Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,2

there. Sylvie bought organic salads. She made meals for Mila but left the kitchen in a disgusting mess. Myriam and Sylvie never saw eye to eye on anything, and the apartment was filled with a dense, simmering unease that threatened at any moment to break into open warfare. In the end Myriam told Paul: ‘Let your parents live their lives. They’re right to make the most of their freedom.’

She didn’t realise the magnitude of the task she had taken on. With two children, everything became more complicated: shopping, bath time, housework, visits to the doctor. The bills piled up. Myriam became gloomy. She began to hate going to the park. The winter days seemed endless. Mila’s tantrums drove her mad, Adam’s first burblings left her indifferent. With each passing day, she felt more and more desperate to go out for a walk on her own. Sometimes she wanted to scream like a lunatic in the street. They’re eating me alive, she would think.

She was jealous of her husband. In the evenings, she stood by the door in a frenzy of anticipation, waiting for him to come home. Then she would complain for an hour about the children’s screaming, the size of the apartment, her lack of free time. When she let him talk and he told her about epic recording sessions with a hip-hop group, she would spit: ‘You’re lucky.’ He would reply: ‘No, you’re the lucky one. I would love to see them grow up.’ No one ever won when they played that game.

At night Paul lay beside her, sleeping the deep, heavy sleep of someone who has worked hard all day and deserves a good rest. Bitterness and regret ate away at her. She thought about the efforts she had made to finish her degree, despite the lack of money and parental support, the joy she had felt when she was called to the Bar, the first time she had worn her lawyer’s robes and Paul had taken a picture of her, smiling proudly outside their apartment building.

For months she pretended she was okay. Even to Paul, she didn’t dare admit her secret shame. How she felt as if she were dying because she had nothing to talk about but the antics of her children and the conversations of strangers overheard in the supermarket. She started turning down dinner invitations, ignoring calls from her friends. She was especially wary of women, who could be so cruel. She wanted to strangle the ones who pretended to admire or, worse, envy her. She couldn’t bear listening to them any more, complaining about their jobs, about not seeing their children enough. More than anything, she feared strangers. The ones who innocently asked what she did for a living and who looked away when she said she was a stay-at-home mother.

*

One day, after doing the shopping in Monoprix on Boulevard Saint-Denis, she realised that she had, without meaning to, stolen a pair of children’s socks. She’d dropped them in the pushchair and forgotten about them. She was a few yards from home and she could have gone back to the shop to return them, but she decided not to. She didn’t tell Paul. It was not an interesting subject, and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it. After that incident, she would regularly go to Monoprix and hide things inside her son’s pushchair: some shampoo or lotion or a lipstick that she would never use. She knew perfectly well that, if the security guards stopped her, she would just have to play the part of a stressed-out mother and they would probably believe her. There was something hypnotic about those pathetic little thefts. Alone in the street sometimes, she would laugh with the feeling that she was taking the whole world for a ride.

*

When she bumped into Pascal one day, by chance, she saw it as a sign. Her former law-school classmate must not have recognised her at first: she was wearing trousers that were too big for her and an old pair of boots, and she’d tied her unwashed hair up in a bun. She was standing next to the merry-go-round, which Mila refused to come down from. ‘This is your last go,’ she repeated each time her daughter, gripping tightly on to a horse, passed her with a wave. She looked up: Pascal was smiling at her, arms outstretched to signify his joy and surprise. She smiled back, hands clinging to the pushchair handle. Pascal didn’t have much time, but,