This morning, Mathis got up before me. When I went into the kitchen he was making his breakfast.
I sat down and watched him for a few minutes: the nonchalance with just a hint of cockiness in the way he picked things up, let the cupboards close automatically, the embarrassment on his face whenever I speak to him or ask a question. I understood then that he was on the threshold, right on the threshold. It’s already stirring and incubating in him like a virus, at work in every cell of his body even if nothing is perceptible to the naked eye. Mathis isn’t an adolescent yet, at least not visibly so. But it’s a just matter of weeks, perhaps days.
My little boy is going to be transformed before our eyes just as his sister was, and nothing will be able to stop it.
MATHIS
On his first day at secondary school he chose the middle row. And then his seat: in the middle of the middle row. Not too far from the board and not too near it. Neither the front nor the back. Where he expected to attract least attention. From the list pinned up in the playground he’d realised that he wouldn’t know any of the other pupils. Everyone from his primary school had been split up between other classes.
By the time the door closed, no one had sat down beside him. He didn’t dare look at the others, sitting in pairs, elbow to elbow, busy whispering. All round the class the murmuring had begun, a low, drifting hum that the teacher, for now, was managing to control. He was excluded from their secrets. He had never felt so alone. So vulnerable. The girls in front had already turned round twice to size him up.
Ten minutes later someone knocked at the door. The education advisor came in with a pupil Mathis had never seen before. Théo Lubin had got lost in the corridors and been unable to find his class. A derisive whistle ran through the rows. The teacher pointed to the empty seat beside Mathis. Théo sat down. Mathis pushed aside his own things, though they weren’t in the way, as a way of greeting the latecomer, of signalling to him that he was welcome. He tried to catch his eye to smile at him, but Théo kept his head down. He took out his pencil case and exercise book and without looking up muttered, ‘Thanks.’
In the next lesson they sat together again.
On the days that followed they looked for the gym together, the head of year’s office, the canteen and room numbers that defied all logic. They mastered this new space, which then seemed endless and which they now know like the backs of their hands.
They didn’t need to talk to know they’d get on. They only had to look at each other to see something silently shared – social, affective, emotional – abstract, fleeting signs of mutual recognition which they wouldn’t have been able to name. They’ve been together ever since.
Mathis knows how much Théo’s silence impresses others. Girls as well as boys. Théo doesn’t say much, but he’s not the sort to be pushed around. He’s feared. Respected. He’s never had to fight, or even threaten to. But there’s something menacing within him that dissuades attack and comments. When he’s beside him, Mathis is protected, not at risk.
On the first day of school this year, when Mathis saw on the noticeboard that they were in the same class again, he felt an intense sense of relief. If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to say whether he felt relief for himself or for Théo. Today, a few months later, it seems to him as though his friend has grown even more sombre. He often has the feeling that Théo is playing a role, that he’s pretending. He’s there beside him, going from class to class, waiting patiently in the canteen queue, tidying his things, his locker, his tray, but in reality he’s standing outside it all. And sometimes when they say goodbye at Monoprix, when he lets Théo go off towards the metro, a confused fear spreads in his chest that stops him breathing.
Mathis is stealing money from his mother. She doesn’t suspect. She leaves her bag lying around, doesn’t check her change. He goes for coins, never notes. And he takes them carefully: one or two at a time, never more. That’s enough for small bottles: €5 for La Martiniquaise rum, €6 for Poliakov vodka. They go to the little grocer’s at the end of the street. He’s more expensive than elsewhere, but he never asks questions. For big bottles, the best bet is to go through Hugo’s brother Baptiste, who’s in his second-last year at the high school nearby. He’s still underage but looks older than he is. He can go to the supermarket and not get asked for his identity card. He asks them for ‘a small percentage’. On good days, he’ll do a discount.
Mathis hides the coins in an ebony box his sister gave him. He thought it looked like a girl’s thing because the inside was lined with floral fabric, but the box has the advantage of locking and now it hides his treasure.
Tomorrow after lunch they have a study period. If there’s no one in the corridor, they’ll slip into their hiding place to drink the rum they bought yesterday. Théo said that it makes your head explode, even more than vodka. He pointed an imaginary pistol at his temple, two fingers together, and pretended to fire.
THÉO
He’s left the big pullover he got for Christmas at his father’s, the one his mother asked him not to take there. She didn’t realise at once, but today, now that it’s got colder, she’s surprised he isn’t wearing it. She’s horribly angry, that’s obvious. She’s struggling to mask the signs of irritation that Théo knows well. She says several times: ‘We’re not likely to see that again.’ The pullover is in danger, absorbed into the depths of the void. She’s alluding to the enemy territory that she will not name. A place governed by unknown laws, where clothes can take weeks to be washed and where objects get lost and never reappear.
Théo promises he’ll bring it next time. No, he won’t forget.
She’s finding it hard to let it go, he can see.
