Page 6 of The Dark of the Moon
I only had time to do one rubbing (Durtaud Robert7 jul. 1943) when Mum came to tell me it was time to go back to the car. I was wearing my ear defenders because the seagulls can be really loud beside the sea, so I didn’t hear her until she came round and stood in front of me and waved. She and the Old Lady had walked all the way to the beach on the other side of the citadel, which is quite a long way for someone with a false leg, even with the flowery walking stick. I wanted to do another rubbing becauseI’d found a few more names that I hadn’t noticed before. But Mum said it was time to sit down at a café because Philly was a bit tired, and I could have an ice cream if I came straight away.
I had my usual – salted caramel with salted caramel sauce. It’s the best and it’s a speciality of the island. The salt comes from the salt pans which are further along the north coast. I’ve sailed there in the dinghy before. The salt pans are also why there are so many donkeys on the island. They were used to carry the baskets of salt that had been raked from the shallow seawater in the pans. The donkeys used to wear pantaloons made of striped material to protect their legs from bites when they worked in the salt pans because the shallow water was the perfect place for mosquitoes and biting flies to breed.
After I’d finished my ice cream and Mum and Mrs Philly Delaney had drunk their coffees, we got back in the car and drove to the other end of the island to visit the lighthouse. The Old Lady’s cup had a big print of red lipstick on the rim. We passed the salt pans on the way, but there are no donkeys working there anymore. Nowadays, the salt is transported by tractors.
The lighthouse is at the very end of the road. There aren’t too many cars on the island. It’s very flat and people mostly use bicycles to get around. There were more bicycles (13, which made me feel a bit wobbly) than cars (8) parked in the car park. 3 more people arrived on bikes while we were buying our tickets, so then there were 16, which made me feel better.
I think the caffeine in the coffee must have given the Old Lady some energy because she insisted on climbing the stairs to the top of the lighthouse. There are 257 steps, but I don’t mind it being an odd number because by the time you go back down again you’ve done 514 steps, so that makes it even. I was pretty impressed that she managed it with her false leg, although she needed to use both her walking stick and the handrail. She was puffing a lot by thetime we stepped out on to the viewing platform, but she said it made it worthwhile to see so far out to sea. I put my ear defenders on because the wind was so loud up there and also the kittiwakes and gulls were screeching as they swooped past us. I thought about Bernoulli’s equation again and I wondered whether the Old Lady was thinking about flying planes, too, because she stood there for quite a while just gazing out to sea at nothing.
By the time we climbed all the way back down again, it was time to go home and have lunch. Mrs Philly Delaney said she was ready for a Post-Prandial Pause, which meant she wanted to lie down and have a nap. I think we’d worn her out with all that sight-seeing.
As we were driving back to the house, we passed the gates of the cemetery at Le Bois-Plage-en-Ré. The Old Lady’s head swivelled round to look at it. She seemed very interested in it, so I said, ‘Would you like to go and visit the graves?’ I was making Polite Conversation, but also thinking I could do some more rubbings to add to my collection, even though I prefer the ones that were carved by the living prisoners into the citadel walls.
Mum looked a bit exasperated and glanced at her watch. It was already 1 p.m.
‘Yes, I’d very much like to do that someday,’ Philly said. ‘But today I’m a bit too tired. And I think I need to get back to the house.’
When we got home, Dad was supposed to have gone to the shops to buy some things for lunch, but he was still writing emails on his computer. I heard Mum say, ‘It was the one thing I asked you to do. And now the shops are closed. What the hell are we going to give her?’
In France, everything shuts at 1 p.m. and doesn’t open again until at least 3 p.m. It’s because they have a rule about not working too many hours in a week and so everyone goes home for a longlunch. If the government tries to change the rule, everyone goes on strike. Dad says going on strike is the French National Pastime, and that gave me an idea. While Dad was moving his computer and all his folders and pieces of paper off the kitchen table, I told him I was going on strike and not doing the sailing camp. He ran his hands through his hair, so it stuck up all over the place like when we’ve been out in the dinghy on a windy day. And then he said, ‘Nice try, Kiddo, but no dice. You’d have to join a union first. And you’re not French.’
I don’t like it when he calls me Kiddo. He only does that when he’s trying not to lose his temper.
