Their Parents Have not spoken a word to each other since morning.
This is not unusual, especially on Sundays. At this time of day, their mother must be in the living room, peeling clementines in front of the TV, while their father does stuff in the garage, listening to the radio. Later, he’ll go out to visit one of his brothers or one of his friends. He’ll be more relaxed when he comes home, smelling strongly of dark tobacco, his mouth full of news that Sylvie will pretend to listen to while she makes dinner.
“Well, well,” she’ll say to bring the story to an end. “Dinner’s ready.”
In the meantime, she sent her sons outside, first of all because she can’t stand their fighting, and secondly because it can’t do them any harm. She told them: “You’re driving me crazy—get out before I make one of you kill the other one.” Out in the yard, Christophe and Julien tried playing soccer, but soon gave up. It was boring with only two of them, and the ball was flat after spending the whole winter outside. So now they’re sitting on the fallen tree trunk that their father varnished to turn it into a bench, hands in pockets, steam exiting their mouths. There’s no way they’d be outside in this weather if they had any choice in the matter. The two boys sniff, staring at the trees, the gray earth, the small pond covered with ice. Nature’s ugly when you’re cold and feeling sad, especially during February in Cornécourt. Every time Julien spits on the ground, Christophe copies him. In four years he will be fifteen too, so obviously he needs to get ready. Above their heads, the sky is a dirty white, and behind them stands the big, warm, forbidden house. Christophe feels his eyes getting wet.
“Ugh, don’t start crying again.”
“I’m sick of it…”
Julien shoves his brother’s shoulder.
“Come on, who cares? Fuck them.”
Christophe nods and grits his teeth.
“Listen,” says his big brother. “I’ve got an idea.”
He jumps to his feet and strides over to the pond. Christophe wipes his eyes on his sleeve, his nose with the back of his hand. He knows Julien doesn’t have to stay here. He could be out with his friends somewhere. He’s stayed here for him.
Julien reaches out with his right foot, touching the ice that formed on the surface of the pond a few nights before. Their father dug this pond to decorate the yard and in the spring it’s full of rushes, wild grass, water lilies. You can even hear frogs sometimes and see water spiders drawing circles on the surface of the water. Their father tried to breed trout and carp there, but found them two days later, floating belly-up. Christophe is a cautious kid and he doesn’t like seeing his brother tempt fate like that.
“Stop!”
“It’s okay, just let me do it.”
Julien takes another step forward, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. Suddenly the ice cracks under his weight.
“Stop!” Christophe yells again, then rushes forward.
But his big brother isn’t listening. He keeps walking ahead, and with each step of his big feet, the ice emits the same deep, crunching sound. In a few seconds, he has reached the farthest point from shore and he turns back to his younger brother, grinning triumphantly.
“Now you,” he says.
He’s dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, and the red scarf wrapped around his neck stands out against the gray landscape, the albino sky.
“Come on, don’t make me say it again…”
Christophe feels a sudden urge to piss. It’s always the same thing when he gets scared. One day he was down in the cellar, rummaging through some old stuff—photographs, his father’s things—and he was so scared that someone would find him that he pissed his pants. His mother didn’t even bother yelling at him that day. She just said: “What is wrong with that kid?” Christophe did not take offense. His mother says things like “I wish I was dead” if there’s a pile of laundry that needs ironing.
Meanwhile, Jules is still there on the ice, waiting.
Christophe reaches out a foot. Under his shoe, he can sense the immense fragility of the ice and, beneath it, the terrifying mystery of the black, freezing water. A shiver runs down the back of his neck despite the thundering of blood through his veins. He can hardly breathe anymore.
“Come on, it’s easy.”
Julien crab-walks back to the shore and grabs Christophe’s hand so he can drag him toward the middle of the pond. Christophe shuts his eyes. He hears a bird fly above them, leaving nothing in its wake but a quick flap of wings and the sky. Little by little, fear gives way to something else, a feeling of ease under his feet that rises up through his legs, and still that urge to piss.
