they're talking too fast. I want you to ask me things, and I want to answer them, even when I've not got the answer ready."
"Can I ask you something now?"
"Go on."
"Will you come to Binche for carnival? With your dad. My dad's dancing. I'm dancing." He held up the paper bag. "My mother sent these. They're waffles. She says to tell your dad she's bought a whiteboard."
Fran thought about the question, the actual question, and found that for once she didn't have to frame it, or reframe it, or turn it into anybody else's words first.
"I like you," she said. In English. Out loud.
He looked at her as though she'd handed him something heavy and he wasn't sure where to put it down.
"That's it?"
"It's a start. I've only ever said it in sign."
"To who?"
"My dad."
Benoît thought about that for a moment. Then he lifted his right hand, uncertainly, and made a shape with it, a sign he'd clearly learnt off the same video as his alphabet: thumb, first finger and little finger up, the other two folded down.
Across the hall, Maureen, who had seen it, put her hand up and signed to the entire room, delighted: THAT'S AMERICAN.
The drum came for them at ten to four in the morning.
Fran heard it first from the spare room above the friterie, a long way off and then not, a single bass drum going through the dark streets of Binche house to house, and under it a sound like loose change in a jar, which was the bells. Her dad, in the camp bed by the window, sat bolt upright before she'd touched him.
Is that it? he signed, in the light from the street.
How can you tell?
He put his good hand flat on the floorboards. It's in the house.
They went down in their coats. The kitchen behind the friterie was full: Pat in a dressing gown setting out champagne glasses beside a crate of oysters on ice, a neighbour with a bottle under each arm, two small boys in miniature costumes, and in the middle of it all Jean-Marie and Benoît, being dressed.
The linen suits went on first, red and yellow and black, printed all over with little lions, and then armfuls of straw pushed in front and back until they both had great round humps like a pair of beetles. A belt of brass bells that rang every time they breathed. Wooden clogs. White lace at the collar. And last, the masks, the green spectacles and the painted moustaches and the face of someone who's been told a good secret, so that suddenly Fran couldn't tell which of the two of them was Benoît except that one of them was taller, and the taller one turned and looked at her through the little green glasses and lifted his hand, and made, quite badly, the Manchester sign for orange.
Pat opened oysters like a woman who'd been doing it at four in the morning every February for forty years, which she had. She handed one to Brendan, who looked at it with great suspicion.
"GO ON, LOVE," said Pat, at about ninety decibels, very slowly. "IT'S. AN. OYSTER."
Brendan watched her mouth, and nodded, and ate it, and signed to Fran, Tell her she doesn't need to shout, I'm Deaf, not in the next room.
"He says it's lovely," said Fran.
Brendan gave her a look. Then he took the whiteboard off the counter, the one Pat had bought specially, a big one with a marker on a string, and wrote on it, and turned it round to Pat.
YOU DON'T NEED TO SHOUT.
Pat read it, and put her hand on her chest, and laughed so much she had to lean on the oysters. Then she took the marker and wrote underneath, HE NEVER SAYS SORRY EITHER, and pointed at Jean-Marie in his mask, and Brendan read it and laughed his big silent laugh, shoulders and all, and the two of them stood there at four in the morning with a whiteboard and no language in common and got on, Fran could see within ninety seconds, better than any two people she had ever interpreted for. It was deeply annoying.
Outside, the drum was waiting.
They danced all morning. It meant the Gilles stood in the street in their straw humps in the grey cold and stamped, clogs on cobbles, bells going on every stamp, for hours, moving through the town a few feet at a time, a ramon in one hand, a bundle of sticks for frightening off whatever needed frightening off. It wasn't a dance you watched. It was a dance you stood in. By nine o'clock the drums had got into Fran's feet, and by ten into her teeth.
Benoît had the hearing aid out and two small pink plugs in, made for musicians, from the snail woman at Saint-Pierre. He couldn't hear much of anything, he told her during a stop, pushing the mask up to drink somebody's champagne. It didn't matter. He put her hand flat on his chest, on the straw, and the drum went there, through the straw and the linen and him and into her palm, and he grinned at her with his face red and his hair stuck to his forehead and said, too loudly, "JE LE SENS!"
Her dad was standing a few yards away with his good hand flat on the window of a shop, eyes closed, smiling. Jean-Marie, beside him, mask up, saw him doing it, and understood, and put his own hand flat on the glass next to Brendan's, and the two of them stood like that a while, two men listening to a window.
At midday the masks came off.
In the afternoon the Gilles came back out in their hats, enormous drifts of white ostrich feather, so tall and so heavy they swayed, and carried wicker baskets of blood oranges against their bellies, and threw them.
They threw them overarm and underarm, at windows netted for the day, at children who screamed and caught them, at old men who caught them one-handed without taking the pipe out of their mouths, hard, so that the whole Grand-Place was full of flying oranges and people ducking and then holding them up in triumph. The cobbles were slick with peel.
Benoît found her in the crowd. She saw him see her, under the feathers, from twenty yards off, and his hand went into the basket, and she thought, don't you dare, and he dared. It came over the heads of a whole family from Mons in a long slow arc, red and gold, turning, and she put her hands up without thinking, the way you'd put them up for anything thrown at you by somebody you trusted, and it landed in them with a slap.
She held on to it. She didn't throw it back.
Beside her there was a thump and a shout and Brendan Mulcahy staggered sideways, holding his head, where an orange had just hit him square above the right ear. Up ahead, twenty yards off, under his own drift of feathers, Jean-Marie Lambotte raised both hands in a gesture that meant I am an innocent man.
Brendan looked at the orange at his feet. He picked it up. He weighed it in his good hand, thoughtfully, like a man choosing a bowl at the green, and then he threw it back, overarm, with real force, and hit Jean-Marie in the middle of his straw hump.
The people round them gasped. Somebody said oh là là. A small boy pointed, scandalised. Pat, at Fran's shoulder, made a noise like a kettle and had to hold on to a lamp post.
Brendan turned to the boy, and to the people round him, and signed with enormous dignity and no apology whatsoever: Deaf. Nobody told me the rule.
Fran didn't translate it. She didn't need to. The whole street could see what he meant.
By the evening the oranges were mostly underfoot. The visitors had gone back to their coaches and trains, and Binche had been given back to the people who lived in it; doors were open all down the street, and music came out of them, and in the gutters the oranges lay crushed in the cold like something after a party, which they were.
Benoît had taken off the hat. He still had the suit on, and the straw, and the bells, which rang faintly whenever he moved, so that walking beside him down the side street from the Grand-Place was like walking beside a very tired reindeer. He'd put the hearing aid back in. She could see it behind his right ear, the fine wire catching the light from the doorways.
She had the orange in her coat pocket. She'd had her hand round it all afternoon.
They stopped under a street lamp where the noise was far enough off that it had turned back into just noise. She stood on his right, the bad side, still, even with the aid, which gave him most of it back but never the whole top end. She stood there on purpose and said it there first, the thing that came after I like you, quietly, in English, in her own voice, on nobody's channel. Just to hear herself say it.
He didn't turn his head.
Then she went round behind him, the way she'd gone round kitchen tables all her life to get where somebody could see her, and came up on his left, and said it again.
Benoît looked at her for a long moment under the lamp, with straw coming out of his collar and orange on his clogs.
"Say it once more," he said. "For the record."
"No," said Fran. "You heard."