Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,24
When they still lived together, Stéphanie used to complain that they never did anything on Sundays, that she wasn’t allowed any of the activities Louise organised for the other children. As soon as she could, she started fleeing the house. On Fridays she would be out all night with the neighbourhood teenagers. She’d come back in the morning, face pale, eyes red with rings around them. Starving. She’d walk across the small living room, head lowered, and aim straight for the fridge. She would eat, leaning against the fridge door, without even sitting down, digging with her fingers into the boxes that Louise had prepared for Jacques’s lunches. Once, she dyed her hair red. She had her nose pierced. She started disappearing for entire weekends. And then, one day, she didn’t come back. Nothing now could keep her at the house in Bobigny. Not school, which she’d left a long time ago. And not Louise either.
Her mother reported her disappearance, of course. ‘Kids that age, running away, it happens a lot. Wait a bit and she’ll be back.’ That was all they said to her. Louise didn’t search for her. Later she found out from neighbours that Stéphanie was in the South of France, that she was in love. That she moved around a lot. The neighbours couldn’t get over the fact that Louise didn’t ask them for details, didn’t ask any questions, didn’t want them to repeat the little information they had.
Stéphanie had disappeared. All her life, she had felt like an embarrassment. Her presence disturbed Jacques, her laughter woke the children Louise was looking after. Her fat thighs, her heavy figure pressed against the wall in the narrow corridor to let the others pass. She feared blocking the passage, being bumped into, sitting on a chair that someone else wanted. When she spoke, she expressed herself poorly. She laughed and she offended people, no matter how innocent her laughter. She had ended up developing a gift for invisibility, and logically, without fanfare, without warning, as if that had been her manifest destiny all along, she had disappeared.
On Monday morning Louise leaves her apartment before daybreak. She walks to the train station, changes at Auber, waits on the platform, walks up Rue Lafayette then takes Rue d’Hauteville. Louise is a soldier. She keeps going, come what may, like a mule, like a dog with its legs broken by cruel children.
September is hot and bright. On Wednesdays, after school, Louise shakes up the children’s stay-at-home indolence and takes them to play in the park or to watch the fish in the aquarium. They go boating on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne and Louise tells Mila that the algae floating on the surface is in reality the hair of a deposed, vengeance-seeking witch. At the end of the month it is so warm that Louise, excited, decides to take them to the botanical gardens.
Outside the metro station, an old North African man offers to help Louise carry the pushchair down the stairs. She thanks him and picks up the pushchair single-handed with Adam still sitting inside it. The old man follows her. He asks how old the children are. She is about to tell him that they are not hers. But he is already leaning down to the children’s level. ‘They’re very beautiful.’
The metro is the children’s favourite thing. If Louise didn’t hold them back, they’d run along the platform, they’d jump into the carriage, standing on people’s feet, just so they could sit next to the window, tongues lolling, eyes wide open. They stand inside the carriage and Adam imitates his sister, who is holding on to a metal bar and pretending to drive the train.
In the gardens, the nanny runs with them. They laugh and she spoils them, buying them ice creams and balloons. She takes a picture of them, lying on a carpet of dead leaves, bright yellow and blood red. Mila asks why certain trees have turned that luminous shade of gold while others, the same kinds of trees, planted next to them, look like they’re rotting, going straight from green to dark brown. Louise is incapable of explaining. ‘We’ll ask your mama,’ she says.
On the fairground rides, they howl with terror and joy. Louise feels dizzy and she holds Adam tight in her lap when the train rushes into the dark tunnels and hurtles down the slopes. In the sky, a balloon flies away: Mickey has become a spaceship.
*
They sit on the grass to