Moon in a Dead Eye

by Pascal Garnier

  ‘This is utter madness … Come on, Marlène, we can all wait together at my place. Nadine, are you coming? What is it?’

  Nadine was pointing at a corner of the lawn. Monsieur Flesh’s right eye lay untroubled, carrying on its staring contest with the moon.

  The car came back a good three-quarters of an hour later. The three women awaiting its return – one biting her nails and staring into space, another making gallons of tea nobody wanted to drink and the third sucking a hastily rolled spliff in the bathroom – hurried out to see it pulling up outside the Sudres’. Martial still seemed to be away with the fairies. He was smiling like a village idiot, which jarred with the crestfallen looks on Maxime’s and Odette’s faces. Marlène leapt towards her husband.

  ‘Is it over then?’

  ‘No … we couldn’t do it.’

  ‘But … I thought you said it was the best thing to do?’

  ‘I didn’t say we’d changed our minds! We just couldn’t do it. Just before we reached the camp, I turned down a track on the left, heading towards that dumping ground. Obviously I had switched my lights off. At the end of the track, there was a big heap of rubble. It seemed like a suitable place to do it. I tried to turn the car round so that we’d be ready to go as soon as we were finished, only … while I was reversing, the back wheel got stuck in a rut, in a hole I hadn’t seen. Martial and I tried as hard as we could to push the car out, but there was no shifting it …’

  ‘So, how did you do it?’

  Maxime hunched his shoulders, dug his hands into his dressing-gown pockets and kicked the tyre angrily. It was Odette who replied.

  ‘The gypsies … We couldn’t just stand there. Who else could we ask for help? They were a bit taken aback at first, and then they started giggling. The whole lot of them came over, women, children … so much noise, so much laughter! In no time at all they had us back on all four wheels, without expecting anything in return. It just goes to show, the things people say about them … Well … Anyway, then we came back here.’

  ‘Does that mean “he” is still in the boot?’

  ‘Well, obviously!’

  All six of them stared in solemn silence at the Sudres’ car, which now served as a hearse. Nadine burst out laughing. The sense she had got of driving into a cemetery on her first visit to Les Conviviales had been spot on after all. Maxime glared at her.

  ‘Think this is funny, do you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s a nervous thing. What are you going to do now?’

  Of course no one was able to answer such an elementary and awkward question. Since they were now back where they had started, Léa had another go at making them see sense.

  ‘Listen, I think it’s time to stop this madness before we make things even worse. What we need to do is call the police, tell them the truth, explain how the caretaker got everyone worked up with his potty ideas about the gypsies, that Martial panicked when he heard something behind his house, it was dark … You’d have a very good case; there are mitigating factors. The longer you leave it, the more trouble you’ll find yourselves in, believe me!’

  Besides Léa, no one was capable of thinking straight: Nadine because she was so spaced out she could no longer tell fact from fiction, and the other four because, quite simply, they were old, physically and mentally exhausted, and all they wanted to do was go to bed and forget all about it. Marlène was absent-mindedly bouncing a little ball of tissue in her hand, which succeeded in driving her husband to distraction.

  ‘Will you stop throwing that thing around? What is it, anyway?’

  ‘Monsieur Flesh’s eye. You left it on the grass. I picked it up in case—’

  ‘Go and throw it away this minute, for crying out loud! It’s revolting!’

  ‘I was only trying to help … If Régis was here, he’d know what to do. He’d know exactly what to do …’

  Marlène disappeared off towards her house, humming the tune of ‘To My Mother’. Maxime ran his hand over his face and then looked at his open palm, as though expecting to see his features imprinted on it. Martial was counting the stars, but kept missing one and having to start again. Odette edged towards the car boot, her nostrils quivering.

  ‘He stinks! … He’s starting to stink! We have to get him out of our car, right this instant. I can’t stand the sight of him! I can’t stand the smell!’

