The Stone Boy (14 page)

Attempted to contact Ms. Polin several times to no avail. This waiting is unbearable. I’m obsessed with the stone boy. At night, I hear him breathing behind the curtains, his moans reach me from the stairwell, and sometimes in the kitchen, I find Bastien with his little baker’s apron, cheeks and hands covered with flour. He whispers to me: “Play for me, Granny Elsa, play for me.”

Drink herbal teas recommended by Dr. Mamnoue and continue Stilnox.

Positive point: smell problem resolved with simple stoppers reinforced with pieces of old bath towels.

From Sunday night to Monday morning, Madame Préau didn’t say a word. The sleeping tablet she had taken with a glass of green apple liqueur in the evening triggered a breakdown. She meticulously noted the worrying noises in the house—crackling, whispers, and other hissing sounds—broke the lead in her pencil three times, and twice went to drink milk in the kitchen where Bastien was waiting for her, silently, sitting on a stool. She collapsed on her bed at five a.m., exhausted from coughing. At eight thirty, the jangling of pneumatic drills resumed on the building site. Madame Préau went downstairs to heat up a cup of coffee. Bastien was not in the kitchen anymore. The phone rang at nine.

“Ms. Polin here. Could you come in to see me this morning? What I want to talk to you about cannot be said over the telephone.”

The urgency of the meeting and Ms. Polin’s nervousness were worrying. What had she discovered? An hour later, the old lady was in the social worker’s office, her heart thumping.

Madame Préau had skipped her morning wash, hastily pulling on a long skirt and turtleneck. With her feet toasty in her lined boots, and a purple wool-knit beret covering her gray hair, she took the bus despite Martin’s warnings. The fate of the stone boy was worth a citywide flu epidemic.

Ms. Polin was not alone in her office with the cheery posters. A permed colleague stood beside her, her arms folded across a sage-green suit.

“Ms. Plaisance, a psychologist here at the social welfare center, and I wanted to inform you as agreed on the results of the meeting with the Desmoulins family…”

The parents had indeed appeared at the social welfare center on the allocated day, equipped with their family record book.

“The problem is that they do not have a third child.”

The record book proved it. The news hit like a flan hitting a tile floor. Madame Préau blinked. A computer hard drive under the desk buzzed, making the ground vibrate.

“Surely there must be some mistake. Perhaps it’s a question of a child from a previous marriage? In that case, it makes sense that it doesn’t appear in the record book.”

“I made inquiries to that effect, which is why I did not respond to your calls right away. But neither spouse is divorced. Neither the father nor the mother has another child.”

Madame Préau shrank into her seat, the victim of a coughing fit. She pulled out a handkerchief from her purse, apologizing. The social worker crossed her fingers over the file in front of her.

“What we want to understand, Ms. Plaisance and myself, is your reason for contacting us.”

Madame Préau straightened. She understood immediately where the social worker was going.

“We do not fully understand why you took this approach.”

“I simply came to report a case of abuse. What is the problem?”

“But, Madame Préau, how can a child be abused who does not legally exist?”

“But he exists, I assure you! I saw him just like I’m seeing you now—it was only last Sunday! And I can assure you that his health has deteriorated significantly in a few weeks.”

The two women exchanged glances. The psychologist put her hands on either side of the desk and leaned forward with a cold smile. The old lady was on her guard.

“Madame Préau, I understand that you live alone.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Forgive me for asking you this question, but do you struggle with loneliness?”

“I’m used to it. It’s not a problem for me.”

“But to not have a family, children, or grandchildren to hug and to play in your garden, it must make you sad, no?”

“I see exactly what you’re insinuating. And the answer is no.”

The social worker took over: “This kind of step is not a small matter, Madame Préau. By filing a report about this family, you have interfered with the private life of Mr. and Madame Desmoulins, which could cause them problems.”

“Do you have any reason to be annoyed with your neighbors?” added the psychologist.

“Not at all. I don’t even know these people!”

“Really? Because they have told us that you were going to give piano lessons to their daughter.”

So there it was.

They were closing in on her.

“How do you know that? Did you speak to them about me?”

“Of course not. We only asked them about their interactions with the neighbors.”

Madame Préau didn’t believe a word of it.

They were in cahoots with Desmoulins!

The rumble of the computer became more threatening.

What had she expected? Social welfare was part of the County Council. All this was only the next logical step.

Madame Préau felt herself pale. She was suffocating in this room; it was too dark, too full of aggressive and violent images for her to face these two harpies. The psychologist’s steel-blue eyes reminded her of a teacher at the boarding school where her father had sent her against her will. She had a face like tanned leather, with a velvety voice and matchstick legs.

“Listen, I stand by what I said to you. There is a child in a very bad way in my neighbors’ garden. If you don’t believe me, well, fine. I’ll go to the police to file a complaint.”

“We want to believe you, Madame Préau,” replied the curly-haired psychologist, “but without proof, it is very difficult. It would have to be proven that the child really does exist.”

Madame Préau stood and nervously buttoned up her coat. She couldn’t wait to leave.

“You only have to come to my house next Sunday, ladies. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea and lend you my binoculars. It’s crazy how many little details you can see with those binoculars. You can see much further than a family book, and well beyond the end of your own nose,” she added before leaving the room without closing the door.

As before, Madame Préau preferred to walk rather than take the bus. Her hands were trembling. She took Rue Parmentier with the notion to stop at the police station but changed her mind. The old lady had a migraine setting in. Better to regain her strength before entering the lion’s den. This battle would be a tricky business—given Madame Préau’s history.

