All the Way (2 page)

Her mother brought her a stool from her shop; it was in the shape of a Coca-Cola can. And curtains with a Statue of Liberty print for her birthday. And Monsieur Bihotz gave her a poster that she loves, the word
WHY?
written above a dead soldier, but her mother says it's not appropriate for someone her age.

Rose's bedroom is completely different. It feels light, delicate. Even the walls are different, the shape of the bedroom is different. You'd need a completely new word, especially when you think about Monsieur Bihotz's bedroom, with the poster of France Gall and the stacks of
Sud-Ouest
newspapers and the filthy coffee cups.

Her father says that Rose's house smells like roses. The Bihotz house smells like dog and soup, or rather it used to smell like soup, when Madame Bihotz was there making it. Madame Bihotz's bedroom smells like something inert. Perhaps dust. Close up, the dust looks like bits of fluffy wool, or ash. At the shop her mother is always dusting, because of the passing traffic. Her mother claims the dust is getting worse.

Her parents' room is brown. The curtains are orange and floral. Two matching lamps sit on two velvet bedside tables. When her mother is home, she's always in bed. On her mother's side of the bed is a photograph of a little boy.

She puts her hand in front of her eyes and tries removing one of the items, the bed, a lamp, the photo, and the whole thing is transformed, it's no longer the same room, one tiny thing changes everything. And when her father is there, everything is different again.

She is lying on one of the school desks, the ones with a hole for the inkwell. Raphaël Bidegarraï, Christian Goyenetche, Nathalie, Rose, Delphine Peyreborde, the two Villebarrouin kids, all the Boursenave kids, even the little Lavinasse kids, everyone is there. Superimposed heads, pairs of eyes like pinheads, and each kid sticks a pin into her body. Red pins like the ones the teacher uses to fix the map to the wall—carefully, one by one, taking it in turns. The pressure beneath her hand increases, the hard, hot spot that is the point of it all, from pinprick to pinprick, the whole class, everyone around her. She's not tied down but it's impossible to move, just as impossible for her to get away as it is for a naughty student to escape the corner of the classroom. She submits and the pins stick into her one by one, slow, deep, her hand rubbing the vital spot, her legs spread wide apart, the unbearable pleasure has to last longer, and when the teacher sticks in the final pin, the indescribable instant of climax—she can fall asleep, in her childhood bed, the sheets scarcely rumpled.

She used to open the big bottle of
Bien Être
eau de Cologne and Madame Bihotz would spring out, flamboyant, like a genie, along with her whole bedroom and her nylon blouses. Then, even though she took deep breaths, Madame Bihotz would disappear into the static memory of a fat, seated woman. She had to put the lid back on the bottle and force herself to forget. And then start again, and Madame Bihotz would spring out again.

‘You can have her bedroom,' Monsieur Bihotz told her. Snuffling and hugging her tight. Hot and moist like a giant mouth.

On top of Madame Bihotz's bed there were three soft-toy dogs. And the real live dog in the middle, called Lulu, a bitch. Lulu was looking more and more like Madame Bihotz.

Are dead people still nice when they're dead?

She preferred Monsieur Bihotz's bedroom, with its posters of motorbikes and France Gall.

At 11.30 p.m. exactly, her father's plane flew over the rooftops. She snuggled up to Monsieur Bihotz. ‘It's Papa's plane,' she whispered, sucking her thumb, and he told her to stop, she was too old for that.

Papa's mother, whom we called Nannie, called her Nono, which has nothing to do with Solange unless you mean Soso. ‘Solange,' corrected her mother. ‘Yes, Nono,' repeated Nannie, and on it went. ‘How you've grown, Nono. What a cute little thing you are, Nono.' Nannie was like Papa, prone to shocking fits of rage: ‘Oh, come on! I'm not making things up. I know exactly what I'm talking about.' We were on our way back from her house in the Alpine sports car, complaining about how gaga Nannie was getting.

When Nannie died, Lulu started to look like her too, her chin receding (if dogs have chins), her forehead bulging more and more, the crown of her head hanging over her absence of a nose.

‘My poor Monsieur Bihotz. It's hard to lose your mummy. Young as you are. But it's also a relief. You'll have to pull yourself together, keep going. Our little girl is all upset, seeing you like this.'

