Jean-Luc stops off at the café on the way home. The café, on the end of the main street, is not his favourite haunt: it belongs to a distant branch of the Lagrange family and the nastier blood-members are almost always inside – or (worse) sitting at the dented metal table in the street, under the faded Drambuie parasol, ready with their quips. He did, however, spot Marcel’s massive silver Cherokee in the hunt convoy passing in front of Les Fosses and so knows that the worst member, at least, is absent. Also, he needs some advice about fencing. He’s never had to keep boars out: some posts and a roll of chicken wire might not be enough.
As it turns out, it’s a dead time and not even old Pierre is there in his usual spot, let alone the doyen of the village, Léonard Vallet, who knows all the traditional ways of doing things.
Louis Loubet, the youngish owner – a cousin of the Lagrange brothers via his aunt’s marriage – is alone behind the bar, settled over the day’s Midi Libre, his big shoulders rearing over his head as he peruses the sport. He looks like a tortoise, Jean-Luc thinks (not for the first time). Louis has yellow teeth and a sallow skin stippled by black warts, and smokes a lot of roll-ups that have given his nostrils a charcoaled look and turned his voice deep and hoarse. His favourite subject of conversation, these days, is the forthcoming ban on smoking in cafés and restaurants.
‘So that’s the Republic,’ he sneers, when the topic has been exhausted yet again. ‘That’s our famous sodding Republic.’
He wears the same faded blue tee shirt day in, day out: Helsinki City of Delights, it says. Somebody must have given it to him, because he’s never been to Finland. Louis Loubet has never been anywhere, in fact. Not even Toulouse, or Marseille.
When Jean-Luc comes in, the rain-swollen café door scraping over the lino, Louis lifts his head to check who it is. Jean-Luc feels annoyed and somehow ashamed by Louis’s indifference: the café-owner returns to his perusal of the paper with only a grunted greeting. So Jean-Luc settles on the stool and waits, both dismayed and relieved by the café’s emptiness.
He pretends to watch the television. The volume is low and the usual compilation is playing over the stereo – top hits from the Eighties that go round and round one’s head. The telly’s chatter is audible under it, like knobbles under a blanket. The wordlessness between them presses down on the blanket and grows heavier and heavier, but Jean-Luc isn’t going to be the first to break it. It is a duel, played out many times before.
Some kind of terrorist atrocity in India or maybe Pakistan, with shots of bloodied shoes and men running with their arms up and their mouths wide open; Sarkozy, looking even more like a cartoon wolf; an advertisement for an intimate female article he’d rather not think about. It all washes through his head without leaving a trace. The pictures flicker and sway, reflected in the one big glass window that gives onto the street, the world, the universe.
Louis looks up at him, finally, as if he has walked in without asking permission. Jean-Luc keeps his gaze on the telly, pretending not to notice he’s being looked at in case it shows that he cares about not being looked at. This tribe is all the same. Fuck them.
‘Beer?’
‘Why not? Yeah. A boc.’
‘A boc,’ Louis repeats, heaving himself away from the paper. He reserves a special contempt for people who order bocs: if everyone did the same, he’d go out of business. Jean-Luc knows this, but he can’t drink coffee here: it is the worst coffee in France. He’d like to know just where Louis buys his coffee from. The sewage depot, probably. Dried and powdered shit, it is. And it’s not yet midday. Jean-Luc, who never drinks much anyway, can’t contemplate a demi at this hour, let alone anything stronger. And what else is there? Petrol-flavoured wine. Chocolate with tepid milk. Fluorescent syrups. Coca-Cola five times the price of a bottle from Champion, and totally flat.
If Oncle Fernand hates this place, it’s for other reasons.
Louis Loubet fills the small, stemmed glass, wipes its base with a cloth and places it in front of his only customer with the hint of a thud, the beer rocking up to the rim. Louis reckons Jean-Luc is one of those types who’ll go off his head one day and kill half a dozen people in the village, including his mother, before doing himself in. It’ll be on the news. They’ll film the café, where the owner was found bleeding to death behind the bar, and then the mairie. Louis has thought this about Jean-Luc ever since primary school, when he saw Jean-Luc, at the age of nine (Louis was the year above, although three years older) stroking a flower. It was a big purple iris, half-wild on the edge of the meadow where the villas now stand, and Jean-Luc was stroking it with the flat of his hand and (from the look of his lips) talking to it. Louis and some of the other lads watched him secretly from the verge, on their way to school, and reckoned this was the weirdest thing they’d ever seen anyone do, at least at that age. After that, they took to teasing Jean-Luc mercilessly, without giving away the fact that they’d spied on him. They were just trying to make him normal.
