Trespass (38 page)

Aramon was leaning against the wire fence, smoking. The air was cold, under a leaden sky. He looked down at the expectant faces, and his pride, his manhood wouldn’t let him tell these youths that he didn’t know whether he’d been Verey’s killer or not.

‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘That’s me.’

The boys began tittering. Michou’s friend, Louis, said: ‘You shot away his pallid face? Uhn?’

Aramon said in a strong voice: ‘He’d promised me money. A lot of money for some land. We had a deal. You see? He tried to back away from it. Cunt. He tried to cheat me. But nobody cheats a member of the Lunel family!’

‘What did it feel like?
Blaff!
One foreigner less! Pretty fucking good, uhn?’

‘It felt all right,’ said Aramon.

‘Did you knock his head off with the first shot?’

‘Not his head,’ said Aramon. ‘I shot him in the gut.’

He was about to brag that he’d killed Verey with one shot, but then he remembered:
two
spent cartridges in the firing chamber and he stammered, ‘I thought I’d get him first time, but my hands were shaking. I had to fire the second barrel.’

‘What, and then his guts spilled out?’

‘Yeh.’

‘You did OK,’ said Michou. ‘Foreigners are vermin. More and more each fucking year, swarming over us, like rats. And they just help themselves to what belongs to us. They try to cheat us all the time. You did good, old man.’

After that, this group – Michou, Louis and three others – began to ‘look after’ Aramon, out of
respect,
they told him. They began by procuring extra cigarettes for him, and pornographic magazines. At his request, they managed to find him a colour photograph of Niagara Falls, which he taped to the wall above his bed and stared at for long hours at a time. He knew that, in recent years, his life had had about it an absence of wonder.

One day, in the yard, Michou told him he was looking tired, asked him, why didn’t he try the other stuff, the beautiful stuff that took all your sorrows away?

‘The “beautiful stuff”?’

‘Yeh. Coke. Crack. Whichever. Even Smack if you think you can handle it. Easy to get. Easy.’

‘How would I arrange it?’ Aramon asked.

Michou said this was easy, too. Deals were always done on the outside. Certain of the guards ‘facilitated’ it, because their own pay was so stingy. Easy as farting.

Aramon told Michou he would think about this. But really, he didn’t have to think about it very long. Because this was what he ached for – had ached for, for most of his benighted life – the drug that would make the world seem wonderful.

Yusuf warned him not to do it, not to go anywhere near it. He warned him he would be putting fetters on himself, selling himself into slavery.

But Aramon had already begun dreaming about it. He clung to his soft pillow and conjured in his mind a substance of perfect whiteness which would allow him to feel what he’d felt long ago, before Bernadette died.

The thing she had sometimes, on summer evenings, described as happiness.

Snow fell on the charred ruins of the Mas Lunel.

Audrun, wearing her rubber boots and her old red coat, stood alone in the landscape and found herself wishing that the snow would go on falling and falling until all the contours and edges of the building were blurred, and the mas became indistinguishable from all that existed around it: a small mound or hill among the greater hills.

She loved the whiteness of everything. Even the raw air she loved.

And the silence. This more than anything.

When the snow melted and the remains of the mas appeared again, in all their blackened ugliness, Audrun had to keep the blinds of the bungalow windows pulled down and barely ventured out of her door, so terrible did the proximity of this
thing
appear to her.

When she realised she’d once again become a prisoner of her loathing, she called Raoul Molezon. She offered him pastis, which she served with cheese crackers. She told him she wanted him to demolish the Mas Lunel.

‘Demolish it? And then what?’ said Raoul.

She remembered her father boasting about selling the stones when he’d torn down the two wings of the mas, long ago.

‘Then it will be gone,’ she said. ‘And the land will recover.’

Raoul was silent for a moment. Audrun noticed that he’d dropped a few cracker crumbs on his tartan shirt. Men, she thought, seldom see what’s been dropped or spilled or just abandoned. They just hurry on . . .

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Raoul. ‘With the insurance money, I could rebuild it for you. It would take a bit of time, but—’

‘Insurance money!’ said Audrun. ‘Aramon won’t see a cent of that. It’s tied up in the courts. Insurers don’t want to pay out to a murderer if they don’t have to! Who can blame them?’

Raoul nodded. He sipped his pastis, with his face lowered. The word ‘murderer’ seemed to have disconcerted him.

After a while, Audrun said, ‘I think it’s better if the house is gone, Raoul. Better for me. Better for the land. Couldn’t you just bring a bulldozer? I can pay you for the work. And you can salvage the stones.’

Raoul was silent again for a moment, then he said: ‘What does Aramon want?’

‘Who knows?’ said Audrun. ‘But it’s of no importance. Aramon’s going to die in prison. They say he’ll get thirty years. He’ll never set foot on this hillside again.’

Raoul arrived with his demolition team at the end of February. The days were grey and cold.

Audrun made coffee for the men. She reminded Raoul of her instruction to take away everything, drag it all away, every last stone and tile, every floor joist, every ancient run of piping, every piece of flaking plaster.

‘What I want to see when you’ve finished,’ she said, ‘is flat ground. I don’t want there to be anything left above the earth.’

Raoul told his men to go on up to the mas, but he stayed behind, sitting at Audrun’s kitchen table, with his hands round his coffee bowl. His brown eyes looked not at Audrun, but down into the bowl.

‘Audrun,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wanting to say this. I should have said it the last time I was here. I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. We all are. Everybody in La Callune. We want to help you in any way we can.’

Audrun looked at him, the still-handsome man she could so easily have loved, if her life had been differently constructed, and felt towards him a sweet tenderness she knew time would never diminish.

