Chapter 5: Fifteen or Fifty
"And does he understand," said the registrar, to Fran, "what we mean by a manipulation under anaesthetic?"
Her dad was sitting on the edge of the couch in the fracture clinic at Stepping Hill with his right arm in a plaster backslab from the knuckles to the elbow, held up across his chest like something he'd been asked to mind for someone else. He had read every word of that off the registrar's mouth. Fran watched him do it. She watched his eyebrows go up, and his jaw go sideways, and his left hand, his only hand at the moment, start to come up off his knee.
"He can lipread you," she said. "Some of it. And he can read. You could ask him."
"Of course." The registrar was about twenty-eight and very tired and kept looking at a screen on a trolley that wasn't working. "Sorry. We did put in a request for a BSL interpreter. I don't know what's happened with it."
What had happened with it was what always happened with it. It had gone into a system, and the system had sent an email to an agency, and the agency had sent an email back, and somewhere between the emails it was Thursday. Fran had been in this clinic, or one like it, a hundred times since she was seven. She knew the chairs. She knew the poster about hand hygiene with the cartoon germ. She'd sat under it at nine and interpreted your dad's going to need a small operation to her dad, in a voice she'd made up to sound like a grown-up, and then interpreted his questions back, and not interpreted the one where he'd asked if he was going to die, because she hadn't known how to say it out loud.
Her dad reached across with his left hand and took the registrar's own notepad off the trolley, and the registrar's own pen out of his top pocket, and wrote on it in big shaky left-handed capitals, and turned it round.
YES. DO YOU?
The registrar went pink. Fran pressed her lips together very hard.
"Right," he said. "Yes. Good. So." He turned his whole body to face her dad, finally, and spoke slowly and much too loudly. "THE BONE IS NOT STRAIGHT. WE NEED TO PUT YOU TO SLEEP. AND STRAIGHTEN IT."
Her dad looked at Fran and signed, one-handed and lopsided, like a man talking with his mouth full: Tell him I'm Deaf, not foreign.
"He says thank you," said Fran, "that's very clear."
He'd come off the ladder on the sixth. Twelfth Night; he'd been taking the lights down, because it was bad luck to leave them up, and the bottom of the ladder had gone out on the wet flags of the front path. Kev next door had found him twenty minutes later, not because he'd heard anything but because he'd looked out of his window and seen the Christmas lights still flashing their secret sequence in the middle of the privet hedge. Kev had rung an ambulance and then he'd texted Fran, Your dads had a fall hes ok-ish hes swearing a lot in sign, and she'd been on the half nine from Zaventem with a toothbrush and the wrong coat.
A broken wrist and a cracked rib. The right wrist. His good hand, the one he did everything with. For a man who talked with his hands it was like being shot in the mouth.
I told Kev not to tell you, he signed at her, in the car park, in the rain, waiting for the taxi.
He was right to.
I don't need you here.
Who's going to do the hospital, then?
The hospital is supposed to do the hospital, he signed, and the cast made the sign clumsy and furious at once. That's the point. That's the whole point, Frances. If you keep doing it, they'll never have to.
The taxi came. He wouldn't let her help him into it. He got in on his own, slowly, swearing in a silent stream with his good hand, and she stood in the rain and held the door.
Benoît texted that night, while she was washing up her dad's one plate and one mug and one fork.
How is he?
Broken wrist. Cracked rib. Furious.
Furious is good. My mother says furious is how you know they'll live.
Then he'll live for ever.
When are you back?
She dried her hands and looked at the screen for a while. Upstairs, her dad was thumping about on his own trying to get his jumper off over the cast, which she'd been told in no uncertain terms not to help with.
Not for Strasbourg. They're doing the op Monday. I've told Darmanin. She's putting Ger in with you.
A long pause. The dots came and went twice.
Ger doesn't do stenography.
Make him.
The dots came and went again. Then: It's sorted 👍
She stood in her dad's kitchen with the tea towel in one hand and looked at that for a long time. She hadn't known he'd noticed that she said it. She didn't know whether he knew what it meant when she did.
He'd been in Binche for Christmas and his mother had shouted at him for three days.
Lovingly. Pat Lambotte shouted at everybody lovingly; it was her register, she'd brought it with her from Kirkby in a suitcase in 1984 and never unpacked it. But she'd shouted at him more than usual, because he'd said pardon to her across the friterie counter eleven times on Christmas Eve, and on the twelfth she'd come round the counter with the chip scoop still in her hand and said, Benoît, love, are you going deaf or are you just ignoring me? and he'd said, Ignoring you, Maman, obviously, and she'd hit him with the scoop.
