Charles was admiring a tool, some sort of very strange magnifying glass, which he slipped into his pocket.
‘Don’t you think?’ He jangled the keys of his SUV.
‘Sure, sure . . . A great space, like you said.’
‘So how do you see it? What would you do?’
‘Me?’
‘Well, yeah, you . . . I’ve been waiting for you for months, I’ll have you know! And I’ve had the property tax people on my tail in the meantime! Ha! Ha!’ (He laughed.)
‘I wouldn’t do a thing. I wouldn’t touch any of it. I’d live elsewhere and I’d come here to relax. To read. To think . . .’
‘You’re having me on, right?’
‘Yes,’ lied Charles.
‘Hey, you’re a bit odd today aren’t you?’
‘Jet lag. Right . . . You have the prints?’
‘In the car.’
‘Okay. Let’s get going, then.’
‘Going where?’
‘Back.’
‘But aren’t you going to take the tour?’
‘What tour?’
‘I don’t know – outside?’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘But . . . you haven’t even asked me what I want . . .’
‘Oh,’ Charles sighed. ‘It’s all right, I know what you want. You want to keep just a little of the rustic touch, just the right amount, but you want it comfortable, just the right amount. You want concrete flooring, or a sort of rough wood like the floor of a railway carriage, you want a footbridge with a glass floor and brushed steel handrails, there, you want a high tech kitchen, professional equipment, something like Boffi or Bulthaup, I imagine . . . You want lava or granite or slate. You want light, pure lines, noble materials, and all of it eco friendly, naturally. You want a big desk, made-to-measure shelving, Scandinavian fireplaces and I’m sure you want a projection room too, no? And outdoors, I have just the landscape designer for you, a bloke who’ll do you a garden in motion, they call it, with sustainable seeds and an integrated watering system. And even one of those swimming pools priced over the top that will save your eco-reputation. You know, a “wild pool” you can actually drink from . . .’
His hand was stroking the beams.
‘Not forgetting the access control kit with alarm system, digital camera and automatic gate, that goes without saying . . .’
Philippe was staring at him.
‘Am I wrong?’
‘Uh, no . . . But how did you guess?’
‘Huh . . .’
He was already outside and refused to turn round and look at the impending destruction.
‘It’s my profession.’
He waited while Philippe fussed with the lock (dear Lord, even his key chain was worth its weight in elegance . . .), spoke to someone through his earplug, gave a few tongue lashings to the support staff, and handed him the keys at last: ‘How soon can you do it for me?’
‘It’: that was the word he used.
‘Say . . .’
‘For Christmas?’
‘No problem. You’ll have a fine manger.’
His new client gave him a funny look. He must have been wondering if he were dealing with the ox or the ass.
Charles gave his little hand a warm handshake and headed for his car, his fingers trailing along the fence.
Tiny bits of paint lodged under his fingernails.
Well, at least I’ve rescued that much, he mused, putting the car in reverse.
Between the Russians, HSBC, and this ear-wired cretin, there was plenty of food for thought for the way home. So much the better, too, because now he found himself buffeted by the rush hour traffic.
What –
What a strange life.
It took him a moment to figure out that it was the radio, above all, that was unbearable. He switched off the squawking of listeners who should never have been allowed to phone in, and settled for a non-stop jazz station.
Bang bang, my baby shot me down lamented the crooning chanteuse. Bang bang, too easy, he retaliated.
Too easy.
‘You’re too intelligent . . .’ But what exactly did that mean?
Yes, I did fold the world up into neat little squares. Yes, I was looking for the way out. Yes, I was on my way home when others were getting ready to go out. Yes, I wore myself out fashioning very complicated little origami figures where the lies were always under the fold of paper, and I went on seeing Alexis and suffering from it and letting him eat me alive, and the only reason I did it was so that I could say to her, ‘He’s fine,’ in between a sip and a smile which, by then, was no longer meant for me.
He’s fine. He stole from me, is stealing from me, and will go on stealing from me. He stole from my parents and traumatized my grandmother so that he could get his fill up to there, but yes, he’s fine, I promise.
She isn’t. I think she died of it. She was an old lady whose weakness was holding on to her memories . . .
But . . . Wasn’t he doing precisely the same thing? Letting himself be annihilated by a load of dusty old trinkets?
Precious, perhaps, but what were they worth today?
What were they worth?
Bang bang, at the Porte-la-Chapelle stop, so close to his goal but so far from home, Charles felt, physically, that the time had come to toss out all that stuff once and for all.
Sorry, but I can’t.
It’s not even fatigue any more, it’s . . . weariness.
Futility.
You see . . . I’m still that poor blighter who checks over his essay, sends the rent in on time, and ruins his eyesight over his drawing table. And yet I did try to believe you. Yes, I tried to understand you and follow you but . . . where has it got me?
Stuck in a traffic jam?
And you, Alexis, who were so condescending with me the other night, with your Corinne and your cottage and your carpet slippers: you were not so proud when I came to fetch you at the police station in the 14th arrondissement, were you?