“Open your eyes,” says Julien. “It’s okay now.”
He feels Julien’s hand let go of his, then his brother moving away.
“Don’t be scared. Don’t move.”
Christophe opens his eyes and sees his brother leaping through the air. Every time his foot hits the ice, there’s a thunder crack that resonates through the surface of the pond and vibrates inside his chest.
“Stop! What’s wrong with you?”
But Julien’s silhouette is now nothing more than a sliding blue blur cut across by the red line of his scarf. Christophe contemplates his movement through space, unhindered, fluid, gloriously fast. It’s so beautiful. He pisses himself.
That Night, in bed, Christophe struggles to fall asleep. He can still feel it in his legs, that gliding feeling, that dizzying flow, his head finally empty, despite the cold and his soaked corduroy pants. Not that he was able to enjoy it for long. Julien made him get changed before their father came home. When their mother found them whispering in the laundry room, she just said: “You’re washing your own clothes? Now I’ve seen everything…”
The next day, he wakes very early and quickly gets dressed before tiptoeing downstairs. Outside it’s still dark but he knows he can find his way from the dot of light made by a wall lamp on the front of the house. In silence he puts on his boots, his hat, then slips out the back door. It’s not seven o’clock yet, and the cold burns his eyes and nostrils. He hurries across the crisp grass toward the pond and breathes in the good smell of frost, so clean in the new morning.
Out on the ice, he instantly feels the same pleasure of the movement under his feet, the sliding ground. He does it again—runs, skids, arms out for balance, the speed of the start, and then the feeling of something so right that rises up from the soles of his feet through his entire body. Soon, dawn appears above the horizon, pale pink and blue, rounded at the surface, and the boy sees it spread delicately from the ground, infusing the sky with its tender touch. Tiny in that nascent landscape, he thinks: one more time and then I’ll stop. A dozen times he tells himself this same lie. But the pleasure is too great, ending it impossible.
Standing in the front doorway, his father has been watching all of this. He blows on his hot coffee, without taking his eyes off his son. He could yell at him, punish him. But instead he smiles. He finds a strange comfort in the sight of that child’s body as it erases the resistance of ground and air. That night, at bedtime, he goes to see Christophe in his room. He sits on the edge of his bed.
“I saw you this morning. On the pond.”
Christophe does not have enough time to invent an excuse, and his father does not ask him for an explanation.
“I don’t want you to do that again. It’s dangerous. This isn’t the North Pole, you know.” The boy promises, and then his father says: “We’ll go to the rink, if you like. But I want you to swear you won’t go out on the pond again.”
“I swear,” the child says.
He watches his father’s lips, barely moving under his mustache. In the darkness, the voice seems to come from nowhere.
“You’ll see,” his father says. “It’ll be even better with ice skates.”
Christophe imagines. His brother played hockey a few years before. Soon he will find his elder brother’s equipment in the attic. He will put on the sweat-burned leather gloves, the helmet, and his blue and white jersey, and he will search for the stick, in vain.
It’s Tough at first. Christophe has just turned twelve and he feels cold all the time. Plus he’s one of the smallest players on the team, a late developer, and he hates the locker-room atmosphere. It stinks in there, the mingled smell of sweat, feet, rubber, and burned coffee too, because there’s a machine gurgling constantly to supply caffeine for the coach, Monsieur Lukic, unmistakable in his red puffer jacket, his red, white, and blue hat, and the steaming cup he always has in his hand. He wears shoes with crepe rubber soles on the ice, which is strictly forbidden, but he doesn’t care. In fact he sometimes even smokes out there, when he’s sure none of the management are around, keeping his cigarette hidden inside the palm of his hand. Not that anyone is fooled, with the reek of the smoke.
