With her, nothing is absurd, nothing is pointless. She never says ‘you and your daft ideas’, she falls into step. She came with me to Monsieur Bricolage to buy washing lines, which I want to put up in my room (to hang up things I’m experimenting on), she came with me to collect old metro tickets (because I wanted to understand what code they use and how the inspectors know which tickets are valid and which aren’t), and she helped me when I did a test in the bath to see how watertight different Tupperware tubs are. At the beginning she was happy to be my assistant, passing me the tweezers, the scissors, the containers with great speed. Now she takes an active part in my little schemes, suggesting new formulas and even solutions.
I can tell that her job isn’t easy, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps one day when she’s got a bit more experience she’ll be able to find something else that’s better, in another hotel or somewhere else. In the meantime she goes off every morning in the dark and spends all her free time with me.
She found some new clothes in a charity shop – a very short red skirt and two pairs of tight trousers. My mother’s given her some pullovers that she wears a lot. She’s keen to hang on to her jacket – the one she was wearing when I met her. My mother’s had it cleaned but the marks haven’t completely disappeared. She’s been back to see the social worker about housing entitlement, but with half her income undeclared, she’s got no chance. The only thing she can hope for is a place in a social reintegration centre where you can stay for longer.
I don’t want her to go though. I remind her that we’re together, she’s the one who said it, it’s a promise we made to each other. ‘We’re together, aren’t we, No?’ Then she nods and stops saying over and over that it can’t last.
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Chapter 30
Lucas writes me little notes in class. He folds them over and slides them in front of me. ‘Awful!’ when the English teacher wears a strange skirt with fringes and pearls around the hem. ‘He can sod off’ when Mr Marin has given him his umpteenth zero. ‘Where’s the gnome?’ because Gauthier de Richemont is absent (he’s not particularly good-looking and Lucas has hated him since he grassed Lucas up to the principal one day when he was smoking in the toilets). In French class he stays quiet, even when we’re doing grammar. It’s the class where I’m most attentive. I hate being disturbed, I concentrate so as not to miss the tiniest thing. Mrs Rivery gives me special homework. French class is like a logic puzzle or a deduction, an exercise in dissection without a scalpel or a body.
People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you’d like it to be.
After giving me a thousand pieces of advice, my father has gone off to Shanghai on business for a few days. I’m not to get back too late, I’ve got to help my mother to prepare the meals and tell him about the tiniest problem. He telephones every morning and asks to speak to me, he worries about whether my mother is OK, if she’s coping without him. I go into another room and give him lots of details to reassure him. Yes, she’s doing the shopping and the cooking, she’s talking, she bought some material at the Saint-Pierre market to re-cover the old cushions.
In the evening the three of us eat together. As my father isn’t here we take the chance to eat things he wouldn’t approve of – hamburgers, chips, dauphinoise potatoes. I’m careful not to mention them on the phone to him. My mother couldn’t care less about nutrition and good health. She’s got other things to worry about.
Yesterday she told No how I learned to read in a few weeks when I was four, first from cereal, washing powder and drinking chocolate packets and then books. Then she told her about the time I fell off the fridge because I’d climbed on to it to find out how the boiler worked. And the time I completely dismantled my Fisher Price cassette player to see how it worked. Encouraged by No’s interest, she told more stories from my childhood: about the loss of my yellow rabbit, accidentally left behind in a motorway service station, the rubber ring in the shape of a duck that I slept with for a whole summer and refused to be parted from, my pink sandals with a yellow star that I wore with socks right until the middle of the winter and my passion for ants.
As I listened to her I thought, this is incredible. My mother has memories. They haven’t all been rubbed out. My mother’s kept colour pictures in her memory, pictures from before.
We stayed up late. She opened a bottle of wine for No and her, and I had a sip just to taste it. No started asking her questions about her life when she was younger, how old she was when she met my father, what age she was when they got married, had we always lived here in this apartment, how long had it been since she stopped working and so on. When my mother talked about Chloe, I almost fell off my chair, because No gave me a reproachful look as if to say ‘why have you never told me?’ I kept looking down at my plate, because there were no good reasons. Some secrets are like fossils and the stone has become too heavy to turn over. That’s all there is to it.
They finished the wine and then my mother said that it was late and I had school tomorrow.
When I’m really angry I talk to myself and that’s what I did in bed for at least an hour, going through my woes and grievances. It really helps. It’s even better when you do it in front of a mirror and exaggerate a bit as though you’re shouting at someone. But last night I was feeling tired.
I heard No get up this morning and then the sound of the shower followed by the coffee-maker, but I kept my eyes shut. Since she started working, we’ve not been able to spend so much time together, so often I get up early to see her for a few minutes, but not today – I didn’t want to.
At school I met Lucas, who was waiting for me at the gate. We had a class geography exercise coming up and he hadn’t revised for it. I let him see my work, but he didn’t so much as glance at it. He doesn’t cheat or make things up. He draws people in the margins of a sheet of paper which otherwise remains blank. I love their wild hair and huge eyes and marvellous clothes.