Now the school is closed and some foreigner is living in it, making pots.
The café smells, in its emptiness, of bleach. This always surprises Jean-Luc, as the place is filthy, especially in the corners. Most evenings, in defiance of the forthcoming regulations, a litter of cigarette butts lines the floor at the base of the bar, as if a tide has washed them up. Jean-Luc can never believe so many have been smoked in a single day, just dropped there so casually, and wonders if Louis has a bucketful behind, scattering them himself when no one’s looking.
Jean-Luc once made a good joke about this, in fact: ‘Ah,’ he said, looking down beyond his feet, ‘I see you’ve been scratching your scalp again, Louis.’
The others, or some of the others, chuckled. Louis asked him to repeat it: the noise had drowned it out, he claimed –although that was a lie. And Jean-Luc repeated it but not well, and felt stupid. Then Louis made a low, obviously cutting remark to Marcel Lagrange, further along the bar, and Marcel guffawed in his usual high-voiced way, slapping his knees and glancing in Jean-Luc’s direction. Jean-Luc felt his stomach collapse like a house in a flood.
It took a lot of courage on Jean-Luc’s part, to make that joke. He still doesn’t regret it.
The boc glass has what looks like detergent stains on the side, a kind of chalky smear. Louis has always been a lazy sod: at school he’d lounge in the back row, rolling ink pellets or dismembering a cicada. He’s not bothered to rinse the glass. Jean-Luc makes sure he drinks from the part of the rim that is clear.
The silence presses onto the blanket like a corpse. Louis lights up and returns to reading the sports without saying a word.
Jean-Luc wishes he smoked, sometimes. It gives you something to do. The beer tastes good, it oils his mind. The first sip is always the best.
‘I need some fencing,’ says Jean-Luc.
Louis chortles. ‘To keep you in, or everyone else out?’
‘Big pigs,’ Jean-Luc replies, ignoring it.
‘Boar?’
‘Yeah. Up at the English place.’
‘Les Fosses?’
Jean-Luc nods. A chill descends at the mention of Les Fosses, as it always does. Jean-Luc quite enjoys the effect; it makes him feel powerful, in some way. Like someone who has ventured into the deepest, darkest part of the cave where no one else has dared to go. Alone. He’s spent hours up there, alone. Nobody else in the village will stay up at Les Fosses alone, not even for a few minutes. Especially over the last six years. As if Uncle Fernand had anything to do with it! Coincidence, that’s all.
Louis pours himself a small pastis, the first of the morning. He never drinks before eleven o’clock, then keeps it down to no more than one an hour, with a break for lunch. This gives him the illusion that he is hardly drinking at all, that he won’t go the same way as his father, who gradually dissolved into a puce-faced, flabby sot behind the bar, insulting customers and belching fumes until his sudden death the day before France won the World Cup. (The fact is, Louis drinks around ten pastis a day, half of them offered by customers. When he was small, running around the clientele’s flared flannels or playing with cigarette butts between the stools, his father was on exactly the same dosage. But Louis does not know that; he was too young.)
He takes a sip of the pastis. The first sip is always the best.
‘Electric,’ he says, smacking his lips.
‘Eh?’
‘That Australian stuff the other American’s put round his place, wired up to a transformer. Where we used to walk. Perfect for big pigs.’
Jean-Luc nods, thinking of when he was small, before things turned bad, when Louis and he would walk with the gang up over the hill through the woods and scramble to where the stream went wiggly over the rocks, to what was now the property of the other American, the younger one, the millionaire with the Chinese wife: a hundred hectares or more. There is a cave there, and a ruin. Paradise for boys. The millionaire has fenced it like an Australian cattle ranch, blocking a couple of old rights of way on some technicality. Or because he’s greased the mayor’s palm. Or both. Even though the mayor, Robert Papel, is a Trot. Jean-Luc hates him. In fact, the whole village hates him. But it is either the mad Trot, or Marcel Lagrange. Nobody else wants to be mayor of Aubain.
He’s always let the hunters in, though, that American. He’s smart enough to understand that. He’s smart enough to know how not to die.
