Chapter 10

Guy was ready. This time the tables were going to turn. He dressed and went downstairs, ready for battle.
His grandmother was waiting, riding-crop in her hand.
“Stand at the table and bend over.” She ordered.
“No.”
His blunt refusal was a shock to both of them. They stared at each other. For the first time, Guy saw his grandmother as she was: an old woman. He smiled. She was not so prepared. The premeditation disappeared and raw anger flared up again.
“Will you bend over this instant or do I have to make you?” she screamed, her face crimson with rage.
“Well, you could always try...” he smirked. He was beginning to enjoy the situation. Then somebody rapped at the door.
It was Figeac, coming to report on the night’s fiasco. Through the window, he saw Guy and stared with astonishment. Three pairs of eyes flashed from one to another. His grandmother pursed her lips with satisfaction. The hatred between Figeac and Guy was nobody’s secret. Everything would soon be back to normal.
Figeac stepped in and looked from the crop in Mme Cavaillon’s hand to Guy’s crossed arms and now uneasy expression.
Something was going on.
“Good morning Bernard. We were just discussing Guy’s return in the early hours of the morning without his condescending to advise anybody.”
“What?” he growled, “we’ve been out all bloody night and the sod’s been here all the time?”
“That, in effect, is what I suspect, but he’s being rather stubborn.” She cracked the whip sharply on the table. Both boy and man started. “Perhaps you could assist me?”
Figeac moved his hand to his belt. He’d been wanting to give the brat a good hiding for years.
Mme Cavaillon hesitated. No, she had a better idea.
“Guy, follow me.”
Guy hesitated too. Things were not going the way he expected.
“You heard what the missus said, get a move on.”
She nodded at Figeac and backed through the door to the alleyway. Guy looked from her to Figeac to the garden. He had no choice. Mme Cavaillon opened the cellar door.

Guy was furious: he’d been had, led to the slaughter like a bloody lamb. The whole plan had fallen to pieces. Instead of humbling her, he was now a bloody prisoner.
It was dark. The only light came from three small air holes near the top of the door and a flat sliver of light at ground level. It took a long time for his eyes to adjust to the dark, but then time was something he had.
“Right,” he thought, with all the dramatics of his sixteen years, “if she wants a showdown, she’s going to get one!”
First, he needed a weapon. Where? He groped his way around the wall: flower-pots, bulbs, packets of seeds and a hose. Useless. So he paced up and down.
Midday came and went and the three shafts of light moved across the room, casting a temporary glow over each brick they passed on their slow journey. Evening came and he heard footsteps.
“At bloody last,” he thought. He was getting very hungry. The footsteps stopped. For a while, neither of them spoke, each waiting on their respective sides of the door.
“Well?” she inquired harshly.
“Well what?”
“You can stop talking to me in that tone of voice. Have you changed your mind yet?”
“No.”
“Then you shall stay there until you have.” The footsteps trailed off into the house.
Although pleased with his new-found self-assertion, he was beginning to feel wary. Once again, she held the trump card.
A fresh wave of fury burst over him and he decided he was going to get out and leave the bloody place for good. With a single-mindedness born of desperation, he began to search every square inch of the cellar with his hands. The biggest haul came from the wall opposite the door. Behind a stack of torn and smelly deck-chairs was a small wine rack with half a dozen mouldy bottles. At last he struck lucky: the trowel.
Next, he ran his finger over the door. The verticals were held in place by two horizontal beams and one diagonal. It would be pointless trying to wrench them off, even if he could get the trowel in between. He tried anyway, but there was no play at all. He probed the wood for screws. All on the outside of course. The only possibility was the two massive hinges. He inserted the tip of the trowel into the screw head and turned. The trowel simply twisted.
Although one side was serrated, there was nowhere he could get a proper angle of attack to use it as a saw, and it was too blunt anyway. So he started jabbing blindly at the door. Then discovered he could actually dig splinters of wood out. All he needed to do was gouge a channel around the lock. It was against the grain and slow work too, but at last he was getting somewhere. Until the handle broke off.
He swore and sat down to rest. He was tired and hungry and getting thirstier by the hour. As he settled down to get comfortable, his knee touched the watering-can. He picked it up and sniffed. Not a pretty smell, but he’d tasted worse. Pulling off the rose, he put the spout into his mouth and poured. The first gulp revived him, then suddenly he gagged and spat, working his tongue around his mouth, and spat again, and again. Eventually, the agitated, crawling insect was spat out too. He wiped his tongue on the back of his hand in disgust.
Outside was pitch black and silent. He had no idea of the time. He fell asleep.
Next morning, he woke shivering with cold and hungrier than ever. His mouth was dry and gooey. Picking up the can, he held it up to the holes to see if there were any more insects, but couldn’t tell, so pulled his shirt out, covered the spout with a makeshift filter and sucked. That was better. Not knowing how long he was in for, he drank little, rationing his meagre reserves.
The water did him good. He set about the door with renewed vigour.