In the queue for the canteen I thought about my mother, how her face and hands are mobile again and her voice is no longer just a murmur. It doesn’t matter if there’s an explanation, a link between cause and effect. She’s feeling better, she’s beginning to recover her appetite for speech and company, and nothing else matters.
After school Lucas said he’d buy me a Coke at the Bar Botté. He thought I was looking sad. He told me all the school gossip (he’s always up to speed because he knows everybody). He tried to worm out of me what was up, but I couldn’t tell him because everything was mixed up in my head and I didn’t know where to begin.
‘You know, Chip, everyone has their secrets. And some of them have to stay hidden. My secret is that when you’re grown up I’m going to take you somewhere where the music is beautiful and people dance in the streets.’
I can’t tell you the effect that had on me, or exactly where it happened – somewhere right in the middle of my solar plexus – but it stopped me breathing. For several seconds I couldn’t look at him. I was aware of the point of impact and the heat spreading up my neck.
We stayed like that without speaking and then I asked, ‘Do you believe that some parents don’t love their children?’
With his father on the other side of the world and a mother who’d drifted off, that wasn’t a very smart thing to ask. I often regret the fact that you can’t rub out words in mid-air like you can on paper, that there isn’t a special pen that you can wave in front of you to remove the clumsy words before anyone can hear them.
He lights a cigarette and stares out of the window. Then he smiles. ‘I don’t know, Chip. I don’t think so. I think it’s always more complicated than that.’
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Chapter 31<
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The other day No and I took some pictures. Lucas had found a camera in his father’s cupboard, an old thing with a film in that you have to get developed. In the same box there were two or three out-of-date rolls of film so we decided to give it a go. We went out while he was at his guitar lesson and took some pictures of both of us using the timer. We invented witches’ hairdos (Lucas had lent me some gel to keep our hair up). A few days later we went to pick up the photos together. We sat on a bench near the shop and looked at them. The colours were a bit faded, as if the photos had been pinned up on a wall for a while. She wanted to tear them up. She thought she looked horrible in them all. She said, ‘Look how pretty I was before, when I was little.’ She took a photo of her as a child out of her bag. It’s the only one she has. She’d never shown me it before. I looked at it for ages.
She must have been about five or six. Her fringe is neatly combed. Two brown tresses frame her face. She’s smiling, but there’s something about the picture that’s painful. She’s looking right at the camera. You can’t really make out where she is – a library or a classroom maybe – but that doesn’t matter. She’s all alone. That’s clear from the picture, it’s there in the way she’s standing with her hands on her dress and empty space all around her – a little girl alone in the world. She took the photo back. She was really proud of it. She said again, ‘You see how pretty I was when I was little?’ I don’t know why at that moment I thought of a report I’d seen on the TV a few months ago about children in orphanages. I cried so much that my father sent me to bed before the end.
‘Anyway, you don’t give a damn . . .’
She’s been in a bad mood for a few days. She shuts herself away in her room and gets annoyed about the slightest thing when the two of us are together. That hurts my feelings, but I remember that my father once told me that it’s with the people you love the most, the ones you trust the most, that you can allow yourself to be unpleasant (because you know that it won’t stop them loving you). I’ve discovered that No is pinching medicine from my mother, tranquillisers and stuff. I caught her in the bathroom as she was closing the box. She made me promise not to say anything, like I was the kind of person who’d snitch. She needs them to calm her down, but I know that you can’t take just things without a prescription. It says so in my medical encyclopedia. She’s promised me that she’ll go back and see the doctor when she gets her health card. Things must be getting more difficult for her at work. She gets back later and later and is more and more tired. Some evenings she refuses to come and eat, claiming that she’s not hungry. At night she roams around, leaves the water running, opens and closes the window. I’ve heard her being sick in the toilet several times, even though she’s closed the door. My parents don’t know because my mother takes sleeping pills and my father’s always been a very heavy sleeper (apparently when he was little you could be doing the vacuuming right beside him and he wouldn’t wake up). When he got back from China, he gave each of us a good luck charm that you can hang up on a red string. I hung mine above my bed because I know that night-time is when things get lost. No tied hers to the buttonhole of her jacket.
She’s had her first pay – half in a cheque and half in cash. Her boss didn’t count her overtime. He said that if she wasn’t happy she could get lost. The same day she spat in his coffee and mixed it in carefully to dissolve the saliva before she took it to him. She did the same the days after that too. Her boss is fat and dirty. He’d kill his own mother and father to save a euro. He rips off the guests and spends his time doing dodgy deals on the phone. That’s what she says. He’s always complaining that she doesn’t work fast enough, spends too long in each room when she’s got the laundry to do and the corridors and lobby to clean. To make up for being so slow, he reckons she should do some extra hours. The boy in the bar’s been sacked and, because he hasn’t been replaced, No has to serve the guests every evening till seven when the other barman turns up. She doesn’t want to tell my parents about it. She says it doesn’t matter, but I’m sure that her boss isn’t that hot on workers’ rights and all that stuff.
