The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  Malone ran over to Maman-da and grabbed her hand. He understood—they’d reminded him again that morning—that they had to talk to the teacher today at lunch about the stories he’d been telling. It was strange to go back into the classroom when it was empty, to have all the toys to himself.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Moulin? Please, sit down.”

  Clotilde Bruyère looked slightly embarrassed as she gestured to the only available chairs in the classroom, which were all of thirty centimeters high. Meetings with parents were often held here, and normally it did not pose much of a problem for the adults.

  Normally.

  On his Lilliputian chair, Dimitri Moulin—one meter eighty tall and weighing in at one hundred and ten kilograms—looked like a circus elephant perched on a stool. With his legs folded up, his knees were almost touching his chin.

  Clotilde turned to Malone.

  “Will you leave us for a moment, my dear? You can go and play outside for a bit. We won’t be long.”

  Malone waited in the playground. He didn’t care. He’d deliberately left Gouti behind in the dolls’ corner, next to the blue bed. No one would notice his toy there, and Gouti would tell him everything afterwards. He looked longingly at the slide and the tunnel, where the big kids usually played and he was never able to. He thought about seizing this opportunity, running over there.

  The sky was very dark, as if it were about to rain.

  The toilets were a long way from the slide and the tunnel, a very long way, almost at the other end of the playground. If the rain suddenly started to fall, he wouldn’t be quick enough to escape the glass drops.

  Then he heard Pa-di shout something, even though the classroom door was shut. Poor Gouti, thought Malone.

  His toy was always a bit scared when Pa-di got angry.

  Seated on the mat for car toys, Dimitri Moulin had unfolded his legs and was grinding his heel into the realistically printed houses, gardens and roads.

  “Mrs. Bruyère, I’ll be blunt. I have better things to do than go back to nursery school! I’ve just got a new job. I had to negotiate with my boss to be allowed to start work at one today. I’m sure you don’t care—you’ll be paid every month until you retire, but that’s not true for me.”

  The usual rant against employees of the state. Clotilde responded with silence. She wasn’t used to it yet—she’d only been a teacher for six years, and a headmistress for two—but she’d been warned about this when she started: it was a classic complaint, almost as common as moaning about the number of weeks’ holiday teachers were given. She had chosen to teach pre-school because she was gentle and patient. These qualities were also supposed to be useful for calming down angry fathers.

  “That’s not what we’re here to talk about, Mr. Moulin.”

  “So let’s get to the point then. Look, I’ve brought everything with me. This should save us a long chat.”

  From the bag he wore over his shoulder he took out a series of cardboard folders.

  “His birth certificate! Our family record book, stamped by the mayor’s office and the maternity ward. Photograph albums showing pictures of the kid since he was born. Go on, take a look. You really think he’s not ours?”

  Amanda, sitting next to him, remained silent. Her eyes drifted over to the dolls’ corner. Malone had left his cuddly toy sitting on a high chair. Gouti stared at them as if he was absorbing every word of the conversation. As if he were spying on them, Amanda thought stupidly.

  “Mr. Moulin,” the teacher said calmly, “we have never questioned the fact that Malone is your child. It’s just that . . . ”

  “Don’t treat us like idiots!” Dimitri Moulin interrupted. “We understand perfectly well what that shrink was implying, that Romanian, Vasily whatshisname. And your insinuations too, those little notes left in my kid’s exercise book.”

  Gentle and patient. Clotilde stuck to her strategy. After all, Mr. Moulin could scarcely be any harder to tame than Kylian or Noah, the two troublemakers in her class.

  “Mr. Moulin, the reason I wrote those notes and suggested this meeting was simply that your son is saying things that might be described as surprising for his age, particularly when he talks to the school psychologist. I simply wanted to meet with you so that you could give me a little more information.”

  “You’re talking like a cop!”

  Clotilde moved forward a few centimeters and squatted down so that her eyes were level with Dimitri Moulin’s. She was used to living eighty centimeters above the ground. The bulk and height of this rhinoceros would not give him any advantage in her classroom. Quite the opposite.

  The headmistress glared at Moulin.

  “Will you please calm down. No one has mentioned the police. This is a school. My school. So, in the interest of your child, we are simply going to have a quiet discussion.”

  Dimitri Moulin looked as if he wanted to get up from his midget chair and storm out, but his wife put a hand on his thigh to restrain him. He stared at the teacher defiantly.

  “All right. You seem like a good teacher, after all. But as for that shrink, I just . . . ” He was silent for a moment. “Can’t parents refuse that kind of thing, their kid being seen by a shrink?”

  “It’s complicated. It all depends on why . . . ”

  “Well, doesn’t matter to me anyway,” Moulin cut in again.

  He seemed to have mellowed. Maybe because he was actually quite attracted to this little woman who was standing up to him.

  “After all,” he went on, “I know there’s something not quite right about the kid. He doesn’t talk much, he uses words that are complicated, there’s a bit too much going on in his head. If it’ll do him good to speak to someone, well . . . I’m glad. That he can speak to an adult, I mean. But this Vasily Dragonski . . . Don’t you have anyone else? Someone more . . . ”

  “More what?”

