Three, p.1
Three, page 1
ALSO BY
VALERIÉ PERRIN
Fresh Water for Flowers
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © Editions Albin Michel - Paris 2021
First publication 2022 by Europa Editions
Translation by Hildegarde Serle
Original Title: Trois
Translation copyright © 2022 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Art direction by Emanuele Ragnisco
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Cover design by Ginevra Rapisardi
Cover photo © Westend61/Getty Images
ISBN 9781609457761
Valérie Perrin
THREE
Translated from the French
by Hildegarde Serle
THREE
For Nicola Sirkis and Yannick Perrin
In memory of Pascale Romiszvili
1
4 December 2017
This morning, Nina looked at me without seeing me. Her eyes slid away like the raindrops on my coat, just before she disappeared into a kennel.
It was raining cats and dogs.
I glimpsed her pale skin and dark hair under the hood of her oilskin. She was wearing rubber boots that were too big and holding a long hose. Just seeing her gave me what felt like an electric shock in my stomach, five hundred thousand volts at the very least.
I deposited thirty kilos of dry pet food. I do that every month, but never go into the shelter. I hear the dogs but don’t see them. Apart from when one of the dog walkers passes by me.
Bags lined up, side by side, in front of the entrance gate. An employee, always the same one, a tall, ill-shaven guy, helps me carry my consolation prizes to just below the signs saying ABANDONING KILLS, and PLEASE CLOSE DOOR SECURELY BEHIND YOU.
Every year, at Christmas and just before the summer vacations, but never on the same day, I slip some cash through the shelter’s mailbox. Anonymous money, with NINA BEAU written in black felt pen on the envelope. I don’t want her to know that this money comes from me. I don’t do it for the animals, I do it for her. I know very well that it will all go into the feeding bowls and the veterinary care, but I want it to go through her without leaving a trace. Just so she knows that, outside, there aren’t only people who toss their kittens into the trash.
Thirty-one years ago, she looked at me without seeing me, like this morning. She was coming out of the men’s restroom; she was ten years old. The women’s was jammed, and already Nina didn’t like waiting.
Her eyes slid over me and she fell into Étienne’s arms.
We were at the Progrès, the bar and tobacco store belonging to Laurence Villard’s parents. It was a Sunday afternoon. The place was closed, the shutters down. They had gone private for their daughter’s birthday. I remember the upturned chairs on the tables, legs in the air, one on top of the other. A makeshift dance floor between a pinball machine and the bar. The torn gift wrap on the bar, beside packets of chips and Choco BN cookies, the yellow straws in paper cups full of Oasis fruit drink and lemonade.
The entire fifth-grade class was there. I knew no one. I’d just moved to La Comelle, a workers’ housing development in the center of France of about twelve thousand souls.
Nina Beau. Étienne Beaulieu. Adrien Bobin.
I observed their triple reflection in the mirrors all along the bar.
They had old-fashioned names, those of ancestors. Most of us had names like Aurélien, Nadège or Mickaël.
Nina, Étienne, and Adrien had just entered that time of their childhood when they were inseparable. On that day, and on all the other days, they didn’t see me.
Nina and Étienne danced to a-ha’s “Take On Me” all afternoon. An EP single. A twenty-minute number. The kids in my class kept it spinning on the deck as if they had no other records.
Nina and Étienne danced like grown-ups. As if they’d done it all their life. That’s what I thought to myself as I watched them.
Under the strobes, they looked like two seabirds spreading their wings on nights of high wind. With only a distant lighthouse illuminating both their wings and their grace.
Adrien remained sitting on the floor, back stuck to the wall, not very far from them. When Cyndi Lauper started singing “True Colors,” he sprang up to invite Nina to slow dance with him.
Étienne brushed past me. I’ll never forget his smell of vetiver and sugar.
*
I live alone in the heights of La Comelle, although it’s not very high, the countryside is just a bit hilly. I left and then returned, because here I know the sounds of things, the neighbors, the days of sunshine, the two main streets, and the aisles of the supermarket where I do my weekly shop. For around ten years, the price per square meter has been derisory, they’re almost giving away the plots of land. I bought a little house for peanuts, and restored it. Four rooms, and a garden with a linden tree that provides shade in summer and lime-blossom tea in winter.
Here, people leave. Except for Nina.
Étienne and Adrien left, came back for Christmas, left again.
I work at home, sometimes correcting or translating texts for publishing houses. And to maintain a social link with life around here, I replace the freelancer at the local newspaper in August and December. In summer, I cover the death notices, wedding anniversaries, and belote tournaments. In winter, same thing. With children’s shows and Christmas markets on top.
The translating and correcting are both remnants of my former life.
Memories, the present, and our former lives all change their perfume. When one changes one’s life, one changes perfume.
Childhood’s is that of tar, inner tubes, and cotton candy, of classroom disinfectant, of chimney fires exhaled by houses on cold days, of chlorine in municipal pools, of sweat-soaked sports clothes when filing back, two by two, from the gym, of pink Malabar gum in the mouth, of the glue that forms strings on the fingers, of CaramBar chews stuck between the teeth, of a Christmas tree planted in the heart.
