Cornécourt was not much to look at. It was a peaceful little town with a church, a cemetery, a seventies-built mayor’s office, a business park that acted as a buffer zone to the next town, residential estates that were mushrooming around the perimeter, and—in the center—a square lined with the usual businesses: a bar, a baker’s, a butcher’s, and a real-estate agency, where two men in short-sleeved shirts were moving about.
The birth rate in Cornécourt was low, the population ageing, but the local government was well funded, thanks in particular to the abundant taxes paid by an enormous pulp mill with a Norwegian name that nobody here could pronounce. This prosperity had not prevented the far-right Front National from topping the polls in the first round of voting; nor did it prevent the town’s inhabitants from deploring a rise in incivility, always attributed to the same people. So it was that a damaged side mirror could give rise to prosecutable comments, and the graffiti sprayed nightly on the walls of the cultural center could provoke thoughts of vigilante justice. At the bar on the corner, Le Narval, violence was not rare, but it remained purely rhetorical. The customers there drank Orangina, glasses of Stella, and rosés on the terrace when the weather was fine. They also scratched off lottery tickets as they chatted about politics, horse racing, and immigrants. At five in the afternoon, the bar would be invaded by house painters in white-splattered clothes, anxious local business owners, Turkish bricklayers who had never seen a pay slip in their lives, and apprentices from the nearby employment training center, all eager to have a drink and wash away the cares of the day. Women were a rarer sight, and almost always accompanied by a man. In addition to these passing customers, a few majestic drunkards decorated the bar, along with some tropical plants. On the walls, photographs of Lino Ventura and Jacques Brel lent the place a sort of old-school, working-class glamour.
Cornécourt owed its name to the ponds north of the city, scattered across the land like a handful of change, producing a landscape of water lilies and bulrushes that extended over several kilometers. Under the low sky, their still waters looked like mercury, reflecting the passage of clouds, migratory birds, international flights. Fishermen haunted the ponds almost continually, diagonal rods signaling their presence from afar. In the spring, the place swarmed with kids on mountain bikes and families with picnic baskets. It was the ideal spot for teenagers to smoke their first cigarettes, make out in secret, drink booze around a campfire. Dog-walkers liked it too.
Fifteen thousand people lived in that average town, among the remnants of nature, a few failing farms, pointless traffic circles, a soccer stadium, a yellow-walled doctor’s office, and the canal that split the town in two. Three generations of the same family could live there only two streets apart. The nights were quiet, even if the local police wore bulletproof vests. The years all followed the same pattern, punctuated by the St. Nicholas parade in December and the fireworks for St. Jean in June. At Christmas, the strings of lights gave the streets an opulent, joyous air. In summer, repeated heat waves caused panic in the geriatric wards. Here, everyone knew one another by sight. The mayor was not affiliated with any political party.
And it was with the mayor that Christophe Marchal had an appointment that day. Every month, he would deliver the same supply of dog biscuits—at least three bags. He and the mayor had known each other forever, and the old man called him “tu,” as he did with all the kids who had been born and grown up in the area. Christophe, on the other hand, always called the mayor “vous.” And when he parked his car, he chose a space some distance from Monsieur Müller’s Range Rover, out of some kind of respect. The old man came out of his house just then, wearing rubber boots and a baseball cap advertising a home improvement store.
“Ah, there you are!” he said, lifting up the cap to scratch his head.
Christophe smiled. The two men shook hands while the mayor looked him up and down.
“Well, look at you! Are you off to a wedding?”
Christophe was wearing a white shirt and brand-new shoes, which did make him look like he was dressed up for something. Monsieur Müller, presuming that Christophe must have a date, told him he was right to make the most of life. Every word he spoke was wrapped in the heavy accent of local places—Les Hauts, Bussang, Le Tholy, La Bresse, cold spots, flower-bright meadows, vowels with circumflex accents—but no one should be fooled by such rustic appearances. During his five terms in office, he had crushed more than one ambitious man in J.M. Weston shoes. Christophe listened to him in silence, still smiling. Then he opened the trunk of his Peugeot 308 station wagon.
“I brought you a fourth bag this time.”
“Oh?”
“On the house.”
“Ah, that’s good of you. I’ll give you a hand. We need to take all this to the kennel.”
