The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (27 page)

‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Morel said now.

‘Of course. Happy to help if it is within my capacity.’

‘It’s just that I’d like to avoid the paperwork and the bureaucracy.’

‘What is it you need?’

Morel explained the case to Golyubov, who listened carefully and didn’t speak until Morel had finished.

‘So, what can I do?’

‘I need to know more about the child and the adoption process. Someone must have helped with the adoption. Maybe they can tell me more about Le Bellec and about the boy.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you.’

It was past 10 p.m. by the time Morel turned the lights off and headed to his car. He checked his phone messages and saw he had missed a call from Solange. This was the second
call from her in two days and he hadn’t even returned the first.

I’ll call her as soon as I get home
, he thought.

When Morel arrived at his house he was surprised to find Adèle sleeping soundly on the living-room sofa. For some reason she was wearing a pair of his pyjamas. The lights were still on
and there was a half-empty bottle of wine on the table beside her.

He debated whether to wake her up but she was sleeping so soundly that he decided not to. Instead he carried the bottle of wine to the kitchen and poured himself a glass. In the fridge was some
leftover shepherd’s pie. He dished some onto a plate and heated it up in the microwave.

He returned to the living room with his drink and supper and sat across from his sister. She opened her eyes.

‘You’re back,’ she said. She sat up and looked at her watch.

‘What are you doing here?’ Morel asked.

‘Something happened with Dad,’ she said.

‘What? What happened?’

‘He’s all right now,’ Adèle said. She came over and touched his arm. ‘You look worn out, Serge. Dad just had a funny turn. Augustine found him wandering down the
street in his pyjamas this afternoon.’

‘In his
pyjamas?
’ Morel said.

‘She brought him back and now he’s asleep. It was lucky she found him. That it was her rather than a complete stranger, I mean.’

Yes, because appearances matter above all else,
Morel thought.

‘How come no one called me?’

‘Augustine called me instead. She was worried about disturbing you at work.’

‘Right.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘No,’ Morel lied.

‘He needs to see a doctor,’ Adèle said.

Morel looked at his shepherd’s pie. All of a sudden he didn’t feel so hungry any more. He set the plate on the table and poured more wine into his glass.

‘Serge.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you hear what I said? I can take care of it if you like. I can see you’ve got a lot on your mind at the moment. This case you’re working on—’

‘It’s fine. I’ll take care of it. I’ll call Dr Roland in the morning and make an appointment.’

‘Dad hasn’t been to see him in years. He always reckons he’s the only healthy one in the family. You know he’s going to be difficult about it, don’t you?’
Adèle said, smiling for the first time since he’d walked in.

‘Nothing new there,’ Morel said, before emptying his glass as if all it contained was water.

Once he left the Moscow Lycée and started teaching at the local school, Armand lost contact with most of his former French colleagues in the city. It was just as well.
Better to make a fresh start, after all, untainted by the rumours that he knew must be circulating about him. Neither Olivia nor Amir ever attempted to contact him.

At times, he missed their company, particularly Olivia’s. Even though she had betrayed him, there had been a real connection there. He tried not to dwell on it and kept himself busy,
waiting for the moment when he would be able to take the boy back to France with him. There were a few more formalities to process, and he would be on his way.

He saw more of Nina and Volodya. Nina told him she had recently converted to the Baptist faith and asked whether he might like to come to a service with her on Christmas Day.

It wasn’t that he was lonely. Soon, he would have the boy. But weekends were empty and long. On Christmas morning he accompanied Nina for lack of anything better to do.

She drove him through deserted streets to a draughty assembly hall in a school building. The hall was filled with elderly people bundled up against the unseasonably cold weather. As they came in
they took off their coats and scarves and hung them on hooks along the walls. Conversations were subdued and the floor was slick with melted snow.

‘Meet Mike,’ Nina said, and Armand found himself shaking hands with a man whose long blond hair and beard gave him the look of a prophet. Pale blue eyes, pale skin. Bloodless lips.
He must have been in his early thirties. A modern-day Jesus in jeans and a check shirt.

