Cut
to the End
Charlie Britten
Cafe Au Lait
Earphones
are an effective device for blotting out the rest of the world. My mother stands
in my room, opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish. ‘Switch that thing
off,’ she says, and I wonder how I know that. Can I do telepathy now? With my mum?
This is scary, so much so I switch off my iPod, even though I am in the
middle of ‘Neutron Star Collision’ by Muse, which is truly amazing.
‘We’re
on holiday, Matthew. In France. You can listen to your music at home. Now, are
you ready?’
‘I
told you. I'm not going.’
‘Come
on, love. We’re all ready to set off. Dad and Steph are waiting. We’re going to
have a nice family day out.’
‘At
a museum?’
‘You’ll
like it when you get there.’
‘Why
would I want to go to a D-Day
museum? Why do you, Mum?’
‘It’ll
be very interesting.’ She sits down on
my unmade bed and then stands up again. ‘Come on. You can't stay here by
yourself.’
‘I'm
all right.’
‘No.’
She draws in her breath and blows it out again. ‘It’s so stuffy in here. You
never open windows, do you?’ Her face
has become flushed, droplets of water forming on her forehead.
The
sun pours through the dusty casement; a river of sweat trickles down the cleft
of my spine, making my black t-shirt cling like a damp cloth to my back and to
the sticky patch on my wrist.
‘Change
into something cooler, Matthew. Black absorbs the heat. I packed you a couple
of light-coloured Ts.’
I
wince at the word ‘Ts’; is that what they call them in M&S? Anyway, black is what I wear: black T-shirts,
black jeans, black hoody, black hair dye. ‘I'm all right,’ I say again.
We
both hear Dad shouting outside, something about a bottle having leaked and
‘made a mess’ in the car. Mum goes out to speak to him, but my sister Steph
appears in her place, as if the two are working shifts. ‘Move it, Matthew. Now.
They’re waiting.’
‘You don’t want to go to this museum.’
‘I
do, actually.’
‘Why? You’re not Dad. You’re not into war films and
all that death and glory stuff. I'm joining CND.’
‘Can
you afford the membership fee? You owe
Mum £5 for the last gig you went to. Just get your arse into Dad’s car.’ She reaches for my hand, pushing back the
cuff of my black T-shirt.
‘Leave
me alone.’ Snatching my hand back, I
pull my sleeve down over my wrist.
‘What
have you done?’
Her
eyes scan my room, but my safety pin lies deep in my jeans pocket.
‘I
scratched myself on the brambles in the yard.’
‘Yeah,
right.’ She looks straight at me but I turn
away.
‘If
you insist on not going and spoiling everybody’s day, I'm staying with you.’
I
suppose I always knew I'd have to give in eventually. I rummage around under my
bed for my trainers. ‘I don't know why you come on a family holiday. You’re a
student.’
‘I
haven't got any money, have I? And Mum
and Dad offered to pay for me.’
‘When
I'm nineteen, I'll be on the road with my metal band.’
‘Right.’
I
bump my head on the kitchen door lintel as I walk outside. It hurts. Being tall
is annoying.
‘Would
you like to sit in the front with me, Matthew?’ asks Dad, as he attempts to
fold up the map, but the gentlest of breezes flaps it around his hands like a
duvet-cover on a rotary-drier. Taking it from him, Mum smoothes it out in a few
firm movements, all the time talking to Steph about how many calories there
might be in pain au chocolat.
‘I
don’t mind.’ I sit in the back with
Steph.
‘All
aboard for Arromanches and the D-Day Museum,’ says Dad as he starts the engine.
I
cringe. So does Steph.
We
drive along straight French roads, through pine forest, families sitting at
picnic tables, children running around amongst the trees and scrambling over
stumps and logs, as Steph and I used to do in England. For a moment, I feel the
springy bracken under my feet, bits of bark in my shoe and dusty mud between my
toes. Afterwards we would eat squashed, peanut butter sandwiches, clammy and
glue-y, washed down with a little box of Sainsbury’s pure orange juice.