While Monsieur Müller went behind the house to fetch a wheelbarrow, Christophe looked around. Next to the main house was another building, almost identical but on a smaller scale, where the mayor’s friends—often hunters—could stay when they were in the area. Farther off, he could see the kennel with its rendered walls, and beyond that—two hundred meters away—the dark line of woods that marked the estate’s boundary. When Monsieur Müller returned, the two men tossed the bags into the wheelbarrow.
“So, how’s business these days?”
“Can’t complain.”
“And the hockey team?”
“Slowly recovering.”
“What a shitshow…I haven’t been for a while. What happened was disgusting.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame.”
“You’re not kidding…All the good ones have left. They’ll probably call you up again at this rate.”
“It’s not impossible,” said Christophe.
The mayor laughed and they set off, Christophe pushing the wheelbarrow while Monsieur Müller hopped along beside him.
For more than fifty years, the neighboring town had enjoyed some special moments with its ice hockey team. Through various ups and downs, the Épinal club had risen from the local divisions to elite level, forever in the limelight for its stunning victories, its brutal defeats, its hard-core supporters remaining loyal through thick and thin. During hockey season, the bleachers at the rink were full for every game. There, town councillors in overcoats mingled with families wearing strings of onions, and teenagers from affluent neighborhoods rubbed shoulders with toothless drunks who downed pints of Picon beer at the bar. Then there were the local businessmen in their private boxes, and the ultras, faces painted in the team’s colors, who would line up from three in the afternoon to make sure they got the best seats. In that town, the skating rink was a sort of crucible, bringing people together in a way they never were anywhere else, in the cold air and the harsh echo of blades on ice. Four thousand eyes followed the same black dot as it shot around at a hundred fifty kilometers per hour. For two hours, everyone was gathered around the oval rink, hoping for goals, speed, and violence. The same desire filled every chest.
“Have they really asked you to go back?” Monsieur Müller asked.
“They’re talking about it…”
“And you can still see yourself playing at your age?”
“Maybe…”
Two years before, the club had been relegated following financial problems—the result of an overambitious recruitment policy that had taken the team to the top of the table but left the club crippled by debt. After it went into receivership, all the Czechs, Slovaks, and Canadians hired at massive expense had disappeared. The reserve team was now trying desperately to stay afloat in the lower reaches of the second division. Why not me? Christophe thought. His years as a hockey player had been the best of his life.
“You might struggle,” said the mayor of Cornécourt. “Your game was based on speed…”
“There are ways of compensating. Experience is important too.”
“And physique.”
Monsieur Müller gave a cruelly mischievous wink. Christophe had put on quite a bit of weight recently. Life as a delivery driver was not much help when it came to staying in shape: always eating in restaurants, ass wedged in the driver’s seat of his car eight hours a day. The forty-year-old clutched the wheelbarrow handles in his big fists and managed another smile.
“You need a few burly guys on a team.”
This reminded the old man of a trip the two of them had taken long ago, with some other teenage hockey players and their parents, to a training camp in Canada.
“Remember the monsters?” Monsieur Müller asked.
Of course Christophe remembered. In Canada, every team had its own appointed brute who was there to protect the more technical, less physical players. Being a fighter wasn’t easy. For quite a few players from poorer areas, taking on this role of enforcer was the only way they could reach the highest level. He could still see that guy, born in deepest Ontario, who had grown up in a small town in the middle of nowhere: two thousand souls and three ice rinks. At the age of twenty-five, the guy had lost all his incisors and had a metal plate under his right cheekbone. Before every game, he would kneel down to pray in a corner of the locker room. But when the time came to fight, he did not hold back: he threw off his gloves and hit hard. In America, certain enforcers had become true legends. Intimidation was enshrined in the rules there, and a large part of the crowd turned up for precisely that—the electric shock, the impression that, at any moment, the game could genuinely become a matter of life and death.
“You were never a tough guy, though,” said Monsieur Müller. “You can’t suddenly start playing that role at forty…”
“Depends,” said Christophe.
He wasn’t smiling as he said this, but the old man gave a hearty, proprietorial laugh, the laugh of someone who for the past fifty years had always felt certain he was right.
