Three Days and a Life Read online

  This Thursday she took the first bus to Marmont, as she did every week. Antoine, unable to get back to sleep, heard her quietly closing the front door. He got out of bed and from his window looked down on Monsieur Desmedt’s garden. There, in a corner that was just out of sight, was the rubble sack and . . .

  Once again he found himself overwhelmed by tears. Ulysses was not the only reason he was inconsolable; the dog’s death was a painful echo of the loneliness he had experienced these past months, of a whole series of let-downs and disappointments.

  Since his mother never came home before early afternoon, she wrote a list of chores for him on the big slate that hung in the kitchen. There was always housework to be done, messages to be fetched, groceries to be bought from the minimart, and a whole litany of exhortations: tidy your room, there’s ham in the fridge, eat a yoghurt and a piece of fruit . . .

  Madame Courtin, who planned everything in advance, could always find things for him to do, she was never at a loss. For more than a week Antoine had been taking surreptitious peeks in the wardrobe at the present his father had sent, a parcel about the right size for a PlayStation, but today his heart was not in it. He was haunted by the death of the dog, by the sudden brutal manner in which it had occurred. He set to work. He did the shopping without exchanging a word with anyone, at the boulangerie he simply gave a curt nod, he could not have said a thing.

  By early afternoon, his only thought was to escape to Saint-Eustache.

  He packed up the lunch he had not eaten to dump it somewhere along the way. As he passed the Desmedts’ house, he forced himself not to glance towards the corner of the garden where the rubbish sacks were stacked, he walked faster, his heart hammering fit to burst, being so close heightened his grief. He balled his fists and began to run and did not stop until he came to the foot of the tree house. When he had caught his breath, he looked up. The fort that had taken so many hours of work seemed grotesquely ugly now. The patchwork of tarpaulin, fabric and tar paper made it look like something from a shantytown. He remembered Émilie’s rather peeved reaction when she saw it . . . Furious, he shinned up the tree and set about destroying everything, hurling planks and pieces of timber as far as he could. When the debris had been scattered, he climbed down again, panting for breath. He leaned against the tree, slumped to the ground, and sat there for a long time, wondering what to do. He had lost all interest in life.

  He missed Ulysses.

  But it was Rémi who showed up.

  Antoine saw the little boy in the distance. He was walking carefully, as though afraid to trample the mushrooms. Eventually he reached Antoine, whose body was racked by sobs. The child stood there looking helpless. He peered up into the tree, saw that everything had been wrecked, opened his mouth to speak only to be brutally interrupted.

  “Why did your dad have to do it?” Antoine screamed, “Why did he do it, WHY?”

  Rage had him leaping him to his feet. Rémi stared at him, his eyes wide, and listened to this diatribe he did not understand since, at home, he had simply been told that Ulysses had run off – something the dog often did.

  In that moment, consumed by an overwhelming feeling of injustice, Antoine was no longer himself. The boundless anguish he felt at Ulysses’ death was transformed into anger. In a blind fury, he grabbed the branch he had used to steady the lift cage, brandishing it as though Rémi were a dog and he the master.

  Rémi, who had never seen Antoine in such a rage, was terrified.

  He turned, took a step.

  Antoine gripped the branch in both hands and, wild with rage, lashed out at the child. The blow caught him on the right temple. Rémi crumpled to the ground. Antoine went to him, reached out and shook the boy’s shoulder.

  Rémi?

  He must be stunned.

  Antoine rolled him over so he could tap the boy’s cheeks, but once on his back he saw Rémi’s eyes were open.

  Fixed, glassy.

  And a simple truth dawned on him: Rémi was dead.

  2

  The branch has just fallen from his hands. He looks down at the child’s sprawled body. There is something strange about the posture that Antoine cannot quite place, a helplessness . . . What have I done? And what do I do now? Go and get help? No, he can’t just leave the boy here, he has to carry him, to pick him up and run all the way to Beauval, run straight to Docteur Dieulafoy.