Not only that, but quite a lot of the kids already know each other from skating class. They shoot across the rink’s perfect oval like missiles. Christophe struggles to put his skates on, his feet hurt, and he feels slow and clumsy.
“Marchal!” yells the coach. “What the hell are you doing? You’re slow, Marchal. You’re too slow.”
Lukic says “slow” in English. He speaks a sort of pidgin French, full of Slavic words and other foreign borrowings. And the less they understand, the more incomprehensible he becomes.
Practice is on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, after school. For Christophe, the pleasures of the lake are just a distant memory. After a few weeks of hazing and stupidity, he tells his parents that he wants to stop so they can save their money. But given the price of the gear and the license, they tell him that’s not going to happen. “Unless you lose a toe or something,” his mother says, “you’re going to keep playing.”
All things considered, the most annoying part of hockey is that scumbag Madani. Every time Christophe bends down to tie his laces, that bastard smacks him over the head with a glove. It’s not really that painful, but everyone laughs. The asshole won’t stop making fun of him. And on the ice, he’s like a bulldozer. Christophe has bruises all over his body.
“Well, he’s two years older than you, what do you expect?” says Julien. “You just have to be faster, more aggressive. That’s the only way you’ll beat him.”
To motivate his little brother, Julien has the idea of a special training session, which begins with a bit of brainwashing. They watch Rocky, Chariots of Fire, Karate Kid and Slap Shot. In every movie, it’s the same story: bare-chested actors and training scenes set to music, during which they are transformed from total losers into winning machines.
“When I played,” Julien says, “The best player was the Adam kid. He had thighs like tree trunks, muscles like electric cables. It’s the legs that matter.”
So, whenever he isn’t training with the team, he goes running near home and exercises in the garage with a foam puck. On Saturdays he goes to the rink with his friends Greg and Marco, whom he has convinced to join the team.
At least hockey brings the two brothers closer, because apart from that Julien isn’t around much. He’s too busy drifting moodily around town, showing off the depth of his boredom, proving that he’s smarter than most mortals. And maybe he is. He did find a way to empty the parking meters around the basilica with a screwdriver, after all. This source of income didn’t last long, but the legend was born. At home, things are less glorious. During meals, Julien sits with his nose in his plate and communicates only in onomatopoeia.
“We need to do something about your hair,” his father says.
“I can’t believe I gave birth to that thing,” his mother adds wearily.
Pretty often, Julien leaves the table before dessert.
“He’ll get over it,” says Gérard hopefully. “Anyway, how was practice?”
After that, the evening is always spent same way at the Marchals’ house: in front of the TV. Gérard falls asleep during the weather forecast and Sylvie takes advantage of this to grab the remote and change the channel. This wakes her husband up and gives rise to endless arguments about sexual equality.
There is love in that house, but it’s expressed clumsily, irritably. They don’t say much, but they make up for that by spending a lot. Well, if Gérard is going to bust his ass twelve hours a day at the store, they should at least enjoy the money he earns. So, at birthdays and Christmases, or whenever they’re about to go on vacation, no expense is spared. They often go out to eat at a pizzeria called La Gondola, or at Le Tablier, a restaurant that overlooks the Moselle. Julien even bought himself a four-wheeler. As for Sylvie, she would give her right arm to make her children happy. She also cares deeply that they are successful at school, not that it always works.
“I’m not going to let you screw up like your brother,” she tells Christophe.
“As soon as I’m eighteen, ciao everyone,” Julien replies.
Christophe hates it when he says that. He does not dare imagine this house once his brother has flown the nest. Probably better not to think about it. Better to clear his head with hockey practice, running, skating, and—every night—push-ups and sit-ups in his bedroom. Afterward he always poses in the mirror to check on his muscles’ progress, of which, for all his efforts, there is as yet little sign.
“That’s good,” says the Serbian coach with his thick accent. “In a hundred years, you will be a real champion.”
It sounds like mockery, but coming from him it is more like a compliment.
