Christophe Looked at his father and wondered how he was going to break the news to him.
The two men were still sitting at the table, lolling in the warm lethargy of habit and digestion. Christophe had put on a real spread that night. On his way back from work he’d bought two slices of beef tenderloin from the meat section at Leclerc and chosen a bottle of Saint-Joseph at the wine store. When his father had seen him unpacking his provisions on the table, he’d asked what they were celebrating.
“You’ll see,” his son replied.
And he had taken the new jersey out of his bag, with the number 20 printed on the back, just like the old days, except the shirt was green and white now, and there was a stylized wolf’s head on the front. His father’s eyes, normally pale as a lake, lit up.
“Why a wolf?” he asked.
“You know, it’s the name of the team. The Beast of the Vosges, I imagine.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Gabriel, who was looking through the shopping bags, gave a cry of joy when he saw the Apéricubes and a box of ice pops, which sent their cat, Minousse, running for its life. The poor animal knew from experience that it was best to watch out when the child was happy.
Gérard Marchal did not say much after that, but he helped set the table and draped his fleece jacket on the back of the chair, his way of getting the party started. Then he served aperitifs—Coke for the kid, beers for the men—while Christophe busied himself in the kitchen. The boy asked for some paper and crayons so he could draw the skating rink and his dad winning games. At one point, they made a toast.
“To us?”
“To your season.”
And they drank, three generations under the same roof, no wife or mother, just men illuminated by the stark fluorescent light, in the warmth from the oven and the squeaking of chairs on the tiled floor.
Then the kid got started on the Apéricubes, stuffing the little squares of flavored, processed cheese into his mouth at such a rate that his grandfather finally told him to calm down before he ruined his appetite. When he didn’t obey, the old man brought down his big hand with its bruised skin and latched hold of Gabriel’s small, round hand, and the child stood there for a second without moving, arm extended, mischief sparkling behind his glasses, as his grandfather gazed at him lovingly. Christophe watched them. Behind him, butter sizzled in the frying pan and spread its delicious smell through the kitchen. The old table, the deep white sink, the cupboards, the hum of the refrigerator. That unchanging decor. And yet all things must pass. Charlie was going to move. Their life here was over.
That evening, though, they ate heartily, and not only because of the bottle of Saint-Joseph. The grandfather even did a few of his magic tricks and, while Gabriel no longer believed that his nose had vanished, the part where the coin appeared from behind his ear left him dumbstruck once again.
After the kid had gone to bed, the two men lingered at the table a little longer. It was barely nine o’clock and Christophe was listening to the dishwasher behind him. He was waiting for the right moment. As for his father, he was in a wonderful mood, a little tipsy, and he was recalling the good old days as he scratched the head of the cat that had jumped onto his lap. The strangest thing with that condition was seeing how the brain would regurgitate memories as its cells slowly died.
Gérard Marchal had lived a fairly average boomer life, which became a sort of epic in the retelling. School until he got his certificate, an apprenticeship with Cugnot as an electrician, moving around France during the Trente Glorieuses, that period of economic growth between 1945 and 1975, going from one construction site to another: Grenoble, Tulle, La-Roche-sur-Yon, Guéret. The country was busy constructing hospitals and new office buildings back then, creating a swarm of happy, insignificant young people in their wake—plasterers, bricklayers, electricians, heating engineers, tilers, elevator technicians, painters, roofers. Those carefree men were put up in hotels and they treated work like a summer camp. The pay was good, they got raises almost every month, and when they got sick of their boss they just handed in their notice, knowing full well that another job would fall into their lap the next day. In the evenings they would eat at a restaurant and after nightfall they’d play belote for money in rustic-looking hotel dining rooms, with plaid tablecloths and clocks on the wall, drinking small glasses of the local eau-de-vie. Around one in the morning, the owner would say, All right, that’s enough, and the men would grumble half-heartedly in their thick, male voices before scraping their chairs back and going upstairs to their rooms, laughing loudly. Lying in bed, they would listen to the sports results on a little Braun transistor radio, smoking a Gitane and reading a few pages of a short thriller, the back cover vaunting the manly merits of Balafre aftershave or Bastos cigarettes. Then they would sleep the sleep of the just, a whole happy generation of proles who had finally gotten lucky and who thought that this moment was just how things were now, that there would be work and progress in perpetuity.