When Monsieur Bihotz comes into their house, and sits there on the couch, so large and upright, it's difficult to breathe: the molecules of air don't know where to line up, the walls of the house wobble. The standard lamps, the pewter trinkets, the Toffoli lithograph: it's like Monsieur Bihotz is going to turn everything upside down. You can see his sleeveless T-shirt under the shirt he has put on specially.

‘Thank you for the flowers,' says her mother.

‘You cut your hydrangeas,' says her father.

Monsieur Bihotz and her father in the same room, under the same roof, like animals from different species, you don't know which one eats which, herbivore or carnivore, an ox in an anthill, a dog swimming between two herons—a catastrophe waiting to happen.

She asks if she can have the bunch of hydrangeas in her bedroom. ‘A real little housewife,' says her father, smiling.

(‘We're lucky', he'll say later, ‘if it'd been Christmas, he would have given them the gold-spray treatment and we would've been landed with them for six months.' ‘The worst,' her mother will add, ‘are the gladioli, you know, those red things he's got under his balcony.')

Monsieur Bihotz puts a single sugar cube in his mug, whereas at his place he puts two cubes in his teacup decorated with a bird. On his hairy face you can still see the marks from when she squeezed his blackheads. Through his shirt you can glimpse his tattoos, AC/DC on one arm, and a skull and crossbones on the other. On his chest he's got a tattoo of a tiger with a rose, but that one's hidden by his T-shirt.

‘He's got them on his cock,' says her father one evening, drinking rosé with his mates. ‘MY, it says, for M
UMM
Y. I've got the same thing, GT for G
ET FUCKED AND GET FUCKED AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO THINKS I
'
M A FUCKWI
T.'

Stories of kidnapped children. Of mothers running behind cars, screaming ‘my baby, my baby'. He forbids her to go out without him, even into the garden. She waits for him to wake up. Climbs on a chair and looks at the chickens, the rabbit cages, the logs of wood under a black tarpaulin. The tree with the name of an island,
albizia
. The rolls of old wire netting. The tyres. The pond at the bottom of the garden. And, at the other end, the bushes trimmed into spherical shapes, and the canna lilies. Big red flowers that look like the heads of turkeys. And the corner stubbornly covered in moss that Monsieur Bihotz weeds obsessively.

One day I'll build you a pool. You'll be able to go swimming.

From this window she can see her house. She left a naughty doll under her little desk, hanging off the trestle.

‘Without you,' says Monsieur Bihotz, ‘I would never get out of bed.' He makes her soldiers of buttered toast, with helmets drawn in the butter. He dips a soup spoon in a kilo-sized pot of jam. He makes her eat an apple. ‘Your mother said you eat fruit.' He pushes the peeler in and flicks out the core. He screws on the lid of the electric coffee grinder. There's a terrifying noise, the coffee beans jump around and disappear in a black cloud, and Lulu barks and barks. A giant hand screws on the roof of the house and she, Bihotz and Lulu disappear, pulverised.

In the afternoon he would reheat the same pot of coffee, and say, just like Madame Bihotz used to, ‘Boiled coffee is ruined coffee.' He also said, ‘The late Madame Bihotz.' That's what you say for dead people.

‘He's a little bit odd,' her mother used to say. ‘But what would we do without him.'

Given their timetables, it seemed just as easy for her to sleep at his place, during the week anyway.

After coffee, they would go down into the basement to shuck the ears of corn. Straddling the edge of the metal tank, scraping the corn cobs between their thighs. He pounded the grains with a mallet, for the ducks. She used to go home covered in splinters and with corn husks in her hair. ‘A real little farmer's wife,' her mother would say.

Madame Bihotz had been cremated. The late Madame Bihotz went up in smoke.

Madame Bihotz is in the urn. Monsieur Bihotz sleeps with it
, she explained to her parents.

Her father sighed. ‘Isn't there a proper nanny in the village?'

‘Well, you could always look after her yourself,' her mother replied.

‘Extroverted,' Rose says to her, ‘is when you laugh, you tell stories, you dance…Your father's extroverted. Introverted is when you're a bit sad, and you look mysterious. I'm introverted. My mother is extroverted. My father is introverted. Actually my family is the opposite of your family.'

