The barking had stopped and this only worried him more, because the dog might appear at any moment, jump at him, tug at his shirt, knock him to the ground and keep him pinned there until the police arrived. He ran straight ahead, dazzled by the sun, his weary legs straining at every little hill, his ankles twisting on the rough terrain. He stopped so he could get his bearings and work out the way to the grave. He got his breath back. He could hear nothing now, not even the roar of the tractors, or the cars passing on the road, and for a second he imagined the whole village had downed tools in order to look for him. He found the silence ominous and set off again towards the meeting point, hoping Marilou would not keep him waiting long.
He hid in a copse of trees from which he would be able to see her arrive. Sitting on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin, arms clasping his legs, he realised his body was beginning to give off a smell of sweat, of muck. In two or three days, he thought, he would stink, like a tramp he and his mother had passed one night outside the sports stadium; he remembered that the stench – like ripe cheese and stagnant water – had stayed with him for days. He remembered the dark figure lying motionless, remembered turning away, terrified and disgusted while his mother tried to tug him away. When he had said something to her about how the man smelled, she did not look at her son, she simply said: “That’s the smell of someone who doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.”
Now Victor knew what death smelled like. It smelled like his mother’s mangled body.
He closed his eyes and began to count in his head, setting targets such that if Marilou arrived before he reached them it was a good sign, and if she arrived later it was a bad omen. He whiled away the time, frequently having to start over because Marilou had still not turned up and he could not quite bring himself to believe that such a childish ruse could influence fate.
In the meantime, he cleaned the black crud of dust and dirt that had collected between his toes, then he wandered away from his observation post and began to collect twigs which he made into a neat pile. He cleared the whole area of brushwood and marked it out with stones he found in a hole from which an acacia tree grew. As he busied himself, he began to daydream about strange adventures. He imagined becoming a living legend, the wild boy of the forest, the boy no-one had ever found, and he thought perhaps he should head north towards the Médoc to lose himself in the forests and the swampland where noone would ever see him again.
He was sitting in the middle of his makeshift campsite when, through the leaves, he saw Marilou’s red dress appear at the top of the hill. She stopped, picked a few grapes and set her backpack down in front of her. She shielded her eyes with her hand so that she could scan the area around the grave and as soon as she spotted Victor, she ran to him and hugged him then, taking the boy’s face in her hands, breathlessly she kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his mouth. Surprised at first, he let her, not knowing what to do with his hands, not daring to touch her, then he put his arms around her and they stood for a moment, huddled together without saying a word next to the patch of ground where Rebecca’s secret was buried.
They went into the copse. Marilou opened the backpack and stepped away in fright as the crimson urn cast an eerie, gentle glow in the shadows where they stood, something they took to be a miracle. Then Victor crouched down, took the urn out of the bag and examined it before setting it on the ground and stroking the curved sides. A few feet away, the girl watched in frozen silence. Victor rummaged in the bag and took out two tins of pâté and some sliced bread and two big bottles of water. He opened one, clicked his tongue and took a long swig.
At the bottom of the bag he found his knife and two packets of paper napkins. He thanked Marilou for the knife which he opened up, holding the glinting blade close to his eyes.
“Thanks for that too,” he said gesturing to the urn.
“I didn’t touch it. It was Julien. I couldn’t do it, it’s too weird.”
“What’s he been up to, Julien?”
“He’s repainting his moped. He said he’ll show it to you when you come back.”
Victor smiled. His face took on a wistful expression. Marilou came towards him, bent down and laid a hand on his arm.
“Where did you sleep?”
“Over there, in the vineyards, in an old trailer.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“No. Scared of what?”
“I dunno. It’s scary in the dark. There’s animals and things … Why don’t you come back? Come back with me, it’ll be fine.”
Victor hunched his shoulders.
“No.”
He stared at his feet, toying with a piece of wood. The dense foliage of the trees was no longer able to bear the weight, the sweltering heat suddenly descended on them.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stay. I’m better off out here.”
“What happens when it rains? And when it gets cold in winter? You can’t just become a tramp. You have to stay with us and go to school. And anyway, my parents are really fond of you, I can tell. Papa doesn’t say anything, but I know he really likes you.”
Victor struggled to his feet and put the urn back in the bag. Then he packed the food and slipped the knife into his pocket. He could feel her tapping on his leg.
“Hey, isn’t that him?”
A man was walking down the hill, following a vine row, heading straight for them. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a jacket with a lot of pockets. He was walking rapidly.
