The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (38 page)

Nicolas leapt up, like one of those worms from a peanut brittle can. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, the way it does when you are falling off a chair. But Nicolas was achieving incredible feats in small increments of time. He had his clothes and boots on and he had stuffed his money in his pockets.

He tried to jump out our bedroom window, but when he saw cops waiting for him right outside it, he leapt back in. I even saw some police officer’s arm reach into the window and try to catch Nicolas’s foot.

There were police officers everywhere. They had surrounded the building. It was five o’clock in the morning. That’s when they always had raids. Right when thieves were in the farthest realms of their dreams.

Nicolas tore through the house screaming. He went out the kitchen window and up the fire escape and into the upstairs neighbour’s window. I guess he figured that he could shimmy up the fire escape and over the rooftops and escape the law the way he escaped from girls he had had sex with. His boots going up and down the stairs were making the sounds of children playing a manic clapping game. He was running in and out of doors like a ball in a pinball machine, waking people up. They came out into the hallways as if they could help him. They were going to be bone-tired. All day it would feel as if there were a little hole somewhere in themselves that sand was slowly draining out of.

The police caught Nicolas on the third floor.

I was looking up the stairwell. I ran back into the apartment and down the hallway to the bedroom, searching for anything incriminating. I saw the gold pack of cigarettes on the night table. I snatched them up, but as I turned, a police officer walked right in the door.

“Hand those over, Nouschka, sweetie.”

A cat peeked out from behind the curtain like an emcee wondering if now was the right time to begin the show.

Loulou had quickly put on his best clothes so that he could show the police that we were clean-living people. He came out of the apartment with a framed photo of Nicolas and me when we were babies.

“Weren’t they cute?” Loulou asked one of the police officers pleadingly. “They’re good kids. They have good natures.
They’re just always in with bad crowds. They were on the radio with their father. Do you remember?”

“Sure. Sure. I know who you all are.”

A news van was pulling up on the scene.

“He was such a sweet, talented little guy,” Loulou persisted.

At that moment, two officers escorted Nicolas out of the building. He was sort of making a fuss, but his heart wasn’t in it. Every now and then he would jerk his arms. He wasn’t actually trying to get away. He kept throwing his head back as if he was desperate to get his bangs out of his eyes. Maybe he knew that this was his last time to look tough. The law always makes an ass out of you. We knew that from Étienne’s fiasco.

Nicolas’s goose had already been cooked the night before.

The old man who had a heart attack had been taken immediately to the hospital. In the ambulance on the way, he began to slip away. As he was being bounced by the potholes, the old man uttered his last magical words. The paramedics leaned forward to hear what he was saying.

“It is okay.
Le petit
Nicolas was at the bank and he told me that everything was going to be okay. He got my envelope back for me. My wife is just going to go crazy knowing that I met him … He was so nice to me.
Il était tellement mignon quand il était petit!
”

We didn’t know any of this at the moment. We had no idea how the police knew that Nicolas had robbed the Caisse populaire. We didn’t know why I wasn’t in handcuffs too.

A reporter ran up and put a microphone in Nicolas’s mouth.

“You love it. You love it,” Nicolas said. “Look, they thought they were somebodies. They thought they were better than us. Now they have nothing. Oh, isn’t it lovely. Take him down a notch. It’s entertainment. I’m not a character in a television
show. Tar and feather me. You stole my childhood. On top of it you losers voted Non! Throw me in jail. You animals, you owe me. You all owe me. Where is my pay for having to spend my whole life being a clown? Be sure to send a postcard of the hanging to Grandpipi in Abitibi!”

Whatever else was said about him, you had to admit that Nicolas had a lovely turn of phrase. He was quoted in all the newspapers. In Montréal later that day, a twelve-year-old boy in the smallest-sized combat boots the army could issue and a jean jacket with gold stars ironed all over the sleeves put a flyer up on a telephone pole and slapped it with a huge paintbrush of glue. The poster was a mug shot photocopied from the front page of
Le Journal de Montréal
. Underneath was written:
LIBéRER NICOLAS TREMBLAY
.