His wire is cutter-proof. His wooden posts are rot-proof. The gates are metal and massive. It snakes over the hills, the land clear-cut for a ten-yard strip behind the wire so that the American can tour his territory in a fat-wheeled buggy, pretending to be Clint Eastwood.
Where we used to walk. That’s what Louis said.
Jean-Luc nods again. ‘We used to have good times up there, didn’t we, mate? The cave. The ruin. The field. That stream.’
Louis nods in turn, leaning on his hands on the bar. The music is disco, but slow and soft. ‘Good times,’ he says. It’s as though nothing has gone wrong, since. ‘That bastard of an American, spoiling our fun. No one ever used to put fences up. It’s only the foreigners who put fences up.’
‘That’s because no one has goats any more,’ says Jean-Luc, whose own father had a small herd up to the 1970s. In fact, there are still three flocks in the commune – two of goat and one of sheep – but both men remember the twenty or so flocks of their early years.
‘Yeah, that’s true. There were no fences before because of the flocks,’ says Louis Loubet, who knows this already; who’s had the same conversation about foreigners fencing a thousand times before, but feels each time as if it’s a fresh wound, and that if he says it enough times it might turn the clock back to what it was all like before.
Jean-Luc thinks: It wasn’t the American who spoiled his fun – he only bought it five or six years ago. It was the others in the gang, including Louis. But he doesn’t comment. He just says, smiling faintly, ‘That time you slipped and fell on your arse in the stream.’
And Louis smiles in turn and prods Jean-Luc’s arm with a plump, yellow-nailed forefinger. ‘Hey, the time we cooked the badger’s turd.’
Jean-Luc laughs, squeezing his eyes tight and nodding. And so does Louis, with a wheeze in his laughter from his short lifetime of smoke.
‘Good times,’ he says, as a ginger-haired walker with a rucksack on his back struggles to enter, the swollen café door resisting his efforts halfway. ‘Very good times, Jean-Luc.’
Hard to see how badly Beans was hurt, at first: she had mutated into a kind of red ball of agony in a pool of steaming milk. Nick yelled, Sarah ran in and shrieked, and Alicia and Tammy looked mutely saccharine until, in a demonstration of sangfroid that was bound to be recalled long after in the oral annals of the Mallinson family, Tammy produced the local doctor’s number as out of a hat.
On the very first day, the piece of paper pinned to the peg-board in the kitchen had attracted her attention: ‘She loves words,’ her bewildered teachers would always say, as if excusing her precociousness. Emergency Doctor – Dr Roger DEMARNE. The word ‘emergency’ had drawn her, like the word ‘schizophrenia’; or ‘torture’ in the newspaper.
It seemed the only area hit was the hand. There was an ice tray in the fridge that required the percussive force of the stone wall to release its load, and the plastic shattered in sympathy. The ice melted quicker in the burn’s heat than it could soothe Beans.
The doctor’s surgery was in Aubain, located in a low, faded house off the main street, its windows blurred by tatty net. Beans stopped crying as soon as they stepped out of the car.
Sonnez et entrez svp.
The bell rang huskily somewhere within, but the door wasn’t locked. It opened straight into the gloomy waiting room, which had a sagging Sixties-style sofa and highbacked easy chairs; it smelt of wet animal fur and vegetable soup. A faded poster showed the evolution of a melanoma like the birth of a galaxy, and another implored parents not to let their kids stay up late beneath a picture of a boy with spirals for eyes and flies circling round his head. The only reading materials were four-year-old numbers of Le Point and a slew of fishing magazines. The back of Beans’s plump little hand was swelling and reddening as if a toadstool was pushing up. Alicia kept talking in stage whispers and was told to pipe down, while Tammy surveyed in silence, sitting on her knuckles and moving them interestingly against the pressure of her thighs. It had been quite an experience for her, driving fast on the empty lanes in the front seat and on the wrong side of the road until her father realised. Her eyes were full of rushing trees.
The one other person waiting – an attractive, sharp-faced woman in her forties, soberly dressed in brown coat and jeans and with long hair dyed a discomfiting raven-black – asked them a couple of polite questions about the incident. Sarah couldn’t be bothered to participate, she was too caught up trying to turn a man holding a fishing rod, or a blurry shot of a prize-winning trout, into something remarkable enough to divert pain.
‘Look at that, Beans,’ she virtually whispered. ‘Look at that beautiful fish!’