Victor carefully closed the backpack and hefted it onto his shoulder. Marilou looked at him questioningly, waiting for him to make a decision.
“This way.”
They took the only path not choked with brambles and emerged between two rows of vines and ran west. Victor took the girl’s hand as she bounded along the hillocks in her leather sandals.
“Where we going?” she said.
Victor did not answer. He ran straight ahead, bent double, then turned onto another path that ran between two vines, dragging Marilou who gave a grunt of pain or surprise, but she said nothing, did not protest. They arrived, breathless and exhausted, at a small stone hut with a pointed slate roof and a hole in the wall like an arrow slit. On the other side gaped another opening with no door. The ground was covered in plastic sacks that had once contained sulphate and over time not only the ground but the walls had taken on a bluish tinge. From here they could see nothing save the straight rows of vines, nor could they hear anything.
Leaning in one corner was a dented old iron hoe, eaten away by rust. Victor picked up the handle, the wood was shiny and hard, and he decided to keep it. They sat by the wall and drank some water in silence, panting hard. Their feet and their ankles were grey with dust and Marilou thought they looked like socks or leggings. She licked a finger and traced dark lines on her tanned skin. Then, since neither of them had said anything, meditating on the silence, Victor said, “He’ll never find us. He’s too dumb.”
“Yeah, but he must have followed me to get to the grave, and he knew you were living at our house. How do you think he worked that out? He can’t be as dumb as all that.”
“You scared?”
Marilou shook her head.
“We’ll be fine. It’s two against one.”
“Let’s go. You have to get home.”
They set off along a path rutted with tyre tracks from the tractors. They made a long detour before turning back towards the village. They passed a bottling plant and heard the hum of machinery and the clink of bottles brought from the storehouse. They saw a forklift truck working in the yard and crouched down for fear of being spotted, small amid the dark green leaves of the vines. They crossed two roads without knowing where they led. Victor kept his bearings relative to the estuary on their right, meaning they were heading towards the village.
“Maybe we’ll meet a policeman,” Marilou said.
Victor shrugged. He walked a little faster, brandishing the shaft of the hoe like a rifle.
In the distance they could see a crossroads. A police car was parked on the verge, all the doors open in the blazing sunshine.
“Come on,” Marilou said.
“We’re safe now.”
“No, you go. I have to leave. I can’t stay here.”
She walked towards the road, jumped the bank and turned back.
Victor had crept back into the furrow and was lying on his belly between the vines. He could see her looking for him, standing in her red dress on the boiling tarmac. She pushed a wisp of hair behind her ear, looked at the ground as though trying to decide what to do, then shrugged and walked down the middle of the road towards the village. Victor stood up again and watched her over the tops of the vines as she grew smaller before she vanished among the houses.
He felt as though he would never see her again and he stood for a long time staring at the point where he had lost sight of her, down in front of a house with a blue shutter. He would have liked to tell her how empty he felt, right in the pit of his stomach, and how he was a prisoner of that emptiness which followed him wherever he went, keeping him in a bubble that he could neither puncture nor burst. But she could not know, still less understand. She could not see the shadow that he sometimes saw at night in the darkness of his room. Could not hear that voice. And yet, a little earlier, when he had held her in his arms, he had felt her thin, hard, gentle body imprint itself, interlocking precisely with that void, nestling in the cleft of that emptiness, but it had lasted only for a moment and then she had become a nuisance and he had wanted to push her away but could not bring himself to, because he loved the feel of her hair against his neck.
He followed the line of the estuary, taking narrow paths that led through the reeds or across the fields of hard mud, dry and cracked from the heat. He recognised this place from the afternoon he spent here with Julien, watching the river rats and the fish leaping sluggishly in the water. He trudged for more than an hour along crude paths that skirted the vines, their leaves blue with sulphate, or disappeared into fallow fields, barren and baked by the sun. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the estuary on his right between the trees, and he thought that he could walk as far as the sea and wake up tomorrow morning on a sand dune watching night sink below the horizon.
He passed a group of three caravans clustered beneath a thicket of trees, they were so dirty and mud-spattered that at first he thought they were abandoned until he heard a squalling baby and a dog barking, a huge brute probably, and – fearful – he took a detour. With the rusty old hoe he could defend himself, he thought, but this place was so desolate, so empty that he felt a faint uneasiness pushing him onward without his knowing what he was doing or where he would stop.