Thankfully, there are also those little scrimmages that the coach organizes at the end of each practice session. Eight against eight, three periods of three minutes each, the players buzzing around at top speed.
“Passing—that’s what matters.”
And they hear Lukic yelling “Patch! Patch!” under the rink’s echoing dome. From a distance, the kids look like armored dwarves, the puck ricochets from one stick to the next, you hear tshak tshak and the sound of the blades digging into the ice. Usually, Madani is the one who scores the most goals, but it’s here that he’s at his most impressive, passing without looking, sending the puck behind him yet always finding a teammate.
“He looks beforehand,” Julien explains. “You always have to know where the others are, even the ones you can’t see.”
Christophe will not forget this lesson.
He also adores the Saturday afternoon ritual when he and his friends go to the rink. The teenage wildlife seeking each other out, the girls huddled together, the boys in little gangs, the way they pile on top of one another, then scatter like birds before the storm. The families too, who come to have fun and always look happier than his own family. It’s always the same here too. Around four, the music is silenced while the Zamboni smooths over the ice. Everyone waits as the machine moves back and forth, leaving wet stripes behind it. Then comes the “minute of speed.”
This is the highlight of the afternoon, much better than the slow dances, only for the toughest skaters. About twenty guys and a few girls line up at the starting line, the announcer says go, and they all set off, skating faster and faster, forgetting risk, ignoring pain. Most of them do not wear gloves or hats, the craziest ones in just T-shirts and jeans. The rink turns into an enormous centrifuge then, filled with no sound but the hiss of skates, that big sharp wheel slicing through ice, and occasionally a roar of encouragement from the bleachers.
Christophe and his friends are in the front row, and every time the peloton passes, they can feel the air displaced by the mass of moving bodies, the intoxicating disturbance in the air produced by speed. But time is running out and soon a few leaders emerge from the pack to jostle for first place. When those sixty seconds are over, just one among them crosses the imaginary finish line. Christophe stares hungrily at the winners. He imagines himself with arms raised, soaking in the adulation of the crowd.
That Summer, the boy and his family pass a boring vacation on the Giens Peninsula. His brother didn’t want to go in the first place, and he made this clear during the eight hundred kilometers that separate Cornécourt from their holiday resort. They made the trip in a Renault 25 with no air-conditioning, which gives some explanation for Julien’s reaction when he found out he was going to have to share a room with his little brother.
“Screw it, I’m going home.”
“Of course you are,” replied Sylvie, biting into a peach.
Gérard did not react at all, having decided he was going to relax come what may, a resolution that was in itself a little tension-inducing.
Thankfully, they soon hit upon an enjoyable routine. Christophe goes swimming early every morning with his brother. When their parents show up at the beach with towels, parasols, and all that crap, Julien disappears. Nobody really knows what he’s up to, but Gérard has made it clear that they should let him get on with it. As long as his elder son turns up for dinner and does not spend the night outside, he doesn’t care. After that, Christophe waits until his father has finished looking through L’Équipe so that he can read it himself. For him, pro sports is like a huge soap opera, with its own heroes, plot twists, and bubbling intrigues. That year, the French rugby team wins the Grand Slam, Lendl triumphs at Roland Garros and Flushing Meadows, and the great French soccer star Michel Platini retires. Christophe reads every word of the tributes, with their lists of trophies and records, that the newspaper devotes to this sporting idol. Every day brings its harvest of faces and role models. Should he be passionate like Senna or meticulous like Prost, infallible like Lendl or punk like McEnroe? Christophe tends to favor the hotheads; the sensible ones remind him too much of his parents.
During that trip, the boy spends a lot of time in the water and makes friends with some boys in the apartment complex. They play soccer together and hang out in the parking lot until ten at night. But he likes it even better when they nose around near the beach volleyball court, which attracts a whole pack of young people, bringing together locals and tourists. The boys all wear swimming shorts, and Christophe feels a bit of a dweeb in his Speedos. He talks about this with his mother, who resolves the problem with a single phrase: “It’s not a fashion show.”