‘Deaded,’ sighed Beans, with the pathos of a dying soldier.
She extended her hand and gazed upon it. The woman made a sympathetic remark, then turned to Nick with an alluring smile and asked him if he was English. He confirmed this with a comic shade of contrition.
‘On reste ici six mois.’
‘Six mois! Où?’
Alicia tugged her father’s sleeve and asked, in a stage whisper, what the lady was saying.
‘She’s asking us where we’re staying.’
The woman smiled indulgently at Alicia, eyes searching over the child’s face as if truly interested. ‘Qu’est-ce-qu’elle vous demande?’
This could go on forever, Nick thought, as he opened his mouth to explain, sweaty from the effort, his legs suddenly shaky from realising that they were all still alive only by some incredible stroke of luck or act of God that had removed all vehicles from the entire length of the lane.
‘Le Mast di Vos,’ Tammy provided, in a shy, velvety voice her parents were entirely unfamiliar with.
‘Le Mas des Fosses,’ Nick repeated.
The woman’s eyebrows, plucked and carefully painted, rose up as her mouth tightened at each furry corner. She nodded and went silent, flicking again through page after page of outworn political events, long-forgotten disasters and once-fashionable faces as if decorum depended on it. Nick guessed that the Sandlers had not made themselves popular. It occurred to him only then that the woman might think that they were the Sandlers themselves, darkened by reputation.
‘Nous ne sommes pas les Sandlers,’ he said, forgetting to pronounce their name in a French way.
The woman frowned at him, as if he had interrupted her sequence of thought, or said something peculiarly stupid, and returned to her magazine. This did not surprise him: he had particularly disliked Alan Sandler, but Lucy Sandler was also pretty objectionable. A mere association was tainting.
Suddenly the woman, without raising her head, mentioned someone called Monsieur Maille.
‘Monsieur Maille?’
‘Jean-Luc Maille.’ She said he worked there, at the Mas.
Nick felt stupid. He over-compensated, repeating Jean-Luc’s name while slapping his forehead. She did nothing more in response to this eccentric display than nod with a demure half-smile. The woman’s mobile growled and she answered it, chirruping in high-speed, sing-song French that made Nick feel thick-set.
He had never actually known Jean-Luc’s surname, but it rang a bell. Maille. He knew a Maille already.
‘It’s the name on the memorial plaque,’ Sarah said, wearily, when he murmured the question to her. ‘Look at that carp, Beans! France came fifteenth in the world carp-fishing championships! Wowee!’
‘Where’s the doctor?’ Alicia demanded.
‘In his inner sanctum,’ said Nick.
‘I’ve got a pain in my inner sanctum,’ Tammy joked.
‘And this one’s really special, Beans,’ said Sarah, pointing at a blurred photo of a man holding his catch. ‘Look at that incredible trout!’
‘Deaded,’ wheezed Beans again, her throat full of tears.
She extended her arm and gazed on her hand once more, her lower lip projected right out, reminding Sarah of those indigenous women with huge discs in their mouths: another school project Tammy over-rose to with the help of her parents, providing a detailed coloured chart of Amazonian kin groups. The woman’s call finished. Alicia had begun to read a magazine; she was trying the French aloud, word by word. From the photos, it appeared that an entire family had been shot dead, one by one, in the Alps. Sarah suggested she read something else.
‘I haven’t finished, stupid.’
An elderly woman with a face like a badly wrapped brown-paper package emerged from the inner room, followed by the doctor. He looked at them over his spectacles, something Sarah was always telling Nick not to do. He spread his arms and said, ‘Toute la famille?’
But it was the raven-dyed woman’s turn. She was in there thirty minutes. They thought she would never emerge. Nick imagined being a doctor, receiving attractive women who allowed you to investigate their intimate parts. When the woman finally appeared, she looked faintly ruffled. Perhaps she’d been told she had cancer.
The inner sanctum was miniscule, shrunk further by an enormous Alsatian stretched out on the examining couch with its chin on its paws, as if at the vet’s. They all squeezed in, somehow. Dr Demarne was in his early sixties and mournful, with a moustache like a thatched roof that almost hid his lower lip. He spoke very slowly. He even had a few heavily accented English phrases like ‘Well, do you see?’ which he dropped in at odd moments like a marble into blancmange. He advised them to go straight to the hospital, seeing the burn as possibly too severe for him to deal with safely.