  Her eyes were popping out of her head. It was no longer just one fly buzzing around her but hundreds, thousands that she batted away, waving her arms about. Léa tried to calm her down by placing a hand on her shoulder, but Odette broke away sharply as though recoiling from red-hot metal.

  ‘Don’t you touch me! All you can think about is the police. You don’t have a husband, you don’t know what it’s like; you couldn’t care less if he gets sent to die in jail! … It’s no surprise – you only like women anyway!’

  This harsh and unexpected reaction gave Maxime the upper hand. He didn’t really give a hoot whether Martial ended his sorry days behind bars, but purely to annoy Léa and avoid losing face, he took it upon himself to act as Odette’s protector.

  ‘It’ll all be fine, Odette. I’m here, and I won’t let you down. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get him out of the boot and then … then we’re going to stick him in the freezer in the clubhouse – there’s plenty of room in there. That will buy us time to find somewhere better. OK?’

  ‘Yes, Maxime, good idea! At least that gives us a bit more time to play with … Let’s go!’

  Léa saw there was no point putting up a fight.

  ‘You’re completely out of your minds. More fool you. You can rest assured I won’t report you, but don’t expect me to get involved in your ghoulish antics.’

  ‘We don’t need you anyway, do we, Maxime?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. Go and open up the clubhouse please, Odette. I’ll move the car over.’

  A warm breeze had picked up. It was like being under a hairdryer. Nadine thought she might have her hair cut very short and dye it red.

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Léa? … How many?’

  Who was this girl putting on a puppet show under her nose?

  ‘How many fingers, Léa?’

  A hundred and fifty? Maybe a few less? It was hard to say; she was waving her hands about so quickly they looked like fans. She plucked a number out of thin air.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Ten! Yes, ten! Oh, Léa, you had me worried there.’

  It was light outside. Nadine … What was she doing here?

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nine o’clock in the morning. Are you OK? Do you feel all right?’

  ‘I think … I’d like an orange juice.’

  ‘Coming right up! Léa, you know … No, nothing. I’ll go and get you a drink.’

  Nadine … Ah, yes, the broken-down car … So she had spent the night here? … But where had the night gone? … How had darkness turned into daylight? … So many times she’d been told to plan for her retirement, but no one said a word about planning for the nights … How they drag when you get old, your sleep as restless as your shaky hands … Her memory of the night before was like a jumpy series of black and white images, jumbled frames from an old Charlie Chaplin film: the moon, a corpse, the moon, a car starting, the moon, a cluster of dazed, dishevelled old people, the moon … It made no sense at all … And then there were the oysters, yes, that’s right, she had fancied some oysters, had opened some … Or rather, had tried to … As she attempted to get up from the sofa she had been lying on, Léa felt a sharp pain in her left hand. It was wrapped in a bandage. A red star-shaped stain had seeped through the gauze. Nadine returned dressed in a baggy T-shirt, carrying the breakfast tray. There was no trace of anxiety on her face; rather she looked relieved, as though she had just been told she didn’t have cancer.

  ‘Here’s some orange juice, tea …’

  ‘Did you sleep here last night?’

  ‘“Sleep” might be stretching it …
but yes, I was here.’

  ‘Still not heard from your mechanic friend?’

  ‘No. Never mind, we’ll sort it out later.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my hand?’

  Nadine waved hers evasively and poured the tea. Léa pressed her.

  ‘What did I do to it?’

  ‘You wanted to open some oysters … Only they were actually pebbles. You hurt yourself with the knife. It’s not too bad. I dressed it for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Nadine offered her the piece of toast she had just buttered. It felt good to bite into something. Her jaw was stiff, as though it had been locked around some long-kept secret. She said ‘Thank you’ again. The wind lifted a corner of the tablecloth; it was still just as warm. Everything more than a metre above ground was at its mercy.

  ‘It’s weird, this wind … Where’s it coming from?’

  ‘From the south. We’ve got at least three days of it to come.’

