The A26 (3 page)

‘She’s not bad, even now, huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even with a few miles on the clock she’s still a catch, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m telling you, Bernard, not only am I not angry with you, I feel sorry for you. Yes, I do, don’t argue. What’s more, out of all the men who’ve come sniffing around after her, you’re the one I like best. You are! Because you’re going to kick the bucket soon – before me. Not by much maybe, but before me.’

Roland’s brow was dripping with sweat. The few hairs he had left were plastered to his temples. He’d been a very good footballer, the best goalkeeper Subligny had ever had, and had inherited the café-restaurant from his parents.

‘I had to tell you, Bernard – it may not look like it but I respect you. Look, if you want to, you can have her right here and now, before my very eyes, and I won’t say a thing. Scout’s honour.’

‘You’re talking rubbish, Roland. You’re sozzled.’

‘Not at all! You’ll see. Jacqueline! Hey, Jacqueline!’

‘What’s the matter? Have you taken leave of your senses, yelling like that?’

‘He won’t believe I respect him! Do your business, you two, and I won’t so much as raise my little finger. Go on!’

‘You’ve got to be mad! There are children present!’

‘So, there’s children. They’ve got to learn the facts of life, haven’t they? Like on the farm, the pigs with the sows, and the mares with the … I don’t know what, but that’s nature’s way, isn’t it, shit!’

‘Be quiet! It’s you who’s the pig – clear off, you’re ruining it all.’

The music had stopped, and so had the dancers. Some of them were sniggering behind their hands, others raising their eyes. Only Serge, whose Communion they were celebrating, still moved around between them on his brand-new roller skates.

‘I’ve got to go, Jacqueline.’

‘No, you don’t, that’s stupid.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not because of him, I’m just tired. I was leaving anyway. Say goodbye to Serge from me.’

Out in the car park Bernard rubbed his eyes. The red sphere of the setting sun was pulsing on his retina. Someone knocked on the window.

‘Hello. Which direction are you going?’

The girl was made up like in the silent movies, hair all over the place, black and red, like a kid disguised as a witch.

‘Towards Arras, but I’m turning off in six kilometres.’

‘That’ll still be a help. Could you give me a lift?’

‘If you like.’

With the amount of perfume she was wearing, she needn’t have bothered getting dressed, a heavy scent.

‘On Sundays, the buses … Is it all right if I smoke?’

‘Of course.’

The girl lit a cigarette. The smoke lingered above their heads. They had stopped talking. Bernard was driving slowly. The sky took on streaks of purple and mauve.

‘It’s pretty. All this silence does you good.’

‘Yes, it’s like staring into a fire in the grate.’

‘Wasn’t there a war here?’

‘That’s right. The Great War and the Second. It’s taken a while for it to look alive again.’

‘Do you remember the war?’

‘Just a little. I was young then.’

‘All our lives we’ve heard people talking about it on TV, all over the world, but we’ve never seen it for real. We’re not quite sure it exists. It’s like fairytale monsters, and ogres and death. We know it exists but we don’t believe in it. We have doubts about everything, even ourselves. We’re never quite sure we’re not in a video game.’

‘Does that bother you?’

‘No, you just have to get used to it. I spotted you just now during the shouting match. You were different from the others. Me too. I’d come with a mate of the boyfriend of … well, whatever, it’s a shame, he was cute. Your air of sadness is very attractive.’

‘I’m not sad.’

‘You look it.’

The sound the girl’s stockings made as she crossed her legs caused him to jerk the wheel. But he was very swiftly back in control. She had noticed. He could just imagine the smile on her face as she crushed her cigarette end in the ashtray.

‘What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m going to drop you off here.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

Bernard parked on the verge. A car hooted as it went by. The lower part of the sky was turquoise with a tinge of gold right at the top.

‘OK, well, thanks a lot anyway.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Vanessa.’

‘Goodbye, Vanessa. Very nice to have met you.’

Vanessa, the motorcyclist, Jacqueline, all of them in the rear-view mirror, in one small piece of mirror which saw things the wrong way round. A life wasn’t very much, not much at all. Giving, taking away. It was so easy. Sometimes death spares people.

