The Penalty Area

by Alain Gillot

  “I’ll contact my sister, I’m sure there’s been some misunderstanding.”

  “Your mother’s leaving day was scheduled a long time ago.”

  “I told you I’ll contact my sister.”

  “We really can’t keep her, you know.”

  “Leave me a number and I’ll call you back.”

  Immediately I’d hung up, I started going through the numbers. Madeleine had better answer me, and quickly.

  “Sorry to say this, Vincent, but you’ve been a bit strange for a while. And I’m not the only one to have noticed.”

  I looked up. I’d almost forgotten he was there. Meunier. “What do you mean?”

  “The deputy chairman didn’t much like the way you answered him after the match against Valenciennes.”

  “Oh, yes? Would he have preferred it if I’d told him lies?”

  “He’d have preferred it if you were pleased with the effort we make for young people in this club by giving them, a professional coach, who’s quite well paid, by the way.”

  “Ah, so that’s it.”

  “And apart from that, I don’t see your little prodigy anymore.”

  “First of all, he’s not my prodigy. He’s just my nephew, and he’s gone away with his mother.”

  “That’s a bit stupid, isn’t it?”

  “Nobody ever said he would stay. Can I go back to my boys now?”

  “You need to be more careful, though.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. You’re really not looking well.”

  Maybe he was right. Maybe the one thing I wanted was to chuck it all in. I looked him in the face and gave him a smile, then left him standing there, in his pearl gray suit.

  Since I’d been in charge of the under-16s, I’d never missed a training session, and I’d never been late. I thought they were going to tease me, but they didn’t. There were no comments, no nasty looks. They got down to the practice exercises I set them, as if everything was normal, they even seemed to apply themselves more than usual, and when the time came for the customary short match, Marfaing came up to me on behalf of the whole group.

  “Don’t worry about us, sir. We can do our two thirty-minute halves. If you have something to sort out, we can carry on without you.”

  For them to react like that, it must have been really obvious that I was worried. I placed myself behind the goal and called Madeleine on the three numbers she’d used lately. Her roommate hadn’t heard from her and was clearly waiting with some impatience for her to settle two late rent payments. The classmate she’d borrowed a phone from barely remembered her. The third number was Patrice’s. It was permanently engaged, but I didn’t give up and eventually managed to leave a message.

  29

  When I left the stadium, I had a vision of my almost empty fridge, and I immediately set off for the supermarket. There was no way I’d go back to the brasserie. I walked along the aisles, pushing the cart in front of me, staring straight ahead. I hardly knew what I was buying. I was on auto-pilot. I’d come level with the product and my hand would grab the pack and throw it in the cart before I’d had time to think. It was then that my phone vibrated.

  “Vincent?” It was Madeleine.

  I felt like yelling at her, but I stood there with the cell phone in my hand for a few seconds to calm down. “What’s this nonsense about our mother?”

  “I swear they gave me another date for her coming out. They really are idiots!”

  “You’d better call them as soon as you can and then go straight there, or they’re going to throw her out on the street.”

  “What? There’s no way I can move from here. Not for two days at least! I’m alone with all the building work, and Patrice is in Germany negotiating with a brewery.”

  “You deal with it, I don’t want to know.”

  “Vincent—”

  “No.”

  “Vincent, at least listen to me—”

  I hung up. The cart was almost full. I had enough to withstand a siege, which was what I was planning to do. I’d been had once, I wouldn’t be had again. I went through the checkout and crossed the parking lot to my car. I was loading my purchases in the trunk when my phone rang again.

  “Give me two days, Vincent,” Madeleine resumed. “Please. Two days to find a solution, and then I’ll leave you alone forever, you’ll never hear from me again. Two days, Vincent. Nobody can take my place. If there’s a problem on-site, we lose everything!”

  I kept quiet. She must have been wondering if I’d hung up. She started crying.

  “No, not that. Stop it right now.”

  I sat down on the edge of the trunk. I mustn’t forget what had happened with Léonard. How my sister, all because she was in trouble, had managed to screw things up for me.

  “Have you contacted anyone to take care of her after she leaves the hospital?

  “Yes. A woman who’s already taking care of her a little bit, and who seems nice. But I need to meet her to make the final arrangements. It can’t be done long-distance. It was planned for another date.”

  “Give me her number.”

  “She’ll tell you what she told me.”

  I paused to catch my breath. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t get over what I was about to say. “Give me the number. I’m going there.”

  “Vincent, I—”

  “Listen to me. I’m going to get her out of the hospital, take her home, and come to an arrangement with the caregiver. And that’s it. You come there, and then I’m out of it.”

  “You know, I—”

  “Give me the fucking number.”

  Once she’d given me the contact details for someone named Madame Robin, I hung up. I stood there in the parking lot, behind the car, the cart beside me. It was as if I was watching my own life unfold in front of me like a play. I was going to see Saint-Quentin again. All those years to get away from it, and I was going back. That barrier I had built, strengthened, every day, every hour, stubbornly, hadn’t been enough. In the end, I was only two hours’ drive from my childhood. What an idiot I was.

