A Long Way Off

by Pascal Garnier

  They sat for some time watching the dustbin lorries chewing up and swallowing heaps of rubbish. The floors of the covered market were being sluiced, leaving them shining like a skating rink. Anne closed her eyes and sighed, bending her neck against the headrest.

  ‘It wears me out, thinking about tomorrow, or even later today. I never could. We can go wherever you like, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It’s my fault. I should never have dragged you into this. I was only thinking of myself.’

  ‘Me, me, me! Go and die if you feel so guilty about it! Or else … let’s go to Spain.’

  ‘Spain?’

  ‘Well, yeah. It’s not very far.’

  ‘And what’ll we do in Spain?’

  ‘The same as in Agen.’

  ‘Give me the map.’

  The garage smelled of hot rubber and engine oil. Here and there, the sounds of hammer blows and clinking chains and pulleys rang out beneath the glass roof. The mechanic gave the tyre on the camper van one last kick and turned to Marc, wiping his hands with a greasy cloth.

  ‘Needs a new engine.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s had it. The rest of it’s all right, but … needs a new engine.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘’Course we can, but with all the work we’ve got on, we’re talking at least a week’s wait.’

  ‘A week!’

  ‘Minimum. I’ll have to order in the parts, and with these strikes … Are you all right, Monsieur?’

  Marc felt his legs giving way beneath him, two big socks filled with sand. He had to sit down on the camper van step. The mechanic looked at him closely.

  ‘It’s not that bad. You know, we fit new engines all the time.’

  That was not the problem. His legs were playing the same trick on him as they had done at Laugnac, the same numb sensation that had been swiftly followed by paralysis. Within the hour, he would no longer be able to move. Total breakdown, barely five hundred metres from Agen’s exit sign … This was looking very much like the end of the road. He would be going no further, he had arrived.

  ‘I’ll need to think about it. Can we leave the van here?’

  ‘No, I’ve got no space. But a little way up on the left there’s a disused factory. You could park in the forecourt for the time being. Your van will get you there, but probably not any further.’

  ‘Anne, how long have we been here?’

  ‘About ten days, maybe longer.’

  Marc glanced out of the window of the camper van. A two-metre-high wall constructed of breeze blocks and covered in graffiti tags ran towards a patch of no man’s land on which the grass was as rusty as the scrap iron strewn over it. When he awoke each morning, Marc’s only view was of this wall, this wasteland his only horizon. He and Anne were like castaways, gradually becoming used to the confines within which they now lived. They had made no decisions or plans. They had settled here, like question marks at the end of a sentence.

  ‘We’re down to our last twenty euros.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We can’t use my card any more, of course; it would be too risky. Take my watch, I don’t need it.’

  ‘Give it here and I’ll see what Tito says. There’s some bread and Laughing Cow if you’re hungry.’

  ‘See you later.’

  *

  Tito was their neighbour. He was squatting in a portacabin at the other end of the wasteland. When they first moved in, he had not seemed especially thrilled about it. He kept his distance and went straight past them on his old moped without so much as glancing in their direction. Then one day Anne had asked him if he knew anyone who might want to buy the spare wheel from the van. Tito had sorted it out for them and refused to take a cut. That was how they had got to know one another. He could have been anything from thirty to sixty years old, and his lack of teeth made his accent difficult to place. Besides, he didn’t talk much. Every evening he would light a fire and sit for hours gazing at it with a glass of wine. He often shared the food he had salvaged from supermarket bins, asking for nothing in return. He had never tried to find out how they had ended up in this dead end, nor why they seemed in no hurry to leave. He was equally tight-lipped on the subject of his own life. He was someone who had clearly been around the block a few times, and somehow got lost on the way home. His resourcefulness kept them going, and his presence was reassuring. He and Boudu were thick as thieves. Tito always saved a nice titbit for Boudu, who returned the favour by hunting the rats around his portacabin. Each new morning pushed doomsday back another day – not that anyone here seemed too concerned about the world ending.

