But Playmobil was having none of it. When you have people crashing your party who have no business being there, at some point you have to put a stop to it. Besides, his parents were coming back the next day, so it just wouldn’t do. Then Hacine muttered something about “racists.” The swimmer snapped his fingers under his nose, twice.
“Hey, you, wake up! You aren’t invited here, so beat it. This has gone on long enough.”
“Look, asshole—”
Hacine didn’t have time to say more. A redheaded girl in a flowered dress had appeared at a first-floor window and shouted:
“I just called the cops. I’m warning you, I just phoned them. They’re on their way.”
She held up a wireless phone to show that she wasn’t bullshitting them.
“So get out of here,” said an emboldened Playmobil. “Now.”
The two scroungers weren’t much to look at, actually, with their shifty posture, sparse mustaches, and oversized Nikes at the ends of their skinny legs. But it still required fifty people, one swimmer, and the police to deal with them.
Hacine began to retreat while trying not to lose face, which mainly consisted in swaggering like somebody from the Bronx. When he got as far as the barbecue, he gave it a big kick, tipping it over onto the grass. The thing hit the ground hard, shooting hot coals as far as the patio. A girl standing nearby suddenly began to utter high-pitched shrieks.
“You guys are complete assholes!” cried her girlfriend.
“C’mon, get the fuck out of here!”
“She’s been burned!”
Now the intruders really had to leave quickly. To be on the safe side, people followed them out into the street. They took their time crossing the village, turning around from time to time to shout insults and give people the finger. They gradually disappeared from view, and the whine of a scooter was eventually heard fading away in the distance.
Ten minutes later, the party was resuming, in stages. People clumped in little scandalized groups, laughing as they described what had happened, hardly believing it. The girl who’d been burned was still whimpering a bit but was all right. Sweatshirt Hoodie had only to act modest while gathering his laurels. Only Playmobil was still agitated. While waiting for the cops, he ran around picking up joint butts and yelling that this was it for him.
A police cruiser actually did show up later, and people told the cops what had happened. They didn’t seem too surprised, or very interested, for that matter. They left the way they’d come.
* * *
—
The first splashes could be heard at the back of the yard, and Anthony made his way down to the pool, which looked like a blue screen between the branches. A dozen swimmers were drinking beer and ducking underwater. A couple was kissing by the edge, their mouths locked. At one point a girl climbed out of the water completely naked and danced for the onlookers’ amusement. Anthony could hardly believe his eyes; these people would try anything. She was even applauded. Her pussy was waxed and she had hardly any chest. It was really beautiful. At the same time it remained very far away.
“Aren’t you going swimming?”
Steph was standing under a willow tree a few steps behind him. She seemed a little confused, her expression vague. Her jeans had a grease stain on the left thigh. Anthony didn’t answer, so she repeated:
“You going swimming, or what?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
She had started unstrapping her sandals and was soon barefoot in the grass.
“Isn’t your pal here?”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Right, your cousin. This party’s too weird. It feels like it’s been going on for two days.”
“Yeah,” said Anthony, not understanding what she meant.
“It’ll be morning soon.”
He checked his watch.
“It’s only three o’clock.”
“Damn, I’m cold,” said Steph, fumbling with her belt buckle.
She unzipped her jeans and tried to slide them down her thighs, but the fabric caught, stuck to her skin. Then she pulled her top over her head. She was wearing a light-colored bathing suit, less sexy than the one from that afternoon.
“Okay, I’m going for a dip.”
Anthony watched as she headed for the water, her butt bouncing and her thighs pumping. Just before the edge, she gathered herself and dove, arms outstretched. Her body slid into the water with exquisite facility. When she surfaced, her mouth was wide open, she was laughing, and her ponytail made wet circles in the air. The swimmers sitting on the steps started to shout. Anthony couldn’t hear what they were saying. He took off his shoes in turn and unbuttoned his jeans, but realized he was wearing underpants with colorful umbrellas on them. This gave him pause. He was shivering a little. It was true, it was cold as hell. On the patio, the sound level was suddenly cranked up, and everybody listened.
It was a song being constantly played on the M6 channel. It usually made you want to smash a guitar or set fire to your school, but here it made everybody thoughtful. It was still almost new, a title from a similar depressed American city, a shithole town very far away, where little white punks in plaid shirts drank cheap beer. The song was spreading like a virus wherever you found loser working-class kids, pimply teens, fucked-over crisis victims, unwed mothers, morons on motorbikes, hash smokers, and trade-school dropouts. A wall had fallen in Berlin and peace was already starting to look like a terrifying steamroller. In every town across this deindustrialized, one-dimensional world and in every blighted village, kids without dreams were now listening to a Seattle group named Nirvana. They were letting their hair grow and turning their sadness into anger, their depression into decibels. Paradise was good and lost, the revolution would not take place; the only thing left was to make noise. Anthony bobbed his head in time, along with thirty other people like him. He shivered as the song ended, and then it was over. Everybody could go home.
