The night their mother first left them was one of those nights: Marguerite was sitting up listening to her parents arguing. She was used to it by then; she spoke to her best friend Adeline about it sometimes in quiet corners at school, drawing her face in and making it sound much more dramatic than it was. ‘I worry for their lives, sometimes,’ she’d say, but that was dazzlingly untrue: her father would never have raised a hand against her mother, nor her mother – tiny and skinny, her meticulously sculpted arms weak – against him. Indeed, their lack of physical contact seemed to constitute a great part of the complaints they routinely filed against each other during the day. At night, on the other hand, specific words were hard to make out through the muffler of the bedroom walls; theirs was an amorphous volley of snarling, parodying, occasional bellowing. It was a tidal swell of rage, it came and went through the night, and Marguerite stayed up to listen, mostly for Cassandre’s sake. Four years younger, she was not yet sophisticated enough to hear the fights without fear and distress.
Inevitably the door handle would swivel slowly and Cassandre would appear with her little helmet of dark hair ruffled from sleep. She’d stand in the doorway until Marguerite beckoned her in. She had a beautiful face before everything changed; surely it was not just through the prism of an older sister’s pride that Marguerite thought that. It was tidy and pointed and neat, her skin a bit darker than Marguerite’s, her lips a very perfect bow.
She’d get under the covers at the foot of Marguerite’s bed and ask her to sing. Until recently, Marguerite had always sung when Cassandre asked. Usually it was a little ditty she had invented, chronicling the adventures of two unlikely friends: a chimp, blundering yet grandiose, and a nightingale. She improvised the words each time, inventing a new adventure for the pair. Cassandre would join in when the chorus came.
But Cassandre hadn’t yet left école primaire, whereas Marguerite was already coming to the end of collège, starting soon at the lycée; she had kissed two boys, she’d smoked cigarettes and tried vodka, she had recently got her period and bought a white bra that she filled carefully with folded tissue. Things were different; she would still defend Cassandre to the death but she no longer sang willingly whenever asked. As a result, Cass had taken to begging, which annoyed Marguerite.
‘The Chimp and the Nightingale, Margo?’ she asked.
‘Not tonight, Cass.’ But because she looked sad, Marguerite added: ‘I’ll sing to you tomorrow. I’ve just had a really long day: double maths in the morning and double Latin in the afternoon, and I have to get up early to finish extra homework from Madame Garcia because she’s a complete bitch.’
‘Poor you,’ said Cassandre. ‘That sounds so stressful.’ She had learnt the word ‘stressful’ from Marguerite, and used it constantly.
‘It is. And Monsieur Clerc’s an imbecile, and the boys in my class are even bigger imbeciles.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘Enjoy primaire while you can.’ Cassandre nodded, wriggling down further under the covers. ‘How’s your homework, Cass? Are you revising hard enough?’
‘I think so.’
‘You’re a little brainbox.’
‘Hmm, I don’t know.’
‘Well, I do. You’re a brilliant little geek. I bet you get the highest marks in your year.’
The toad started rattling again and Marguerite opened her eyes, back in Jérôme’s quiet house. She sat completely still, treasuring the memory but also aware that she was inventing the conversation. She always did this: she let her younger self become her ideal of Cassandre’s older sister. Always guiding, always supportive. Would she really have been so kind that night? She remembered the slamming of doors, her father coming into the room to declare that their mother had left them all. It was the first time she’d done this, and they didn’t know better than to doubt its permanence. She remembered Cassandre crying and her father’s willowy frame disappearing back into the darkness; she remembered holding her little sister and drying her tears, eventually getting her to sleep. But she couldn’t remember whether she’d sung.
‘Please say I sang, please say I sang.’ She closed her eyes and shook her head to banish the thoughts and images. She lay back down, leaving the lamp on, hoping that Jérôme would call her down to tend to him. ‘Please say I sang.’
Jérôme was sick all morning. He refused, over and over, to sit up to vomit, and dragged his weight down in her arms when she tried to force him to. She had to give up, pulling him instead to the very side of the mattress so he could retch sideways into the bin. He hadn’t eaten much the night before and there was next to nothing for him to bring up. A senseless, repetitive heaving went on throughout the morning, punctuated by protracted groans like a woman in labour.
As the hours wore on she started to feel angry at the sheer relentlessness of his vomiting. She was rough with him when she pulled him repeatedly onto his side, and almost shouted when he disobeyed her instructions.
‘Do you want to choke on your own vomit? Do you think that would be enjoyable?’
He in turn was obstructive and difficult, but she caught a look sometimes in his eyes that was fearful. In regret, she would lower her voice and cool his forehead, but then the heaving and the refusal to get into the right position would start again and her frustration would flare.
Finally the gaps between retching were longer than twenty minutes, but she still didn’t dare leave his room. She let him lie back and close his eyes, and then she sat at the bedroom table, exhausted. She needed to eat, but she couldn’t face getting up. She couldn’t even face cleaning the bin out; it sat by the side of the bed and the room stank. Jérôme started to snore, a faint and reedy sound.
She was startled by a loud knock coming from the kitchen; so too was Jérôme, who snorted and opened his eyes, glassy and distant, before falling back to sleep. She picked up the bin, taking it from the room as she walked through the house to the kitchen.
‘Shit,’ she said under her breath as she saw Suki’s face peering through the glass of the kitchen door. She tried to smile as she opened the door but it couldn’t have been convincing.
‘Is it a bad time?’ Suki asked.
‘Well, quite, yes,’ she said, letting her come in. ‘Hold on a moment.’
She turned, taking the bin out into the utility room. She took her time to rinse it out with hot water and bleach. You don’t just turn up, unannounced, on someone’s job, she thought. When she had finished rinsing it out, she took it back into Jérôme’s room, setting it down by the bed. Then she turned him, finally malleable with sleep, onto his side. His mouth gaped.
She smelt Suki’s smoke before she came back into the kitchen.
‘Can you take that outside?’ she said. It came out harshly, rudely. ‘It floats through the house,’ she said, more softly.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Suki. She opened the kitchen door and stood there, gazing at Marguerite. Half in shade and half in sunlight, she looked more beautiful than Marguerite had realised