There had been Christmas Eve, and Monsieur Desmedt with his arms around his waist. And then the search parties sent out to scour the woods and the area around Saint-Eustache . . .
He closed his eyes and waited for the dizzy spell to pass, then tried again. Leaning against the wall and the furniture for support, he stumbled out onto the landing, opened the bathroom door and, propping himself against the toilet, opened the medicine cabinet.
Empty.
He clearly remembered pills scattered over his nightstand before he fell asleep, some had even landed on the floor . . . Where were they now?
With difficulty he made his way back to his room.
It was a relief to be able to lie down.
“Here you go . . .”
Madame Courtin had brought up a tray with a steaming bowl of broth which she set down carefully on the bed.
“I don’t feel that hungry,” Antoine said weakly.
“I’m not surprised, that’s always the way with a stomach upset, you can feel peaky for ages, you don’t feel like eating.”
The television blaring in the living room worried Antoine. Madame Courtin was not in the habit of having the T.V. on in the middle of the morning, in fact it went against her principles. Staring at that screen makes people stupid!
“Docteur Dieulafoy said he’d come by again this evening to check you’re alright. I told him not to bother, I mean, obviously you’re fine, we’re hardly going to make a big fuss over a little tummy upset. But he insisted – you know what he’s like, that man, so conscientious . . . So, anyway, he’ll be back later . . .”
Madame Courtin was poking around the room, going from the chest of drawers to the window, pointlessly opening and closing doors, trying to busy herself, to seem composed, but her obvious unease belied the firm, confident voice with which she said:
“I mean, would you credit it! Selling me a capon that’s gone off! Oh, he’ll be hearing about this from me, let me tell you!”
Antoine noticed that she avoided using Monsieur Kowalski’s name. This was just like her, if you did not talk about something, that something did not exist.
“Anyway,” Madame Courtin went on, “a little tummy upset is hardly worth making a song and dance about. That’s what I said to Docteur Dieulafoy, he was prattling on about hospital and blah, blah, blah, but in the end he gave you something to make you vomit and that was that.”
It was as though she wanted him to back up her story.
“An emetic, they call it, apparently. News to me . . . So you don’t fancy any of this broth, then?”
After this long rigmarole that Antoine had not really understood, Madame Courtin seemed suddenly in a hurry to leave.
“Want me to turn off the light? You should get some rest . . . Sleep, now that’s the best medicine.”
She switched off the light and pulled the door to after her.
In the dim bedroom all that could be heard was the whistle of the wind as it grew stronger. Perhaps a storm was brewing.
Antoine tried to make sense of everything he had seen and heard, the doctor’s visit, his mother’s ramblings . . . What did it all mean?
He fell asleep.
*
He was woken by the ringing of the doorbell.
He did not know whether he had been dozing or whether he had been asleep for hours. He threw off the blankets, went and stood by the half-open window, and then he recognised the doctor’s voice.
Madame Courtin was whispering.
“Wouldn’t it be better to just let him sleep?”
But then the doctor’s footsteps on the stairs.
Antoine got back into bed, rolled onto his side and closed his eyes.
The doctor came into the room and stood motionless by the bed for a long moment. Antoine anxiously tried to regulate his breathing. How do you breathe when you’re asleep? He adopted a long, slow rhythm that he thought matched a sleeper’s breathing.
After a while the doctor stepped forward and sat in the same spot on the bed as he had on his first visit.
Antoine could hear his own heartbeat and the howling wind outside.
“If you’re worried about anything, Antoine . . .”
He spoke in a quiet, calm, confiding tone. Antoine had to listen hard to understand.
“. . . you can call me any time. Day or night. You can come and see me, you can phone, whatever you like . . . You’re bound to feel weak for a day or two, then things will start to get back to normal and maybe when that happens, you’ll want to talk to someone . . . Nobody’s going to force you, it’s just that . . .”
The words came slowly, the doctor’s sentences did not end but simply faded in the room like an insubstantial vapour.
“If I’d admitted you to hospital . . . things would have been very different, you realise . . . But now, as things stand, well, I don’t really know how to . . . And that’s why I came round to tell you that, whatever happens, I mean, if something happens, you can come to me, you can call me . . . any time. That’s all. Just to talk. Any time at all.”
Neither Antoine nor anyone else in the village had ever heard Docteur Dieulafoy speak at such length.
He sat in silence for a while to allow Antoine, if he were listening, time to take in what he was saying, and then he got up and left as he had come. Like an apparition.
Antoine could not comprehend it. Docteur Dieulafoy had not spoken to him, he had whispered a lullaby. He did not change his position. He lay there and let himself be carried away by sleep, forcing himself to ignore the wailing of the wind as it echoed in his bedroom: the harrowing cry of a thousand voices . . .
Antoine!
When he woke again he was certain that it was late, even though downstairs the television was still on.
The events of the day before came back to him in all their clarity. The search parties setting out, the pills, the doctor’s visit . . .
He should have run away.
Another memory comes back to him: he had wanted to run away.