‘Welcome,’ was all he said. Armand watched him move away, shaking hands with people as they came in, holding back all the while as though he didn’t want to occupy the centre of
the room, when in fact he was the focus. Everyone’s eyes were on him.

Later, Armand would find out that Mike was from Louisiana and that he’d been born again in a state prison halfway through a seven-year sentence for aggravated assault. God had helped him
overcome a drug and alcohol problem, Nina said.

Meanwhile the dreamy-eyed American shook hands and smiled at everyone he made contact with. He might have given up drugs but he still looked spaced out, Armand thought. He watched Mike get on
stage and pick up his guitar. A fat woman in a red hat and a red dress two sizes too small for her shook a tambourine, swaying from side to side. The people standing before them swayed too, as if
mesmerized. Up on stage there was a makeshift altar with a candle burning, the words ‘The Lord Is Thy Light’ inscribed on it. A tacky souvenir, that’s all it is, Armand thought.
He felt ashamed for these people and their readiness to join in. Were they so lonely and afraid that they needed an ex-convict from Louisiana to give them hope?

Mike stopped strumming and the woman placed her tambourine on the stage. You could have heard a pin drop. Then Mike looked around him and spoke up.

‘The question is this: if you are a believer, where is your faith? If you are a Christian,’ the man said, raising his voice, ‘then where are you serving Christ?’ The
‘where’ resonated with meaning. A ripple of words ran through the listeners. ‘Today, we come together to serve Christ in this assembly hall, our church, humble as it may
be.’ He spread his arms and the woman in the hat did the same.

The words rose to a torrent of noise. Mike came down from the stage and moved among the people. Armand took a step back, but the man’s gaze rested on him. Armand’s thoughts were all
over the place, jumping from fascination to repulsion, and back again. He could not see or feel what these people saw and felt, yet he envied them their easy acceptance. How convenient it was to
simply believe!

Mike obviously had no clue what Armand was thinking. He came up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘You know, we don’t just open our doors to anyone who wants to join,’ Mike told Armand. ‘But I can tell by your eyes that you’re one of us. You belong right
here.’

Armand could have told him he wasn’t the joining type. But Nina was standing by his side and he didn’t want to disappoint her. Not after what she’d done for him.

So he smiled and nodded. It was easier than starting an argument about faith. He could tell this Mike a few things about what religion did to a person. His own mother, for example. But looking
at the man before him, caught up in his comforting little daydream, he knew there was no point.

When Nina finally suggested they go he was relieved. He thought he would never go back there again.

Until the following Sunday, when she knocked on his door and asked whether he would like to join her. He thought for a while before agreeing. This time, he told himself, he would explain a thing
or two to Mike about faith and forgiveness.

Gradually, in his own time, Armand became a convert. Not in the mindless, gaping sense that he attributed to others. He would not sway and weep, nor would he nod at every word the American
preacher uttered or sang, as though pearls of wisdom fell from his lips.

There was nothing Mike could tell him that he couldn’t work out for himself. He would follow his own way.

Armand and the boy left Russia and arrived in Paris in early summer, a day before the boy’s seventh birthday. They booked into a hotel room in Montmartre for a week. On
Dima’s birthday, Armand took him out for breakfast, at a cafe on Rue des Abbesses. Armand watched as Dima gobbled up his croissant and emptied his cup of hot chocolate in one gulp. With his
pale face and wide eyes and his cropped black hair, he drew stares. There were shadows under his eyes and he was too thin. He looked like he’d been in hospital and was convalescing.

After breakfast Armand took Dima for a walk along the river. He bought clothes for the boy. Two pairs of jeans and five long-sleeved shirts, to cover the boy’s arms. Sneakers and a
baseball cap. The boy was completely taken by the cap. He looked at his reflection in the mirror for a long time while Armand paid for the things he’d bought.

Wherever they went after that, the boy wore the cap.