The next morning I was standing completely clueless in front of one of the posters outside Loulou’s house. I had been standing there for ten minutes. I thought that there was something that I should be doing, but I didn’t know what. I was missing a compass and it made me feel dizzy. There was no use in trying to call Raphaël. He was not to be found. I suddenly wanted to call Lily. Supposedly, mothers were like North Stars that guided you when you were profoundly lost. How on earth could I explain this situation? I walked over to the phone booth. I looked up her number in the telephone book that was hung from a metal ring. I first turned to the names that began with S, but then I remembered that she would be under Noëlle Renaud. It was amazing: her number was there, right where it should be. What was even more incredible to me was that her name had been circled with two different colours of ink. How many times had Nicolas sat right here, thinking of calling her?

T
HE FOG WAS MADE IN A FACTORY IN
L
AC
-S
AINT-
Jean. They have the same old machines that were built in 1942. The same guys have been working there for fifty-five years. They have a good union. They carry the steel cans of ice cubes up a huge ladder and then dump them in the machine. Nobody needs fog anymore, but Heritage Canada saved the factory and kept it up and running.

I couldn’t even see out the window as the train pulled out of the station. The tracks went west over nondescript land into Ontario. The train shook ever so silently back and forth like it was weeping in bed.

The fog magically went away as soon as I crossed the border into Ontario. You rode across it and there were jobs and decent, clean living and loads and loads more Protestants.

I probably wasn’t even considered good-looking in Ontario. I certainly wasn’t famous. It was no big deal to be tall. There were people that chose not to smoke. They spoke one language. Nicolas would probably come out of Kingston Penitentiary speaking perfect English.

This was the same prison we’d visited Étienne at years and years ago. Nicolas stuck out among all the other prisoners. His hair was flapping all over the place. He looked good and clean. His face looked sober and wiser. He looked relaxed for once. It was strange to see him in one colour and not some crazy getup. We held each other for a long time. I could have spent the whole hour just holding Nicolas in my arms. I felt perfect and complete. Finally we let go because we worried simultaneously about what the guards would think. We sat down on either side of the table.

“Have you heard anything from Pierrot?” he asked.

“No.”

“Did you go to that poor old man’s funeral?”

“No, I didn’t know what his family would think.”

We were quiet. The things that we had to say to one another were so gigantic that we didn’t know where to start. We had no idea how this new situation defined or changed us.

“You look good,” I said, breaking the silence.

“You’re the only one that I miss,” Nicolas said quickly. “But I guess that I can get used to it and then I can do anything. I was always so scared that I couldn’t live without you when we were kids that I wanted to roll over in bed and strangle you. I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

“I know,” I said. “Remember when I hit you on the head with a pot for no reason at all?”

“Poor Loulou. That sort of stuff confused the hell out of him.”

“And remember when you poked me in the eye with that crayon?” I said. “I could have gone blind.”

Nicolas put his hands over his face in disbelief.

“How did we ever survive one another?” he asked.

“Or do you remember that time we had an argument with a kid at the park because we said that we were identical twins?”

“And he said that his father was a doctor and his father said that it was impossible for a boy and girl twin to be identical.” Nicolas laughed.

“Well, we proved him wrong, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

We both put our arms on the table, straightened up our backs and became absolutely still. We had this routine where we pretended that we were the mirror image of one another. We’d performed it on Gaston L’Heureux’s show once, but we’d perfected a few versions of it over the years.

As we sat in the prison visiting room, we began to move very slowly, so that we could guess the meaning of each other’s gestures more precisely. We both pretended that we had picked up a toothbrush and we began brushing our teeth. Then we both spat into a non-existent sink together. We put our toothbrushes into their immaterial stands. We both picked up our imaginary combs and we pulled them through our hair. When we were done with our hair, we dipped the tips of our fingers into little invisible tins of wax. He twirled the end of his imaginary moustache. I twirled the end of mine.

