David Szalay - All That Man Is

The office, showroom and warehouse occupy adjoining units of an industrial estate in the suburbs of Lille, within earshot of the E42 motorway. It is here that Bérnard has been spending his days this spring, working for his uncle Clovis, who sells windows. The office is as dull a space as it is possible to imagine — laminate floor, air-freshener smell, lightly soiled furniture.

—

Five fifteen on Wednesday afternoon.

From the large windows, listless spring light, and the sounds of the industrial estate. Bérnard is waiting for his uncle to lock up. He is already wearing his jacket, and sits there staring at the objects on the desk — next to a depressed-looking plant, the figurine of the little fairy maiden, winged and sitting under a drooping flower head with a melancholy smile on her heart-shaped face.

Clovis arrives and makes sure that all the drawers are locked.

‘Cheer up,’ he says unhelpfully.

Bérnard follows him down the spare, Clorox-smelling stairs.

Outside they take their places in the BMW, parked as always in the space nearest the door.

There is no way that Clovis would have taken Bérnard on if he wasn’t his sister’s son. Clovis thinks his nephew is a bit thick. Slow, like his father, the train driver. Easily pleased. Able to stare for hours at something like rain running down a window. It is typical of him, Clovis thinks, that he should have dropped out of university. Clovis’s own attitude to university is ambivalent. He suspects that it is mostly just a way for well-to-do kids to avoid working for a few more years. Still, they must learn something there. Some of them, after all, end up as surgeons, as lawyers. So to spend two whole years at university and then drop out , as Bérnard did, with nothing to show for it, seems like the worst of all worlds. A pathetic waste of time.

They leave the estate and feed onto the E42.

The kid smokes pot. That’s not even a secret any more. He smokes it in his room at home — he still lives with his parents, in their narrow brick house in a quiet working-class residential district. He shows no sign of wanting to leave. His meals are made for him, his washing is done. And how old is he now? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Unmanly, is the word.

He once tried to have a talk with him, Clovis did, for his sister’s sake. (The boy’s father was obviously not going to do it.) He sat him down in a bar with a beer and said, in so many words, ‘You’ve got to grow up.’

And the boy just stared at him out of his vague blueish eyes, his blonde hair falling into them, and said, in so many words, ‘What d’you mean?’

And, in so many words, Clovis said, ‘You’re a loser, mate.’

And the boy — if that was the word, his chin was thick with orange stubble — drank his beer and seemed to have nothing more to say for himself.

So Clovis left it at that.

And then Mathilde said to him, when he was trying to tell her, post their drink together, what he thought of her son, ‘Well, if you want to help so much, Clovis, why don’t you give him a job?’

So he had to make a place for him — first in the warehouse, and then, where there was less scope for him to do any damage (they sent the wrong windows to a site once, which Bérnard had loaded onto the truck), in the office. Though he is totally forbidden to answer the phone. And not allowed anywhere near anything to do with money. Which means there isn’t much, in the office, for him to do. He tidies up. And for that, for a bit of ineffectual tidying, he is paid two hundred and fifty euros a week.

Clovis sighs, audibly, as they wait at a traffic light on their way into town. His fingers tap the steering wheel.

They stop at a petrol station to fill up, the Shell station which Clovis favours on Avenue de Dunkerque.

Bérnard, in the passenger seat, is staring out of the window.

Clovis pays for the petrol, V-Power Nitro+, and some summer windscreen-wiper fluid, which he sees they have on sale, and takes his seat in the BMW again.

He is just strapping himself in when his nephew says, speaking for the first time since they left the office, ‘Is it okay if I go on holiday?’

The presumptuous directness of the question, the total lack of supplicatory preamble, are shocking.

‘Holiday?’ Clovis says, almost sarcastically.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve only just started.’

To that, Bérnard says nothing, and Clovis has to focus, for a few moments, on leaving the petrol station. Then he says, again, ‘You’ve only just started.’

‘I get holidays though, don’t I?’ Bérnard says.

Clovis laughs.

‘I worry about your attitude,’ he says.

Bérnard meets that statement with silence.

Holding the steering wheel, Clovis absorbs waves of outrage.

The silly thing is, he would be more than happy to have his nephew out of the way for a week or two. Or — who knows? — for ever.

‘You planning to go somewhere?’ he asks.

‘Cyprus,’ Bérnard says.

‘Ah, Cyprus. And how long,’ Clovis asks, ‘do you plan to spend in Cyprus?’

‘A week.’

‘I see.’

They travel about a kilometre. Then Clovis says, ‘I’ll think about it, okay?’

Bérnard says nothing.

Clovis half-turns to him and says again, ‘Okay?’

Bérnard, for the first time, seems slightly embarrassed. ‘Well. I’ve already paid for it. That’s the thing. The holiday.’

A further, stronger wave of outrage, and Clovis says, ‘Well, that was a bit silly.’

‘So I need to go,’ Bérnard explains.

‘When is it, this holiday?’ Clovis asks, no longer trying to hide his irritation — if anything, playing it up, enjoying it.

‘It’s next week.’

‘Next week?’ Said with a theatrical expression of surprise.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, you need to give at least a month’s notice.’

‘Do I? You didn’t tell me that.’

‘It’s in your contract.’

‘Well…I didn’t know.’

‘You should read documents,’ Clovis says, ‘before you sign them.’

‘I didn’t think you’d try to take advantage of me…’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’

‘Look,’ Bérnard says, ‘I’ve already paid for it.’

Clovis says nothing.

‘You’re not really going to try and stop me?’

‘I worry about your attitude, Bérnard.’

They have arrived in Bérnard’s parents’ street, the featureless street of narrow brick houses.

The BMW stops in front of one of them and first Bérnard, and then, more slowly, Clovis, emerges from it.

Unusually, Clovis comes into the house.

—

Bérnard’s parents are both there. His father, in a vest, is drinking a beer. He has, within the last half-hour, returned from work. He is short, blonde, with a moustache — Asterix, basically. He is sitting at the table in the front room, the room into which the front door directly opens, with a single window onto the street, in the light of which he is studying La Voix du Nord . Bérnard’s mother, further back in the same space, where the kitchen is, is doing the washing-up.

On Bérnard’s entrance, neither of them looks up from what they are doing.

‘ Salut ,’ he says.

They both murmur something. His father has a swig from the brown bottle in his hand.

‘André,’ Clovis says to him.

At that, André looks up from the paper. Mathilde, too, looks across from the neon puddle of the kitchen. She smiles to see her brother.

André does not smile.

If happiness is having one euro more than your brother-in-law, then Clovis is happy a million times over.

And André — André is fucked.