All That Man Is (6 page)

And, in so many words, Clovis said, ‘You're a loser, mate.'

And the boy – if that was the word, his chin was thick with orange stubble – drank his beer and seemed to have nothing more to say for himself.

So Clovis left it at that.

And then Mathilde said to him, when he was trying to tell her, post their drink together, what he thought of her son, ‘Well, if you want to help so much, Clovis, why don't you give him a job?'

So he had to make a place for him – first in the warehouse, and then, where there was less scope for him to do any damage (they sent the wrong windows to a site once, which Bérnard had loaded onto the truck), in the office. Though he is totally forbidden to answer the phone. And not allowed anywhere near anything to do with money. Which means there isn't much, in the office, for him to do. He tidies up. And for that, for a bit of ineffectual tidying, he is paid two hundred and fifty euros a week.

Clovis sighs, audibly, as they wait at a traffic light on their way into town. His fingers tap the steering wheel.

They stop at a petrol station to fill up, the Shell station which Clovis favours on Avenue de Dunkerque.

Bérnard, in the passenger seat, is staring out of the window.

Clovis pays for the petrol, V-Power Nitro+, and some summer windscreen-wiper fluid, which he sees they have on sale, and takes his seat in the BMW again.

He is just strapping himself in when his nephew says, speaking for the first time since they left the office, ‘Is it okay if I go on holiday?'

The presumptuous directness of the question, the total lack of supplicatory preamble, are shocking.

‘Holiday?' Clovis says, almost sarcastically.

‘Yes.'

‘You've only just started.'

To that, Bérnard says nothing, and Clovis has to focus, for a few moments, on leaving the petrol station. Then he says, again, ‘You've only just started.'

‘I get holidays though, don't I?' Bérnard says.

Clovis laughs.

‘I worry about your attitude,' he says.

Bérnard meets that statement with silence.

Holding the steering wheel, Clovis absorbs waves of outrage.

The silly thing is, he would be more than happy to have his nephew out of the way for a week or two. Or – who knows? – for ever.

‘You planning to go somewhere?' he asks.

‘Cyprus,' Bérnard says.

‘Ah, Cyprus. And how long,' Clovis asks, ‘do you plan to spend in Cyprus?'

‘A week.'

‘I see.'

They travel about a kilometre. Then Clovis says, ‘I'll think about it, okay?'

Bérnard says nothing.

Clovis half-turns to him and says again, ‘Okay?'

Bérnard, for the first time, seems slightly embarrassed. ‘Well. I've already paid for it. That's the thing. The holiday.'

A further, stronger wave of outrage, and Clovis says, ‘Well, that was a bit silly.'

‘So I need to go,' Bérnard explains.

‘When is it, this holiday?' Clovis asks, no longer trying to hide his irritation – if anything, playing it up, enjoying it.

‘It's next week.'

‘Next week?' Said with a theatrical expression of surprise.

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, you need to give at least a month's notice.'

‘Do I? You didn't tell me that.'

‘It's in your contract.'

‘Well … I didn't know.'

‘You should read documents,' Clovis says, ‘before you sign them.'

‘I didn't think you'd try to take advantage of me …'

‘Is
that
what I'm doing?'

‘Look,' Bérnard says, ‘I've already paid for it.'

Clovis says nothing.

‘You're not really going to try and stop me?'

‘I worry about your attitude, Bérnard.'

They have arrived in Bérnard's parents' street, the featureless street of narrow brick houses.

The BMW stops in front of one of them and first Bérnard, and then, more slowly, Clovis, emerges from it.

Unusually, Clovis comes into the house.

Bérnard's parents are both there. His father, in a vest, is drinking a beer. He has, within the last half-hour, returned from work. He is short, blonde, with a moustache – Asterix, basically. He is sitting at the table in the front room, the room into which the front door directly opens, with a single window onto the street, in the light of which he is studying
La Voix du Nord
. Bérnard's mother, further back in the same space, where the kitchen is, is doing the washing-up.

On Bérnard's entrance, neither of them looks up from what they are doing.

‘
Salut
,' he says.