Having
parked in one of the many car parks at Arromanches, we walk along the
promenade, gulls ‘caw-caw-ing’ above our heads. Then Dad stops dead, thrusting
his arm out in front of him, almost knocking off Steph’s sunglasses. ‘Look. Look.
Mulberry Platforms.’ He turns to me. ‘You
do realise how significant these were, don't you?’ Before I can even draw breath, he tells me -
again - about Hugh Iorys Hughes building portable landing platforms so that the
Allies could invade France. Blah, blah, blah.
It’s
like a demolition site, lumps of rusting metal and concrete on the beach and in
the sea. French families swim around them, using them as diving platforms and
spreading their beach towels over them. It’s a hot day.
‘Hugh
Iorys Hughes was Welsh by the way.’ Dad’s
mother is from the Valleys. He bigs this up, has done ever since the World War
Two craze took him over.
We
have to wait in a queue to enter The D-Day Museum, alongside wall-displays of
uniforms stiff with age, yellowed wartime notices in blotchy typescript, gas masks,
photographs of men with round, horn-rimmed glasses and brylcremed hair,
standing behind bulky pieces of equipment. ‘Fascinating, fascinating,’ says Dad,
pushing his glasses down his nose. I move my weight from one foot to the other.
It’s all so old, a miasma of Dad-ness. My wrist throbs under new scars. I
notice that my cuff sticks to newly dried blood.
Mum
and Steph stand together chatting, pointing at things and laughing. They have
this joke about generals in war films moving canes over maps and saying in cut-glass
accents, ‘We’re-ah here-ah. The enemy’s there-ah. And we’re going to obliterate
the blight-ahs.’ It was funny the first
time.
Inside
the museum at last, a bald-headed Frenchman talks through the events of D-Day,
pointing with a ruler at a papier-mache
model of Arromanches. ‘Nous sommes ici, ici, et ici, et les Nazis, voila!’ Mum and Steph dissolve into giggles; every so
often they press their lips together and look serious, but seconds later their
mouths pucker again. Whose side are they on?
I
glance at Dad, but he’s so caught up in it all that he doesn't notice, which is
perhaps as well. For a while I'm really pissed off with them. We’re doing this
for Dad, aren’t we? It’s his thing, isn't it? But the museum goes on and on,
more and more rooms and exhibits, another storey, yet another video. Dad has to
see everything.
At
last, lunch, open air and sunshine, cafe table legs scraping against the
pavement. The waitress furrows her brow as Dad orders in English; he gets cross
when she brings tiny cups of espresso, instead of what he calls ‘proper coffee’.
I tighten my knuckles under the table. Mum leans across the table murmuring, ‘Grand’,
but Dad shakes his head at her. ‘Bigger.’ He draws his hands apart as if he
were playing the accordion. ‘And... With.... Milk.’
‘Cafe
au lait,’ I say to my feet.
‘What’s
that, Matthew?’ Dad turns on me, raising his eyebrows.
‘Nothing.’
‘Better
not be.’ As we finish eating, he takes another
brochure out of his pocket and opens it out on the table. ‘Now, the ‘Arromanches
360 Cinema’. It says here that ‘This circular theatre with nine screens shows
the film ‘The Price of Freedom’, which mixes contemporary news-reel images from
war correspondents with pictures from the present day. There is no spoken
commentary, just the sounds and noise of D-Day.’’
I
don’t say anything. All I do is curl my lip about a millimetre.
Dad
leaps out of his chair and storms out the cafe, leaving Mum to pay. In the car
park, he shouts at me, ‘What’s the matter with you? What were you going to do this morning that
was so much more interesting?’
Silence.
Dad’s
furious eyes bore a hole into my face. ‘Well?’
‘I
don’t know.’
‘Why
are you like this? What do you want?’
‘I
don’t know.’
‘You
don’t know! You don’t know
anything!’ I jerk my head backwards;
it’s what I always do when I'm told off, even though it’s uncomfortable. ‘Get
into the car! You will see this!’
In
dreadful silence we drive about a mile, to a bunker-like building
half-submerged in cliff top. I wander away from the others, across the grass
area which slopes down to the sea, grateful for the offshore breeze blowing on
to my face. An elderly couple smile at me and say something in French. They
must think I'm normal, but my wrist still smarts. I touch the safety pin in my
pocket.
