Stile Maus (6 page)

‘Come on, Emile sit down,’ her mother said as she turned to see the curious youngster standing between the two rooms.  Emile obliged, sliding carefully onto one of the many chairs.

‘Here you are,’ chanted Isabelle as she pushed a hot plate down onto the table,

‘Jeremy,’ she continued, ‘Sophie,
Laurin!’  A bustle of small children hurried into the room, each climbing their chairs with extreme determination.  Chuckling at the progress of his nephew, Pierre grabbed at his dungarees and hoisted him onto the cushioned base,

‘Nearly,’ he chortled.  Emile didn’t say a word.  Every remark, every comment spoken was stored inside her mind hoping that one would shed light on last night’s development.  She found herself growing impatient.  Her Mother was busy wiping at the counters and stove, too distracted to get caught up in any kind of conversation and her Uncle seemed stuck in a daydream.  The only noise in the room happened to be the echoing gurgle that Jeremy was now performing with a mouthful of food.  Pushing both of her palms down onto the base of her chair Emile lifted herself just a tiny bit so that she could look out through the window and into the fields.  A vast stretch of rich green and yellow rippled into the distance.  Her Father was nowhere to be seen. 

‘Emile,’ she almost jumped from the sudden exclamation, plodding her backside down against the seat almost immediately.

‘Come on you, eat your food.’  Her Mother took a seat beside her, sporting an unhappy expression as she looked over the untouched assortment of bacon, egg and sausages.  Emile winced.  She wasn’t in any mood to eat.  She
needed
to find out what was going on. 

‘Your Mother is right,’ muttered Pierre, ‘even the bravest of adventurers need their breakfast.’  Emile nodded glumly and took up her fork, scooping effortlessly at a rasher with absolutely no intention of picking it up.  A knife slipped from Pierre’s hand and clattered against the table top.  Emile looked up, it was then she saw it.  At first it must have eluded her but now, brought to her attention by the clattering silverware, Emile found herself staring at the first clue of her latest escapade.

Every morning at precisely five-thirty Emile’s Uncle Pierre would wake up, bath and then sit at the kitchen table smoking his favourite brand of French cigarettes until the rest of the cottage rose from their slumber.  Every
evening
Pierre would come in from the fields, bath and then sit at the kitchen table waiting for his supper, like everyone else.  He would only head out and tend to his duties at nine o’clock, every day, without fail.  Emile’s Father joked that his need for routine came from years ago when he ran a clinician practice in Paris and now the habit was too profound to shake off.  To the children, his reason for leaving was unclear.  He had appeared to have had everything in Paris, however now he had nothing, merely working his keep by helping her Father with the animals and the land.  Nevertheless he had a ritual.  A procedural habit that meant he only started work after breakfast.  So, taking into consideration his strict schedule, Emile found it odd that there seemed to be a strange type of black liquid smudged over his hands and between his fingers.  It wasn’t mud that much was clear.  It was much more,
oily
.  She studied him with intense concentration, searching for any other sign of the mysterious sludge.  His arms and knuckles were hidden in a forest of entwining hair not to mention the thick dark stubble that dashed across his face.  Anything could have been under there.  Her eyes fell over his tunic, a rugged old maroon jumper that had more holes than buttons. Ripples of greyish seams ran over his shoulders and down to each rolled up cuff.  Emile squinted, desperately trying to focus.  A faded blotch of black seemed to rest upon the underside of her Uncle’s sleeve, barely noticeable against the rippled bundle of fabric.  Her eyes glared with promise.  She looked towards the opposite arm, finding exactly the same mark yet slightly lighter.  Pierre stared up from his breakfast, finding an awestruck Emile gawping at his plate.  Taking his fork away from the dish he tapped the blunt silver curve onto the table twice before exclaiming,

‘Get your own,
petite canaille
.’  Emile broke away from her thoughts and smiled innocently before taking a sip of cold milk.  With a huff Pierre rose from his seat, taking his plate and coffee mug with him and plunking them into the basin.  Emile watched him leave, thinking that he would almost definitely take to the washroom for a bath.  She was wrong.  Instead of heading for the bathroom he continued through the living room and out through the front door, spilling a hot douse of morning sunlight across the worn flooring as he disappeared across the lush emerald lawn.  Emile grimaced.  She knew she wouldn’t be able to leave the table without finishing her meal so reluctantly she began cramming as much as she could into her mouth, chewing only when it was uncomfortably full.  Isabelle looked at her with wary eyes,

‘You are a peculiar one,’ she whispered with a smile.