They both murmur something. His father has a swig from the brown bottle in his hand.

‘André,' Clovis says to him.

At that, André looks up from the paper. Mathilde, too, looks across from the neon puddle of the kitchen. She smiles to see her brother.

André does not smile.

If happiness is having one euro more than your brother-in-law, then Clovis is happy a million times over.

And André – André is fucked.

Clovis steps forward into the room.

‘To what do we owe the honour?' André says.

Mathilde asks her brother if he'd like something.

‘No, thank you,' Clovis says.

Having left the harsh light of the kitchen, she kisses him on the face.

‘I find myself in a difficult position,' Clovis says.

His sister indicates that he should sit. Again, he declines.

‘I wanted to help,' he says. ‘I tried to help. But Bérnard has made it clear that he does not want the sort of help that I am able to offer him.'

At the sound of his name, Bérnard, who has been peering into the fridge, looks at his uncle.

‘I'm afraid so,' Clovis says sadly.

‘What do you mean?' André asks.

Clovis looks at him and says, ‘I'm sacking your son.'

He half-turns his head in the direction of the kitchen and says, ‘Yes, that's right, Bérnard – you can go where you like now.'

Bérnard, still illuminated by the open fridge, just stares at his uncle.

Mathilde is already pleading with him.

He is shaking his head. ‘No, no,' he is saying. ‘No, I've made up my mind.'

‘I knew this would happen,' André murmurs furiously.

‘What?' Clovis asks him. ‘What did you know?'

Through a friend at the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie, he had, a few years ago, found André a job as a Eurostar driver; the interview would have been a formality. André, saying something about the long hours, had turned the opportunity down, and still spends his days trundling back and forth between Lille and Dunkerque, Lille and Amiens. The stopping service. Local routes. Not even the Paris gig.

‘What did you know?' Clovis asks him, looming over the table where André is sitting with his paper.

André says, clinging to his beer, ‘You didn't really want to help, did you?'

‘Oh, I did,' Clovis tells him. ‘I did indeed. Your son is lazy.' He throws his voice towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, Bérnard. I'm sorry to say it, but you are. You have no ambition. No desire to improve yourself, to move up in the world …'

‘Please, Clovis, please,' Mathilde is still saying.

He silences her with a lightly placed hand – her shoulder. ‘I'm sorry. I am sorry,' he says. ‘Despite what your husband says, I did want to help. And I tried. I did what I could. And I will pay him,' he says, drawing himself up like a monarch in his suede jacket, ‘a month's wages in lieu of notice.'

‘Clovis …'

‘There is only so much I can do,' he tells her. ‘What can I do? What do you want me to do?'

‘Give him one more chance.'

‘If I thought it would help
him
, I would.'

André mutters something.

‘What?'

‘Bollocks,' André says more distinctly.

‘No. No, André, it is not
bollocks
,' Clovis says, speaking quietly, in a voice trembling with anger. ‘How have I benefited in any way from taking Bérnard on? Tell me how I have benefited.'

There is a tense silence.

Then Clovis, in a sad voice, says, ‘I'm sorry, Bérnard.'

Bérnard, now eating a yoghurt, just nods. He is not as upset as either of his parents seem to be.

He is not actually upset at all. The main facts, as he sees them, are: 1) he does not have to go to work tomorrow, or ever again, and 2) he is getting a thousand euros for nothing.

His mother's near-tearfulness, his father's smouldering fury, are just familiar parts of the family scenery.

He is aware that there exists between his father and his uncle some terrible issue, some fundamental unfriendliness – it is not something, however, that he understands. It has always been there. It is just part of life.

Like the way his parents argue.

They are arguing now.

From his room on the top floor of the house he hears them, far below.

When they argue it is either about money – which is always tight – or about Bérnard.

They worry about him, that he understands. They are arguing now out of their worry, shouting at each other.

He does not worry about himself.
Their
worry, however, sets off a sort of unwelcome humming in his psyche; like the high-pitched pulse of an alarm somewhere far off down the street, leaking anxiety into the night. Their voices now, travelling up through two floors, are like that. They are arguing about him, about what he is going ‘to do with his life'.