A brief volley of barking greeted them when they reached the kennel. Monsieur Müller whistled and the dogs calmed down. The only sounds now were the scraping of their claws on cold concrete, the jingling of collars, the damp huffing of the animals’ breaths. There were about twenty hounds there, each in its own pen, with white tiled walls and high barred windows, the whole place very clean despite the heady smell. The two men went to the back, where the hermetically sealed bin for storing food was located. They divided the work without a word, Monsieur Müller opening each bag with a box cutter while Christophe poured the biscuits into the bin. When they’d finished, Christophe dusted off his clothes and took the invoices and a receipt from his pocket.
“I’ll just need a signature…”
Monsieur Müller read the papers diagonally, then, without looking up, asked Christophe to bend down. The younger man thought this was a prank at first, but the mayor was serious. So Christophe leaned forward from his hips, hands on his knees, and waited while Monsieur Müller signed the documents on his back. The mayor finished up with two dots that stung his spine. All the time this was happening, the closest dog sat staring at Christophe with its beautiful, glistening, vaguely melancholic eyes.
This unpleasant episode did not prevent Christophe uttering a few kind words. He could tell that these dogs were well cared for. That wasn’t always the case.
“I look after them. What do you expect me to say?” Despite this gruff outburst, Monsieur Müller was obviously flattered. He lifted his baseball cap to scratch his head again, then added: “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.”
The two men left the storage building and headed toward the woods. Soon Christophe spotted two tiny chalets surrounded by a wire fence.
“Is that new?”
“I gave myself a little treat,” the mayor explained, patting Christophe’s shoulder.
They continued across the meadow, under a slate-colored sky where the possibility of rain was ripening. The countryside spread out around them, with the gray ribbon of trees up ahead, and in the air the musky odor of the dogs mingled with the sharper smell of humus and fresh air. In the tall grass their footsteps made a pleasant, intimate swishing sound, almost as overpowering as a lullaby.
“You’ll see,” said Monsieur Müller, opening the fence.
In reality those little chalets were just spruced-up doghouses. Outside them Christophe saw bowls filled with water and with biscuits. The two men crouched in front of the entrance and, once his eyes had gotten used to the dark, Christophe made out two soft shapes inside: two beautiful puppies sleeping on plaid blankets.
“What are they?”
“Tibetan mastiffs.”
“No!”
“Move closer.”
Squatting on their heels, the two men began petting the two heavy creatures. Beneath the dogs’ unbelievably soft fur, the men could feel their hearts beating, fast and stubborn. They truly were magnificent animals.
“Where did you find them? You don’t often see them around here.”
“My Spanish network.”
“How much?”
“Two thousand each. Plus transportation costs. Their father was a real champion.”
Christophe whistled. This breed had become fashionable recently, and with a good pedigree it was possible to sell them for dizzying sums. One dog had even gone for more than a million euros somewhere in China. Christophe glanced at his watch.
“I can keep one for you if you want,” said Monsieur Müller, apparently serious.
Meanwhile one of the puppies had stood up and lazily paced around in a circle before collapsing onto the floor again and gazing at them languorously.
“That one’s Jumbo. He’ll be about seventy kilos when he’s fully grown.”
“He’s a real beauty,” Christophe admitted.
Nothing could touch him the way animals did. Apart from his kid, of course. Although, now that he thought about it, the kid had some of the same innocent mannerisms as an animal, a sort of sniffing, primal existence. Sometimes, watching his son as he lay on the couch, in front of the TV, his feet bare and his head lowered, he would think, that’s it. His little guy, his little boy. Then he would think about what came after, about the kid’s mother. All that hit him so hard that he had to leave the room.
“They’re not the easiest pets though,” Monsieur Müller said. “Incredibly pigheaded. If you want a guard dog, you can’t do better. And to think I’m going to sell him to some stuck-up bitch in an SUV…”
“I read somewhere about a Chinese guy who bought a mastiff like that. The dog wouldn’t stop putting on weight. It’d just guzzle food all day long. Astronomical quantities. And then one day, the mutt stands up on its hind legs. And that’s when they understood.”
