Fish Change Direction in Cold Weather Read online

  ‘Thanks for having us over.’

  ‘It’s only natural.’

  ‘What with the other fag upstairs who didn’t stop dancing all night . . .’

  ‘You mean that young Russian student from next door?’

  ‘Is he Russian?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. But yesterday it was more like he was studying Québécois . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean to contradict you, my dear Michel, but it was more like he was studying young women from Quebec.’

  At the end of the meal, Alexis scratched his forehead. He hesitated for a moment, then ploughed ahead.

  ‘Alex told me you guys were brothers.’

  ‘In a way . . .’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Do you like whisky?’

  ‘With Coke, yeah.’

  ‘I mean good whisky.’

  ‘With good Coke, yeah.’

  ‘This is not the sort of whisky you mix, my dear Alexis . . . Have a walk around the apartment while I get things ready.’

  Michel was pacing nervously around the kitchen. Had Simon lost his senses? The whole point of settling in this humdrum neighbourhood all those years ago had been so that they could remain discreet. Simon went up to him.

  ‘Have you seen what you’ve dragged in?’

  Simon put his arm around Michel reassuringly.

  ‘Calm down, my love, the situation is under control.’

  ‘You can’t control an idiot like that!’

  ‘He’s not an idiot, he’s just not very well . . .’

  ‘He’s sick, I agree! And he’ll go and tell everyone.’

  ‘He won’t say anything to anyone . . . At least, not for the time being.’

  Michel was still nervous. Simon caressed his cheek.

  ‘He’s no more homophobic than you or I.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t know it by the sound of him.’

  ‘Calm down, Michel . . .’

  Eeek! The floorboards creaked. Michel instinctively drew away from Simon. Alex was looking at them from the kitchen door. In this sort of situation, only a false cough will do. Michel volunteered.

  ‘Ahem, hem. A little walk with the dog?’

  ‘Uh, sure, yeah, sure . . .’

  ‘Pipo, where are you, you naughty little Pipo?’

  Once he was sure that Michel and Alex had finally gone out, Simon brought out the bottle of Chivas Royal Salute 21 Year Old, and set it down on the little coffee table in the sitting room. He removed the precious bottle from its velvet case. He turned the stopper. He filled only two of the three glasses. He heard footsteps walking around the apartment. He sank deep into the armchair to wait, serene. Alexis, puzzled, came to sit on the sofa opposite the armchair.

  ‘Is this a sofabed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh? Well there’s something I can’t quite figure out here . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I saw there are two bedrooms and a study where there’s no bed, so I just wondered where we’re gonna sleep?’

  ‘In the room down the hall.’

  ‘But then where do you sleep?’

  ‘In that room there.’

  ‘And your . . . brother?’

  ‘In that room there.’

  ‘Huh? But it’s the same room.’

  ‘Michel, who is not my brother, sleeps in the same room as me because we always sleep together. Like any couple.’

  Alexis narrowed his eyes. Simon handed him a glass of Chivas Royal Salute 21 Year Old. Glug!

  ‘You’re not really supposed to drink it all in one go . . .’

  Alexis opened his eyes and stared at Simon for a long time. He put the empty glass back down on the table.

  ‘Sorry . . .’

  ‘No need to apologise. There’s some left. The bottle is half full or half empty. It all depends on how you look at it. How do you see it?’

  ‘Completely empty.’

  Simon nodded, a connoisseur of couch confessions.

  ‘Tell me, Alexis. Are you afraid of black people?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘You never get angry at them?’

  ‘No, never!’

  ‘If I tell you my name is Simon Birnbaum and that I’m Jewish, is it a problem for you?’

  ‘Well no, not any more . . .’

  ‘You know why, “not any more”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you’ve identified me.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What you are afraid of, Alexis, is people you cannot identify – homosexuals, Jews . . . A black man, you can see he’s black, you’re not afraid of him. Now that you’ve spoken with me, and you have an idea who I am, the fact that I’m a homosexual, and Jewish as well, doesn’t bother you, or doesn’t bother you . . . any more, shall we say. You need something to mark the difference. You weren’t born like this, Alexis; I know you certainly weren’t like this before. But before what, do you know?’

  Alexis shuddered. The memory of what he did not want to talk about any more was there again. When something hurts, even if what you’ve just heard is very complicated, it feels good to find yourself in the presence of someone who can help. Alexis had, through a simple glance, asked for help. He was aware of what he had become. He just didn’t know how to get out of it. He let himself sink into the soft couch, head back. Simon poured him a second glass of Chivas Royal Salute 21 Year Old.

  ‘If you like, you can put your feet up on the table. You should feel comfortable. Just mind the whisky bottle, if you would . . .’

  Alexis, docile, stretched out his legs and set them gently on the little table, careful not to touch the bottle. Simon crossed his hands on his lap.

  ‘Alexis? Tell me about your childhood . . .’

  Alexis took a tiny swallow of whisky. He kept it in his mouth so that his taste buds would absorb all the different flavours. He set the glass down in front of him, took a deep breath, and set off on a journey back in time, starting deep inside himself.

  ‘Roll over!’

  Out in the street, Alex burst out laughing. He couldn’t stop.

