‘And?’
‘And very … simple. I mean, she doesn’t put on airs the way a lot of them do around here.’
‘Very simple … Do you fancy her?’
‘Excuse me? I don’t understand.’
‘Fill me up, please.’
‘Of course, coming right up.’
The barstool was getting higher and higher. Soon Marc’s head would be brushing the chandelier. Everything around him shone, sparkled and crackled, glowing in the dark like fish in an aquarium. Désiré suddenly reappeared out of nowhere.
‘Désiré, I’m going to ask you a favour, nothing more. A …’
Marc clutched the bronze bar counter with both hands as he strived to find the word. Where had it gone? There were others pounding his ears like towels against his head, words that were gradually seeping into the aquarium. Bodiless, pointless words, bubbles …
‘Are you OK, Monsieur?’
‘Yes, fine. Do you know Agen?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a lovely town. But it’s a long, long way away …’
‘I’m sure, Monsieur, yes. Excuse me, there are customers.’ Marc grabbed Désire by the wrist, as much to hold him back as to maintain his own precarious balance.
‘Would you like to sleep with her tonight?’
‘With whom, Monsieur?’
‘My daughter.’
Désiré’s eyes grew so wide that there was nothing left of his face besides two white saucers with a black olive rolling in the middle. Marc did not let go; his face was close to the barman’s.
‘This is very important – very! I’ll give you five hundred euros to spend an hour with her after your shift. Don’t turn me down – I’m asking as a father!’
Désiré’s mouth hung open, as if his bottom jaw had just come loose. Without lowering his gaze, he lifted each of the fingers gripping his arm, one by one.
‘Well?’
‘I have customers, Monsieur. Please excuse me.’
Marc stayed a while, gazing at his open hand as a strange sense of calm washed over him. All that remained of his drunken state was the serenity of a master who has just freed a slave. The barstool seemed to slide back down to a normal height. He stepped off it without the slightest wobble, and reached the lift, an ineffable smile plastered across his face.
He kept the smile up throughout the meal, during which Anne did not once glance towards the bar or mention Désiré. She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, so absorbed was she in extricating her whelks from their shells.
‘Whelks are nice, especially the big ones. What’s the matter with your mouth? Are you having a stroke?’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t stopped smiling.’
‘That’s because I’m happy.’
‘It’s because you’re pissed. You stank of whisky when you came up earlier.’
‘Excuse me a minute, I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’ll get some at the bar.’
He had never felt so sure of himself. Everything seemed to have been pre-written, as carefully orchestrated as a musical score.
‘Désiré, a pack of Winstons, please.’
As he handed Marc the packet, Désiré blinked slightly. Beneath the cigarettes was a note folded into four: ‘OK. But not at the hotel. At mine: 4 Passage Grimaux, third floor, on the left, 12.30. 500 euros.’
Back in the room, when Marc had told Anne she had a date with Désiré at half past midnight, she had simply replied, ‘OK,’ without looking up from the TV screen, two pillows under her head, Boudu purring on her belly.
It took them a while to find it. All the roads looked the same and the street signs were illegible in the rain. At last Marc pulled up outside a narrow four-storey building and handed Anne the envelope with the five hundred euros.
‘Happy?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’
He watched her, hunched over holding her coat above her head as she crossed the road and vanished into the building, its entrance area suddenly filled with lemon-yellow light. A few minutes later the automatic light clicked off again, returning it to darkness. On the third floor, a bluish light filtered through the shutters.
The rain was pounding the roof of the car, brown ink dripping from the night sky onto the windscreen. A car went by in the other direction with a hiss of tyres, its headlights casting a greenish beam across Marc’s dashboard. Marc yawned and stretched his arms. He took his phone out of his pocket. The voicemail was full of messages from Chloé. He picked one at random: ‘Marc, where are you? Ple—’ He deleted them all. He thought back to the bridge over the motorway and the time she had found him on all fours looking for his childhood in the rug. Where was he? On a road in Le Touquet, at midnight, in the rain, waiting for the daughter he had just paid a Togolese barman to make love to. Everything was fine. Le Touquet was not far, but it was becoming a little further away than before.