His dad hadn't said anything. His dad had sat at the corner table with his coffee and his Nouvelle Gazette and looked at him over the top of it, and then, on the last night, said, Tu danses, cette année? Are you dancing this year? Carnival was in February. Benoît hadn't danced last year either. He'd said it was work.
On verra, he'd said. We'll see. And his dad had nodded, and gone back to the paper, and that had been worse than the scoop.
Now it was the Tuesday of the January session and he was in the right-hand chair in the English booth in Strasbourg with Ger Fitzpatrick beside him, reading the Irish Times on his phone and sucking a Polo, and the pad on the desk between them was blank.
It was the fisheries debate. Annual quotas, the North Sea and the Skagerrak. The same faces from the committee room in September, plus some new ones who'd come in for the vote and were checking their emails. The hemicycle wasn't full but it wasn't empty, and it had what passed for quiet on a Tuesday morning: a couple of hundred people moving papers and coughing and murmuring behind their hands, the air-conditioning, and under all of it, in his right ear, the kettle. It had been worse since Christmas. He hadn't slept well since Christmas.
He was live. A German MEP from the coast, Hollmann, a big careful man with reading glasses on a cord, was going through the Commission's proposals one by one in good fast German.
Benoît was keeping up. He was fine. He'd done three hours this morning and been fine. He'd caught himself, twice, leaning to his left in the chair before he remembered there was nobody there.
"Was den Kabeljau betrifft," said Hollmann, "as regards cod," Benoît said, "ist der Vorschlag der Kommission, die Fangmenge um fünf…"
Somebody in the row below dropped a binder. It went off like a gun on the floor and three people laughed and the roar came up in his right ear and folded over the top of the German and when it came down again Hollmann was saying, "…Prozent zu kürzen, aus meiner Sicht vernünftig. Und ich unterstütze ihn."
Fünfzig. He'd heard fünf and he'd heard the end of it, a hiss, a click, -zig. Fifty.
"As regards cod," Benoît said, smoothly, without a gap, "the Commission's proposal to cut the catch by fifty per cent is, in my view, reasonable. And I support it."
Ger turned a page of the Irish Times on his phone.
Hollmann went on to haddock.
Ger showed him on Wednesday morning, at the coffee machine outside the booths, holding out his phone with the face of a man showing someone a photograph of a car crash he'd been in.
A fishing paper from Donegal, online. GERMAN MEP BACKS 50% COD CUT. A picture of Hollmann looking careful. Two paragraphs, quoting the Parliament's English stream, and a line from a skipper in Killybegs about what he'd like to do to German MEPs, which had been tidied up for print. And under it, added at seven that morning: UPDATE: Mr Hollmann's office says the Member called for a fifteen per cent reduction and that the English version was the result of an interpretation error.
"It's in the newsletter as well," said Ger. "The Brussels one. Third item. Under a thing about a goat."
Benoît read it twice. He felt very calm, the way he'd felt in March last year with the man in Athens, as if the noise had got so big there was no room left in him for anything but a high clear silence.
"It's grand," Ger said. "It's grand, chief. Happens to everyone. I once said orgasm for organism in front of the Agriculture committee and the Chair had to suspend the sitting." He put a hand on Benoît's shoulder. "Darmanin wants you at ten."
Liliana Darmanin's office in Strasbourg was a borrowed one on the fourteenth floor, with somebody else's family photos turned face down on the shelf and a view of the river, and nothing on the desk but a laptop and a fountain pen. She was small and neat and fifty-five and had run the English unit for six years without anyone ever seeing her raise her voice, which made people more frightened of her rather than less.
"Sit down, Mr Lambotte."
He sat, and moved the chair a few inches so that she'd be a little to his left. He couldn't help it.
She didn't say anything about the newspaper. She turned the laptop round so he could see it, and pressed a key, and Hollmann's voice came out of the speaker, from yesterday, from the archive: ist der Vorschlag der Kommission, die Fangmenge um fünfzehn Prozent zu kürzen.
Fünfzehn. Clear as anything. Somebody's binder hit the floor somewhere behind it, quite far off.
She pressed the key again and it stopped.
"Everybody mishears," Darmanin said. "I have misheard. In 2003 I gave a Finnish minister a wife he didn't have. That's not why you're here."
He waited.
"I asked Mr Fitzpatrick why he hadn't written the number down for you. He said that he doesn't do stenography." She folded her hands. "He said that Ms Mulcahy writes your numbers. All of them, apparently, and the names, and the place names, in very large letters, and has done since October. He said, and I'm quoting, that he thought it was a courting thing."
The office was very quiet. He could hear the kettle in his ear, and the radiator, and nothing else.
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Mr Lambotte?"
He opened his mouth to say It was the room. The binder. It was very loud in there. He could feel the sentence ready, smooth and finished and charming, all the way to the end.
