Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  Clotilde’s sense of humour.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she went on. ‘It’s just a strange impression. Looking at the road just now, I had a sense that even driving too fast, even at night, my father would have had time to brake, to turn the wheel. And that impression, weirdly, matches the memory that I’ve been carrying in my head since the accident.’

  ‘You were fifteen years old, Clo.’

  Clotilde set down the book again, without replying.

  I know, Franck.

  I know that these are only fleeting impressions, that everything happened in the space of two or three seconds … But listen, Franck, if you can hear me, down in the depths of your brain. If you can still read in the hollow of my eyes.

  There’s no question about it. It’s an absolute certainty!

  Papa didn’t turn the wheel. He drove straight towards the precipice. With us inside.

  Clotilde stared for a moment at the lamp swinging gently above her head, the swarm of moths frying their brief lives against the bulb.

  ‘There’s something else, Franck. As the accident happened, Papa took Maman’s hand.’

  ‘Before the turn?’

  ‘Yes, just before. Just before we crashed through the barrier, as if he understood that we were going to fly across the void, as if there was nothing he could do to prevent it.’

  A faint sigh. A third bolt yielded.

  ‘What are you saying, Clo? That your father wanted to kill himself? With all of you in the car?’

  Clotilde replied quickly. Perhaps too quickly.

  ‘No, Franck. Of course not! He was angry because we were late. He was taking us to see a concert of polyphonic music. It was also the anniversary of the day my parents first met. We’d been for drinks with the whole family, his parents, his cousins, the neighbours. So no, it wasn’t suicide, of course it wasn’t …’

  Franck shrugged.

  ‘Well that’s sorted then. It was an accident.’

  He switched to a 12 mm wrench.

  Clotilde’s voice dropped to a murmur. As if she didn’t want to wake the neighbours. From the next plot came the distant sound of an Italian television series.

  ‘There was Nicolas’s expression as well.’

  Franck stopped what he was doing. Clotilde went on.

  ‘Nicolas didn’t look surprised.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just before we went through the barrier, a second before, when it was already clear there was nothing we could do, that no one would be able to stop the Fuego, I saw a weird expression in my brother’s eyes, as if he knew something I didn’t, as if he wasn’t all that surprised. As if he understood why we were all going to die.’

  ‘You didn’t die, Clo.’

  ‘I did, a little …’

  She rocked her plastic chair back and forth. In that moment, she would have liked Franck to step down from the car and take her in his arms. Press her against him, say anything at all. Or even say nothing, but at least give her some reassurance.

  Instead, he liberated the fourth bolt, then shifted the empty grey roofbox onto his back.

  Obelix style, Clotilde thought.

  The image made her smile. Always take the drama out of things.

  Yes, carrying his plastic menhir on his back, bare-chested with his blue canvas trousers, Franck looked amazingly like Obelix.

  Without the paunch.

  At forty-four, Franck was still a handsome man, with a broad chest and taut muscles. More than twenty years ago she had been blown away by his open smile, his reassuring confidence, but also his swimmer’s physique; it had helped Clotilde to carry on, to love him, to persuade herself that he was the right one. Or at least that there were worse, much worse.

  Weirdly, now that year after year, half-kilo after half-kilo, centimetre after centimetre, he had developed the stomach that even the handsomest young men eventually get, she didn’t care. It didn’t really matter any more, her partner’s body, while Franck made a mountain of it, or at least a hill, a pretty, round little hill around his navel.

  Obelix delicately set down his menhir.

  ‘You shouldn’t let that old story ruin your holiday, Clo.’

  Translation: You shouldn’t ruin our holiday with your old story, darling.

  Clotilde gave a hint of a smile. After all, Franck was right. They had all been lumbered with her pilgrimage, the whole family.

  It was a chore.

  Fulfilled, then forgotten.

  She allowed herself one final debriefing. Franck had that quality at least: with him you could talk endlessly about the upbringing of children. And hence of Valentine.

  ‘Do you think I shouldn’t have talked about it to Valou? Shown her the site of the accident?’

