CHAPTER 2
And he sat there, and sat there. Not a word, for at least five minutes, which seemed an age, and I wondered what he would do. He was my big brother, the man who took up Papa’s torch when he dropped it in the mud. He drew a long, soughing breath.

“Does anyone else know?”

“As far as I am aware, nobody. This is not a thing I shout out to the world, Rollo”

“Then you must not. Those bastards will eat you alive if they know. And you do not tell Maman, not now, not until I have time to think. Look, I had news, yes? News I will share with her, but this news, we will keep just to ourselves for now”

His voice was so much gentler than it had been, sadness leeching away anger.

“What are you going to do, brother mine?”

“Ah, little one, that I do not know, not in detail. I have read of this, we have had seminars and pamphlets on it, the whens and hows of searching a man who isn’t, or a woman who doesn’t want to be, but this, this is home, this is family…”

He sat again in silence, then shook himself.

“For now, you put away that shirt and you go and see Monsieur Vallon at the tailor’s, you know the shop. Tell him it is for me, but it is a shirt for you, yes? I will pay him next week, but you go now, and before our mother returns. Oh, and here, take this for bread”

I went to my room and pulled on a T-shirt before running down the street to the tailor shop, where M Vallon himself cast an appraising eye over me before pulling a shirt from a drawer. I had been lucky; nobody else was about, nobody from my school, so it had been safe. He stared at me for a short while, obviously unhappy about my hair.

“Tell Roland that he is not in debt to me, my friend. He will know”

Two baguettes and a pavé, that was all he wanted, and I got back just after Maman had returned. She saw my face, and there were sighs.

“Fighting again? You find the one boyish activity that does most harm, and you excel at it!”

Rollo grunted. “I think not, dear mother, I think if he excelled at it he would have less damage. What Sacha excels at is lying down while they kick him, I suspect. We need to think about moving him”

She started to undo the overall she wore for work, revealing the slightly frayed blouse I had made for her two years before, back when Papa was still notionally sitting at the same table and sharing the same bed. I would have to see about making another. Rollo held up his hands as she started to protest about costs, journey times, interrupted studies…

“Maman, I have news, good news. I am changing job”

She sat down, weary, as I began to slice the bread for our soup.

“And this is good news how exactly? That you throw away your career? What are you changing to?”

He smiled, and it was warmer. “No, Maman, not a change in that sense. I have a post with the PAF. Instead of having to walk some smelly back street in the cold and the wet, I shall be sitting in a warm booth looking at passports of boring English people. I shall be getting a leg up as well. Early, too…they like me. Sous-brigadier, Maman, which means…”

She was now awake fully. “A pay rise?”

“Not much at first, but it will go up each year, and then, you know, if they like me…”

She pulled some papers from her overall pocket. “So, perhaps, I can give these up?”

Lotto tickets. Papa had spent most of his earnings at the PMU, gambling it away in the tabac where he had met Her, as Maman referred to the woman he now lived with, the capital letter audible along with the spit and venom. Mother limited herself to a couple of weekly tickets, just on the chance…it was so much better a vice than the cigarettes she had smoked most of her life, and certainly less pungent. Roland smiled again.

“Still, you should check the numbers, just in case. One never knows”

Supper, dinner, call it what you will, was a sort of soup, sort of daube, sort of whatever she had left, thickened with cornflour and soaked up with the bread. It filled, and that was the point of it.

“Rollo?”

“Yes, brother?”

“Do they have a canteen at the port?”

“I believe so, Sacha, but I will not just be at the port. Carpiquet as well. Ah.hostesses, my life improves”

Maman smiled across the table at him. “Lechery, is it? There are seven of them, seven to collect, if the old women are to be believed in their superstitions”

Roland laughed, and made a joke about Jacobins, and the mood at the table left me feeling that perhaps, just perhaps, a little of this life might be worth the effort, and I loved them both deeply just then; one imperfect perfect moment among so much dross. I boiled the water again, for coffee, and a tisane for me, and Maman went to the television for the lottery numbers while I took the old shirt and the new thread upstairs to begin my salvage. The scream came twenty minutes later. I ran down the stairs, looking for something to use as a weapon. Was he back? Had he hit her? Where the hell was my brother? I heard sobbing in the front room, and burst in to find her wrapped in Roland’s arms, a piece of paper in her hand. His eyes were sparkling, wet with rising tears.

“Sacha…we have five numbers. Maman, sorry, she has five numbers. We did not get the last, but we have five numbers. Five. Fuck–sorry, Maman, WE HAVE FIVE NUMBERS!”

He looked round the room. “Where did you hang my jacket? Shit, no, I took it out, you got the bread, whore…”

He fumbled out his wallet, and pulled out two twenty Euro notes, all that was in there.

“Sacha, go down to the grocers, not Carrefour, you know why, just tell them it is for your brother, do not mention the win, and bring a good bottle of Calvados and some Muscadet, on the lees, not the crap stuff, and---“

He paused, and took a breath. “And when you return, you, me, Maman, we talk before we get drunk, yes?”

Once more I left the house, this time in such a state I didn’t check for others, so it was only by luck that I made the shop without problems.

“How old are you, Sacha?”

“Er, sixteen, Monsieur”

“So that would be a very heavy fine for me. How fortunate that your brother would appear to be standing outside the door looking in…for the benefit of the security tape”

That last was in a sibilant whisper, and he winked as he passed me the bottles, adding a small bar of chocolate. If he only knew…five numbers. Oh dear yes.

Luck stayed with me as I dashed back to the maisonette, and I had to bite my cheek to stop laughing as Roland apologised to Bacchus as he slipped the wine into the freezer to take the edge off its temperature. The Calva, that was cracked immediately, and I was given a well-diluted glass. Roland proposed the toast.

“To Fortune, who has finally smiled on us”

We drank, and Maman looked over her empty glass at me.

“And you…who are you, my little girl child? Who is it that I have fed and washed all these years, who could not trust her own mother with the truth?”

‘Ma petite’…there was no mistaking that one. I looked over at my brother, and he did a sort of shrug and eyebrow raise that suddenly left him looking the age I remembered, not the hard, foul-mouthed street policeman he had become.

“Rollo, we said, you know, nobody else”

“Ah, my little Alexandre, this paper, it changes everything”

I felt tears rising. “You haven’t called me that in years…”

He smiled, and the years fell away from his face. “No, the little prince, the ruler of all his cries could reach, he left with the first day in school, no? And now…now we have another to serve, not true, Maman?”

She was clearly bursting to shower me with questions, but she held it in, reined it back. “How long, Sacha? How long have you been this way?”

Rollo shook his head, and interrupted my answer before it could reach my lips. “We have the pamphlets, Maman, we have the lectures, and if this is true, if this is real, there is no start, there is no ‘how long?’, it is just, well it just IS”

He turned to me. “Not so?”

All I could do was nod, as the tears came at last, and my mother took me to her breast, as mothers do with hurting children. Rollo was continuing his musings.

“This could be a way out, dear ones. This money, for it must be at least five figures, this money can give us more. We rent a better place, we find a better school, one where my…sister, our girl here, she has a chance not to be beaten every day, we move out of this cesspit. Is that not true?”

Maman just lifted my face with a finger, and tutted at my black eye.

“So, I seem to have a new child…what is your name, my sweet one?”

“Sophie…”