The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

“In the toilets. I was sitting on the floor. Maman closed the door, so she could talk to me without anyone else hearing.”

  “What was she saying, your Maman?”

  “She told me that everything in my head was going to go away, like the dreams I have at night. But that I had to force myself to think about her, every night before I go to sleep. That I had to think hard about her, and our house, and the beach. The pirate ship. The castle. That was all she said to me, that the pictures in my head would go away. I didn’t really believe her but she kept saying the same thing, that the pictures in my head would fly away if I didn’t think about them each night in my bed. Like leaves falling off the branches of a tree.”

  “This was before she left you with your other mother . . . is that right?”

  “The other one isn’t my mother!”

  “Yes, yes, Malone, I understand, that’s why I said your other mother. And what else did she tell you? Your first mother, I mean.”

  “To listen to Gouti.”

  “And this is Gouti? Your cuddly toy? So you had to listen to Gouti, is that what your mother told you?”

  “Yes! I must listen to Gouti, but in secret.”

  “He must be very powerful then. How does Gouti help you remember?”

  “He talks to me.”

  “When does he talk to you?”

  “I can’t tell anyone, it’s my secret. Maman made me swear. She told me another secret too, in the toilets. The secret that protects you from ogres when they want to take you into the forest.”

  “OK, it’s your secret. I understand. But she didn’t say anything else, Malone?”

  “Yes! She said that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Malone! She told me it was a nice name and that I had to answer when someone called me that.”

  “But you weren’t called Malone before that? Do you still remember your other name?”

  Malone remained silent. An eternity passed.

  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. And what happened after that?”

  “She cried.”

  “OK. So what about your house, from before? Not the one you live in now. The other one. Can you remember that?”

  “A little bit. But almost all the pictures have gone away, because Gouti never talks to me about that.”

  “I understand. But can you describe the pictures you have left of the house? You were talking about the sea earlier? About a pirate ship and the towers of a castle?”

  “Yes. There was no garden, just a beach. If you leaned out of my bedroom window, the sea was right there. I could see the pirate ship from my room—it was broken in two. I remember the rocket too. And that I couldn’t go far from the house because of the forest.”

  “The forest of ogres, you mean?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you describe the forest for me?”

  “That’s easy. The trees were as high as the sky. And there weren’t just ogres in the jungle, there were big monkeys too, and snakes, and giant spiders . . . I saw them once, the spiders. That was why I had to stay in my room.”

  “Do you remember anything else, Malone?”

  “No.”

  “OK. So tell me, Malone . . . I’m going to call you Malone, if that’s OK, until we remember your name from before. Your cuddly toy. What kind of animal is it?”

  “Well . . . it’s a Gouti.”

  “A Gouti. I see. And you say it really talks to you. Not just in your head? I know it’s a secret, but can you tell me just a little bit about how it talks to you?”

  Malone suddenly held his breath.

  “Quiet, Gouti,” he whispered.

  Malone heard footsteps on the stairs. He always listened very carefully to the noises in the house, especially when he was in his bedroom, under the sheets, listening in secret to Gouti.

  Maman-da was coming.

  “Quick, Gouti,” whispered Malone, “you have to pretend to be asleep.”

  His toy stopped talking just in time, before Maman-da came into the room. Malone held his furry rat close. Gouti was very good at pretending to be asleep.

  Maman-da’s voice was always a bit slow, especially in the evenings, as if she was so tired she could never finish her sentences.

  “Everything OK, sweetie?”

  “Yes.”

  Malone wanted her to leave, but just as she did every evening, Maman-da sat down on the edge of his bed and stroked his hair. Tonight, the stroking went on even longer than usual. She put her arms around his back and pressed her heart against his chest.

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to see your teacher at the school, remember?”

  Malone did not reply.

  “They say you’ve been telling stories. I know you love stories, sweetie, and that’s normal for a little boy. In fact, I’m proud that you can invent things in your head. But sometimes grown-ups take those stories seriously; they think they’re true. That’s why your teacher wants to see us, do you understand?”

  Malone closed his eyes. It was a long time before Maman-da made a move.

  “You’re sleepy, my darling. I’ll let you get some rest. Sweet dreams.”

  She kissed him, turned off the light and finally left the room. Malone waited, cautiously. He glanced at the cosmonaut alarm clock.

  Little hand on the 8, big hand on the 9.

  Malone knew he shouldn’t wake up his toy until the little hand was on the 9. Maman had taught him that too.

  He looked at the calendar of the sky pinned to the wall, just above the alarm clock. The planets shone in the darkness. When the lights were turned off in his room, all you could see were those planets glowing in the night. Today was the day of the moon.

  Malone couldn’t wait for Gouti to tell him his story. His own. The story about the treasure on the beach. Lost treasure.

  3

  Today, Mimizan beach. I took off my bikini top just for Marco, my boyfriend. He likes my breasts. So did the fat pig lying next to us, visibly.

  Want to kill

  I stabbed his fat gut with the end of the parasol, right through his belly button.

