The A26 (2 page)

Bernard did not think the photo was a good likeness.

Newspaper photos never looked like anything, or rather they all looked alike, sharing a family resemblance, hangdog and miserable. The papers said any old thing. They never had anything very interesting to report, so they told lies. There wasn’t so much as two lines to be said about the girl. Apart from a handful of individuals, no one knew Maryse existed. Her death made no difference. What album had they dug that photo out of? She couldn’t be more than twelve in it. The silly smile of the young girl turned his stomach.

‘Oh Bernard, you haven’t eaten a thing! That’s no use, and you know you like shepherd’s pie.’

‘I have, Jacqueline, I’ve had some. I’m just a bit out of sorts, that’s all.’

‘I can see that. You haven’t touched your food. Have you seen Machon again?’

‘Yes, on Monday. Everything’s fine.’

‘Everything’s fine, my foot!’

Jacqueline put her pile of plates down on the corner of the table and wiped her hand over her face as if removing an invisible spider’s web. She had had this habit ever since they’d been at primary school together. Jacqueline was his best friend. They might have got married, had children, a dog, a caravan, the most modest of lives but a life even so. But there was Yolande. Jacqueline had waited for a long time, and then married Roland. They had the restaurant across from the station.

‘Are you coming on Sunday, for Serge’s First Communion?’

‘I don’t know, maybe.’

‘But you’ve got to. He’d be hurt … I suppose you’re fretting about Yolande, is that it?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Of course it is! She’ll take advantage of you for your whole life, that one! Why don’t you put her in a home? It’s about time you started taking care of yourself. Have you looked in a mirror recently?’

‘You know perfectly well that’s impossible. She’s not capable of —’

‘Give me a light, will you? Yes, Roland, I’m coming, just a second! And he’s a bloody nuisance too, that one.
Can’t do a damn thing for himself. It’s a mess, isn’t it?’

‘Please don’t start, Jacqueline.’

‘What? What would we have left if we no longer had our regrets?’

‘Remorse, perhaps.’

‘Sometimes I think I might prefer that. At least it would mean we’d done things.’

‘Things? They don’t leave much of a trace behind them.’

‘Well, did you want to leave pyramids behind you? Things aren’t just stuff made of stone, your churches, castles, monuments! It’s the little things, like when you used to go fishing in craters on bomb sites, smoking your first P4 round the back of the bike sheds, all the things we said we were going to do even if we already knew we’d never do them … I’m coming, I tell you! Please come on Sunday, just for me.’

‘All right, I’ll be there.’

Jacqueline got up with a sigh. She could almost have supported the tray on her ample bosom, leaving her hands free to carry other plates, other dishes. It must feel good to lie sleeping on those breasts, like being on a cloud. A long time past, down by the canal, the weather was hot. There was a scent of cool grass. He had laid his cheek on Jacqueline’s white breast. Beneath the thin stuff of her bodice he could feel her quivering, giving off a fragrant dew. Fish were jumping, snapping at dragonflies. The air was alive with a thousand tiny things. One of them had said, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’

The small fluorescent green letters on the screen were no longer making proper words. They were now just long wiggly caterpillars, line upon line of them.

‘Is something wrong, Bernard?’

‘No, a spot of dizziness, that’s all. It’ll be the new medication, no doubt. Take over from me, François. I’m just nipping out for a breath of air.’

‘Certainly. Why don’t you take some time off?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Where did those rails along the platforms go? Not all that far. They joined up again over there, behind the warehouses, the end of the world was within arm’s reach. Everything was rusty here, down to the ballast stones, even the grass clinging to life at the edge of the track. The railway had left its mark, a lengthy scar with dried blood at its edges. Seated on a trolley, Bernard ran his fingers over his face, feeling the rows of teeth, the angle of the jaw. Beneath the pallid, soft skin a death’s head was hiding, like the one on a pirate flag or the labels of particular bottles at the pharmacy, with two crossbones behind. So what if it was ugly here, it was still the richest landscape on earth. You could make a life here. It was all there ahead of him, rails leading to more rails, on and on to infinity. François was right, he would take some leave. Actually, he would leave. Like old Fernand the year before. But he’d been retiring. He was old. He had gone off with a fishing rod under his arm, a cuckoo clock and a return ticket to Arcachon, first class. Bernard would never go to Arcachon. To tell the truth, he didn’t give two hoots about
Arcachon, there were so many places in the world where one would never set foot. What was there over there, anyway? A dune, a big Dune of Pilat which looked just like the desert, they said. It was people who’d never been there who said that. Everything looked like everything else, people couldn’t help comparing the things they knew to the things they didn’t know, so they could say they did know, that they’d been round the world without leaving their own fireside. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, no cause for regrets. No gifts for sick employees, they’d prefer them just to clear off, preferably without a trace. Illness really annoyed them, it was bad for business, and they took a dim view of it. It lowered the troops’ morale.

‘Oh my poor Bonnet, and with your poor sister too! How much time off do you want?’

Taking his cap between thumb and forefinger, Bernard sent it flying somewhere over the containers, like a Frisbee. He had another one in the locker room. No harm done. The wind caressed his baldness. In the early days, when Yolande’s hair had begun to grow back he’d loved running his hand over her head. All the little hairs standing upright had given him a feeling like electricity in his palm. Her hair had grown back pure white. Yet she was only twenty. The shock of it, no doubt. Before that it was blonde, red blonde, Titian she used to call it.

There it was in black and white, in the bound volume of
La Semaine de Suzette
, under the heading ‘Suzette across the world’, an old collection from 1932, worn shiny, stained and yellowing, like everything from that era. Despite knowing it by heart, Yolande loved to spend hours leafing through it. She had done all the crosswords, every rebus and sewn the entire wardrobe for Bleuette (a 29-centimetre doll, real curled hair, eyes that shut, and unbreakable posable head). She loved the smell it gave off when the pages were opened, a musty smell of old biscuits. The Germans would be back. She wasn’t especially waiting for them but she knew they’d be back.