  “You know what I mean.” He laughed. “More French. I’m not allowed to say that, right?”

  He leaned over and, pushing away the little cars, spread the photograph albums across the town printed beneath his feet.

  “Anyway, you might as well have a look at them. So we haven’t come here for no reason.”

  Clotilde turned her eyes to the documents.

  “Vasily Dragonman is not under my authority. He reports directly to the regional education authority. I am here today as a mediator. We will discuss the matter and afterwards, I will provide him with my conclusions. It will probably be necessary for you to meet him again. Briefly.”

  Dimitri Moulin seemed to be thinking. His wife spoke for the first time.

  “You mean that the school psychologist can alert the authorities without even going through you?”

  “Yes,” replied Clotilde. “If there’s any doubt about the child’s safety, he can speak first of all to the child welfare services, who will appoint a social worker . . . ”

  “First of all?” yelled Dimitri. “What comes after that?”

  Clotilde delicately removed a little fire engine that Moulin’s heavy shoes were threatening to crush. Then she said in her thin voice:

  “Informing the police.”

  “The police? You’re not bloody serious? For a kid who’s not even four years old and can barely string together three sentences?”

  Clotilde rescued a second vehicle. She felt she had control of this conversation once more.

  “I didn’t say we would do that,” she reassured him with a smile. “I can see that Malone is an adorable little boy who is growing up in the normal way and who is being perfectly well looked after. Besides—just between us—the last thing I want is the police opening an investigation, interrogating the children in my class and all their parents.” She leaned even further forward, her eyes fixed on his, her preferred position for addressing three-year-old big shots. “In a little village like Manéglise, no one wa
nts that, do they, Mr. Moulin? So we are going to discuss this quietly and calmly, and you are going to try to explain why on earth Malone keeps telling us that you are not his parents.”

  Dimitri Moulin opened his mouth to speak, but Amanda cut him off.

  “Please shut up now, Dimitri,” she said, almost imploringly. “Shut up and let me speak.”

  * * *

  Outside, a first drop fell on the iron slide and trickled down to the sand.

  A second. A third.

  Each of them more dangerous than the last.

  Malone had been lucky. None of the drops had touched him.

  Not yet.

  He took one last look at the classroom window. All their drawings were stuck to it, and their handprints. They had put their hands in a tray filled with paint and then pressed them against a sheet of paper.

  His was bright red.

  Behind the windowpane, they must be talking about him. And about his Maman, perhaps. Not Maman-da, but his Maman from before. Maybe about pirates too, and rockets and ogres. The adults knew about all that. He could only remember because of Gouti.

  Another drop, landing on his trainer.

  He’d only just escaped. Malone started to run.

  Another twenty meters until he reached the door of the toilets.

  Open the door and shut himself inside, as Maman had taught him.

  7

  Today, my little sister Agathe finished all the sweets in the house before I got home from school and Maman got home from work.

  Want to kill

  One of them had cyanide in it!

  Convicted: 253

  Acquitted: 27

  www.want-to-kill.com

  Vasily Dragonman spread out the drawings in front of Captain Marianne Augresse. He pointed to the first, an almost blank sheet with four black vertical lines and one red zigzag scrawled on it.

  “Look carefully at these lines.”

  Mariane Augresse put a hand over the drawing to conceal it.

  “No, Mr. Dragonman! We’re going to start at the beginning. Who is this child? Tell me about his parents. The short version.”

  Vasily bit his lip like a child who’d been told off.

  “The parents. Normal, ordinary people. There’s nothing much to say about them really. The mother, Amanda Moulin, is probably just over thirty, but she looks more like forty. The father is older: he probably is in his forties. They’ve been married for years. They live in a little house in Manéglise, on a housing estate called Les Hauts de Manéglise, on the outskirts of the village. Place Maurice-Ravel, to be exact. That’s about all there is to Manéglise: a tiny village center and a huge housing estate. She works as a cashier at Vivéco, the village minimarket. He’s an electrician, or something like that. I think he’s been struggling to find a steady job. People also know him in the village because he coaches the children’s football team.”

  “Have you met them?”

  “Once, yes, when it all started. I was less curious about the matter back then.”

  Vasily almost seemed to be apologizing, as if he felt guilty about casting suspicion on a seemingly innocent family. Marianne found it incredibly endearing, the way he was behaving like a little boy, embarrassed to be telling on someone. She promised herself that she would talk to Angie about him that night. She wondered if the little flirt had a thing for this handsome man too? It seemed unlikely: the guy seemed a bit too intellectual for a tart like Angie. Her friend preferred bad boys.

  Papy walked past the office window just then, a cup of coffee in hand. She raised her eyebrows at him and he responded by shaking his head. No word yet from Professor Larochelle about Timo Soler.

  “Very good, Mr. Dragonman. So, let’s get back to the kid. Tell me about these drawings.”

  “Well, as I said on the phone, he claims to have had a different life before the one he’s living now, before his bedroom in the little house in Manéglise, before his parents, Amanda and Dimitri Moulin. He had described that previous life in great detail to me, even though his teacher, Clotilde Bruyère, says that Malone Moulin is normally a very quiet, reserved child.”

