Betrayal. All those years they’d lied to him. About everything. They’d made fun of him. Some men dressed like women to earn their living and as funny as aunties, for the pleasure of deceiving him, had made him think all kinds of things about themselves, about their work, their lives, and he’d believed them. He had opened up to them, he’d loved them – Greta, the biggest liar, most of all. He refused to think of Greta as a woman now, the most dangerous woman, the one he’d adopted as his second mother, to whom he’d poured out his heart, with whom he’d had so many laughs and eaten so many steamed hotdogs and smoked meat sandwiches, in whose company he’d spent whole summers watching him walk the sidewalks of St. Lawrence Boulevard but never knowing who he was dealing with, never suspecting the conspiracy. Why hadn’t he seen anything? Now that he knew, it was obvious: they’d all united against him to keep him in childhood, in the ignorance of childhood. He’d thought he was smart but in the end he’d been nothing but an average baby who’d let himself be led up the garden path by a bunch of male bitches who wanted to keep him with them – he was so naïve, such an easy victim – to laugh at him. A defenceless toy.

He’d been fooled. Those women weren’t like the others: they had Adam’s apples when he knew perfectly well that women don't, he’d learned that in grade one! When he saw them again in his mind – tall, square-shouldered, with hoarse voices and movements that were often abrupt, he called himself an idiot and he wanted to die of shame.

And all that time he could have been talking to real women … He’d tried, in fact, but they’d pushed him away. Greta had told him it was because those ladies had enough with their own children, they didn’t want to look after someone else’s. So they had betrayed him too. By not warning him. About the fake women. Who knows, maybe they’d all been in on it together.

All of them. All of them had betrayed him.

A hole was being dug, a pit of resentment where there used to be so much love. Resentment of the fake women. Of the real ones. How they had laughed at him behind their backs. Even his mother, who never thought twice about leaving him in the care of a professional liar to go and beg for the crumbs that would allow them to survive.

So it was shame more than pain that had him confined to his bed for weeks, feverish, spiteful, howling with anger and swearing revenge. Absolutely delirious, he constructed deadly traps, senseless plans, he destroyed one by one everyone who’d laughed at him, including his mother and, even more, Greta, then resurrected them so he could kill them again; he imagined other ways to make them suffer and to humiliate them before he killed them once again … He felt the excitement of imagined reprisals and the relief of endless insults.

Emerging from his torpor, exhausted and melancholy, he refused to go back to the Main with his mother and took refuge with his grandmother, the only person he had left, who he knew would never betray him. And he allowed himself to sink into that clinging love, knowing he was totally dependent on her but unable to fight. For years. In school, he was the solitary child no one dared to confront because everyone was afraid of his rages, which were sudden and devastating; at home, his refuge was the brand-new television set, perfect sanctuary for those like him who’d been voluntarily abandoned. In his teens, he began to suffer from incomprehensible, brutal and always short-lived episodes of overexcitement – he was Nero and set fire to Montréal while singing a comic opera aria – and from increasingly frequent and prolonged fits of depression; no one is unhappier than me, I’ll show them what a tragic character is. He swung from one mood to the other, sometimes without transition, without warning, and he revelled in it. His circular madness was starting to build the nest for its poisoned eggs.

When his mother died, the most beautiful death there ever was – an angel without wings takes flight on a winter’s night and crashes onto a pure white snowbank! – he closed all the doors and retreated into a constant pain that made him almost happy. He would have stayed there, deep in his hole, constantly tacking between highs that were too high and lows that were too low, had music and drugs and sex not intervened in his life at the very moment when he was becoming an adult.

But that’s another story …