* * *
—
Around five in the morning he was awakened by the cold settling on the garden. Without realizing it, he’d fallen asleep on a chaise longue. He was under a tree. He sneezed a few times and went looking for his cousin.
On the ground floor of the house, a little group was still chatting, hoarse and intimate, their hair wet. Girls wrapped in big towels huddled against their boyfriends. A faint smell of chlorine hung in the air. Dawn would come soon, and Anthony thought of the sadness that would follow, that little twinge of pale sunrises. His mother was going to kill him.
Upstairs, he looked in the bathroom, opened bedroom doors. The beds were full of sleeping shapes, three or four to a bed. The two heavy-metal guys had found a trapdoor and climbed up onto the roof. They were drinking wine under the stars. Anthony asked if they’d seen his cousin.
“Who’s that?”
“My cousin. The tall guy.”
The metalheads offered him a drink. Anthony refused.
“So you haven’t seen him?”
“No.”
“Did you look in the bedrooms?”
“I just did, all of them.”
“Sit down, then. See how beautiful it is.”
The nearest metalhead pointed to a spot on the horizon where a thin ocher sliver was rising from the earth, filling the sky with light. The night gradually turned blue.
“Did you try the shed in the garden?” asked the other one, who had his hands behind his neck and was gazing at the sky. Tufts of light-colored, almost red hair stuck out of the sleeves of his T-shirt.
Anthony went through the house again. Seeing the now-empty living room felt a little like visiting a crime scene. Beer cans, cigarette butts, a record spinning in the empty air, speakers making that little crackly hiccup at the end of a record. The sky had already lightened. He went through the garden. Oddly enough, the swimming pool was perfectly clean, a toilet-
bowl blue, glowing and artificial. He stood on the edge for a moment, rocked by the tiny wavelets and fighting an urge to dive in. He could see a bathing suit bottom in the depths, or maybe they were panties. He thought of Steph, whom he hadn’t seen since the swim. Anyway, he didn’t care. He spat in the water. He was just exhausted.
“Hey there!”
He turned to find his cousin waving at him from the patio. He was wearing a T-shirt that didn’t belong to him. Anthony joined him, dragging his feet. They took the path out to the front gate.
“It’s almost dawn. Where were you?”
“Nowhere,” said his cousin.
“Did you see Steph again?”
“No.”
“What’s that T-shirt?”
“It’s nothing.”
Anthony had a headache. A rooster crowed. They reached the stacks of wood where they had left the bike a few hours earlier. In another life, practically.
The YZ wasn’t there. This sent Anthony to his knees.
5
A little later that morning, Hacine had an appointment at Heillange City Hall, in a shabby ground-floor office. He’d hardly slept, and he was cold. The mayoralty was housed in a former elementary school, which explained its endless hallways, echoing stairwells, and fortress-like chill. In fact, everyone who worked there was careful to always bring a sweater. Hacine hadn’t taken that precaution, and he was freezing his nuts off. This of course put him on edge, especially since he’d rather be almost anywhere else.
Facing him, a young woman with bulging eyes and novelty earrings was studying his resume. She made a comment from time to time, or asked a question. On her earrings, you could make out a little elephant or a cat; it was hard to tell. Without looking up, she asked him:
“Here, for example, what did you mean by that?”
She was pointing at an entry under the heading “Interests.” Hacine leaned over to look.
“It’s boxing,” he said simply.
“I see.”
After getting her bachelor’s degree, the young woman had specialized in employment law, a discipline that benefited from the healthy employment figures of the 1960s. It was a fast track to management positions in human resources, a sector that had steadily grown during the previous thirty years despite the notable job losses that characterized the same period. Once she had her diploma (baccalauréat + five years), it took her less than two months to get a job. As a result, she tended to view unemployment as one of those abstract threats that mainly appeared on the evening news, like malaria, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. At the moment, she was introducing Hacine to the finer points of putting one’s skills in the best light. The boy was being only moderately cooperative. The young woman tried again. She was intrigued by this boxing business.
“And what do you call it?”
“Muay Thai. It’s Thai boxing.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to put that down?”
“It’s a sport,” answered Hacine.
“Yeah, but with your profile, see…”
Hacine frowned. In his case, this meant looking disdainful while pursing his lips into a duck face. Given the shadow of mustache decorating his upper lip, the resulting look was pretty unusual.
The young woman smiled.
“Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Good. And here, under information technology skills, can you be more specific?”
“Well, computer stuff.”
“Do you have a computer at home?”
“Yeah.”
The boy had hooked his feet around the legs of his chair. It squeaked on the tile floor each time he moved, so he tried to keep still. How much longer was this bullshit going to last?
“Give me some examples. What do you know? Word? Excel?”
“A little of everything.”
“It’s important to be specific. You’re listing real-world skills, see? That’s what you’re selling. Can you run office software, for example?
