The A26 (6 page)

Yolande’s soup consisted of some leftover cabbage, a tin of ravioli in tomato sauce, two potatoes, a chicken carcass, a handful of lentils, a vanilla pod and two or three other ingredients she couldn’t quite recall. While emptying the cupboards into the large cooking pot she had said to herself that her recipe would be called ‘Everything must go’.

‘Is it nice?’

‘It’s unusual – what is it?’

‘Slum-it soup. You weren’t here when the butcher came. You’re having what there is.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll go shopping tomorrow.’

‘Have you been out derailing a train again?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Do you think I’m an idiot? I know your little game, it’s an open secret. To be honest, I couldn’t care less, if it makes you happy. But damn, I could have murdered an escalope!’

‘I’ll get some tomorrow, I promise. It’s not bad, this soup. A little … exotic maybe.’

Obediently, Bernard cleaned his plate. Yolande left hers untouched, giving him her china-doll stare.

‘So you’ll eat any old thing and not say a thing to me?’

‘I said I liked it, Yoyo.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about! My dress?’

‘Oh yes. It’s beautiful. It could almost be the one you were wearing the day …’

‘Aha, so you do … I found it in the wardrobe. I’ve added a few frills and some lace round the collar.’

‘Of course! It’s very pretty. Stand up, turn round… Splendid!’

A slight blush crept over Yolande’s cheeks. She went back and forth, twirled around the table. Bernard turned the pendant lamp on her as a spotlight.

‘If our idiot of a father had just let me move to Paris I’d have been another Chanel. And there’s nothing to it, you know, just reusing some old bits and bobs. It can’t have taken me more than a couple of hours!’

‘It’s a masterpiece. Really.’

‘And it goes nicely with that little chain you gave me: “Less than yesterday and three times as much as tomorrow”.’

‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow.’

‘Same difference. I’ll have to make myself a coat to go with it. Could you give me your old SNCF one? You won’t need it any more, you’re going to die.’

‘Naturally. Yolande, shall we dance?’

‘But of course. I adore you.’

They couldn’t really have said what they were
celebrating, Yolande’s amazing dress, the death of the young man, the unspeakable mush congealing on their plates or simply a moment of grace which had strayed into this place which had known so few, but they did it with all their heart. Bernard waltzed his sister around; she was laughing, head flung back and white hair flying like an ashen cloud. Round and round they whirled, heedless of the furniture they bumped into as they went past, toppling objects, setting the dust flying and scaring a rat out of the very mouth of the dustbin. The world could have stopped revolving and they would still have continued their drunken waltz atop its ruins, to the accompaniment of Yolande’s reedy tones as she sang softly:
‘J’attendrai, le jour et la nuit, j’attendrai toujours, ton retour …’
The swaying ceiling light was a makeshift glitter ball, throwing multiple copies of their shadows on to the walls. They were a whole ballroom, just the two of them. What else, who else could they ever need? Bernard surrendered to the ever faster rhythm forced on him by his sister. Eternity must be like this whirl, a gigantic food mixer, blending bodies into one paste, one wave crashing into oblivion. Bernard lost his footing, stumbled and fell full length on the floor.

‘You wretch! Give up now, would you?’

Yolande took hold of him by the collar and tried to get him on his feet again. Bernard opened his mouth but couldn’t make even the slightest sound. His body no longer responded to the orders issued by his brain. He was in unknown territory.

‘Shift your backside, will you! Hang on, have some wine, that’ll sort you out.’

He saw his sister stride over him, her legs as spindly as a chair’s. He heard her uncorking a bottle. She came back and poured the wine straight from the bottle into his mouth. Bernard couldn’t swallow any longer. He could understand everything, see everything, hear everything but he no longer knew what to do to live. He didn’t have the instructions any more. Apart from this feeling of panic he wasn’t suffering, unless he’d forgotten how to do that as well.

‘Dance! You mustn’t stop dancing, not ever!’