Lucas has given me a hardback notebook, like a blank book, and a felt-tip pen with a special point for downstrokes and upstrokes. He took me with him to buy old CDs and choose a new jacket. He’s said he’s going to take me to a restaurant near his house where he knows the owner and that one day the two of us will go on holiday with a camping stove and tins of ravioli, an Igloo tent and all that stuff. And the other day I thought he was going to punch Gauthier de Richemont because he bumped into me in the playground and didn’t say sorry.
His mother calls sometimes to check he’s OK. He wants me to meet her. Once I heard him ask her if she was planning to come back for the weekend, and afterwards I realised he was sulking, but I didn’t ask him about it. My parents are happy that I’ve made a friend in my class. I’ve not been too specific about his age and his educational achievements. When I go to his I give him news of No, I tell him stories about her boss. We think up plots, vengeance, reprisals. Each time the situation is different, but the outcome’s always the same. We’ll let down his tyres, wait for him at the corner of the street with black hoods like in the films, give him such a fright that he’ll hand over all his money and abandon his hotel and never come back. Then, after a year and a day No will become the owner. She’ll have the walls repainted and the outside spruced up. She’ll attract a sophisticated international clientele. People will need to book months in advance to get a room. She’ll earn lots of money and organise dances. One day she’ll meet an English rock star and they’ll fall madly in love. Then she’ll open a branch in the heart of London and travel between the two capitals. Or else Laurent will come back. He’ll decide to leave Ireland and come and live with her.
What I like about Lucas is that he’s able to think up the most improbable stories and talk about them for hours in lots of detail, as if that was all it took for them to come true, or just for the pleasure of the words as if they were true. Even if he doesn’t like French class, Lucas is like me: he knows the power of words.
The other day when he was handing back our work, Mr Marin declared in front of the whole class that I was a utopian. I tried to look like I was taking it as a compliment. I checked in the dictionary. Then I was less sure. When he’s striding round the class frowning, with his hands behind his back, Mr Marin’s carrying in his head the true reality of life in concentrated form – the true reality of the economy, the financial markets, social problems, exclusion and so on. That’s why he stoops a little bit.
Maybe I am utopian, but it doesn’t stop me wearing matching socks, which isn’t always the case with him. And if he can wear one green sock and one red sock in front of thirty pupils, you can’t tell me that he doesn’t have his head in the clouds just a little bit.
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Chapter 32
Unlike most people, I love Sundays when there’s nothing to do. No and I are sitting in the kitchen. Her hair’s falling over her face. Outside the sky’s pale and the trees are bare. She says, ‘I need to go and see my mother.’
‘What for?’
‘I just do.’
I knock on my parents’ door. They’re still asleep. I go over to their bed and whisper in my father’s ear that we want to go to the flea market at Montreuil. No doesn’t want me to tell them the truth. My father gets up and suggests coming with us. I quickly discourage him: he should have a rest, it’s direct on the metro if we go from Oberkampf. In the corridor he hesitates, looking at both of us one after the other. I try to look reasonable and smile.
We take the metro to Austerlitz station and then an RER train to Ivry. No looks on edge. She’s biting her lip. I keep asking her if she is sure she wants to go, sure that this is the right time. She’s got her stubborn look. Her jacket’s buttoned up to the neck, her hands thrust in her pockets, her hair in her eyes. When we leave the station, I go over to the map. I love looking f
or the ‘You are here’ arrow, finding the red circle in the middle of the streets and crossroads, working out where I am using the grid references. It’s just like battleships – H4, D3, hit! Sunk! You might almost think you had the whole world there in front on you on the board.
I see that she’s shaking and ask her one last time, ‘You sure you want to go?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure she still lives there?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I rang the other day and she answered. I said I want to speak to Suzanne Pivet and she said “Speaking” and I hung up.’
It’s not twelve o’clock yet. We go into the estate. From the bottom of the building she shows me the room with closed curtains that used to be hers. We go up the stairs quietly. I feel my legs turn wobbly and I get out of breath. No rings once. And then again. Shuffling footsteps come towards the door. The peephole goes dark and for a few seconds we hold our breath. In the end No says, ‘It’s me. Nolwenn.’ We hear a child’s voice from further away, then whispering, then silence again. We can sense a silent presence on the other side, waiting. Minutes go by. Then No starts kicking the door and punching it too. My heart’s beating loudly. I’m worried that the neighbours will call the police. She’s hitting it with all her strength and shouting, ‘It’s me. Open the door!’ but nothing happens. So after a while I tug her sleeve. I try to talk to her and take her hands, her face. Eventually she comes with me. I lead her to the stairs and we go down two flights and then all of a sudden she slumps to the floor. She’s so pale I’m afraid that she’s going to faint. She’s breathing heavily and her whole body’s shaking. Even through two jackets you can see that it’s been much too much for her – too much sadness. She keeps hitting the wall, and her hand’s started to bleed. I sit down beside her and take her in my arms.
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