what you need."
I toss the goddamn fucking useless piece of fucking shit lighter against the fucking wall. And instantly regret it. Now I'll have to go down the fucking stairs and buy another fucking lighter at the fucking spaza, which will probably be fucking closed at this time of the fucking night. I prowl over to the wall and pick up the lighter. The little plastic nib has broken off. It's well and truly fucked.
"Whatever is or isn't between me and Giovanni – you don't have a say in my life anymore, Benoît."
"I didn't know I ever did." He looks at me like I'm the bad guy. "Do you want to see photographs of them?"
"Why would I want to see photographs of the people you're leaving me for?"
"Because I'd like to show you."
"Oh for god's sake. Fine."
It takes him a couple of minutes to retrieve the photographs from his room upstairs. In the meantime, I manage to score a box of matches off a woman carrying a bucket of water up the stairs on her head.
Back in my room, Benoît takes the cigarette from my mouth and drags on it. I've never seen him smoke before. Then he sits down beside me on the bed with a bundle wrapped in plastic and bound with elastic bands in his lap. He starts slipping off the elastic bands and putting them neatly beside him. Some of them are practically rotted through. I'm curious in spite of the poison flower in my chest.
"When was the last time you looked at these?"
"Yesterday. Before that, I don't know. A year? Two years? I used to look at them every day."
He unfurls one Checkers packet. It's wrapped around another, which is wrapped around another, which is wrapped around a tight sheaf of papers bound in a piece of military green raincoat and tied with string.
It's a mix of photos and computer print-outs of photographs, already faded, the paper worn soft with handling and the rigours of cross-continental travel. Benoît, a woman and three children aged two to seven at a guess, posing formally, unsmiling in front of a low wall. Their features are indistinct. Washed out. They already look like ghosts.
The same woman, looking exhausted, wrapped in bright yellow sheets and holding a pinch-faced newborn, his eyes clenched against the light, a little girl poking her head into the bottom of the frame like she can't bear to be left out.
The same little girl holding the baby under his arms, carting him around.
The little boy sitting in a cardboard box, grinning to reveal one tooth.
The family posing formally again in front of a fountain in a city setting.
The same background, but this time Benoît is holding the little boy upside-down as if he's about to drop him into the fountain, while the rest of the family collapses in laughter.
But the one that yanks my heart into my stomach is the picture of the woman hiding her face behind her apron with a coy smile, playing a game with the camera.
Or rather, the man behind it.
"Celvie," Benoît says. "Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. He's the smallest. Two and a half years old. He has so much energy. You need a leash to hold him."
I do the maths. "So six or seven now."
"Seven. His birthday is in April. Next week. Seven years old. Practically grown-up. I'll have to start saving for his university fees." The corner of his mouth twitches grimly, not even a Fong Kong smile. We're both considering the impossibilities of university fees, of universities in general, of where a university degree might get you. My BA. Benoît's third-year mechanical engineering.
He starts to put the photographs away, re-bagging them in plastic, slipping the elastic bands back into place.
"What are you going to tell them?"
"That papa got lost for a while."
"And the Mongoose?"
"Ah," Benoît waves his hand. 'He'll get used to them. They might pull his tail, but it will be okay. He's only mean to nasty Sloth girls," Benoît says, shoving me for emphasis.
"Oof. Well, I'm not going to miss you at all."
"I won't think about you for a second."
"I won't even remember you, I'll be so busy shagging other guys. I'll be, like, Benoît who?"
"You'll remember the Mongoose when the fleas hatch."
"I won't. I won't remember you. I won't miss you. I never loved you. I never even liked you. And you smell funny. And your feet, your calloused nasty-ass feet? They're disgusting. I'll be glad to have them gone from my bed."
"You smell funny too," he