Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  Gently, silently, she disappeared into the darkness.

  ~

  As she left the Euproctes campsite and followed the deserted path beneath the olive trees, the silence of the campsite quickly made way for the sounds of the night. All the shy and ugly things frightened by the sun were waking up. Fearful wood mice, keen-eyed owls, lascivious toads. Clotilde walked for ten minutes, using the torch on her iPhone, until she reached the beginning of the path that led to the Casa di Stella, marked by a large wooden panel that stood in the small beaten earth car park.

  She stopped.

  Wait there. He will come and guide you.

  Wrap yourself up, it’s bound to be a bit cold.

  She had put on a fawn cotton pullover, like an obedient little girl, as if it really was the ghost of her mother issuing this advice.

  Ridiculous.

  There was still time to run away, to get undressed, to press herself against Franck and show him the letter, tell him what had happened.

  Ridiculous …

  Six months ago he had circled the date of 21 August in his diary. Nothing could have stopped her husband from going sailing with his family, not even this letter. Not even if she confessed that she had a lover.

  Far off in the forest, a toad croaked. A plaintive cry of love, or of encroaching death.

  A lover, Clotilde thought again. Wouldn’t the best solution be to send a text to Natale? To explain, to ask him to drop everything and come and join her, to go with her, to protect her?

  Ridiculous.

  At that time of night, her brave knight was fast asleep in the arms of a policeman’s daughter who went to bed early because she got up at dawn to clock in at Calvi hospital while he took delivery of boxes of frozen fish.

  Ridiculous.

  Her whole life was nothing but a charade. In novels that dared to invent stories as surreal as her own, you would gradually realise, as you turned the pages, that the heroine was mad, that she suffered from schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder, and that she had made up all those letters, that she had written them herself.

  Clotilde heard no sound, she noticed no shadow. It was just that the darkness in front of her suddenly seemed darker, deeper, more intense, even though she couldn’t say why.

  The lights of Calvi Bay and the lighthouse of La Revellata suddenly disappeared.

  Then they reappeared all of a sudden, while the stars marked by yachts on the Mediterranean went out.

  The black night was moving.

  As she staggered forward, she could hear it now.

  The huge mass that had concealed the light was standing in front of her. Clotilde only recognised who it was when she pointed her torch at its dead hand, its neck, its face.

  Hagrid … Hagrid was the name that came to her, despite herself, even though she hated herself for it.

  ‘Orsu?’ she murmured.

  The giant didn’t reply. He merely held out his good arm and stared at her with the frightened look of an elephant waving its trunk at a mouse. Then he pointed out the way.

  He turned on a torch whose beam reached ten metres further than Clotilde’s phone, and set off ahead of her, at surprising speed in spite of his stiff leg, using it almost like a jointed cane. After a few minutes they left the path signposted to Casa di Stella, and plunged into the maquis. The soft branches of the broom and the arbutus caressed her in the darkness. The climb seemed endless. Not once did Orsu utter a single word. Clotilde had been hesitant about asking him any questions at the bottom of the hill.

  Where are we going? Who’s waiting for us? Do you know my mother?

  She had said nothing, probably because she knew that Orsu wouldn’t reply, or perhaps in order not to disturb the solemnity of the moment, as if their walk had to be done in silence if they were fully to appreciate its meaning, its deep significance. So that an intimate certainty would be imposed.

  That the person waiting for her was her mother.

  He will lead you to my dark room.

  Who else could have used those words?

  They passed by a small stream, then advanced up a steep hillside that was bare except for a few scrubby trees. Orsu frequently turned round, as if to check that there was no one behind them. Instinctively, Clotilde did the same. Surely it was impossible for someone to be following them? They were climbing about a hundred metres above the path, using a torch, and it would have been impossible to steer through the pitch darkness without a light. Any light but their own, however far away, would have been as immediately visible as the evening star.

  One thing was certain, Clotilde thought. They were alone.

