Thursday evening
I was fagged out the other evening. I hate dead leaf days. They ruin your back. Wearing that blower machine on your back all day is pure punishment. The bloody thing’s as heavy and bulky as the 25 kilo kits blokes carried in World War I. Don’t know why they changed our programme: we were meant to be on bulbs, they put us on dead leaves, stuck out there on the Chartres road, stacking huge leaf piles against the plane trees between the turnoff to Alençon and the superstore, where traffic gets dire. For people who know Nogent, that says it all.
I stopped by Planet Organic to pick up a ready-cooked meal– chervil and pomegranate cream quinoa – planning on eating in front of the telly, as usual.
Lately, I’ve stopped going to the pub with Gilbert after work, he gets wasted and I don’t like it. Sometimes he even forgets where he parked the van.
And anyway they haven’t got tomato juice at the local, and Gilbert is pissed about me not drinking. Pissed about me not drinking, pissed about me being vegetarian, pissed that I know fuck all about football. How can I tell Gilbert I went off meat when I was in the slammer? Because of a bloke I met there, a bloke as refined as Gilbert is coarse, who told me that not eating meat was the mark of a superior mind, who did tai-chi and yoga, who knew how to cook cassava and betel leaves, century eggs and kasha, who slept in silk pyjamas with his head facing north because of Fengshui? We got out together. His case was dismissed, I was released for good conduct. And we lived together for eight years, like man and wife. Alexandre was his name. Alexandre the Great is no more, and now Little Boss Gilbert is my company.
So there I was on the sofa with the little carton on my lap, heated up thanks to my pal the Microwave, while my other pal the Telly delivered its load of images. I zapped around stuff that hypnotizes you real easy, programmes full of experts discussing the news for hours– politics, culture, economics.
And suddenly I dropped my fork and choked.
On the telly, there was a woman with a pointy face talking full screen.
Fuck fuck I know that bird I know I do .
I turned up the sound and looked harder. That voice, I know the voice too. I listen. The woman wrote a book, that’s why she’s been invited on this book program. The book, it’s for her daughter who died at sixteen. She’s talking about painful stuff, grief, loss, ghosts and all that. Her hands move around a lot, her gestures are unpleasantly familiar. Suddenly I get it, I put all the pieces together.
But what the fuck is that bird doing in my telly ?
That face talking on the telly is the daughter of the woman I murdered thirty years ago. A real shock, right, and it sure doesn’t make you any younger.
Thirteen years since I got out of prison, six years since Alexander died, I’ve been holed up here for five years, I reckon it’s been at least two decades since I really thought about that business, apart from bluffing shrinks and social workers on the judicial monitoring team.
I sat there gobsmacked, gaping at the screen, remote dangling between my legs, completely petrified. The rotten leaf stench incrusted in my track bottoms rose to my nostrils, blending with the bitter smell of tepid chervil. There was a kind of short circuit in my neurones, an electrical time shock rewinding the years in a deafening chaos.
I remember this thing Alexandre told me – I wasn’t paying attention cause I always switched off when he started flaunting his knowledge. A story about Greek flies, where this guy, who murdered his mum-the-Queen to avenge his dad-the-King, putting an end to a long family history of bloodshed and complications, found himself pursued by beasties flying into his hair, into his clothes, into his thoughts, even into his dreams. All day long they buzzed old saws into his ears, about remorse, fault, impossible pardon, etc. Furies, they were, with a complicated name, a word with lots of i’s in it.
When I went to bed, the bbbzzzing started inside my brain…
The man who killed my mother with forty-one knife blows, after raping her with a snow shovel handle one January night, was sentenced to life. In view of the fact that he had nothing of a repeat offender’s profile, and that court authorities esteemed him worthy of “rehabilitation”, without mentioning his irreproachable prison record, he was released after serving the mandatory eighteen years.
Details of the crime, the court case, even of his first years in prison, can easily be found in legal archives or press articles, given that he featured in a long television documentary, in which he comes across as particularly photogenic.
A star is born.
Being a generous, humanitarian and progressive woman, I can only applaud this exemplary experience of reconstruction: the prison cell as a social ladder, life behind bars as a personal development course, carried out with success.
I was sentenced to life inside too. Inside a cesspool of stagnant grief, compulsory amnesia and muddied repression, which eventually dried out with a subtly sickening smell. But after thirty years within this ingenious sarcophagus, the crust starts itching, the wound begins to speak. Something starts oozing and must be thoroughly washed clean.
So I’ll make my way to the wash house, …where memory is scrubbed against rough granite, where the tongue is rinsed by a river lathering like inky soap, where fiction acts as bleach. I’ll watch grimy water seep away in a synovial torrent of words and dry out the splatter in the warm sun of consolation. Washing day.
A character is essential. When I lean down to watch the last reflections, he’s the one I see. Star for a day, star forever.
The bloke who killed my mother will be a city gardener in Nogent-le-Rotrou.
Friday morning
I didn’t sleep all night.
Faces wiped out of my memory years ago resurfaced and danced behind my eyes: the woman I killed, the girl on the telly – green eyes, red chignon, pointed chin –, big fat J.P., my mother, my lawyer, the motorway petrol pump attendant who saw the blood on my clothes, the guys from the telly, the girl on the telly again but as the kid she was in high school where I hung around on the make, the shit-faced mugs of all the louts I got sloshed with that night.
Still, I must have dropped off for a bit because I also saw my mother cooing I love you big boy in my ears while the screws fucked her.
Yeah, that could only be a nightmare. Filthy night.
The next day, I had to meet Gilbert at 8 o’clock in front of the Town Hall. He was smoking while he waited, leaning against the van. It also pisses him off that I don’t smoke but he shows respect: never lights up a fag inside the car when he knows he’s driving me to work. After my night of horror, it was felt so good to see him I wanted to kiss his steak-and-kidney guzzling gob and burrow into his belly. I must have looked fuck awful but he didn’t mention it.
Truth is, I say nasty things about him but I do like Gilbert. He’s an okay geezer and he truly loves flowers. You should see him unloading crates of pansies or daffodils, full of devotion, walking backwards with his chin low over quivering petals to shield them from the wind; hear him sweet-talking the asters, clematis or larkspur flowers while he eases them onto bamboo stakes.
But that morning – my first morning with those ancient Greek beasties hissing in my ears – flowers weren’t on the agenda. We were supposed to dig up the roundabout on the Le Mans road. Which meant spending the whole day out in the wind, slogging away like idiots in the middle of nowhere. Which also meant no hope of Francine’s Daily Special, that kind of job means you’re at it all day long, and you have to eat on site. I happen to be a real fan of Francine’s Friday couscous, she serves it to me without meat, and it’s dead cheap.
We had to swing by the Super U for petrol, which provided Gilbert with yet another opportunity to moan. What with our department’s cutbacks, the municipality has stopped making advances to cover expenses. So Gilbert’s got to use his personal debit card for even the smallest of purchases, and remember to ask for a receipt each time, and they take six months to reimburse him. That goes for petrol, but also for gardening gloves, pruning shears, all the indispensable stuff for the job. Gilbert’s fed up to the teeth. He thought being Head of Department would make it easier, and it’s just the opposite. Next thing you know we’ll be paying fertilizer and mowers out of our own pockets – and why not automatic sprinklers while we’re at it?
I stay quiet about all that, pleased to have landed this job, thank you Mrs. Post-Sentence-Supervision-Resettlement-Services.