Yolande was making pancakes, dozens of them, building them up into an enormous stack. There were enough to feed at least fifty. It was her only way of combating the successive waves of ‘outside’ which had been beating against the walls of the house non-stop since the morning. For almost two hours now she had been busy, frying pan in hand in front of the stove. To begin with, she had counted them, as people count sheep to fall asleep, but then it had become mechanical, like breathing: a ladle of batter, turn the pan, wait, toss the pancake, wait, put it on the pile, a ladle of batter, turn the pan … They were like the skin of faces, faces she could put names to: Lyse, Fernand, Camille … She saw them go past one after the other, the way they used to lean over her cradle, gigantic, stinking of beer or cheap perfume, and belching out their slobbering coochie-coos, disgusting. Even then she had hated them, was nothing to do with them. She had only had to look at
her father’s face or her mother’s belly to know for certain that she did not come from ‘that’. Each time she tossed a pancake bubbling with dark craters, she said, ‘Nice one.’

An hour after Bernard had gone out, the clock-radio in his room had come on by itself: ‘Stock market news now, and all week the CAC 40 has been on a continual …’ Yolande had jumped in her chair. She was in the middle of copying a map of France, concentrating, tongue between her teeth, on making a good job of the nuances of blue shading along the coast with a coloured pencil.

‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’

She had taken the poker from where it hung on the handle of the stove and burst into Bernard’s room, brandishing it aloft. The metallic voice coming from the small plastic box by the unmade bed had metamorphosed into an unbearable loud rasping with the first blow of the poker. But the creature was not dead and Yolande had had to finish it off with her heel to silence it for good. It had been some time before her nerves recovered and she was able to pick up her pencil again to draw the outline of Finistère.

The ‘nose of France’ was so hard to manage, with all its little ins and outs edging the coastline between Saint-Brieuc and Vannes. She had always got ten out of ten for her maps; they would be pinned up in the classroom they were so beautiful. For that she’d needed to sharpen her coloured pencils really well and wet their points with spit. It was Brittany Yolande took the greatest pains over, because of the holidays. There were cousins in Pénerf, a little village beside Vannes. Yolande had a thin frock in
embroidered muslin from St Gallen, with tulle trim at the shoulders and waist, and a sky-blue straw cloche hat. But most of the time she would be in her bathing suit, barefoot, spattered with sand up to her knees. Every day, crowds of workers would pour out of excursion trains for their first visit to the seaside. Only the villa residents held themselves aloof from this display of overwhelming joy. It seemed as if the holidays would never end, like the Paradise they learnt about at preparation for First Communion. Yolande had a constant humming in her head. Perhaps it was from pressing seashells to her ear, or maybe the water from all the swimming. Yannick had white-blond hair, dry as straw. They would have play fights with sticky seaweed, and, squealing wildly, feel for each other with outstretched arms, under cover of the foam. That was the first time she had kissed using her tongue. For everything it was the first time.

A thudding at the door had ripped through the iridescent haze of her holidays at Pénerf. Her pencil point had snapped clean off on the south of Brittany. Yolande had pressed her eye up to the world’s arsehole; two women, one stout and the other small, were rummaging in the letter box. They had persisted, while Yolande held her breath. She had rumbled them, they were Boches disguised as French. Unless they were the girls from the Resistance done up to look like Boches … You could never tell, there was no difference. Either way, playing dead was the thing if you wanted to stay alive. The two old dears had taken a step back and then moved off. Yolande had waited for a long time before retrieving the piece of paper from the
letter box: ‘Do you know the Bible?’ Yolande hadn’t read to the end of the text because it was obviously written in code, the proof being that it was signed ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses’. What a bunch of losers! There would never be witnesses at her trial, because there would never be a trial. Bernard had promised her that. But they kept on trying all the same; they needed guilty people, even guilty people who were innocent, to fuel their morbid obsession with stamping out clandestine goings-on. That being so, she had to be on her guard; they would be back, they always were. That was her day shot to pieces. The only way to ward off the misfortune was to make pancakes, pancakes and more pancakes.

‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Bonnet. We are all …’ His boss had searched for the appropriate word – ‘Mortal? Alike?’ – but held back, from embarrassment, perhaps, or fear. ‘OK. Have some rest and come back to us soon.’

Right, that was sorted, indefinite sick leave. It seemed just like any other day, however. Bernard felt no worse than the day before. Decidedly better in fact. The two days after Serge’s First Communion had been a veritable agony: vomiting, migraines, an intense feeling of malaise. Then, on making this decision, a sort of respite. ‘It’s a matter of attitude, Monsieur Bonnet,’ Machon said. Perhaps he was right; they were mysterious, the body and the mind. Of those two days spent at the mercy of Yolande’s whims and the vagaries of his physical condition, all he had left was ‘room’ in his life, ‘room’ like in a garment which is too big. Someone who knew about such things had once told him it should be impossible to see the light between
two good dancers. His dancing days were over, and that was that, except with Yolande, of course, for the light had never been visible between them. As for his boss and his colleagues, he knew he wouldn’t be seeing them again. It was no sadder than casting off an old pair of slippers. In taking leave, he had married death, and death fitted him like a glove. Sorrow came from denial – that was why life had so often made him suffer. Now he would say ‘yes’ to everything, good and bad, sunshine and grey skies alike; this November Sunday afternoon it was the latter.

Sitting behind the wheel of his car in the station car park, he felt desperately free. Doubtless this was how someone felt on the first day of unemployment: ‘I could go here, or there, do nothing, go home and be bored stiff, go out of my mind with …’ The excess of freedom knocked him sideways. Maybe he should start collecting stamps, or keep pigeons like the retired men in these parts? Or build model ships? It was too much, too …

An urgent rapping on the window made him jump. Roland’s face, squashed up against the windscreen, looked strangely distorted, like a portrait by Bacon, streaming with rain.

‘Bernard, I’m in deep shit. Féfé’s just been run over by a lorry.’

‘Who?’

‘Féfé, my gun dog. Let me in.’

A smell of frying hung around Roland as he got in beside Bernard. His eyes were glassy from tears and the rain.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’

Bernard let him drum his fingers on the dashboard.

‘He’s one of a kind, that dog!’

‘Calm down. What’s the matter?’

‘My parents just phoned. I left Féfé with them for the weekend. I told them to keep him tied up! He always goes chasing after lorries!’

‘Is he dead?’

‘If only! I have to go and finish him off. I’m not brave enough. I saw you getting into your car and thought you …’

‘I’d what?’

‘Well … that you’d be able to … Don’t make me do this on my own.’

Roland was leaking all over, from his eyes, nose and hair. He was the last of that ridiculous breed, the Sunday huntsmen who shoot at anything that moves, or not, as the case might be (he was the one to thank for the shot-riddled ‘Caution. Children’ sign on the way into the village), and now he was crying over his Féfé, half flattened by a lorry. A man who would swear on his deathbed that he loved animals. His own. He was a stupid, sad idiot, and at this moment Bernard could not bring himself to treat him as such. He knew he was a stupid idiot, a stupid idiot who hated him, but a stupid idiot who was weeping, the way the sky weeps, sometimes.

‘Why me?’

‘I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Féfé and I … I just couldn’t. But you know death.’

‘Not yet, I don’t.’

‘You’ve seen it. I can see it in your eyes!’

‘You’re still drunk, Roland.’

‘True, but it’s because I’m suffering. You’re the only one who can do it. Bernard, please…’

‘Where d’your parents live?’

‘Over beside Brissy.’

Black and white like an old Chaplin film, minus the laughs. The sky could not decide whether to be bright or not. Most annoying. They parked outside Roland’s parents’ house, an elegant old house, which had been revamped with garden gnomes and fake wells made from tyres, like something out of a bad novel. Roland emerged, carrying a .22 rifle.

‘Over there, by the bridge.’

Bernard parked. As they got out, Roland handed him the gun. They walked along the verge, the grass green against a backdrop of grey sky. It was a little slippery. In a dip in the bank, the ginger and white dog, with a vacant look and his tongue lolling, was lying stretched out on his side. His back legs were now just a wet mush of hair and blood.