Dragging him like a broken puppet, Yolande hoisted him on to her back and walked him round the room. Bernard’s gaze fixed on the corner of the table, a patch of wall, a myriad of tiny details it seemed he was seeing for the first time, pencil marks on the doorframe with the legend ‘Bernard aged six, Yolande aged eight’, all the things a bull must see when the horses are dragging it out of the ring. Nothing hurt, there was just the strange feeling that he’d forgotten something, like when you leave the house and wonder whether you’ve turned the gas off properly.

Exhausted, Yolande walked him round the table one last time before putting him down on his bed. She collapsed on to a bedside chair.

‘See where your stupid tricks have got you? Everyone who plays at war ends up like you. But you won’t listen to me, you will go out playing the hero. I’m going to make you a nice eggnog. There’s nothing like eggnog.’

The last thing Bernard saw was a monstrous hen pecking away with the tip of its beak at an endless worm.

‘A settling of scores, I don’t think so!’

‘And why not? There’s a whole load of junkies hanging around the depot. The guy the police found was one of them. His arms were covered in needle marks, from what they’re saying.’

‘And the remains of the woman they found in the works on the A26, was she an addict? And the kid who’s never been found, she was one too, was she?’

‘There’s no connection, Roland.’

‘Hmm, well, I think there is, and I’ve got my own theory about it, what’s more.’

‘Out with it then!’

‘I know what I mean. And when the time comes, there’ll be quite a few who won’t know what’s hit them. Whose round is it?’

There were just three of them left propping up the bar, noses in their beer. Roland was at the pump. He couldn’t
wait for them to clear off. At this time of day he was as prickly as a hedgehog, everything got to him. All he wanted to do was sit down in front of the TV and stuff himself with sounds and pictures to the point of oblivion. The dog he’d bought to replace Féfé was a non-starter, he’d had to take it back to the kennels that afternoon. He’d given them a piece of his mind and no mistake. The Strasbourg–Monaco match scheduled for that evening had been postponed because of bad weather. And all these idiots could talk about was the young man who’d been found stabbed in the disused warehouse of the old goods station. No need to get upset over him. One little shit more or less – who was counting? But on his way back from his parents’ in Brissy, it was definitely Bernard’s Renault 5 that he’d seen parked near the shed. Naturally he hadn’t said a word to anyone. His little secret, he was hugging it close, so he could come out with it at the right moment. For years now he’d had him in his sights, that Bernard. Right family of lunatics, him and his tart of a sister. Never mind that they were local, one of these days it was all going to go up, and it would be him, Roland, who set it off. And that trollop Jacqueline would have to shut her big mouth. He’d always known he was a pervert, that bloke, with his ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ act. Even as a small child he’d been like that, doing things on the sly and hiding in his sister’s skirts as soon as things went badly for him. All the things that had happened in the neighbourhood, the kid who’d vanished, the body on the building site and that little toerag the other evening, it had all started the day Bernard left his job at the station. Always prowling around
in his Renault 5, or disappearing off. If someone went to the bother of digging around in that direction they’d turn up some interesting things, that was for sure! You’d only had to see him put a bullet in poor Féfé’s head, hadn’t so much as batted an eyelid, not a moment’s hesitation, bang!

‘OK, Roland, we’re off now. See you tomorrow.’

‘Right, see you tomorrow.’

Roland bolted the door and switched off the lights. He was about to leave the room when he met his own gaze looking back at him, that of a tall blond young man, a good head taller than the rest of the football team in a yellowing photo which had pride of place between two trophies and three pennants. Nothing got past him into the net in those days, people respected him. He could have turned professional if he’d wanted. Why hadn’t he wanted? Not finding an answer to that question, he told himself it was because of Jacqueline. She had to be of use for something. Couldn’t even give him kids – or do the dusting. Roland whisked the cloth from his shoulder and gave the two cups a polish. Then he turned out the lights and climbed wearily up the stairs to the flat.

There were dozens of buttons, hundreds even, scattered over the table. Tiny ones in mother-of-pearl, little half-spheres with painted flowers on them, leather buttons, wooden buttons, some in horn and others covered with fabric. Yolande’s fingers caressed them, sorted through them, mixed them up, married and divorced them and began all over again, untiringly. She had boxes full. Before emptying out a new one she would plunge her hands into it, like a miser with his gold. Bernard had passed away at around one in the morning.

