The A26 (7 page)

It was past nine at night, yet the lights were still on in the café. This was the only light in the darkness bathing Place de la Gare. It looked like a fish tank filled with yellow oil, inside which Roland was darting about. He was going back and forth, giving things a wipe down with his cloth, a bullfighter’s cape without a bull; it was lovely and idiotic at the same time, as he was alone amid the tables and chairs. A car zoomed away from behind the premises. Jacqueline was at the wheel. She hadn’t even taken off her apron, just put on a big woollen jacket on top. Her hair was a mess, there was anxiety in her gestures. In the rear-view mirror she glanced at her swollen right eye.

‘Poor bastard!’

She could no longer remember what had started it, something insignificant as usual, a few centimes out on a bill, a disagreement over what to watch on TV, a word in the wrong place. In recent months she and Roland had
been sitting on a powder keg, the tiniest spark was enough to blow it all sky high. That evening they’d reached the very end of the road. It wasn’t Féfé’s head Bernard should have put a bullet in, but that idiot’s.

‘Just take a look at yourself, with your big fat beer belly hanging out everywhere, your furred-up tongue and your bulging eyes. What a handsome footballer!’

‘You’re fed up with me! Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’ve got tits like floppy flannels and hair like a floorcloth. Even the most miserable migrant building the motorway wouldn’t be turned on by you. You’re ancient, old girl, you’re ugly, and you smell of dishwater.’

‘Maybe not to everyone.’

‘All right, you bring that Bernard here, then, the poofter, and I’ll get my own back on him. I may be the way I am, but at least I don’t rape young girls, kill women and murder kids!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m saying what I know. Young Maryse who’s never been found, the murdered woman on the building site, all that started at precisely the time Monsieur Bernard began prowling about the area.’

‘Oh poor Roland, you really should stop drinking, it’s sad …’

‘We’ll see about that. And what was your precious Bernard up to beside the warehouse when the kid got himself stabbed? I saw him! I was driving past and I saw him even if he did turn away when I slowed down. That’s taken the wind out of your sails, hasn’t it?’

‘You’re just talking nonsense.’

‘We’ll see who’s talking nonsense tomorrow when I go to the police.’

‘You’re not going to do that?’

‘Watch me.’

‘Leave him alone. You know perfectly well he’s ill.’

‘Ill, my foot! He’s a dirty, rotten, deceitful murderer! Ill or not, he’ll pay for it, just like his trollop of a sister did, even if she did get off too lightly!’

‘It’s true that when it comes to dispensing justice your family are the experts. Wasn’t it your father, who’d feathered his nest on the black market, that shaved her head? In this very place?’

‘Don’t you talk about my father like that, you slut. Tomorrow I’m going to the police and I’m telling them what I know!’

‘You’re a hero of the Resistance too, now, I suppose. You disgust me! Anyway, you won’t go, you don’t have the balls.’

‘So that’s what you think, is it?’

His fist had caught her full in the face. She’d just had time to fling a chair at his legs before making a run for it.

‘You bastard! You rotten bastard!’

And yet, though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, the accusations were eating their way into her mind, like a worm in an apple. In her shocked state and at night, anything became possible, question marks dangled from the stars like fish hooks. It would be good to pull in the net and find it empty but, to be honest, Bernard had been so strange lately it was as if he had a secret, something he was keeping to himself, something which, like all secrets, was
just dying to burst from his lips. But that was his illness, nothing but his illness. It was unthinkable that Roland should poison his last days by setting the police on him. That scumbag would stop at nothing. Bernard, a killer?

It’s difficult to drive with only one eye, you only see half the world, the uglier half. She couldn’t really remember the way to Bernard’s, she’d only been there once or twice, a very long time before. A sombre, grey house – she’d had to wait outside.

‘I’m sorry, Yolande’s very fragile. Oh shit, my keys … It doesn’t matter, I always leave a spare set under the flowerpots.’