He was getting nowhere. The trowel was totally blunt and increasingly painful to hold. He wrapped his shirt around the broken end but both palms were now too sore. He smashed a flower-pot and tried using that against. Another waste of time.
His blood was boiling. He paced up and down, impatiently stamping and kicking. Then he ran at the door, barged it angrily and hurt his elbow. He didn’t hear her coming.
“Have you had enough, boy?”
Guy sobered up immediately. His spate of fury burnt itself out and he became cold and calculating. He said nothing.
“Are you going to answer me; I asked you a question?”
Silence.
“I shall count to ten.”
The magic sentence. Just hearing it made him stiffen. He could feel her cold stare as she counted the numbers and stroked the crop across her fingers. His old reflex took over: hands sweating, nails digging into his palms. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. There was nothing she could do!
“... seven, eight...” the words hardened, became more threatening, “ni...ne, Ten!”
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen! Unlucky!” Guy burst into uncontrollable laughter.
The old woman smashed the crop against the door with such violence, it snapped. She stormed off to the house with Guy’s laughter ringing in her ears.

Rumbling noises from his stomach reminded him he was famished. He reckoned he hadn’t eaten for almost forty hours. It was unbelievable! How long was the fucking cow going to keep him locked up?
He picked up a bulb, pulled off the outer skin and took a bite. Then spat it out. Jesus that was bitter. He rinsed his mouth out.
The day passed very slowly. He’d given up on the door as a waste of time. The only thing he could do was wait, dammit. “Well, if that’s her bloody game, I will wait!” he exploded. He’d out-wait her! She was going to be the one to beg him to come out. On her hands and fucking knees she’d have to beg before he came out!
But of course she didn’t. Nobody and nothing came except the dark and the cold. And the stench was getting unbearable. He’d hung on as long as he could but eventually had had to squat in the corner. He covered it with a flower-pot, but the smell lingered heavily.
And now there was no water left either, except for the pint or so lurking at the bottom of the hose-pipe coils, and Guy hadn’t thought about that.
He took one of the bottles of wine and broke its neck off with the trowel. Swirling a quarter or so of it around the bottom of the watering-can, he rinsed it out and poured the dregs into the corner.
As the liquid poured into his mouth, he knew it was not ‘just’ wine. His entire mouth tingled with indescribable pleasure. It was exquisite. He sucked and sucked, slaking his thirst as he drank the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. Lost, almost non-existent memories swam in with the cool sweet fluid. He leaned back on the wall and closed his eyes, then slid down to a crouching position and swallowed another mouthful. The wine went straight to his head and he sighed in happiness. It was a feeling of such intense joy, it was almost sexual. He was warm now and glowing. His two days of imprisonment became laughable nonsense. He could stay here for as long as he liked, he had everything he needed, everything in the world. All that existed was this feeling of total fulfilment. He picked up the bottle and held it under his nose, inhaling the fragrance, then cradled it in his arms, moaning softly, half-dazed by the wonderful sensations he was experiencing. His head started nodding.
As his head fell forward, he impaled his cheek on the jagged edge of the neck and woke with a start. His left cheek was warm. Blood was trickling over his chin and down his neck. He didn’t care, he didn’t even feel any pain. Leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, he opened his mouth and let out a wild-western “Yaaaah-Hoo!” then staggered up to get another bottle. Unsteadily, he ‘sabred’ this one too and poured it gurgling into the watering-can. With another whoop, he carried his spoils back to his seat and drank it greedily, as if unable to swallow fast enough and still impregnate his mouth with its unbelievable siren beauty.
In his increasingly drunken condition, the injustice of his fate changed his mood. He started muttering what his teenage maudlin called dark imprecations on his grandmother’s head. He tried to get up but his legs were too shaky.
“You fucking bitch, I’m going to kill you!” he shouted from the depths of his lungs. And a stream of obscenities in English followed. The outburst lasted some five to ten minutes, interrupted at regular intervals for refuelling, then gradually died out and stopped. The watering-can fell from his hands and toppled over, spilling its precious contents on the floor. Guy was asleep.
Mme Cavaillon had been asleep too. She was awoken by the first war-whoop and had listened intently to all the goings on. Assuming he was doing it on purpose to annoy her, she was on the point of going down to sluice a bucket of water under the door when the noise stopped. She got back into bed and slept soundly until morning.