No, you don’t remember a thing, of course, but put me back on your answerphone for a second so I can describe the pitiful shit you were back then . . . It took me for ever to get you dressed, holding my breath all the while, and I carried you out to the car. Carried, do you hear me? Not helped, carried. And you were crying, and you lied to me yet again. And that was the worst thing of all. The way you still, after all these years, after all our oaths as kids and the force of the Jedi, after Nana and the music, and Claire, and your mother, and mine, after all those faces I no longer recognized, after all you’d laid waste to around me – you still tell me a load of bullshit.
I ended up hitting you so you’d finally shut up, and I dropped you off at the emergency entrance of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital.
For the first time, I didn’t stay with you and, you know, I regretted it.
Yes, I regretted I hadn’t let you just die right there, that night . . .
But you’re back on your feet, it looks like. You’re strong enough now to send anonymous letters, expedite your mother to the junkyard, and laugh in my face. So much the better. And you know what? When I think about you, I can still smell it, that stink of piss.
And puke.
I don’t know how Anouk died, but I remember that Sunday afternoon when I came to see the two of you before heading back to my dormitory . . .
I must have been about Mathilde’s age, but I was nowhere near as streetsmart as she is, sadly . . . I wasn’t abrasive, the way she is. Mathilde hadn’t yet taught me to beware of adults, or how to squint when life came creeping up on me. No, I was a child. An obedient little child, who brought you cake and regards from his mummy.
I hadn’t seen the two of you for a long time, and I unbuttoned the top buttons of my shirt before ringing at your door.
I was so happy to get away from my holy family for a few hours to come and get a breath of your fresh air. To sit in your messy kitchen, gauge Anouk’s mood by the number of bracelets she was wearing, hear her beg you to play s
omething for us, but I already knew that you’d refuse; so I was happy to talk with her, to yield to the weight of her questions, let her touch my arms and shoulders and hair and look down when she went on, My, how you’ve grown, such a handsome lad, where has the time gone, but . . . why? And wait for the moment when she’d reminisce about Nana, unconsciously placing her hand on her wrist to silence it before placing it on her forehead and laughing again. I could be certain that you’d soon give in, and you’d sprawl on the first armchair you could find to tune in to our little gossip and give a pleasing texture to our silences . . .
The two of you couldn’t possibly know, you’ve never known, but what was left for me, there, on those long evenings with the stifling presence of all the other boys, and the school supervisors who were such wankers? I had you two.
You were my life.
No. You would never have been able to understand. People like you who never obeyed anyone, and didn’t know the meaning of the word discipline.
So perhaps I idealized the pair of you? That’s what I used to tell myself, at any rate, and you have to admit it was tempting . . . I was trying to convince myself, I blurred your outlines, I experimented on you with the great da Vinci’s sfumato – he was my absolute idol at the time – and I would smudge my memories to soften you, until the time came when, sitting once again in my usual seat at the end of your table as I painstakingly resumed picking at your rotten old oilcloth tablecloth and listened to the two of you squabbling, I could at last feel my heart beating again.
My blood, my blood was circulating.
‘Why are you smiling like a great oaf?’ Alexis would ask.
Why?
Because I could feel solid ground.
For fifteen years they’d been telling me, two gardens farther over, that life was nothing more than a succession of duties and flagellations of all sorts. Nothing could be taken for granted, everything was based on merit, and that merit – while we’re at it – had become a very wobbly notion in a society that no longer respected a thing, not even the death penalty. Whereas you. You . . . I was smiling because your empty fridge, your open door, your psychodramas, your half-baked solutions, your downright barbarian philosophy – you were so sure that there could be no substituting one word for another down here on earth, and that happiness was in the here and now, eating any old thing provided it was eaten with heart – all proved exactly the contrary.
To Anouk’s way of thinking, our only merit was that we were neither sick nor dying, and the rest was not important. The rest would follow. Eat, boys, eat, and you, Alexis, just give it a rest, you’re driving us mad with your cutlery, you’ve got your entire life ahead of you to make noise.
But that day I’d knocked a few times and I was just about to turn away and go home when I heard a voice I didn’t recognize: ‘Who’s there?’
‘Little Red Riding Hood.’
Silence.
‘Hey! Hallo? Is anyone home?’
Still no answer.
‘I’ve brought a cake and a little pot of butter!’
The door opened.
She had her back to me. A figure in a bathrobe, bending over, her hair dirty, a pack of cigarettes in her hand.
‘Anouk?’
She didn’t reply.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m afraid to turn around, Charles. I . . . I don’t want you to see me like this, I . . .’
Silence.
‘Okay . . .’ I said eventually, ‘I’ll just put the plate on the table and . . .’
Then she turned around.
It was her eyes, above all. Her eyes terrified me.
‘Are you sick?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Alexis.’
And while I was heading for the kitchen to get rid of my sickly strawberry gateau, I was already sorry I’d come, and had the confused certainty that I didn’t belong here and that very soon I would be out of my depth.
I had homework to do. I could come back later.
‘Where did he go?’
‘He left with his father.’
