by Louise Dean
‘I shouldn’t have been the one to leave the house. Max. He needs his mother.’ Her voice broke again.
‘Oh pack it in, will you? I’m a better mother than you are.’ He got up, the phone under his chin, and pulled on underpants, socks, jeans and then he slipped his shirt over his head.
‘But, you are not a mother, Ri-schard. You were not even a good father, and by the way you were also a very bad husband. You fuck your way through France, through Europe, and now maybe you fuck your way through Africa. You were never at home, you don’t even know your son at all. You don’t know anything by the way.’
‘Well, darling, guess what, by the way,’ he stood, tucking the ends of his shirt into the waist of his jeans and belting up, ‘I’m not giving up my son. I’m going to give up work instead.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Max is fine with me. Yup, I’m quitting the job to be with him. I love him.’
He ended the call and went out into the kitchen. He lit a cigarette and smoked it hard and fast, then he pressed it out on the dirty dinner plate in the sink and let loose a yellow-grey stream of smoke. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
She called back.
‘It is so stupid, I mean, how will you live? On what? And what about me . . . ?’
‘I don’t want him with you and that piece of shit arsehole. You think he’s a good example? For my son? No, no way. No, I’m going to give up work, I don’t give a flying fuck about it any more.’
‘You are being so . . .’
‘Yes! I am stupide,’ he said, imitating her. The phone went dead. ‘Stupide,’ he mimicked again, pleased with himself, ‘bitch.’ He uncorked the bottle of whisky and took great pleasure in drinking from its neck. He lit a cigarette. The phone rang.
‘What you are doing is just some kind of pathetic revenge. It is not about Max, it is about you. Jeff, he is saying he wants to meet you in the car park in front of the leisure centre. You are pathetic, you are a pathetic man . . .’
She didn’t need to write it down for him this time.
‘Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ he said.
He wiped his face, and took in as much whisky as he could. He lit a cigarette for the car journey, jumped in, started her up, lowered the window, pulled out. The ground crunched under the tyres. He turned on the radio, and it was Daniel Balavoine, of course.
‘Who is it that can save love?’ he sang.
He had his lights on bright. He put his foot down. He was pure of heart in hatred.
Chapter 34
When Richard pulled into the car park, the gendarmes were waiting in their van with only their sidelights illuminated. As he dimmed his lights and turned off the engine, their lights went on full and he saw how it was.
No one else was there, just this young man and young woman, two gendarmes in their dark-blue outfits. They didn’t look happy to be there. He was Breathalyzed and handcuffed and spent the night in the cell. The next day, at a tribunal, his driving licence was rescinded for eighteen months when he was convicted for drink-driving. This was the first thing her lawyer raised at the custody hearing.
He was required to see his local doctor for referral to a psychiatrist, on account of the state’s concern for his well-being — mental primarily, it turned out — they considered it abnormal to want to kill someone. (He’d admitted his intentions.)
He had given the doc a lot of free samples and gifts in the past. The doc had won the Sanitoxat prize draw last year, a week in Sardinia for himself and his wife. Richard confessed things were bad. He’d lost his wife and now his son. And his home. He’d also lost his driving licence. He was going to lose his job, more than likely. The doc offered to put Richard on sick leave for as long as he could. He offered Richard a prescription for his own products and they laughed about it. You have to laugh, the doc said, you have to be able to laugh, that’s what will keep you sane. The rest of it, well, if the drugs work for you, great, but keeping a sense of humour, that’s the main thing.
Of course, a sense of humour would not help him get custody of his son. He told the doc he had some thoughts about madness and sadness, those ‘defective’ human conditions for which he used to purvey relief. The doctor kept right on writing.
I’ll tell you what the problem is, it’s the absence of understanding of what love really is, he said, and the doc winced. He saw him hunch over his pad. Love is loyalty or the presumption of it and that can be quite a presumption, believe me. I know, but that’s the point, Jean-Pierre, isn’t it? Love is the last delusion of the rational age, the final faith. In a world in which everything is junk, everything is disposable, the idea of love as a fearsome promise is something worth dying for. Worth living for even. Don’t you think?
Well, why not? said the doc, rising and seeing Richard to the door. You may very well be right. The doc nodded at the woman at the door. Her husband had died of alcohol poisoning just before Christmas.
‘Ça va, Claudine?’
‘Il faut,’ she said, looking Richard in the eyes. She was the mother of Maxence’s best friend. They’d had a few drinks together as couples when her husband was alive. Now she seemed so distant; her pupils were like rafts at sea, the glint of white like the wave of a handkerchief.
He took himself home through the cobbled backstreets via what they called with good reason ‘dog-shit’ alley. He left his shoes outside his front door.
Whether love of any kind really did exist or not, he didn’t know. But he suspected it was highly unlikely anyone could exist without it.
Chapter 35
He went into one of the toilet cubicles and sat there and he took out of his briefcase the print-out of the email he’d saved as a draft to send to Rachel and he reread it.