‘Thank you, Raoul,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for Jeanne, too. That it had to be her to witness such a terrible thing . . . I’m sure nobody ever imagined that. And the little girl from Paris . . . on their picnic . . .’

He shook his head, as if to say that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He moved the bowl round and round on the oilcloth. He still wouldn’t look at Audrun, although she sensed that he had something else to say.

‘I know . . .’ he began, ‘I know . . . that when we were young, your life was made very difficult by . . . by certain things that—’

Audrun stood up straight away, pushing her chair away so violently that it fell over with a crash.

‘A life is a life,’ she said emphatically. ‘I never dwell on the past. Never! Which is why it’s going to be better for me when the Mas Lunel is gone. And look at the time, Raoul. Hadn’t you better get started? They’ve forecast rain this afternoon.’

He stood up. He took his gloves out of the pocket of his work coat and slowly put them on. He nodded and went out.

Built over years, it was demolished in days.

True to Audrun’s orders, Raoul and his men left nothing standing above ground. When their work was finished, where the Mas Lunel had been, there was only a rectangular declivity in the earth.

Audrun walked round and round this declivity, a clay and limestone wound, fancifully zippered together by the stitching of the bulldozer tracks. The shallow rectangle appeared far smaller than the house itself had been and there was about it, thought Audrun, an embarrassing pointlessness, as though, in the end, the beautiful hillside above La Callune had been dug out and levelled and terraced to no purpose. And this thought tore at Audrun’s heart, tore at her sacred memory of Bernadette, standing at her sink or at her ironing table, keeping watch.

But then, hearing a blackbird singing in one of the holm oaks, Audrun remembered that spring was coming and that the seasons would bring their own, more kindly alteration. In the ruts left by the bulldozer tracks no less than on the bare mud and limestone, tiny particles of matter would accrue, swept down by the rain and the wind: filaments of dead leaves, wisps of charred broom. And in the air, almost invisible as spring came on, would be specks of dust, grains of sand, and these would slowly turn and fall and settle among the detritus, making a bed for the spores of lichen and moss. In one season, the scar of the Mas Lunel would begin to heal.

Later, in the autumn gales, in the drenching rains falling under Mont Aigoual, berries and seeds would fall onto the lichen and take root. Box and bracken would begin to sprout there, and in time, in not much time . . . wild pear, hawthorn, pine and beech would spread their branches . . .

She knew her beloved land. What would begin to grow all around her, as the seasons passed, was virgin forest.

Spring came slowly, reluctantly, with cold squalls of rain and morning frost and nights when the wind seemed bent upon hurling the roof off the bungalow.

And then everything quietened. The sun was suddenly warm. In Audrun’s wood, aconites and dog’s-tooth violets pushed up in the new grass. The sound of the cuckoo was heard.

She drove her car down to Ruasse and parked in the square and walked up through the old town to the prison. She hadn’t known she was going to do this. But some sudden feeling of . . . what could she call it? Kindness? Some sudden calm in her prompted her to dress herself in her Sunday clothes and drive down to Ruasse, and then to walk up the steep cobbled road to the prison and ask at the gate to see her brother, Aramon Lunel. She was there almost before she realised it. After she’d said his name, clouds gathered above the town and a light rain began to fall.

She went in and the stone walls of the old Foreign Legion barracks closed around her. The guards looked at her with interest. She was Lunel’s first and only visitor, aside from his lawyer. She was told to wait. She’d brought an awkward package with her, wrapped in newspaper, but this was taken away.

She sat on a hard bench and listened to the sounds of the prison. After a while, the newspaper package was returned to her and she was shown into the long empty space reserved for prison visits, set out with tables and chairs, as though for some school examination. The room was deserted except for Audrun and an elderly prison warder, on whose features was etched a melancholy of the most profound kind.

‘Do you know my brother?’ Audrun asked.

The warder nodded.

‘Is he . . . is he able to
endure
?’ she asked.

The warder shrugged. ‘He’ll never be well,’ he said. ‘His ulcers were treated, but they still bleed . . .’

‘And . . . in his mind . . . how is he in his mind?’

As Audrun said this, a lock turned, then the door opened and Aramon came into the room. He wore his prison uniform: grey trousers, blue shirt, grey pullover. And in these clothes, thought Audrun, he looked better dressed than he’d been for a long time. His face was freshly shaved, his hair cut and washed. Prison had cleaned him up.

A second warder led him to the table where Audrun sat, then withdrew. He and the elderly prison officer walked away and kept guard by the door.

Aramon stood with his hands by his sides, looking at Audrun. Behind her, she heard the rain fretting against the narrow windows. Aramon sat down. He put his hands flat on the scarred wooden table that separated them.

‘Normally,’ he said, ‘I don’t get any visitors.’

‘No?’ said Audrun. ‘Well, you’re used to being alone, aren’t you?’

She noticed that the soreness in his eyes had gone and he smelled of strong soap, not alcohol. His look was hectic and bright, as though some recent news had excited him.

‘You don’t have to feel sorry for me,’ he said.

‘I don’t feel sorry for you,’ said Audrun.

‘I have a room of my own,’ he said. ‘Painted white. Well, it’s a cell, not a room, but I think of it as my little room. I have my own toilet and washbasin.’

‘Good. That’s nice.’

‘And a picture of Niagara Falls on the wall.’

‘Yes?’

‘I like waterfalls. There used to be falls in the Gardon, high up near Mont Aigoual, in the winter-time, after the snows. Remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘They won’t let me frame my picture of Niagara. Stupid idiots. They don’t let me have glass – in case I cut my wrists,
pardi
! But I don’t feel like cutting my wrists. I’m all right.’