The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  Malone proudly exhibited the gadget to Vasily.

  Instinctively, the psychologist reached over to the office door and pushed it shut with his foot.

  “It’s easy,” explained Malone. “You just have to press these five buttons.”

  The green triangle. To listen to Gouti.

  The red circle. To silence Gouti.

  The two lines. So that Gouti listens and tells you later.

  And the two arrows, on two different buttons, pointing in opposite directions. So you could search around in Gouti’s memory.

  “So you can find the right story for each night. Is that right, Malone?”

  “Yes.”

  Vasily’s hands trembled slightly. The explanation was so obvious. So simple, it was almost . . . childlike.

  Seven files. One for each night. Seven stories, always listened to in the same order. Impossible to go wrong, even for a three-year-old child.

  “Was it your mother who taught you how to use it? Your Maman from before. Did she make Gouti’s heart and hide it inside him? Did she ask you to listen to Gouti’s stories each night? Is it Maman’s voice you hear? Is that right?”

  Malone nodded in response to each question. He seemed to have grown up by two years in two minutes. Vasily did not have time to analyze the staggering consequences of what he had just learned.

  Why impose such a ritual on a three-year-old child?

  How could Malone have hidden this secret from Amanda Moulin?

  What were the stories about? What was their coded meaning? What effect did they have on this child’s developing brain?

  And, most of all . . .

  Vasily stroked Malone’s hair with one hand, in an attempt to calm his trembling.

  What madness could have inspired such a strategy?

  They heard the footsteps too late. The door opened. Malone reacted the quickest. Force of habit. Or instinct. In the same movement, he smiled reassuringly at Clotilde, hid the earbuds and MP3 player between his knees, and dropped Gouti, belly down, on the table.

  “Everything OK, Malone?”

  A shy, natural-sounding yes.

  Mankind, as a species, has a gift for lying.

  The headmistress glared at the dormant coffee maker but didn’t say anything. She turned to the child.

  “Your mother is here. Can you go and get your coat?”

  “He’ll be there in just a minute,” replied Vasily in a conciliatory voice. “We’ve almost finished.”

  He made a show of sorting his notes on the table, while Clotilde shrugged and then left. The rain hammered even harder against the window. This time, Malone could not conceal a jerk of terror.

  Vasily moved towards him and whispered.

  “You have to give me Gouti’s heart, Malone. I have to listen to what he says.”

  Malone was scared. Because of the rain. Because of what Vasily was asking him to do.

  “I know, you promised. You promised your mother. But I won’t tell anyone.”

  The child’s knees slowly opened. His little hand reached out, holding the MP3 player and the two black wires that hung between his fingers like strings of liquorice.

  The psychologist’s hand closed around the boy’s. They stayed like that for several long seconds, sealing a pact that would link them from that moment on.

  Vasily felt an immense responsibility fall on his shoulders, as if this child were handing him his very own heart, warm and still beating.

  The bell suddenly rang.

  That seemed to shake Malone from his terror. He nervously grabbed hold of Gouti and pressed him against his heart.

  “I’ll give him back his voice,” whispered Vasily. “I’ll give him back to you, I give you my word, in exchange for his. I . . . ”

  Vasily realized that he wasn’t making much sense. He closed his hand around the MP3 player.

  “Gouti is simply going to sleep for a while. He’s going to rest. Don’t worry, I’ll give him back to you tomorrow, outside the school. I promise. I’ll be there and I’ll give you back his heart.”

  Malone went to fetch his coat. Vasily watched him vanish down the corridor, jumping with fright every time he passed under one of the plastic skylights being pummelled by the downpour. Among the mysteries hidden deep inside this child’s brain, there was also this fear of rain, like the permanent cold he felt whenever he went outside, forcing him to dress in more layers than the other children.

  Would he find the answers to all these questions in the stories that Malone listened to? Vasily had a foreboding that, instead, these recordings would only deepen the mystery.

  As he left the room, a classroom assistant walked over to open the school gates. The psychologist took out his mobile phone before putting the black earbuds and the MP3 player in his pocket. Vasily’s finger slid down the touchscreen, scrolling through the messages he’d received since the previous day.

  Angie. 9:18 A.M.

  A smiley holding a red, heart-shaped balloon.

  I love you. Take care of yourself.

  Unknown. 12:51 A.M.

  A tomb, under a red sky.

  You or the kid. You still have a choice.

  He shivered. Feverishly his finger moved down to the previous message.

  Unknown. 11:57 P.M.

  Probably stupid of me, but I want to believe you.

  Aware of urgency. I’ll do my best.

  Contact me, whenever.

  Marianne

  Without hesitating, he pressed on the CALL icon.

  * * *

  Amanda Moulin stood outside the school gates, under a black umbrella, surrounded by mothers who were more interested in talking to each other than hearing their child tell them about his or her day.

  Malone was just about to walk out into the playground when he froze, incapable of moving another step.

