Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,57

between employers and employees. The women come to complain to Lydie, the self-proclaimed president, a tall woman in her fifties from the Ivory Coast who wears fake-fur coats and has thin red-pencil eyebrows.

At 6 p.m., groups of youths invade the park. The nannies know them. They’re from the Rue de Dunkerque, from the Gare du Nord. The nannies know that these youths leave broken crack pipes by the edge of the playground, that they piss in flowerbeds, go looking for fights. Seeing them, the nannies quickly pick up children’s coats and toy diggers covered in sand, they hang their handbags from the handles of the prams, and they leave.

The procession goes through the park’s gates and the women go their separate ways: some walk up towards Montmartre or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; others, like Louise and Lydie, head down towards the Grands Boulevards. They walk side by side. Louise holds hands with Mila and Adam. When the pavement is narrow, she lets Lydie walk ahead of them, bent over her pram with a baby asleep inside it.

‘A young pregnant woman came by yesterday. She’s going to have twins in August,’ Lydie tells her.

Everyone knows that some mothers – the most sensible and conscientious ones – come here nanny-shopping, the way people used to go down to the docks or to the end of an alley to find a maid or a warehouseman. The mothers prowl around the benches, observing the nannies, examining the faces of the children when they go running to the thighs of these women, who brusquely blow their nose or console them after a fall. Sometimes the mothers ask questions. They investigate.

‘She lives on Rue des Martyrs and she’s due at the end of August. She’s looking for someone, so I thought of you,’ Lydie concludes.

Louise looks up at her with her doll-like eyes. She hears Lydie’s voice, as if from far away; the sound echoes inside her head but the words are a blur and she doesn’t grasp their meaning. She leans down, takes Adam in her arms and puts her hand under Mila’s armpit. Lydie raises her voice; she repeats something. She thinks that perhaps Louise didn’t hear her, that she’s distracted, her mind wholly occupied by the children.

‘So what do you think? Shall I give her your number?’

Louise does not reply. She gathers speed and pushes past, brutal, silent. She cuts in front of Lydie and as she makes her escape, she knocks over the pram with a sudden gesture, waking the baby, which starts to scream.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ shouts the nanny as all her shopping falls into the gutter. Louise is already far away. In the street, people gather around Lydie. They pick up mandarins that have rolled along the pavement; they throw the soaked baguette in a dustbin. They worry about the baby, who is fine, thankfully.

Lydie will recount this incredible story several times, and each time she will swear: ‘No, it wasn’t an accident. She knocked over the pram on purpose.’

Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. Once it’s on its way, it will shut up the harpies in the park, it will drive away her horrible landlord. It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom. She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet – whining, demanding cuddles – Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire.

One evening, Louise waits impatiently for Myriam. When her boss finally opens the door, Louise practically jumps on her, eyes ablaze. She is holding Mila by the hand. The nanny appears tense, concentrated. She looks as if she’s making a great effort to contain herself, not to hop up and down or yell something. She has been thinking about this moment all day