  “Don’t worry,” Antoine whispers. “We’ll get you to hospital.”

  His voice is almost inaudible, as though he is talking to himself.

  He bends, slips his arms under the boy’s body and gathers him up. He does not know his own strength, which is just as well because there is a long road ahead . . .

  Antoine begins to run, but Rémi’s body suddenly feels like a terrible weight in his arms. He stops. No, it’s not that Rémi is heavy, but that he is limp. The head is thrown back, the arms hang by his sides, the feet jiggle as though he were a puppet. It is like carrying a sack.

  Antoine’s willpower suddenly fails, his knees buckle as he is forced to set Rémi back down on the ground.

  Can he really be . . . dead?

  Faced with this question, Antoine’s mind goes blank. It requires an almost superhuman effort to hunker down next to the boy. He studies the pallor of the skin, the parted lips . . . He reaches out, but he cannot touch the child’s face. There is an invisible barrier between them, his hand encounters an immovable obstacle that prevents it advancing further.

  The consequences begin to dawn on Antoine.

  He has scrabbled to his feet and is pacing nervously, sobbing, he can no longer bring himself to look at Rémi’s body. Fists clenched, his mind white-hot, his every muscle tensed, he paces up and down, what should he do, tears come so fast he can barely see, he wipes them away with his sleeve.

  And then he feels a surge of hope – he moved!

  Antoine feels like calling on the forest as witness: he just moved, didn’t he? Did you see that? He bends down.

  But now, not the slightest tremor, nothing.

  Except that the place where the branch made contact has changed colour, it is now a deep red, a huge bruise that covers the boy’s whole cheek, and seems to spread like a wine stain on a white table cloth.

  He needs to make sure, to check whether the child is breathing. It is something he once saw on T.V., they put a mirror to someone’s lips to see whether the glass misted. But he has no chance of finding a mirror here . . .

  There is nothing else to do. Antoine tries to concentrate, he crouches over the body, brings his ear close to the boy’s mouth, but the rustle of the forest and his hammering heart make it impossible to hear anything.

  He needs to try something different. Antoine opens his eyes wide and, fingers splayed, he reaches his hand out towards Rémi’s chest, towards his Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. As he touches the fabric, he feels a wave of relief: it is warm. He’s alive! He places his hand firmly on the child stomach. Where is the heart? He feels for his own heart. It is further up, further to the left, it is not at all where he thought . . . And as he fumbles for a pulse he almost forgets what he is doing. There: his left hand has found his own heart, his right is pressed to the same spot on Rémi’s chest. Beneath one hand he feels a powerful throb, beneath the other, nothing. He presses a little harder, feels around, still nothing; he places both his hands flat on the child’s chest, there is no pulse. The heart is dead.

  Antoine cannot help himself, he lashes out. He slaps the child hard, once, twice. Why did you die? Why did you have to die?

  The boy’s head lolls from side to side. Antoine stops abruptly. What the hell is he doing! Slapping Rémi . . . who is dead.

  He scrabbles to his feet again, distraught.

  What should he do? Over and over he asks himself the same question, his thoughts refuse to budge.

  He begins to circle the body again, wringing his hands, savagely brushing away an endless torrent of tears.

  He has to give himself up. To the police. What
would he say?

  I was playing with Rémi, I hit him with a branch and killed him?

  Besides, how can he confess, the nearest police station is in Marmont, eight kilometres from Beauval . . . His mother would find out from the gendarmes. The news would kill her, she couldn’t bear to be the mother of a murderer. And his father, how would he react? He would send another present . . .

  Antoine is in prison. Forced to share a tiny cell with three older, vicious boys. They look like characters from the T.V. series “Oz” – he watched a few episodes on the sly – there is this one guy, a terrifying thug named Vernon Schillinger, who has a thing for pretty boys. If he goes to prison, Antoine is convinced he will come face to face with someone like that.