Martin received a call from his mother late in the morning. She asked him if there weren’t a more effective cough syrup than Helicidine, and if he could get her a camera that was easy to use. Martin questioned her about what had prompted her to start taking photographs at more than seventy years of age. She said that she wanted to photograph the present to keep track of the truth, rather than live in the past, which Martin took as a tremendously positive impulse and a step on the road to recovery.

“Well, you know, something that’s easy to handle, but that can take sharp pictures up to thirty meters.”

Martin promised to take care of it this week. He added: “Take care of yourself, and most importantly, no more open-air piano performances. If the fever doesn’t return, you can go out on Friday to do your shopping.”

Madame Préau hung up with a sigh. She had an adorable son. Too bad he shared his life with a demon.

After having checked all the windows and doors of the house next door through the shutters of her bedroom window, the old lady spent the afternoon on the lookout for the slightest movement in her neighbors’ garden.

Madame Desmoulins went out twice. Wearing a blue fleece and white jeans, she had a mobile phone stuck to her right ear and was pacing the terrace. She left the house at four twenty p.m. Twenty minutes later, Madame Desmoulins was back with Laurie and Kévin. All three of them went straight into to the house. The shutters on the four windows were closed at six thirty, plunging the house into darkness. However, thanks to the glass bricks arranged above the French doors of what must have been the living or dining room, Madame Préau could tell whether the light was on or off inside. At about seven o’clock, Mr. Desmoulins drove his metallic red Kangoo into the garage. The old lady took the opportunity to take a break from her stakeout. She warmed up a Tetra Pak of organic leek and potato soup, ate two slices of bread she thawed under the grill along with a piece of Comté, and finished off her meal with some Muscat grapes and the France 3 evening news. An item on computer viruses and more specifically the microchips implanted in dogs and cats caught her attention. She promised herself to look up a book in the library that specialized in this area when she was feeling better. If a cat’s microchip could “crack” a computer code simply by the animal being present in the room, millions of people could have been under surveillance without their knowledge and had their privacy violated continuously. At least dogs are forbidden in nuclear power plants. Regardless, from now on, she’d be more wary of stray cats in the garden.

At nine thirty, she had a wash. Then she put on her nightgown, buttoned her woolen coat over it, put on her beret, and went to her room, plunged into darkness. She grabbed the binoculars and resumed her post at the window, hidden behind the shutters. Mr. Desmoulins came out a quarter of an hour later to smoke. As usual, he had his mobile phone in his hand and seemed very absorbed in it. He was probably playing one of those card games that Martin had shown her in his office; Madame Préau’s son sometimes enjoyed a game of backgammon on his Nokia. But there was no way of knowing for sure. Maybe it was one of those new monitoring tools that allow you to see and hear at a distance. Could Mr. Desmoulins be quietly scanning Madame Préau’s house?

The door opened, and Madame Desmoulins appeared wearing her white trousers. She went over to her husband and they exchanged a few words. From where she was with the window open, in the still of the night, Madame Préau could only hear a faint murmuring carried on the breeze. The father and mother seemed like conspirators, whispering to each other. Mr. Desmoulins even slipped a hand under his wife’s sweater. She heard them giggling. Madame Préau imagined that she was the butt of their jokes. The Desmoulins must have been happy with the trick that they had pulled with the help of the two bitches at the social welfare center. Soon, a small child’s cry rang out from the house. The mother immediately broke away from her husband, looking distinctly displeased, and went back inside, closing the door on the echo of a new cry.

Madame Préau took a deep breath and rested the binoculars on the side table.

It could well be Kévin.

Or Laurie.

The two bitches at the social welfare center had been right. Other than the little girl’s drawing and the stone boy’s appearance on Sundays, to which she was the only witness, nothing could suggest that anything was amiss in this family.

The light was still shining from the neighbors’ after midnight. Madame Préau did not wait for them to turn it off before going to bed. As she still wasn’t asleep by the time the freight train passed, disturbed by her cough, she took a glass of green apple liqueur, a big spoonful of cough syrup, and a Stilnox, and closed her eyes.

She spent the night paralyzed under the bedclothes, coughing, thirsty, sweaty, convinced that Mr. Desmoulins was scaling the wall of her house and was trying to open the metal shutters on her window, making horrible grinding noises.

21 October 2009

For the attention of the Deputy Mayor for the environment

Mr. Deputy Mayor,

I read with great satisfaction the piece in the city council’s magazine issue devoted to green spaces in the city. And I am delighted to live in a town that can boast a four-flower “City in Bloom” rating.

I am glad, too, to read your comments in the article regarding “planting and landscape heritage” and “sustainable development.” The use of chemicals is banned on the city’s plants, and city gardeners are working with organic fertilizers—I myself have been a natural compost enthusiast for over thirty years. As for the numbers, they speak for themselves: 40 hectares of green space, 9,000 trees, 15 kilometers of hedgerows, 372 planters, 250,000 tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth bulbs—you’d think you were reading a garden center’s promotional leaflet.

I can only encourage you in the development of the arboretum at Bois de L’Étoile; it seems to be a veritable tree museum, one that I have not yet had the time to visit.

But allow me to inquire after the contrasts of our beautiful city: why cheer up the approach to a train station with abundantly planted containers, when a few meters away buses leave their engines idling while parked along the path, where users don’t even have a bus shelter to protect themselves from the elements and breathing in pollutants? And what about that awful old bridge, black with dirt, which spans the main street of the town, causing terrible noise pollution for passersby and the neighborhood? None of your delicate little window boxes would last a day attached to the safety barriers against which a cyclist was crushed by a truck some time ago, if memory serves.