And the most amazing thing about our performance was that we had identical tears streaming down from our eyes at the very same time.

I
SAT ON THE COUCH NEXT TO
E
MMANUELLE,
with her arm around me. The baby was finally asleep. Emmanuelle’s boyfriend came and squeezed in too. There was going to be a special segment on the news about
Le déclin et la chut de la famille Tremblay
as directed by Hugo Vaillancourt. Before we knew it, there was Nicolas in a prison uniform, his hair slicked back, smoking a cigarette, looking confident.

“Did you feel that you were missing out on anything as a child?” Hugo’s voice asked.

“I had the best clothes,” Nicolas started with a big grin, plainly feeling that he was going to dominate this interview. “I would have a cobbler make these adorable leather shoes for me. Because I have very particular feet. A doctor once called them
jazz feet
. We had this chauffeur named Gauguin. And Gauguin was always getting speeding tickets while driving Nouschka and me to school. Because we would say, ‘Gauguin, Gauguin! Will you just drive this car and get us to school on time; we’ll pay your fucking ticket.’ Oh, we were raised very differently than
Papa. As Papa is probably very anxious to tell you, he was baptized in a spaghetti pot.”

There was a cutaway to footage of Nicolas on the street corner, scalping concert tickets. Then there was footage of Nicolas and me fighting on the street corner. I wasn’t even pregnant yet. We were horsing around. But they played the clip in slow motion and for some reason it came out looking brutal.

Then there was Raphaël yelling at a journalist. Raphaël held a garbage can over his head, threatening to dump it on all of Québec. I missed him. I didn’t even care what he thought of this fiasco. What I really wanted was just him here next to me on the couch. Now that the other love of my life had been taken away, he ought to return.

Hugo’s voice-over reiterated our family’s loss of fortune. Next came Étienne looking tipsy and trying to stuff a hot dog in his mouth. You’d think that they might have had a bit of respect, seeing as how he had been a national hero a couple weeks before. But as usual, now that the referendum was over, he would end up being tossed away by the public. Then they played the end part of the speech I’d written him, where he’d gone off-script and ended up barking.

Nicolas was the one who had seen it coming. He had always known that the Non side was going to win.

Then the camera was where it had never been before. Loulou had let them in and he probably told them his most complicated thoughts and his most colourful anecdotes about life in
La Grande Noirceur
. But they weren’t interested in those. This was a case of a picture saying a thousand words. I felt sad for Loulou. When he was lonely he would garbage-pick. There he was, proudly displaying all the wonderful things that he had found in the trash: cracked vases, lamps with no light bulbs,
amateur paintings of trees. He had straightened up, but he had put things in odd places. There was a plastic kewpie doll in with the dishes, and a row of shoes on the bookshelf. They panned the camera slowly across the room, as if they were showing footage of a city that had been ravaged by a bomb.

This was our great secret. This was where we had grown up. This was what the childhoods of Little Nicolas and Little Nouschka had actually looked like.

“How did growing up without a mother affect you?” a voice asked Nicolas in prison.

“How do you mean? Well … yes,” Nicolas stuttered, clearly taken aback by the question.

His nonsensical, witty repartee came to a stop. You had to give it to Hugo. He was asking new questions.

“I don’t know,” Nicolas said carefully. “Most of the guys in here have mothers. They show up on visitor’s day all happy and shit. I mean, there are guys doing eight-year stints in here and their mothers treat them like they’re saints and if they can just turn things around, they’ll be the next prime ministers for sure.”

Nicolas stubbed his cigarette out and looked up at the ceiling for a minute.

“So I don’t have some coddling middle-aged woman coming in and telling me fairy tales about myself. And telling me how wonderful I am when I am clearly nothing but a piece of shit. I’ve always been a realist. Since I was five years old, I’ve been singing the sad, true nature of this terrible world.”