Gérard remembered in particular the month of May 1968, which he spent in Corsica, where he was installing electricity for the new hospital in Furiani. While mainland France was caught in an uproar of strikes and riots, workers were able to forget for a short time their blackened hands and imagine new political tomorrows, while everywhere you looked the rich and the powerful were in a panic, taking refuge in Switzerland or the countryside or in reading Chateaubriand. Amid this bedlam, Corsica had grown even more insular and, in the absence of materials or instructions, the construction work at Furiani had abruptly ceased. And so Gérard and his colleagues had found themselves, like a gang of Robinson Crusoes, living by the sea with nothing to do.
Of course, they had been worried, stuck on that island where they didn’t know anyone and they were no longer receiving their pay. But the owner of the Beau Rivage hotel—a calm, potbellied man—had allowed them to continue to stay and eat their meals there, and had even given them each a bit of pocket money to keep them entertained. This little interlude did not last long, but it remained in Gérard’s memory like an oasis of pure happiness, at the intersection of youth and springtime, with its endless days spent at the beach, the tipsy haze of anisettes, evenings on the terrace, and the dark-haired girls there who were, curiously, more liberated than the mainland girls—or so, at least, he would recount fifty years later, smiling wanly under his gray mustache. He still kept in his wallet the photograph of a long-haired girl from Bastia. He’d forgotten her name, but not the hours they had spent together in those coves. By the end, this would perhaps be all that remained to him: the image of a beauty spot below a woman’s navel.
Later, having grown tired of this semi-nomadic existence, Gérard had found work at Rexel, where he’d been promoted, and then he’d married Sylvie Valentin before opening his own sporting goods store. A grocery store for rackets, as he put it. Gradually, as their situation had improved, his mood had soured. Therein lay the tragedy of shopkeepers, that gnawing anxiety, the daily headache of supplies and logistics, stocks and deliveries, the customers—always too few or too irritating—and those two wily, idle employees of his who were always asking for more. The last remnants of his good mood had been utterly destroyed in the mid-1990s by an especially severe tax audit. He and Sylvie still had a beautiful house, two cars, three televisions, a full fridge, and two kids who were a source of pride despite the misdeeds of the elder. But it wasn’t enough. Time had passed and that bilious torment had become a sort of background noise, an endless headache.
It was also true that Sylvie never really had much appetite for life. Once she gave up work after Christophe’s birth, something inside her had died. When the boys were older, Gérard had advised her to find a job, to volunteer for a charity, or take up cycling. But his recommendations had inspired in that underappreciated woman nothing more than a warily raised eyebrow.
“Or I could just jump in the Moselle,” she said carelessly, taking a drag on her Winston.
As a child, she had been a very good student, as attested by the school report cards she kept in the attic. Not to mention her famous IQ test, which she’d taken at sixteen and which she invariably brought up as indisputable proof that her life had been wasted, her brilliant mind left to stagnate. She could have gone to university if anyone had encouraged her a little, but in her family nobody saw the point in higher education. Her parents believed in pay slips, multiple pregnancies. Her mother had never bothered signing her report cards.
“You could go to university now,” Gérard suggested, without truly believing it.
Sylvie rolled her eyes. Why bother? She was hardly going to become a lecturer or an engineer at her age, was she? She’d rather go out to smoke another cigarette and stare at the little pond, the fruit trees in the garden. So this was their daily life: this battlefield bereft of any real fighting, just a few unchanging skirmishes and sulks. Julien, Christophe’s elder brother, had taken his mother’s side early on. He was just like her, in fact: oversensitive, moody, incapable of expending any effort to make things easier, self-assured and yet full of hang-ups, with that razor-sharp wit that could cut you to the bone. Christophe, on the other hand, was more like his father, even physically. Anyway, the four of them had taken up their positions and their roles, hostile and loving, antagonistic and prisonlike, as families tend to be. Thankfully, ice hockey had allowed them to agree to a sort of truce. There, at least, they were all on the same side.
For a few years, Gérard had been a team sponsor, giving him access to a private box and free tickets. He’d been able to invite suppliers, customers, and friends, and they’d had a great time there. Even Sylvie was unrecognizable during the games. When a player on the opposition team sent Christophe flying into the barrier, you could hear her from the other side of the rink. The supporters, who had made her their mascot, would sometimes chant a caustic, invigorating “Allez, Maman!” And then, at the end of the first period, the mayor would make the rounds of the sponsors. He would shake hands with them and exchange a few polite words. Gérard appreciated that kind of gesture.