It was the drop of water falling on her newly shaven head which had hurt her the most, a deafening sound like the stroke of a gong which had stayed in her head ever since. As for everything else, she had let them get on with it, like a sheep, there was nothing else to be done with idiots. For as long as they kept her in the café, amidst their yelling, she had been outside her body. She was a past
master at switching off, what with her lunatic of a father who would bawl her out for the slightest thing. She’d had enough time to practise. But on leaving the Café de la Gare, after they’d let her go, a large drop,
plop!
filled with all the absurdities of the past four years. You’d have thought that ever since they’d dragged her out of her house, the sky had been holding itself back so as to descend on her with all its might in that drop.

Yolande didn’t even remember the Boche’s name. To tell the truth, it wasn’t so much for what she’d done with him that they’d shaved her head, more for what she’d refused to do with some of her ‘barbers’.

What did it matter anyway? She had never liked them, they had never liked her. It had let her get shot of all those bastards for good and all. Besides, they must all be dead by now. But what had he been playing at in the lav for the past hour?

‘Bernard, what are you doing in there?’

‘Trying to unblock the toilet. How many times have I told you not to use newspaper!’

‘I didn’t have anything else. You forgot to get toilet paper when you were at Auchan.’

‘There’s tissues.’

‘They’re no use to me, there’s nothing to read on them.’

The sound of the flush drowned out Bernard’s reply. He emerged from the toilet, wiping his hands. He was wearing a white shirt, the collar gaping wide round his thin neck.

‘What are you dressed up like that for? Are you going to a wedding?’

‘No, it’s Jacqueline’s nephew’s First Communion. I told you that last night.’

‘You didn’t tell me a thing. You’re always up to something behind my back.’

‘For one thing, I did tell you, and for another, I’m not up to anything. I’m going to the Communion, and that’s all.’

‘So basically you’re going to get yourself filled full of liquor by that cuckold she calls a husband.’

‘Yoyo, that’s enough. I won’t be staying long. I’m done in but I’ve got no choice. I won’t be late back. The toilet’s unblocked and I’m begging you, please don’t put any more newspaper in there.’

Yolande shrugged and buried herself in
La Semaine de Suzette
again. Bernard rolled down his sleeves, slipped on his jacket and planted a kiss on his sister’s neck.

‘Come on now, don’t sulk – I’ve got a present for you.’

The pendant on its gilt chain was dangling over the book like a pendulum. Catlike, Yolande caught at it.

‘What does that mean, “More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow”? Is it about the blocked toilet?’

‘No, it means I love you more than yesterday and much less than tomorrow.’

‘You’re going to love me less tomorrow?’

‘No, it’s the other way round.’

‘It’s beyond me. Can you put it on for me?’

Bernard’s fingers had a little difficulty in doing up the clasp. Strange, the skin on Yolande’s neck wasn’t an old lady’s but a baby’s, all soft, warm little folds.

‘You’re very beautiful.’

Yolande put the pendant into her mouth.

‘I used to have one with the Virgin Mary, a blue one, it tasted of electric wire. At school when you went for an
X-ray, you had to put it in your mouth so you wouldn’t see right through to the Virgin’s bones. This one doesn’t taste of anything.’

‘See you later, Yolande.’

The countryside, accustomed to low skies and drizzle, looked ill at ease done up in its Sunday best in the sunlight. The bricks were too red, the sky too blue, the grass too green. It was as if Nature felt embarrassed at being so extravagantly made up. As if for the camera, she was quite still except for the occasional crow hopping about in the middle of a field. At the wheel of his car Bernard was feeling good, for the first time in a long while. He loved these expanses of brown stretching as far as the eye could see, you could almost fancy you were by the sea. He passed a motorcyclist at the roadside, leaning against his bike. He was smoking a cigarette, at right angles to the horizon. There was no house nearby. Here was a chap who had simply said to himself, ‘I know what, I’ll stop here for a cigarette because this is absolutely the best place in the world for that.’ It was over in seconds, just the time it took for the motorcyclist’s image to disappear in the rear-view mirror, but Bernard felt every bit of that man’s happiness in his own body: ‘I feel good.’

‘And what’s going to happen to me as long as Yolande’s still alive?’ He realised he had never asked himself that question before. He would very much have liked to be a biker stopped at the roadside for eternity. No doubt Yolande had never asked herself that question either.

She didn’t care, had never cared about anything but herself. It couldn’t really be called egotism, she had simply never been aware of other people. They were bit parts, at most, even her brother. When she had come home with her head shaven, never to leave the house again, she had appeared relieved, her face serene like that of a young nun. They didn’t want her any more, and she had never wanted them. At last things were clear, ordered, everyone in his own place. She had never wanted anything but this cat’s life of cosseting and food.

Bernard slowed down as he passed the works on the A26. The pillars supporting the slip road had advanced a few steps. RIP Maryse.

‘Now, Bernard, that’s not an empty glass, is it?’

‘Yes, but I’m fine, thanks.’

Roland’s eyes looked like two egg whites, pastis yellow shot through with red.

‘It’s lovely to see the young ones having fun, so full of life!’

In the back room of the café, where the tables had been arranged in a horseshoe, the young ones were jigging to one of the summer’s hits. The acrylic of the girls’ little skirts was stretched out of shape over their bulging thighs. The boys, a glint in their eye, were blowing themselves a smoke screen to hide their acne and drinking out of cans. Jacqueline, hair dishevelled, was zigzagging amongst the dancers with a tray in her outstretched arm. She looked like a statue carrying its upturned plinth.