The kid has dry snot stuck to his cheek. Séverine crouches to wipe his face. In the village school where she works, Séverine doesn’t just serve meals with a paper cap on her head. She also looks after the kids during playtime while the teachers are smoking their cigarettes in the parking area, and helps out during classes: she puts away the games, blows snotty noses, dabs scraped knees with red cotton wool and counts to make sure all the round-edged scissors are there. She hands the children to their parents after school. She doesn’t mind. It’s a job. Badly paid and exhausting, but so vital that she can’t see how they could dispense with her. Naturally, she sometimes dreams of something else. But she doesn’t know what.
She doesn’t stop in the summer. The outdoor centre replaces school but it’s the same kids, the same company that provides the meals, and playtime is longer.
She pushes the kid towards his mother, who quickly shoves a bun in his mouth. Séverine knows the boy’s mother, of course, she’s the younger sister of a high-school friend; except for American retirees and holidaying Parisians, she knows everybody here, and that’s the problem.
“I heard about your daughter.”
Séverine makes a U-turn, her face not very friendly, but the other woman isn’t discouraged.
“If you need anything at all —”
“Like what?”
The mother’s smile freezes and turns into an embarrassed laugh. “I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, why are you talking?”
The young woman pulls her kid towards her like a shield. She suddenly has a fleeting but clear picture of Séverine in year ten, while she was starting in year seven, a little girl lost amid all the ruthless savagery of preadolescence. Once, Séverine even made a female student supervisor cry. Self-confident and triumphant, she chose her friends and enemies from the jungle where she reigned. Back then, when she had reigned.
“I just wanted to help.”
“We don’t need anything or anybody.”
When she gets home, she finds Jo in the kitchen. Feet on the table, her daughter is putting paprika crisps into the oven after dipping them in yoghurt.
“I’ve never understood how you can eat that.”
Johanna turns away. “I put the dishwasher on.”
Séverine starts emptying it, hanging the saucepans on the wall above the sink in order of size.
“Why are you so angry with Céline?”
The teenager’s voice echoes in the silence of the kitchen, interrupted only by the sound of Pyrex plates her mother is now stacking up in the sideboard. Séverine purses her lips and her cheeks move as though she’s chewing her words before spitting them out. “She deserves it.”
Jo watches her, her and her staring eyes, suddenly lost in the cracks in the wall. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. Life’s not like a fairy tale for silly girls. Life hurts. You’re younger, and yet I see you already know that. No point deluding yourself because then, in the end, it’s worse.”
She finishes putting the plates away, rubs her thumb over the embossed poppies and the hollow edges.
Jo rinses her bowl by hand in the sink, without answering. Her mother continues. “You shouldn’t hang around so much with Saïd.”
“Why? What have you lot got against Saïd?”
“Me, nothing. But your father is being stupid enough at the moment without you adding fuel to the fire.”
“We’ve been friends for ever.”
“You’re not kids any more, and I don’t know how he could afford to buy his car, but considering his wages as a farmworker —”
“So?”
“He’s bound to be wheeler-dealing.”
“As if you care about his wheeler-dealing. Papa does cash-in-hand work every other weekend, but if Saïd has some money, then he must be wheeler-dealing.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Actually, you did. That’s exactly what you said.”
Séverine sighs. She looks at her daughter and her furious eyes. Such an alien, such a strange gaze. After all, she couldn’t care less if Jo hangs around with Saïd, or anybody else actually. She just wants to be left alone. She wishes she could have come home to an empty house, not had to talk or listen. She just wanted to be alone, that’s all.
She feels immense relief when Jo goes up to her room. Pointing the remote at the screen like a weapon, Séverine lies down on the sofa. Dreading the arrival of the other two, she glances at the Mickey Mouse clock – another ugly thing she’s never been able to get rid of. An hour of calm. She turns up the sound.