He passed the village, saw the church spire in the distance, and drifted closer to the estuary before suddenly spotting a blue fisherman’s cabin, the glare of a corrugated iron roof in the sun. He moved closer. The boat was still there, tied up, resting on the mud. A path, or rather a wheel track in the dirt, stopped some fifty metres from a flat area of ground where the fishermen probably turned their cars. An old banger sat rusting, propped up on breeze blocks, surrounded by rusting steel rods and even older tyres. He walked along this path to see whether it might not lead to the back of a house or a storehouse and saw that it came out onto a wider dirt track, the one they had taken when they cycled here. The tracks here seemed to be older, since many were overgrown with grass.
No-one would come here. He felt as though he had come to the end of the world. He wondered what time it was and turned on Rebecca’s phone which told him it was just after four. There was a long time still before it would be dark. Suddenly he felt exhausted and walked to the shade of some trees growing near the fisherman’s jetty. There, he sat down, opened the backpack and drank a little water, careful to leave some for later. He was sitting facing the muddy water, he heard it lapping against the shore and leaned against the trunk, legs stretched out. He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing and listened to the murmuring all around him.
He felt as though he might fall asleep here, so he got up again and walked to the fisherman’s hut. The door was nothing more than a salvaged piece of board, the varnish worn away, fastened by a bolt and two padlocks. The board did not reach the top beam; he pushed the point of his hoe under it and using it as a lever, he managed without much effort to ease it off its hinges. Then he had only to push and the door fell onto the floor of the shed, overturning a camping table and two folding chairs. He opened the shutters on either side of a huge cogwheel – used for reeling in the nets – turned by a handle which operated a windlass to which was attached a steel cable. He liked the breeze on his face, and the fact that from here he could see the whole breadth of the estuary.
The water shimmered yellow in the sun and the blue of the sky was reflected as grey shards that shifted on the waves. A fish leapt above the water not far from him and the boy stood watching, hoping he might see another. The far shore was nothing but a dark line, above which rose an expanse of sky more vast than anything he had ever seen. Even the towers of the nuclear plant seemed insignificant, like pebbles placed along the shore. He quivered to feel so alone, faced with the expanse of the horizon, proud to be standing staring at it even as he was crushed beneath the vastness and the weight which he could feel bearing down on him. He turned around, picked up the chairs and the camping table, then opened the doors of an old formica cabinet: he found crockery, some knives and forks, a bottle of pastis, four or five glasses stacked on top of each other, salt, pepper, a bottle of olive oil and two tins of sardines. In the drawers, there was a ball of string, a pair of rusty scissors and a jumble of nails, screws and wire. In the bottom cupboards he found nothing interesting other than a hacksaw.
He stood in the middle of the hut, turning slowly around, wondering whether it would be possible to survive here, especially in winter. He had no clear answer to this question. He set the chairs facing each other and sat down on one, putting his feet up on the other, grabbed his backpack, rested it on his legs and began to rummage through it. First he took out the urn, laid it on his belly, placed one hand on it. He closed his eyes. It was warm. He took one of the tissues Marilou had brought and wiped the urn clean of fingerprints, then, wetting the tissue with spit, polished the red surface until it shone. “There you go, Manou,” he whispered.
They sat for a long time, lost in a daydream, a rush of chaotic images mingling old memories of Marilou, Rebecca and Julien, but also memories of Nicole and Denis, and he could no longer distinguish his previous life from this one. He had gone on living without quite knowing how. But there was still this pain, this tightness in his heart, this insurmountable void. This desert heat followed him like a shadow.
He was struggling to breathe, so he looked out at the river again, the powerful waves and eddies of the water, and took a deep breath, shaking his head with a groan. Suddenly he felt unbearably hot. He ran out of the hut and the air outside felt cooler as it whispered in the leaves. He went down to the boat and saw that it was chained to one of the piles supporting the jetty. He sat in it, his feet resting on a hillock of ropes. He looked around for the oars, went back to the hut in case he had missed them, then decided it was probably normal for the fishermen to take them home so no-one would steal the boat, as he had been planning to do. He wondered what he could use to steer to boat. The estuary was murmuring now with a thousand jets of spray as the waters swelled, the waves breaking in a spume of muddy water that glittered in the sun. The rising tide pushed against the river, the powerful current rippling the water.
Victor went back up onto the bank to explore around the old abandoned car. It was a veritable rubbish dump: old tyres, scrap iron, gravel and a few long planks that he dragged back to his den. There, he set to work on them with the broken hoe and the hacksaw. He had no skill and not much strength. Before long he was sweating profusely, perspiration burned his eyes and left his lips tasting of salt. He stopped from time to time to drink some water, finishing off the first bottle. He watched the rising tide, observed the inexorable patience as it encroached on the dry ground.