Inside
the ‘Arromanches 360 Cinema’, it’s standing-room only, with metal crash
barriers, like an old fashioned football ground, but our family and that
elderly French couple make up the whole audience. The screen extends almost all
round the auditorium, so when the lights go out, images of D-Day bear down upon
us from everywhere, truly 360 degrees, soldiers in khaki and the tat-tat-tat of
gunfire, buildings dissolving in smoke and fire, the view from an aircraft with
the ground rising up and down. Makes you dizzy. I reach out for the metal crash
barrier. Dad jerks his head round to stare at me.
They
ride through a field, which changes into a modern town. Germans in grey
uniforms surrender to teenage Allied soldiers, watched by ragged French
villagers, who cheer and cry at the same time. In the auditorium, I hear a
gulp: the elderly French couple are sobbing, easy tears flowing down their
cheeks unchecked. She taps me on the arm and points to her chest, saying in stilted
English, ‘Me, I... was... here.’
I
nod, my father also; he draws in his breath to say something in reply but
doesn't.
More
images of Allied soldiers now, scared faces under their round metal helmets,
dirty and exhausted. For a moment I think I recognise one of the sixth-formers
at school. Seventy years ago, this is what sixth-formers looked forward to. This
would have been me if I had lived in the 1940s.
My
father is still watching me, but I don't care. It’s all too much, in the same
way that listening to ‘The End’ by ‘The Doors’ blows your mind, because you
know you can never create anything as big, never do what they do, only glimpse
at something massive. With my finger, I trace the outline of that safety pin,
the loop at the bottom, the rounded catch at the top. The soldiers’ faces have
scratches on their faces, but they didn't do it to themselves, because they
were bored, or because their family weren’t cool.
We
leave the ‘Arromanches 360 Cinema’ in silence, Dad walking on ahead of us, his
shoulders sagging, his head cast down. I quicken my pace, about to join him, but
he doesn't look at me.
‘Let's
have another coffee,’ says Mum, forcing a smile.
‘No,’
mutters Steph, ‘not that again.’
Nevertheless
we follow her across the road to the nearest cafe. Leaving them hovering outside,
I walk into the gloomy interior, pushing past wooden chairs with tired paint
and bare tables with just ashtrays on them. A waiter polishes glasses behind
the bar, his eyes intent on the television in the corner, watching a games show
with lots of canned laughter.
‘Café
du lait, s’il vous plait,’ I say. ‘Quatre.’
Nodding,
he reaches over to the coffee machine. ‘A la table?’
‘Merci
bien.’
I
rejoin my family outside. Dad peruses one of the leaflets we picked up today,
pages rustling as he turns them. Mum and Steph have stopped chattering; I wish
they’d say something. Anything. The sound of my heart pumping blood around my
body is deafening, throbbing through the scratches on my wrist, which have
reached the smarting, sore stage. I pull down my sleeve.
Then
Dad raises his head. Simultaneously Mum, Steph and I draw in our breath and
hold it.
‘You’ve
ordered?’ Dad says.
‘Yeah,’
I reply, exhaling again.
‘In
French?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Well
done.’ He smiles. ‘You’re a good
linguist, you are.’ He holds the smile until
his face muscles must've ached. He looks down at what he had been reading, then
at me again. ‘What did you...? How did you...?’
He taps the brochure.
‘It
was okay.’
Still
smiling, he nods. ‘Yes. It was okay. Wasn't
it?’
On
the way back to the car, I throw the safety pin into the gutter.
Author Bio
Charlie Britten has contributed to ‘FictionAtWork’, ‘The
Short Humour Site’, ‘Mslexia’, ‘Linnet’s Wings’, CafeLit, ‘Radgepacket’. She writes because she loves doing it and
belongs to two British online writing communities.
All Charlie’s work is based in reality, with a strong human
interest element. Although much of her
work is humorous, she has also written serious fiction, about the 7/7 Bombings
in London and attitudes to education before the Second World War.
Charlie Britten lives in southern England with her husband
and cat. In real life, she is an IT
lecturer at a college of further education.