“You remember?” his father said.
Christophe remembered. His father always repeated the same old stories, so there wasn’t much likelihood of him forgetting.
“The kid’ll be happy to see you play.”
“I think so.”
“We’ll go to the games together.”
“I don’t know how much playing time I’ll get. I’m mostly just there to fill a hole.”
“We’ll see.”
Christophe smiled, but he knew where he stood. Madani, the coach, had been clear on that point when the two men had met three days earlier.
“I’m not going to lie to you. You’re too old. You’ve already missed the preseason and five games. You’ll have to get in shape. We’re playing Vaujany next week. Do you have any idea what they’re like?”
Vaujany was the team used by Grenoble to mold its future players—snot-nosed kids with too much energy, desperate to impress. They lacked maturity, but toward the end of the game it became impossible to keep up with them.
“I’ve only got one Slovak left. And with Pavel in goal, the average age is thirty-one,” Madani went on. “Most of the players have work on Monday. It’s a shitshow.”
Madani and Christophe had played on the same team for almost ten years, but they had never liked each other. This, though, was nothing personal. The coach was right.
Of course, the club president had presented things in a very different light: that was his job.
“I got in touch with the communications director at Norske Tre, he’s a friend of mine. The Norwegians have more money than they know what to do with. Unfortunately they’re not too eager to sponsor us after all our troubles in the past few years. But I talked to my friend—the two of us went to the same business school, and his son plays tennis with my eldest. I think we can figure something out.”
President Mangin was one of those pink-skinned, nicely groomed entrepreneurs who wear Ted Lapidus jackets and are always about to rush off somewhere. He owned a restaurant, two bars, and the bowling alley in town, and he also ran the shopkeepers’ and artisans’ union in Épinal. He had contacts at the chamber of commerce and the mayor’s office, and people said he was left-wing because his sister had run for office on a socialist ticket. Wherever he went, this affable, energetic man left behind him the same trail of jovial bonhomie and the lingering scent of aftershave. However, nobody would go so far as to consider him an honest man.
“We’re going to sell them a comeback story. If you put your skates back on, it’ll really capture people’s imagination. The journalists will be happy. The return of the prodigal son. You’ll wear the colors of the pulp mill. That way, everyone can forget about the compulsory liquidation and all that crap. The legend returns. You see what I mean, Christophe?”
Christophe saw exactly what he meant, this total stranger who was already talking to him like they were best friends.
The next day, the two men visited Norske Tre, where they were given a warm welcome—cookies and fruit juice—followed by a tour of the property. The Norwegian company had kept a factory there for more than three decades, and yet there was still a residue of hostility toward its semi-Viking presence, despite the fact that the factory employed more than three hundred people and kept Cornécourt prosperous. The smell of rotten eggs that it emitted on certain nights, to the disgust of people in the nearby residential areas, probably had something to do with this negative attitude, which gave rise to rumors and petitions. According to Greg, the emanations in question were completely safe, and the whole controversy was just a conspiracy theory. Anyway, he couldn’t smell anything, and he lit a cigarette to underline his skepticism.
“We’re very happy to have you here,” said Monsieur Gailly, the communications director, the kind of handsome gray and blue man that you can find in image banks.
He pointed to a photograph hanging on his wall that showed the whole expanse of the site: seventy hectares, a billion euros’ worth of buildings and equipment, close to three hundred million euros in annual revenue. Monsieur Gailly spent most of the visit bouncing up and down on his heels.
“We want to change the company’s image. People are already well aware of our economic impact, but they continue to regard us as foreigners.”
The club president had nodded obligingly. He understood: mentalities, habits, a certain narrow-mindedness. But they could fix that. The locals wouldn’t mind the smell so much after they’d won a few games.
As they left the factory, Christophe saw Greg in the parking lot, leaning against a workshop wall, smoking a cigarette. He was easily recognizable with his long legs, his cowboy boots, his prominent belly. The two friends waved to each other. It was good to see him, even from a distance.