To him, the question seems entirely abstract.

He is playing a first-person shooter, listlessly massacring thousands of monstrous enemies.

After an hour or so he tires of it, and decides to visit Baudouin.

Baudouin is also playing a first-person shooter, albeit on a much larger and more expensive display – a vast display, flanked by muscular speakers. His father, also Baudouin, is a dentist, and the younger Baudouin is himself studying dentistry at the university. He is the only university friend with whom Bérnard is still in touch.

In keeping with his impeccably provisioned life, Baudouin always has a substantial stash of super-skunk – imported from Holland, and oozing crystals of THC – and Bérnard skins up while his friend finishes the level.

He says, ‘I've been sacked.'

Baudouin, the future dentist, takes out half a dozen zombies. ‘I thought you worked for your uncle,' he says.

‘Yeah. He sacked me.'

‘What a twat.'

‘He is a twat.'

Baudouin stretches out a white hand for the spliff.

Bérnard obliges him. ‘I don't give a shit,' he says, as if worried that his friend might think he did.

Baudouin, blasting, grunts.

‘I get a month's pay. Severance or whatever.' Bérnard says that with some pride.

Baudouin, however, seems unimpressed: ‘Yeah?'

‘And now I can come to Cyprus for sure.'

Passing him the spliff again, and without looking at him, Baudouin says, ‘Oh, I need to talk to you about that.'

‘What?'

‘I can't go.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘I didn't pass Biochemistry Two,' Baudouin says. ‘I need to take it again.'

‘When's the exam?' Bérnard asks.

‘In two weeks.'

‘So why can't you go?'

‘My dad won't let me.'

‘Fuck that.'

Baudouin laughs, as if in agreement. Then he says, ‘No, he says it's important I don't fail again.'

Bérnard, sitting somewhat behind him on one of the tatami mats that litter the floor, has a pull on the spliff. He feels deeply let down. ‘You seriously not coming then?' he asks, unable to help sounding hurt.

What makes it worse, the whole thing was Baudouin's idea.

It had been he who found, somewhere online, the shockingly inexpensive package that included flights from Charleroi airport and seven nights at the Hotel Poseidon in Protaras. It had been he who persuaded Bérnard – admittedly, he needed little persuading – that Protaras was a hedonistic paradise, that the weather in Cyprus would be well hot enough in mid-May, and that it was an excellent time for a holiday. He had stoked up Bérnard's enthusiasm for the idea until it was the only thing on which he fixed his mind as he tried to survive the interminable afternoons on the greyish-brown industrial estate.

And now he says, still mostly focused on the screen in front of him, ‘No. Seriously. I can't.'

His hand, stretched out, is waiting for the spliff.

Bérnard passes it to him, silently.

‘What am I supposed to do?' he asks after a while.

‘Go!' Baudouin says, over the manic whamming of the speakers. ‘Obviously, go. Why wouldn't you? I would.'

‘On my own?'

‘Why wouldn't you?'

‘Only saddoes,' Bérnard says, ‘go on holiday on their own.'

‘Don't be stupid …'

‘It's true.'

‘It's not.'

Bérnard has the spliff again, what's left of it, an acrid stub. ‘It so is.' He says, ‘I'll feel like a fucking loser.'

‘Don't be stupid,' Baudouin says, finishing the level finally and saving his position. He turns to Bérnard. ‘Think Steve McQueen,' he says. Baudouin is a fan of the late American actor. He has a large poster of him – squinting magisterially astride a vintage motorbike – on the wall of the room in which they sit. ‘Think Belmondo.'

‘Whatever.'

‘Do you think I'm pleased I can't go?' Baudouin asks. A Windows Desktop, weirdly vast and static, now fills the towering screen.

‘Whatever,' Bérnard says again.

While he moodily sets to work on the next spliff, massaging the tobacco from one of his friend's Marlboro Lights, Baudouin starts an MP4 of
Iron Man 3
– a film which has yet to arrive in the Lille cinemas.