people.
Dominic
1
They were out to kill him. He didn’t know exactly who, he didn’t know exactly when, but he did know it was coming, that one of them – Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour or Aurélie – would shove his head in the piano and crush his cheeks between the keys and the wooden lid. That’s definitely how they were going to do it. They were going to crush his head in the piano in the living room.
Dominic didn’t know much, but of that he was certain. The keyboard would be splattered with bits of his brain. The blood would spurt on to the wooden floor. At his funeral they’d play a Purcell march on the evil piano. The maid would have cleaned the keyboard thoroughly and flushed the bits of his brain down the toilet to avoid blocking the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even have had the privilege of the waste disposal unit. His encephalon would have vanished down the toilet like a big, cumbersome turd.
Now it was floating in the septic tank, thekeyboard had been cleaned, white as snow, his sister Aurélie was learning to play on it. The family no longer thought about little Dominic; he’d been expelled from their minds the way shit comes out of our arses and is sucked into the septic tank.
Dominic’s childhood was kind of sad. He notched up each day as a little victory, but his anxieties soon came back to torment him. Perhaps they’d kill him tomorrow. It was a crime novel in the making. They behaved as if they loved him, as if their son were the most important thing in the world to them. But Dominic was no fool. He knew very well that beneath the veneer of the ideal family lurked a big monster full of hatred.
Since he didn’t go to school, a private tutor came to the house three times a week. His name was Joncourt and he had a moustache. He carted all sorts of books around in his briefcase – algebra, geography, hundreds of typed pages, in French, in Latin and in figures.
Joncourt wasn’t much fun, but at least he wasn’t out to kill him. You could trust him – he wore glasses. Father wore glasses too, but it was a trap, a disguise, to gain his son’s trust, a clown’s mask on a villain’s face.
Don’t ask Dominic why they wanted to kill him. He had no idea. He could have done without it. It’s not pleasant living in fear, with the expectation of being murdered.
This situation wasn’t his choice, but here he was, in this evil family bent on crushing his head in the piano in the living room. If he’d said anything , they’d have thought he was mad. Aurélie seemed so sweet, so studious. As for his parents, they were the image of propriety, their place in heaven guaranteed. But they were out to get him and Dominic couldn’t forget it. That was his only certainty, a very sad certainty.
He prepared himself for it. He wrote notes explaining the circumstances of his death and hid them alongside the footpaths in the hope that one day an eager hiker would avenge him, savagely mowing down the murderous family with an axe or a machine gun. Justice would be done; there must be a God for that. The murder of a child cannot go unpunished; Joncourt’s moral philosophy teachings would confirm that, no question. Only evil people like Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour and Aurélie would wish the opposite.Oh, they were very cruel beneath their pretence of being the perfect family! Killing their own son, their own flesh and blood, by jamming his head in a piano! A heinous crime, yes, it would be a heinous crime. Compared with them – with what they were planning to do sooner or later – Pierre Rivière, that guy in the nineteenth century who hacked his family to death, was a model of respectability. There was nothing worse than what they were going to do. If Dominic were able to rely on an epidemic, a war or an earthquake, he might have a hope of surviving, of not ending up with bits of his brain floating around in the toilet bowl, floating in the septic tank like a common turd. Only the
Dominic
1
They were out to kill him. He didn’t know exactly who, he didn’t know exactly when, but he did know it was coming, that one of them – Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour or Aurélie – would shove his head in the piano and crush his cheeks between the keys and the wooden lid. That’s definitely how they were going to do it. They were going to crush his head in the piano in the living room.
Dominic didn’t know much, but of that he was certain. The keyboard would be splattered with bits of his brain. The blood would spurt on to the wooden floor. At his funeral they’d play a Purcell march on the evil piano. The maid would have cleaned the keyboard thoroughly and flushed the bits of his brain down the toilet to avoid blocking the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even have had the privilege of the waste disposal unit. His encephalon would have vanished down the toilet like a big, cumbersome turd.
Now it was floating in the septic tank, thekeyboard had been cleaned, white as snow, his sister Aurélie was learning to play on it. The family no longer thought about little Dominic; he’d been expelled from their minds the way shit comes out of our arses and is sucked into the septic tank.
Dominic’s childhood was kind of sad. He notched up each day as a little victory, but his anxieties soon came back to torment him. Perhaps they’d kill him tomorrow. It was a crime novel in the making. They behaved as if they loved him, as if their son were the most important thing in the world to them. But Dominic was no fool. He knew very well that beneath the veneer of the ideal family lurked a big monster full of hatred.
Since he didn’t go to school, a private tutor came to the house three times a week. His name was Joncourt and he had a moustache. He carted all sorts of books around in his briefcase – algebra, geography, hundreds of typed pages, in French, in Latin and in figures.
Joncourt wasn’t much fun, but at least he wasn’t out to kill him. You could trust him – he wore glasses. Father wore glasses too, but it was a trap, a disguise, to gain his son’s trust, a clown’s mask on a villain’s face.
Don’t ask Dominic why they wanted to kill him. He had no idea. He could have done without it. It’s not pleasant living in fear, with the expectation of being murdered.
This situation wasn’t his choice, but here he was, in this evil family bent on crushing his head in the piano in the living room. If he’d said anything , they’d have thought he was mad. Aurélie seemed so sweet, so studious. As for his parents, they were the image of propriety, their place in heaven guaranteed. But they were out to get him and Dominic couldn’t forget it. That was his only certainty, a very sad certainty.
He prepared himself for it. He wrote notes explaining the circumstances of his death and hid them alongside the footpaths in the hope that one day an eager hiker would avenge him, savagely mowing down the murderous family with an axe or a machine gun. Justice would be done; there must be a God for that. The murder of a child cannot go unpunished; Joncourt’s moral philosophy teachings would confirm that, no question. Only evil people like Father, Mother, the maid, the neighbour and Aurélie would wish the opposite.Oh, they were very cruel beneath their pretence of being the perfect family! Killing their own son, their own flesh and blood, by jamming his head in a piano! A heinous crime, yes, it would be a heinous crime. Compared with them – with what they were planning to do sooner or later – Pierre Rivière, that guy in the nineteenth century who hacked his family to death, was a model of respectability. There was nothing worse than what they were going to do. If Dominic were able to rely on an epidemic, a war or an earthquake, he might have a hope of surviving, of not ending up with bits of his brain floating around in the toilet bowl, floating in the septic tank like a common turd. Only the
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