‘There is always the danger of infection,’ he said, his French somehow coinciding with English homonyms for most of the essential points so that even Tammy could understand.
The dog grunted, releasing the meaty whiff of its breath as she stroked its coat; it had exactly the same feel as the purple hair on her mother’s childhood troll, which Tammy had requisitioned. Sarah told them not to bother the dog – Alicia was poking its vast flank, checking it wasn’t dead. It opened one bewhiskered eye. The doctor told them it was called Rondpoint, because he was found on a roundabout.
‘Very funny dog,’ he said, again in English. It was as if he were two different people, one behind smudged glass, the other behind an open door. He was tapping their details into his laptop with studied effort: there was confusion when they explained, in both French and English, that ‘Beans’ was actually called Fulvia, the nickname derived from the expression ‘full of beans’. He had no idea what they were talking about. An unbridgeable linguistic gulf. When Sarah gave him the French address, his eyebrows lifted but his gaze remained on the screen.
‘Le Mas des Fosses,’ he repeated, in his ponderous manner, typing with two fingers. He sighed. ‘It is OK? Hm? Not roubles?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sarah.
‘On loue,’ Nick hurriedly explained. He didn’t want to be regarded as a rich Brit.
Alicia and Tammy sniggered in unison. The doctor examined them over his spectacles as the snigger threatened to spread into a virulent fit of giggles.
‘Pour six mois,’ Nick went on, anxiously.
‘Loo means renting,’ Sarah whispered, which didn’t help at all. Their small forms were racked by the effort of stifling themselves. Dr Demarne said something in French and Nick translated: the doctor says he has this bitter syrup for such serious cases of fever. ‘It’s not a joke,’ he added, in a jokey voice.
As they left, the doctor shook the grown-ups’ hands and said bon courage, and stroked the children’s hair.
‘Yuk,’ said Alicia, back in the car, brushing violently at her head. No adults were allowed to touch her, normally, except her parents. It was as bad as taking photos of her, outside her family.
‘He’s a pervy,’ Tammy whispered in her ear.
‘What was that thing about roubles?’ Nick asked. ‘Or was that just my ears?’
‘Troubles, dumbo,’ Sarah explained. ‘He asked if we had no troubles.’
‘Dumbo!’ the kids chorused in the back.
Things were looking up, Sarah thought. The family had survived yet again, and genially. Her hands stank of wet dog fur.
‘Why should we have troubles?’ Nick asked, in a troubled way.
Jean-Luc turns the little nail-spotted doll over and over in his hands, deep in thought in his room. Until Marcel Lagrange came in, he was having a good time in the café, with Louis and their memories. Soon, he guesses, the Café de la Tour will close down. Half the houses in the village are shuttered, most of the year. The vacanciers don’t come to Louis’s place very much; it isn’t very welcoming, it isn’t their image of a picturesque French café. In the morning, under the coffee, there’s always a smell of wet mops.
The ginger-haired hiker (who’d had a German accent when ordering a beer) sat on his own in the corner, writing in a notebook. This reminded him, Louis Loubet said, of the time when the English mec on a horse had come in. On a horse? Louis laughed: no, he’d left the horse outside, like in the old days that neither Jean-Luc nor Louis were old enough to remember. Then the mec had sat down where the hiker was sitting and got out a polished wooden box and produced a quill with a real goose-feather, a leather notebook and a bottle of ink. The mec was dressed like a smart cowboy, with a dark leather hat, a leather waistcoat and leather riding boots. He’d written there with his quill for an hour or more. Louis had dared to ask him a question or two, when serving him: crossing France on a horse, he was, from top to bottom. Six months or more. When he left, everyone had felt a bit, well, disappointed. Disappointed with themselves.
Jean-Luc had never seen Louis Loubet like this: quietly telling a story, sharing something intimate. It wasn’t really intimate, but he made it sound as if it was. And Jean-Luc felt proud to be part of it. He felt almost happy, sitting there in the near-empty café, with Louis and his bloodshot eyes and yellow skin leaning towards him, elbows on the bar, talking like a brother, a friend. Even though Jean-Luc knew the story already, in its rough outline.
