The torpid November drizzle trails were endlessly crashing down on the rusty Carrefour store’s clink as he was passing through the Lens shopping area adjoined to the corons’ red bricks. The headframe of the N3bis pit, which seemed to support the leaden blanket of the northern sky, reminded Pathé spectators and the nearby Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet
customers of the region's mining past.
So he began his pilgrimage to the cinema parking lot, where, when he was about seven,
his grandfather had first taken him to see an American animated film about children trying to
escape from a haunted house... only memories he retained of it, to his great regret. But in the hazy fog of this memory, the only light he could make out was his grandfather's balding head and the affection he showed him reflected by the ordering of popcorn, which compressed his glottis and reddened the back of his retina. A flurry of images from his past assailed him, like that post-match evening when, in this very parking lot, a friend's parents had taken him to the Mc Drive for the very first time. The smell of hot chips emanating from the craft paper that the oil was dripping on stimulated his appetite. The anticipation of unpacking on the way home excited children as much as a goal scored by the Racing in Bollaert. In the car, "Mc Do" was compared with "Quick" and "Burger King", as were the actions of Dindane, Keïta and Hilton. Mc Do was definitely preferred to its rivals, as the red and yellow colours of the company echoed the “blood” and “gold” worn by the team and proudly chanted by the fans.
The first crunch of the Happy Meal filled him with intense joy, all the more so as his
mother had forbidden him that kind of food. What would she have said about her friends, who, on match days, allowed the kids to eat burgers and drink Coke? To each of these innocent pleasures - mainstream cinema, football, fast-food - she systematically opposed a glance or a word of disapproval, so that he would feel guilty for simply being a child. What such a “French” pushy complex… one might say.
Only a bamboo fence separated his roughcast house from his grandparents' yellow brick
one. All he had to do was crossing a small dirt track in the middle of what seemed to him like
a wild jungle to get his afternoon snack. The rustic kitchen cupboard, with its patinated brass
handles, was an Ali Baba's cave of delicacies, of which the milk chocolate “petits écoliers”
were the most wonderful treasure. His grandmother was already reminding him : « But what
would your mother say if she saw you there… » while handing him the precious biscuits.
Then, the old blue Golf car flanked by the protection society's hedgehog in the left-hand corner of the driver's window pulled up in front of the house. His grandfather, who had introduced him to World War II model aircraft, would bring him back from the Jouet Club on the main boulevard the very precise colour references required by the instructions of the brand new Spitfire he just got. The store owner had known him for over forty years, and before his grandson, he had done the same for his own son. After wallpapering the kitchen table with back issues of Le Canard Enchaîné, they set to work. The room was transformed into a laboratory where the smell of paint and white spirit reigned supreme. The chemical fumes mingled with those of the boiling jasmine tea his grandfather used to drink, cradling the room into an ambience he would never forget. However, by eight o'clock, that came time for him to cross back the dirt track and face the constant bad temper of his parents, who, although they ignored each other, tirelessly rehearsed the same comedy of being a close-knit family.
It was surprising to see the extent to which my parents' social frustrations formed the
emotional glue that held their relationship together. Seventeen years of a foggy marriage,
resulting in the depressive state of their two spoiled fruits, and all that in the name of the neurotic fiction of being "decent people". In the end, they must have been more in love with the image of their couple than with each other.
It was still raining in the cinema parking lot, so to take my mind off things, I decided to
take a trip to Mc Donald’s, where the nostalgia drove me to order a Happy Meal, even though I am 24. I thank God for having invented automatic terminals; ordering directly from the cashier would have been a shameful ordeal that I didn’t have the courage to face in that very parking lot.
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