Chapter 4
Chez Josiane
You’re picking up where you left off.
On Friday the first of May it has been raining since morning, and I've finished.
The house is empty. Not quite: I've kept the bed in the spare room, the kitchen table, two chairs, the stove, the radio. Everything else has gone to the Red Cross, to Josiane's niece, to the tip at Philippeville, where a man in an orange vest helped me heave the old sideboard into the skip for bulky waste, saying it was good oak all the same, and a shame. I said yes, it's a shame. I kept the Delacre tin. I put it back under the sink, behind the cleaning things, where it was. I don't know why. It seemed to be where it belonged.
On Monday I'm due back at work. The firm has an engagement with a medical supplies wholesaler in Zaventem, a three-week audit, and I'm leading it. Samir sent me a message at noon: Coming home this weekend? I haven't answered. I don't know what I'm going to answer.
Jeanne's exercise book is in my bag. I don't let it out of my sight. I take it to the tip, to the bakery, to the toilet. I've read it three times. I've made an Excel table on my laptop, because that's what I do when something is too big for me: I put it into columns. Date. Observation. Injury. Explanation given. Witness. Two hundred and fourteen rows. In the witness column, my mother's name comes up often. Sometimes Dr Gillain's. Once, Mrs Bertrand's, my teacher in fifth year.
I don't know yet what I'm going to do with it. I only know I can't put it away.
At seven in the evening I'm hungry, and there's nothing left in the house. I put on my raincoat and walk down to the chip shop.
Chez Josiane is a brick shack on the corner of the square, with a white-tiled front and a neon sign whose J has been flickering since I was ten. Inside, three Formica tables, a counter, a television on a wall bracket showing a match with the sound off, and the smell. The smell of beef dripping, vinegar and mayonnaise that catches you by the throat as you come in and stays in your hair till the next day. I loved that smell. I still do. It's absurd, but it's one of the happiest things of my childhood: a cone of chips at Josiane's, on a Friday, with Jeanne, before he banned me from her house.
It's busy. It's the first of May; nobody's working and nobody feels like cooking. Two workmen in sweatshirts are leaning on the counter waiting for their order, men of about thirty, broad, with cement dust in the creases of their hands. On the backs of their sweatshirts is a logo I know: a stylised trowel inside a triangle, and underneath, DELCOURT CONSTRUCT.
I order a medium cone, andalouse sauce. Josiane winks at me as she takes my money. I sit at the table at the back, against the wall, facing the door. I always sit facing the door.
The workmen are talking about the sports hall.
They're not loud, but the chip shop is small and I don't have to try. They finished the sports floor last week. Still to do: the stands, the signage, and the letters on the front.
“Brushed stainless steel,” says the taller one. “Sixty centimetres high. The boss picked them himself out of a catalogue. Took him three weeks to decide on the font.”
“The what?”
“The font, you muppet. The style of the letters.”
“He's proud, eh.”
“He's earned it. Thirty years he's been paying for everyone's kit. My lad got his football boots for free last year. Never asked anyone for anything.”
“True enough, he's a good sort.”
“He's a good sort. Remember when he redid old Ma Wautelet's roof for nothing after the storm?”
I eat my chips one at a time. They're too hot. I burn the tip of my tongue and keep going.
“On the fourteenth,” says the shorter one, “apparently the minister's coming.”
“What minister?”
“Dunno. A minister. Sport, something like that. From the Region.”
“For Roger?”
“For the hall. But yeah. Same thing.”
Josiane puts their order on the counter, two trays of chips, two frikandels, one mitraillette. They pay. On his way out, the tall one holds the door for a man coming in and claps him on the back as he passes.
“All right, Kev.”
“All right.”
I don't recognise him straight away.
He's thirty-six, I'll find out later, and he looks fifty. He's thin, not a sportsman's thinness, shoulders hunched, cheeks hollow, a badly shaved greying beard and a delivery driver's cap, a blue one with a parcel company's logo on it. His hands are in his jacket pockets. He orders a frikandel, nothing on it, and stands at the counter waiting, watching the silent television.
And then he turns his head and sees me.