  ‘About ten days,’ Anne had said, ‘maybe longer.’ She could have told him forty-eight hours or six months, what difference did it make? Yet time had passed. The proof was that his finger had now completely healed over. The tip was still a little sensitive, but he could move it backwards and forwards. Not that this was especially helpful. In the end he had forgotten about it and now only used the finger for minor tasks such as scratching his nose or an ear lobe. The remaining nine fingers more than sufficed for fiddlier jobs, like this embroidery depicting a splendid, almost life-size, horse’s head.

  Propped up with pillows, Marc spread his sewing kit in front of him. Tito had retrieved the embroidery set from the bin of a haberdashery shop that was closing down. The plastic packaging was still intact and held the painted canvas, a whole assortment of brightly coloured wools, needles and an instruction booklet. Tito had initially offered it to Anne.

  ‘What’s this shit for?’

  ‘To make a pretty picture.’

  ‘Look at me, Tito. Do I look like someone who wants to embroider a horse’s head?’

  Bruised, Tito turned to Marc.

  ‘Want it?’

  ‘But … absolutely! It’ll keep me busy. Thank you, Tito.’

  The horse’s head was as ugly as the one Chloé had hung behind the toilet door, of the same conquering breed with flared nostrils, flowing mane and bulging eye, festooned in garish colours. Marc had got started on it that very evening and had continued to work on it increasingly passionately every day since, forcing himself to rein in his enthusiasm so as not to finish it too quickly. He sewed as slowly as a miser counts his gold, point by point, even going as far as to redo some stitches he judged too slack, in order to prolong the pleasure. Alas the project was already three-quarters complete. He would confine himself to the nostrils today, specifically the one on the left.

  As the needle came and went through the brown cloth, Marc let his mind wander. The things going through his head were not, strictly speaking, thoughts, but rather random snapshots of apparently unimportant moments in his life, scattered pieces of a puzzle that sometimes came together to form a semblance of coherence. Small things … the taste of the langoustines at that dinner party when he had cried out ‘I know Agen, too!’ … Marc held the needle suspended, the thread taut, and burst out laughing. You bet he knew Agen! One day, everyone would know Agen. It was the impression they had of it that was all wrong. Zoltan, the pizza guy, Désiré – none of these people could have guessed what a crucial role Agen would play in their destinies. You casually invoke Agen at a dinner party, never imagining you are actually invoking it, which is quite different.

  Marc laid his handiwork on his belly. Boudu was dreaming at the foot of the bed, grinding his teeth and whimpering, his lips, ears and whiskers quivering. It was a moment of almost total peace, before the bubble burst with the screech of tyres. Then came voices, voices which belonged to neither Anne nor Tito. They were prowling around the camper van. Two men. Boudu had pricked up his ears and was turning them round like radars. This was the first time that outsiders had ventured this way. Marc watched as the door handle was lowered and the door opened on a bearded face which, at the sight of Marc, said, ‘Jos, there’s someone here.’

  Another face appeared behind the first, but it was hard to mak
e out with the light behind it.

  ‘On your own in there, Monsieur?’

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing to be afraid of, we’re police. We’ve had your vehicle reported. Have you been here a while?’

  ‘I broke down. Ten or so days ago.’

  ‘There’s a garage down the road.’

  ‘I know, but … I’m waiting for money to get the engine fixed.’

  ‘Can you stand up, please?’

  ‘No, I’m disabled.’

  ‘Oh. So who’s the driver?’

  ‘My daughter. She’s gone out.’

  ‘Can I see some ID?’

  Marc took his wallet from under his pillow. Struggling to stop his hand from shaking, he gave his identity card to the tall bearded man, who stood beside the bed examining it. After five minutes, he gave it back.

  ‘Everything is in order, Monsieur Lecas. Do you intend to stay here much longer?’

  ‘Just long enough to get the money to have the van fixed. Soon.’

  ‘Soon … From what we’ve been told, you’ve been parked here almost three weeks.’