  ‘How does he do that?’

  Pipo, following Michel’s twirling hand, was rolling over on the ice. The moment his master stopped waving his hand, he lay still, wagging his tail.

  ‘How did he learn that?’

  ‘We’re not too sure whether he taught us or we taught him.’

  ‘I think you taught him.’

  ‘Sometimes animals have something inside them already and all we do is discover it. Like with human beings.’

  Alex could tell that Michel was trying to get some message across, like ‘the world is a beautiful place’. He didn’t want to hear it. It reminded him of the ethics classes they had at school.

  ‘What else does he know how to do?’

  Michel snapped his fingers. Pipo began to crawl.

  ‘Can I try?’

  ‘Try, it might work. It depends on him.’

  Alex snapped his fingers. Pipo crawled.

  ‘Roll over!’

  Pipo rolled over on the ground to the rhythm of Alex’s hand. Alex was flabbergasted that the little dog had obeyed him.

  ‘Does he do it with everybody?’

  ‘No!’

  Alex couldn’t get over it. As a boy-on-his-way-to-a-bad-end, it felt good to know that he could do something that no one else could do. But every victory has its price.

  ‘Now you have to reward him.’

  ‘What do I say?’

  ‘You stroke him and tell him you’re pleased with him. All he wants to do is please you.’

  Alex stroked Pipo, who rolled over on his back.

  ‘Now he’s surrendering; you’ve become his friend, he trusts you.’

  ‘That quickly?’

  ‘It’s instinctive.’

  Just for a moment, Alex thought that maybe the world could be a beautiful place. This was nothing like his ethics classes, where it was all just theory. He smiled at Michel. That was a nice thing he’d just sa
id. He went on stroking Pipo.

  ‘Gently, I said!’

  Boris Bogdanov had never learned how to shout quietly.

  ‘You mustn’t break it!’

  ‘Do you always get stressed out like this?’

  Careful not to slip, Boris and Julie were carrying the aquarium from the dark apartment over to the little nest opposite. Boris hadn’t been able to carry it on his own. As she turned, Julie saw Michel, Alex and Pipo, who was still on his back.

  ‘So now it’s Michel’s dog you’ve found?’

  She gave him her little smiling wink, no hard feelings, but Alex still blushed bright red.

  ‘Gently!’

  ‘Yes, yes, I heard you, gently!’

  ‘Well, Julie, he certainly seems to know what he wants!’

  ‘I’m not too sure what he really wants.’

  ‘Don’t worry, when the ice melts, everything will go back to normal.’

  Julie’s smile faded and she almost slipped in her high heels. She knew one thing, she preferred this abnormal everything. Hadn’t she already stuck her neck out by telling her boss at Sex Paradisio that she wouldn’t be coming into work that night?

  ‘I’m sheltering four fish and a Russian!’ she had told him.

  ‘I already told you not to go getting cosy with the mafia.’

  ‘He’s not mafia, he’s into knots.’

  ‘Don’t you take me for a fool, Julie, the mafia is everything but slipknots. I don’t like you hanging around with Russians. You want me to tell you what they do to women?’

  ‘This one doesn’t do anything to women! Not a thing! He just makes knots with his fish. He’s got no power and no heat. I can’t let him stay there on his own. It’s just for a day or two. Show some solidarity!’

  ‘I’ll tell you where to put your solidarity – you’re fired! That’s not how we work over here at Sex Paradisio!’

  True, solidarity wasn’t exactly Sex Paradisio’s stock-in-trade. Among the girls it was every woman for herself, and stealing each other’s clients was the very definition of team spirit on high heels.

  Julie hadn’t felt a thing, getting sacked like that. The only thing that surprised her was that every time she met someone new, in other words practically every evening, she always told them up front that she had no intention of quitting her job. Men are like that: they desire you because you’re a stripper, but the minute you sleep with them, they want you to stop stripping, and they don’t want other men looking at you. Julie didn’t have a relationship with Boris yet, but she’d already grown used to the idea that she wouldn’t be stripping any more. She’d been giving it some thought.

  ‘Let’s put it on the table in the sitting room, because of the cats.’

  ‘Wherever you like, Boris. Wherever you like.’

  ‘They’ll be fine here!’

  STOP IT, YOU’RE HURTING ME!

  If it weren’t for the ice, Alex wouldn’t be playing with the neighbour’s dog, and our Russian wouldn’t be moving in with the most beautiful girl in the neighbourhood. I moved away from the window. There was nothing left to see. Why wasn’t anything happening to me? Maybe something was going on elsewhere. At the cottage, my dad picked up the phone right away.

  ‘Have you got heat?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘So you’re not cold?’

  ‘Course not, I’ve got the generator. It’s not a big one, but it does the job. Well, that is, if I can get gas tomorrow . . .’

  ‘And what are you eating?’

  ‘I’ve learned how to make a ham sandwich.’

  I’d run out of questions.

  ‘And how are things at home?’

  ‘Okay. Mum’s on the computer. She’s doing some calculating.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’

  ‘No, all the schools are closed, even police school.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to try and get the ice off the roof, there’s way too much on it right now.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll slip?’