‘Oh damn! Kill him, kill him!’

Bernard aimed the barrel at the back of the animal’s ear, as it looked up at him, eyes growing dim. ‘Why me?’

It was a small rifle and the noise it made going off was no louder than a fart under the bedclothes. One click – and lights out. The dog’s head fell back on to the soft grass.
‘C’est un trou de verdure … qui mousse de rayons …’
1

Behind Bernard, Roland was busy throwing up.

‘What do we do now?’

‘Bin bag. In the car …’

Bernard took charge of everything. The dog was nothing but a piece of rubbish.

‘What next?’

‘How should I know? Better dig a hole.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Bloody hell, you’re cruel!’

‘I’m a killer not a gravedigger. There’s a spade in the boot – off you go.’

Nowhere, here was nowhere. Unconsciously, while Roland was digging a hole for his dog, Bernard adopted the stance of the motorcyclist at the roadside. He smoked a cigarette; the sun was not there, however, and nor was the serenity which had made that moment a moment out of time. At best, there was the complicity between two killers, one of them too cowardly to do the deed. The cigarette butt he flicked down on the wet tarmac was out in less than three seconds.

‘I’m done. We can go.’

Roland was green, the colour of goose cack.

‘That’s another reason you’ll have to be angry with me.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m the person who’s killed your dog. Who will you have to complain about once I’m gone?’

‘There’s always someone. Do you think you’re the only man who’s been with Jacqueline?’

Bernard smiled. Whatever else, humans were marvellously resourceful.

Getting out of the car outside the restaurant, Roland did not say thank you. He ran off, jacket up over his head, a hunched figure. People never said thank you to those who had done their dirty work for them.

He already knew which dog he would buy next.

The same, no doubt. Roland always bought the same
car, and if Jacqueline were to die he would find another one. A Nadine or a Martine maybe, but a Jacqueline even so. There are people like that, who think they can make things last for ever if they try hard enough.

For the past hour, Bernard had been driving around aimlessly, turning left here and right there, as luck or misfortune would have it. He had no idea where he was going but one thing he was sure about, he had no desire to go home, not straight away. Like a fly trapped under a glass he was looking for the way out while knowing only too well that none existed. As when he had left the station he felt burdened by the excess of freedom he was unable to use. Signposts pointed him in different directions: Lens, Liévin, Noeux-les-Mines, Béthune … but they were traps, leading only to fields of mud crushed under the weight of the impending dark. Occasionally he passed through villages, brown brick houses set out like Lego belonging to a child devoid of imagination, blank windows hung with lace curtains depicting a pair of peacocks face to face or else plump cherubs in the same pose, and roofs topped with TV aerials resembling giant dragonflies. Who could possibly stop off in one of them, unless he had broken down? And yet people lived there, had their joys and sorrows no less than those who lived in picture postcard landscapes drenched in sunlight and azure. In those parts you would stop to buy regional pottery, local honey or to visit an old Romanesque church. Here there was nothing but home-brewed beer and war memorials of a soldier pointing his bayonet towards an indifferent sky, framed by four shells with chains between them.

But you can’t continue going nowhere for long, especially when it’s nightfall, and so Bernard convinced himself he felt like eating moules-frites beside the station in Lille. It was years since he’d done that. He smiled at his own audacity. There was Yolande, it was true, but how could he let her know since she never answered the phone? In any case, she wasn’t aware of the passage of time. And anyway, stuff Yolande, stuff Roland’s dog, stuff it all! Illness makes you self-centred, that is its greatest advantage.