  Before him, the rain was pouring down in a furious torrent.

  He stood there for what seemed like an eternity, his eyes imploring Maman-da, who stood behind the gates with the other mothers.

  A hand touched his back.

  Vasily. He had come up silently behind him. The psychologist gently pushed Malone forward while observing the thin trickle of water running from the gutter in front of the classroom, fed by the last drops of the downpour.

  “Go on, it’s all right.”

  Malone did not move. He stared at the gray sky, petrified.

  This time, Amanda did react. Crossing the line that parents were not supposed to cross and entering the playground, she walked over to the classroom door. Without glancing at Vasily Dragonman, she lifted the umbrella above her son’s head.

  “Come on, sweetie, let’s go home.”

  Behind her, she sensed the mute protest of the other mothers who were obeying the school’s rules.

  The psychologist seemed annoyed too, standing there like a post behind Malone, eyes averted, hands stuffed in his jean pockets as if he’d just stolen a sweet. Amanda looked up at him.

  “Leave my kid alone, sir. I’m perfectly capable of looking after him myself!”

  Vasily’s hand tensed inside his trouser pocket.

  “I’m just trying to help Mal—”

  “Leave him alone,” she repeated, louder this time. “I’m begging you.”

  The conversations on the other side of the gate went silent.

  She whispered the rest.

  “Leave him alone, Mr. Dragonman. Or you’ll make something bad happen.”

  30

  Captain Marianne Augresse waited. Irritated. Her eyes scanned the tram stop opposite, the cars moving down Boulevard George-V, even the Optimists and 420 dinghies sailing across the port.

  How would he arrive?

  And when?

  She hated waiting like this, feeling vulnerable, dependan
t—especially here in front of the police station when her usual daily life consisted of barking orders at people and making her own decisions about what she should do with her time.

  Two officers, Duhamel and Constantini, walked past, rushing down the steps without even noticing her. She had no idea where they were going. That annoyed her even more, the absence of control over the movement of her men, particularly as she lacked the manpower to juggle all of the demands being made on the force.

  She’d already had to give up on the idea of leaving an officer outside Alexis Zerda’s house all night. The last one had gone off-duty at 11 P.M. and the next had not taken over until 6 A.M. the following morning. She couldn’t have a cop tailing that man twenty-four hours a day, for weeks, when they had no concrete evidence against him. And that was without even mentioning Papy, who’d been pestering her all morning.

  The Guzzi California screeched to a halt outside the station. The captain did not recognize Vasily Dragonman until he took off his helmet. His disheveled dark hair made him look like a crow whose feathers had been ruffled by the storm.

  “You’re late, Mr. Dragonman.”

  Vasily did not even bother replying. He just got off his bike, walked up to the captain and extended his arm—so that she could see the object he was holding in his hand.

  An MP3 player.

  “The kid didn’t invent anything,” Vasily muttered.

  He briefly explained Malone’s revelations: the MP3 player sewn into the cuddly toy, the stories that the child listened to every night, earbuds in his ears, under the covers. An MP3 player that Vasily had promised to return to the child the following morning, outside the school.

  Captain Augresse put one hand on the bonnet of the nearest car.

  “Christ! That’s unreal.”

  “Not really, it’s the truth.”

  The captain’s hand tensed.

  “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to go on about hidden memories and how the brain of a three-year-old is as easy to mould as a ball of clay. But what I’m talking about is the MP3 player and that cuddly toy. Did the kid really believe that his rat was talking to him?”

  “I think so. Well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. It involves psychological theories about child development that are still being debated.”

  “Theories that I’m too stupid to understand?”

  Vasily frowned in surprise.

  “No. Why?”

  “Too rational, then? Too much of a cop? Not enough of a mother? Not enough of a woman?”

  The psychologist hesitated. He stared at Marianne. Clearly, he was more at ease with the neuroses of children than with those of grown women.

  “I don’t know, Captain.”

  There was a silence.

  “Well, go on then! Explain it to me!”

  Vasily took a deep breath before starting to speak.

  “Well, the question we have to ask, if we want to understand Malone’s relationship with his toy, is when do children start pretending? Or, to be more precise, when do they become aware that they’re pretending?”

  Well, we’re off to a good start, thought Marianne, frowning but not daring to ask the psychologist to repeat himself.

  Vasily looked at her indulgently, then chose a different tack.

  “OK, to give you a concrete example, let’s say that from about the age of five, a girl who plays with a doll knows that she is playing with a doll, that what she’s holding in her arms is a toy, even if she rocks it and cuddles it as if it were a real baby. She’s become aware of the fundamental difference between the reality and her perception of that reality, and she can play on that difference through social codes. You follow me so far, Captain?”

  Marianne nodded.