  ‘Oh … Everything’s so dry … It’s all cracking apart.’

  ‘Drink your orange juice.’

  ‘What about the others? Aren’t they up yet?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone, thank goodness. They give me the creeps.’

  ‘Do I, too?’

  ‘No, it’s different with you.’

  ‘I’ll just have a shower and then I’ll run you home.’

  ‘It can wait … it can wait. I’m not in any hurry; there’s plenty of time. I like being here, with you …’

  Nadine blushed like a little girl and tried to hide it by plaiting a few tangled strands of hair in front of her face.

  ‘Nadine … did something happen between us last night?’

  ‘Of course not! You want to know what happened next? You … You went into your own world for a while, like you did the other day. I looked after you and you went to sleep, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah … so I went off my rocker then.’

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic! Everything’s just fine. Other than trying to cut open pebbles, you didn’t do anything strange. These things happen.’

  ‘Did you undress me …?’

  ‘I had to, you had blood all over your dress.’

  ‘Ah …’

  While the others were busy freezing Monsieur Flesh in the clubhouse, Nadine had gone home with Léa. She was still wondering what hair colour to go for: red, but perhaps more of an aubergine shade. There was no message from Gilbert on the answering machine. Léa had put on some Billie Holliday. Like the night itself, it was so beautiful it brought tears to Nadine’s eyes. Léa had opened a bottle of Lacrima Christi and as they sipped it they made light chitchat, which the breeze swiftly carried off into the darkness. When ‘Strange Fruit’ came on, Léa stood up and disappeared into the kitchen. A scream followed by the sound of smashing crockery roused Nadine from her comatose nirvana. The drops of blood trickling from Léa’s hand made little crimson suns as they splashed onto the white flagstones. She sat expressionless as her hand was bandaged, as though the whole thing had nothing to do with her. The wound was superficial; the knife had slipped on a stone. More pebbles had been arranged in a spiral on a metal tray, decorated with lemon wedges. Nadine laid Léa on the sofa, took off her bloodstained dress and put a satin dressing gown around her. She was asleep, or pretending – it was hard to tell. Nadine had had her share of sapphic experiences along with everyone else at boarding school, then later in the commune, yet it was something other than desire she felt for the languid body which lay available to her: the irresistible urge to be the other, from the ends of her hair to the tips of her toes, the urge to be bound together so totally that she could forget herself. Just as Nadine was wrapping the dressing gown around her, Léa grabbed her hands and held them against her breasts. A heart was beating underneath and, in that moment, the whole world seemed to throb to the same rhythm. Nadine had not left her side all night.

  ‘Is someone cooking a barbecue?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It smells like charcoal, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, it does a bit …’

  ‘Bit odd, at this time of the morning … You know, Nadine, I still feel like oysters.’

