He began scaling the wall. It wasn’t easy! The ladder was hard to hold on to, and strange obstacles kept forcing him to lean way back and risk falling, and his sweating hands were too slippery to hold on to the rungs (shelves, actually), but finally, after much effort, he was at the top, out of breath, glistening with sweat, the arches of his feet aching, and proud of his accomplishment.
But wait! His troubles were far from over. From the top of the wall a thin branch stretched out over the void (a terrifying gulf) leading to the window of the Room of the Giants. The branch was curiously hung with leaves, vines, and sleeping bats, and it was difficult and dangerous to work his way along it. Charles was able to push some of the obstacles along the branch (some of them fell, and after a long while he heard them hit the ground with a faint thud), and then holding on with his hands and knees, his head dangling, he managed to advance slowly, jerkily, towards the Room of the Giants and the Famous Chocolate Cherry, which he couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into, because for the past several minutes his stomach had been growling like a washing machine.
Charles had now arrived at the middle of the rod suspended in the closet. The back of his knees were hurting slightly, but he smiled as he hung there in the darkness, the tips of his toes touching the ceiling; with his left hand he continued pushing the clothing that was blocking his advance, but it was becoming more and more difficult, and eventually he had to let them fall to the ground. But to do that he first had to raise the hangers off the rod, and that was extremely difficult. He wiggled and wriggled, arm outstretched, panting for breath, feeling as though his head were swelling up like a balloon, his cheeks were about to explode, and his blood would start pouring out through his eyes – when suddenly Crack!, the rod bent in the middle and became detached from the walls, and Charles tumbled ass-over-teakettle to the floor, landing on a pile of clothes that fortunately broke his fall, although he did manage to scrape his neck on a coat hook.
He lay without moving for a moment, flat on his back, thinking about the consequences of his accident. His father would be furious and would punish him again, this time even more severely because he’d interpret this mess as an act of revenge, a revolt.
He got up, picked up two sections of rod and tried to fit them together. No use. It was like trying to stick a tail back on a cat. It would have to be replaced with a new one. Whose stupid idea was it for him to act like a monkey in a closet?
Then a thought so horrible struck him that he let out an involuntary cry. He hurried over to the side of the closet, his hands feeling in the darkness, expecting the worst. But no, the jam jar was still standing up in the corner, and still contained the urine that made his nose wrinkle, all the more so because he knew it was his own.
Charles began carefully piling the clothes in the corner opposite the jar in order to give himself more room to move about. Not that he had any particular reason for moving here rather than there, lying down or standing up, stretching out his legs or keeping them bent. It was total boredom, the perfect punishment; his father must really hate him for thinking up something like this.
And so he was back where he started in his thinking. What fate awaited him? Luckily, his acrobatic antics had tired him out, and fatigue even more than hunger so dampened his spirit that he curled up again in Alice’s coat, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
A faint noise under the door woke him up. Opening his eyes, he saw two chocolate bars sliding through the line of light.
“Sylvie? Is that you?”
A dark shadow divided the line in half; the shadow wavered back and forth as though whoever was making it was trying to make up her mind.
“Not a word to your father, okay?” she said finally in a low voice. “And don’t leave the wrappers out where he’ll see them, either.”
He heard another faint noise. The floor creaked and she was gone.
Feverishly, Charles unwrapped one of the bars, ate it in two bites, unwrapped the second bar, ate that in two more bites, then lay back on the pile of clothes with a contented sigh. He didn’t feel quite so alone any more. Someone had thought of him. He was sorry for calling her a bloody bitch. She wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. She really was very kind underneath, in her own way. But she was probably afraid of his father. Just as he was. And anyway, how could she love him, seeing as she wasn’t his mother?
Charles thought about it for a while, his eye on the thin line of light as it began to fade, then realized that his mouth was dry and his throat stinging. All that chocolate had made him thirsty. Sylvie probably hadn’t thought of that, and anyway what could she have done about it if she had? She couldn’t slide a bottle of water under the door!
He worked his jaws and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, hoping to find a bit of saliva. His tongue had become thick and heavy. Again he was overcome by anger, and he took a violent swing at the door with his foot. The door resonated loudly but did not give.
“I want out of here!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, but his voice echoed hollowly in the empty, darkening apartment. His only reply was the sound of a fly buzzing around the room, aroused by the promise of an early spring.
Around five-thirty Wilfrid, who had come home from work earlier than usual feeling a bit uneasy in spite of himself, removed the screws from the closet door. Charles was sitting on the floor, stunned and blinking in the harsh light from the ceiling fixture.
“You can come out,” Wilfrid said without seeming to notice the piled clothes and the two pieces of rod leaning against the wall.
Charles stood up slowly, walked unsteadily to the centre of the room, and then stopped. He turned his back to his father.
“Are you hungry?” Wilfrid asked, his voice curiously solicitous.
Without turning around the child nodded, yes.
“Good! Then let’s eat. I brought you some Chinese food. You like that?” he asked.
There were two beige cardboard boxes on the kitchen table, tied up with string. Charles went straight to the sink and drank two large glasses of water, then, after looking at the boxes without apparent interest, let his gaze travel about the room as though seeing it for the first time; gradually his expression became more animated.