When he was younger, up until the end of primary school, she packed his bag for him before he went to his father’s. She chose his least nice, most worn clothes on the grounds that they took ages to come back and sometimes never came back at all. On Friday evening she took him there on the metro and left him outside the building. At the start, when Théo was too young to take the lift on his own, his father would come down and be watching from the other side of the glass doors. Like a hostage exchanged for some unknown commodity, Théo would go down the hall and cross the neutral zone, scarcely daring to press the light switch. A week later, at the same time on Friday, on a different street, his father would switch off his engine and wait in the car for Théo to go into the building and start the whole thing again. In another stairwell, his mother would hug him tight. Between kisses, she’d stroke his face and hair, looking him over with relief, as though he had returned miraculously alive from some unfathomable disaster.
He remembers one day a long time ago – he must have been seven or eight – when his mother was checking the contents of his bag after he came back from his father’s, she didn’t find the trousers she’d bought him a few weeks earlier. She began taking all the clothes out one by one, as though it were a matter of life and death, tossing them angrily in the air. And then, having confirmed that the garment was missing, she began to cry. Théo watched her, stunned. His mother was kneeling in front of a sports bag, her body wracked with sobs. He could see her pain, it struck him in jolts, but there was something that escaped him: why was it so serious?
His mother had begun complaining that his father couldn’t give a shit about getting his things together (every time she said something bad about his father, this wrenching feeling of discomfort agitated his stomach and the sharp sound made his ears buzz) and he had to admit that he’d packed his bag himself. He’d done his best to collect up his clothes, but he hadn’t found his trousers, which were probably in the wash. And then suddenly his mother had shouted, ‘Doesn’t that slut know how to turn a washing machine on?’
When his parents divorced, his father moved in to a new apartment, where he still lives. He put up an extra partition at the back of the living room so that Théo could have a room of his own. In the months after the separation, his father was seeing another woman whom his mother called
‘the bitch’ or ‘the slut’. The bitch came to his father’s some evenings but never slept over. She worked in the same company as him. They must have got to know each other in the lift or the canteen; that was how Théo imagined them meeting, a scene he tried to reconstruct several times, despite his difficulty conceiving the setting. He found it impossible to imagine what ‘the office’, the place his father went each day on the other side of the ring road, looked like.
He remembers a spring day at the botanical gardens with his father and this woman. He must have been six or seven. He’d been on the trampoline and the go-carts, had a go at the coconut shy. Later in the afternoon, all three of them got lost in the maze of mirrors, then they climbed into a boat and, for what seemed like a deliciously long time to him, they allowed themselves to be carried along by the current of the enchanted river. Later they had candyfloss. The bitch was nice. It was thanks to her that they’d discovered this marvellous world, protected by gates and fences, a world where children were kings. This woman must have had some connection to this place, she knew every corner. She was the one who had guided them along its paths and handed out the tickets, and his father looked at her with such devotion that Théo came to the conclusion that the whole garden must belong to her.
But the next day when he went back to his mother, he had stomach ache. He felt sad. Guilty. He’d had fun with this woman, accepted her gifts.
Something sweet and sticky still clung to his hands.
At the start, when he got back from his father’s, his mother would ask him questions. While pretending not to get involved, as though he couldn’t spot her ploy, she would fish for information by means of digressions and circumlocutions that he saw through immediately.
To say as little as possible, Théo pretended not to understand the questions, or else he replied evasively.
Back then, his mother would suddenly begin crying without warning, because she couldn’t open a jam jar or find something that had disappeared or because the television had stopped working or because she was tired. Sometimes it was like an electric shock, sometimes a cut or a punch, but his body always connected with her pain and absorbed its share.
At the start, every time he came back from his father’s, she asked him, ‘Did you have fun? You didn’t cry? Did you think about Mummy?’ He couldn’t have explained why, but he instantly felt this was a trap. He never knew whether he was supposed to reassure his mother by telling her it had all gone well or claim that he’d been bored and had missed her. One day, when Théo had probably struck her as too happy after his week on the other side, his mother’s face took on a horribly sad expression. She became silent and he was afraid she’d start crying again. But after a few minutes, she said in a small voice, ‘All that matters is that you’re happy. If you don’t need me, I’ll go, you know. Go travelling, maybe. Have a rest.’
Théo learned very quickly to play the role expected of him. To offer words sparingly, expressionlessly, eyes lowered. Not to expose himself. On both sides of the frontier, silence was clearly the best policy, the least dangerous.
After a time, he couldn’t say when, the bitch disappeared. According to what he managed to glean at the time from scraps of phone conversations caught on one side or the other, the woman had children, who couldn’t have appreciated her having fun at the botanical gardens without them, and a husband she didn’t want to leave.
Gradually, his mother stopped crying. She sold the furniture and bought newer, nicer furniture, then she repainted the apartment. Théo chose the colours for his room and the kitchen.
She stopped questioning him when he came back from a week with his father. She no longer asked what he’d done or with whom. If he’d had fun. In fact, she started avoiding the subject. She didn’t want to know anything any more.
Today, the time he spends away from her has ceased to exist. One evening she explained to Théo that she had drawn a line under all that and no longer wanted to hear it mentioned.