It's five o'clock, hot chocolate time; Rose's mother is in the kitchen. ‘I've made a fruit loaf, girls! How are your parents? I stopped by the shop the other day. Your mother has some pretty things there at the moment.'

Rose's mother wears boots that click on the wooden floor. She sits down at the table, between the bowls of hot chocolate, wearing her short, fringed skirt. She lights a cigarette. You can see her underpants.

She's always doing disturbing things like putting a gentle hand on the back of her neck and whispering, ‘So, Solange, how are you?'

Yeah, okay.

Rose's mother always wears knee-high red boots, even at home. Those boots hold her to the floor like a magnetic field.

Her father calls her a madwoman: ‘She's a madwoman
and
an idiot.'

‘If there was a problem, you'd tell me, wouldn't you?'

Her head tilts beneath the gentle hand. And, inexplicably, she feels water pressing at the back of her throat and behind her eyes, as if she's a jug about to spill over.

Monsieur Bihotz picked her up at six o'clock. Rose's mother insisted he stay for a drink. Rose's father came in for a minute to say hello. He always made the same joke, in a nasty voice, about her and Rose, the princesses of Clèves, and no one knew what to say. Especially Monsieur Bihotz, who looked like he was encased in a bell jar that muffled his occasional utterances, and squashed him smaller and thicker. But with Rose's mother Monsieur Bihotz behaved more or less normally. He had a Ricard and she had a whisky, and they clinked glasses.

The others started in on her as soon as she arrived at school. It was inevitable. Everything was thrown off balance, tipped over. It was vicious: suddenly all eyes were on her. It didn't happen every day, but every day it was a possibility, and there was nothing to be done about it.

A gang formed around Raphaël. The only day she cried was when they all cut a big strand of hair off the side of her head. She didn't run away. They would have made even more fun of her. She examined herself in the mirror. What was the matter with her? Was it because she didn't go to Sunday school, or was it because of her father's
extroversion
?

And yet there were so many other crazy people. The Lavinasse family had nine children, two of whom lived with their cousins the Boursenave family, who had six children themselves, none of whom could read. On the topic of crazies, Madame Bihotz died enormous but respected by everyone.

The whole school was cascading over Solange like a liquid. When Concepción González turned up at school with her ringlets, her frilly dress and not a word of French, Solange had hoped that things would change. But Concepión González slipped on a pair of jeans two days later, spoke French by the end of the month, and became best friends with everyone. She had come to the shop for a communion present. ‘That little Spanish moppet is adorable. No silver spoon in
her
mouth. You'll have to be nice to her.'

Of course there was Peggy Salami, but she actually was retarded. On one of her hands she had a sixth finger without a fingernail or bones. And let's not forget the weirdest of the Boursenave sons, who clutched at his groin and rocked. Nor the Kudeshayan kids, who were called the Dogs' Arses and were darker than Africans but you must be
tolerant
.

The Boursenave kid shouted ‘Faggot!' to anyone who came too close.

She was waiting for Grade Six, to leave this dump. Leave primary school behind her like a lost world of dinosaurs and fossils.

‘You got scalped by the Indians?' Monsieur Bihotz asked her. And at night when he put her to bed: ‘School's not that easy.' What would he know. A tiny lifebuoy in a huge flood.

Rose seemed different too, when she wasn't at home. That rainy day, when Raphaël put Solange's head under the drainpipe as Roland Lavinasse and André Boursenave each pinned back one of her arms, that day of deafening rain, Rose, of course, was not holding her head under the water nor was she in the cluster of girls egging the boys on and laughing over the sound of the rain. But she had seen Rose looking across at her, standing back a bit, looking at her as if she didn't know her, or didn't recognise her. A bit upset, put out that she had got to this point, to the extreme limit of what is possible to look at, or away from. Her best friend Rose.

‘I like you because you're really intelligent,' Rose had said to her over their hot chocolates. ‘Even my father says so.' She was looking at her intently. ‘You've got that thing not many people have. My mother has it. I've got it, too. I can't really say your mother has it; I'm not exactly sure what it is that she's lacking. Perhaps she needs to leave your father?' Rose always said the most alarming things in that incomparable syntax and elegant accent.