  Convicted: 28

  Acquitted: 3,289

  www.want-to-kill.com

  The telephone rang, waking Captain Marianne Augresse with a start. For a brief instant, her eyes remained fixed on her cold, naked skin, then she removed her arm from the bath where she had been dozing for the past hour and picked up the phone. Her forearm knocked the little tray of toys balanced on the laundry basket and plastic boats, wind-up dolphins and small fluorescent fish scattered over the surface of the water.

  “Shit!”

  Number unknown.

  “Shit!” the captain repeated.

  She had been hoping it was one of her lieutenants: JB, Papy, or one of the other duty cops at Le Havre police station. She had been waiting for a call since the previous day, when Timo Soler was spotted in the Saint-François quarter, near the pharmacy. She had stationed four men between the Bassin du Commerce and the Bassin du Roi. They had been searching for Timo Soler for nearly a year: nine months and twenty-seven days, to be exact. The hunt had begun on Tuesday, January 6, 2015, during the armed robbery in Deauville. The surveillance camera had immortalized the face of Timo Soler just before he vanished on a Münch Mammut 2000, taking with him the 9 mm Luger bullet, lodged, according to the ballistics experts, somewhere between his lung and his shoulder. Marianne had known she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep until the following morning and so had planned only to doze in the bath, then on the sofa, then in bed hoping to jump up in the middle of the night, grabbing her leather jacket and abandoning her crumpled sheets, her Tupperware box of food and her glass of Quézac mineral water in front of the dormant television, pausing only to throw a handful of biscuits to Mogwai, her cat.

  “Yes?”


  Her index finger slid across the wet glass. She gently patted the iPhone with a towel that was hanging close by, desperately hoping that this would not end the call.

  “Captain Augresse? Vasily Dragonman. You don’t know me. I’m a school psychologist. A mutual friend, Angélique Fontaine, gave me your mobile number.”

  Angie . . . For fuck’s sake, thought Marianne. She was going to tear a strip off that little slut, with her lacy bras and loose tongue.

  “Is this a professional matter, Mr. Dragonman? I’m expecting an important call on this number at any moment.”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

  He had a soft voice. The voice of a young priest, a hypnotist, or a telepathic magician from the East. A smooth and confident talker, with just a hint of a Slavic accent.

  “Go on,” sighed Marianne.

  “You’re going to find what I have to say slightly disconcerting. I’m a school psychologist. I cover the whole region north of the Havre estuary. For a few weeks now, I’ve been looking after a strange child.”

  “Strange how?”

  Marianne’s free hand played with the water between her half-submerged legs. There were worse things than being woken in your bath by a man, even if he wasn’t calling to invite you to dinner.

  “He claims that his mother isn’t his mother.”

  The captain’s fingers slid over her damp thigh.

  “Sorry?”

  “He claims that his mother isn’t his mother, and that his father isn’t his father either.”

  “How old is this kid?”

  “Three and a half.”

  Marianne bit her lip.

  An over-zealous shrink! Angie must have been completely taken in by his smooth psychobabble.

  “He expresses himself as if he were a year older than that,” the psychologist continued. “He’s not particularly gifted, but he is precocious. According to the tests that . . . ”

  “And his parents really are his parents?” Marianne cut in. “Have you checked with his teachers? He’s not adopted, or in foster care, or anything like that?”

  “There’s no doubt whatsoever. He really is their child. The parents say the kid has an over-active imagination. The headmistress is meeting them tomorrow.”

  “So, the situation is being dealt with then . . . ”

  Marianne suddenly felt guilty about the curt way she had replied to the soft-voiced shrink. Just below the surface of the water, the fin of a mechanical dolphin tickled her legs. It had been at least six months since Grégoire, her nephew, had last stayed over; and, given that he would turn eleven next month, it was far from certain that he would ever return to binge on pizza and DVDs at his aunt’s house. She ought to throw these toys away, along with the Pixar films and the Playmobil boxes, throw them all in a garbage bag like so many regrets, instead of allowing them to taunt her.

  “No,” the psychologist insisted. “It’s not being dealt with. Because, as odd as this may sound, I have a feeling the child might be telling the truth.”

  “What about the mother?” the captain asked.

  “She’s furious.”

  “You don’t say! Please get to the point, Mr. Dragonman. What do you expect me to do about it?”

  Marianne used her knee to push away the dolphin. She felt flustered by the voice of this stranger, particularly as he almost certainly had no idea that she was naked as she spoke to him, her thighs in the air and her feet resting on the edge of the bathtub.

  The psychologist left a long silence, allowing the captain to sink a little deeper into her hot, damp thoughts. Although realistically, the idea of sharing a bath with a man didn’t get her that excited. She had too many hang-ups, perhaps. And there wouldn’t be enough space to cram her body between the cold wall of the bathtub and the muscles of an ephemeral but well-built lover. Her real dream, though she could never admit it to anyone, was to share her bath with a baby. To spend hours splashing around with a little mite who was as chubby as she was, the water gone cold, surrounded by plastic toys.

  “What do I expect you to do? I don’t know. Help me?”