That had been a lovely day. Roland had gone off to Le Touquet for three days, to a bar keepers’ meeting, something she’d got out of without even having been invited. It was a Sunday, and there hadn’t been many for lunch. By three o’clock she was free. Bernard had taken her to the forbidden places of their childhood. They’d both been a little tipsy, had forgotten, for a few hours, who they were. And during those few hours they’d found they were unchanged, free of the little notches in the skin at the corners of their eyes. They’d seen the sea tumbling pebbles on the beach, and imitated the gulls, turning their scarves into wings; they’d eaten chips though they weren’t hungry, drunk beer without a thirst, like any other couple trailing their Sunday behind them like an ornamental poodle. A few hours in which they could believe they were what they never would be. Roland wouldn’t be back until the next day. Like misers they counted out the hours, minutes and seconds they had left. Bernard had suggested the cinema.

‘Five minutes – I’ll be right back.’

She had seen him hunting around under the geranium pot which contained nothing but a spadeful of dry soil, then give three knocks on the door and disappear inside after turning the key. For the twenty minutes during which she had waited in the car, she’d wondered what Yolande would look like after so long. And what it was like in their house, and what it would have been like at Bernard and Jacqueline’s if life had had other ideas. She was on to the choice of wallpaper in the bedroom when he had emerged again, gaunt and looking sad.

‘I’m so sorry, Jacqueline, we’re going to have to call a halt here. She’s not well. I’ll take you home.’

‘I quite understand,’ she’d said, strangling her scarf on her knees.

Life had had the same lurid violet tint as this evening, and the brush of the headlamps was powerless to soften it.

‘Oh where is it? Damned hellhole!’

There it was, it was coming back to her now. The disused mine shaft, and the first hovels of this dump which might indeed be called ‘Damned hellhole’. Her right eye felt like a piping-hot fried egg stuck to her cheek. The only light in the house windows was from the bluish TV screens. One more right turn, all the way along, the very last house.

Others had grown up in the meantime but it was easy to recognise, grey, unseeing, deaf. Jacqueline parked and switched off the engine. She hesitated then caught sight of Bernard’s Renault 5 squashed up against the gate like a fag end in an ashtray. A sliver of light came from the downstairs window.

A woman, even if she’s in her pinny, and disfigured by a punch in the eye, tidies her hair in the rear-view mirror.

The cold was nipping at her thighs, the points of her breasts. She ran across the road the way girls run, legs going out to the sides, holding her jacket closed across her chest with both hands. Even at fifty-five and counting, a woman is still a girl. She had to push open a rotting wooden gate with a letter box nailed to it: Yolande and Bernard
BONNET.

The house seemed to hate her. She would be hard put to it to say in what way, why, and how it showed this, but it hated her. Its way of puffing out its walls as she approached, and swallowing her up into the area covered by the canopy over the door.

Jacqueline knocked three times, louder at each turn. All she got in reply was a dull thud as if the house wasn’t hollow inside, was without resonance.

‘Bernard! It’s me, Jacqueline! I’ve got to talk to you! Open up!’

The house hunched a little deeper into its autism. Jacqueline took a step backwards and flung a handful of gravel against the shutters. Nothing.

‘I know someone’s there. Yolande, open the door, it’s important!’

Despite the bedcover over Yolande’s head, the handful of gravel was like a volley of buckshot to her. Her head was still thrumming from the knocking at the door, which had dragged her from the sleep engulfing her, soft and black as soot. They were going to mount an attack, it was imminent. They would not pass. All these years, one on
top of the other, had made the walls of the house as thick as a blockhouse’s. Yolande stroked her hair. They wanted to take her back to the café, to do it all over again, that was why they’d sent Jacqueline. But Bernard had made her a promise, no one could get in, no one could see. It was like Switzerland here, the war would stay outside. To ward off ill fortune she sucked the pendant ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow’. The gold didn’t taste of anything. It wasn’t worth the blood spilt for it. With a swift tug she snapped the chain and swallowed the pendant.

Jacqueline had found the key under the flowerpot. She was reluctant to use it. This house was out of bounds, but Roland would stop at nothing. He wouldn’t be sober again for a week, he’d be sprawling about at the police station. She didn’t believe a word of what he was saying of course, but Bernard was so weak. She wanted people to leave him in peace for what little time he had left. The key was rusty, it lay heavy in her hand like a weapon. She gave the door one last thump.

‘Bernard, Yolande, I’m begging you!’

The key grated, as if unwilling to do its job. Then the door opened.