Two days later he touched his new jersey, with the number 20 on the back. But no sooner had fate lifted him to his feet than it kicked him in the balls again. At the restaurant, Charlie had made the announcement abruptly, in a voice that mixed sympathy with absolute determination: she would be moving in January.
“This can’t have come as a surprise. I told you before that I wanted to leave.”
This was true, but Christophe had never believed her. He’d thought it was just another passing fancy, a girlish whim; they were fine where they were.
“I found a job as artistic director. In Troyes.”
“Troyes? Are you serious?”
Troyes was more than two hundred kilometers away.
“Yeah, in a small agency. GrazzieMille Communication. They’ve got some big clients. The champagne fair in Troyes, some institutional clients, the BNP bank. I’ll be earning almost six hundred euros a month more. It’s a huge opportunity.”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“It’s not a problem for him.”
Of course not. Speech therapists could find work anywhere; she had told Christophe that often enough.
There, at the restaurant, eating his steak with pepper sauce, Christophe had tried to digest this news.
“And the kid? Have you told him?”
“Not yet,” Charlie replied, her face suddenly closed. “And I don’t want you to tell him. I’ll do it in my own way.”
They exchanged a few tense words during the remainder of the meal, but Charlie was immovable. She reminded Christophe of his own past misdemeanors: his absences, his friends, his whores. When his plate was empty, he stood up to go to the bathroom. What could he say? Words never conveyed what he wanted them to, he wasn’t going to cry in public, and a slap in the face was out of the question now. He had no way of processing the hurt. He thought about his father.
In the End, Christophe couldn’t find the courage to tell him.
He cleared the table, then went upstairs to check that his son was asleep. By the time he went back down, his father had moved to the living room and was already snoring in front of the television, the cat in his lap. He had taken his teeth out and he looked so frail and elderly then, so deeply sunken in old age, that he almost resembled a small child. His mustache was all that remained of the man he had once been. Christophe tucked the blanket over his shoulders, then considered him for a moment. Sometimes he wondered if his father wouldn’t be better off dead. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t very late, and Marco had sent him a dozen texts telling him he had to come visit. He and Greg had something to show him: Christophe should get his ass in gear and drive over there pronto. Christophe weighed the pros and cons. But did it really matter if he had one drink more or less? Besides, it was Friday. He gave the cat one last stroke before leaving, taking his new jersey with him.
When he Reached his friend’s house, Christophe was not surprised to find all the windows lit up. Those two freaks must already be completely smashed, a supposition confirmed by the bass line booming from the terrace. Before ringing the bell, he hid the jersey up his sleeve, then breathed in the evening air. It was a little chilly, but not too bad, and everything around was quiet. He could barely even make out the rumble of the highway in the distance. He glanced at his watch and promised himself he would not stay late. In two days he was going to start team practice again, and tomorrow he would go running, to try to lose some weight.
“Ah! The handsome prince is here,” said Greg, opening the door.
Christophe laughed. His friend was dressed in a camouflage jacket and had a thick black line of soot on each cheek. He looked like an American football player or a hunter. Above all he looked like a guy who’d had way too much to drink.
“What the hell are you up to?” Christophe asked.
“We’re growing in power,” explained Greg, deadpan.
In the kitchen the table was littered with empty beer bottles and torn-up junk-food packaging. The fridge door hung open. Greg grabbed some more beers and beckoned Christophe to follow him. As they moved through the house, the music grew louder and heavier. Christophe thought he recognized a Rolling Stones song. Before going onto the terrace, Greg whispered: “It’s crazy, just wait and see…”
With that, he laughed between his teeth: tsss tsss tsss.
On the terrace, Marco was pointing what looked like a PVC pipe in the direction of the yard. He had the same soot stains on his face, and he was dressed in a Sepultura tank top under a khaki shirt. Meanwhile the gas parasols were blasting out heat and the speakers, balanced precariously on a windowsill, looked like they might fall and explode at any moment.
“What is that thing?” Christophe asked, gesturing at Marco’s weapon.
“Just wait,” said Greg. “You’ll see.”
He took it from Marco, wedged it against his hip, holding the handle and aiming straight ahead, then pressed the little red button. There was a huge BOOM and the tube spat its invisible projectile into the darkness with unexpected ferocity.
“What the hell is it?” Christophe asked again, moving closer to get a better look.
“A potato launcher!” boasted Marco.