The mayor turned to Christophe, frowning, awaiting the punch line. Up close, Christophe could see the network of tiny red and purple veins on his nose and cheeks. He was always tempted to look for his way home, there among the spreading arteries, to find a route beneath the leathery skin.
“They’d been given a bear.”
“You’re kidding!” the old man chuckled.
“I swear it’s true.”
The mayor’s face looked suddenly childlike. He said, “Ah!” and slapped his knee. “Those idiot Chinese!” They were priceless, those billions of yellow, small-dicked men who lived over there. Impressively efficient though. He imagined them, with their bear, and he basked in the glory of that image. In his mind, the anecdote had taken on the neat and amusing outline of a scene from the Tintin book The Blue Lotus.
On the Path that took them back to the house, Christophe looked at his watch again, then up at the gray, swirling sky. It was more humid now, and big drops of sweat had appeared on Monsieur Müller’s forehead as he pushed the empty wheelbarrow. Twice, Christophe offered to help him, but the mayor of Cornécourt shook his head. So they went on, the young man and the old, over that vast stretch of coarse grass: two black silhouettes on the horizon, under the oppressive immensity of the sky. Halfway there, Monsieur Müller stopped for a rest. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief. He looked good like that, sweating in the open air. His face was red, he was breathing hard, and there was a shrewd gleam in his eye despite the way the pupils were starting to fade. Christophe wondered how old the mayor was. It seemed to him that he had always been like this: elderly, bald, a badly dressed despot, rich but discreet, relentlessly cautious, part of that race of hustlers who produce flattened heirs and turbulent successions.
After catching his breath, Monsieur Müller asked him if he’d heard about the last town council meeting.
“Vaguely. My father mentioned it.”
“Marina doesn’t have long left.”
“Ah…”
During that meeting, the assistant head of leisure and communication had collapsed and been taken to the hospital. For some time before that, there had been whisperings in the corridors of the mayor’s office about her repeated fainting fits. On several occasions, people had seen her turn suddenly pale and begin to shake. During a cheerleading exhibition, she had even had to stop mid-speech, looking glassy-eyed, before taking her seat with the excuse that she’d had a dizzy spell. These symptoms led to various diagnoses, all of them made by amateurs and all of them absolutely categorical. And yet she had been only sixty-two, a fact that provoked metaphysical musings and rekindled ambitions among her colleagues.
“I thought you might be interested in that post,” said Monsieur Müller.
Christophe’s eyebrows rose in unison. “Me?”
“Well, yeah. You’ve lived here since you were a kid. Everybody knows you. And your name brings back good memories around here.”
The mayor’s heavy accent wrapped each word in a familiar thickness that was both reassuring and persuasive. Christophe nodded. It was true: he was famous in his own way. The 1993 final remained engraved in people’s minds.
“And your face would look good on an electoral poster,” the old man added, chuckling.
Christophe smiled despite his embarrassment. He hated this kind of situation. He was so used to agreeing with others. Saying no remained an ordeal for him.
“So?” Monsieur Müller said.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Just say yes. It’s not complicated.”
“I’ve never done that kind of thing before.”
“It’s not rocket science. As soon as someone comes up with an idea, you tell them it’s brilliant. You watch out for the socialists, and the rest is always the same: living together in harmony, democracy, promoting local business, lifeblood of the community, blah blah blah. And most important, always nod in agreement when someone complains.”
“I don’t think I’d have time,” said Christophe.
The old man turned away and seemed to sniff the wind that was blowing harder now, pressing their clothes against their skin.
“Do you really intend to start playing again? At your age?”
Christophe lowered his chin to his chest, abruptly pensive. Nobody understood what it was like. Every game made you want to play the next one, every goal gave you the desire for more. It was there, inside his body, pure muscle memory. People imagined sports careers with an exit at the end, medals on the wall, the feeling of a mission accomplished, but it was the exact opposite. Seven years after retiring, he would still sometimes dream about it at night: the sensation of sliding, the relief of hitting the puck, arms tensed, bodies jostling all around, the roar of the crowd. His shoulders, his arms, and his hands in particular were still full of those old habits. It almost hurt sometimes.
At last he raised his head and dared to look the old man in the eye.
“I’m sorry. I can’t give you an answer right now.”
Monsieur Müller shrugged and shook his head, as if in response to an amusing joke.