He sits on a wall and watches them play for hours. Arrogant, muscular guys make rocket serves and then rush the net; they high-five each other every time they win a point. Their shoulders are peeling, their smiles dazzling, and around their necks they wear heishi beads like surfers in Malibu. But it’s the girls whom Christophe is there to watch, with their round butts and their ponytails that bounce up and down when they run, their feigned indifference, the way they sit chatting in little groups on the rocks that lead down to the sea from the road. Some of them even go topless. Christophe’s favorites are two Dutch sisters, the taller of whom has huge breasts and swaying thighs and who reminds him of a brioche still hot from the oven, while the other one is more willowy, with thin lips and a series of beauty spots on her back in a pattern he has learned by heart. They come quite late in the afternoon, walking slowly after their siesta, and, each time, it takes them ages to go back into the water because they’re so sensitive to the cold. They splash around half-heartedly, wetting their shoulders and neck, pulling faces. Everyone knows that afterward they will return to the beach to dry in the sun and smoke a cigarette after first undoing their bikini tops. All the boys wait, while pretending not to, for that second when their breasts will appear, and Christophe is just like the others, his legs dangling, eyes staring. It’s a pain in the ass having to wear a pair of tight blue Speedos when you want to make space in your life for two hot young Dutch girls.
Sometimes, when he gets too hot, Christophe rushes back to the apartment. His mother gives him the keys, raising her eyebrows knowingly. His flip-flops make that ridiculous slapping noise as he runs up the staircase. He opens the door, grabs a magazine—VSD or Voici—from the kitchen countertop (they always have some useful photographs of naked women) and sorts himself out in the bathroom in five minutes flat. This sometimes happens three times a day. Afterward he feels guilty and embarrassed: there has to be something unhealthy about it. But he can’t help it.
One day, a girl from the famous gang of volleyball players comes over to talk to him. He hadn’t noticed her especially before this. She’s an unremarkable-looking girl, topless, with freckles and long dark hair, and she chews gum as she talks. She sits next to him on the wall and asks him what he’s called, what he’s doing there. Christophe looks at her shyly from the corner of his eye, but she seems less and less insignificant as time passes. This is how he discovers that people’s faces can change depending on how nice to you they are. When she catches him staring at her breasts and asks him what he’s looking at, the mischievous sparkle in her eyes takes his breath away. He doesn’t answer. She says she doesn’t mind. As if he can do what he wants.
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” Christophe lies.
“Have you been out with a girl before?”
He blushes. Thankfully he’s tanned and she doesn’t notice. He doesn’t really understand what she means by “been out with.” Out where? To do what? Amused by this, the girl explains it to him.
But it’s starting to get late and as the heat fades, they see families on the beach taking down their parasols, packing up their things. Sand squirts from the sandals of suntanned, exhausted children as they shuffle away. The sea, meanwhile, has turned the color of dark metal. And that girl is sitting close to him. She makes fun of him a little and her nipples are a shiny, pretty brown color that makes him salivate. She says: “If you were older…” This is how Christophe learns that he is cute. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s good news.
The next day, however, she doesn’t even glance his way. The worst thing is that he never even dared ask her name.
One night during their third week, Julien is picked up by the police. He got drunk and pissed on one of the boats in the Hyères port. Nothing too bad, but it’s enough to transform the family into a prison camp. After that, the boys are ordered to remain within shouting distance and Christophe is no longer allowed to go out alone to the beach volleyball courts. Lying on his front, he has to make do with spying on the players from a distance, looking for that nameless girl whom he can’t stop thinking about. “Don’t you move from there,” his mother tells him. “You’ve done it enough already.”