“Oh my God, you two are like Dumb and Dumber…”
Feigning dismay, he grabbed the homemade weapon so he could try it himself. All dark thoughts were pushed out of his head.
“The only problem,” Greg explained, “is that you have to recharge the gas after each shot.”
“Did you make it yourself?”
“Yeah, there’s tutorials on YouTube.”
“You are seriously nuts.”
Christophe quickly gathered that his friends had had the idea during the week, after a particularly alcoholic air-gun session. For the past two hours they had been guzzling beers and shooting spuds like crazy, which explained both their euphoric mood and their military getup. They fired another kilo of potatoes into the Vosges night, unconcerned by the amount of energy being consumed by the heated parasols, as excited and brutish as children. At last there was a lull. Marco turned down the music and Christophe took advantage of the quiet to show them his new jersey.
“Fuck me!”
Marco whistled. “That’s beautiful, dude. Let me see.”
The jersey was passed from hand to hand. They praised the color, the material, the design. Greg even howled at the moon, like the wolf emblazoned on the front. Christophe, who couldn’t help feeling thrilled by this reaction, accepted a second can of beer. Then, things being what they were, he drank another three. Just after midnight, they collapsed onto the lawn chairs and, elbows resting on the plastic table, began to chat. Their heads were heavy, their shame had mostly evaporated, and Greg was in deep shit.
He’d been going out with this girl for a while now. He’d met her at his mother’s place; the girl worked for a charity offering personal assistance and she would deliver meals there every day. She was younger than Greg, a fake blonde who did her job with an indefatigable spirit, and she had immediately caught his eye. Before daring to make a move, Greg had talked to his two friends about her for a long time, in a bawdy, falsely indifferent way, and both Marco and Christophe had done their best to encourage him. For weeks, Greg had turned up at his mother’s house whenever he could, at the time when her meal was delivered, about ten in the morning. He had even asked to go on night shifts at the factory just so he could have his mornings free. His relations with Jennifer Pizzato—that was her name—had initially been limited to quick hellos, polite evasions. The young woman put the vacuum-sealed dishes in the fridge and talked to Greg’s mother using the third person—had she slept well? was she eating well?—in a loud, clear voice, which irritated the old lady, who was not deaf, thank you. After that, Jennifer hurried out on her white Reeboks, her formidable behind swaying as she made her way to the next address. From the balcony, Greg would watch her get in her van, which she would then drive through town, to feed other helpless old people.
Of course she had eventually realized what Greg was up to, unless his mother had slipped her a note. Anyway, she started speaking a little more quietly and applying her makeup with a little more care. Greg bought some coffee and, while his mother watched game shows on Channel 2, they stirred it with their spoons in sandstone mazagrans, sitting face-to-face in the tiny sixth-floor kitchen. Light fell from a very high window that overlooked a cornice where some pigeons came to shit and fuck. In spring, three eggs had appeared in a nest. The day the baby birds hatched, Greg finally took the plunge.
Until then, his love life had not amounted to much. From time to time he would go dancing at Le Pacha, or turn up to one of those tea dances at Le Panache so he could bring home a fiftysomething who wasn’t too fussy, but that was about all. With Jennifer, on the other hand, he had access for the first time—despite being over forty—to a proper romance, with trips to the movie theater, breakfast in bed, introductions to the in-laws, and all that shit. He had even tried yelling at Bilal, the kid Jenn had had from a previous relationship, a bit like that guy on TV who went to strangers’ houses and told them what to do. But at thirteen, the kid was already five-ten and he’d been through this routine many times before. Son of a bitch, he had replied, you’re not my dad, and Greg had left it there. In any case, he and Jennifer had slipped into that routine of cozy restaurants and peaceful evenings spent watching TV. Their life as a couple had gradually solidified, and presumably it was going well in bed too, even if Greg, normally a braggart and a bit of a compulsive liar, didn’t talk about it, which was perhaps a sign in itself. So anyway, everything was going fine, and nobody was bringing up any dangerous subjects, like marriage, living together, vacations, or joint bank accounts.
And then, a few days earlier, he’d found out Jenn was pregnant.
