I SAT ON THE COUCH NEXT TO EMMANUELLE, with her arm around me. The baby was finally asleep. Emmanuelle’s boyfriend came and squeezed in too. There was going to be a special segment on the news about Le déclin et la chut de la famille Tremblay as directed by Hugo Vaillancourt. Before we knew it, there was Nicolas in a prison uniform, his hair slicked back, smoking a cigarette, looking confident.
“Did you feel that you were missing out on anything as a child?” Hugo’s voice asked.
“I had the best clothes,” Nicolas started with a big grin, plainly feeling that he was going to dominate this interview. “I would have a cobbler make these adorable leather shoes for me. Because I have very particular feet. A doctor once called them jazz feet. We had this chauffeur named Gauguin. And Gauguin was always getting speeding tickets while driving Nouschka and me to school. Because we would say, ‘Gauguin, Gauguin! Will you just drive this car and get us to school on time; we’ll pay your fucking ticket.’ Oh, we were raised very differently than Papa. As Papa is probably very anxious to tell you, he was baptized in a spaghetti pot.”
There was a cutaway to footage of Nicolas on the street corner, scalping concert tickets. Then there was footage of Nicolas and me fighting on the street corner. I wasn’t even pregnant yet. We were horsing around. But they played the clip in slow motion and for some reason it came out looking brutal.
Then there was Raphaël yelling at a journalist. Raphaël held a garbage can over his head, threatening to dump it on all of Québec. I missed him. I didn’t even care what he thought of this fiasco. What I really wanted was just him here next to me on the couch. Now that the other love of my life had been taken away, he ought to return.
Hugo’s voice-over reiterated our family’s loss of fortune. Next came Étienne looking tipsy and trying to stuff a hot dog in his mouth. You’d think that they might have had a bit of respect, seeing as how he had been a national hero a couple weeks before. But as usual, now that the referendum was over, he would end up being tossed away by the public. Then they played the end part of the speech I’d written him, where he’d gone off-script and ended up barking.
Nicolas was the one who had seen it coming. He had always known that the Non side was going to win.
Then the camera was where it had never been before. Loulou had let them in and he probably told them his most complicated thoughts and his most colourful anecdotes about life in La Grande Noirceur. But they weren’t interested in those. This was a case of a picture saying a thousand words. I felt sad for Loulou. When he was lonely he would garbage-pick. There he was, proudly displaying all the wonderful things that he had found in the trash: cracked vases, lamps with no light bulbs, amateur paintings of trees. He had straightened up, but he had put things in odd places. There was a plastic kewpie doll in with the dishes, and a row of shoes on the bookshelf. They panned the camera slowly across the room, as if they were showing footage of a city that had been ravaged by a bomb.
This was our great secret. This was where we had grown up. This was what the childhoods of Little Nicolas and Little Nouschka had actually looked like.
“How did growing up without a mother affect you?” a voice asked Nicolas in prison.
“How do you mean? Well … yes,” Nicolas stuttered, clearly taken aback by the question.
His nonsensical, witty repartee came to a stop. You had to give it to Hugo. He was asking new questions.
“I don’t know,” Nicolas said carefully. “Most of the guys in here have mothers. They show up on visitor’s day all happy and shit. I mean, there are guys doing eight-year stints in here and their mothers treat them like they’re saints and if they can just turn things around, they’ll be the next prime ministers for sure.”
Nicolas stubbed his cigarette out and looked up at the ceiling for a minute.
“So I don’t have some coddling middle-aged woman coming in and telling me fairy tales about myself. And telling me how wonderful I am when I am clearly nothing but a piece of shit. I’ve always been a realist. Since I was five years old, I’ve been singing the sad, true nature of this terrible world.”
There he was in the cage like Iago, speaking like a beautiful, bitter bird. Iago pretended to be a model of virtue and propriety, but at heart he was downright rotten. Whereas Nicolas wanted to be evil and hard, but he was really so soft and sweet and broken.