In the same way that the development of serious mental illness is a multi-factorial scenario — family issues, impartial mothering, cannabis use at a young age, ostracism experienced through immigration — so it seems to me is the development of the ability to love. To be able to love, you need to have been loved unconditionally during the crucial window of early development. After this point the love module will develop subject to steady acquaintances, familial relationships and friendships with people from the same background set within the context of community acceptance. It requires nonexposure to desertion or abandonment by those who claim to ‘love’ you. In brief, during the soft phase of development, the ‘idea of love’ must not be demonstrated to be a lie. This scenario eliminates from the possibility of love all but the most innocent, most remote places. Perhaps it persists in regions of rural Ethiopia.
He sat back. Well, it wasn’t much of a love letter. It wasn’t much of a letter at all but it had them all covered.
He intended to email it to Rachel for her rebuttal, her holy fury.
Tell me I’m wrong, Rachel, tell me I’m wrong.
He went down to the information centre, took for himself a small sample cup of the coffee, accessed his account, chose the draft he’d prepared, pasted it into an email for her. Then he deleted it and wrote instead:
Do you believe in love? Write to me, Rachel, most urgently because I need to hear from you. I don’t know what to do.
He sent neither. All that was certain was that he didn’t know what to do. He’d have to keep listening and hope to hear.
* * *
‘Please conclude the presentation,’ Richard said. ‘I apologize for that. I’m fine, actually. Quite fine now.’
They exchanged looks, not mean ones or mocking ones, but looks of concern. The young fellow went through his conclusions and then a senior, older, doctor spoke for the team.
‘What are the reasons, we might conjecture, for this low level of depression in such difficult circumstances? Well, we like the term “social capital” here because it seems to us that these very impoverished women are rich in social capital, they turn to each other for help, and share what they have. These informal community-based arrangements act as protective factors in depression and possibly
other mental illnesses. Essentially, community — family, friends, and a wider local circle of relationships that are genuinely and intimately co-invested — is a key factor in basic human functioning. Thank you for listening . . . Richard.’
There was some more laughter from the others on the team as the man bent forward to double-check his name-tag.
Richard stood up. He put his hands above his head and he clapped and clapped and clapped. Then he spoke.
‘You, in Africa, you have something we don’t have! Call it social capital, call it whatever you like. Call it humanity or even decency. Call it love! Hold on to it! Hold on to it! Don’t let us fuck that up too! My God.’
The room was silent. The plastic water bottle on the presenter’s table crackled and popped.
Chapter 36
Without a car and on long-term sick leave, Richard was a scuttling thing cornered; a beetle in a box.
The stairwell of the block of rentals was pitch black, and it smelt of fried fish. There was a timed light, you pressed a round button on your entry, but it expired by the time you got to the stairs and you were obliged to make your way up blindly. The desperate coughs of a neighbour indicated that he was at the end of his tether; his sputum ricocheted early morning and in the evenings and then lay dormant during the night.
The lettings agent had shown him two dwellings, both at three hundred euros a month, and the one he took was the least dark. Dressed to the nines on a budget, the girl was inordinately professional, her foot on the first rung of the ladder of her career in property. Scrupulously, she’d made an inventory of the single room with its adjacent toilet. She checked the walls for pin tacks, tried the taps, crouched down to look at the electric plugs, opened the shutters and turned the knobs on each of the two wall heaters. The shower curtain was covered in stains, as if someone ran short on the toilet paper. The entire bathroom was about a metre square. It would have been impossible to conceive of one smaller.
Of course the advantage was that you could have a shit and a shower all in the seated position.
The shower curtain was to be retained, it was on the list. She gave a gay little laugh. How was it that in late autumn her face was orange? He decided to examine, he found the cut-off point just before her ears. It was a painted mask. He didn’t blame her. He would wear a mask too if he was trying to shoehorn good people into bad spaces.
He settled in, with a couple of bags and boxes and some furniture they’d been ready to throw out or have Guy convert into something else. Possibly a vest.
From the desk at the window he looked up to the bells of the dark church, those great iron testicles of the past strung up as a warning to all would-be romantics who passed through the place from baptism to burial.
Besides floor tiles and the crépi roughcast walls that wouldn’t stand for him lolling, there was installed a stainless-steel sink and counter. The taps on the sink were vicious things that spouted at angles a tirade of boiling watery abuse.
There was no light in the bathroom. In preference to flaying his back, he showered either in cold water in the dark or increasingly not at all.
He had a coffee machine and its drone punctuated the day as he moved between the computer and its good self. It rattled and shook the corrugated aluminium surface of the sink, underneath which was his fridge. He purchased a futon, the edges of which cut into his calves. There was a sly mattress. They called this minimalism in better circles.
The bells rang at midday; just before the siren went off to remind people that life was lunch.
He went to see his bank manager to arrange the overdraft that he would need. He had never been there before; Valérie and her mother had handled their finances. Under the porch, an old man was sitting on a rug with handwritten posters about him declaring his intention to starve himself to death to shame the bank. He had a cat on a lead for company.