"It was the room," he said. "Somebody dropped—"
"It was a Tuesday," said Darmanin. "It's never loud on a Tuesday." And she looked at him, not unkindly, and waited, the way he'd seen Fran wait on the slag heap, and he found that he couldn't do it to her for long.
He told her. March last year, the man in Athens, the form that said temporary. Saint-Pierre. The letter behind the toaster. He didn't tell her about the right-hand chair, or the laces. He told her that he'd meant to come and see her in January.
"It is January," said Darmanin.
She was quite gentle about everything after that. She was exact, and she was gentle, and it was so much worse than the shouting he'd been bracing for. He was to stop booth work from today. He was to see the medical service in Brussels on Friday. There would be an assessment, and an audiologist, and a review, and nobody was going to make any decisions until the review, and in the meantime there was a great deal of written work that needed doing, the Committee on Petitions was very behind.
He nearly laughed at that. He didn't.
"Did Ms Mulcahy know?" Darmanin asked, as he stood up. "About the hearing. Not just the numbers."
He looked at the turned-down photos on the shelf.
"I'll ask her," said Darmanin, "if you'd rather not say."
Darmanin rang on Wednesday afternoon, while Fran was at the kitchen table in Edgeley copying out the physio's exercises in big capitals for the fridge.
"Did you know?"
There was no point pretending she didn't know what about. Darmanin had a way of asking a question so that the answer was already in the room.
"Yes."
"Since?"
"October."
There was a short silence on the line. Fran could see her dad watching her mouth from the doorway.
"Thank you, Ms Mulcahy," said Darmanin. "I'd have preferred to hear it in October." And then, after a moment, in a slightly different voice: "I hope your father is recovering well."
Benoît rang at ten that night. She was in her old bedroom in Edgeley with the County posters still on the wall from when she was fourteen, sitting on the single bed with her knees up. He never rang. He hated the phone. She'd known that without either of them saying it, and she knew it now from how he said her name, too loud, like a man on a bad line.
"Did you tell her?"
"She asked me if I knew. I said yes."
"Ger told her you wrote my numbers," he said. "Like a nanny. Since October, he told her. Ger saw it. Ger, who can't find his glasses when they're on his head." He was walking; she could hear his steps, and traffic, and a tram. "Everybody in that booth could see I needed a nanny."
"Somebody had to write them."
"I didn't ask you to."
"No. You never ask anyone for anything. You just sit on the right."
"And you never say anything. You just do it. You sit on my left for three months and write me eye charts and take all my video links and interpret French into French for me at a biscuit stall, and you never once said, Benoît, you're deaf, you idiot, go to the doctor."
"You asked me not to. On the slag heap. You asked me for a month."
"A month! You'd have given me a year. You'd have given me the rest of my life, as long as you got to sit on my left."
She closed her eyes. Across the landing her dad's light was off; the door was open; he'd be asleep, or lying awake not hearing any of this, which was the only good thing about it.
"You liked it," he said. His voice had gone quiet and very precise, and it was the worst she'd ever heard it. "Admit it. You liked it. It's the only way you know how to be with anyone, being their ears. Your dad's. Mine. You'd do it for anybody, Fran, so you never have to say what you want."
It went in and stayed in. It was true enough that it went all the way in.
She heard herself answer in the voice she used for the Commission. The clear one, the kind one, the one that belonged to nobody.
"And you'd let anybody," she said, "so you never have to say what's wrong."
He didn't say anything.
"I made you sound better than you are for three months," Fran said. "That's the job. You're welcome."
The line was quiet for so long she thought it had dropped. She could hear the tram again, going away.
"Go and look after your dad, Frances," Benoît said. "You're good at it."
She hung up before he could.
She did it properly. She always did things properly.
She sat at the kitchen table at half past eleven with her laptop and a cup of tea she didn't drink, and wrote to Darmanin, short and clear, taking herself off the roster for February and March, for family reasons. She thanked her. She didn't explain. Then she opened the other tab, the one she'd had open for weeks on her phone, the course in BSL/English interpreting, part-time, starting September, and began to fill in the form.
Name. Date of birth. First language.
She typed British Sign Language and looked at it.
She didn't hear her dad come down. She never heard him; he moved round the house like weather. He was in the doorway in his dressing gown with the cast held up across his chest, watching her over the top of the laptop. He'd seen the screen. He'd seen her face, which was worse.
She waited for him to ask what she was doing. He didn't ask. He knew.
He lifted his good hand, the left one, slow and clumsy and perfectly clear, and signed it at her across the kitchen, one-handed, the way he'd had to say everything since Twelfth Night.
You're doing it again.