It wasn’t the noise of the key in the lock that made Yolande jump but the icy draught, the breath of the outside. That shit Bernard had betrayed her. They were there! She could hear footsteps. In her head she was yelling, ‘Bastard, you bastard!’ She huddled still further into the corner of the room, wrapped in the bedcover, with only her eyes peeping out. She was no longer able to control the shivers
rippling through her from her feet all the way up to her hair roots. Her right hand was looking for something, it didn’t matter what, as long as it could be used as a weapon. A Bic biro, Cristal, with blue ink.

A wave of nausea came over Jacqueline as she ventured into the hall, an infernal stench which had leapt in her face like a wild cat.

‘Oh, good God!’

Any rubbish tip would have looked like a picnic spot next to this house. A heap of old newspapers collapsed as she made to steady herself against the wall. A creature slipped between her legs. Stifling a cry, she felt about for a switch but thought better of it. It might look worse in the light.

‘Bernard? Yolande? Don’t be frightened, it’s me, Jacqueline.’

She moved forward blindly, arms outstretched in front of her, towards the glimmer coming from under a door. She had only four steps to take but it seemed like several kilometres. As she moved, among the countless stale odours crowding into her nostrils, one came to stand out, sweetish, yellow, rancid. She had never smelt it close up and yet she knew. It was in the genes. When her father had died, the same smell had filled the air outside the room she’d been forbidden to enter.

‘But why can’t I go in?’

‘Because.’

When her father had emerged, it had been as a long box in pale oak. The wax polish had never managed to banish the smell from that room. Gingerly she pushed the
door in front of her. Centimetre by centimetre her field of vision increased: the stiff bulk of a wardrobe, the corner of a chair with a cup on it, a bedside table bearing a reading lamp with its shade at an angle and … Bernard’s profile, eyes and mouth open, emaciated. Her hand flew to her mouth. Tears came into her eyes.

‘It’s not true! It’s not true!’

Her foot trod on something plastic, a ballpoint top. Bernard was staring at the ceiling with a silly grin. One of his lips seemed to have been gnawed. Bernard’s elbows and knees stuck up beneath the sheet. Run away as fast as she could … But that was impossible. All the mysteries were there, all the things you want to know about ‘the Hereafter’. In any case, the orders from her head were no longer getting through to her limbs. It was horrible, monstrous, but it was fascinating. She stayed there in astonishment, faced with this life in which death had taken up residence. Her blood shot up and down in her veins like an elevator gone mad, then froze around her heart. She didn’t hear the bedcover moving behind her. Once upon a time there lived Bernard and Jacqueline …

Yolande had pounced, gripping the biro in her fist. Pulling Jacqueline’s head back by the hair she had plunged the biro into her exposed throat. The blood spurted out, spattering Bernard’s cheek. Gurgling noises came from Jacqueline’s mouth. Her arms were flailing. But Yolande kept her grip. Several times she struck with the pen, into her neck, her eye, five times, ten, twenty! Until that tart from the café fell like a rag doll at her feet.

‘Good shot! Good shot! Good shot!!!’

While she’d been kicking the body, Yolande had lost her slipper. She looked for it under the bed. There it was, she’d found it. As she took her head out from under the bed again, she found herself face to face with Jacqueline whose face, streaming with blood, was still making drowning noises. Yolande planted her lips on Jacqueline’s and kissed her greedily.

‘There, that’s for Bernard, you little trollop.’

Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, Yolande got to her feet. Never had she felt so cold. That was the outside rushing in.

The passageway was filled with night. The others must be lying in wait in the bushes. That air … that air … She went to close the door but it was as if she were charmed by the Pied Piper. In front of the immense dark, she wavered, stretching out her hand. The night had no walls, no limits. That was frightening and enticing at the same time. Silence didn’t exist, or else it was made up of a thousand tiny sounds. The wind on her face was an invitation. ‘Come, Yolande, come. Here’s something that has no end.’ The air took hold of her under the arms, gently, tenderly, like her lovers of long ago. Scenting the air, Yolande quivered with all those good things. She ventured on to the doorstep. The night slipped under her skirt. ‘Come here, Yolande, the world is yours for the taking. You’ve earned it, haven’t you?’