  Another certainty: that she was being reckless.

  Of her own accord, she was plunging into the maquis, answering a call from beyond the grave, in the company of a lame and silent ogre in whom she had placed her trust from the outset. This pilgrimage towards a place, a ritual, a God she knew nothing about, would last another hour.

  They progressed up the hillside, amidst low-lying undergrowth. Opposite them, in the distance, brightly lit, the citadel of Calvi looked like a fortified island linked to the land solely by the neon strip of bars in the harbour. They walked on for a long time, turning their backs to the sea, and after plunging into the forest once more they reached a small clearing. Orsu lit a path through a carpet of cistus flowers, climbed some steps cut into the slope, then stopped. He directed his torch ahead of him.

  Clotilde thought her heart was about to explode.

  The beam picked out a little shepherd’s cabin, right in the middle of nowhere, or that was how it seemed to her. Perhaps Orsu had led her round in a large circle to bring her back to somewhere very close to the starting-point. The cabin seemed to be well looked after, and Orsu aimed his spotlight as if to display its state of repair, the perfectly cut dry stones, the tiled roof, the closed shutters, the rough wooden door. Clotilde managed not to rush towards the cabin, grabbing the torch from his hands; or, even better, to throw it on to the ground so that it broke and she could check that there was indeed a thin thread of light filtering out beneath the door and through the grooves in the shutters.

  Because someone lived here.

  Because there was someone inside waiting for her.

  Her.

  Palma.

  Maman.

  She was very close, Clotilde could sense it.

  Orsu was her ally.

  He will lead you to my dark room. I won’t be able to open the door. But perhaps the walls will be thin enough for me to be able to hear your voice.

  Outside the cabin door, the land was flat and clear. Orsu, as if reading her thoughts, took a step back and turned off the torch. Clotilde walked on, keeping her eyes on the ray of light, waiting for the door to open.

  What would her mother look like?

  She hadn’t calculated how old she would be today. Her hair would be grey, of course, but would her face be wrinkled, her back bent? Unless her ghost hadn’t aged, unless she was still the gorgeous woman that she remembered, the one she was jealous of, the one Natale was in love with.

  You have grown into a very pretty woman.

  Your daughter too, perhaps even more beautiful.

  She looks like me, I think.

  Yes, only her mother, only her ghost, eternally young, could have written such hurtful words to her daughter. But the door was going to open, and they would throw themselves into each other’s arms. Clotilde stepped forward.

  But the light wasn’t coming from the cabin in front of her; or from Orsu’s torch behind her. It came at her from the side, aiming straight at her temple, then settled right between her eyes, like the sights of a sniper.

  Footsteps.

  Quick. Manic. Breathless.

  The stamping, the breathing, the excitement, everything about the arriving shadow betrayed its anger, breaking branches as it passed, crunching gravel beneath its feet.

  Worse than anger: hatred.

  A beast was charging towards her, a raging beast.
>
  It was a trap. Orsu had disappeared. He had led her to this place in exchange for a few banknotes.

  It was only thirty metres away, but Clotilde knew she would never reach the shepherd’s cabin. Suddenly the beast was right in front of her.

  Clotilde recognised it.

  She hadn’t been wrong, not about the anger or the hatred.

  But the creature couldn’t have followed them into the maquis; it had been waiting here for them.

  How had it known?

  It didn’t matter now. She was lost.

  41

  My father is cheating on my mother.

  He skimmed through the words, the lines, the pages, recto verso, endlessly repeating this simple phrase, then carefully examined the black drawings on the notebook, the spiders, the cobwebs, as if the dry ink might sting him, even after all these years.

  Then the writing began to calm down, like anger gently subsiding.

  Not his.

  *

  * *

  Monday, 21 August 1989, fifteenth day of the holidays

  Binbag-blue sky

  I cheat

  You cheat

  He or she cheats

  I’m on the beach, turning the pages.