She told him this on the phone and Greg was lost for words. I know, it’s a pain, she admitted. But what are we going to do? Greg had no idea. Or rather, his idea was to run for his life, to drive along Route 66 under a false identity. He went to see her the next day and drank a beer without even sitting down. He was cold as ice, a stranger. Jenn got the message. She was the kind of woman who always has to understand, to appease angry men and forgive cowards, to carry kids around and wipe the asses of old people, to always get paid less and never make a fuss. The same stoicism, passed down from mother to mother.
“Why, what do you want to do?” Greg asked her.
“I don’t know.”
Which strongly suggested that she wasn’t sure she wanted to get rid of the future human growing inside her womb.
Bilal’s father had disappeared years before and she’d had a hard time holding her life together, working extra hours and dealing with her difficult kid. She’d made it through, fierce and smiling, without ever completely giving up on the idea of life as part of a couple, the only other life she could imagine. She didn’t have any great hopes about the kind of man she could get, and she harbored very few illusions about love after all these years. For her, it was no longer a question of love at first sight, or even of raw passion, heart racing and hands clammy. Where that stuff was concerned, Hollywood and the Harlequin collection could go fuck themselves. At thirty-two, Jennifer wasn’t kidding herself anymore.
In her life, she had known nice boys and weed-smoking temps, Xbox crackpots, violent brutes, and zombies, like Bilal’s father, who could spend hours in front of the TV without speaking a word. She’d had guys who fucked her quickly and badly at 2:00 a.m. in the parking lot of a Papagayo somewhere. She’d fallen in love and been cheated on. She’d cheated and felt guilty. She’d spent hours sobbing into her pillow like an idiot over liars and jealous boyfriends. She’d been fifteen and, like anyone, she’d had her dose of love letters and hesitant flirtations. They’d held her hand and taken her to movies. They’d said I love you, I want your ass, by text and in a whisper in the intimacy of a bedroom. Jenn was a big girl now. She knew what to expect. Love was not that symphony that people always went on about; it was not a TV commercial or an enchantment.
Love was a shopping list stuck to the fridge, a slipper under a bed, a pink razor next to a blue one in the bathroom. Schoolbags spilling stuff on the floor, a chaos of toys, a mother-in-law who takes you to get a pedicure while her son transports some old furniture to the dump, and late at night, in the dark, two voices warming each other up, barely audible, saying simple things without intonation, there’s no bread left for breakfast, you know I’m scared when you’re not there. But I am there.
Jenn couldn’t have said it in so many words, but she knew all of this. It was in her body and in her skin. A baby was coming, a baby that would be warm and would block out the thought of death.
Greg, for his part, did not have any real opinion on the matter. So Jennifer gave him a few days to think about it, which he managed to avoid doing as much as possible. This night with his friends was yet another opportunity to escape the need for reflection. Unfortunately, late at night and after lots of alcohol, Marco had a tendency to overstep the mark.
“But do you love her, at least?”
“I don’t know,” replied Greg, who found the question almost insulting. “She’s nice.”
“That’s not enough for a kid.”
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed? Christophe and Marco brooded on this for a moment before Greg spoke again.
“I feel like I’ve fallen into a trap. I don’t know what to do anymore. My life will never be the same again…”
“Maybe it won’t be worse, though.”
“I don’t like arguments.”
“Yeah, it’s true that when you have kids, you do tend to get more arguments…” observed Marco, who, like everyone who is not a parent, could never resist the temptation to give his opinion on the matter.
Christophe listened. He thought about Gabriel. He didn’t get to see him much as it was, just one week out of every two. Time would speed up again after he’d left. He would know only scraps of his son’s childhood, brief summaries of the latest news. A sketch of a life.
Marco went to find another drink and the other two remained sitting under the parasols in silence, both slightly dazed by alcohol and tiredness. On the radio, Nino Ferrer was singing about time passing slowly. Night stretched out around them like a sea. By the time Marco returned with three more bottles, the atmosphere had lost its lightness.
“I received something strange today,” said Christophe, using his lighter to open his beer.
“What was it?”
He took his phone from his jacket pocket and showed them a message he had received from a stranger on Messenger.
“Who’s she?”
“A girl from our old high school.”
“You stud, you,” Marco snickered.
“She’s not bad-looking,” said Greg, scrolling through the woman’s photographs.
“Yeah, although it’s hard to tell from those.”
Greg and Marco took turns rereading the message and looking through the woman’s profile. She was called Hélène and she wrote briefly that she had spotted Christophe at Les Moulins Bleus and that it had been a strange experience for her. She said she hoped he was doing well.