  ‘Is that against the law?’

  ‘Not really. Are you in financial difficulty?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Three weeks on this wasteland. There are better places to go on holiday.’

  ‘It’s temporary. A problem with my bank. It’ll sort itself out.’

  ‘I hope so. Where were you heading?’

  ‘To Spain.’

  ‘Sightseeing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Beautiful country, Spain.’

  How irritating it was, the way the man punctuated every sentence with a crooked grin and a stroke of his beard. What was keeping him from disappearing back to his world of right and wrong? His sidekick reappeared in the doorway.

  ‘Nothing to report, Antoine.’

  The bearded man gave a knowing nod.

  ‘Well, since everything seems to be all right here, we’ll leave you be, Monsieur Lecas. We’ll stop by again. It’s not the safest area, round here. They cleaned things up a bit, got the dealers out, but they could come back anytime. Bye, then. Take care!’

  ‘You need to get out of here, Anne. They’re coming back, they said so.’

  ‘No way. I’m happy here. I’ve got my father, my cat, my friend Tito and a place I like. Why would I fuck off somewhere else?’

  ‘They took down my identity. I’m sure they suspect something. If they come back, they’ll arrest us.’

  ‘So what’s new? We’ve already come to the end of the line. Agen, terminus, all change! You say the same thing every single day: we can’t go any further, this is it, our “far, far away”; there’s nowhere else to go.’

  ‘For me, Anne, only for me! I don’t care if I go to prison, but you could make a go of it somewhere else, start again …’

  ‘Start again? Start what again? Haven’t I done enough of that? I’m sick of your “somewhere elses”. That’s what got us here, you wanting to take a hike. For the first time in my life, I’m happy where I am, so I’m staying put, and that’s final.’

  Anne had put on her stubborn face, brow low, nostrils pinched, lips pouting. For ten minutes she had been battling with a jar of rollmops that refused to open.

  ‘Fuck this!’

  She grabbed a hammer in exasperation and, using a knife as a chisel, smashed open the lid in three blows. Marc watched her with a mixture of horror and admiration. She was like a ship’s figurehead, impervious to the mightiest of tempests. How had he engendered such a daughter? He tried in vain to think what she had inherited from him. Everything he had never dared to do, perhaps? A wave of tenderness rocked his heart.

  ‘If you’re staying because of me …’

  ‘You’re getting old, my poor Marco. I don’t like old age – you get ugly, you hurt all over and you’re close to death. Stop talking such crap. No one cares about your two cops. You’re sewing your horse’s head, Boudu’s catching rats, and Tito and I are doing a bit of business. That’s life, real life, the only life there is. By the way, your watch wasn’t gold.’

  The set of slightly too large false teeth, for which Tito had swapped a brand-new kitchen tap, gave him a fixed grin and the pronunciation of a badly tuned radio.

  ‘Before, yes, there were a lot of junkies here. Always fighting, shouting, being sick. Sometimes dying. It was too much. Even I was glad the police cleaned the place up. They’re all right, you know, the cops. We’re friends. Don’t worry, Marc. They come back and I’ll talk to them. No problem.’

  Tito took out his dentures to try a rollmop. Using his teeth, Marc cut the yarn with which he had finished his horse’s nostrils. Anne looked up from the magazine she was flicking through.

  ‘What did I tell you? No problem.’

  Tito carefully wiped his fingers on the inside of his jacket and readjusted his teeth, making them chatter several times.

  ‘Anne, what’s that thing next to you?’

  ‘An African fetish.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  Tito weighed the object in his hand, stretching out his arm and shutting one eye to take a closer look at it.

  ‘I’ve seen ones like this in the ethnic shop in town. They cost a lot of money. Almost exactly the same, with nails sticking out.’

  In Tito’s great paws, the statuette looked tiny, curled up on itself like a mummified foetus. It almost seemed afraid. Peering over his glasses, Marc caught Anne’s gaze.

  ‘It’s meant to bring you good luck, isn’t it?’