  “So why would he confide in you?”

  “It’s my job.”

  Good point, Marianne admitted to herself. Vasily was gentle and polite, but he had an ego too. And what if he was the one who was making all of this up, the captain wondered? What if he had invented this whole affair to make himself look good?

  “Look at these drawings,” the psychologist went on. “On this one, the four vertical lines, according to Malone, represent the castle near where he used to live. Those are the four towers. The zigzag that slants up to the top of the page is a rocket. He says he remembers having seen it fly up into the sky. Several times.”

  Marianne sighed. None of this was convincing. She was only listening to what the shrink had to say because it killed some time while she waited for the surgeon’s call, after which she would send five police cars to trap Timo Soler at the port. Her eyes drifted over to her computer screen for a moment. The website want-to-kill.com was flashing at the bottom of the screen. Naturally, she thought of Angie.

  Was that little tramp playing a joke on her? What if this man, this supposed psychologist, was just a friend of hers, playing a role?

  “You forgot the pirates,” she said distractedly. “You mentioned a pirate ship too, yesterday.”

  Vasily did not notice the irony in her voice.

  “Yes! Exactly.” He grabbed another drawing. “The blue shading represents the sea. Malone claims that he could see it from his bedroom. And the two little black dots . . . that’s a ship.”

  “One pirate ship or two?”

  “Just one, but it’s been cut in half. He said he could see that from his bedroom too. It’s that kind of detail that I find troubling. Everything he says, from one meeting to the next, is very consistent. He never contradicts himself.”

  Marianne’s finger traced the blue sea.

  “And the forest of ogres? There were ogres in the kid’s story too, weren’t there?”

  She leaned forward over the desk. Whether this was one of Angie’s jokes or not, it was time to put an end to this farce.

  “Frankly, Mr. Dragonman, what do you expect us to do, realistically? Did you really think I would just accept all this? You’re not telling me you believe this kid is telling the truth based simply on his ramblings and some scribbles?”

  Vasily Dragonman’s eyes flashed with panic, their terracotta sheen shattered. As if this was the first time he had ever come up against the walls of a cold, cruel, pragmatic world.

  “Yes, Captain, in spite of everything, I do believe him! Eight years of study and as many working in the field should have taught me that this child has created an interior world with its own symbolism, a psychological labyrinth in which we should advance with caution. But call it what you want—instinct or intuition—I am convinced that the majority of this child’s memories are real. Even if it doesn’t fit with what I know about psychoanalysis. I am certain that he really experienced all these things that he has drawn pictures about.”

  “In that little house in Manéglise?”

  “No. That’s the point.”

  For God’s sake! thought Marianne. Her hands tensed under the desk. She felt she was setting off on an impossible journey, her sole motivation being that it was more pleasant to spend the time waiting for her cavalry charge staring into those gingerbread eyes than staring at the vending machine.

  “Do you have anything else, Mr. Dragonman? Anything . . . more concrete?”

  “Yes.”

  Vasily bent down over his patched leather satchel, then took out a series of photographs of a shopping center.

  “You recognize this?”

  “Should I? There are a thousand just like it in France, aren’t there?”


  “It’s the Mont-Gaillard shopping center. The biggest in the region. Malone claims that it was in this shopping center that his mother—the real one—handed him over to his second mother, Amanda Moulin. I showed him several pictures of it. Malone recognized the McDonald’s, the Auchan logo, the drawing of the Pirate Island, a red and green parrot. The only place where those three shops can be found together is in this shopping center. The child couldn’t have invented it . . . ”

  The captain took the time to look at the photographs in detail.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” she concluded, after a moment. “He could be confused. Or he could simply be citing a place he’s familiar with. He’s probably spent every Saturday since he was born in that place. It’s a shopper’s paradise! Everyone north of the estuary goes there at the weekends.”

  “He’s not confused, Captain. It’s difficult to explain to you in such a short time the subtle differences between implicit and episodic memory, but this is not confusion, believe me!”

  Handsome, proud and stubborn as a mule, this shrink.

  Marianne sighed. “According to you, how long ago did this exchange of mothers take place?”

  “Several months ago, at least. Maybe a year. It’s not a direct memory. It’s a memory of a memory, if you like.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “A memory that he forces himself to think about every night so that he won’t forget it. A memory that he is hammering into his brain like a nail. A nail to which he’s attached a kind of sheet in his brain, so he won’t have to see what’s beneath it.”

  “What’s beneath it?”

  “Whatever he experienced before the exchange in Mont-Gaillard. What he is able to express only in the form of drawings. The ogres, the pirates, and the rest. A reality that is too difficult to look at directly.”

  “So you’re saying that he is concealing a trauma?”

  Suddenly, Vasily seemed more sure of himself. He smiled like a happy child.

  “Yes, that much seems obvious to me. The rest is open to question, I guess—whether his mother is real or false, the honesty of Amanda and Dimitri Moulin. As far as I’m concerned, one thing is certain: this boy endured a traumatic experience and has built some incredibly high walls in his memory to keep it out of sight.”