Then Marcel Lagrange came in with one of his hunter mates (an enormous barrel of a bloke with a sour expression called Aimé, whom Jean-Luc had once caught skinning a baby boar). He must have sensed, from wherever he was, that Jean-Luc was having a good time. The air turned cold, like outer space. Outer space without the stars. The swollen door shrieked over the lino as Marcel encouraged it with a violent kick, the German hiker looking up in alarm. And Jean-Luc was surprised to see Marcel; he should have been hunting. It was like a bad dream, because unexpected.
The hiker was even more alarmed when Marcel shook his hand and said bonjour in that high voice – always a shock. Marcel is one for the formal niceties. As long as the café isn’t too full, he always shakes everybody’s hand when he comes in. Not everybody’s: those he has some grudge against, he ignores. It’s a signal. If you’re one of those who don’t get Marcel’s lifeless handshake, you have to start worrying. Unless, of course, you’re a complete stranger. But he’ll shake a complete stranger’s hand before he’ll shake yours, if you’re on his grudge list. It’s been known to get men wetting themselves, that signal.
He shook Jean-Luc’s hand, though, the watery eyes skating over the younger man’s face without settling. Marcel’s hair is vigorous and messy, turning grey, and his head is bucket-shaped from the back. It tends to lean to one side, as if he’s being hanged. But his face, with its large mouth full of grey teeth and its fleshy lump planted instead of a nose in the middle, is not really wicked-looking. It isn’t mean-looking or rat-like. It’s a hearty, fifty-odd-year-old’s face, especially when spread over by a smile. It isn’t the face of evil, even when it gets angry. Then it’s a frightening face, but only in the way a bull is frightening. It isn’t a devil’s face, except perhaps in the eyes, because those watery eyes flash and spit when he’s angry. And his mouth expands, displaying the gums of his bottom teeth. And his skin looks as if someone has ground some black pepper over it, as over a slab of fish. He usually has a cigarette or cigarillo stuck to the bottom lip, but today it was a toothpick.
Apparently, old Gérard Rodier had a bad turn getting out of the jeep and the hunt was called off.
‘Heart,’ said Marcel, glancing over the front page of the Midi Libre, which featured a terrible earthquake somewhere in South America.
Louis asked if Gérard was OK, now.
‘They don’t know,’ Aimé said, in his throaty bellow. ‘It was a bad one. He went blue.’
‘Thousands dead,’ said Marcel, huge head bent to the photograph. He sucked on his toothpick, making a squealing noise. ‘Terrible. Women and kiddies. Nothing left. We ought to send money. We could do a collection. Put a jar on the bar, Louis.’
Louis grunted, only half-listening. They talked weather: it was going to rain this week, maybe a storm, Marcel announced. To the German hiker, Marcel Lagrange must have looked like a colourful local, something off a calendar, or out of a Pagnol film. He probably noted it down in his book, in his neat German hand. What the hiker would never have believed was what Marcel Lagrange had once done to a German of about the same age, back in 1977. It might have been empty rumour, of course: the kind that hopped from door to door like a crow.
When Jean-Luc pictures the hippy they found on the side of the road, shot in the head, he could actually smell that sheepskin jacket, because it was so pungent. The hippy was part of the druggy, whacky group up at Les Fosses; no one warned him not to fall for one of the village girls, let alone plot to elope with her to Morocco.
The police put it down to accidental death. It was the hunting season, it happened, his sheepskin and dark trousers made him look like a – what? A boar? But the crows cawed from the tree-tops: you know those hotheads from Aubain, relatives of the girl? Caw! Lads like Marcel Lagrange? Well, we’ll say no more. Caw caw!
A kind of honour killing, a hangover from the war. All those German atrocities. Sins of the fathers. The police conveniently lost the file. Washed their hands. Heil Hitler.
Whenever someone goes to their successors in St-Maurice-de-Cadières and makes an official complaint about Marcel Lagrange, all he does is laugh and ask: ‘Who built the fucking police station? I built the fucking police station!’ It’s as if, having laid the foundation slab and cemented the breeze blocks and fitted the plasterboard, it belongs to him, that he’s above the law. Anyway, most of the police in St-Maurice are his hunting mates.
He is above the law, in a way.