Eventually he fashioned a piece of wood that would serve, flattened at one end. He threw it into the boat and began slowly cutting through the first link of the chain, the steel ring shifting under the hacksaw which was reluctant to bite into the metal; the boy grunted and groaned as the boat rocked under his movements.
When he checked the time again on Rebecca’s phone, it was almost 7.30. He decided to eat in the boat which he had now reattached to the jetty with the length of rope. From the hut, he got an old blanket that smelled of paraffin and threw it onto the seat. He opened a tin of sardines which he ate using the tip of his knife, then sopped up all the juice with some of his bread. He did not eat all the pâté, nibbled a few of the crackers. Finally, in small sips, he drank half the second bottle of water.
He felt happy and tired. He lay down in the bottom of the boat and looked up at the leaves of the trees above him. There were noises from the bank, a crackling in the dry reeds, river rats probably. He heard the fish leaping in the water, carried in on the high tide, which was calmer now the ocean had the upper hand.
Then he heard the shout. It was Julien. And another voice, muffled. A car door closing. Victor dashed to the hut to get his bag. He had trouble fitting the urn back into it, got tangled with his shoelaces, grabbed the hoe.
As he stepped out the door he saw the man running towards him, and behind him Julien scurrying down the bank shouting something he could not make out. The man was no longer paying any attention to Julien, who raced to the water’s edge. Victor took his knife from his pocket and leaned his weight against the boat towards the current, forgetting that it was still tied to the jetty and had to fumble to loosen the knots he had tied himself. He was still pushing the boat, his feet already in the water, when the man grabbed him by the hair, jerked him backwards and clamped a hand over his mouth in case anyone might hear a scream in this godforsaken spot, then he put an arm around his throat. The boy felt his face flush and gulped as much air as he could. He still had his knife, but did not know where or how to strike and he knew the man could easily disarm him, so he lashed out, stabbing behind him at random, feeling the blade hit something hard; he pulled it out and stabbed again. He felt a warm wetness on the fist gripping the handle that made him feel nauseous. The hand over his mouth disappeared and he heard the man stumble back and fall. Victor turned and saw him get to his feet and walk towards him, his trousers stained with blood. The pale, slick face betrayed no emotion. He looked like a robotic creature, executing a mission it had been programmed to perform. Watching him lumber forward, head down, dragging his injured leg, it fleetingly occurred to Victor that the man might be immortal, eternally destroyed only to be reborn. At that moment Julien leapt at the man, only to receive a punch in the face that sent him reeling; he fell onto his back, motionless, as though dead. Victor let out a cry. He called out then turned and jumped towards the boat which was drifting into the current. He fell into the water, trying to grab the length of rope, his hands sank into the mud and were cut on something sharp and jagged that made him think of bones. When finally he managed to grab the rope, he pulled the boat towards him, moving deeper into the water as he did so, then clambered over the side and fell onto his stomach.
The man was behind him, clinging to the back of the boat, the water up to his waist, trying to climb aboard. Victor got up on all fours, grabbed the hoe and lashed out with all his strength but he only struck the man’s shoulder with the handle, the rusted metal barely grazing his shoulder blade. The man arched his back, leaned his weight on his hands, but he seemed unable to hoist himself, sinking back into the mud. The boy stood up, unbalanced by the man rocking the boat, he took the hoe in both hands. This time he was careful to keep his eyes open, but as he struck out he stumbled and had to steady himself against the side of the boat and the blow caught the side of the man’s head and he saw the metal scrape across the scalp, seeming to rip his ear off, Victor could see nothing in the gush of blood. Screaming, the man clamped his hand over the wound, staggering in the water, clumsy and heavy, his whole upper body now spattered with blood, bogged down in the mud, the water lapping around him.
Victor paddled as best he could with his makeshift oar, and the boat moved away from the stupefied man who shook his head and slowly turned back towards the bank. The boat slipped into the current and was carried, askew, far from the bank, so Victor stopped paddling, his arms stiff, his back aching. He could still see the fisherman’s hut, but the man had vanished. He wondered whether Julien had come round, picturing again that brutal punch that would have stunned a rabid dog. He felt like a coward, running away like this, but did not know what else he could have done. He knew he had to disappear. And here, in the middle of the estuary, being carried upstream on the tide towards Saint-Estèphe and Bordeaux, he was going back in time, going back to the place he had left and as he lay exhausted in his little boat there was nothing he could do about it – he could not fight the power of the tides which, tomorrow, might drag him back and fling him into the roaring ocean.