Free The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen Page A

weak and croaky.
         It makes me laugh my head off. I laugh and laugh and laugh.
         —Gotcha!
         I can’t stop laughing, and the more I laugh the more he hates it but he can’t say anything because he’s being paid. You know something about Fat Perez? I don’t think he can cope with Wacko Boy. When Maman comes, they leave me in the living-room watching Les Chiffres et Les Lettres and they talk in his kitchen. And after he’s talked for a while she starts using the Ice Voice. So I turn up the volume with the remote control because I hate that voice. I have to keep turning it up louder. When she comes in to get me, she’s still in a rage and her mouth’s twitching like mad. It does that sometimes.
         On the way home in the car, she says that she and Monsieur Perez have had a little talk because he’s got some strange things into his head. And that’s when I know for sure that Fat Perez was lying. He said that whatever I tell him will never leave the room because it’s a secret between him and me.
         But look. He told her, see? So he is a liar like all of them and he plays the same games they all play like Pretend You Don’t Hate Him that’s like a show on TV. They’re all acting and I’m supposed to believe in it, like I’m supposed to believe Papa’s my real dad. But he’s just playing Pretend You’re His Dad. And that makes him the biggest fake of all and that’s why I won’t talk to him on the phone any more when he rings from Paris and that’s why I stop writing him letters and I start hating him because he’s done a terrible thing, he hasn’t got honour, he’s let me down very badly.

 
    I used to sleepwalk, as a child. My mother would find me in strange places. The first time I was only four or five; she found me hunting for something out in the garden; when she asked me what I was looking for, I replied that I was looking for ‘it’. I was to search for this unidentifiable ‘it’ in my sleep on later occasions – in the garden, or the neighbour’s field, or the nearby beach. Such episodes worried my parents, and they unsettled me too, when I learned of them the next morning. But in a strange way, I also found it fascinating that a part of me could be giving my body orders in my own absence. I never remembered my dreams afterwards, but I always awoke feeling groggy and exhausted, as though I had undergone a huge physical and mental ordeal in order to visit a place beyond maps. Sleepwalking became an increasingly regular feature of my life, and the habit peaked during my adolescence, when the mind and body are evolving so rapidly. During my puberty, those years of daily self-astonishment, sexual fantasy and furtive masturbation beneath the sheets, I sleepwalked almost every night. I never went as far as the beach again, but sometimes I would awake and find myself in a barn belonging to the neighbouring farmer, or in the storeroom where my parents kept antiques awaiting restoration. Surprisingly, I never had any accidents during any of these episodes. My sleepwalking appeared to be completely benign, and we all came to accept it as an idiosyncrasy which I would one day outgrow. And sure enough, I eventually did. By the time I had left home and begun life as a medical student, somnambulism had become a distant part of my mental landscape, faded to ghosthood like the old Polaroid photos of my youth.
         But it stirred up an impulse that would not leave me, however blurred the memories became – a curiosity to re-visit that country beyond maps whose contours I had once traced in my sleep, in my restless quest for ‘it’. Like anyone who becomes fascinated by the psychiatric side of neurology, I studied under Professor Flanque at the Institut. But ultimately it was the fully unconscious state, rather than the malfunctions of the conscious one, that held the most enduring appeal for me, and so when I left Paris, I decided to specialise in coma. Which is how I