She had not been at his bedside. Something like a gap had opened in the silence while she was making vigorous cuts in the SNCF overcoat. She had gone into his room. He had the same over-earnest look as in his school photographs, a complete act, anything for a quiet life. It hadn’t mattered what anyone thought of him just as long as they left him in peace. His watch had stopped at eleven
forty-five. He must have said to himself that his train was late. He’d been looking at his watch constantly in recent days. She’d wondered momentarily where she was going to put him, before telling herself he was in as good a place as any. As for the escalopes, that was scuppered, he wouldn’t be buying any more now.

The Big blue coat button family ran into the Mother-of-pearl shirt button family. ‘How are you today? Shall we go for a walk? Tip-tap-tip.’

Four days of Siberian chill. Nothing was moving on the plain, the cold took even the wind’s breath away. Work on the A26 site had been brought to a standstill. The silence was such that you could hear a branch snap with the ice like a glass straw from a mile away. It no longer seemed like death even, more like the time before life, before life had even been thought of. Yolande spent hours face to face with the cooker, as rigid as the chair she was sitting on, chewing the inside of her cheeks. Four days, four years, four hundred years … And then the chap had rung the doorbell. When no one answered, he’d knocked several times. He took a few steps back and looked upwards. All the shutters were closed. He scribbled a quick note on his knee and slipped it under the door. Yolande was watching him through the world’s arsehole. She’d waited for him to disappear off in his little blue car before seizing on the note. ‘Hello Bernard! Down at the station we’re wondering how you are. Give us a ring or join us for a drink. See you soon, Simon.’

Yolande folded the note in two, then in four, in six, then eight, till it was no bigger than a pill and she swallowed it.
Others would come. She would swallow them all. She’d swallow everything. That’s what she’d do. Everything could be eaten. The rats were eating Bernard, Yolande would eat the rats. With garden peas. She had loads of them. Bernard didn’t like them but he’d always got a tin when he did the week’s shopping. It was a tradition. There were sardines as well, plenty of them, and tomato sauce. She had all she needed, several times over. She had the wherewithal to live two lives here, two lives sheltered from others. She could do it all herself. She needed no one else. Music, for example, on that mandolin. She knew a tune: ‘Ramona … I’ll always remember the rambling rose you wore in your hair.’

‘Bugger off!’

The mandolin narrowly missed the rat running across the table. The echo of the instrument made ripples on the surface of the silence. Yolande closed her eyes. The same movement in the darkness inside her head.

‘Don’t lean out of the window, Yoyo, you’ll get your head torn off if we go through a tunnel.’ It would all be going so fast that it was impossible to open your eyes or even breathe. Now and then you’d get tiny smuts in your face. The tears in the corner of your eyes would be drawn upwards and vanish into your hair, streaming backwards with the wind. It took a smack across the legs to make her come away from the window and sit quietly on the seat. The intoxication would last for quarter of an hour and then she’d be at it again, on the pretext that she felt travel sick. That’s how she would have liked to go through life, eyes closed, at the window of a train hurtling onwards, at
the risk of getting her head torn off in a tunnel. They’d made do with shaving it.

Yolande had thought Bernard had moved, but no, it was a rat, a big fat rat under the bedcover. She hadn’t missed that one, eliminating it with one blow from the dictionary, open at the page with the D’s: deride, derision, derisory, etc. Afterwards she’d dissected the animal with her little sewing scissors, ever so neatly. She’d cooked it in red wine like a rabbit, a rabbit the right size for her, a one-portion rabbit.

She was alone in the world now, surrounded by miniature rabbits, rather like Alice in Wonderland. After dinner she would play the little horse game, while she dipped biscuits into a thimbleful of red wine. She would be both Bernard and Yolande. When she was Yolande she would cheat, of course.

The dice was stuck on five. Besides the unseen presence of mice and rats, nothing moved. The pendant lamp went on shedding its forty watts of greyish light over the board with its tiny racecourse, now lying in ruins. Bernard had got angry with Yolande who was cheating shamelessly. In an instant, the little horses had gone flying to every corner of the table. Only one was left standing, a green one, on the square marked 7.

