My name is Justine Neige. I’m twenty-one years old. I’ve been working at a retirement home called The Hydrangeas for three years. I’m a nursing assistant. Generally, retirement homes are named after trees, like The Lindens, or The Sweet Chestnuts. But mine was built upon banks of hydrangeas. So no one considered trees, despite the home being on the edge of a forest.
I love two things in life: music and the elderly. I go dancing one Saturday in three, pretty much, at the Paradise club, about thirty kilometers from The Hydrangeas. My Paradise is a kind of reinforced-concrete cube stuck in the middle of a field, with a makeshift car park where, sometimes, I drunkenly kiss people of the opposite sex at around five in the morning.
Of course, I also love my brother Jules (who’s actually my cousin) and my grandparents—my late father’s parents. Jules is the only young person I spent time with at home during my childhood. I grew up with the elderly. I skipped a generation.
I divide my life into three: caring by day, interpreting the old folks’ voices at night, and dancing on Saturday evenings to get back that carefree feeling I lost in 1996 because of grown-ups.
Those grown-ups were my parents and Jules’s parents. They had the terrible idea of dying together in a car accident one Sunday morning. I saw the article that Gran cut out from the newspaper. An article that’s supposed to be hidden away, but not if you rummage. And I saw the photo of the car, too.
Because of them, Jules and I spent every other Sunday at the village cemetery, placing fresh flowers on their tomb. A wide tomb featuring two photographs, framed by two cherubs, of my father’s wedding and my uncle’s wedding. As for the two brides, one’s a blonde, the other a brunette. The brunette’s my mother. The blonde, she’s Jules’s. On the photos, the husband of the blonde and the husband of the brunette are the same man. Same suit, same tie, same smile. My father and my uncle were twins. How could the same man, seemingly, have fallen in love with two different women? And how could two women be in love with the same man? Those are the eternal questions I still ask myself as I enter the cemetery gates. And I have no one to answer me. Perhaps that’s why I lost that carefree feeling: because I’m missing answers from Christian, Sandrine, Alain, and Annette Neige.
At the cemetery, while the long dead lie down below, the recent dead are contained in small enclosures, all somewhat on the periphery. As if they’d arrived late. My family lies at the top of the village. Half a kilometer from my grandparents’ house.
My village is called Milly. Some four hundred inhabitants. You need a magnifying glass to find it on a map. There’s one commercial street: that’s Rue Jean-Jaurès. At the center, a small Romanesque church with its square. When it comes to stores, apart from old Prost’s grocery, there’s a betting office, a garage, and a hair salon, whose owner shut up shop last year because he’d had enough of doing just tints and sets. The clothes stores and florists have been replaced by banks and a medical analysis lab. Otherwise, windows have been lined with newspaper, or, if the stores are now homes, white curtains hang there instead of slacks.
There are almost as many “For Sale” signs as there are houses. But since the nearest highway is more than seventy kilometers away, and the nearest station fifty, no one’s buying.
There’s still a grade school. The one I went to with Jules.
To get to middle school, high school, the doctor’s, the chemist’s, or to buy some socks, you have to catch a bus.
Since the hairdresser’s departure, it’s me who does Gran’s sets. She sits in the kitchen with wet hair and passes me the curlers, one by one, as I wind her white strands around them and then skewer them with a plastic pin to hold them in place. When I’ve finished, I pop on a hairnet and put her under the dryer, where she drops off after about five minutes, and then, once the hair’s dry, I unroll it, and it lasts until the following week.
Since my parents died, I have no memory of being cold. At home, it’s never less than a hundred degrees. And I can’t remember a thing from before they died. But that I’ll talk about later.
My brother and I grew up in old-fashioned but comfortable, softener-washed clothes. Without smacks or slaps, and with a mixing desk and LPs in the cellar for making a racket when we’d had enough of the silence of polishing-slippers sliding on parquet.
I would have loved to go to bed late, have grubby fingernails, and hang around empty lots, grazing my knees and cycling down hills with eyes closed. I would have loved to feel pain or wet my bed. But with my grandmother, no chance. She always had a bottle of antiseptic to hand.
Aside from Gran cleaning inside our ears with Q-tips throughout our childhood, and washing us twice a day with a cloth, and forbidding anything that could be dangerous, like crossing the road alone, I think that, since the death of her twins, she had waited for the day when Jules or I would finally look like our fathers. But it never happened. Jules has Annette’s face. As for me, I don’t look like anyone.
Despite being called Gran and Gramps, my grandparents are younger than most Hydrangeas’ residents. But I don’t know when one starts to be old. Madame Le Camus, my boss, says it’s when you can’t look after your home on your own anymore. That it starts when the car must stay in the garage because you’re becoming a danger to the public and ends when you break a hip. Personally, I think it starts with loneliness. When the other person has left. For heaven, or for someone else.
My colleague Jo says that you become old when you start to ramble on, and it’s an illness that can be caught very young. Maria, my other colleague, that it comes when you lose your hearing, and your keys, having to search for them ten times a day.
I’m twenty-one, and I search for my keys ten times a day.