On the way back, Christophe is submerged in an immense wave of misery. A ten-hour drive, being passed by reckless idiots, the car like a furnace and his father chain-smoking in the front, his elbow leaning out of the open window. While they’re stuck in traffic jams at Orange and Vienne, Christophe has time to think things over. And he realizes: this year, he was no longer young enough and not yet old enough. At one point, the Marchals stop by the side of a mountain path for a picnic. Christophe feels distant from them, even his brother, although he’s always miles away. Back at the house, Julien runs straight up to his room without even helping the others empty the trunk. This will be their last-ever family vacation.
In August, Thank God, Christophe spends three weeks at a summer camp where he plays golf, judo, and Clue, and sails an Optimist dinghy. Best of all, he makes some friends his own age. He tells them about the bare-breasted girl on the beach; their jaws hit the floor and they beg him for details. He gives them plenty, inventing some new ones when he runs out. They ask him what it feels like to touch a girl’s breasts, and Christophe shows them, although he doesn’t have the faintest idea, by getting them to feel the fleshy swelling between their thumb and their index finger: a tit is just the same, he promises. The others reach out their fingers respectfully. True, it’s really soft and squishy. All these innocent boys squeeze their fists shut and fondle themselves, straight-faced. Is that really what it’s like? A terrifying mystery. Christophe says nothing more. Anyway, it’s snack time. They sit in a circle on the grass and eat some bread and fruit paste. Below them, the lake smells of mud and the windsurf boards await a breeze that never comes.
The rest of the day, they laugh and swim; the food is disgusting and the guy in charge of the stables is a thug, but the female instructors are nice. Not like the male ones, who are all show-offs and flirt with the girls, even the underage ones.
The coolest thing is that Christophe gets along well with Myriam, the instructor in charge of the morning dance class and the quiet games in the afternoons, activities that he chooses to attend every day. Around three, when the sun is still hot, they meet up with a few friends in one of the little chalets with a terrace overlooking the lake. They play Mikado and belote, and in between games they chat. Christophe and Myriam sit side by side and he can feel the closeness of her arm, their skin magnetized, even if she is seventeen and he’s only thirteen. She’s blonde, with a little layer of puppy fat, round cheeks and a crease in her neck, her buttocks spilling out of her pale cotton shorts. Sometimes, to make him laugh, she will tickle him or hug him. One day in the middle of August, while the temperature is in the nineties and the lake is as still and shallow as a big puddle, Myriam sits in his lap during a game of kemps. The night before, she took part in a big drinking session with the other instructors and now she feels weird, hypersensitive, her body languid and her head like it’s trapped in a vise. Christophe feels his weight on her, rounded and mobile; the back of her neck smells sweet. When he dares to put his arm around her waist, she says: “Hey, watch it.” But with each movement, he experiences once again the elastic softness of her flesh. The unbearable heat beats down on them all, on the whole country, and Christophe tries to think about something else so he doesn’t get hard, but he can’t help it, he’s tortured by the need for her to swallow him up, to close up around him like some sea animal, like hot algae.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” she says.
She lays her head, which weighs a ton, in his open hand, and crosses her ankles under the wooden bench, then starts rocking back and forth on her soft, damp, fleshy ass. As she leans back, he glimpses some blonde, downy hair in the gap between the top of her shorts and the bottom of her tank top. He swallows his spit. Karim Dahbane is watching them with mocking eyes. Christophe can tell he’s tempted to say something, to turn it into a joke. He’s a scrawny, fidgety kid in a Fido Dido T-shirt who’s constantly clowning around. There’s always one. Christophe glares at him: say a word and you’re dead. Then Myriam gets up and sits next to him again.
“It’s too hot,” she says. “Your skin is sticking to me.”
Christophe presses himself against the table, holding his cards tight in both hands. Karim giggles. That’s it—Christophe punches him in the shoulder, right in the spot where it really hurts. It’s like giving a dead leg if you aim it just right. Christophe got hit like that several times in the hockey team’s locker room. Seb Madani was a master at those punches.