  Maman is sunbathing and Papa’s asleep.

  Papa insisted on taking us to the beach at Port’Agro, an almost secret inlet hidden beyond the rocks of Petra Coda. To get there, you have to follow a donkey-and-goat track through the middle of the maquis, climb a bit, then walk in single file among the needles of the junipers that sting you worse than a regiment of mosquitoes, past a ruined Genoese tower, then another kilometre in the sun without a drop of shade, then twist your ankles on a steep dusty path that leads straight down to the sea, plunge into a sand dune and there, just behind the last of the dunes, you suddenly spy the beach, a paradise that not even ten hikers will have been bold enough to reach during the course of one day.

  Almost inaccessible, you are thinking …

  One last effort before we get to play at Robinson Crusoe in paradise.

  And then it’s true, I swear – there are at least a hundred tourists on the beach. And right in front of us, blocking the horizon, sailing boats, yachts, Zodiacs, dozens of them, anchored beyond the row of buoys that marks the edge of the swimming area. The hulls and white sails of the boats dirty this landscape, like scraps of paper torn up and thrown in the gutter. Robinson Crusoe? You must be joking! Or maybe this is the Corsican version, in the summer. A Robinson Crusoe who’s sent out thousands of messages in a bottle, and guess what, they’ve all been found!

  We cheat

  You cheat

  They cheat

  Mama Palma has spread out her towel facing the biggest yachts. We’ve all done the same. The Blu Castello, whose varnished wooden deck I’ve been staring at for three hours – Madame with her chihuahua, Monsieur with his panama, Gino with his sailor’s jersey and captain’s hat, fat Teresa with the towels and the feather duster, a teenager my age who hasn’t budged from her deckchair – leaves me with one observation, which is beyond dispute.

  Yachts are boring!

  It’s true, when you think about it; the smallest plot in the shittiest campsite is bigger than the largest sailing boat. Even on a thirty-metre yacht, you can do the full circuit of it pretty quickly. A bit like being shut up in a bungalow all summer. There’s nowhere you can go to be on your own, no porthole that you can sneak out of, flirt through or slam the door of to lock yourself in; there’s water all around, nothing but water, kilometres of water. The more I look at the Blu Castello moored off the island, the more I understand this crazy and obvious fact: the people with the most money in this world lock themselves up in prisons, prisons they’ve bought themselves, prisons that cost millions, just because, when you’ve got millions to chuck around, you don’t want to walk down to the beach, sleep on a campsite beside a family that lets its baby cry, share the smell of barbecued sausages. And since they’re bothered by all this, they leave the island, they go into exile. So basically I think it’s cool to reject those water-bound toffs, even if they spoil the horizon a bit.

  The teenage girl on the Blu Castello has got up from her deckchair, taken three steps, exchanged three words with her parents who are lying crammed together on the deck, she’s switched sides, port–starboard, three or four times, then gone back to sit in the same place.

  I wouldn’t swap with her. Even if her parents love each other. Perhaps money helps with that at least.

  I have cheated

  You are cheating

  He or she will cheat

  Maman is asleep and Papa is looking around.

  How can you cheat?

  Cheat on the person you live with. And still go on living?

  Do you cheat on someone because you’ve cheated yourself? Cheated on your wife, cheated on life, cheated on your dreams?

  Will I cheat on life as well?

  Will I cheat on someone too, one day?

  42

  20 August 2016, midnight

  ‘You?’

  ‘Were you expecting someone else?’

  Clotilde didn’t know whether to answer, or yell her fury into the night.

  They defied one another in the shadows, face to face in front of the shepherd’s cabin, like boxers puffing out their chests.

  Dog and wolf.

  Prey and predator.

  Robber and cop.

  Wife and husband.

  She and Franck.

  Once she’d got over her astonishment, Clotilde tried to collect the thoughts that were scattering around her head like sparrows after a rifle-shot, trying to line up the questions that jostled against one another. After the ‘who?’ she concentrated on the ‘how?’

