Remnants by Céline Huyghebaert

Author:Céline Huyghebaert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2022-04-08T15:14:06+00:00

Scene 13

CÉLINE, THE MOTHER, PHILIPPE, A NEIGHBOUR, CHRISTELLE, ÉLODIE, ANOTHER NEIGHBOUR

CÉLINE: At what point do we decide someone is an alcoholic? Is it when the people around them start feeling embarrassed? Are you an alcoholic based only on other people?

THE MOTHER: I think when you start to drink in secret, that’s when you’re an alcoholic.

CÉLINE: And Papa?

THE MOTHER: He only ever drank in the evening at first. But later, he’d drink all day long. There were bottles everywhere. In the morning, he’d have his cup of coffee, then he’d go into the living room and open the door of the TV cabinet to pour himself a drink.

PHILIPPE: I didn’t see him for years. But a few times your mom called me, when your dad had really lost the plot. “You need to get it together,” I told him.

A NEIGHBOUR: I never realized he drank. But then one time I saw him park the car and drive right into the pole by the house. He backed up and tried again. Second time, same thing. He didn’t hit it that hard, so the fender was fine, but he crashed into the pole three times before he managed to park the car.

CHRISTELLE: I got the feeling the drinking was something that had happened gradually. But Ludovic’s death in that accident definitely triggered it in a major way.

CÉLINE: I’m not sure there’s a precise moment when Papa started drinking.

CHRISTELLE: It was definitely subtle, and at first it was social. I blame his friends for encouraging him. Though everyone in his family drank too. But I think after Ludovic died…it was more obvious after that. He lost control. It really wasn’t normal, all those deaths in the family.

ÉLODIE: There was Grandpa, then his brother Gaëtan died, then Anthony, Noëlle, his boss and Ludovic, all in that same period of time. Ludovic in the airplane was too much for him. He’d shake his fist at the sky and say, “You can’t take a child like that, dammit.”

CÉLINE: And all those deaths earlier on in his life too. He always used to say he was next on the list.

In this family, tragedies are recounted dispassionately, no differently from small everyday anomalies. The story of a child who boarded a plane that exploded minutes after takeoff. Or, further back, the two cousins Céline and her sisters never met or saw a photo of, they don’t even know their names. The older one died in a hunting accident. He wanted to go out hunting with the men. One of the hunters—“he was just a teen,” says the mother, a great-uncle in Céline’s mind—shouldered his shotgun and pointed it in the child’s direction to give him a scare. He forgot he had just loaded the rifle, and he pulled the trigger. A few years later, the other cousin got off a school bus, crossed the street to his mother waiting on the other side and didn’t notice a car driving the wrong way down the road.

CHRISTELLE: That’s how things were.

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