“Fine. We’ll talk about this another time, then.” And he took hold of the wheelbarrow again before adding: “But are you sure they actually want you to play?”
Thankfully, Christophe felt his cell phone buzz inside his pocket. It was his father.
“Sorry, I have to take this. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
The mayor continued alone toward the house, he and his wheelbarrow shrinking as the distant sky loomed closer to the earth.
“Hello?”
On the other end of the line, Christophe’s father began stammering vehemently. Something to do with the kid, how late it was, the teacher, and some other kids at the school. Christophe listened as best he could, covering his other ear with a hand and lowering his head to shelter from the wind. He said yes several times, then okay, and promised to call back in five minutes. His father finally relaxed then, and he was able to catch up with the mayor of Cornécourt, who was waiting for him, leaning against his Range Rover.
“How is your father?”
“He’s fine.”
“Tell him hello from me.”
“I will.”
They shook hands. The mayor told him the offer still stood. For now, at least. Christophe thanked him and promised to think about it. As he left, he saw in his rearview mirror that the old man was still standing there, watching him leave, worse than a judge.
The First Raindrops spattered against the asphalt just as Christophe came to a stop by the roadside. He pulled on the handbrake, then looked at the sky through the windshield. Then came the deluge, a wall of water that drowned out the entire landscape. Before he called his father, Christophe took a few drags on his vape.
“Hello, Dad?”
“Didn’t you try to call me back?”
“I am calling you back.”
“I had to go to the school to fetch the kid earlier today.”
“What happened?”
“Same thing as always. He’s being bullied.”
“What did they do to him?”
“I don’t know. He was crying in the car.”
“Did they hit him?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, he doesn’t want to go to school anymore.”
“Did you ask him what happened?”
“He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ll arrange a meeting with the teacher.”
“You’ve done that before. You know it does no good.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“He’s your kid. If you don’t do anything, I’ll take care of it.”
There was nothing visible beyond the car windows except for the relentless downpour of rain. Christophe felt his right eyelid twitch and with two fingers he touched the tiny scar just beneath his eye, the small part of him that had lost all feeling after a trauma.
“There’s one in particular,” his father explained. “A little shit in red sneakers. If he keeps doing this, I’ll take care of him. He won’t forget that in a hurry.”
“Let me speak to Gabriel please,” said Christophe.
A few seconds later, he heard that thin, little lisping voice.
“Hello?”
“Hey, sweetie. How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“How was school?”
“Okay.”
“Grandpa told me you’d been crying.”
“A bit.”
“Were they bothering you?”
The boy did not reply and Christophe found himself alone in the car with the muffled echo of the rain. He sucked hard at the end of the vape. He wanted to feel it burn.
“Will you be okay?”
“Yes,” said the small voice at the end of the line.
Christophe did not have time to say another word, because his father had already taken the receiver.
“Are you coming home late tonight?”
“Yeah, a little bit.”
“What time, roughly?”
“Around midnight, I think. I told you, remember? I’ve got a meeting with his mother.”
“What does she want this time?” his father grumbled.
“Nothing, we just need to go through a few details—vacations and so on.”
“All right. Well, I’m going to make doughnuts. With blueberry jam. That’ll make him feel better.”
“Okay…I’ll try not to be too late.”
“All right. Well, good night. Have fun.”
“Yeah, right…”
He should perhaps have gone home before driving to see Charlie. Since their separation, he had been living with his father, and with his son when he had custody. But when he thought of returning to the large, cold house with its peculiar smell of age and habits, of having to hear the muted sound of Business FM from the end of the hallway and to see the ice skates in the entrance hall, his courage failed him.
He set off again, vaping as he brooded over the same old thoughts. All his life, he had felt caught between two stools like this. As a kid, he’d been the mediator between his father and his mother. Then he’d found himself torn by the other big dilemmas: sports or academics, Charlie or Charlotte Brassard, and now this—the cold war between his father and his ex, particularly since she had announced her intention to move.
“I’ll never let her do that,” his father had warned him.
Christophe replayed the scene in his mind. The old man watching TV, a cable show about some home improvement guys who could renovate your house from top to bottom for peanuts. He hadn’t even bothered taking his eyes off the screen.