“She wants you, it’s obvious,” said Marco.
“No doubt about it. She’s hot for you.”
“Don’t be stupid, she’s got two kids.”
“So?”
Christophe held out his hand so they could give him back his phone, but Marco had already begun typing something on the screen.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” said Marco, getting to his feet.
“Hey, stop that.”
“Shit, yeah!” shouted Greg, his face lighting up. “I remember this girl.”
Christophe’s arm was still outstretched across the table. His face, though, turned toward Greg.
“What do you remember?”
“A girl who used to come to the games. She was best friends with Charlotte Brassard.”
Christophe did not bother confirming this, but he remembered too, and that message had left him feeling strange. It had brought back so many memories: songs by the Pixies and Mano Negra, the way everything felt so easy, the whole town at his feet, the games, his final. It was far away and cruelly close.
“There you go, I sent a reply,” said Marco, handing back the phone with a satisfied grin.
Christophe grabbed it, but he must have touched something on the screen because he accidentally closed the app. It took him a few seconds to find the message from the girl and the reply that numbskull Marco had sent. “Shit,” he said, when he saw the damage.
I’d love to meet up for a coffee. I really felt something, the other night.
This was followed by his phone number.
“You’re such a dick,” said Christophe.
“Ah, it’ll be fine,” said Marco. “You’ll get along like a house on fire.”
“If I remember right, she wasn’t all that hot,” said Greg, frowning doubtfully.
“Oh, people change,” said Marco, with an unexpected flash of wisdom.
When he Woke, Christophe was hungover and had no memory of how he’d gotten home. He turned over in bed, grabbed the bottle of water from the floor, and drank it all. Apparently he had been too tired to close the shutters before going to bed and daylight was pouring through the blue tulle curtains, hurting his head like a loud noise. Then there was a noise: he recognized a familiar tum tum tum tum in the hallway, and the door opened to reveal Gabriel’s face.
“Hey, sweetie.” His throat was still sticky despite all the mineral water; his voice sounded rusty. He had to swallow a ball of phlegm before adding: “Up already?”
“Are you sick?” the child asked, without sounding particularly concerned.
“Nah, I’m fine. Didn’t sleep too well.”
Dressed in only his underwear, the little boy jumped onto the bed and quickly burrowed under the sheets, close to his father’s warmth. Christophe kissed his head, the kid’s hair, light as air, against his lips.
“You smell bad!” said the boy, pinching his nose.
The alarm clock on the nightstand said it was already ten-fifteen. So much for going for a run.
“Can we play something?”
But Christophe had collapsed back onto the pillow and was lying there like a statue, one arm folded over his closed eyes.
“What do you want to play?”
“Would you rather have a tongue made of poop or be followed around all your life by ten ducks?”
“Okay, I get the idea.”
A deep sigh, time to think, then Christophe said: “Would you rather have knees made of whipped cream or an eye at the back of your head?”
“That’s no good,” the child said, disappointed.
“I’m tired, sweetie.”
So Gabriel threw back the covers and straddled his chest like a horse.
“Giddyup!”
“Oh fuck,” Christophe moaned.
And he held his son in his arms, eyes still closed, hugging him tightly to his chest. The child started laughing and struggling to free himself. His skin, against Christophe’s stubbly face, was unimaginably soft. Christophe squeezed him even harder, then suddenly let go, and the boy rolled to the side.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No, I’m okay.”
The small hand resting on his arm. A foot, cold from the floor, touching his leg.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it true that we’re leaving?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Mom said it.”
Of course. Children always overhear stuff. Christophe cleared his throat again and rubbed his temples, still unable to open his eyes.
“It’s not happening yet, anyway.”
“I know.”
Then he put his arm around his son and brought him closer.
“You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“I can’t help it,” the boy replied.
“I’ll come to see you. And you’ll come here too. You’ll come and watch me play.”
“Yeah, but still!” the boy cried out, suddenly angry.
Christophe could feel the small body shaking with sobs against his own, then the wet warmth of tears through his T-shirt. He kept saying: “It’s okay, sweetie, it’ll be fine.” The tears continued for a while. Then, when his son had calmed down, he said: “Don’t tell Grandpa yet, okay?”
“I know,” the boy said.
And Christophe hugged him again, but this time for himself.