Little hand on the 12, big hand on the 1
The class dispersed and Malone found himself alone. Half of the children were already lined up in pairs, forming a noisy caterpillar, waiting to go through a little iron gate behind the playground that led to the canteen. The other half were running towards their parents. Mothers mostly. The fathers tended to come in the mornings or evenings. Each child grabbed a hand or two arms, hugged a neck, or clung to a leg.
But not Malone. Not today.
“Be a good boy and wait here. They won’t be long.”
Clotilde, his teacher, smiled at him.
It was true: Malone did not have long to wait. Maman-da and Pa-di arrived just after the other parents had left. Maman-da was rarely late, but she usually came on her own to fetch him for lunch, not with Pa-di.
Malone ran over to Maman-da and grabbed her hand. He understood—they’d reminded him again that morning—that they had to talk to the teacher today at lunch about the stories he’d been telling. It was strange to go back into the classroom when it was empty, to have all the toys to himself.
“Mr. and Mrs. Moulin? Please, sit down.”
Clotilde Bruyère looked slightly embarrassed as she gestured to the only available chairs in the classroom, which were all of thirty centimeters high. Meetings with parents were often held here, and normally it did not pose much of a problem for the adults.
Normally.
On his Lilliputian chair, Dimitri Moulin—one meter eighty tall and weighing in at one hundred and ten kilograms—looked like a circus elephant perched on a stool. With his legs folded up, his knees were almost touching his chin.
Clotilde turned to Malone.
“Will you leave us for a moment, my dear? You can go and play outside for a bit. We won’t be long.”
Malone waited in the playground. He didn’t care. He’d deliberately left Gouti behind in the dolls’ corner, next to the blue bed. No one would notice his toy there, and Gouti would tell him everything afterwards. He looked longingly at the slide and the tunnel, where the big kids usually played and he was never able to. He thought about seizing this opportunity, running over there.
The sky was very dark, as if it were about to rain.
The toilets were a long way from the slide and the tunnel, a very long way, almost at the other end of the playground. If the rain suddenly started to fall, he wouldn’t be quick enough to escape the glass drops.
Then he heard Pa-di shout something, even though the classroom door was shut. Poor Gouti, thought Malone.
His toy was always a bit scared when Pa-di got angry.
Seated on the mat for car toys, Dimitri Moulin had unfolded his legs and was grinding his heel into the realistically printed houses, gardens and roads.
“Mrs. Bruyère, I’ll be blunt. I have better things to do than go back to nursery school! I’ve just got a new job. I had to negotiate with my boss to be allowed to start work at one today. I’m sure you don’t care—you’ll be paid every month until you retire, but that’s not true for me.”
The usual rant against employees of the state. Clotilde responded with silence. She wasn’t used to it yet—she’d only been a teacher for six years, and a headmistress for two—but she’d been warned about this when she started: it was a classic complaint, almost as common as moaning about the number of weeks’ holiday teachers were given. She had chosen to teach pre-school because she was gentle and patient. These qualities were also supposed to be useful for calming down angry fathers.
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about, Mr. Moulin.”
“So let’s get to the point then. Look, I’ve brought everything with me. This should save us a long chat.”
From the bag he wore over his shoulder he took out a series of cardboard folders.
“His birth certificate! Our family record book, stamped by the mayor’s office and the maternity ward. Photograph albums showing pictures of the kid since he was born. Go on, take a look. You really think he’s not ours?”
Amanda, sitting next to him, remained silent. Her eyes drifted over to the dolls’ corner. Malone had left his cuddly toy sitting on a high chair. Gouti stared at them as if he was absorbing every word of the conversation. As if he were spying on them, Amanda thought stupidly.
“Mr. Moulin,” the teacher said calmly, “we have never questioned the fact that Malone is your child. It’s just that . . . ”
“Don’t treat us like idiots!” Dimitri Moulin interrupted. “We understand perfectly well what that shrink was implying, that Romanian, Vasily whatshisname. And your insinuations too, those little notes left in my kid’s exercise book.”
Gentle and patient. Clotilde stuck to her strategy. After all, Mr. Moulin could scarcely be any harder to tame than Kylian or Noah, the two troublemakers in her class.
