Japan. Good day to you, sir.’
‘Merci,’ say father and son in unison, both slightly thrown by their audience’s sudden departure.
Madeleine Claeys pretends to be lost in thought as the van comes up her drive, but behind the reflections in the window separating her from the front garden she keeps a careful watch on the driver. He’s a man who doesn’t like to arrive late. The fact that it’s nevertheless happened for the second time must have to do with some disturbance to the peace that usually surrounds him. You can tell that just by looking: he’s a person surrounded by peace. She wants to hear it from a person like this.
He’s startled by how quickly she opens the door.
‘Sorry,’ he begins, but she interrupts him.
‘Have you read them?’
Only then does he think back to the pile on the passenger seat. He can’t remember seeing it there this morning.
‘Only a few,’ he says. ‘These are strange days. Do you want me to read them?’
‘I want you to read everything, then tell me about them. Before you do any more work.’ Despite her slight stutter she says it with complete conviction.
He agrees and goes back to the van. The pile of letters is still there. He picks it up and arranges with Madeleine that he’ll read them all in the room and then come and find her.
They are variations on a single theme.
‘1993 when i sit next to him i draw little hearts on the ball of his thumb with my finger i casually say something about cowardly men and that the hands can go slowly but the years fast in the end and that i accept it can go even quicker but that i wont leave him alone i often say that i wont leave him alone i tell him about what ive seen that day or the night before its never much a swallows nest or once a procession a fanfare mostly i say nothing and wipe his mouth or look its no good really those eyes turn but real contact what is that i stroke him comb his hair usually with earplugs in because i feel i deserve routine and earplugs’
‘2001 in the end it comes down to limiting damage done to others which is why i agreed to it my brothers vocal cords were cut last month neighbours at the day centre have been complaining about the shouting and screaming for years and in the end even the social workers spoke to me about it i dont blame anyone he did shout most of the day never a whole day not year in year out and i know that for them it wasnt mainly about decibels but about how he shouted because anyone who heard it thought he was in unbearable pain now you only see that and you have to come close.’
When he’s read all of them he goes downstairs.
‘Gin and tonic?’ she asks. He nods and takes a cigarette from the pack she’s holding out. He smokes just a few a year. He waits on the poof that belongs with the sofa near the window until she comes to sit next to him. She puts his glass on the side table and her own to her lips.
He tells her the story she knows, about her younger brother who was born normal but after a fall or an infection would have been better off dead. He tells her she never doubted it was her fault, that her mother convinced her of that, blaming her not just for her brother’s condition but for her father’s disappearance as well. She’s never dared allow herself to see that there are a lot of things that guilt has nothing to do with, that a child can be inattentive and inattentiveness fatal. That events don’t even require inattention in order to be fatal. She was the only one to go and visit him every day, out of love and to punish herself. Sometimes a partner threatened to come between them, but never for long. Anyone who didn’t disappear of their own accord she chased away with double-glazed loneliness, her world of bedsores, severed vocal cords, and malicious fate, a sorrow so great and incontrovertible that everyone walked away from it. And that her brother then finally found peace and she went on living, he tells her that too. Now she must set the fire. He’ll paint the room and she must fill the decades that remain to her with what she enjoys, everything she can still love.
He waits for the sobs to subside before wiping back the grey lock hanging over her face.
‘Dropped, that’s what,’ she says.
‘Come on.’
She nods.
Outside, in the long narrow garden at the back of the house, they gather wood. He lights it with thin twigs and one of the letters. It burns quickly in the dry air. Without any hesitation Madeleine throws the other letters on, one by one so as not to smother the fire, until she’s finished and takes his hand. He doesn’t let go until the last blackened fragments have turned to white ash.
The rest of the day he wets the wallpaper in the room. It seems to have been waiting for his paint scraper and it makes way without complaint for walls flayed smooth. He brushes flakes of paint from the ceiling, sands and repaints the parquet and the skirting boards. At the end of the day he finds himself inside a cube that’s waiting, naked and buoyant, for a new coat.
He doesn’t see Madeleine until he’s clearing up. She called out to him earlier that she was going shopping. He leaves the house promising to be back the next day, while she puts a considerable quantity of pasta away in a cupboard and ice-cream cakes in an empty freezer.
‘Hungry,’ she says.
At home he finds Cat, also looking into an empty freezer compartment, but peering and groping. Her face is tear-stained. The packs of spinach, the bag of croquettes, and the leftovers of soup she’s pulled out stand near her feet weeping too.
He wants to take her in his arms but the scene dissuades him, first because he finds it disturbing, then because of a suspicion that he can explain all this, although he doesn’t yet know how.
‘I’m going crazy,’ she says.
‘No you’re not,’ he says.
‘I no longer know what I dreamed and what’s real. Yesterday I went to get something out of the freezer and I saw a box at the back that seemed to have been hidden there.’
With secret pleasure he decides to let her tell the whole story.
‘When I open it up there’s a little guy made of ice inside, about as big as my forefinger, dressed in a loincloth and a pair of those straw legwarmers, with a shield and a spear. Beautifully made, I’ve never seen anything like it. All ice. No idea if it was supposed to be an African. Its face made it look white. I put it back in the box and thought: I’ll have to ask Alphonse—the fact that I forgot isn’t normal either!’
He sees her dismay—greater, crazier than he’s used to in her—and wants to interrupt, but she rattles on.
‘And now it isn’t there, because of course it never was, I’m imagining things and that I imagine things is my own fault!’ She ignores the placatory arms he holds out to her, his lips pouting to say something. ‘Because I’m not sick, or only in my head. I’m not sick any longer, I lied.’
What is she saying?
He looks at the rising water in her eyes, watches it pour over the rims.
‘The tests?’ he begins.
‘I’m cured.’
‘But that’s great, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t know what he’s feeling, doesn’t know who this woman is or why she’s