  Maxime was stroking Marlène’s hair and staring up at the ceiling, which was slashed with diagonal streaks of light. It had been years since he had woken to feel the weight of her head on his chest. She had slept in his arms. Though he urgently needed to pee, he dared not move for fear of breaking this fragile moment which carried him way back in time … a cool, bright April morning. They were cycling in the countryside. They had known each other barely a week. A friend had dragged him along to the Opéra one night and, while looking for an excuse to get out of the place before dying of boredom, he had spotted her among the corps de ballet. There were other dancers more beautiful, more brilliant, more graceful, but she was the one … While they were laughing at one of his hilarious jokes, she had brushed against a mossy wall and fallen onto the dew-covered grass. Her knee was grazed. He licked it clean before tying his handkerchief around it. She was so beautiful! … For the first and only time in his life, he meant everything he said. He still held out hope of becoming a racing driver, he still cherished good-quality dreams. So where had it all gone wrong? The day he married Marlène, another man had taken his place. A puffed-up, power-hungry arsehole who thought he could gobble up the whole world with his toothy Colgate smile, who had locked his pretty bird inside a cage and shelved his dreams. So he had begun selling greenhouses, and more greenhouses, sealed up nicely, taking them anywhere and everywhere, and business was good! … Here comes golden balls! … They don’t half get in the way, though, golden balls … He had to find a way to be shot of his load … One-night stands in provincial hotels, each more forgettable than the last … Every time he would come home spent, broken, exhausted, laying before his little bird an offering grabbed at the station or picked up in duty-free … The bird would take one look at the Hermès headscarf and go back to preening her feathers. When Régis was born, he thought … Too late, the little chick had hidden under his mother’s wing, never to come out again. How had life passed him by so completely? What a waste! With all the things they cook up nowadays, shouldn’t it be possible to go back in time and rub it all out with a magic eraser? … What the hell had he got himself into last night? Why should he care what happened to the caretaker, or Martial? Life imprisonment was a pretty short sentence, at his age … But no, the dickhead with the big horsey teeth couldn’t help barging in, just to piss Léa off. He wasn’t even angry she had turned him down; he actually quite liked her … That’s pride for you … Now what were they going to do with that idiot Flesh’s body? The bastard’s life had not been worth a thing, but now he was dead, it had suddenly taken on a significance out of all proportion. Acid? Quicklime? Fire? The damned fool should never have been born. Marlène yawned and stretched out like a cat beside him.

  ‘Have you made toast?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I could smell burning … I’m hungry, Maxime.’

  ‘I’ll make breakfast.’

  As he slipped out of bed, Marlène propped herself up on her elbow and opened one bleary eye.

  ‘You’re going to make breakfast …?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’

  His mouth tasted gamey, rotten, like a corpse. He had not brushed his teeth before bed, which was very unlike him. As he worked the toothpaste into a lather over his gums, he caught sight of his natural hair colour in the mirror. Horrified, he picked up a pair of nail scissors and began cutting into it until only half a centimetre remained. Then slowly, carefully, he shaved it all off, without leaving a trace of fluff behind. Aesthetically speaking, the result was seriously questionable, but he felt clean, clean inside. Afterwards, he went into the kitchen and made tea and coffee. The wind carried the whiff of the funeral pyre on its breath and the sky was tinged sulphurous yellow. He hea
rd Marlène’s voice from the bedroom.

  ‘Maxime? Can’t you smell it? The toast’s burning!’

  He had not even put the bread in the toaster.

  ‘Have I never told you about that little girl Nicole? It was a long time ago … a long time … On the Côte d’Opale, in Wissant. It was that thing on the telly the other day that made me think of her, you know, the beast in the dunes. It was in the school holidays, we must have been six or seven … Nicole was very pretty, we got on well … One day, in the dunes, I was suddenly desperate to touch her breasts, her buttocks, her genitals. It was like a fever, and she seemed to have caught it too. We rolled around in the sand but didn’t dare touch one another, catch one another. It was like we had gone mad … Then we found this little injured bird – one of its wings was broken. I could feel it pulsing in the palm of my hand; it was like holding my own heart. It looked at me with its big round eye, huge in comparison to its body.

  ‘“If you kill it, I’ll let you touch my breasts.”

  ‘Nicole muttered the words without looking at me. The wind lifted her hair, revealing her ear, which was bright red, almost glowing. I tightened my fist. I thought I heard a little “pop!” like when you squeeze bubble wrap between finger and thumb … Yes, pop! … I gently opened my hand … The bird had stopped moving, its legs were stiff, it was just an object …

  ‘“Murderer!”

  ‘Nicole slapped me and ran off as fast as she could. I never saw her again … These things stay with you … Who knows why.’

  A kind of low murmur carried Martial’s voice long into the silence. It was like an orchestra tuning up far, far away. Martial and Odette were lying naked on the bed, like two recumbent tomb effigies. The sheets, pushed down to the bottom of the bed, seemed sculpted from marble. It was hot like an oven.