“Mr. Moulin, the reason I wrote those notes and suggested this meeting was simply that your son is saying things that might be described as surprising for his age, particularly when he talks to the school psychologist. I simply wanted to meet with you so that you could give me a little more information.”
“You’re talking like a cop!”
Clotilde moved forward a few centimeters and squatted down so that her eyes were level with Dimitri Moulin’s. She was used to living eighty centimeters above the ground. The bulk and height of this rhinoceros would not give him any advantage in her classroom. Quite the opposite.
The headmistress glared at Moulin.
“Will you please calm down. No one has mentioned the police. This is a school. My school. So, in the interest of your child, we are simply going to have a quiet discussion.”
Dimitri Moulin looked as if he wanted to get up from his midget chair and storm out, but his wife put a hand on his thigh to restrain him. He stared at the teacher defiantly.
“All right. You seem like a good teacher, after all. But as for that shrink, I just . . . ” He was silent for a moment. “Can’t parents refuse that kind of thing, their kid being seen by a shrink?”
“It’s complicated. It all depends on why . . . ”
“Well, doesn’t matter to me anyway,” Moulin cut in again.
He seemed to have mellowed. Maybe because he was actually quite attracted to this little woman who was standing up to him.
“After all,” he went on, “I know there’s something not quite right about the kid. He doesn’t talk much, he uses words that are complicated, there’s a bit too much going on in his head. If it’ll do him good to speak to someone, well . . . I’m glad. That he can speak to an adult, I mean. But this Vasily Dragonski . . . Don’t you have anyone else? Someone more . . . ”
“More what?”
“You know what I mean.” He laughed. “More French. I’m not allowed to say that, right?”
He leaned over and, pushing away the little cars, spread the photograph albums across the town printed beneath his feet.
“Anyway, you might as well have a look at them. So we haven’t come here for no reason.”
Clotilde turned her eyes to the documents.
“Vasily Dragonman is not under my authority. He reports directly to the regional education authority. I am here today as a mediator. We will discuss the matter and afterwards, I will provide him with my conclusions. It will probably be necessary for you to meet him again. Briefly.”
Dimitri Moulin seemed to be thinking. His wife spoke for the first time.
“You mean that the school psychologist can alert the authorities without even going through you?”
“Yes,” replied Clotilde. “If there’s any doubt about the child’s safety, he can speak first of all to the child welfare services, who will appoint a social worker . . . ”
“First of all?” yelled Dimitri. “What comes after that?”
Clotilde delicately removed a little fire engine that Moulin’s heavy shoes were threatening to crush. Then she said in her thin voice:
“Informing the police.”
“The police? You’re not bloody serious? For a kid who’s not even four years old and can barely string together three sentences?”
Clotilde rescued a second vehicle. She felt she had control of this conversation once more.
“I didn’t say we would do that,” she reassured him with a smile. “I can see that Malone is an adorable little boy who is growing up in the normal way and who is being perfectly well looked after. Besides—just between us—the last thing I want is the police opening an investigation, interrogating the children in my class and all their parents.” She leaned even further forward, her eyes fixed on his, her preferred position for addressing three-year-old big shots. “In a little village like Manéglise, no one wants that, do they, Mr. Moulin? So we are going to discuss this quietly and calmly, and you are going to try to explain why on earth Malone keeps telling us that you are not his parents.”
Dimitri Moulin opened his mouth to speak, but Amanda cut him off.
“Please shut up now, Dimitri,” she said, almost imploringly. “Shut up and let me speak.”
* * *
Outside, a first drop fell on the iron slide and trickled down to the sand.
A second. A third.
Each of them more dangerous than the last.
Malone had been lucky. None of the drops had touched him.
Not yet.
He took one last look at the classroom window. All their drawings were stuck to it, and their handprints. They had put their hands in a tray filled with paint and then pressed them against a sheet of paper.
His was bright red.
Behind the windowpane, they must be talking about him. And about his Maman, perhaps. Not Maman-da, but his Maman from before. Maybe about pirates too, and rockets and ogres. The adults knew about all that. He could only remember because of Gouti.
Another drop, landing on his trainer.
He’d only just escaped. Malone started to run.
Another twenty meters until he reached the door of the toilets.
Open the door and shut himself inside, as Maman had taught him.