“I don’t understand how you can let her say stuff like that.”
It was something to see, the way they got along, the old man and the boy. In the evenings, when Gabriel tried to avoid his bedtime, he could always count on his grandfather’s support, and pretty often the two of them would end up falling asleep on the couch together, the kid with his cheeks bright red and the old man snoring loudly. Christophe worried what his father might do if the boy were ever taken away for good.
Christophe reached Marco’s place at six precisely. Marco lived at his parents’ house too—but alone, since his father had died and his mother was in a retirement home. The house was fairly isolated house despite being less than ten kilometers from the highway, midway between the center of town and the back of beyond. Real estate had not been expensive back then, and Marco’s parents had been able to build the cabin of their dreams for a modest sum. A thousand square meters of lawn, two floors, three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. In the evenings, when Marco was feeling optimistic, he would think about having a swimming pool installed.
Marco’s friends were always welcome at his place. The cupboards were full of aperitif snacks and in the cellar there was a keg to keep the beer cold. You might know what time you were arriving, but the hour of your departure was generally less certain.
“Oh,” said the master of the house when he opened the door, “what brings you here?”
Marco was a gentle giant: he might have weighed a hundred kilos at fifteen, but he had never thrown his weight around. Seeing his kind face and curly hair again, Christophe instantly felt better.
“I was in the area. Saw your car.”
“Just in time for aperitifs,” Marco observed.
“I can’t stay long.”
“Chill out, you just got here.”
“Are you on your own?”
“Yeah.”
Marco earned his living driving a taxi for hospital patients, so he spent his days inside a white Passat with a blue star on either door, racing around at top speed, with the car stereo tuned to Fun Radio. All year round, he transported people with kidney failure, leukemia, and diabetes who needed the high-tech medical services offered by the university hospital in Nancy. He knew every square kilometer of the department, the cheapest gas stations, the location of every speed radar. He was only one point away from losing his license. He had not had a single accident since 2007.
“What are you drinking?”
“Nothing…or whatever you’re having.”
The two men went through to the kitchen, where nothing had changed since Marco’s mother had been moved to a care center. On the dresser was a painting of two lumberjacks and a sled on a mountainside. There were piles of bills and Daxon catalogues on the table. A lamp with a fancy shade cast a light with Andalusian accents over the table.
“Hang on, let’s go outside. I’ve got something new out there. You’ll like this…”
“We’ll freeze.”
“Nah, it’ll be fine, come on.”
Marco grabbed two beers from the fridge and a pack of pistachios from the cupboard and the two men went out onto the terrace, which was sheltered by the upstairs balcony. Marco had set up two heated parasols there, along with some new garden furniture. He turned the heaters on and soon it felt like Brazil.
“Pretty hot, eh?” the giant said, his face lit up. “With these, you could have a barbecue at Christmas if you wanted.”
“You’re unbelievable,” said Christophe, laughing as he took a drag on his vape. “It must cost a fortune in electricity.”
Marco made a little sound with his mouth that was the equivalent of shrugged shoulders, and they sat down on the plastic chairs.
“Cheers.”
“Here’s to you, big man.”
The two friends took a long swig of beer and then sat there like that for a while, not saying anything, just enjoying the warmth and the peace. Then Marco stood up to turn on the yard spotlights, which revealed the bushy shapes of trees and, about ten meters away, a washing line suspended between two poles, with clothespins hanging from it.
“Watch this.”
Marco grabbed an air rifle that had been propped up in a corner of the terrace and held it against his shoulder. There was a small pneumatic popping sound and immediately one of the clothespins began spinning around the line.
“Whoa, cool!” said Christophe. He had already put his beer down and wanted to have a go.
“See?”
“You’re right—that is genius.”
Marco beamed. He broke the barrel, inserted a new pellet, and handed the rifle to Christophe, who took three attempts before he managed to hit a clothespin. It fell to the ground, where it lay on the lawn among other corpses. Apparently Marco had been having fun with this activity for quite some time.
“How did you get the idea?”
“I found my little brother’s rifle in the cellar. It’s just a great way to unwind when I get back from work.”
“It’s perfect.”