He hadn’t ordered moules-frites but doughy, cheesy flammekueche. Inside Aux Brasseurs, once he had tucked himself away in a corner, he had felt so overwhelmed by all the noise, the belching and smoking throng – it was like something out of Breughel – that when the waiter had come to take his order he had asked for the same as the people at the next table, just to keep things simple. By now he was ruing his audacity. He hadn’t even got a newspaper to read to make him look in command of the situation. This was taking ages, he’d already looked through the menu a dozen times. The clientele here were groups of friends or at least couples. Hang on, there was another man on his own. He even thought he recognised him as the travelling salesman who was cutting a swathe through the area, persuading lonely housewives to buy lingerie on credit, much to their husbands’ anger. The man was eating mussels without caring that the loud slurps he made when swallowing them were annoying his fellow customers. He had the dispassionate and ice-cool air of a bounty hunter in a western. Or maybe it wasn’t him after all. As a result of
looking at people, since he had nothing else to do, Bernard ended up recognising everyone. That was odd, but not as improbable as all that. He had never left the area, and had seen a lot of people pass through the station. That said, no one recognised him. It was all an illusion, a whirl of faces seen here and there, a fug of beer and cigarette smoke. You rub shoulders with the whole world in a lifetime, but forget people again as you go along, like friends you make on holiday – you promise to keep in touch only to consign them to the dungeons of memory at once. How could it be otherwise? You’d need ten lifetimes to keep on top of all that. Besides, when all’s said and done, we only need a few satellites to make up our galaxy. All stars are alike. That old pal Robert we were so fond of, who was lost in the mists of time, reappears one fine day calling himself Raoul or François or …

‘Flammekueche with lardons!’

‘For me, please.’

‘Another beer?’

‘Umm … all right.’

‘Excuse me, Monsieur, but there’s a lady on her own looking for a table, and we’ve run out. Would it put you out if she were to share yours?’

‘Well, no, I …’

‘Thank you, Monsieur. Madame? This way, please.’

She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t ugly, she almost wasn’t, full stop, and yet she was very fat, first-rate camouflage.

‘Good evening, Monsieur, thank you so much. It’s so crowded here that it’s hard to find a table if you’re on your own.’

‘Don’t mention it, it goes without saying.’

‘And this way, we’re not on our own any more.’

They both gave an embarrassed little laugh, which lent them a family resemblance. Not wanting to appear as if she wished to intrude on Bernard’s privacy, while she waited for her food the lady pulled out a pair of specs and a theatre programme which she began to study with a frown of concentration. For Bernard the situation was even more embarrassing than when he had been alone. He tackled his flammekueche in small mouthfuls, dreading that at any moment he might spill slivers of onion or lardons on his lap. In any case, by halfway through his meal he was no longer hungry. He felt torn between the desire to run away as fast as his legs would carry him or to fall asleep then and there, like a log. But he could do neither. The lady had already started on her grilled ham hock and he would have to ask her to stand up if he were to leave the table. He was doomed to spin out his beer for as long as he could, whilst affecting the air of someone wishing to enjoy the moment to the full. It was strange, but he felt he recognised her too. It wasn’t her facial features, nor her outline but rather something in the way she chewed, switching her food from one cheek to the other with a twist of the lips. He was convinced of it now, he had eaten with this woman before. Sensing his gaze, heavy with beer, on her, the lady looked up. Bernard blushed, they smiled at each other awkwardly. This happened two or three times until nothing was left of the hock but a bone picked clean.

‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

‘I don’t know, but it seems like it. I didn’t like to ask. It
would have looked as if I was trying to take advantage of the situation.’

‘I know what you mean. But no one could care less, you know. If by any remote chance someone was interested in us, which I doubt, they would take us for a nice retired couple eating out as they do once a month.’

‘Are you retired?’

‘Yes, just recently. I’m getting used to it. Education. And yourself?’

‘The same, but SNCF. Do you come from these parts?’

‘I was born here and still have a few relatives in the area, but I live in Dijon.’

‘Ah. But seriously, I do think I know you from somewhere.’

‘That may be, one comes across so many people in a lifetime. Perhaps years ago, at school, or summer camp, at a dance …’

‘Quite so. No point in wondering about it. We wouldn’t be the same people now in any case.’

‘That’s true, but you can’t help it, it’s like a need to search for survivors around us. Other people’s lives are annoying but they’re also reassuring.’

‘I apologise. I won’t go on.’

‘Don’t worry. I feel the same.’

Deep down, it was better this way. As far as possible, Bernard avoided delving back into his youth. Not that his memories were any more painful than the next man’s, it was just that it seemed to him as cold and desolate as a deserted house.