That Summer—The summer of 1988—Christophe kisses two girls. The first behind the cabin that smells of mold and socks, where the boys get changed after going swimming. Her name is Émilie Costa. A bold girl, always falling in and out of love. Her pale blue irises remind him of sled dogs’ eyes. She made the first move, slipping him a note in the cafeteria. As soon as he turns up, she pushes him against the wall and kisses him. In all honesty, it’s not particularly pleasant at first, that tongue rummaging about inside his mouth, not to mention the fear of being caught, the splinters in his back from the cabin’s wooden planks, the smell of piss. They keep twisting their heads in all directions. They’re at that age of acrobatic French kisses followed by shy muttering. In the end, though, Christophe starts to enjoy it, and that evening they sit together at the back of the bus and she lets him grope her a bit. By the next day, it’s all over. She’s fallen for someone else and Curtis, her big brother, tells him: “Touch my sister again and I’ll smash your face in.”
He kisses the second girl at the final-night dance. A tall, unattractive girl in shorts who comes on to him while he’s gawking idiotically at Myriam. He lets her, to get revenge and because this girl is two years older than him. They go outside to make out under a poplar tree.
“You’re not too bad at this for a virgin.”
At least, after that, there’s no doubt that he’s one of the lucky boys—the fast learners, the ones that girls like. He’s grown up.
At the First practice session of the next season, he’s surprised to discover that his gear is now too small for him. And when Madani comes to find him in the locker room to fuck with him as usual—“What’s up, dickless?”—Christophe stands up and his tormentor realizes right away that he will have to find someone else to bully. He laughs despite his surprise.
“Chill out, pencil dick.” But things have changed for good.
As far as practice is concerned, however, the basics remain as they were, except that Coach Lukic has returned to his native Serbia and the under-sixteens are now coached by Anthony Gargano, a first-team player idolized by all the kids. He has two caps for the French national team and, even more impressive, he drives a Ducati. But he, too, is obsessed with passing. Pinball, he calls it.
“Whenever you’re in their half, your passing should be as fast as the bumpers of a pinball machine. You shouldn’t even see the puck, it’s moving so fast. The secret is: don’t think. As soon as you start thinking, it’s already too late.”
Once, Gargano even takes his players to the little café opposite the rink and shows them a real pinball machine, the Diamond Lady. With the boys standing around him, he shows off his skills and they start to howl with excitement.
“See? Don’t think.”
He gets them to skate forward and backward, to slalom between cones, the puck glued to their stick. He shows them in blue marker on his whiteboard what he expects from them: automated movement. To achieve this, he sets them up in lines of five, and each line has to reproduce combinations of his own invention as fast as possible before leaving the ice so that the next line can take their turn. To start with, they make stuttering progress and Gargano bawls them out a lot. Gradually the instructions are internalized, transformed into muscle memory. The puck speeds up. Each line becomes a wave, and there is something implacable, almost musical about the way they crash over the ice.
“Come on, faster! Go, go, go!”
They’re like dwarves in helmets now, thrashing around so quickly that soon all you can see is a complex ribbon of passes. Tshak tshak tshak. Goal.
Christophe has Developed a new routine to put on muscle. Every evening after school, he rides his mountain bike down to the center of Cornécourt, then heads toward the Suprema 2000 zone until he reaches Firefighters Hill. Seeing that, you have a better understanding of what people mean when they say the town was built in a basin. For a kid his age, that slope is like the Ventoux. So he sets off, speeding downhill before the stoplight and then climbing as far as his legs will take him. At first he can’t get past the bus shelter and he collapses, wheezing, onto the ground. But day after day, meter by meter, he keeps setting new records. It’s a depressing sort of adventure, because the hill offers no surprises, no mercy. But it teaches him the arithmetic of progress, where you add only small numbers. And when the weather is so bad that he can’t ride up the hill, he feels as if he’s losing some of his strength, as if he’s missed out on the most important meeting of his life. Every day, he repeats this necessary torture, and sometimes all of life seems to be summed up in that tableau: a steep slope in a small town, a kid on a bike, riding one centimeter farther before dark. The hill keeps pushing back but he refuses to give up. He has to hold firm. To change.