His father does not exist. She has stopped uttering his name.
HÉLÈNE
I wanted to bring up Théo Lubin’s case at the next student welfare meeting. Frédéric convinced me to wait a bit longer. He feels I don’t have enough evidence. Also, bringing up a case always leaves traces, which might harm Théo or his family down the line, and that’s not something that should be treated lightly.
Did I appear to be treating it lightly? I wake up every night, my breathing constricted by anxiety, and it often takes me hours to get back to sleep. I no longer want to go out with my friends or to the cinema. I refuse to have fun. Anyway, there is no ‘case’. I have no documents to add to the file and I’d have to go against the advice of the nurse, who didn’t think it was a good idea to call in the parents, though so far she hasn’t had any reply to the letter she sent home to the mother.
I agreed to wait a bit. Frédéric promised he’d pay particular attention to Théo, though he only has his class for one hour a week.
Yesterday afternoon, when I saw Théo come into class just after Mathis, my heart gave a lurch. I was sorry I’d given in. He immediately struck me as odd, unsteady. He was walking carefully, as though at every step the ground might give way beneath him. What a sight the poor kid was, leaning on the tables to get to his. That really got to me. He looked like a drunk. I thought he’d injured his leg or his back, he was having such difficulty moving forward. Then he collapsed into his chair, looking relieved to have made it that far. His eyes were fixed on the floor, avoiding mine.
By the time all the students had sat down and the hubbub subsided, he still hadn’t moved. I asked him why he hadn’t taken his exercise book out. Without looking up at me, in a thin voice, he replied that he’d forgotten it.
I felt panic flood through me. Images that I couldn’t block out assailed me. I couldn’t calm my mind or get my breath back. I couldn’t stop looking at him, trying to understand what was going on.
Then I saw the injuries on his body. I saw them as clearly as if his clothes were ripped in exactly the right places to reveal the bruises and the blood. I was gasping for air. I looked at the other students. I watched their faces for the moment when they would realise. I hoped that one of them, just one of them, could see what I saw. But they were all motionless, waiting for the sentence I was going to pronounce or for the lesson to begin. I repeated these words in my head several times: I’m the only one who can see his injuries. I’m the only one who can see he’s bleeding. I closed my eyes and tried to reason with myself, to calm my breathing, to recall the words of the nurse who had examined him and her firm, reassuring tone: ‘There was nothing. No mark, no trace, no scar.’
There was nothing.
Except: I’ve been hit, so with me that won’t wash.
Hugo in the front row asked me gently, ‘Miss, are you feeling ill?’
The images were fighting back.
I took a deep breath and asked the students to take out a piece of paper, then I read out the test questions without going to the trouble of writing them on the board.
‘What is the function of the foods we consume each day?’
‘List the food groups that you know.’
‘What unit of measurement is used to calculate the energy foods provide?’
One of the girls in the front row (Rose Jacquin probably, who never misses a chance to pipe up) interrupted me: ‘Miss, you’re going too quick!’
I had never given them a surprise test before and a ripple of dissent ran through the room. Théo still had his head down, his hands shielding his eyes like a visor so that I could no longer see them. I asked if he wanted to go to the nurse and he said no.
The students, who’d been incredulous at first, eventually settled and got down to work. On the grounds of preventing any chatting, I was now able to observe him. His body was inclined slightly forward, his pen raised. He had put his free hand on his paper as though for support. It was as if he couldn’t focus his attention on his work; his eyes were looking for some a
nchor point but couldn’t find one.
After a few minutes I walked through the rows. As I passed him, I saw he hadn’t written anything. He had a film of sweat on his forehead. I had an urge to stroke his hair. I had an urge to sit down beside him and give him a hug.
I walked past his table several times, but he never raised his head to look at me. I no longer figured in his field of vision.
Maybe he was annoyed with me because of the nurse. He was indicating to me that I had betrayed him, that I no longer deserved his trust.
I returned to my place at the desk. In silence I managed to calm down and pretend I was marking exercise books.
When the bell rang, I asked Rose to collect the tests. As she came to pick up Théo’s and Mathis’s, she stopped. She gave a high laugh, though I couldn’t tell if it was one of surprise or complicity.
I watched the students file out. Théo was walking with a little more confidence, but something was wrong, I was sure of it. Something I didn’t understand.
When the room was empty, I sorted through the tests until I found his. In the margin he’d simply written his first name. He hadn’t copied down the questions or attempted to answer them.
He had, however, tried to draw one of the diagrams illustrating the digestive system that I had given out in class a few days before. In a style that was simple but precise he had drawn the outline of the human body from the head to the waist. Within this shape he had represented the mouth, oesophagus, stomach, and the intestine coiled up on itself like a snake. At the bottom of the stomach he had drawn something that at first I took for a vegetable or flower. The drawing was unclear and I had to peer at his paper and then hold it away from me to work out that it was in fact a skull.
CÉCILE
Mathis came home from school drunk yesterday.
Loyalties Page 3