He got up, he felt weak but he could stand. He knelt and groped under his bed. Nothing. Though he was certain – absolutely certain – that he had shoved his rucksack full of clothes there. And the shirt he had screwed into a ball.
He leapt to his feet and searched through the chest of drawers: everything was back in its place. His Spiderman action figure had been placed on top of the globe. He opened the drawers of his desk. The papers he had hidden there were gone.
He needed to be sure in his own mind.
He opened the door of his room a chink and silently tiptoed down the stairs. He could hear the soft voices of the television. He crept into the hall and, screwing up his face, he opened the top drawer of the console table. His passport and the Travel Authorisation for a Minor were right there, exactly where they had been . . .
He was convinced his mother had cleared the pills from the nightstand, unpacked the rucksack he obviously intended to use in his escape, replaced his passport and his savings book . . .
Why did she think Antoine wanted to run away? How much did she actually know? Probably nothing. But she had probably deduced the essentials. Did she suspect that Antoine was linked to Rémi’s disappearance?
He closed the drawer, took one step, then another. Peering in, he saw his mother in front of the television, her chair pulled up to the screen like a blind woman. She was watching the midnight news on the local channel. The sound was turned down so low as to be barely audible:
“. . . of the child who disappeared on Thursday afternoon. Regrettably, a search of woodland areas near the town turned up no new evidence. It proved impossible for the search parties to comb the area where the child might have strayed to in a single day, in particular the woods near Saint-Eustache, and therefore the gendarmerie has a second multi-agency search planned for tomorrow morning.”
Footage showed lines of people walking shoulder to shoulder, slowly and deliberately.
“The initial focus of the sécurité civile, a pond n
ear Beauval, is being dragged by divers who will resume their search tomorrow.”
Seeing his mother hunched anxiously next to the television made Antoine’s stomach lurch and once again he wished he could die.
“Witnesses are requested to call the Freephone number at the bottom of the screen. Just a reminder that, when he disappeared, six-year-old Rémi Desmedt was wearing . . .”
Antoine crept back up to his room.
One day had not been enough for them to scour the woods, a second search had been scheduled. For tomorrow morning.
They would go back.
For Antoine, there would be no second chance.
He wished that the storm, which had been threatening for the past two days, would finally break.
Outside the wind lashed harder, rattling the shutters on their hinges.
11
The gale continued to gain in strength throughout the night, becoming so fierce that, by the early hours, the torrential downpour dwindled as the rain-swollen clouds were forced to admit defeat.
Across the landscape, the storm left the dramatic scar of its passage. Rather than waning, as had been expected, it laid siege to the region like an invader confident of his superior power.
The whole town was awake.
Antoine felt the weight of the exhaustion that had accumulated over the past two days, especially as he had not slept a wink.
He had spent the night imagining what form it would take, this catastrophe that was now inevitable. He lay on his bed and listened to the storm rage. Behind the closed shutters the windowpanes clattered, wind gusted into the chimney making a dull roar. He felt there was a confused correlation between this house as it shuddered beneath the force of the gale and his own life. He also spent a lot of time thinking about his mother.
She knew nothing specific about Antoine’s role in the disappearance of Rémi; anyone else would be plagued by gruesome images, by the sheer horror, but Madame Courtin had her own way of dealing with things. Between the facts she found disturbing and her imagination, she built a thick wall that filtered out everything but an inchoate dread that she could mollify thanks to an extraordinary list of habits and mysterious rituals. Life always triumphs in the end, this was a favourite expression. It meant that life must go on, not as it is, but as she might wish it to be. Reality was simply a matter of willpower, it was pointless to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by trivial worries, the easiest way to be rid of them was to ignore them, it was a flawless approach, her whole life was proof that it worked perfectly.
Her son had tried to kill himself by swallowing the contents of the medicine cabinet, fine, that was one way of seeing things. But if you considered it as a tummy upset brought on by a capon from Monsieur Kowalski, tragedy was reduced to a minor setback, a bad patch to get through, two days sipping broth and everything would be fine.
Antoine’s thoughts were difficult to dissociate from the murky half-light, from the noise of the wind, shrieking like some colossal engine, that threatened to topple the house.
He decided to go downstairs. He wondered whether his mother had been to bed. She was wearing the same clothes as on the day before. In the living room the television was still on, the sound turned down as low as possible.
The breakfast she had made, the table laid with plates and cutlery, were just the same as every morning, but she had not opened the shutters, it was like having breakfast in the middle of the night, the wind whipping through the slats set the ceiling light swinging.
“I wasn’t able to get them open.”
She looked at her son in terror. She had not said good morning, had not asked how he was feeling . . .
She was astonished that she had not been able to open the shutters. There was an anxious tone in her voice. The weather forecast announcing serious storm damage would not be appeased by a bowl of broth . . .
“Maybe you’ll manage better than me.”
Antoine knew that this request masked a number of others that he did not quite understand.
He went to the window, turned the handle, and the window flew open with such force that he almost fell over backwards. Only by leaning all his weight on the handle did he manage to get it closed again.