Three light knocks on the window woke him with a start. Anne’s face came into view like something out of a Bacon portrait. When the door opened, a pocket of air seemed to rush into the car with her.
‘OK?’
‘Of course I’m OK. Let’s go.’
‘All right. What’s that?’
‘A present. A statue from his country, a lucky charm with nails in it.’
The 30cm-high statuette represented a squat little man, his legs slightly bent. His left hand was pressed against his stomach and his right – missing an index finger – open at shoulder height. His jaw was clamped around a metal disc chained to a kind of cannonball between his feet which he seemed to want to wrench from the ground. His head and back, bristling with rusty nails, bowed slightly backwards. The model was made of wood, covered in red clay like coagulated blood, and metal. Its hollow eye sockets stared at Marc, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to take his eyes off it. You could not appraise the statue in the same way as the curiosities Chloé picked up at flea markets, nor even as a work of art. There it was, in the corner of the table, irrefutable, emitting a raw energy that banished all aesthetic considerations. After staring at it for more than an hour, Marc’s muscles had hardened so that he seemed to be making as much effort as the little man pulling on his chain.
‘Why are you sitting there fully dressed? Didn’t you go to bed?’
‘Yes, I had a bit of sleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Ten past seven.’
A milky early light seeped through the curtains. Boudu and Anne yawned in unison.
‘Can you order breakfast? I’ve got the gwamba.’
‘The what?’
‘The gwamba. I heard about it from Désiré. It’s an illness, a kind of fever you get in Africa when you’re craving bush meat. It drives you so crazy you’d eat anything, even humans.’
A ray of sunlight lent a glossy sheen to the croissant crumbs strewn across the tray. With deliberate tongue strokes, Boudu ate them one by one, as if he were a mechanical toy. Anne came out of the bathroom, steaming and wrapped in a towelling bathrobe that made her look like a giant spring roll.
‘Still no rain?’
‘No, I think it’s actually going to be a lovely day.’
‘It must be weird to see this place in the sunshine.’
‘Do you still want to go back to the hospital?’
‘I don’t know. Yes.’
‘Then here’s what I suggest. We make the most of the good weather to go for a walk on the beach, have lunch here and then I’ll take you back this afternoon.’
‘OK.’
Anne bumped into the table on her way past and the statuette wobbled. Marc caught it just in time.
‘Don’t worry, it’s fine.’
‘I don’t care. It’s ugly. Things like that bring bad luck. Look, there’s the proof – you’ve cut yourself on it.’
A drop of blood was forming under Marc’s nail.
There were lots of people on the beach, little blots of colour that grew bigger as you drew nearer. It made yo
u wonder where they had come from, these people you saw nowhere else. The sun had probably just conjured them up. Their average age was quite high.
‘Must be an open day at the local cemetery.’
Anne seemed sulky. She was taking obvious pleasure in crushing the empty shells under her feet.
‘Did it not go well last night?’
‘What? With Désiré? No, it went fine. Like a dose of local anaesthetic.’
Marc was put out by Anne’s lacklustre response. It had, after all, cost him five hundred euros to get her a shag. And yet he did not regret it. He had paid to dare make it happen, to prove to his daughter that he could meet her strangest whims. Yet clearly he had only succeeded in impressing himself. Still, if it made her feel momentarily better, then why not? What was really bothering him was the thought of going back. Back to what? He had only just left but had already gone too far to turn back. His newfound freedom stood in the way.
‘Look, a rat!’
It might have been mistaken for a patch of tar, but was indeed a rat, a dead one, with a bloated stomach, gummed-up fur, stiff paws and a floppy tail, lying on a bed of kelp.
‘It must have fallen off a boat.’
‘Maybe it came from China?’
