No and Me Read online

  ‘No, listen to me. Your mother’s not strong enough to see you. Maybe she’d really like to, but she can’t.’

  ‘She doesn’t give a fuck, Lou. She doesn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘No, I’m sure that’s not true.’

  She’s not moving any more. We’ve got to get out of here.

  ‘You know, with parents and children it’s always more complicated than that. But, hey, we’re together, you and me, aren’t we? You’re the one who said it. Come on. Get up and let’s get out of here.’

  We go down the last flights. I’m holding her by the wrist. In the street the sun casts our shadows on the ground. She turns back to the building. We glimpse the face of a child at the window just before it disappears. We walk back to the station through deserted streets. I think I can hear the sound of a market in the distance.

  .

  Chapter 33

  Aunt Sylvie’s husband has met someone else and wants a divorce. My father has decided we’re going to stay with her for three or four days during half-term in February. She needs support. For once my mother agrees. Even if it’s been ages since we’ve left Paris, I feel a bit annoyed. Especially as No can’t come with us because of her job. I tried to suggest that I could stay with her because of all my schoolwork, I even claimed that I was in the middle of a few personal experiments which I couldn’t leave, but they wouldn’t hear of it. That evening I heard my father and mother discussing whether they could leave No alone in the house. They were speaking softly, so I couldn’t hear everything, just a few scraps from which I worked out that my mother was inclined in favour and my father wasn’t too sure.

  We’re in her room. There are clothes all over the floor and the bed’s unmade. No’s leaning on the window ledge smoking.

  ‘We’re going away for a few days next week to stay with my aunt in the Dordogne. My father’s sister. She’s dead sad because her husband’s dumped her. It’s not easy, with my cousins and everything . . .’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘Not long. Just a few days. You can stay here, don’t worry.’

  ‘On my own?’

  ‘Well, yes . . . but it won’t be for long.’

  She’s quiet for a few seconds, biting her lip. I’ve noticed before that she can bite her lip till it bleeds when she’s annoyed.

  ‘But can’t you stay? Do you have to go?’

  Things like this break my heart in two. She throws her cigarette butt out of the window and lies down on the bed with her hands behind her head. She’s not looking at me. I stay with her and try to distract her. But floating there above us and growing stronger is the feeling I have that I’m abandoning her.

  .

  Chapter 34

  My father gave her a big speech about trust, responsibility, the future and all that stuff. If he’d had a microphone, you’d have mistaken him for the leader of a political party. You can tell that my father manages a team of twenty-five people at work. Sometimes that rubs off on the way he behaves at home. He loves schedules, plans, graphs. We’re lucky he doesn’t give us a performance review at the end of the year. When my mother was really ill it was more complicated, but now that she’s recovering, he’s cooking up a four-stage programme for the return to life.

  In my opinion he overdid it a bit with No, but she looked very serious, very concerned. She nodded, yes, she would take care not to lose the keys, yes, she would pick up the post, yes, she would call every day, yes, she had understood that she wasn’t to invite anyone round. I’ve noticed that when you tell people fifty times that you have faith in them, it’s often the case that you’re not too sure. But No didn’t look annoyed, just a bit worried.

  We’re leaving tomorrow. This evening No’s meeting me at Lucas’s for a little party. I’ve packed all my things, and everything’s sorted, apart from the fact that I’ve got a knot in my stomach. I don’t know what it’s made of, but it’s a knot that makes me scared or worried or both. No rings the doorbell. She’s managed to get away from work. When Lucas opens the door he goes, ‘Wow!’ She’s got her miniskirt on and is wearing make-up. It’s the first time I’ve seen her like this, perched on her high heels. She’s as beautiful as a Manga character, with her dark hair, pale skin and huge eyes. It’s been ages since the three of us were together. Lucas goes out to get her favourite cakes and some cider, which she loves. I have some too. At least three or four glasses. The warmth spreads through my stomach and the knot dissolves. We shut the curtains and settle down on the sofa like we used to, all snuggled up, and we put on a DVD that Lucas has chosen. It’s about a young deaf woman who works in a company where no one knows she wears a hearing aid. She takes on a trainee, he’s just got out of prison, and falls in love with him. He uses her to plan a crime because she can lip-read. She does everything he asks her to, becomes his accomplice, takes huge risks. She trusts him and loves him and everything, but the day of the break-in she discovers that he’s planning to leave without her. He’s got just one plane ticket. But she doesn’t leave him, she goes through with it and she’s the one who saves him. At the end he kisses her and it’s probably the first time a guy has kissed her. It’s a great scene because you know that he’s not going to leave her. He’s understood what she is – her strength and reliability.