He looks at me for a long time. Not the way a man looks at a woman in a chip shop. The way you look at a photograph when you're trying to find someone in it. He frowns. He blinks. And something crosses his face, a shadow, very fast, that I recognise without yet knowing where from.
“Lise? You're Lise Dervaux?”
“Yes.”
“Kevin. Kevin Lambot. I was… you were in third year of primary school when I was in sixth. At the village school. I played football. You used to come to the pitch with your mum sometimes, on Sundays, for the matches.”
And then I can see him. A fair-haired boy, fast, who scored all the time. They called him Lambot the Rocket. His hair was almost white and his knees were always grazed. Everyone said he'd go to Standard, or Charleroi, that the scouts came to watch him specially. He was the star of the youth club. He was the chairman's pride and joy.
“I remember,” I say. “You were very good.”
He smiles. The smile doesn't reach his eyes.
“I was very good,” he repeats. “Yeah.”
Josiane puts his frikandel on the counter. He pays with coins he counts out in his palm. He doesn't leave. He stands there holding his tray, and then he comes over to my table and sits down opposite me without asking if I mind. He puts the tray down without opening it.
“I heard about your gran. I'm sorry. She was kind. She used to give me buttons for my jackets when I tore them off playing football. She'd never let my mum pay.”
“Thank you.”
“How long are you staying?”
“I don't know.”
He nods. He looks at his hands. They're rough hands, nails bitten to the quick, and a wedding ring he no longer wears whose white mark still shows on his finger.
“You going to the opening?” he asks.
I don't answer straight away.
“I don't know,” I say at last.
“Everyone's going. My daughter too. She's nine. She wants to play football. At the club.”
He says it in an odd voice, a voice a little too flat, like someone reading a text out loud.
“She wants to play at the club,” he says again.
And then he says:
“You know he used to run training camps? Weekends. For the best ones. His Hopefuls, he called us. He'd take us in the company van. Friday night. We slept in the site hut behind the depot, there were camp beds. He said it was to build team spirit. He said we were his Hopefuls.”
I say nothing.
“He'd have us running round the lake at Eau d'Heure on Saturday morning. And in the evening…”
He stops. He looks at the television. A player in a white shirt collapses in the penalty area and rolls about on the grass, and the referee blows his whistle, and nobody hears the whistle.
“I was eleven the first time,” he tells the television.
And then he gets up. He picks up his tray. He says goodnight to Josiane, and he goes out.
I stay where I am.
I look at the door that's closed behind him. My chips are going cold. The fat is turning white at the bottom of the cone. Josiane is wiping her counter, slowly, in circles, and she doesn't look at me, and I understand that she heard as well, or heard enough, and that she has chosen to wipe her counter. It's the same movement as my mother at the sink. She's rubbing the same spot.
I get up. I pick up my bag, with the exercise book in it. I go out.
He's there, under the chip shop awning, two metres from the door. He hasn't gone. It's raining harder. The flickering J turns his face yellow, then black, then yellow. He's lit a cigarette and isn't smoking it: he holds it between two fingers, his arm by his side, and it burns down on its own in the rain, the ash growing longer and dropping.
I stop beside him. We both look out at the square. On the other side, on the cork board by the church porch, the poster for the opening is still there, buckled, darkened by the rain. Only the big letters can still be read. ROGER DELCOURT. 14 JUNE.
He doesn't look at me. He speaks very quietly, so quietly the rain swallows half the words.
“Why did you leave, at seventeen? Everyone said you didn't get on with him. That he was too strict. That you were a difficult teenager. That's what he said at the club. He said: my stepdaughter's giving us a hard time, she makes things up, she's not well, don't listen to her.”
I don't answer.
The cigarette burns down to the filter. He drops it in a puddle. It goes out with a small hiss.
And at last he turns his head towards me. His eyes are red, but he isn't crying. He has the face of an eleven-year-old boy in the body of a worn-out man, and he asks me the question that nobody, in seventeen years, has ever asked me. Not my mother. Not the doctor. Not the social worker. Not me.
He asks it in two words. He doesn't say what. He doesn't need to say what.
“You too?”