Читать книгу Searching for Sam - Sophie Bienvenu - Страница 15

I’VE ALWAYS FELT LIKE I WAS SUFFOCATING, FOR as long as I can remember. Maybe suffocating’s not the right word. You know those posters in the metro for that disease … “I’m drowning inside”? That’s what it was like for me, except I couldn’t breathe in my head. When you’re a kid, you don’t know life isn’t supposed to be like that. You think it’s normal. You think everyone is like that, that all the other kids in your class hear a muffled sound, all the time, that everyone on earth thinks the air is fucking heavy.

But eventually I realized it was just me.

After that, I learned more about gravity. Not a lot more, because I didn’t want to know much, but let’s just say I heard about gravity. I started telling myself maybe it weighed more on me than on other people.

Lonely.

There’s no word for it in French. It’s this sad, heavy alone feeling that doesn’t make you want to die, at least not on good days, but sort of just not exist, like Freddie Mercury wishing he’d never been born at all.

Like most teenagers, I scribbled in my notebooks all the lines that basically spoke to me. I had written that one in bold on the cover, with the insides of the letters painted in Liquid Paper. I took my time and cleaned up where it went outside the lines with my X-ACTO knife. It was fucking beautiful, and my throat would clench every time I looked at it. On the back of the notebook, I wrote that bit from that Smashing Pumpkins song about being a rat in a cage over an A, for “Anarchy.” My dad used to listen to that song over and over when I was six or seven. It got to me then, just like it must of got to him at the time.

So that particular morning, I was eating my cereal before school. It was winter, because the light was on in the kitchen.

I was all alone, and that made me pretty happy, but it didn’t last.

My mother came up from the basement in her bathrobe, her face all pale, like when she had a migraine and she would come lie down in the living room, so we would know she was suffering. I sighed and stuck my nose back in the bowl.

She came over and put my notebook on the table, in this repressed gesture, but still full-blown dramatic. It was seven thirty, I already had a joint in me, but I started thinking fast. “Okay, she’s figured out I’m ditching some of my classes.” I wondered whether I had forgotten to rip out the page where Grenier left me a note about whether I was holding. If that’s all it was, I could convince my mother he wanted me to sell him some copies of albums I had. Maybe she read the love note Karine wrote on the page for the day we fucked the first time, and she was pissed off.

“You feel like a rat in a cage?” she said, with too much sobbing in her voice to be believable.

“I told you to stop going through my shit.”

“You never wanted to be born? Do you realize how much that hurts me, to read that, Mathieu?”

“They’re just songs, Mom. Don’t freak out.”

“I want you to stop listening to those songs. They put funny ideas in your head. I’ll bet it’s Karine who gets you to listen to them.”

Staring at my cereal so I wouldn’t kill her, I answered quietly: “That’s just stupid.”

She sat down on the chair beside me and started crying, saying she had stolen her son. Meaning, like, Karine. That she wanted us to go back to the way it was before, when she stopped working to take care of me and my dad, the house, the yard, her watercolours, her associations, and a thousand other things. She took me everywhere with her when I didn’t have school; I would watch her make pies for fundraisers, and I would rub her feet because she was tired of doing so much for others and never hoping for anything in return. Aside from being made a saint in her lifetime, say. “Why have things changed, Mathieu? Don’t you love me anymore?”

I got up and went over to her, and I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Of course I love you, Mom. You haven’t done anything … I’m just … sad.”

“Why are you sad?”

“Cause … I dunno …”

I sort of hoped she would ask me to tell her. At the time, I didn’t know it, but I was hoping. Now today, I do. I wanted to tell her, I wanted to cry, get all the tears out, and start fresh. I wanted her to take me in her arms and tell me everything was okay. She went all stiff under my hand.

“Do you hear me saying I’m sad? No. I don’t say it. And yet, I have reason to be sad. But I’m strong.”

I looked away.

“I’m going to be late, Mom.”

“You’ve got no right to be sad, Mathieu. You have a roof over your head. You go to school … you have a mother who loves you and who works her fingers to the bone to give you whatever you want … You know what you are? You’re just a spoiled little brat, an ingrate. Just like your father.”

She inhaled, got up and started clearing the table, while I just stood there like an idiot in the middle of the kitchen.

She opened the fridge and without looking at me, she said: “Go, go on, you’re going to be late …”

I walked around the island to kiss her on the cheek, and she made like she couldn’t give a shit.

It was twenty to eight, I already had a joint in me, and I rolled another one to quit thinking.