The two men continued to take turns shooting. They each drank another beer, occasionally exchanging a few words, and enjoying themselves like a pair of kids. They had known each other since seventh grade, and you could tell. When Seb Marcolini had arrived at the Collège Louise-Michel, Christophe was already on the junior team, and it was he who convinced the new boy to play hockey. The problem was, there were three children in the Marcolini family and only one wage-earner—the father, who worked as an odd-job man at the nursery school in the center of town. So Christophe’s parents had had to provide the cash to buy little Marco’s equipment. It was only cheap Artis gear, but it still forged a connection.
Later, the Marcolinis won a tidy sum in the lottery, almost seven hundred thousand euros, enough to make the front page of L’Est républicain and a lot of jealous neighbors. This jackpot had enabled them to build the house where Marco still lived and to reimburse the Marchals, among other things. Soon afterward, Marco’s father had gone off the rails a little, buying a Chevrolet and becoming a regular at local hostess bars, where he got into the habit of buying rounds for all his new friends. He had been fired by the nursery school and had ended up crashing his car into an embankment one New Year’s Eve. Marco’s mother, who narrowly escaped with her life, had been left with a permanent suspicion of lottery tickets and fast cars.
Anyway, since the junior team already had two Sebs (Seb Madani and Seb Coquard), the new kid was called Marco and the name stuck. As a hockey player, he was always pretty slow and ungainly, and despite his big frame he never managed to intimidate anyone. But he was one of those easygoing, sweet-natured guys who help with the atmosphere on the bus and at the postgame party. Twenty-five years later, he played the bass drum for the supporters’ club, the Cannibals. And then there was the third man, Greg, another former hockey player and schoolmate. The three of them never went a week without seeing each other.
“Oh shit,” said Christophe a little later, handing the rifle back to Marco. He had just noticed the time. “I have to get going. I’ve got a meeting with Charlie.”
“Oh shit.”
“Nah, it’s just bits and pieces this time.”
“Now I understand why you’re dressed up like that.”
Marco had never been very fond of Charlie either. In fact, he wasn’t very keen on any of his friends’ girlfriends. As for his own romantic life, it was a mystery. He had gone out with a woman once, a nurse from Meurthe-et-Moselle. But that relationship had quickly mutated into a friendship with benefits—the benefits in question being that Marco had mowed her lawn and lent her a van to transport an Ikea wardrobe. No one knew anything more than that.
When Christophe and Greg talked about Marco, they liked to imagine that he had a secret life. So they would often come out with lines like: “I’m going to phone that faggot Marco and we’ll meet up at my place” or “Have you heard from that big queer Marco lately?” But none of that really mattered. The three friends would go to one another’s houses regularly: brief visits, for no real reason, just long enough to have a drink and a chat about sports or work, family and memories, sometimes the news. Hardly ever about politics. On Friday evenings their aperitifs would often turn into a marathon drinking session. And then, very late at night, tongues loosened by booze, one of them might mention a woman’s name, an affair whose scars had never healed, a vague hope for the future. Even so, love remained taboo, hidden deep inside, inexpressible in words.
“Where are you meeting her?”
“Les Moulins Bleus, next to the bowling alley.”
“Seems a bit weird.”
“It was her idea.”
“Well, at least it’s cheap.”
“I guess so. I wouldn’t have minded spending a bit more and going somewhere nice though.”
Christophe was finding it hard to leave. He would have gladly taken another beer, for the road, as they say. But Marco turned off the spotlights and the heated parasols, and night fell once again upon the lawn.
“Well,” he said.
“Yeah.”
In the entrance hall, before saying goodbye, the two men stood for a moment in front of the glass display case containing the lead soldiers that had belonged to Marco’s father. After watching a TV ad for Éditions Atlas, Monsieur Marcolini had bought the first three soldiers, then been sucked into the endless spiral: grenadiers, cavalrymen, hussards, dragoons, the emperor himself…They were all there, standing tall, every detail present, with their little cannons, their badly drawn faces, their colorful feathers, at once ludicrous and impressive. The collection had made Christophe and Marco laugh hysterically when they were fifteen-year-olds, smoking weed in Marco’s bedroom.
“Oh, so did the coach ever call you?” Marco asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Shit.”