“Yeah. I do some coding, too. JavaScript. Stuff like that.”
“That’s good. In fact it’s really good.”
The compliment hurt Hacine’s feelings. What did this cunt think, that he just knew how to press the Power button? At that, he shut down. Too bad. She would certainly have liked the edifying story of a kid who went to Microfun every Saturday morning. Located at the foot of the ZUP projects hill, the little store salvaged old computer equipment and passed it on to schools or to the poor, or resold it by weight. A new Amstrad 6128 cost more than three thousand francs, and neither Hacine nor any of his pals could afford gear like that, so they went to Microfun instead. They spent hours dismantling obsolete IBM towers, swapping processors and advice. His eighth-grade tech shop teacher even helped him solder some of the parts. He wound up building a pretty decent tower, powerful enough to play Double Dragon, anyway. But since then, Hacine had more or less quit doing that stuff. As he thought about it, he realized he’d pretty much quit everything recently.
“And you’ve been to Frankfurt?”
He nodded.
“London. And Bangkok.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve done a lot of traveling for someone your age.”
She was looking at him with a friendly smile while fiddling with an earring. Or maybe the smile was mocking. She must think he was a bullshitter. He’d actually never been to Frankfurt—what the hell would he do in Frankfurt?—but that didn’t give this bitch the right to doubt him.
“Do you speak English?”
He moved his head in a way that might mean yes.
“Okay. Anyway, everybody puts that down,” she said, suddenly perking up.
Just then, the woman’s phone began to ring. Her hand hovered indecisively over the phone for two or three rings. Hacine felt more and more tense. Was it some sort of test?
“Hello…Good morning…Yes…Of course…”
Her “yeses” were drawling and motherly. In fact, she gave the impression she was talking to a half-wit. This made Hacine feel somewhat better. Apparently, she talked to everybody that way.
“Of course, sir. Call us back when classes start. Yes, all right…”
She was mimicking the exchange, while taking Hacine as her witness. People asked such questions! After advising her caller to check with the national employment service, she hung up.
“It’s like that all day long.”
There were more questions. Hacine’s resume did have quite a few dubious entries. It’s true that everybody fudged a bit, but it was important to keep it modest. Depending on the situation, transatlantic voyages, fluent English, internships with ministries, and a passion for philanthropy could arouse suspicions. What mainly bothered her was the Thai boxing business.
“See what I mean? Especially given where you come from.”
“But what about the job?” said Hacine. “Do you have a thing or not?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, my dad told me to come to City Hall. He said you had jobs.”
“Oh no, not at all. Your father came to the mayor’s office, but I don’t know what they told him. We just do orientation here. We help people get back into the workforce.”
“So there’s no job, actually.”
“There must have been a misunderstanding. Our role is to help people put themselves across well, regain their self-confidence. We help them write their resumes and get training. We can also do coaching. Besides, you aren’t eighteen yet, are you?”
Hacine confirmed this. He was suddenly sorely tempted to ask her what the fuck he was doing there.
“You’re a minor, too, so it’s nothing doing. And in summer, forget it.”
* * *
—
As Hacine was leaving, she insisted on going with him because she wanted to have
a smoke. That way, he was sure not to get lost. The place was practically deserted, and in the empty hallways the young woman’s high heels made a somewhat intimidating managerial clicking. By contrast, her attitude had become decidedly friendly, almost familiar. After all, she was young and open-minded; they could get along. Once out on the sidewalk she shook his hand with obvious pleasure. And then, without warning, her face fell.
“I forgot to ask. Do you give high fives?”
At first, Hacine didn’t understand.
“You know,” she said. “This sort of thing.”
She was holding her palm out, so he was forced to slap it.
“Because I met some employers the other day, they were super put off by that. They have young people who high-five people at work, with everybody. It just doesn’t look good, see?”
Hacine wondered if she was making fun of him. Apparently not.
“I gotta get going.”
“Yes, of course.”
He could’ve taken the bus across the street; the number 11 went straight to his place. But he was afraid she might want to keep him company while he waited. He’d rather walk home. He could sense her looking at his back, until the moment when he turned the corner. It was lucky he had pockets; he could put his hands in them.
* * *
—
Along the way, he stopped at a bakery to buy a Coke and two croissants and ate his breakfast as he climbed the hill to the ZUP projects. It was already hot, and the coldness of the Coke was something miraculous. He soon spotted Eliott hanging out in the courtyard. As they did every year, the fairground people had set up a bumper-car carousel and a little stand where they sold waffles. Hacine and his pals hung out there all day long. When Eliott saw him, he waved, and Hacine ambled over to join him.
“What’s with this piece of shit?” he asked, kicking the wheel of Eliott’s wheelchair.
“Battery’s dead. The motor’s shot anyway, so I took the old one.”
“That sucks.”
“No shit.”
“What’d you do to get downstairs?”
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