  And who would come to visit? Images flash past, his friends, Émilie, Théo, Kevin, the school headmaster . . . Suddenly the image of Monsieur Desmedt rears up, the hulking frame, the blue overalls, the square jaw, the grey eyes.

  No, Antoine will not have to go to prison, there will not be time, when Monsieur Desmedt finds out what happened he will kill him, just like he killed his dog, a shotgun blast to the belly.

  He looks at his watch: 2.30 p.m., the sun is high, Antoine is bathed in sweat.

  He needs to make a decision, but something tells him it has already been made: he will go home, say nothing, go and hole up in his room as though he had never been out, how will anyone know it was him? No-one will notice Rémi is missing until . . . He tries to calculate, but gets confused, he tries counting on his fingers, but counting what? How long will it take for Rémi to be found? Hours, days? And in any case, Rémi has often been seen hanging out with Antoine and his friends, they are bound to be questioned . . . The others are probably all at Kevin’s house right now, playing on the PlayStation, leaving only him, Antoine, which means everyone will suspect him.

  No, what he needs to do is make sure that Rémi is never found.

  The image of the rubbish sack containing the body of Ulysses flashes through his mind.

  Get rid of him.

  Rémi disappears, no-one knows where he went, there, that’s the solution, they’ll search for him and no-one will even imagine that . . .

  Antoine is still pacing up and down next to the body, he cannot bring himself to look at it. It freaks him out, makes it impossible to think.

  What if Rémi told his mother he was going up to Saint-Eustache to see Antoine?

  People might be out looking for him already, any minute now he will hear voices calling, “Rémi! Antoine!”

  Antoine feels the trap snap shut. His tears begin to well once more. He is done for.

  He needs to hide the body, but where? How? If he hadn’t destroyed the tree house, he could have winched Rémi up in the lift, no-one would think to look for him up there. The crows would have feasted on him.

  He is overcome by the sheer scale of the tragedy. In a few fleeting seconds, his whole life has changed course. He is a murderer.

  These two thoughts seem irreconcilable, surely it is impossible to be twelve years old and a murderer . . .

  Desperation rises in him like a flood tide.

  Time passes, still Antoine does not know what to do. By now, back in Beauval, people are probably starting to worry.

  The millpond! It will look as though he drowned!

  No, the body would float. Antoine has nothing to weigh it down. When the child is fished out, someone will notice the bruise on his temple. Maybe they will think he fell and hit his head?

  Antoine is at a complete loss.

  The beech tree! Antoine can picture it as though it were right in front of him. A huge tree that toppled years ago. One day, without warning, it simply keeled over, like an old man dropping dead, and disinterred a huge knot of roots, a vast bank of earth as tall as a man. It brought down other trees with it as it fell, creating a tangle of branches where he and his friends used to play a long time ago until, for no particular reason, they grew bored of the place . . . The beech tree collapsed onto a sort of burrow, a cavernous hole that no-one dared climb down into – even before the tree fell – no-one knows where it leads, or whether it leads anywhere, but Antoine can think of no other solution.

  He has made his decision, he turns around.

  Rémi’s face has changed again, it is grey now, the bruise has blossomed and grown darker. The mouth is gaping. Antoine feels queasy. He will never have the strength to go all that way, to the far side of Saint-Eustache, even under normal circumstances it would take fifteen minutes.

  He did not think he had any tears left. They stream down his face, drip from his chin. He blows his nose into his hand and wipes it on some leaves, approaches the body of the child, hunkers down and grabs the wrists. They are thin, warm, soft, like sleeping animals.

  Turning his head away, Antoine begin to drag . . .

  He has not gone six metres before he encounters obstacles, tree stumps, undergrowth. The forest of Saint-Eustache has not been private land for as long as anyone can remember, it is a dense snarl of thickets, closely spaced trees, many collapsing onto one another, and brambles and coppices; dragging the body is impossible, he will have to carry it.

  Antoine cannot decide.

  All around him the forest cracks like the beams of an old ship. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. How can he summon up the courage?

