Page 17 of Beautiful Losers

‘Ummm, thank you?’

He nods and hands Ari a sheet of paper, folded neatly into quarters. I watch him walk off in the direction of his room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Ari unfolds the paper and squeals in delight.

‘Mummy, wow!’

I lean over for a better look. It’s a biro sketch of Ironman.

10

Ari’s teacher leaves a note in his backpack. She has ‘concerns’ she’s keen to discuss. It’s not the first time I’ve been summoned to a meeting about Ari. Once, the nursery in Dublin called to say he freaked out during music hour. He said the noise from the instruments was hurting him and hid under the table with his hands over his ears. Another time, I had to leave work early because Ari was inconsolable. It was a sunny day, so the staff decided to have outside play before the mid-morning snack. Ari didn’t appreciate the change in routine and locked himself in the crafts cupboard, refusing to come out until I arrived.

Ecole Saint-Georges is halfway up the hill between Cordes’ main square and the medieval centre of the village. An inconspicuous red door opens out onto a courtyard, flanked by classrooms overlooking the Cérou valley. There are only fifty pupils, all French, all Tarnese. Except Ari.

Myriam agrees to come with me to take Ari fora madeleine while Madame Dupont and I talk. Themaitresse, a woman in her mid-fifties, dressed in a calf-length pleated skirt and ballet pumps, invites me to sit on a tiny wooden chair in thematernelleclassroom, while she perches on the edge of her desk, sifting through a red ring binder. I scan the neat row of children’s crayon pictures on the wall behind her. There are flowers and trees and smiling families. A day out at the beach. A rocket. An orange-haired man playing with his genitals.

A few weeks ago, Ari’s class was asked to draw a picture for Father’s Day. Cillian has recently taken up the tin whistle. (He’s become fierce into the mother culture since leaving Ireland. He says this is because he wants to feel connected to home. I think he believes camping up his heritage gives him an edge over his competitors.) It was an impressively accurate rendering of Ari’s dad. Unfortunately, the positioning of the instrument was slightly off and it looked like Cillian was playing something else. I reassured Mme Dupont this was not the case and there was no need to alert the authorities.

She turns the ring binder round to show me Ari’s progress chart, a quarterly log of all the things French five-year-olds are expected to be able to do. Write their name, share toys, recognise colours, shapes and numbers. Standard stuff. She indicates a stick figure lying on the ground with an ‘X’ through it and taps at the image three times with her pen. I stare at her blankly.

‘Your son,’ she says, folding her hands on her lap. ‘He does not understand death.’

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to re-familiarise myself with the French language and have taken comfort in the fact that my degree was notentirely wasted. I can get the general gist of most conversations. Still, I’m sure I’ve misheard the word, ‘mort’. It seems out of place amid the colourful trays of art materials and papier-mâché bowls.

‘Death,’ Mme Dupont says, switching to English and speaking V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y, less convinced of my linguistic abilities than I am. ‘Ari does not know what it means. I showed him this picture and he could not explain to me what was happening.’

I laugh. Mme Dupont does not.

‘Well, I mean, how many five-year-olds understand death?’ I say, scratching my head. ‘How many adults do, for that matter?’

Mme Dupont narrows her eyes over a pair of pink, thick-rimmed glasses.

‘Is death education, erm,necessaire, in France?’ I say, suitably intimidated.

‘We all die,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘Loss is part of life. Ari must know this.’

Now, in fairness, I’d have been hard pushed myself to connect the rudimentary stick figure being presented to me with the finality of life.

‘Are you sure he doesn’t understand? Because, you know, I was listening to “Harvest Moon” the other day and Ari said it was a beautiful song and that he was going to play it when I died before making a sculpture out of my bones.’

‘He does not understand,’ Mme Dupont says curtly. ‘I explained to the class that my cat was murdered by my neighbour. Ari told me not to be sad, that she would come back to life.’

I have questions. Namely, is it appropriate to discuss theriocide with a bunch of preschoolers? And also, what did your neighbourdo?

Instead I say, ‘That’s cute. Ari telling you not to be sad, I mean.’

I swear, Mme Dupont could freeze the Flaming Mountains of Xinjiang with the look she’s giving me right now.

‘Well, you can understand his confusion,’ I continue. ‘I mean, don’t you guys teach them that Christ came back to life?’

Mme Dupont colours. ‘Our Lord came back to life. Only Him. For everyone else, there is nothing.C’est fini.’

Despite my teachers’ best efforts, after fourteen years of convent-school education I’m no more convinced of life after death than I am of the Roswell alien landings or Ross and Rachel being on a break. If we were still living in Dublin, I’d be sending Ari to one of the few secular schools around. Unfortunately, this is the only school in Cordes and if I want to avoid a fifty-kilometre round trip to the nearest non-Catholic educational facility, I have to get Mme Dupont onside.

‘Of course,’ I say, in a solemn tone. ‘How can I make Ari understand death?’

‘When a bee dies in the garden, you poke the body. You say, “Look, this bee is dead. It is not coming back.”’

She stabs the air with her pen three times.

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