  ‘No, you should have, of course you should. They were her grandparents. It’s important for her to …’

  He came towards Clotilde, wiping his hands on a towel that he had taken from the line.

  ‘You know, Clo, I’m proud of you. For having the courage to do that. After everything you’ve been through. I do understand where you’re coming from. I haven’t forgotten. But now …’

  He wiped his shoulders, his armpits, his chest then threw the towel aside, leaning towards Clotilde.

  Too late, Clotilde thought. Too late, my darling.

  Just a few seconds too late, so that her husband’s words sounded less like compassion and more like a man suddenly excited by the heat. A civilised male, who still stores away his roofbox and protects the bodywork of his car before going to hump his female.

  ‘Now what, Franck?’

  Franck put a hand on Clotilde’s waist. Neither of them was wearing very many clothes. His hand climbed up towards her blouse.

  ‘Shall we go to bed?’

  Clotilde got up and took a step backwards. Gently. Without offending him. But without giving him hope either.

  ‘No, Franck. Not straight away.’

  She stepped forward and took her towel from the line and picked up her wash bag.

  ‘I need to take a shower.’

  Just before she reached the path, Clotilde turned towards her husband one last time.

  ‘Franck … I don’t think we’ve survived that accident.’

  He looked at her stupidly, like a lion that had allowed a gazelle to leave the watering-hole without even pursuing it.

  Without understanding what that phrase had just done to their conversation.

  The campsite was barely lit. Having passed the only light on avenue B, the one where five almost Finnish-looking chalets had been erected six months earlier, Clotilde passed in front of the last pitch reserved for tents. A group of bikers lay there in a circle, beer in hand, arranged around a camping gas-stove totem pole, their bikes parked under the trees like a troop of thoroughbreds.

  Like absolute freedom.

  A perfume shot through with melancholy.

  As Clotilde walked across the patch of ground, a dozen heads rose to greet the passage of the beautiful woman, in a weary horizontal Mexican wave. Clotilde’s skirt reached half-way down her thigh, and the three open buttons of her blouse revealed the first swell of her breasts.

  At forty-two, Clotilde knew she was still attractive.

  Petite, yes. And slight. But with curves in the right places, curves where men like to find them. Since the age of fifteen, Clotilde had barely put on four kilos. One in each breast, one in each buttock. Prettier today than yesterday – in her mind at least; in other people’s eyes, too. She had never needed to join a gym or go to a swimming pool to keep her figure, it was just the result of everyday training. A healthy mother in a healthy body. Pushing a full shopping trolley, sprinting to school at pick-up time, bending and stretching by the dishwasher, the washing machine, the tumble drier …

  Combining useful with easy on the eye, isn’t that right, Franck?

  A few minutes later, Clotilde emerged from the shower wrapped in her towel. She was alone in the block apart from a very brown teenage girl wh
o was busy shaving her legs with an electric razor that sounded like a mosquito zapper. On the other side of the partition, the noisy laughter of a group of boys was accompanied by a relentless techno rhythm.

  Clotilde took the time to look at herself in the huge mirror that ran the length of the wall. To smooth her long black hair that fell to below her breasts. This campsite took her back twenty-seven years, to the same body, the same face, in front of the same mirror, when she was fifteen.

  To that girlish body that she had dragged around like a ball and chain; to that imagination of hers, which had been her only trump card with the boys, her only weapon. Pathetic. Like a water pistol.

  5

  Wednesday, 9 August 1989, third day of the holidays

  Aquamarine sky

  Sorry, my mysterious intergalactic reader, I’ve abandoned you for two days, and I can’t even hide behind the excuse of having had too much to do – I’ve been lounging around all day. I’ll be more conscientious over the next few days, I promise. I need time to get my bearings, check out the location, observe, to find out my position, like a little spy, or an anthropologist on a mission, a traveller from the year 2020 who’s been parachuted into 1989.

  Incognito.