It rained often but that didn’t stop Armand from taking Dima out each day to introduce him to his new surroundings. He bought a toy sailboat and they watched it float across the fountain
at the Jardin du Luxembourg. At the Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park they rode a boat along the magic river, through a landscape of reeds and weeping willows. They ate candy-floss and
Armand won a blue teddy for Dima by knocking down three milk bottles in a row. The boy’s face never changed but he wanted more. Insisted on going on the merry-go-round six times, changing his
ride each time from a rocket to a car to something else, before Armand was able to drag him away. Dima rode a pony with his back ramrod-straight, both hands on the animal’s neck. Not like he
felt the need to hold on but like he was discovering the feel and shape of its hide and bones. When Armand urged him once to choose a toy in a shop and Dima chose a fluffy white dog, he ran his
hands over it again and again with the same thoughtful gesture.

From the beginning, Armand spoke to the child in French. He wanted to make sure the boy would be ready for his new life. Classified as an idiot by the orphanage because of his muteness –
despite the fact that he was in no way mentally retarded – the boy had not received any education.

Beneath the expressionless gaze Armand could see Dima’s mind at work. Intensely processing every new thing that came his way. At times the light seemed to hurt his eyes. He ate every meal
as though it were his last and Armand had to hold him back, beg him to slow down.

Armand had never walked so much. It was the boy who insisted, his skinny little legs infused with unexpected strength. The left leg determined to keep up with the right. The boy walked as though
he was making up for a lifetime of immobility.

Armand was the one with blisters on the soles of his feet at the end of the day. The boy did wear himself out, though. He fell asleep within seconds each night, his face and arms pressed tight
against the fluffy dog.

Every day after they had been walking Armand ran a bath for the boy. There were sores on his arms and legs, particularly over his elbows, knees and ankles. With clumsy hand gestures, he quizzed
the boy about his past. The boy’s awkward response, traced in the air with delicate fingers, coupled with what Nina had told him about the lying-down room at the orphanage, told Armand all he
needed to know. Dima had been bedridden for so long that he had become covered with bed sores.

They took to hanging out for hours in the museums because they were free. Armand loved to walk through the galleries with their displays and share what he knew with the boy. Teaching Dima was
like teaching a child half his age. He was a blank page to fill.

Armand had been surprised by the amount of money his mother left him. Even after paying for Dima’s adoption, he had enough for a down payment on a two-bedroom flat in Clichy. He took the
boy to Ikea near Charles de Gaulle airport and let him pick a few things for his room. A lamp, a toy train set and a couple of duvet covers, one with robots on it and the other with cars. After
lengthy discussions with the head teacher, he enrolled the boy in a school close to where they lived. He would be older than the other children in his class but still, Armand had scored a small
victory by managing to get him in. The boy couldn’t speak but his hearing was fine, as was his intelligence, he’d told the head. Would she prefer that he receive no education at all? He
knew how to speak to her. This had always been his strength, after all, the ability to convince people.

Once he’d sorted the boy out, he got a job at a school in Denfert-Rochereau, a long way from Dima’s school but it didn’t matter. At least he could start earning money again,
rather than keep digging into his dwindling funds.

Over the course of the first term, he spent many hours with Dima going over the alphabet, performing basic maths.

Dima’s adoption had to be fate, Armand thought. How could it be otherwise when, as he saw it, the boy’s experience so closely mirrored his own?

Though Armand tried hard to keep it at a safe distance, the memory of his own confinement returned vividly night after night. The loss of Charles and the price his mother made him pay for his
sins. Even animals knew better, she said. She could not let him out of the house, not until he became pure again. Shapes and smells he’d managed to forget returned, precise and real. The
outline of his own bed and the tenderness around his wrists where the knots dug into his skin; the indifferent expanse of the ceiling overhead; the sour smell of unwashed sheets and fear; the
extent of his disgrace and of his longing for escape, from her and from himself.

Armand took Dima to the doctor’s but didn’t tell him anything about the boy’s past, fearing that he would court scrutiny. Instead he listened in silence while the man told him
that the boy’s limp was probably due to muscle atrophy. The doctor recommended physiotherapy, though it probably wouldn’t make the limp go away entirely.