“Right, I shall ask you one more time. Are you going to come out and obey me?”
No answer.
“I’m warning you, the longer this goes on, the worse it will be.”
Still no answer.
Counting up to ten, to herself this time, she spun round and went back inside.
“Don’t you think...”
“No,” she cut him short, “he will stay there until he has learned his lesson. I will not tolerate such behaviour.”
Figeac realised he was wasting his time trying to convince her to let him deal with it, so he left.
Two hours later, Guy woke up and was violently sick. He couldn’t move. Another spasm of nausea shook him. Covered in vomit, he rolled over and fell back to sleep.
In his sleep, dark, confused figures danced in front of his eyes. He couldn’t recognise them, it was all too far away. Faces leered at him, mouths whispered together, somebody picked him up then put him down in disgust when their hands touched the diarrhoea oozing from his shorts and dribbling down his legs. Strange voices, pity and cynicism, lurid comments, flashlights, then men grabbing her roughly and taking her away, and the sound of his own desperate screaming. Nobody heard the little French boy as his mother’s putrefying corpse was taken away. Nobody knew he’d been there, locked in for three whole days watching her discoloured, immobile body. Nobody. And the nightmare started slashing his face with the razor-blade of memory.
Panic gripped him and he started to sweat and tremble. A pain - gnawing, chewing, stabbing and punching his insides - tore at his chest. His breathing faltered and, within seconds, he was wheezing loudly. His head pounded, pounded, pounded and he leaned over and heaved up another trickle of green bile. He was cold, freezing, and his teeth chattered wildly as he panted and groaned and choked.
He struggled to get away, to escape the racking pain. Whimpering as he tried to block out the awful sight, whimpers that shed tears, tears that burned his face, that ripped his mind apart. Clawing at the floor and digging in with the heels, he grovelled backwards. His hand landed on the broken bottle-neck and tore into his flesh. He screamed in agony.
Something snapped inside. Covering his eyes in his hands and smearing the other cheek with blood, he threw back his head and screamed again and again. The noise hit his ears, panic-ridden sobs and screams echoed round and round and smashed his face.
“No no no no no no no no no!” he yelled in an endless litany of terror. The screams went on and on.
Hallucinating hideously, faces twisted out of shape and merged into one another, the riding-crop rained down on him blow after stinging blow, slaps and beatings pummelled his head, his neck, his legs, his arms, his ears, his bottom, his belly, his sides, his hands, and he screamed and screamed and screamed. ¶ 1:58 AM