When it came to a real adventure, Emile took nothing for granted.  She knew this wasn’t one of her usual capers, crawling across the forest floor in search of frogs or timing how long it took her to clamber up to the top of the tallest tree, this was something else.  She could feel it.  Her fingers grabbed at the worn binding of her favourite book and she yanked it away from its dusty shelf, flicking through the pages until she came to one particular chapter.  Fortunately for Emile, she had at her finger tips first-hand advice from one of the world’s finest explorers.  Rupert
Montjoy.  A smooth faced, knuckle grazed, dungaree wearing traveller who loved nothing more than to venture into forbidden swamps and lava plugged volcanoes.  Emile owned four of his beloved tales and sat up throughout most nights, smiling at each faintly printed word by candlelight and occasionally the simmering glare of the rising sun.  Her favourite tale, which she clutched at within her restless hands, saw Rupert voyage to a magical land, an island in fact which he had discovered whilst pursuing an incredible sea beast.  At this point in the story Rupert had taken refuge inside a small cavern, taking a break from mending his cherished vessel which had taken considerable damage from the sea bound foe.  It had attacked unexpectedly, thrusting its hammer like head into the underbelly of the boat and forcing the brave Captain Montjoy to harbour upon the red sands of the mysterious island.  Rupert listened to the sounds of the night, wary of what other creatures may be hiding amongst the forests of tropical trees.  The cave in which he found himself appeared gloomy and damp and the fire that he had started promised to soon wither and die.  He worried about his boat, shored against the melting sands of the red beach.  The tide that had carried him ashore had been strong and given his anxious rush to escape the thrashing sea monster he had had failed to think about the risk of becoming permanently marooned.  The
Endless Summer
              sat a matter of yards away from the tree line, its wounded belly buried beneath a cruel blanket of sand.  Rupert knew that if the tide decided not to come in that far again, he would be deserted.  From his back pack he pulled out a small journal to which he opened towards the back page.  Lowering the pad down to the glowing fire he studied a bundle of small diagrams and sketches intently before turning the page, repeating the same process until he shouted,

‘Aha!’  His husky bellow aggravated an army of bats and they flew towards the entrance in flocks, whistling at a startled Rupert as they passed.  Regaining his footing he glanced back at the page with a confident smirk.  He would have to build his second pulling device of the month. 

Emile tapped her finger over the chapter’s final sentence.  What did Rupert
Montjoy do every time he faced an obstacle?  He made a plan.  And that’s exactly what she was going to do.  Right after she knew what she was up against.   

Since the Germans had begun to occupy Paris Emile’s playful schemes had become somewhat limited.  Her Father had forbidden any of the children from venturing out of sight and he allowed no exceptions.  If the Beaujolais dragon himself would have risen from over the hills, spewing fire as it flew, Emile would have been instructed to hide under her bed rather than head deep into the woods where it’s snapping jaws could not reach.  She understood.  The Germans brought trouble and a certain tension that she had not before witnessed.  Her family didn’t talk about them, there were only warnings.  She couldn’t be seen leaving the cottage.  If she was, a question would arise, the type of question she didn’t want to answer. 

‘And where are you off to?’