Jean-Luc has no idea which girl it was had wanted to elope with the hippy. A dozen candidates, back then, most of them related to Marcel. His mother won’t ever say. Even his mother is scared. Sometimes, he feels the whole village conspired together. The whole of Aubain. Or, at the very least, it took a vow of silence, like a village in Sicily or somewhere. It was only a German, after all; wasn’t it the Germans who had shot poor old René Dessilla by the stream: stone-deaf René, who couldn’t hear the armoured car and the soldiers,’ shouts to get out of the way? Rausch! Rausch! They threw the bullet-peppered body over the bridge. Poor old René. He was much loved in Aubain. Even Jean-Luc’s mother feels tearful, when she thinks of René Dessilla. Even more than when she thinks of Oncle Fernand, because Fernand was only her husband-to-be’s brother, and quite a bit older than her. She was only ten when he was shot.
Over sixty years back, now!
Jean-Luc was even younger, back in 1977. He didn’t even notice the crow hobbling through, with its nasty, biting fleas. He’d already been rejected by the gang, that’s why. He was already a loner, dreaming and miserable. He was already fucked up.
As a result, whatever the actual facts, there’s this general idea among the villagers that Marcel Lagrange can kill. It floats around him, like a cloud of gnats. He has this temper, this sudden temper. It flares up in seconds.
Jean-Luc knows all about it. When he was nineteen, Marcel was a powerful oaf in his early thirties: once, in the café, he knocked Jean-Luc’s tooth out when Jean-Luc had physically objected to being called a pederast. Jean-Luc told his mother he’d fallen off a wall.
‘Like a picture,’ his mother sneered.
Marcel Lagrange can’t stack five bricks straight. All he does is throw in concrete, tons and tons of it. Concrete: his solution to everything.
Unlike his brother, Raoul. Craftsmanship, not concrete. And so Raoul Lagrange had been getting more of the lucrative jobs than Marcel, right up to the accident. But Jean-Luc prefers not to think about Raoul Lagrange. After all, he has to spend days up at Les Fosses on his own. No one else in the village will do that. They’re a superstitious lot. Jean-Luc is used to being alone, even in the company of phantoms. In which, of course, he doesn’t believe. Not for a minute. If the house is troubled, it’s not because of Raoul Lagrange’s ghost. It’s more thick-skinned than that.
He turns the slim little doll over and over, like an expert examining it for faults. He’ll call it Bibi. Everything has to have a name. The twelve pieces of gravel are in a neat circle on his table. The little girls pretended they were sweets. It pleases him, seeing how white they are, even in the dim room. They watch him as he examines the doll. Little white eyes, watching.
When he takes a break, he reaches under the bed for his pile of Spirou.
They feel different, these days; they feel like dry leaves. The yellowing pages turn with a dry rustle and tear easily. His father bought them for him in the flea market in St-Maurice when he was nine. It was the one and only time his father bought him anything, as a kid, outside his birthday. He just walked in with a pile of old comics and said, ‘The complete set from February 1957 to January 1958.’Jean-Luc was so pleased he didn’t know what to say, and Maman clipped him on the ear for ingratitude, but not hard. She was pleased, too. She could read them, and she did. She still told Papa off for bringing back rubbish, though.
He knows them back to front and sideways, every comic strip in them: each cartoon square, each speech bubble, each black line. Buck Danny. The Knight Without a Name. Tom and Nelly. Alain Cardan. Gil Jourdan.
They were only twenty-two years old, then. That already seemed more than a lifetime. Now they are fifty years old. They look it. They’re disintegrating, the edges are fraying, the colours are going. They can be buried with me, he thinks.
He finds the one with the page on ‘Curious Little Facts’ about the Elysée Palace: ‘a resident clockmaker deals with its 130 clocks’. He remembers wanting that job, as if it were yesterday, and his father laughing at him. Laughing and laughing.
‘Jean-Luc wants to be the President’s clockmaker, and he can’t even get up on time!’
His mother’s calling him. He ignores her and searches for the Spirou for today. What is the date today, exactly? He glances up at his St-Maurice firemen’s calendar with its glossy photo of a horrible car crash. The shock of the number punches him in the chest. Oncle Fernand never spoke a word about it all morning, staying sad in a corner. That’s the trouble when someone else dies close to your date, however long after: you get overlooked.
‘I didn’t forget all last week,’ Jean-Luc murmurs. ‘It’s what happens when you have too much to do.’
He’ll just have time to buy the flowers before the place closes for lunch. The last lot were nicked – probably by the Lagrange widow, who’s kept herself to herself ever since, gone a bit funny in the head. At some point you have to pick yourself up.
He doesn’t even look at Maman as he whips through her bedroom, her shrieks following him all the way down the stairs.