  30

  I set off without anything in my stomach. The sooner this business was settled, the better. It started raining before Amiens and I lost my way. I must have gone at least twelve miles too far. The town had changed a lot. I stopped in a service station and had a sandwich that had no taste. I finally spotted some signs pointing to the teaching hospital. It was a real treasure hunt, but just before two in the afternoon I drew up in the parking lot of the hospital.

  At reception, I was pointed in the direction of the office, where I had to answer questions I had no answer for. My mother’s medical record was a mess; she owed lots of money to the hospital, and nothing had been done according to the rules. Then I was told how to get to the oncology department, because before I could collect my mother, I had to speak with Professor Charlier, who had operated on her several times. I sat down in a waiting room with people who’d been through chemo. Opposite me, a five-year-old boy with a shaved head was doing a jigsaw puzzle.

  Professor Charlier saw me in his office. I was surprised by how cramped it was. He looked tired and overworked, but his eyes were piercing.

  “Are you the son?”

  He started by running through my mother’s medical history. He spoke concisely, without beating around the bush, and without taking refuge behind complex language. From the breast to the pancreas, the cancer had spread throughout her body over the years and become generalized. The professor had negotiated a few truces with the disease, but never gained a real victory. And now he was laying down his arms.

  “Another operation would be pointless. These days, society has realized that it’s more humane for the terminally ill to be with their families rather than in hospital.”

  I understood what he was saying, but wondered if there was a
nything humane about my return to Saint-Quentin. I struck me more as high-risk. I found myself in an elevator, holding the case history of Gabrielle Barteau, née Lemoine. I quickly looked through it and closed it again. I knew the ending.

  The floor was reserved for terminal patients. I got a better idea of why the hospital was in such a hurry to retrieve any bed they could. It was like a military hospital struggling to cope with the ferocity of the fighting. Stretchers blocked the corridor, cables hung from the ceiling, the staff seemed in a constant hurry. Suddenly I saw my mother. They had already taken her out of her room so that a nurses’ aide could disinfect it. She was waiting in a wheelchair, a blanket over her shoulders. She was wearing a wig, and the skin stretched across her face seemed to pull her jaw back, forcing her to keep her mouth open all the time. I came level with her and she looked at me with her little black eyes. She didn’t show any surprise, let alone any emotion. She must have been warned, but that wasn’t the main reason for her attitude. She seemed to have come back from a long way away, from a country you can’t talk about to those who haven’t been there, a country that changes your perception of the present and considerably reduces its importance.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  There was no breath in her voice, but in spite of everything, it was audible, as long as there wasn’t too much noise around. A nurse arrived.

  “Where can I get some water?”

  “At the end of the corridor, on the right. You can keep the wheelchair to take your mother down, but you’ll have to leave it at reception. You can hire another one, if you want to.”

  I pushed my mother to the elevators. Being behind her suited me perfectly. It helped me get used to her. I could see the pins keeping the wig in place over her real, sparse hair. Her blemished hands. She drank from a paper cup at the water cooler, almost greedily.

  We crossed the lobby. The sun was low in the sky. I took hold of her emaciated body and placed it in the back seat. I gave up the wheelchair and hired another, since I had no choice. I had to struggle to fold it and fit it in the trunk. I thought I’d never manage. I sat down at the wheel, feeling that I’d gotten through the first stage. The hardest part was still to come. Saint-Quentin. I’d sworn never to set foot there again. But there it was.

  As soon as the car set off, my mother fell asleep. Before handing her over to me, the nurse had given her some tablets, two in one go, and had left me what remained in the box, advising me to use them sparingly. “She’ll sleep for a while now,” she said, adding, “Old people don’t like being moved.”

  31

  Entering Saint-Quentin, I found that the town hadn’t changed as much as all that, at least in the center, but when I got to the neighborhood where I’d spent my childhood, I revised my judgement. The little houses had almost all been torn down to make way for apartment blocks. A supermarket had replaced the movie theater, and the park had become a parking lot. I turned onto Rue des Cordiers. I had the impression it had shrunk, like my mother, and I almost missed the house. I had to back up to come level with it. How low and gray it was. Nobody had lived in it for a long time. Or maybe just ghosts.

  I searched in my mother’s bag for the keys. It was a complete mess in there. I thought I was going to have to wake her. Had she entrusted them to a neighbor? And then I came across them. They were in a separate pocket, along with a photograph of Léonard, her grandson. It was a poor-quality snapshot. He must have been three or four. His head already had that unusual shape, and his arms almost touched his knees. I quickly put it back and opened the door of the house.

  The smell caught me by the throat. So it was still there after all these years, that horrible sewer stench. My parents had endlessly called in professionals, had work done, the drains changed, but without any improvement. It was still a joke. I tried to concentrate on simple thoughts. I just had to settle my mother at home and leave again. I went to the room that had been my parents’. The mantelpiece was sagging from the weight of the ornaments and framed photographs. A pair of slippers lay on the carpet.