  Hello, my galaxy? Lydia Deetz checking in. Captain’s log, live from an unknown planet where it’s more than thirty-five degrees during the day and where the locals walk around almost naked.

  To tell you the truth, if I’ve neglected you for a while, it’s because I didn’t know where to start.

  Where to plant my pen.

  In the middle of our campsite, like a clothes line, right on the terrace of bungalow C29, the one we’ve been coming to every year since I was born?

  At Papé and Mamy’s house, like a Moor’s Head flag, right in the middle of the yard at Arcanu Farm?

  In the middle of Alga beach, like a parasol?

  Shazam!

  Let’s go for Alga beach. I’m going to paint a picture for you, like the kind of postcard you send just to make your friends who are stuck in the high-rises of Vernon salivate.

  White sand. Turquoise water. Tanned skin.

  And just one little black mark.

  Me!

  Little Lydia-Winona, with my convict’s T-shirt, my hedgehog hair and my zombie-head flip-flops. The crazy girl who keeps her T-shirt on at the beach even when it’s forty degrees! Admit it. You’re thinking like my mother. This girl’s completely round the bend.

  But allow me to explain myself to you alone, my secret confidant.

  You’re not going to make fun of me? Swear?

  In my swimming costume, all one metre forty and tiny tits, I look about ten. So keeping my living-dead T-shirt on when I’m at the beach is the only way I’ve found of adding on a few years. And it keeps at bay the little girls who might come and ask me to help them build a sandcastle. It’s because I don’t look fifteen that fifteen isn’t there behind my eyes, in the depths of my heart, between my thighs.

  So I slip on my armour.

  I know what you’re about to say, you’re about to come out with that line about the spoilt little girl who’s incredibly lucky to be on holiday in a corner of paradise, and who’s disgusted by everything, the mountains, the beach, the sea.

  Well, you’re wrong. Not at all.

  Not at ALL!

  I love everything, I love the beach, I love the water!

  At the swimming pool in Vernon I swim lengths like a mad thing until I’m exhausted and ready to sink like a stone, like Adjani in that video for the song ‘Pull Marine’.

  I think they’re lovely, the lyrics written by Adjani and Gainsbourg. They talk about swallowing someone whole. Gainsbourg, he’s an immortal kind of guy. He has cigarette after cigarette, girl after girl, and he will go on writing songs to die for until the end of time.

  Besides, on the subject of water, let me tell you a secret. For several months a weird thing has been happening to me. I’ve found myself wanting to change my Tim Burton black for blue. It first happened to me by chance, ten months ago. Without warning. At the cinema.

  The Big Blue. The sped-up shots of the Mediterranean, Eric Serra’s haunting soundtrack, the white and turquoise façades of the Greek houses.

  And bang! In less than two hours I was crazy in love with dolphins, and maybe a bit with their human friend, not the Sicilian with the glasses, the other one, the explorer of the depths with the eyes like deep pools.

  Jean-Marc Barr.

  The very thought that by diving into the Mediterranean I’m swimming in the same water as him does something to me. Apparently the film was shot here, off the Revellata Peninsula.

  Black as a carapace, but with the heart painted blue.

  You won’t repeat that, will you, my confidant? It’s important that I can trust you. It’s my life I’m entrusting you with.

  I’m writing on the sand. The sand of Alga beach. It looks like a crescent moon that has forgotten that day has broken and is now being nibbled at by the small waves of a fluorescent-blue sea, where fish slip between your hands and your toes.

  Of the members of the Idrissi family, only Maman is with me on the beach. Papa has gone off God knows where. Weirdly, here, when he rediscovers his roots, it makes him all fidgety; when he’s away from them, he barely budges from the sofa. Nico is probably wandering about with a swarm of girls behind him. I won’t be here for long, by the way, I’m going to have a look. I like to know what my big brother’s up to.

  So, there’s only me and Maman on the beach, and lots of strangers around us. I like sitting here with my notebook, watching other people’s lives. For example, three towels away from me, there’s a woman, very pretty, boobs in the air but not to show them off – she has a hungry baby pressed to her breasts. I find it both incredibly moving and incredibly disgusting.