  In the dark we didn’t notice the time go by. It’s very late when we leave Lucas’s. I phone home to tell them that we’re coming. On the way No doesn’t say anything. I take her hand.

  ‘Is something up?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t want to tell me?. . . Are you afraid of staying by yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know, if we’re together you need to tell me so that I can help you.’

  ‘You’ve already helped me a lot. That’s not the problem. But you’ve got your parents and your school and your family. You’ve got your life, you know what I mean?’

  I can sense my voice beginning to tremble.

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Yes, you know exactly.’

  ‘But you’re part of my life too. You know, you know I need you . . . and you . . . you’re part of our family . . .’

  ‘No, I’m not, Lou. That’s what you’ve got to understand. I’ll never be part of your family.’

  She’s crying. In the icy wind she can hardly control her sobs.

  We walk on in silence and I know that something’s happened to her, something that can’t be said, something that could push you over the edge.

  .

  Chapter 35

  My aunt Sylvie’s hair was all a mess. For once she didn’t make any remarks about my mother. She must have suddenly realised that you can’t always appear as though everything’s fine, take care of the cooking and the housework and the ironing, make conversation and everything. What’s more she’d lost her all-purpose smile and forgotten to put on her perfect lipstick that stays in place all day. To tell the truth, it made me sad to see her like that. She couldn’t even manage to shout at my cousins any more and they were making the most of it. Their room was messier than I’d ever seen it before and they hardly answered when she called them.

  No phoned as agreed the first two days. But on the last two days we didn’t hear from her. My father tried calling the house, but there was never any reply, not in the morning or the evening or even during the night. He contacted the neighbour downstairs. She listened at the door and couldn’t hear anything. He decided not to panic. We’d planned to go home on Thursday so that’s what we’d do. The time seemed endless to me. I didn’t even have the heart to play with my cousins, though they had heaps of ideas for making building sites in the garden, tunnels, irrigation systems, country trails, unbelievable things that you can’t do in Paris. I stayed inside reading love stories. My aunt has a whole collection of them – The Courage to Love
, Honeymoon in Hawaii, Beauty and the Pirate, Celia’s Shadow and heaps more. I agreed to go on a couple of walks, helped with peeling the vegetables and played Trivial Pursuit, just to put in an appearance. My father and mother’s time was completely taken up with my aunt. They spent hours talking; it was like a council of war.

  When I got in the car I gave a big sigh of relief, but then the little knot in my stomach came back, and throughout the whole journey it got tighter and tighter. I was looking out for the signs to see how far we were from Paris. We were getting nowhere, we were dawdling, and all the while I was sure we were in a race against the clock. Most people tell you after the event that they had a bad feeling. After it turns out that they’re right. But I had a bad feeling, a premonition in advance.

  My father played a classical music CD in the car. That annoyed me because he always plays sad things with clear voices that make you realise what a mess the world is in. My mother had fallen asleep with her hand resting on his thigh. Since she’s been getting better I can tell they’ve got closer. They kiss in the kitchen and laugh together with a kind of complicity.

  I was afraid. Afraid that No would be gone, afraid I’d be alone like I was before. Eventually I fell asleep because of the trees whizzing past like a garland without lights. When I woke up we were on the Paris ring road. It was very hot in the car. I looked at my watch – it was almost eight. No should be home. My father had tried to call her that morning, but there was no answer.

  The ring road was jammed, so we were crawling along at a snail’s pace. From the window I could see the camps of the homeless on the verges, under bridges. I saw their tents, tarpaulins, huts. I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know that it existed here on the edge of the city. My father and mother were looking ahead. I thought, people live there in all the noise of the engines and the filth and the pollution, in the middle of nowhere. People live there day and night, here in France at the Porte d’Orléans or the Porte d’Italie. Since when? My father didn’t really know. In the past two or three years the number of camps had grown. Now they’re everywhere, all around Paris, especially to the east. I thought, that’s the way things are. The things you can’t do anything about. We can put up 600-metre-high skyscrapers, build hotels underwater and artificial islands in the shape of palm leaves, we can invent ‘intelligent’ building materials that absorb organic and inorganic pollutants from the atmosphere, we can create robot vacuum cleaners and lamps that come on when you get home. And we can leave people to live on the side of the ring road.

  My mother opened the door and we went in. At first sight everything looked normal: the curtains were drawn, things were in place, nothing had disappeared. No’s door was open, her bed unmade and her things scattered about. I opened the cupboard to check that her suitcase was still there. It was. Then I saw the empty bottles that had been knocked over on the floor, four or five of them. My father was behind me and I didn’t have time to hide them. There was vodka and whisky and empty blister packs of pills.