Wilfrid cut the strings, took the food out of the aluminum wrappers, and began setting the table.
“I stopped off at the Jade Garden on my way home from work,” he said cheerily. “You remember we went there last summer with Sylvie?”
Charles said nothing. He took his place at the table and waited for his father to serve the meal. After the two chocolate bars he had little appetite.
They ate in silence. The kitchen smelled of deep-fried sugar. Charles thought of Boff, wondering where he was and sorry he couldn’t share his food with him. Wilfrid ate noisily, smacking his lips, from time to time looking across the table at his son.
“You’re not hungry?” he said after a while.
“No.”
“Why not? Oh, I don’t suppose you got much exercise today, eh?”
He was trying to speak lightly, but Charles remained cold. The carpenter’s face tightened with annoyance.
“I know what you’re thinking, Charles, but you shouldn’t be angry with me. What I did I did for your sake. You needed to be taught a lesson that you would remember for a long time. It’s a serious thing to lie to your father and to laugh at him behind his back with the neighbours. Parents deserve their children’s respect, don’t you ever forget that.”
Charles hung his head and squirmed in his chair, saying nothing.
Wilfrid watched him for a few seconds.
“It’s too bad you’re not hungry,” he said in a syrupy voice. “I got it especially for you because I know how much you like this stuff.”
Charles stared at him, open-mouthed. His father had never spoken to him in such gentle tones before. Wilfrid smiled, then stuck his finger in his mouth to pry at a piece of meat with his fingernail.
“Stop staring at me like that, for Christ’s
sake,” he suddenly shouted. “You look like you want to skin me alive!”
That night Charles went to see Boff at the Fafards’. He fed him, gave his house a good cleaning out, put in a new square of soft carpet, checked that the light bulb under the floor was working, talking to him all the while, teasing him and covering him with hugs and kisses. Everything he’d gone through for Boff’s sake only seemed to increase the love that the child now felt for his dog.
“My little Boffie,” he said, embracing him, “I love you more than if you were my brother!”
“I’d trade him for my sister anyday,” laughed Henri.
Several weeks went by before Charles could bring himself to tell Henri about the punishment his father had inflicted on him, and which he’d been warned not to tell anyone about. His friend heard him out, his mouth hanging open in amazement, arms dangling, as though Charles had suddenly turned into a giant bird or a fire hydrant.
“The whole day?” he said when Charles had finished. “You spent the whole day locked up in a closet?”
“Yes,” Charles said with a kind of stoic pride. “And I wasn’t scared a bit.”
Henri shrugged his shoulders and gave a skeptical laugh.
“Don’t tell me you weren’t scared, Thibodeau. I bet you cried. Didn’t you? A whole day locked in a closet? It’s like waking up in a closed coffin, or under a pile of rubble after an earthquake! Holy Moley! I’d’ve lost it for sure. And I bet you lost it, too.”
“Nope. I made up games. I didn’t even notice the time passing. The first thing I knew it was six o’clock at night and my father was opening the door. Maybe I was a bit thirsty.”
Henri laughed, half-closing his eyes like a lawyer who didn’t believe a word the witness was saying. Then he became serious.
“Why did he do that? Because of Boff?”
Charles nodded. Henri looked him in the eye.
“He’s crazy, your father is,” he murmured, looking very serious. “If I were you I’d go straight to the police! No question about it!”
Charles said he’d think about it, but made Henri promise in the meantime that he would keep the story to himself.
“Of course,” said Henri, almost offended. “What do you take me for, a blabbermouth?”
But keeping such an important thing secret took an extraordinary amount of willpower. Henri had enough to last him about three hours, forty-two minutes, and eighteen seconds, which took him up to suppertime. At the table he broke down and gave a vivid description of the ordeal forced on Charles by his father. Fernand and Lucie listened to him, petrified.
“The whole day locked in a closet!” cried Céline in her thin, clear, little-girl’s voice. “I’d be dead! Poor Charles! I’ll bet he nearly died!”
Fernand slowly ran his fingers through his non-existent hair. Red splotches appeared on his face, evidence of the extreme agitation taking place just beneath the surface.
“I’m going to speak to Wilfrid about this right now,” he said in the voice he used for important occasions.
“That’s a good idea, dear,” Lucie nodded. “Oh, Fernand, before I forget,” she went on in a voice so light and carefree that Henri stared at her in astonishment, “can you come into the bedroom for a minute and help me hang up those curtains? I can’t do it myself. You know how dizzy I get standing on a ladder.”
Fernand gave her a quick look, got to his feet, and left the kitchen in two strides. Céline shrugged her shoulders, surprised by all the sudden leave-taking in mid-meal.
Henri leaned towards her. “It’s because they don’t want us to hear their conversation,” he explained. “They’re going to talk about Charles.”
“If I were you,” Lucie said, closing the door behind her, “I’d think twice before going over there to talk to Wilfrid. He might take it out on his son. This is a matter for the police, Fernand.”
“I’m going to speak to him in any case. By the time I’m finished with him he won’t dare take it out on anyone, believe me.”