At last, one Saturday afternoon while he’s with his friends at the rink, the announcer’s nasal voice informs them once again that it is time for the minute of speed. Christophe decides to try his luck.
“You’ll get smashed to pieces,” Marco warns him soberly.
All the same, heart pounding, Christophe skates out onto the ice and is soon joined there by the regular crowd: hockey players, old-timers, and Gainz (named after Serge Gainsbourg because of his cauliflower ears), an inveterate weed-smoker and projects rebel who skates in a T-shirt, one of those ghetto heroes who live with their parents until they’re thirty-five and respond to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by punching people in the face.
The Zamboni has departed the ice, leaving it as impeccably smooth as ever. The announcer, with his fairground voice, whips the crowd into a frenzy. A rink employee arranges a few orange cones to mark out the racing track.
“It’s almost time. Are you ready? One minute. Just one minute!” the voice blares through the loudspeakers.
Christophe gets into position, deaf to the trash talk of the men beside him, his body tensed like a bowstring.
“Hey, kid!” He turns to see a big guy in a sheepskin jacket calling to him. “Don’t do that—you’ll end up on your ass.”
But the front row is already moving slowly forward.
“And here we go…” the announcer screeches as the skaters elongate their movements.
The race starts calmly, the competitors surreptitiously eyeing one another. Then the peloton becomes gradually stretched out. At the third bend, the leaders start to accelerate. Christophe speeds up too, well balanced, his arms pumping wide to either side. And without warning he starts moving through the pack.
Behind the barrier, a wave of surprise stirs through the crowd, everyone wondering who that kid is, what he’s doing there. The first lap is already over and Christophe is still making up ground. He comes up alongside the second-placed racer. Generally the best skaters don’t really hit the gas until the end of the second lap, because the third lap is usually the last one. So the boy’s attack looks like what it is: brave, impossible, suicidal.
But he keeps putting distance between himself and the pack, driving forward with his thighs, fluid and spare in his movements, almost silent, following the ideal curve he has set for himself, the shortest distance to the finish line. Behind him, a burst of pride. The pack shifts into top gear.
“Come on! Faster!” shouts the man in the sheepskin jacket.
But Christophe can already sense the disorder of the other skaters, the displacement of air at the back of his neck. He knows the ice by heart. He could almost close his eyes, let his momentum carry him through the bend. He lets them come for another second and then, to a collective gasp, accelerates again.
People start whistling, yelling encouragement, clapping.
“Only twenty seconds left,” announces the voice from above them.
After that, everything speeds by in a blur. Christophe finishes the second lap in the lead. He can see nothing now but the crowd. All those faces merged in a single vague blur. But his pursuers are still there. He can practically feel their breath, their hostile speed. They are hot on his heels. Guillaume Papeloux, who also plays for the first team, outflanks him to the left, crashing into his shoulder. Christophe wavers, feels the ground giving way beneath him, then Gainz shoves him before two other anonymous bodies, stronger and faster, knock him completely off balance. For an instant, his speed carries him forward through the air, levitating above the rink, until he falls flat on his stomach, his chin smashing hard into the ice.
Twenty other skaters cross the line without him, like a flock of sheep.
When the boy gets up again, leaning on one knee, he immediately recognizes the copper taste in his mouth, almost pleasant, then brings two fingers to the skin below his right eye, where it stings. Blood. The race is over.
“You okay?”
Papeloux is already standing in front of him, helping him up. Christophe nods. He smiles, exposing his teeth. One of his incisors has broken clean off, at an oblique angle strangely reminiscent of a guillotine blade.