“I don’t know if I’d have time to go to practice anyway, to be honest. I’m already flat out as it is, with work and the kid.”
“Yeah, right,” Marco said mockingly.
Christophe grinned too. They both remembered vividly games played in distant places, parties at seedy hotels in Nantes or Chamonix, the fear that gripped you in the locker room before the puck drop, fifteen boys rigged out like riot cops, the muffled roar of the crowd. Come on, boys, let’s do this. Nothing could beat that feeling.
“All right, I’m off.”
“See ya.”
They kissed cheeks and Marco wished him a good night in his ex’s bed.
“Ha, no way…”
Before setting off, Christophe sat for a moment in his car, blowing vape smoke through the half-open window, savoring the quietness, the darkness, the air still humid from the storm. In the distance, a dot of light flashed from the top of the pulp mill’s tall chimney. The mill was the biggest source of employment in Cornécourt. Greg worked there, although less often these days since he had been elected to the works council. Norske Tre had tried to fire him on several occasions, on the basis that he spent his delegation hours at the local bar. Greg enjoyed telling his friends about the summonses, the letters with acknowledgment of receipt; it made him laugh. There was something mysterious about his optimism when you considered his lifestyle: single, debt up to his eyeballs, not even a driver’s license. At the last New Year’s celebration, he had turned up in a suit and cowboy boots, with three crates of Mumm. Given the state of his finances, that was practically suicidal. But Greg didn’t give a fuck. His father had died young, a diabetic with an addiction to Paris-Brest patisseries. Greg liked a drink himself and smoked two packs of Camels every day. No worries for the rest of your days…
At last Christophe decided to leave and he twisted the knob on the car radio, searching for a good song. Often, when he was driving through the familiar streets of this town where he had grown up, fallen in love, and was now growing old, he liked to let himself be swept away by one of those crappy old hits that were on constant rotation on the FM stations. The roads were empty, the streetlamps punctuated his route, and, little by little, he started feeling those big emotions brought on by hearing the lyrics of songs etched into his memory when he was a kid. He had despised Johnny Hallyday when he was younger, but that voice pierced his heart now. Old Johnny sang about cruel twists of fate, men in pieces, the city, loneliness. The passing of time. One hand on the wheel, his vape in the other, Christophe rewrote history, a man all alone with his memories. The bus shelter where he’d wasted half his childhood waiting for the school bus. His old school, the kebab stalls that had sprouted up everywhere, the skating rink where the best moments of his life had been spent, the bridges from where he used to spit in the Moselle to kill time. The bars, the McDonald’s, and then the emptiness of tennis courts, the local swimming pool with the lights off, the slow glide toward suburbia, countryside, nothingness.
That night, he stumbled upon the old Michel Sardou song “Les Lacs du Connemara” and once again saw his mother in her flower-patterned apron, shelling peas one Sunday morning while he drew a castle at the kitchen table, this song on the radio and springtime through the window. Then his cousin’s wedding, when he vomited behind the village hall, an ugly tie around his head, “color the land, the lakes, the rivers”…His father had picked him up at dawn and, at a stoplight, had said: “You look like you’re on a roller coaster, kid.” At twenty, he’d heard the same martial drumming—tatam tatatatatam—in a nightclub on the edge of Charmes, Marlboro smoke and Charlie in the misty glare of pink and blue lights, before going out to the biting cold of the parking lot and the dull drive home on the expressway. Ten years later at the café, seven in the morning and the singer’s voice quiet in the background while he drank a coffee at the bar, fatigue pooling under his eyes, wondering how he would ever find the courage to get through yet another day. Then, finally, at forty, one New Year’s Eve after dropping the boy at his mother’s house, the voice echoing around the lakes, “it’s for the living,” and him alone at the wheel, with no idea where he would eat dinner or with whom, and finally ending up there, his hair thinner and his shirt too tight around the waist, surprised by that wise old man who, out of the blue, picked him up in a company car, and this song rolling out its travel-agency heroism. Christophe thought about that girl he’d wanted so desperately, and whom he had left. About that kid who was everything to him and for whom he could never find the time. The feeling of waste, weariness, the impossibility of going back. He had to keep living, though, and hoping, despite the countdown and the first white hairs. Better days would come. That was the song’s promise.