Adolescence has the smell of a first drag, of musky deodorant, of buttered bread dunked in hot chocolate, of whiskey-and-Coke and cellars turned into ballrooms, of the body that desires, of Eau Précieuse cleanser, of hair gel, of egg shampoo, of lipstick, of detergent wafting off jeans.
The lives that follow, the smell of the scarf forgotten by the first person to break one’s heart.
And then there’s the summer. Summer belongs to all memories. It’s timeless. And its smell is the most persistent. That clings to clothes. That one searches for all one’s life. The over-sweet fruit, the sea breeze, the doughnuts, the black coffee, the Ambre Solaire, the Caron face powder of grandmothers. Summer belongs to all ages. It has neither childhood, nor adolescence. Summer is an angel.
I’m a beanpole with a decent enough chassis. Bangs, shoulder-length dark brown hair. A few white hairs sprouting from the mop, which I cover up with brown mascara.
My name is Virginie. I’m the same age as them.
Today, out of the three, only Adrien still speaks to me.
Nina despises me.
As for Étienne, it’s me who can longer stand him.
And yet, they’ve fascinated me since childhood. I’ve only ever become attached to those three.
And to Louise.
2
5 July 1987
It starts with a tummy ache after the sandwich and fries dunked in ketchup. Nina is sitting under a Miko-ice-cream parasol in front of the fries stall. There are a few colorful metal tables, and a terrace overlooking the three municipal pools. While licking the grains of salt off the pads of her fingers, Nina listens to Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” and dreamily watches a tanned blond guy dive from the five-meter board. She runs her fingers along the bottom of the empty container to catch the crumbs in the grooves of the plastic. Étienne is rocking back and forth on his chair while sipping a strawberry soda, and Adrien bites into an overripe peach, it drips over hands, mouth, thighs, juice everywhere.
Nina often watches Étienne and Adrien. She never does so on the sly. She directs her gaze onto one part of their bodies and holds it there. It makes Étienne feel uncomfortable, and he often says, “Stop looking at me like that.” Adrien doesn’t seem bothered, she’s like that, Nina, no brakes.
Again, sharp pains in the tummy, then a warm liquid trickling between her thighs. Nina understands. Not already. Too young. Don’t want. Eleven years old in a fortnight . . . She thought one got it in junior high. Between sixth grade and ninth grade. She starts in fifth grade in two months’ time . . . The shame, if the other girls know I’ve got my period, they’ll think I’ve had to redo that grade.
She stands up, wraps herself in a scratchy towel, small but enough to go around her hips. She’s very slender. “A wire,” Étienne is forever calling her to annoy her. She returns the Walkman to him without a word, heads for the girls’ changing room. Usually, she goes into the boys’ room so she can undress and dress faster.
Étienne and Adrien stayed on the terrace. Nina had shot off without saying a word to them. Those three never part without saying where they’re going.
“What’s up with her?” asks Etienne, straw in corner of mouth.
Adrien notices that the strawberry syrup has turned his tongue bright pink.
“Dunno,” he whispers. “Her asthma, maybe.”
That day, Nina doesn’t return to the terrace. A brown stain on her swimsuit. She gets changed quickly, slides a ball of toilet paper inside her panties. Like a swelling between the thighs. She stops off at the Petite Coopérative to buy sanitary napkins with the change from the fries. A packet of ten. The cheapest.
When she arrives home, her dog Paola considers her with a strange look, wagging her tail. She lifts her nose and then turns her back to go rejoin Pierre Beau, Nina’s grandfather, busy in the garden. He hadn’t seen her come in. She locks herself in her bedroom upstairs.
It’s really hot. Nina would like to be with Étienne and Adrien in the trough. That’s the deepest pool: four meters. Three diving boards look down on it: from one meter, three meters, and five meters. The water in the trough is too deep ever to warm up. The daily challenge is to go down and touch its freezing-cold floor after jumping in.
That evening, Étienne phones Nina. Just then, Adrien also tries to call her, but the line is engaged.
“Why d’you leave without a word this afternoon?”
She hesitates to reply. Thinks of a lie. What’s the point.
“I’ve got my period.”
For Étienne, periods only happen to girls with breasts, pubic hair, to mothers, to married women. Not to Nina. Étienne collects stickers in Panini albums and still secretly sucks his thumb.
Nina is like him. He’s seen all the Barbie dolls lined up in her bedroom.
After a long, doubtful silence, he asks:
“Have you told your grandfather?”
“No . . . The shame.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What d’you want me to do?”
“Maybe it’s not normal at your age.”
“Apparently, it depends on the mother. If mine got hers at this age, it’s normal. But I can’t know.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yup. Kind of cramps. Cramps from a disgusting onion soup.”
“I’m glad not to be a girl.”
“Well you have to do military service.”
