The List of My Desires (4 page)

So I go into the newsagent’s and ask for a lottery ticket. Which? Which what? Lotto or EuroMillions? How would I know? Try EuroMillions, then, there’s a good jackpot this Friday, says the newsagent. I give him the two euros he asks for, the machine picks the numbers and lucky stars for me, then he gives me a ticket. The twins applaud.

At last! Our little Jo will have lovely dreams tonight.

I
slept very badly.

Jo was unwell all night. Diarrhoea and vomiting. He never complains of anything usually, but for some days now he’s been saying he aches all over. He trembles the whole time – and not because of my kisses on his burning forehead, or the way I massage his chest to ease his cough, or because I sing Maman’s nursery rhymes to soothe him.

The doctor came. It’s probably the A/H1N1 virus, he says, that horrible swine flu. Yet they follow all the safety regulations at the factory. Face masks, hand-washing with alcohol gel, airing the workshops regularly, no handshaking, no kissing – and no screwing either, Jo added two days ago, before it struck him down. Dr Caron prescribed him Tamiflu and plenty of rest. That will be twenty-eight euros, Madame Guerbette.

Jo fell asleep in the morning. Although he had no appetite, I went to get two butter croissants, his favourite, at François Thierry’s, I made a thermos flask of coffee and left it on his bedside table, just in case. I watched him sleeping for a little while. He was breathing noisily. Little beads of sweat kept forming at his temples, sliding down his cheeks, dropping on to his chest and dying there. I saw the new lines on his forehead, tiny wrinkles round his mouth like mini-brambles, the way his skin was beginning to slacken where it met his neck, just where he liked me to kiss him in our early days. I saw all those years of the past etched on his face, I saw time taking us further from our dreams and bringing us closer to silence. I thought my Jo looked good, sleeping like a sick child, and I liked the lie I had told myself. I thought that if the most handsome man in the world, the kindest man, the most
everything
man appeared right here and now I wouldn’t get up, I wouldn’t follow him, I wouldn’t even smile at him.

I’d stay here, because Jo needs me, and a woman needs to be needed.

The most handsome man in the world doesn’t need anything because he already has everyone and everything. He has his handsome looks, and the irrepressible, insatiable desire of all the women who want to feast on them and will end up devouring him and leaving him for dead, bones sucked dry, brilliant and white in the pit of their vanity.

Later I called Françoise. She said she’d tape a notice to my shop window.
Closed for two days on account of flu.
Then I posted the news on my blog.

A hundred emails arrived within the hour.

People offering to run the shop for me while my husband recovered. People asking me Jo’s size, so that they could knit him sweaters, gloves, caps. People wanting to know if I needed any help, blankets, someone to be with me, help out with cooking and housework, a friend to talk to at this difficult time. It was incredible. My
tengoldfingers
blog had opened up buried, forgotten stores of kindness. My anecdotes about cords, drawstrings and decorative thread seemed to have created a strong bond within a whole invisible community of women who, in rediscovering the pleasures of sewing, had suddenly replaced the loneliness of their lives with the joy of being part of a family.

Someone rang the doorbell.

It was a neighbour, an adorable dried-up little twig of a woman who looks like the actress Madeleine Renaud. She was bringing me some tagliatelle. I coughed – so much unexpected solicitude had me all choked up. I wasn’t used to being given something I hadn’t even asked for. I couldn’t speak. She smiled so sweetly. They’re made with spinach and fromage frais. Carbohydrates and iron. You need to keep your strength up, Jo. I stammered thanks, and my tears poured out, I couldn’t help it.

I
went to see my father.

After asking who I was, he wanted news of Maman. I told him she was shopping, she’d look in a little later. I hope she’ll bring me my newspaper, he said, and some shaving foam, I’ve run out.

I talked to him about the shop, and he asked me for the hundredth time if I owned it. He couldn’t get over it, he was so proud of me.
Jo’s Haberdashery, formerly Maison Pillard. Jo’s Haberdashery
, your name on a shop sign, Jo, fancy that! I’m so pleased for you. Then he raised his head and looked at me. Who are you?

Who are you? Our six minutes were up.

Jo was better. The Tamiflu, rest, the tagliatelle with spinach and fromage frais had got the better of his nasty flu. He stayed at home for several days doing a bit of DIY, and when he opened a Tourtel low-alcohol beer and switched the TV on one evening, I knew he was back to normal again. Life went on as usual, calm and quiet.