  ‘Depends who you ask.’

  ‘If you ask me it’s an expensive bit of wood.’

  ‘If you sell it, we split it fifty–fifty.’

  ‘We’ll see …’

  Tito put the figure back on top of the fridge.

  ‘I’ll take it to the shop tomorrow. Marc, finished the horse’s head?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Nice work!’

  ‘Keep it. It’s for you.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ll put it by my bed. But now you’ve finished it, what are you going to do?’

  The moon was full to bursting. Lying still against one another on the bed, Anne and Marc watched wordlessly as its milky light crept into the camper van. Despite the close quarters, it was like a cathedral, the two of them stretched out like recumbent effigies en route to everlasting life. Marc remembered a painting he had seen in an art magazine. It showed two adolescent boys lying in the bottom of a boat on a calm river. A huge sky stretched above them, marbled pink and grey, and the riverbanks were lined with tall, brooding trees. Curiously enough, this painting, which gave off such an impression of calm and contentment, was entitled The Unnerved. Reading the accompanying article, he learned that the scene had been inspired by the legend of a king’s two sons who had tried to overthrow him. When the king got wind of their plot, he had them ‘unnerved’, meaning he had the tendons in their ankles cut so they could no longer walk, before having them thrown into a boat and left at the mercy of the current.

  Was this not what he was experiencing with Anne: the thrill of drifting away for ever? Marc propped himself up on his elbow. Anne’s face was as serene as those of the boys in the painting, only she was crying. There were no sobs, just an outpouring of tears which looked, in the white light, like drops of mercury rolling along her cheekbone, following the line of her nose, pausing at the corner of her mouth and disappearing in the crook of her neck. Raindrops on a windowpane. She must have felt his gaze on her and turned towards him without trying to hide her pain, but offering it to him as if opening a door.

  ‘Anne … is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Yes. Put your arms around me.’

  Clumsily, he pulled her towards him. Anne rested her cheek on his chest and wrapped her arm around his waist. He barely dared breathe, his blood rushing to his head.

  ‘Have you ever wondered if I’m really your daughter?’

  She said this sof
tly, but her mouth was so close to Marc’s heart that her words left him reeling.

  ‘No, never. You are my daughter.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? You know Édith as well as I do.’

  ‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this.’

  ‘Do you think we look alike? Look at my mouth – it’s not your mouth. I don’t have your nose either, or eyes, or hair, nothing!’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. Of course you’re my daughter. And even if you weren’t, I’ve always thought of you as mine.’

  Anne held him more tightly.

  ‘Thought of me … but not loved me.’

  ‘Anne! … What are you doing?’

  ‘Just relax. I’m going to teach you how to love me. You have to love me. You at least owe me that, don’t you?’

  ‘Anne, it’s … We can’t … I can’t!’

  ‘Of course you can, the proof’s right here in my hand. Relax …’

  ‘Anne, I’m your father, your real father. Don’t …’

  Anne sat up. Her face was so close to Marc’s it blotted out everything else. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, and he stared into a bottomless pit where even darkness had ceased to exist.

  ‘OK! You’re my father and I’m your daughter. So what? I have a right to know where I came from, don’t I? I want to know if you came when you were making me, because you see I’ve never been able to, not with anyone. Anyone! Ever! I want to know what it’s like, and you’re the one who’s going to show me. You’re the one who wanted me to come with you to places you’d never been. Well here we are. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Anne …’

  ‘Love me, damn it!’

  Marc had the impression his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets like two hard-boiled eggs when Anne grabbed him by the throat. The pressure of her fingers on his Adam’s apple made him feel as if he were choking on a ping-pong ball. He felt Anne’s other hand thrust his penis inside her. Above his nose, her breasts were bouncing in time. The blood was pounding in his temples, beating an incessant rhythm, tom-tom, jungle sounds, animal grunts, rustling leaves, throbbing sap. Fear had given way to a survival instinct accentuated by pleasure. Waving his hand in the air, it landed on the fetish.