“Probably best to wait till it dies down.”
He sat down to breakfast. He knew his mother would ask him no questions, she was busy buttering a biscotte the way she always did, the jam was in its usual place on the table. Antoine was not hungry. After a few minutes of a silent conversation that exemplified their mutual incomprehension, he cleared away his plate and went back to his room.
The PlayStation had been packed away in its box. He took it out and started a game, but still he felt anxious.
When he heard the television downstairs being turned up, he went onto the landing and cautiously went down a few steps. A severe thunderstorm warning had been issued with strong-gale force winds expected over the coming hours. People were advised to remain indoors.
What they were experiencing now was just the beginning. Confirmation of the forecast came less than an hour later.
The windows shook like leaves, the wind whistled through every crack, the whole house echoed with ominous groans and creaks.
Concerned, Madame Courtin went up to the attic, but did not stay there for more than five minutes. The roof tiles rattled, several leaks had sprung and water trickled down the walls and onto the floor. When she reappeared she was deathly pale.
At the first loud crash, she started and let out a scream. It came from somewhere to the north of the house.
“Stay here,” Antoine said. “I’ll go and check it out.”
He slipped on his parka and his shoes. Madame Courtin would have tried to stop him, but she was petrified with fear, she did not realise the danger he was in until he opened the door. She shouted to him but it was too late, he had already pulled the door shut, he was outside.
The cars parked along the road had begun to slalom ominously. Thunder growled like a vicious dog about to attack, a continual barrage of lightning bolts strobed the houses with a bluish light, some of the roofs were beginning to shear.
On the far side of the street, two telegraph poles were lying one on top of the other. Whipped up by the wind, a jumbled wreckage of tarpaulins, buckets, and wooden boards hurtled past, close enough to touch. A yowl of fire engines could just be heard, but it was impossible to tell where they were headed.
The wind was powerful enough to toss Antoine to the far end of the garden and indeed beyond. He had to try and cling to something solid, but looking at the cars and the rooftops, it was obvious that nothing could be considered solid under these conditions. Bent double, he crawled, hand over hand, to get to the other side of the house. He glanced around a corner and barely had time to duck as a whirling sheet of corrugated iron flew past, narrowly missing his head. He was on his knees, keeping his head as low as possible and shielding himself with his arms.
The fir tree had fallen across the garden. A fir tree that was almost ten years old, planted one Christmas, Antoine remembered photographs of the family gathered for the ceremony – his father had still been living with them at the time.
The whole village seemed to buckle, warping and bending as though about to be uprooted.
Antoine stood up, dropping his guard only for a moment, but this was enough for a mighty gust to lift him off his feet. He landed almost a metre away, scrabbled for something to hold on to, but he was struggling against an overpowering force, he rolled over and over until he was slammed against the garden wall. He huddled against it, his head between his knees. He could barely breathe.
The task of making it back to the front door seemed hopeless.
Seeing the Desmedts’ house reminded him that a second search had been scheduled for that morning. By now everyone should have been heading towards Saint-Eustache, but no-one was outdoors, it would have been impossible to walk as far as the end of the street.
He crawled to the fence that separated their garden from t
he Desmedts’ and peered through the slats. The swing set had toppled onto the grass. Everything else had been blown away and was lying against the far wall. Including the rubbish sacks. The bag containing Ulysses had burst. The dog’s corpse protruded from the ripped plastic, a mass of dark, blood-spattered fur. Antoine stared in horror, then turned back towards his own house. The satellite dish mounted on the corner was swaying dangerously.
But for the fact that his mother would worry if he did not come back, he would gladly have stayed there huddled against the low wall, watching as, piece by piece, the house was swept away.
Finally he laid himself flat on the ground to give the wind as little purchase as possible, and he crawled. Crossing the garden like this took him several minutes. He managed to get around to the other side of the house and enter by the back door, which was a little more sheltered. By the time he got inside, he was exhausted.
His mother rushed to him and hugged him. She was breathless, as though she was the one who had been outside braving the storm.
“My God! How could I let you go out in such weather!”
It was impossible to know when the gales would subside. By now it had stopped raining, the storm had passed, there was only the wind which raged on, growing harder and faster with every passing minute.
With the windows and the shutters closed, they lived blindly, like people under siege, listening to the house creak like a ship tossed on stormy seas. At 11.00 a.m., the television sputtered out, the satellite dish had probably been ripped away. An hour later it was the electricity. The telephone line was dead too.
Madame Courtin sat in the kitchen, her hands cradling a mug of cold coffee. Antoine felt unexpectedly protective, he did not want to leave her alone so he came and sat beside her. They did not talk. His mother’s face was so ashen that he felt an urge to lay his hand on hers, but he held back, not knowing what doors such a gesture might open, given the circumstances . . .
He knew there was a chink in the living-room shutters through which he could look out at the street. He was stunned by what he saw. The two cars that had been there earlier were gone, a tree several metres high was rolling down the road at terrifying speed, smashing into walls and gates. The peak of the storm lasted for three hours.
Three Days and a Life Page 10