  How could Franck have known that she would be here? That he would find her here, since it would have been impossible to follow her without being spotted in this barren scrubland? So her husband had been waiting for them in front of this cabin lost in the maquis; he knew about their meeting-place. She pictured him sleeping, snoring, when she had tiptoed away from the Euproctes only an hour before. He’d been play-acting. He had organised this whole thing.

  Franck landed the first blow.

  ‘Your tea’s going to get cold. You left it on the table before you went off.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘No, Clotilde. Not this time. We’re not going to reverse the roles.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Clotilde said again.

  ‘Stop that, Clo … When the thief is caught red-handed, you don’t ask the police why they were in the right place at the right time.’

  ‘But I’m not married to a policeman. So tell me, how did you know?’

  ‘I followed you.’

  ‘That’s impossible, try something else.’

  Franck looked startled for a moment, as if reluctant to backtrack without saying anything else. He held back.

  ‘Please, Clotilde.’

  ‘Please what?’

  ‘OK, you want us to dot the i’s? So let’s do it. My lovely wife receives texts all day, and answers them; my lovely wife comes up with a thousand excuses, including a visit to her parents’ grave, to go and meet her lover; and since they still don’t have enough time, my lovely wife waits for me to fall asleep so she can go and spend the night with him.’

  Clotilde exploded.

  ‘Were you trying to trap me? Is that it? The letter I found wedged under my windscreen wiper, did you write that? Modelling it on the first one?’

  Franck sighed.

  ‘Of course, Clotilde, if that’s what you want to think, imagine that it’s been me, right from the beginning, that I’ve been assuming all the identities – your husband, the father of your daughter, your mother suddenly brought back to life. Your lover. I suppose I was even the one who wrote the texts from that guy Natale Angeli on your phone?’

  Franck had read the messages on her mobile. He’d admitted it. Even worse, he
assumed that it was OK.

  ‘I know I’ve disappointed you, Clo. You’re forcing me to do things I’m not proud of. That I would never have believed myself capable of. So yes, I did go through your phone, to read what that Angeli guy was saying, at least before you started keeping the phone on you at all times.’

  He would pay for that, Clotilde promised herself. Franck would pay for that later. While he was talking, Franck had grabbed Clotilde’s arm and was forcing her to walk back down the hill with him. Clotilde resisted as best she could, keeping an eye on the shepherd’s cabin, which was now nothing more than a silhouette in the darkness. Orsu had melted into the mountain.

  Her husband owed her an explanation.

  ‘You couldn’t have followed me this evening, Franck. No one could have followed me without a light, a light that I would inevitably have seen. You knew where I was going. So please, Franck, tell me. I need to know if you were the one who sent me that letter and brought me here. If it was you who …’

  She was at the end of her tether. Someone was trying to drive her mad. And someone was succeeding.

  ‘Oh, shit! I just want to know whether it was you or my mother who wrote that letter!’

  Franck stared at her, alarmed, almost frightened. Shadows played across their respective faces, like two actors in a badly lit black-and-white film.

  ‘Fuck it, Clotilde! React! I’m trying to make you understand that I’m going to leave you, because you kiss another guy the moment my back is turned, because you make love with that bastard as soon as I’ve gone to bed. Valou is sleeping in our house, not suspecting a thing, while you’re busy throwing it all away. Or we’re throwing it all away, if you prefer, and the only thing you’re interested in is your mother. Worse than that, your mother’s ghost! Christ …’ He tried to laugh. ‘I know that some men leave their wives because of their mother-in-law, but not a mother-in-law who died twenty-seven years ago.’

  He stepped back again, pulling his wife’s arm; the cabin had disappeared into the darkness.

  ‘Do you have nothing else to say to me, Clo? Bury the dead, damn it! Even if you want to destroy us as a couple, you still have a daughter. Surely you must care about her?’