  Maman’s staring at her too, a jealous expression on her face.

  Maman is lying on the towel beside me, although a good five metres away.

  As if I’m not her daughter.

  As if she is ashamed of me.

  As if I were faulty, the only flaw in my otherwise perfect mother.

  Wait a second, I turn around, using my body as a screen, so that Maman can’t read what I write next over my shoulder. I’m going to paint you her portrait in three points. From the nicest to the most horrible.

  Point 1. Maman’s name is Palma. It’s a name of Hungarian origin, my grandparents come from there, from Sopron, a few kilometres from the Austrian border. Sometimes I call her Palma Mama.

  Point 2. Maman is tall and beautiful. You could also call her rangy, curvy, classy … She’s a good one metre seventy-five in her flip-flops, so you can imagine her dressed for a night out, perched on stilettoes, with her long stork legs, her hummingbird waist, her swan’s neck, her big startled-owl eyes.

  Apparently genes sometimes skip a generation.

  I am confirmation of that.

  The doctors addressing my case are categorical, I’ve almost finished growing, I’ll never grow beyond one metre fifty-five, like millions and millions of other women, the doctors say to reassure me. They add that, because the genes are playing skip-a-generation, if I ever have a daughter one day, she could be a beanstalk, just like my mother. Promises, promises! I prefer not to think about that so let’s move straight on to point 3.

  Fasten your seatbelts.

  Maman is annoying. Maman is mean. Maman is a pain. Maman is on her towel five metres away from me, reading The Devil is Still Laughing. I’d like to spit all these words that I’m hiding in my notebook out at her. And so I swear on all my Corsican ancestors sleeping in the cemetery in Marcone, I testify here on Alga beach, and you are my witness, my future reader …

  I don’t ever want to become like her!

  I don’t want to be a mother like her. A woman like her. An old woman like her.

  Wow.

  I was miles away there. I look up and realise that there’s nothing to panic about. Maman is still lying on her belly. Her back is
bare. She has unhooked her green bikini top and it’s fallen like a jellyfish, crushed by her flattened breasts. She might make fun of me for my T-shirt, but she’s the same with her disguise. That little top that she fastens again, playing at modesty, every time she sits up, just in case some guy catches a glimpse of nipple. Putting down her book. Sprinting with little footsteps towards the sea; aren’t you coming, darling?, she says to me. She comes back dripping; it’s lovely, darling, aren’t you too hot, wearing all that? Lying down again, pretending to be interested in the book that will last her the whole holiday. And taking off her top again so that she can tan one side without exposing the other.

  Maman would rather die that have strap-marks. With the marks left by my T-shirt I’ve become accustomed to the brilliant joke I get to hear every time I go back to school at the Lycée Aragon: ‘Hey, Clo, have you been doing the Tour de France this summer?’

  Hahaha … OK, that’s it for today, because I can tell you’re about to come out with some two-bit psychobabble. Go on, admit it, because that’s what you’re thinking.

  I’m jealous of my mother!

  Pfff … If it makes you happy.

  If you had any idea what this dark little rebel was saying to you. She’s clever, she has a plan. She’s not going to be taken in by anyone. She will find herself a lover to enjoy the rest of her life with. She will have babies that she will fill with constant laughter so that they can hardly bear it. She will have a job that will be a constant fight: a boxer, bear trainer, acrobat, exorcist.

  I testify here on Alga beach!

  Are you happy now? Next time, I’ll tell you about Papa.

  But now I must leave you. Maman has squeezed her boobs into her little top and is coming over to MY towel. I don’t know whether to be nice or bite her. I don’t know yet. I’ll improvise.

  Bye …

  * * *

  He closed the notebook again.

  Yes, without question, Palma was a beautiful woman. A very beautiful woman.

  She didn’t deserve to die. Certainly not.

  But since the worst crime had been committed, since she couldn’t be brought back to life, he needed to make sure that no one ever learned the truth.