He put the laptop and the pile of folders down on a chair and they slid off and went all over the floor just as Mum was carrying the water jug. She tripped and the water went all over the laptop. I put on my ear defenders and went upstairs to look at my scrapbook of rubbings again because I don’t like it when they fight, even if this fight was in hissy whispers because of the Old Lady being in the sitting room.
In the end, we all had Marmite sandwiches for lunch. I ate four because I was pretty hungry, even after the ice cream.
Mum looked pleased. ‘I told you the sea air would do you good, Finn,’ she said.
‘We’d better pack extra sandwiches for the camp next week then,’ said Dad. ‘There’s going to be sea air a-plenty when we’re out on the boats all day.’
I’m trying not to think about it.
I’ve laminated the rubbing ofDurtaud Robert(7 jul. 1943) and added him to my collection.
Philly
I’m exhausted again after our morning’s sightseeing. After lunch, I excuse myself and go to have a lie-down on my bed for an hour. ‘Just a little lie-down,’ I say to Kendra, ‘before we do the next instalment.’ To tell the truth, talking about those times so long ago takes it out of me a bit too. Although I do enjoy thinking about Ben again. It brings him back to me after all these years on my own. Perhaps that’s all it is, recalling the stories, reliving the sensations of flying and falling in love – which are, after all, almost identical – but somehow I feel closer to him here on the island. Is he here? How can I find him? Where do I start to look?
Sometimes the grief is still overwhelming, so to distract myself I try to do the crossword on my iPad, daily copies ofThe Timesbeing unavailable out here of course. But the squares swim before my eyes as I begin to doze, drifting on the edge of sleep, and other lost faces from those wartime years float through my mind like clouds across a blue sky.
Amy . . . my brother Teddy . . . Jakub and Janina . . . Antoni . . . Gwido . . . Noor . . . Violette.
And I must have fallen into a proper sleep because I wake with a start and find I’ve been crying, my throat tight with sadness and my cheeks wet with tears. I lie there for a few moments, trying to calm the gulps of my breath, forcing myself to focus on the peacefulsanctuary of the room with the afternoon light playing through the thin fabric of the drapes.
Once I feel a little steadier, I check my watch, get up and splash my face with cold water, washing away the tear stains. Then I run a brush through my hair and reapply my lipstick, resolutely stretching my mouth into a smile before going downstairs to the study to find Kendra and continue with my story.
‘Did you manage to sleep?’ she asks. ‘Aren’t naps a wonderful thing? I had one too.’ Under her summer tan, there are dark shadows beneath her eyes. ‘I haven’t had an unbroken night’s sleep for years,’ she says, without a trace of self-pity, as she reaches for her notebook. ‘Finn was never a good sleeper, even as a baby. Still, I can write at any time of the day or night, which is a blessing.’
I realise she must wake up when Finn does, keeping her son company and watching over him through those dark hours before the dawn when he’s up and about.
‘It’s a lot to cope with,’ I reply, wanting to give her more time to talk about her own situation before I re-embark on my life story.
‘Dan and I have learned to divvy it up between us. I do the nights so that he can do the days.’
‘That’s good. The two of you finding a way to make it work.’ I let the words hang there, in the beat of silence between us, as she thinks about replying. Will she brush away my gentle invitation to open up a bit, or can she see I really want to know, to hear how hard things are between them? Her need to talk wins out.
‘It’s caused so much friction between us,’ she says quietly. ‘Some autistic children don’t differentiate between day and night, you see. The second Finn wakes up, he’s hyper-alert, as if the volume in his brain is immediately turned up to full blast. When he was tiny, I’d walk for miles around the darkened streets, pushing him in his buggy. Or I’d drive for hours through the darkness with him strapped into his car seat, desperate to try to get him to fall asleep.Even when he does finally drop off, his brain can still torture him. It’s not just bad dreams, he has extreme night terrors. He wakes screaming, inconsolable and unreachable. Before we discovered the trampolining helps, I’d read him stories for hours on end just to give him a little respite from the fear, and so that Dan and I would have a little respite, too, from our desperation. When you watch your child biting at his fingers until they bleed, his hands swollen from being hit against things, hurting himself physically as he tries to fight against the terror in the only ways he can find, you’ll do anything to make it stop. We’ve tried everything ... medication, changing his diet, more stimulation, less stimulation ... in the end, adapting our routines to fit in with what works best for him has been the only solution we’ve been able to find.
