JUNE 1996, GENEVIÈVE MAGNAN
The Parisian girls arrived in a minibus—suitcases, pigtails, braids, flowery dresses, sick bags, squeals of joy. Lots of chattering, lots of whining: six- to nine-year-olds. Some I knew, already seen them the year before. Only girls. Four will be arriving by car, later. Two kids from Calais, two from Nancy.
I’ve never liked girls; remind me of my sisters. Couldn’t stand ’em. Thankfully, I just had two boys, tough ones. They don’t whine, boys. They fight, but they don’t whine.
I’ve never been good at math. Or any other subjects, come to that. But I do know what the scale of probability is—my crap life taught me that only too well, just let me knock that into your thick head. The bigger the number, the bigger the chance of the thing happening. But in this case, the number was minuscule. A godforsaken place of three hundred souls, where I was a replacement for two years.
When I saw her getting out of the car, looking peaky, my first thought was of a resemblance, not of the scale of probability. I said to myself: Old girl, you’re nuts. You see evil everywhere.
I went off to the kitchen to make pancakes for the lot of them. I found them again in the refectory, sitting around jugs of water and bottles of grenadine syrup, and served them a pile of pancakes sprinkled with sugar, which they gobbled up.
When the boss called the register, and the little girl replied, “Present,” on hearing her surname, I nearly fainted. A name that goes with the dead.
One of the supervisors gave me a glass of cold water. She said, “Is it the heat making you feel queasy, Geneviève?” I replied, “That must be it.”
At that moment, I realized that the Devil existed. God I’d always known was an invention for suckers, but not the Devil. That day, I’d have almost taken my hat off to him, a hat I’ve never had. In my family, we almost never wore hats.
“Hats, they’re just for the bourgeoisie,” my mother would say, between wallops.
The kid looked like her father, two peas in a pod. I watched her eating her pancake, and thought back to that last time, that taste of blood in my mouth. It was three years since I’d seen him, and I thought about it all the time. Sometimes, at night, I’d wake up in a sweat, I’d dreamt of missing him, and that yearning to get my revenge, too, have his hide like he’d had mine.
After tea, the brats went out to stretch their legs. I cleared the tables, it was a lovely day, I opened the windows, I saw her playing, running with the others with squeals of joy. I thought to myself that I wouldn’t last the week. Seven days of seeing him through her, at morning, midday, and evening meals. I’d have to call in sick. But this work, I needed it. The upkeep of the château gave me a living all year. And I couldn’t clear off in full season. The boss had warned us: in July and August, no absences allowed unless you’re dying. A right bitch, that one, all holier-than-thou.
I thought of tripping the kid up so she broke a leg on the stairs and got sent back to her father pronto. No one the wiser, return to sender. With a note pinned to her dress, “With my worst memories.”
I prepared the grub. Tomato salad, breaded fish, rice pilaf, and creamy desserts. I laid the tables, twenty-nine settings, Fontanel gave me a hand.
“You don’t look quite yourself, old girl.”
I asked him to shut it. That made him laugh.
He leaned out of the window to ogle the two supervisors, while the brats were playing one, two, three, red light, green light.
One, two, three, red light, green light . . .