In the following days, however, the haberdashery shop was never empty, and
tengoldfingers
now had over five thousand hits a day. For the first time in twenty years I ran out of casein, corozo and bakelite buttons, cutwork and bobbin lace, cross-stitch and sampler patterns as well as pompons. Or rather
the
pompon, the only one in stock, because I hadn’t sold any pompons for a year. I felt as if I were in the middle of a soppy Frank Capra film, and I can tell you that a bit of slush sometimes feels really good.

When all that died down, Danièle, Françoise and I did up parcels of the blankets, sweaters and embroidered pillowcases that kind people had sent for Jo, and Danièle said she would take them to a charity shop run by the diocese of Arras.

But the most important event in that period of our lives, the one that sent the twins into a two-day fit of hysterics, was the fact that the winning EuroMillions ticket had been sold in Arras. In Arras, good heavens, the arse-end of nowhere, it could have been us! they cried. Eighteen million euros, so OK, not a huge win like the seventy-five million won on a ticket bought in Franconville, but all the same, eighteen million! In the arse-end of nowhere!

What sent them into even more of a flat spin, indeed left them practically apoplectic, was the fact that the holder of the winning ticket still hadn’t turned up.

And now there were only four days left before the win was lost and the money went back into the jackpot.

I
don’t know how I knew, but I did.

I knew, even without looking at the numbers, that it was me.

One chance in seventy-six million, and it happened to me. I read the framed box showing the numbers in the
Voix du Nord
. They were all there.

The 6, the 7, the 24, the 30, the 32. And lucky stars 4 and 5.

A ticket bought in Arras in the Place des Héros. For a stake of two euros. Picked at random.

18,547,301 euros and 28 centimes.

I felt faint.

J
o found me on the kitchen floor – just as I’d found Maman on the pavement thirty years ago.

We were setting out to go shopping together when I realised that I’d left our shopping list on the kitchen table. I went back for it while Maman waited for me outside.

When I went out again, at the very moment when I was stepping out into the street, I saw her looking at me with her mouth wide open, but no sound came out; her face was twisted, grimacing like the face of the horrible person in Munch’s picture
The Scream
, and she folded in on herself like an accordion. I lost my mother within four seconds. I ran to her, but it was too late.

When someone’s dying, you always run to that person too late. As if by chance.

There were people shouting, the sound of a car braking. Words seemed to be flowing out of my mouth like tears, stifling me.

Then the damp patch appeared on her dress between her legs. It grew visibly, like a shameful tumour. I immediately felt the cold of a wing-beat in my throat, the heat of a scratching claw, and then, like the mouth of the person in the painting, like my mother’s mouth, mine opened, and a bird flew out from between my grotesque lips. In the open air it let out a terrifying cry; its chilling song.

A song of death.

Jo panicked. He thought I had that dreadful flu. He wanted to call Dr Caron, but I came back to my senses and reassured him. It’s nothing, I said, I didn’t have time for any lunch. Help me to get up, I’ll sit down for five minutes and then I’ll be all right, I’ll be fine. You’re so hot, he said, feeling my forehead. I’ll be fine, I tell you, and anyway I’m having my period, that’s why I’m hot.

Period.
The magic word. It puts most men off.

I’ll warm up something for you, he suggested, opening the fridge. Unless you’d rather order a pizza. I smiled. My Jo. My dear Jo. Or we could eat out for once, I murmured. He smiled and got himself a Tourtel. I’ll put on a jacket, my beauty, and then I’m your man.

We ate at the Vietnamese restaurant two streets away. There was hardly anyone there, and I wondered how the place kept going. I ordered a light soup with rice noodles (
bun than
), Jo ordered fried fish (
cha ca
), and I took his hand in mine the way I used to when we were engaged twenty years ago. Your eyes are shining, he whispered with a nostalgic smile.

And if you could hear my heart beating, I thought, you’d be afraid it was going to explode.

Our orders arrived quite quickly. I hardly touched my soup, and Jo looked anxious. Are you sure you’re all right? I cast down my eyes.

There’s something I have to tell you, Jo.

He must have sensed that it was important. He put his chopsticks down and wiped his lips with the cotton napkin – he always made an effort in a restaurant – and took my hand. His dry lips were shaking. Tell me it’s nothing serious? You’re not ill, are you, Jo? Because . . . because if anything happened to you it would be the end of the world . . . Tears came to my eyes, and at the same time I began laughing, a restrained laugh that sounded like happiness. I’d die without you, Jo. No, Jo, it’s nothing serious. Don’t worry, I whispered. I just wanted to tell you I love you.

And I swore to myself that no sum of money would be worth losing all this for.