  He does not know where the surge of strength comes from, but brusquely he bends down, grabs Rémi and slings the boy over his shoulder. And he sets off, walking quickly, skirting those tree trunks he cannot step over.

  He stumbles, his foot catching on a root, trips over and falls, Rémi’s body lands on top of him, a heavy jumble of floppy, flailing limbs twisting around at him like an octopus, Antoine lets out a scream and pushes the corpse away, struggles to his feet still screaming and backs against a tree, panting for breath . . . He had always assumed a corpse was stiff, he has seen pictures, dead people stiff as planks. This one, on the other hand, is limp, as though boneless.

  Antoine tries to steel himself. Come on, you’ve got to hide the body, make it disappear, once you’ve done that everything will be fine. He takes a step closer, squeezes his eyes shut, grabs Rémi’s arms, bends so he can hoist the boy onto his shoulders again, and sets off once more, treading carefully. Carrying Rémi on his back makes him feel like a firefighter saving someone from a burning building. Like Peter Parker when he carries Mary Jane.

  The temperature has dropped, but still he is dripping with sweat. And exhausted; his feet seem to weigh a tonne, his shoulders have begun to sag. But he has to move faster, people back in Beauval will be worrying.

  And his mother will be home soon.

  And Madame Desmedt will call round to ask her whether she has seen Rémi.

  And when he gets home, she will ask him the same question, and he will say, Rémi? No, I haven’t seen him, I was . . .

  Where was he?

  As he clambers over fallen branches, circumvents the dense thickets, stumbles over saplings and the occasional root snaking above the ground, staggering under the weight of the dead child, he tries to work out where he would have been if he had not been here, but he can think of nothing. “The boy’s not got much imagination . . .” his teacher had said last year before he started his last year in primary school. Monsieur Sánchez has never really liked him, he had time only for Adrien, who had always been teacher’s pet, there have even been rumours about Monsieur Sanchez and Adrien’s mother . . . This is a woman who always wears perfume – not at all like Antoine’s mother – at the school gates, everyone stares at her because she smokes in the street and wears . . .

  It was bound to happen, for a second time he falls flat on his face, bangs his head against a tree trunk, releases his burden and howls as he sees Rémi tumble over him and hit the ground with a sickening thud. Instinctively, he had reached out . . . For a moment, he had worried that Rémi might be hurt, had thought about him as though he were still alive.

  He can see the boy’s back, his
skinny legs, his little hands, it is heartbreaking.

  Antoine cannot bear it any more. He lies there, sprawled among the leaves, breathing in the earthy smell the way he once breathed in the smell of Ulysses’ fur. He is so tired he wishes he could sleep here, wishes he could sink into the earth, wishes he too might die.

  He will give up, he does not have the strength.

  He glances at his watch, his mother must be home by now. It is difficult to explain, but if he manages to get to his feet again, it will be for her sake. She has done nothing to deserve this. It would kill her. He will have killed her, if she finds out that . . .

  Painfully, he stands up. Rémi has scratches on his arm and on his legs, Antoine cannot help but imagine that they must hurt, it’s crazy, he cannot get it into his head that Rémi is dead, he simply cannot admit it. It is not a corpse but the boy he knows that he heaves onto his shoulders and carries through the forests of Saint-Eustache, the boy he hoisted in the lift cage with Ulysses, the boy who screamed yaaaay! He loved the lift.

  Antoine is beginning to hallucinate.

  As he moves forward, taking long strides, he see Rémi coming towards him, sees him up ahead, smiling and waving at him, hiya!, he always admired Antoine. Hey, is that a tree house? He looks up into the branches, he sees a small boy with a chubby face and twinkling eyes, he’s very well spoken for his age, alright, he’s a kid, he thinks like a kid, but he’s interesting, he asks amazing questions . . .

  Antoine did not realise how close he was. He has made it.

  There it is. The huge, fallen beech tree.

  To reach the trunk and the burrow beneath it, he will have to fight his way through thick brambles and, to make things more difficult, it is much darker in this part of the woods.