‘Maybe.’
‘All that way just to snuff it at Le Touquet. He’d have been better off staying at home too.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘No reason, just saying. For everyone who thinks things are better somewhere else.’
They found two more rats before they reached the lighthouse where they sat to look at the wide-open sea, which at this point on the estuary seemed in fact rather narrow.
‘Do you really want to go back to the hospital?’
‘Are you going to make me a better offer?’
‘Do you know Agen?’
‘Agen? Where’s that?’
‘In the south, the south-west.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Prunes,’ he replied without thinking, his head bowed, tracing parallel lines with his toe in the sand.
‘Are you constipated?’
‘No. I just don’t want to go home.’
‘Ah.’
There was a boat balancing on the horizon line in the distance, standing almost still.
‘Are you not getting on with Chloé?’
‘It’s not that. I don’t want to go back, that’s all.’
‘So you want to go to Agen.’
‘Agen or anywhere, it’s all the same to me.’
‘But you don’t want to go on your own.’
‘You don’t have to come.’
‘Glad to hear it! … What are you afraid of?’
‘I don’t know. Of having regrets.’
‘Well then, let’s go to Agen. It can’t be any worse than this place!’
Having had lunch at the hotel, loaded the luggage in the car and put Boudu on the back seat, Marc asked Anne if she wanted to say goodbye to Désiré.
‘What for?’
He said nothing. Anyway, while settling the bill at reception, he had learned that Désiré had not shown up for work that morning. There was another barman standing in for him, a tall redhead riddled with freckles.
‘I don’t believe in the dead.’
‘The dead? What do you mean?’
‘They don’t exist.’
‘Death doesn’t exist?’
‘No, “the dead”, people dying.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Listening to this news on the radio. This guy they’re talking about from the Académie Française – I don’t think he’s dead. Nor are the ones from the air accident or the terror attack in Egypt. They can say what they like, show us pictures on telly. It’s not true.’
‘No?’
‘No. They take people to one side, give them a new face and identity, and they go on living on islands far away. No one’s ever really dead.’
‘And why would “they” do that?’
‘To scare us. To give us a good reason to live.’
‘And who are “they”?’
‘I don’t know. Staff. I’ve had enough of their nonsense. I’m putting some music on.’
Anne started fiddling with the car radio, setting off a stream of jumbled frequencies, broken sentences and bursts of song. Still unsatisfied, she switched it off.
As the sun went down, the countryside rolled by like a naïve painting of valleys, clumps of trees, hamlets of houses clinging together to keep warm, yellow lights in windows and ribbons of smoke curling up from chimneys. Marc yawned and stretched, his arms taut on the steering wheel. Dusk had always made him want to go indoors and curl up in front of the fire. To be inside one of the houses they were passing, hearing snatches of trivial chitchat and smelling soup on the stove, would have filled him with happiness. Every so often he felt an irritating itch coming from the finger he had caught on one of the nails sticking out of the doll. It wasn’t painful but might become so. He would go to the pharmacist tomorrow. He switched on the headlights, catching a sign saying ‘Limoges 20 km’ in their beam.
‘I’m feeling a bit tired. Shall we stop in Limoges for the night?’
All towns are grey by night and Limoges was no exception. They could have been anywhere. Thanks to a big international conference in town, the only hotel they could find was a grotty place on the outskirts. Their window looked out on a ring road cutting through the retail park whose neon lights gave the sky a bilious green tinge. Pale puffy clouds floated above like the bellies of whales. They had to make do with floppy pizzas for dinner, bought from a van the hotel receptionist had pointed them towards. Marc had barely managed a quarter of his.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘Not very.’
‘Can I finish it?’
‘Go ahead.’
The window was shut but the roar of passing lorries made the bedroom walls shake. A nearby stop sign forced vehicles to brake and then move off again, wheezing and puffing like angry bulls. The noise came in waves, almost in time with the shooting pains in Marc’s finger. As bizarre as it was, it gave him a kind of thrill, as if he were the one directing the on-off throbbing. Lying on the bed with his eyes closed, he let the waves swell and crash down again, each one causing a little more damage than the last.