“Fernand, this is way out of our league. If I were you …”
“What kind of Christian,” Fernand thundered, to the great satisfaction of the two children sitting immobile in the kitchen with their ears trained towards the bedroom, “would treat a nine-year-old boy like that, tell me? No, no, and no. I’m going to have a talk with him! There’s only one way to deal with a bully like that – make him afraid!”
“He won’t be afraid of you.”
“We’ll just see about that!”
He rolled his terrible eyes, turned around in the room, and repeated in an even louder voice:
“We’ll just see about that!”
“Papa is very angry,” said Henri, smiling at Céline. “I think he’s going to go over there and clean Monsieur Thibodeau’s clock for him!”
“But then they’ll put him back in jail,” said Céline, horrified.
“Let’s say he is afraid of you,” said Lucie, motioning to her husband to keep his voice down. “After three or four beers his fear will disappear, and who knows what he’ll do after that?”
Fernand was stopped for a moment by the logic of this argument, but the righter-of-wrongs in him demanded immediate punishment for such insupportable behaviour; a raging bull wouldn’t stop him from achieving his end.
“Don’t worry, Lucie,” he promised. “I’ll take time to think before going to see him. I’ll make sure I know what I’m going to say. But put yourself in my place, for crying out loud! – I can’t just stand around with my arms folded with things like that going on.”
“You are not the police, Fernand. It’s not up to you.”
“Hey!” called Henri from the kitchen, “we’re starving to death out here! Can’t you talk about this after supper?”
“Oh well, do what you think best,” sighed Lucie, leaving the bedroom. “If you ask me, there’s a much better way to deal with this problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We can talk about it later.”
Shrugging her shoulders, she went back to the kitchen. Fernand headed down the hallway towards the front door, but the delicious smell of lasagna-au-gratin suddenly reminded him that a stomach deprived of food could transmit its emptiness to the brain, and so it wasn’t until after he’d had two huge helpings followed by a slice of blueberry pie and a cup of syrupy tea that he put on his overcoat and left the house.
12
Fortune smiles on the brave. When Fernand crossed the street, Wilfrid was working on his front staircase, prying off a rotten board with a crowbar. Fernand kept his eye on the carpenter’s back, walking quickly and breathing deeply, trying to keep calm. But the sight of his neighbour’s long, thin hands and angry, drawn face, reddened by the cold but looking flushed with anger as he applied his weight to the tool with sharp movements that made the board shriek in protest, made him forget his resolution and feel the bile well up in him.
“Wilfrid!” he called out. “I need to speak to you!”
Wilfrid hadn’t heard Fernand coming up behind him and nearly jumped out of his skin. The crowbar fell from his hands and clattered down the stairs.
“What do you want?” he said nastily, eyeing Fernand up and down.
“You know darn well what I want,” growled the hardware-store owner, standing at the foot of the stairs and motioning for the carpenter to come down.
Thibodeau curled the corners of his lips in a show of bravado and turned his back, then, fearing his refusal to come down would be taken as a sign of cowardice, he descended, but slowly, only a few steps, until only a metre separated him from his interlocutor.
“It’s not right, Wilfrid, what you did to your son the other day.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me! I know everything. You don’t lock a small kid in a closet for a whole day, without light or food or anyone to keep an eye on him. It’s a lousy thing to do! What if he hurt himself? Did you stop to think what such a thing might do to him psycho
logically?” he added, tapping his temple with his forefinger.
“What business is it of yours? What are you, his father now?”
“No, of course not, but speaking as a simple citizen …”
He stopped, not knowing how to finish the sentence. His embarrassment brought a mocking smile to the carpenter’s lips, rendered vaguely sinister by his thin mouth and yellow teeth. Emboldened, Wilfrid came down another step.
“I have the right to raise my kid any way I see fit, you got that, Big Mouth? I don’t go sticking my nose in your business, so don’t come around here sticking yours in mine. Understand? Do I need to draw you a picture?”
Fernand looked at Wilfrid for a minute, staring at him strangely, then his heavy cheeks began to twitch. His hand suddenly shot out and grabbed Thibodeau by the shoulder, making him grimace in pain.
“You listen to me, fella,” Fernand said. “If I ever hear that you’ve mistreated that boy again, I’ll rip off your arm and shove it down your throat, you miserable little excuse for a human being!”
And he shook Wilfrid so hard the carpenter had to grab the handrail to prevent himself from falling backwards.
“Ow! Let go of me, you fucking idiot!”
Enraged beyond control, Fernand continued shaking Wilfrid, seemingly unable to stop himself. His eyes narrowed, his mouth tightened, his nostrils flared; his whole face seemed to be closing down, a terrifying sight. It certainly frightened Wilfrid, who went on whining in protest. Suddenly, he delivered a violent kick to his assailant’s stomach, succeeded in freeing himself, and dashed up the stairs as though all the demons from hell were at his heels. At the top, he turned and looked down at Fernand, who was bent over, holding his stomach with both hands and trying to catch his breath.
“You try that on me one more time,” shouted the carpenter, rubbing his shoulder painfully, “and you’ll be back in prison before you can count to ten, you jailbird!”
Charles the Bold Page 15