Even an honest answer would have probably attracted a watchful suspicion from her parents given her long stretch of previous escapades.  A dash of sunlight stretched warmly over her face as she slinked through the living room.  She peered into the kitchen, quickly ducking against the wall as she caught sight of her Mother.  A rattle of juddering beats emerged within Emile’s chest, a clear indicator that her testing quest had begun.  She stooped low, brushing the wooden floor with her fingertips.  Her Mother seemed engaged, hands sweeping a damp cloth over an already gleaming stove and her lips were pursed, humming along to a song that had arisen from the archives of her past.  Emile took shelter behind an armchair a few feet away from the front door and peeked over its large, flowery rests and towards the kitchen.  The entire room bathed in a warm blaze.  Any sudden movement would ruin her chances of escape and see her banished to her bedroom for the rest of the day.  Her timing would have to be perfect.  She stretched a foot forward, carefully pulling herself towards the edge of the chair.  With wide, attentive eyes she searched the room.  Her glares were quick and soon enough they fell over a wicker basket full to the brim with dirty clothes.  Eventually her Mother would throw the contents of the basket into the sink where she would then scrub at each garment until they were clean.  After that she would pile them back into the basket and carry them out onto the green at the back of the house which was host to a long stretch of washing line where the attire would then be pinned up to dry.  A door stood to the side of the pantry, close to the wash basin.  That would be where her Mother took the mound of soaked laundry. That was her only chance.  Emile ducked down even further, almost sitting against the floor.  The humming stopped.  Footsteps clapped at the stone kitchen flooring.  Emile’s heart raced, her eyes shut, her hands scrunched.  The silence was torturous.  Through the blackness of her eyelids she envisaged her Mother standing over the armchair, scowling and pointing towards the gloom of the hallway.  The suspense got the better of her and one eye twitched open, slowly followed by the other.  The worn fabric of the chair slid beneath her palms.  Her glare met an empty kitchen.  The pantry door swung gently in the breeze.  A smile charmed her face.

This is the part in the story where Rupert Montjoy would land upon the unsound stones of a cliff top, snapping his whip back and sniggering at a gang of ravenous trolls who sat beyond a large fall, arguing amongst themselves and blaming each other for his escape.  Of course, in the French countryside there were no gargantuan mountains, nor were they inhabited by enormous trolls.  In this case however, Emile thought of the task as the impossibly high mountain and of her family as the lumbering beasts that roamed its rocky cliffs.  They wouldn’t devour her over a roasting fire but they might cause quite a stir if she was discovered to be snooping around where she shouldn’t be.  Whatever her Uncle was up to in the early hours of the morning was obviously something that he and her Father didn’t want anyone else knowing about.  She couldn’t prove it yet but she knew it had to be linked with the hushed conversation that took place after supper last night.  Emile’s knee hit the grass as she fumbled loose the shoe lace on her left shoe, pretending to amend the scraggily fabric into a firm knot.  As she hunched Emile glanced up, scanning the yellow fields and ivy meadows.  Explosions of white cloud launched across the skies of perfect sapphire, stretching further than her eyes could see.  The sun was warm but threatened to hide behind the breeze of oncoming clouds and cast the farm and all of its budding meadows within a shadowy gloom.  The figure of her Father shimmered in the distance.  His stooped form trudged behind a great bulk of steal that he ploughed across the land, coming to a brief halt every now and then to swipe at the irritating mask of sweat that had gathered upon his brow.  Her Uncle Pierre was nowhere to be seen.  Across the lawn of blossoming green and quaking dandelion heads, sitting upon a slight rise of grassy slope sat the old barn.  It was a stable structure, built with dark timber that had undergone a harsh discolouring within the winter months.  A memory sprang to mind.  She sat on the dusty rafters of the first floor, tying shards of hay into knots and throwing them down onto the ground below.  Her Father scampered across the whining floorboards, scattering buckets under each rain soaked beam.  His urgency was in no way surprising.  It was a night of lightning and deafening thunder.  Rain had attacked the roof, dribbling through its weakened boundaries with no regard for the contents which lay within.  The main priority was obvious to everyone.  Beneath the leering balcony of the first floor sat her Father’s most prized possession.  An instrument used in a previous life, a life which was in fact not that long ago.  Her Father’s motorcycle (the motorcycle that he had famously pulled around the corners of Paris before zooming to triumph in front of speechless locals) sat on the underside of a thick dust sheet hidden within one of the darker corners of the barn.  His memories lined the walls, black and white photographs framed in silvery gold that bore the dust of a forgotten age.  His racing career had finished just before Emile was born, courtesy of a fall that threatened to take his life.  Emile didn’t know much about it, although she did know that the front wheel of the motorcycle was crooked, bending slightly to the left and missing a host of spindles.  Scratches tore into the paintwork, black and grey, stretching across its thin body like a cluster of shooting stars.  Before her curfew had been introduced, Emile would sneak into the barn regularly, sneaking lengthy peaks inside each of the many boxes that had been thrown into the darkness by her Father.  It was obviously a part of his life that he wished not to revisit, however Emile could not help herself from trying to unearth the mysteries and memories that lay within the dusty confines of each box.