  “I pretend to feed my doll with a bottle, but I’m aware that she is not really drinking and that she is not going to die if I don’t feed her. I know that she is just a toy, even if that doll means more to me than anything in the world, even if my parents play along with me and talk about that doll as if she were a real person. That is what the game is for: imitating, codifying, transgressing. On the other hand, before, say, three years of age, children have no awareness of the difference between reality and their perception of that reality. For example, life and death do not really exist for them: a teddy bear is as alive as the bear they see at the zoo. Likewise, truth and falsehood are not notions that they can distinguish between: things exist or they don’t, and that’s all. For instance, it’s impossible to have a true or a false mother. A child of under three will have a mother, and perhaps other female figures who look after him: a babysitter, an auntie, a friend . . . ”

  He took a breath, and Marianne took advantage of the pause, like an attentive student.

  “So, if I’ve understood correctly, for little Malone, his cuddly toy really was talking, even if he was the one pressing the buttons.”

  Vasily shook his head. He seemed to be weighing each word of his reply in order not to upset her.

  “It’s not that simple, Captain. As I’ve said, this process of becoming aware of their own perception, this cognitive detachment in children, generally takes place between the ages of two and five. But at what moment does it fundamentally flip from one to the other? Between two and five, we give kids the same toys to stimulate imagination, manipulation, and cognition. Most often toys that imitate real things: a car, houses, dressing up costumes (a doctor, a fireman, a princess, a pirate). Vast teams of marketing experts and education specialists work on this kind of thing, and kids are deluged with supposedly educational toys each Christmas. Children have never been as stimulated as they are now, but, most of the time, we still don’t know anything about the kid’s ‘black box’ despite all those colorful objects we’ve invented for them. Is the child playing or not? Does he know that he’s playing? Is he playing because we join in with his game? Or because he wants to join in with ours?

  “So, to get back to Malone, this much seems clear to me. In his eyes, Gouti is neither an inanimate object nor a living being with its own feelings—those words don’t really have any meaning for him—he is not capable of distinguishing between the two. Malone is obviously not aware that his attachment to Gouti is linked only to the projection of his own emotions on this cuddly toy. But a child of three is aware of what is forbidden and what isn’t. The big difference between Gouti and an ordinary toy is not that he talks, listens, and tells stories—most other toys can do that sort of thing in Malone’s eyes: a television, a radio, a telephone—but that Malone’s maman told him never to reveal this toy’s secret, never to admit that his toy talks, listens, and tells stories. And a child, even a very young child, knows how to do that: to obey. There is no awareness of what is good or bad—that comes later, even if you have to explain it to them as soon as possible—but he knows what he is allowed to do and what he isn’t. It’s later that this all gets a bit more complicated, when you have to align good and bad with what is permitted or forbidden. But thankfully for Malone, he has not yet reached that stage.”

  A satisfied smile concluded this lecture.

  While he was speaking, the captain had almost forgotten the comings and goings of her colleagues outside the station. This man fascinated her, unless it was simply the fascination she felt for all information about early childhood. Perhaps she would have been equally spellbound by an old, bald, myopic psychologist if he’d been expounding these same theories.

  “OK,” said Marianne, forcing herself to focus on more pragmatic concerns. “I’m with you on Gouti and I take back the word ‘unreal.’ So, how long do you think this, um, secret relationship with Malone has been going on?”

  “Probably about ten months, which means that Malone has listened to each story more than thirty times, that they have become his reality, the only one he really knows.”

  “Along with his normal daily life,” Marianne
pointed out. “Along with his school and his family.” She looked at the MP3 player in the psychologist’s palm. “Have you had time to listen to it yet?”

  “Yes. It’s not very long. Seven stories, each one lasting a few minutes.”

  “So?”

  Two officers were entering the station. They saluted the captain while glancing, surprised, at the Guzzi parked on the sidewalk and at the man deep in conversation with their boss.

  “Nothing is certain yet. There are some clues, lines of enquiry . . . that’s all. The same obsessions keep recurring: the forest, the sea, the ship, the four towers of the castle. In a coded way, but also sometimes more precise. I’ve made some progress on the list of possible locations. It should only take me a few hours to visit the spots that could correspond to the place where Malone used to live, before.”

  He leaned down to the luggage carrier attached the motorbike. The captain thought he was about to unfold his annotated map in front of the police station.

  “Unless,” she added a little brusquely, “those memories are entirely fabricated. Unless little Malone has never lived by the sea or near a forest.”

  “No! There’s a meaning, a coherence to everything he says. I can sense it. It’s my job to discover what that is. Your job, on the other hand . . . ”

  He left his sentence unfinished and opened the luggage carrier with the aid of a miniature key.

  “I have another gift for you, Captain.”

  He took out a little child’s cup with a picture of Tinker Bell on it, rolled in a paper towel.

  “Malone drank from the cup this morning.”

  “So?”

  “It’s the only way of knowing if the Moulins really are his parents, isn’t it? A DNA test. Should be simple enough for you, right?”

  The captain sighed as she turned to look at the port. Kids wearing identical orange life jackets stood waiting to climb onto an Optimist. Their shouts mingled with the cries of seagulls.