This much I knew. That his prodigal father had reappeared on the scene a few months earlier, driving a superb Alfa. ‘Is he nice?’ I’d asked. ‘He’s okay,’ said Alexis, and that’s as far as it got, those two words. Blasé. Harmless, or so it seemed at the time.
Oh, woe. I must have missed a few episodes. What was I supposed to do, now? Call my mother?
‘But, uh . . . he’ll be back.’
‘Do you think so?’
I didn’t know what to say, then.
‘He took all his things, you know . . .’ She paused, then, ‘It will be like with you. He’ll come back on Sundays to eat cake . . .’
Followed by a smile I would have preferred she’d kept to herself.
She tipped a few bottles upside down and eventually poured herself a big glass of water that she swallowed in one go before choking on it.
Right. I was trying to find a way to get round her to go back out into the hall. I didn’t want to witness any of this. I knew she drank, but I had always refused to know how much. It was something about her that didn’t interest me. I’d come back when she’d got dressed.
But she didn’t move. She gave me a hard look. Touched her neck, her hair, rubbed her nose, opened and closed her mouth as if she were drowning. She looked like an animal caught in a trap, ready to devour her own paw before going to die in the room next door.
As for me, I looked away, through the window at the clouds.
‘D’you know what it means, bringing up a kid on your own?’
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question, anyway, it was an abyss she was opening so that she could stumble into it. I wasn’t very brave, but I wasn’t a complete idiot, either.
‘You’re so good at figures: how many days does it make then, fifteen years?’
That, on the other hand, was a question.
‘Um . . . a little more than five thousand, I think . . .’
She put her glass down and lit a cigarette. Her hand was trembling.
‘Five thousand . . . Five thousand days and five thousand nights . . . Can you imagine? Five thousand days and five thousand nights all alone . . . So you end up wondering if what you’re doing is okay . . . You worry . . . You wonder if you’ll manage . . . And you work. You forget about yourself. Five thousand days of slogging and five thousand nights locked indoors. Never a moment for yourself, never a single day off, no parents, no sister, no one to take your little boy so you can catch your breath for a while. No one to remind you that you were quite pretty once upon a time . . . Millions of hours wondering why he did that to us and then one fine morning, there he is, the bastard, and you know what you say, then? You say you miss that time already, those millions of hours, because that was nothing compared to the hours still to come.’
She struck her forehead against the wall.
‘You think . . . A father who’s a pianist in fancy hotels, that’s better than a pathetic nurse now isn’t it?’
She was shouting at me, but I refused to fall into her trap. She was shouting in the wrong ear. I was too young for this sort of thing, it’s not for you, as my father would say. No, it wasn’t up to me to tell her whether she was right or wrong. She’d have to manage on her own for once.
‘You have nothing to say?’
‘No.’
‘You’re right. There is nothing to say. I fell right into the trap, too, so . . . I can understand him . . . There’s nothing worse than musicians, believe me . . . You mix everything up. You think they’re Mozart or I don’t know what, but really they’re just con artists who look the other way when they realize they’ve got what they want. That you’re done for. They close their eyes with a smile, and then they . . . I hate them.
‘I know perfectly well that I’ve never been a good mother, but it was hard, you know? I wasn’t even twenty when Alexis was born and . . . he’d disappeared . . . It was the midwif
e who went to register him during her lunch break and she came back all proud and handed me this thing they call a family booklet. I started crying again. What was I supposed to do with a family booklet when I didn’t even know where I’d be living a week from then? The woman next to me in the ward kept saying, “Hey, don’t cry like that, it’ll make your milk go off . . .” But I didn’t have any milk! I didn’t have any, bloody hell! I looked at that wailing baby and I . . .’
I clenched my teeth. Please, be quiet, have mercy, be quiet. Why was she telling me all this? All this bloody women’s stuff I could never understand? Why was she imposing it on me – hadn’t I always been loyal to her? I’d always stood up for her . . . At that moment in time I would have given anything to be at home with my family. Normal people, well balanced, deserving, who didn’t shout, who didn’t pile up empty bottles under the sink, and who had the tact to send us packing to our bedrooms when they did need to pour out their feelings.
Her cigarette ash had fallen into her sleeve.
‘Never a sign of life, never a letter, no help, no explanation, nothing . . . Not even curious to know his son’s name . . . He was in Argentina, it seems . . . That’s what he told Alexis, but I don’t believe him. Argentina my arse. Why not Las Vegas while you’re at it?’
She was crying.
‘He left me to do all the hard part, and now that the kid is weaned, up he rolls, one screech of the tyres, two promises, three pressies and ciao, old lady. You know what I think? It stinks.’
‘I have to go or I’ll miss my train.’
‘That’s right, go on, be like them. You too, go on, abandon me . . .’
As I walked by her, I realized I’d grown taller than her.
‘Please . . . stay . . .’
She’d caught hold of my hand and pressed it against her belly. I pulled away, horrified; she was drunk.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered, pulling her bathrobe tighter, ‘sorry . . .’
I was already on the landing when she called out: ‘Charles!’
‘Yes.’
‘Forgive me.’
I didn’t reply.
‘Say something . . .’