Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“You talk to Mum about this?”

“Not yet. But she’ll be on board, and you know it.”

Trevor acknowledged this with a grunt.

Glancing towards him, Richard Rivière found the young man serious, almost sombre, which he took to mean that he’d struck a nerve.

“Why would you do that?” Trevor asked in a hurried, clipped, gruff voice, as if he disapproved of the question but felt he had to ask so that everything would be clear.

Because I’m going away, and I want to leave you with a good memory of me, because I’ve never done anything more than the minimum for you, knowing you didn’t like me, and so not much liking you either.

But he said no such thing.

Horrified to find himself blushing, he answered:

“After all this time, you’re sort of my son, aren’t you?”

Oh no, he wasn’t, and he never would be.

How was it that even now he could not forget Trevor’s many offences, or his own lack of love?

He felt only compassion and a need to do his duty, put his affairs in order and settle his debt, even if no-one but him thought he owed them anything, before he took off.

The vision of an abandoned Clarisse and Trevor tormented him.

He would simply say he was going back to Langon, back to the house, which was still up for sale.

Would Clarisse Rivière then come looking for him?

To take him where, into what frightful back ways?

In truth, he felt no fear, only burning desire and impatience.

Trevor grunted again, his forehead wrinkled, more sombre still. His left leg had started to twitch. During their lunch hour that Monday, while eating in the kitchen with Clarisse, he got a call from the bank.

His bank manager informed him that to his deep regret the cheque he had deposited five days before had been refused as a forgery, and the credit to his account cancelled.

“There must be some mistake,” said Richard Rivière. “I never deposited a cheque.”

He smiled reassuringly at Clarisse as her brow furrowed in concern, but that smile was more for himself than for her, a dazzling forced smile that left his lips aching.

“A cheque for forty-seven thousand euros, deposited on the fourteenth of this month,” the man replied, somewhat sharply. “It had your signature on the back, your account number.”

“I don’t understand.”

He broke off and took a deep breath, all trace of his smile gone.

Suddenly he found his own breath foul and repellent.

He turned his back to Clarisse and looked up at the mountain that had given up torturing him.

The midday sun was shining on the still-green slopes, suddenly reminding him of the landscape that came with an electric train he’d been given as a child, a little mountain covered in dark green felt overlooking a tiny chalet with doors and windows that opened.

How he had wished he could make himself small enough to get into that chalet and live there alone, undisturbed, far from his scolding parents, sheltered by that gentle springtime mountain!

“I sold a car privately, and the buyer paid by bank transfer, just as we’d arranged. I never deposited a cheque for that sale.”

“You’re absolutely certain it was a transfer?”

“I’m not, actually,” Richard Rivière mumbled, trapped, now so worried that he could feel his strength draining away. “I saw the credit to my account, and since we’d agreed he’d be paying by transfer, I thought, obviously. . And what about my signature, how could he have. .”

“I assume you signed a contract. He must have copied it, it’s not hard. I’ve heard of this happening before, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” said the banker, as if to console Richard Rivière.

“What do I do now?”

He fleetingly remembered the desperation in Berger’s last words on the telephone, his unspoken plea for Richard Rivière not to hang up just yet, hoping in vain for support or a few comforting words he could draw on when the phone call was over.

Now it was his turn to speak in that tone — oh God, oh God, he dully repeated to himself, and he saw the raspberry socks, the rippling overcoat, the lustrous, carefully styled brown hair.

The man had driven away in the four-wheel drive, gunning the engine, and Richard Rivière, standing on the pavement, had started to lift his hand in farewell, but his dishonoured, burning hand rose no higher than his shoulder.

And when the car turned the corner, the distant, indefinable memory of a similar scene flashed through his mind, disappearing before he could catch hold of it.

“. . file a complaint,” the banker was saying, concluding a sentence that Richard Rivière hadn’t listened to. “Goodbye, Monsieur Rivière.”

Call me Richard, he wordlessly implored him, still pressing the phone to his ear after the other man had hung up.

He took the afternoon off to go to the police station, and when he walked into the apartment, hours later, so exhausted he thought he might faint in the hall, Trevor emerged from his room and announced that he had diabetes.

He’d just got the results of his blood tests via the Internet, and that’s what was wrong with him, he blurted out, seeming at once anxious and strangely excited: type 2 diabetes.

fuck you, you fucking fuck, Richard Rivière read blankly on Trevor’s green and black T-shirt.

Against a black background, the big green letters undulated like tall meadow grass on the boy’s shifting flesh.

“Type 2 diabetes,” Trevor repeated in a grave, pedantic voice.

fuck you, you fucking fuck.

Trevor bought these T-shirts with the money Clarisse earned.

Why did he seem so proud of himself for being ill? As if, forever failing tests, even the baccalauréat, twice, he could now tell himself he’d passed this one with flying colours?

Well aware of his cowardice, Richard Rivière realised this meant he could put off telling Trevor he’d lost the four-wheel drive money, thinking the lab results surely outweighed the swindle.

More than his own financial troubles, was it not the fear of letting Trevor down that had tied his stomach in knots as he waited in the police station?

Not to mention feeling like a pitiful failure, incapable of responding to Trevor’s progress with anything but false promises, undone by his own idiocy.

Because this was all his fault, he never should have trusted that jittery, pushy, overdressed buyer.

And, sitting on a hard metal chair, head in his hands, he could think only of how to help Trevor make a new start all the same, relegating the money problems hanging over him to a future too uncertain to worry about.

He couldn’t imagine how he might do it.

He owed the bank tens of thousands of euros as it was.

Well, he told himself, he’d just have to take out another loan.

So he’d be mired in debt — what did he care?

He laid an awkward hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“We’re going to get you the best possible care,” he said stupidly.

A hint of a derisive smile grazed Trevor’s lips, replaced at once by a thoughtful, diligent look.

“I’ve been reading up about it on the Internet. As a matter of fact I’ve got to get back to it now.” And he lumbered quick as he could towards his room.

It seemed to Richard Rivière, who had almost never seen Trevor in the company of another person, that nothing had ever interested the boy like this diabetes business.

Clarisse burst into tears when Trevor told her the news.

He came running as soon as he heard the key in the lock, and, at once frightened and pleased with himself, beaming like a child who knows he has something big to divulge, he threw that word diabetes in her face, then took a demure half-step back, hands behind him.

Richard Rivière found them this way, Clarisse wiping her damp cheeks with one hand, Trevor shifting his weight from one leg to the other, basking, and what struck and saddened him was not only the helpless solitude, the ordinary, trivial sorrow of these two people of no particular note, but also that they seemed to expect nothing more from him, that, though not yet aware of it, they realised he no longer lived there, with them, if he ever had. He wasn’t worried that he had not yet heard from Ladivine.