Yolande wasn’t going to play with Bernard any more. She was asleep, chin on her chest, arms hanging by the sides of the chair and a mauve crocheted shawl round her shoulders. She had quickly tired of being Bernard and Yolande, switching from one side of the table to the other. After a short while she had lost track of who she was.
Then she had played the part of Bernard in a rage, simply to have done with it.

Bernard had gone off to his room in a sulk. Yolande would have liked to continue. She hated things coming to an end. She’d always been like that. She’d never wanted to get off a merry-go-round. Later on when she’d go out partying all night, she took badly to the first glimmerings of dawn. She’d get angry with the people who left her and went off to bed. When there was a cake she liked, she wouldn’t eat just one but ten, even if it made her sick. Nothing was ever supposed to stop.

Every night she struggled against sleep. She lost every time, but one day she’d win. She would keep her eyes open, like statues. She might be covered in moss and pigeon droppings but she would not let her eyelids fall. Generations of dribbling old men and snivelling babies would pass by and she wouldn’t so much as blink.

Seeing her like this, wound in her mauve shawl like a withered bouquet, you wouldn’t think she was made of some indestructible substance. Time had been on her side since birth. Yolande was the great witness. Let them go and get buried in their lousy cemeteries. Their marble slabs and plastic flowers would rot before she’d lost a single tooth. There was nothing they could do to her, and that’s what really got to them. She was like the sea, they could throw anything they wanted at her, even an atom bomb.
Boom!
it would go, and then the surface would grow perfectly smooth again as if nothing had happened. Scarcely a ripple. And when she’d had enough of everyone swarming around, then she would overflow, in wave upon
wave from her statue body. In her sleep, Yolande parted her thighs and revelled in peeing where she sat.

Yolande had awoken with a start, a silent cry filling her mouth. Something had smashed on the floor. Her bowl half full of red wine. Some creature going past, no doubt. They were everywhere. You couldn’t see them but they were there, nibbling, scrabbling, gnawing even the very shadows. She pushed the shards of her bowl under the table with the toe of her slipper. Her back hurt, the chair had been pressing into her ribs. It was a horrible day. Although it had barely begun, she could sense that from a thousand tiny details, her itching head, the cold in her bones, the way things all seemed to have moved imperceptibly from their usual places so her hand had to feel around for them. The matches that needed striking ten times before she could light the gas. Yolande set the water to boil because she had to start somewhere. She pressed up against the cooker, her hands cupped round the small blue flames. She felt stiff, as rigid as the chair on which she had spent the night. Her neck and knees cracked with every movement. The water took a day and an age to come to the boil. Yolande poured in half a jar of instant coffee, added four or five sugar lumps and filled a cup that was as stained as an old pipe. The first scalding mouthful made her cough. Then she busied herself, moving things about for no reason, just so that she wouldn’t be paralysed by the light filtering through the world’s arsehole. She made heaps, heaps of little horses, heaps of biscuit crumbs, heaps of little balls of paper, heaps upon heaps, stacked up the plates with leftover food congealed on them, donned
coat upon coat, and put socks on over her slippers.

She ran from one place to another, bumping into stacks of newspapers which collapsed in her wake, raising clouds of outdated information. Everywhere she felt hunted by the pale light creeping in like smoke through the gaps in the shutters, and the keyholes. All those gaps had to be plugged with scrunched-up pages of newspaper. On one of them the distressing photo of Maryse L. crumpled and disappeared in her hands. As she went to plug one last slit in a shutter, Yolande had time to see the Germans hiding on the other side of the street and a handful of Resistance fighters springing from one dustbin to the next. They no longer had enough space outside to fight their war, now they wanted to do it in her house. In her terror she found cracks in every corner, one there, another one here! The daylight was pressing with all its might against the walls. She didn’t have enough arms to battle against the pressure from outside. There was cracking and banging on all sides. It was so powerful and she was so fragile. She rushed into Bernard’s room. A troop of rats fled at her approach. She began to lay into her brother with her fists.

‘Bastard! How can you abandon me now?’

Shaking with fury, she grabbed the cover from the bed, put it over her head and huddled down behind the door, arms wrapped tightly, so tightly round her knees, a mass of shivers. On the mattress the exposed corpse gave a toothy grin.