  So I thought about adverbs and coordinating conjunctions that mark a rupture in time (suddenly, all at once), an opposition (nevertheless, on the other hand, however) or a concession (while, even if, all the same). I just focused on that and tried to count them off in my head, to make a list. I was incapable of saying anything at all because everything around me, the walls and the light, was getting foggy.

  Then I thought that grammar has already foreseen everything – disenchantment, defeat and how crap things are in general.

  When you can’t sleep at night, worries multiply – they swell and get bigger, and as time ticks by, the future grows darker, the evidence backs up your worst fears, nothing seems possible any more, nothing is calm or surmountable. Insomnia is the dark side of the imagination. I’m familiar with these black, secret hours. The following morning you wake up numb, the disaster scenarios have become fantastical. The day will wipe away the memory of them. You get up, wash and tell yourself that you’ll make it. But sometimes the night does announce the colour of the day, sometimes the night reveals the only truth: time passes and things will never be the same again.

  No got back in the early hours. I was sleeping lightly. I had left my door open so that I didn’t miss her. I heard the key in the lock, the noise light and very soft. At first it slipped into my dream. I saw my mother in my room. She was wearing the nightgown she had on in the hospital when Chloe was born, open at the front. Her feet were bare and white in the darkness. I woke with a start and jumped out of bed and went along the corridor, my hand sliding along the wall to guide me. Through the door I saw No taking off her shoes. She lay down with all her clothes on, without even bothering to take off her jeans. I went closer and could hear she was crying. It was like a sob of anger and powerlessness, a note that was both high and hoarse, unbearable, a note that could only be created in silence because she thought she was alone. I turned round on tiptoes. I stayed standing behind my door. I felt cold but I couldn’t move. I saw my father go into No’s room. I heard his voice for an hour, low and firm, but he was too far away for me to be able to understand, and No’s voice, lower still.

  I got up early. No was still asleep. Later that morning she had an appointment with her social worker. She’d written it weeks ago on the whiteboard beside the fridge. It was her day off. I found my father having his coffee in the kitchen. I poured some milk into a bowl, grabbed the cereal and sat down opposite him. I looked around. It wasn’t the right moment to continue my experiment on the absorbency of various brands of sponge or to start a new test of the power of cupboard door magnets. It was the moment to save what could still be saved. My father leaned towards me.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on, Lou?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear her come in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that the first time with the bottles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does she have problems at work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has she talked to you about it?’

  ‘A bit. Not really.’

  Some days you feel like words could take you down a slippery slope and make you say things that it would be better not to.

  ‘Is she still going to work?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You know, Lou, if this doesn’t work out, if No doesn’t respect our life, if Mum and I decide that it’s not good for you, that it’s putting you at risk, she can’t stay. That’s what I told her.’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could see time ticking by, and No still hadn’t got up, though she had an appointment with her social worker. I could see the moment coming when my father would look up at the clock and think to himself, there’s the proof that it’s not working, that it’s getting out of hand, that we can’t count on her any more. I got up and said, ‘I’ll go and wake her. She asked me to.’

  I went over to her bed. There was a smell I couldn’t quite place, a smell of alcohol and medicine. Without meaning to, I trod on things lying about on the floor. When my eyes began to get used to the dark I saw that she had rolled herself up in the bedspread. I shook her gently and then more firmly. It took her a long time to open her eyes. I helped her change her T-shirt and put on a pullover. I heard the front door slam as my father went out. I went back to the kitchen to make coffee. I had the entire day ahead of me. I would have liked to call Lucas but he was spending the whole holiday at his grandmother’s.

  No eventually got up, but she’d missed her appointment. I took a cloth and wiped the magic slate clean. I put on the radio to cover the silence. Later she locked herself in the bathroom for two hours to take a bath. We couldn’t hear anything apart from the sound of the hot water from time to time. In the end my mother knocked on the door and asked if she was OK.

  Around lunchtime I found her in
her room and tried to talk to her, but she seemed not to hear me. I wished I could shake her with all my might, but instead I just sat opposite her and didn’t say anything. Her eyes were vacant.

  It made me think of the way Mum looked after Chloe died, how her eyes fell on objects and people. It was a dead look. I thought of all the dead looks on Earth, the millions, without a spark or light, lost looks that only reflect the complexity of the world, a world saturated with sounds and images and yet so empty.

  .

  Chapter 36

  No has changed job at the hotel. Now she works nights. She works behind the bar till 2 a.m. and stays on until morning to let guests in. It pays better. She gets tips. For the past week my father’s been bumping into her in the hall downstairs as he goes off to work. Often he helps her upstairs. She collapses on the bed, never takes off her clothes. One time he picked her up in the hall, her tights torn and her knees all scratched. He carried her upstairs, put her head under the shower and then helped her into bed.