‘You’re quiet.’
‘I’m tired. And my finger’s bothering me.’
‘Show me.’
Marc held out his index finger. It was red and swollen, with a white spot under the nail.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘A bit. I’ll go to the pharmacist tomorrow.’
Anne returned his hand to him, making a face.
‘You should, yeah. You ought to have it cut off.’
‘That might be going a bit far.’
‘I’m saying it for your own good, I don’t care. It’s your own fault – you shouldn’t have touched the stupid doll.’
‘It’s nothing. I’ll go and see a doctor, he’ll give me a tetanus jab and that’ll be the end of it.’
‘Doctors can’t treat that kind of thing. You need to get it cut off.’
‘Anne, I pricked my finger. You don’t die from a scratch.’
‘You could, but you’ll rot first. Last year I had an abscess in one of my molars. I would rather have died a hundred times over. It’s stupid being in pain, and pointless. They took my tooth out and I was all right again. Get your finger cut off and that’ll be that. Anything that hurts just needs cutting off.’
The bed creaked as she stood up. Boudu was licking the pizza boxes. Anne ruffled his head.
‘Useful, this cat. You can lug him from place to place and he never kicks up a fuss. He just needs a handle to carry him with. I’m still hungry too. Fancy a crêpe? The pizza guy sells them.’
‘No, thanks. But if you could ask for an aspirin at reception …’
Boudu accompanied Anne to the door with his tail in the air and once she had closed it behind her, leapt up onto M
arc’s stomach which he began pawing as he purred away, eyes half shut. Stay still, stay still.
Marc woke with a start, sending Boudu flying to the end of the bed where, after a few seconds of uncertainty, he became absorbed in a thorough cleaning operation in an attempt to appear unruffled. Anne was still not back. The red numbers on the clock radio showed 4.10 a.m. What crazy dream had he just woken up from? He was taking a bath … yes, that was it, he was lathering himself up. Through the window, he was watching uniformed police officers digging up his lawn. They were looking for bodies, bodies that he, Marc, had buried. He knew he was guilty – he wasn’t denying it. Yet it was not the certainty of being arrested and sent to prison that bothered him, but the fact he could no longer remember whom he had killed, nor why, nor when.
As he made his way into the bathroom for a drink of water, he caught the impenetrable gaze of the doll standing next to the greasy pizza boxes. He couldn’t remember taking it out of the luggage. Had Anne? Under the bright ceiling light, the nail-studded talisman seemed to thrum feverishly, as painful to look at as the filament in a light bulb. Marc threw the contents of the tooth glass over it and immediately regretted it, as if he had just committed some sacrilegious act. Yet no lightning came to strike him down, and he went peacefully back to sleep as if without a care in the world.
‘You were back late.’
‘Oh. Maybe.’
‘I woke up around four and you weren’t here.’
‘I went for a walk. I couldn’t sleep. Shall we go?’
The hotel lobby felt like a fish tank. The receptionist and a chambermaid had their noses pressed to the glass entrance. Flashing blue lights from outside swept across the walls and ceiling.
‘What’s going on?’
‘The pizza van burned down. The guy was inside it.’
‘Is he …?’
‘Yes. Will you be having breakfast?’
‘No, thank you. Do you know of any doctors nearby?’
‘A doctor, round here? You could try Dr Blanchard on Avenue Foch, but I don’t know if he’s still practising. Turn left at the second roundabout heading back towards the town centre, where they’re building the new stadium. You can’t miss it – it’s the only house still standing.’
At the car park exit, a police officer held them back to let an ambulance screech out onto the ring road ahead of them, sirens blazing. All that remained of the pizza van was a charred, smoking carcass with police and firefighters swarming around it. Marc remembered the baby-faced pizzaiolo.
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