  ‘I’ll be careful, I promise. And what are you going to do tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you been using your video camera?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll slip and break it.’

  ‘I hope you’re being nice to Mum.’

  I could tell my mum must have told him what I’d said the night before. It must have hurt her. I wanted to apologise. He spoke first.

  ‘Seems you were feeling kind of down, or so she said . . .’

  ‘I’m pretty bored.’

  ‘It’s this damned ice that makes everything complicated. Things will go back to normal afterwards.’

  I’d run out of strength to talk. I felt guilty and my eyes filled with tears. I didn’t want the ice to complicate things, I wanted it to fix them. It wasn’t doing any of the things I had asked. Why had I even bothered?

  I went into the big storage room that we used as a study. My mum was typing slowly on the computer keyboard. When she saw me she suddenly stopped and with a click she closed the document on the screen. I just had time to see it was an Excel spreadsheet. They’d started teaching us Excel at school two months earlier.

  ‘Are you okay, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Sort of . . . bookkeeping.’

  ‘Can I watch television?’

  ‘Do what you like, darling, you can even stay up late, there’s no school tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks, my sweet Mummy!’

  I hugged her. She was surprised at me clinging to her like that. I didn’t feel like helping myself any more. I’d been mean enough the night before. What was the point of making her cry? I love my mother. In the end, hurting other people doesn’t make you feel any better. And besides, it didn’t do any good. What I was trying to do was just too hard. Children can’t decide things, I should have realised that right from the start. There’s not a thing you can do once your parents have decided to split up.

  ‘I love you so much, sweetheart. Right! Go and watch television.’

  Hugging her did her good: she seemed relieved. I was throwing in the towel. Split up, share me between you, I won’t say another word.

  I curled up in my dad’s spot, in ‘his’ armchair with ‘his’ remote. Before was before. I had to stop hoping he’d come back and that life would go on just like it used to. I surfed through all the channels. On Le Canal Nouvelles all they talked about was the ice. It was perfect for them. But the problem with these non-stop news programmes is that they end up repeating themselves. I heard the same thing over and over again so often that for a laugh – well, actually in order not to cry – I started multiplying. Seven hundred thousand households without electricity times the number of evacuation centres, add a thousand volunteers and multiply by twenty-five millimetres of ice: what do you get?

  ‘The cost of the storm could be devastating. Damage is already estimated in the tens of millions of dollars . . . And the ice has not stopped falling . . .’

  I was ashamed of what I’d done. If it had solved my problem, I wouldn’t have minded, but . . . it was all for nothing. I ran towards my room, angry, but before I got there I stopped suddenly in the storage room.

  ‘Night, Mum.’

  She wasn’t there. My gaze landed on the tray by the printer. On the bookkeeping sheet there were two columns, ‘you’ and ‘me’, and loads of numbers. I read, ‘video camera: one thousand dollars’. In the ‘you’ column was written, ‘five hundred dollars’. Same thing in the ‘me’ column. There was a comment in the margin: ‘we were still together . . .’

  It’s the thought that counts, not the present . . . Easy to say.

  Everything in the house was listed. I saw that my dad could keep the electronics but he had to give up the sofa and his precious leather armchair. What? The sofa was worth three thousand dollars? My dad was keeping the television, six
hundred dollars, but giving up the computer, eight hundred. There was a line marked ‘alimony: five hundred dollars’. It was spread over a year. It looked like my dad wouldn’t be paying anything until April because my mum was getting the big double bed and the big dresser in the sitting room, which came to two thousand dollars. And in the middle of all those figures, there I was like a piece of furniture. Hardly worth any more than the sofa.

  I heard the toilet flush. I rushed to my bedroom before my mum was even out of the bathroom. Slam!

  The sky hadn’t done a thing for me; on the contrary, my situation was getting worse by the day, by the hour. I went to the window. I stared at the sky and shouted.

  ‘Stop it, you’re hurting me!’

  Wednesday, 7 January 1998

  ‘Contrary to all expectations, the storm has begun to lessen in intensity. Hundreds of Hydro-Québec team workers have been busy repairing and replacing poles, power lines and damaged pylons. Three hundred thousand users have already been reconnected to the grid. Everything would seem to indicate that the situation will soon be under control.’

  BUSINESS IS BUSINESS

  The first thing Julie saw when she woke up was the Hydro-Québec trucks doing a waltz. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She hadn’t woken up this early in ages. She went into the sitting room: there was absolutely no doubt about it, this was no ordinary man. Every morning he came up with something new.

  Boris was lying face down on the sofa, with one hand on the big sheet of cardboard covering the aquarium, which he had placed right next to him on the coffee table. The two cats, who’d grudgingly given up their usual spot, were sitting on the coffee table, their noses up against the glass. Tails twitching, they watched attentively as the fish twisted and turned. Their obvious intention, if Boris let his vigilance slip for so much as a nanosecond, was to revise his entire mathematical theory, to simplify his calculations by two units. Only Brutus, as loyal as can be, lay purring on Boris’s back.

  Julie went into the kitchen on tiptoes. She switched on her little radio. Not loudly, just enough to find out if, by some miracle, this might all continue.