  “You want me to open an investigation, is that it?”

  “Not necessarily. But you could at least do some digging. Angie told me that’s what you do. Just check out what the boy is saying. I have hours of recorded interviews, notes, drawings . . . ”

  The dolphin was back. It was obsessed.

  The longer the conversation went on, the more convinced the captain became that the simplest thing to do would be to meet this Vasily Dragonman. Especially as it was Angie who had sent him. Angie knew what she was looking for. Not a man; Marianne couldn’t care less about men. At thirty-nine, she had at least another twenty years in which she could sleep with all the men in the world. No, Marianne had hammered the message home to Angie during their girls’ nights out: in the coming months, the captain would be going in search of a single, mythical creature: a FATHER. So, in sending this guy her way, Angie was perhaps thinking . . . After all, a school psychologist would make the perfect father. A man with a professional understanding of early childhood, quoting Freinet, Piaget, and Montessori while other blokes were content to read magazines such as L’Equipe, Interview, or Detective.

  “Mr. Dragonman, the usual procedure for a child in danger is to call one of the child protection organizations. But I must admit that this case you have described seems . . . well, unusual. Do you really want to notify the authorities on the basis of the child’s declarations? Does he strike you as mistreated? Do the parents appear dangerous? Is there anything that might give us a reason to separate them?”

  “No. On the face of it, the parents seem completely normal.”

  “OK. So there’s no emergency. We’ll make some enquiries. We wouldn’t want to put the parents in prison just because their son has an over-active imagination . . . ”

  A shiver ran through the captain’s body. The bathwater was now cold and faintly pink, as if the mixture of lavender, eucalyptus and violet essential oils she had poured in had gone stagnant. Marianne’s breasts emerged from the pale surface, large in comparison to the little yellow plastic boat that floated over her belly. A vision of the end of the world, thought Marianne. Two virgin islands polluted by a liner dumping its toxic waste.

  The psychologist’s voice snapped the policewoman out of her reverie.

  “I’m sorry, Captain, please don’t take this personally, but you’re wrong. That is why I was so insistent with Angie, and why I felt compelled to call you this evening. This is an emergency. It’s urgent for this child. Absolutely urgent. Irreversible, even.”

  Marianne’s voice rose. “Irreversible? For God’s sake, you told me the kid wasn’t in any danger!”

  “Please understand, Captain. This child isn’t even four years old yet. All those things he remembers today, he could easily forget tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or in a month or two.”

  Marianne stood up.

  “What are you trying to say, exactly?”

  “That this child is clinging to fragments of memory in order to convince me that his mother is not his real mother. He talks about a castle, a pirate ship, a forest of ogres . . . other things. But in a few days, or maybe a few weeks, as surely as this child will get older, he will learn new things—the names of animals and flowers and letters and the rest of this infinite world that surrounds him—and then his older memories will be erased. And that other mother, whom he remembers today, that previous life that he tells me about each time I see him, will simply cease to exist!”

  4

  Little hand on the 9, big hand on the 12

  Malone listened to the silence for a long time, making sure that Maman-da was not on her way back up the stairs.

  His small fingers reached beneath the sheets until they felt Gouti’s heartbeat. His toy was slightly warm. When he had complete
ly woken up, Malone hid under the sheets and got ready to listen. It was the day of the moon. It was the day of the story about Gouti and the hazelnuts. Malone couldn’t remember how many times he’d heard it.

  There had been many days of the moon, so many that he couldn’t count them. But he didn’t remember any days of the moon from the time before.

  Malone put his ear against Gouti, as if the toy were a very soft pillow.

  * * *

  Gouti was just three years old, which was already pretty big in his family, because his mother was only eight and his grandfather, who was very old, was fifteen.

  They lived in the biggest tree on the beach, which had roots shaped like an immense spider. Their place was on the third floor, first branch on the left, between a tern that was almost always away on trips and a lame owl who had now retired, but who used to work on the pirate ships.

  Maman said that Gouti was very similar to his grandfather a daydreamer, just like he was. It’s true that his grandfather spent a lot of time dreaming, but that’s because he was losing his memory. They would often find him asleep on another branch, his white moustache all disheveled, or burying a gray stone instead of an acorn. Gouti liked to sit in front of the sea and imagine that he was climbing on a boat, hiding in its hold, secretly eating wheat or oats from a bag until they discovered a new island. He imagined himself staying on that new island and making a new family. He often thought about that and forgot the rest.

  And yet he did have work to do. His work was always the same, but it was very important: gathering the hazelnuts from the forest and burying them close to the house. Because the reason the whole family was living in this place was the forest. Hazelnuts, walnuts, acorns, pine cones . . . this was the treasure that fell from the sky in the autumn and that had to be carefully hidden before winter so they could eat for the rest of the year. Maman didn’t have the time to do this because she was busy with his little brother Mulo and his little sister Musa.

  So, every day, Gouti would gather and bury the nuts, then he would look out to sea and daydream. And every evening, on the way back to their big tree, he would realize that he had forgotten where he had buried the nuts.