“Maybe . . . but I’m still glad. Are you going to see the doctor?”
“Dunno.”
“D’you want us to go with you?”
“Maybe. But you’d have to wait for me outside the office.”
*
The three of them had met ten months earlier, in the yard of the École Pasteur, on the first day of fifth grade.
At that age everything’s a shambles. It’s the age when children don’t resemble each other anymore. Tall and short. Puberty, no puberty. Some look like they’re fourteen, others eight.
The two fifth-grade classes are gathered in the schoolyard. In front of around sixty pupils, the two teachers, Madame Bléton and Monsieur Py, call the register, side by side.
It’s the morning when the whims of chance and the blows of fate are felt. When one learns to tell the difference.
Each child silently prays—even those who’ve never set foot in Sunday school—for it to be Madame Bléton who calls them. The schoolmaster has a very bad reputation. Generations of traumatized former pupils have told the younger kids all about it. A total bastard who doesn’t hesitate to take a swipe or lift a child off the ground by the collar, or smash chairs against the wall when he blows his top. And every year, he picks a whipping boy, and never lets them go. Usually a weak student. “So best to work hard, or you’re dead.”
Madame Bléton, line to the right. Monsieur Py, line to the left. They call out the register in alphabetical order.
Discreet sighs of relief can be detected in the right-hand line. Something about how the head is held that seems to thank heaven, how the shoulders relax. And a look of the condemned among those who join the line to the left.
There’s an oppressive silence at École Pasteur that morning. Only the voices of the two teachers ring out in the covered yard. In turn, the pupils whose surname begins with an A are called.
Adam, Éric, line to the right.
Antard, Sandrine, line to the left.
Antunès, Flavio, line to the right.
Aubagne, Julie, line to the left.
Then it’s the Bs.
Beau, Nina, line to the left.
Beauclair, Nadège, line to the right.
Beaulieu, Étienne, line to the left.
Bisset, Aurélien, line to the right.
Bobin, Adrien, line to the left.
And that’s how Nina Beau, Étienne Beaulieu, and Adrien Bobin are brought together on that third of September 1986. Since the two boys seem stunned, Nina grabs them by the hand and drags them over to the line in front of Monsieur Py. Étienne lets himself be led. Letting a girl hold your hand is mortifying, but he doesn’t notice, he’s received a double sentence: he’s just lost his friend, Aurélien Bisset, and he’s with Py. At the École Pasteur, from first to fourth grade, all the pupils see that final straight before junior high as an ordeal. “You’ve got Py, shucks, it’s hell with him.”
The three of them wait, side by side, for the register to be over.
Étienne is much taller than the other two. He has the fine features, blond hair, and fair skin of the ideal child in antique prints, and his swimming-pool-blue eyes strike all who meet him.
Adrien has dark brown hair, a riot of unruly tufts, is very slender, with milky skin, and so shy he seems to be hiding behind himself.
Nina has the grace of a doe. Black eyebrows and long lashes framing ebony eyes. After two months of summer, her skin is brown.
Behind his glasses, Monsieur Py surveys his future pupils, seems satisfied, smiles, and asks them to follow him into the classroom, where he positions himself in front of the blackboard.
Still that chilling silence. Each step, each gesture frozen stiff.
Each child picks their desk at random. Those who know each other stick together as a pair. Inconspicuously, Étienne nudges Adrien with his hip to position himself beside Nina. Adrien complies, positioning himself behind her. He looks at her, forgets the teacher. He loses himself in her two braids, her brown hair, dark at the roots and sun-bleached at the tips, her two elastic bands, her middle part, the pearly buttons on her red velvet dress, the down on her neck. Beauty from behind. She senses his eyes on her and turns furtively around to give him a mischievous smile. A smile that reassures him. He has a friend. A girl friend. He can go home and tell his mother: “I made friends with a girl.” He hopes Nina lunches in the canteen, like him.
“You may be seated.”
Monsieur Py introduces himself, writes his name on the board. The tension eases, and in the end, he seems quite nice, he almost smiles, explains things calmly. Maybe he’s changed, don’t they say grown-ups can improve over time?
The morning goes by quickly. Textbooks handed out, to be covered that very evening, not tomorrow.
“I detest procrastination . . .” Monsieur Py declares, while fumbling in his leather briefcase.
Baffled silence in the classroom.
“I see that you don’t know the meaning of that word.”
Monsieur Py stands up, rubs his name off the board, and writes instead: PROCRASTINATION: FROM THE VERB TO PROCRASTINATE, which he underlines three times.
“That is to say, put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”
Next, he asks each pupil to stand up in turn, state clearly his or her surname and first name, and specify his or her weak point and strong point.
No one moves a muscle.
“Dear, oh dear, you’re all half-asleep! We’ll have to wake you up! Right, we’ll start at random.”
He points at Adrien’s neighbor. A wan blond girl. She stands up.
“My name is Caroline Desseigne, my strong point is reading, my weak point is that I get dizzy . . .”