  I went to fetch my mother from the car. The back of her neck was resting on the top of the seat and she was breathing hard, with her eyes closed. I slid my hand between her back and the seat and lifted her without her waking up. I put her down on her bed, fully dressed, and covered her with a blanket, the first one I found. This was stage two, and the fact that she was knocked out with sedatives suited me just fine. Now I had to settle the question of the caregiver. I dialed her number to tell her I’d arrived at the house, which was what we’d agreed when I called her earlier in the day. But just as I was starting to relax, she told me she couldn’t be there for an hour because of another lady she was looking after who had fallen downstairs.

  A whole hour, waiting in this house. What the hell could I possibly do? I thought to call Madeleine again, but what would have been the point? To tell her I had the situation under control? To reassure her? Definitely not. To calm my nerves? Forget it. I picked up the bunch of keys again and opened the back door of the house. I felt my throat tighten. Nothing had changed, or almost nothing, although, of course, the garden was a bit overgrown. The flagstones, the scrawny rectangular lawn with a stone wall on one side and a hedge on the other, the cherry tree smack in the middle, the hut at the far end with an open shed next to it that served as a storeroom for tools, household products, anything that couldn’t be kept in the basement. Everything was the same. It was in this garden that the battle with my father had reached its height. Since I wasn’t allowed to go out, or have friends, I’d spend most of my time here, running and kicking a ball. I had a route that I repeated to the point of exhaustion. I’d start from the flagstones, with the ball at my feet. The wall was an imaginary teammate and I’d pass the ball to him. He’d return it with a greater or lesser degree of precision, depending on how the ball hit the stone. I’d dribble past the cherry tree and find myself in a position to shoot, facing the shed, which represented the goal and in front of which I’d placed the mower as a goalkeeper you really couldn’t get past. I indulged in this exercise so often that I became quite skilled, so skilled that I ended up knowing every stone in the wall off which the ball bounced and could pass to myself on the other side of the cherry tree and attempt a volley as I ran. In this way, I could sometimes put the ball away in the top corner—in other words, the corner of the shed—five or six times in a row. But of course I sometimes got carried away a little and my ball went too far and caused damage in the shed, which I’d then try to repair, without quite succeeding. One day, I even broke a pane of glass in the shed in a slightly too optimistic attempt at a lob. And when my father came home, I was given one of the most memorable beatings of our whole shared history, to the point where I pissed in my pants. In his eyes, I saw a desire to kill me, and he might have done it if I hadn’t answered him back, saying, “Go on, get it over and done with.” That stopped him in his tracks. As far as he was concerned, I’d once again tried to provoke him, and that’s what had driven him crazy. He just couldn’t conceive of the fact that a child needed to let off steam, that in being prevented from leaving the house he’d end up hitting the walls.

  I opened the door of the hut. It didn’t resist much. I had to bend a little to get inside. Here too, everything was in its place, even though dust covered the work bench, the pigeonholes, the wood stove, which my father lit in winter, at a time when he spent his weekends doing DIY projects. I wondered if the miniature garage was still there. I stooped to look under the work bench. There it was. I pulled it out from a pile of planks and put it down in front of me, blew on it, gazed at it. All that was missing was the ramp that had allowed the cars to park on the upper level, but the structure still held. I’d spent hours playing with that garage. My father had made it for me when I’d caught pneumonia in the schoolyard one very cold winter and had stayed home for several weeks in the middle of the school year, recovering.

  That was the kind of man he�
��d been, too. Sometimes I forgot it. But that was before he’d gone downhill. Before he went, in a few years, from being an indispensable foreman, proud of the trailers his workshop produced, to a traveling salesman, ripping off the innocent, and especially the poor, luring them with the virtues of buying on credit, until he again ended up unemployed. Maybe that explained why I was so mistrustful of the human race: the way my own father had changed, a transformation I’d lived though in real time during my childhood. If he’d been a violent person from the start, I think I could have accepted it, thought I’d been unlucky with the circumstances of my birth, and that was all. But this was different. I was present when the sickness started. I saw how easily madness could take hold of a man who built wooden garages, took you on his lap, read you stories. I watched my father become, almost in spite of himself, a wild animal whose only wish was to break me, lock me up, because he’d lost his job. Because society had destroyed him. If we were at the bottom of the heap, it meant you couldn’t trust anyone. Nobody was safe from degradation, and that included me. It all depended on circumstances. That meant you needed a referee and red cards, and always to stay on the alert.

  32

  I wondered if the caregiver would ever show up. The hour had long passed. And then I heard her parking her car, a door slamming. Through the kitchen window, I saw a short, round, redheaded woman, limping a little and carrying a shopping bag. No sooner did I open than she was already in the corridor. She was used to the house. I held out my hand, but she took my arm and kissed me.

  “She’s told me so much about you,” she said, “I have the feeling I know you. Is she asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “They must have given her Nordax. That’d knock a horse out. There’s a problem, Vincent. I prefer to tell you right away.”