He was directed towards an office. With its transparent sides and cardboard rear, it made the bank manager look like a dollyman attached to his containment by plastic-coated twisty wires, but one smooth pink arm appeared free enough to move the mouse.
Richard had only ever been overdrawn by a couple of hundred euros. He still had a monthly salary, but a good part of it went to his wife. He had a cheque to deposit from the sale of the four-byfour. He explained that he was awaiting the sale of the house valued at around four hundred and fifty thousand euros which, after the mortgage repayment, would net them about seventy thousand euros from which he expected half. The bank manager smiled damply. His expression seemed to say: Forget it, pal. The only good man’s a gay man these days.
He noted Richard’s good financial behaviour for the last fourteen years there, the regular salary; at times he had had thirty thousand euros in the account. He never put it in a savings account. This was a shame, as he could have had some interest on it. They were offering one and a quarter per cent. He paused, looked up from his computer to see if Richard understood the value of this.
Richard attempted to look blown away with remorse. The young man announced that Richard could have his overdraft of a thousand euros. The printer cheered. He explained — with good reason, given he had before him a man who had just lost his wife and son — how to manage things better from now on.
Richard looked awestruck, grateful, dependent. He wanted the overdraft slightly more than he wanted to maim the bank-boy, but it was close.
He was now occupied for the first time in his life with dealing with ‘the little people’. He had ridiculed Valérie for her struggle with France Telecom, the unfathomable invoicing, the contracts due to finish in five years’ time for services that weren’t supplied or functioning. He’d called her all the names under the sun. He’d even said something he now considered stupid — ‘How hard can it be?’
Simone took him to the doors of France Telecom, but she would not go in. She’d rather flagellate herself with nettles, she said. It was nice of her to drive him to L’Argens. She wouldn’t look him in the eyes though; obviously they’d known about Jeff before he did.
The place had changed since Valérie once punished him by taking him in there on a Saturday. Just a year or two ago it was a communist barracks, big grey desks, small rooms with heavy doors. The cast was the same but the place had gone over to consumerism. A tall bald clown and his accomplices, five chunky women in zip-up Terylene navy waistcoats over their mufti, perched on bar stools at kidney-shaped tables with marketing material the bunting around their computer screens.
Holding their tickets, sinners like him sat it out on trendy red pouffes, reading the posters which promised all sorts of things for a modest monthly outlay: clear-skinned children, good looks in old age, companionship. He waited three-quarters of an hour. One man jumped the queue. Sure enough, the man’s dreams of a new home/work interface were quickly dispatched and it was at last Richard’s turn.
He had come to cancel his mobile phone. The mobile phone could only be cancelled in August 2010. It didn’t even work, he said. There was no address for a complaints letter, he should call the helpline. They don’t answer, he told the clown. I know, he replied, his eyes twinkling.
Christ, he thought, I wouldn’t be surprised if my wife wasn’t depressed out of her mind.
He was desperate for a drink by the time they quit the Parisian pretensions of L’Argens for the wannabe chain stores and trashy billboards of the industrial areas. He and Simone lit up. No wonder people smoke so much round here, he thought. The poor bastards are all just trying to talk to each other, and what do they get for their trouble? That circus of heartache, ‘Farce’ Telecom.
‘How can people live like this?’ he said. ‘I had no idea it was so awful.’
‘This is real life, Richard,’ she said. He saw her lean into the wheel. ‘But they have a nice new baker’s down here by the roundabout and you can just pull into the parking area, it’s very convenient.’
He looked at the other side of the traffic queue; at the older angular cars shaped like half-sucke
d lozenges, Citroëns and the Renaults, the traffic lights changed and they were off.
Chapter 37
He had bronchitis after just a month in the apartment. It might have been something to do with the smoking. Pale petals of bile burst into his mouth. He got up and went out. He didn’t bother to lock the door. He walked in the damp October air to the doctor’s.
He was in the waiting room for an hour. Old folk sat ranged against the wall in plastic garden chairs. They contemplated the African savannah the doctor’s artistic wife had painted on the wall.
Ten years older than Valérie’s parents, the last thrifty generation, ailing now, still traded and bartered in the leftovers from their gardens, haunting each other’s bungalows with plastic bags of nuts or plums, some quince paste, a jar of jam; or they drove round to see who was alive and what they had on their trees. In their tracksuits and acrylic sweaters, in their clapped-out cars, they swarmed out in the afternoon, slightly boozy.
Two enormously fat men came in at once, took a plastic garden chair apiece, and one capsized, with the other following suit. It was a remarkable scene; they couldn’t raise themselves, crammed into their chairs, they were limbs in the air for a few minutes, six legs apiece, each an octopus. Richard laughed and shook his head, he wiped the corners of his eyes.
A man with his coat buttoned to his chin stood and with ancien régime frostiness asked him to stop laughing; it was not the way things were done in France, monsieur.
‘I’ve lived here fourteen years; I’m not some parvenu. You people are so racist.’
The stiff old boy insisted, ‘It is not dignified, it is lacking in respect.’