Jean-Luc studies the remains of the fish he has rescued from the kitchen bin. Fish is expensive. Just as well, then, that one of Jean-Luc’s hobbies is angling. He took it up properly when he was a teenager. He has one rod and no permit. He knows the hidden, special places you have to scramble down to. He always fishes alone. He prefers it to hunting with a gun.
He caught the fish in the autumn and froze it for lean times. Yesterday he shared it in the evening with his mother, making sure there were no bones for her to choke on. He pretended it was fresh, but she could tell it wasn’t. He insisted it was. ‘Pffff,’ she scoffed, spraying particles of fish all over the place. It was a smallish trout; where he fishes, up above St-Maurice, the river squeezed between rocks and forming pools as it descends, there is never anything big. He wants to eat all of it himself, but he isn’t that sort of person. Anyway, his mother would have smelt it cooking. The white flesh came off easily and he served it to her, as ordered, with a scatter of capers, a knob of butter, and an overdone mulch of salted spinach.
She’d been well enough to come down to the kitchen to eat, although she groaned on the stairs and he had to help her. She peered at her plate when he served her.
‘Is that all?’ she complained, her eyes widening at it nevertheless.
‘You’ve got half,’ he said, taking the plate back, teasing her with it. ‘But you don’t have to eat it. It’s fresh.’
She smelt of toilets. Her dressing gown needed washing.
‘When did you catch it?’
‘This morning,’ he lied.
His hand was on her shoulder; he felt the shoulder blade as a sharp ridge, like the edge of a flint. He squeezed it gently, imagining the skeleton so close under the skin, getting closer and closer as she thinned until it popped out, cackling like a horror film, and that was that.
‘I hope you’ve washed your hands,’ she said.
He threw the bones away and now he’s rescued them. They smell rotten already. His idea seems even better, looking at the bones. He cleans the skeleton under the tap, with plenty of washing-up liquid, then takes it upstairs to his room in a plastic bag, ignoring her snores.
It is all spine and a head with its gaping mouth. He tugs the head off and an eye goes flying, as round and white as the Sandlers’ gravel. His fingers are oily with fluids. He runs his thumb down the sharp backbone. This is what we came from. Bibi, the little doll, is caught in the cobweb. The sieve is no longer a sieve. He rocks the sieve as it lies on the table, although cobwebs don’t rock and make that noise, they just tremble in a draught. Bibi has a backbone, too. So does the Englishwoman. And Raoul Lagrange, once.
He bends the fish-spine back until it snaps, cutting his finger slightly on its sharpness. That’s what happens when you hit a stationary object too fast. Backlash. Rabbit punch.
He shot his first rabbit when he was ten or eleven, and didn’t kill it outright. He picked it up by the ears. It kicked feebly, although its rump was mincemeat. ‘Like this,’ his father said, making a chopping movement with his hand. ‘That’s why they call it a rabbit punch, when you break your neck.’
Jean-Luc held the rabbit tight by the ears and chopped onto the neck. The rabbit kicked again, feebly. He chopped again and the rabbit kicked. It must be stuck in a nightmare, Jean-Luc thought. The worst nightmare possible. His father shouted at him and grabbed the rabbit and down came his father’s hard, calloused hand and the rabbit’s neck snapped with a tiny click, the eyes losing their spark, the legs dangling after a little judder. But his father was so angry with him! Jean-Luc had never seen his father so angry!
‘Never do that again!’ he shouted. He was upset, that was the thing. The rabbit had suffered. Jean-Luc wanted to chop his useless hand off; instead, he practised on sticks and planks of wood until the side of his hand was blue and bleeding. The next time, the rabbit’s neck snapped straightaway and his father nodded, obviously proud of him.
What he needs now is a head. A tiny, shrunken head.
The excitement is deep in his belly again. Better than playing with himself, and not sinful (while he doesn’t reckon God exists, these days, you never know, you can never be too careful).
It doesn’t have to be a real human head: that would be hard. A chicken’s or a rabbit’s, say: he can ask at the butcher’s for that, but it’ll go off. Or a cat’s head. He’d still have to shrink it, though.
Once, long ago, in the rubbish dump beyond Yves Dardalhon’s farm, he and another kid – Matthieu Soupault – splashed paraffin on a kitten and dropped a match on its tail. They watched it run about, screeching and mewling, until it lay down in its own flames as if tired, raising a burning paw to its burning face as cats do when they clean their whiskers. Then they poured water over the little black corpse and studied it. Jean-Luc had only watched, it wasn’t even his idea. It was mad Matthieu’s idea. Matthieu now worked at the tax office, in a proper shirt and tie, at his own desk with his own computer, making sure people paid their taxes. Jean-Luc felt sick for a week, after that.
It doesn’t have to be a head at all.
It can be anything that makes you think of a head. Something round. Or he can take a photograph and stick it on something shaped like a disc. Of course, he thinks of the photograph of Raoul Lagrange stuck into the gravestone. He looks over his shoulder, just in case. Although he never feels scared up at the Mas.
His room is in shadow, the desk-lamp pointed low so that his own form darkens whatever’s behind him. His high, old-fashioned bed is made up, the sheet folded neatly back over the thin blue quilt, touching the bolster like a collar. No one can make up a bed like Jean-Luc, except his mother. Sometimes, for no reason, it won’t come right, the folds and pleats and tucks not working, the top edge a few centimetres out, and he wants to scream. He does scream, now and again, when making up his bed: short, sharp screams, more like a puppy than anything else.
‘What’s up?’ his mother always calls out.
‘Mind your own business,’ he yells back, each time. Or doesn’t say anything at all and keeps very still, hand on the quilt, so she can worry for a bit.
He looks at the sieve and Bibi and the fish bone and the little white circle of gravel stones and feels something expand inside him, like a flower. It is going to be much larger, this flower, than he ever expected. He realises that, now. Will he be able to hide it, if it is that big? He looks up at the ceiling. There’s the attic. But if it rains hard, his flower might get damaged. So he needs a big sheet of plastic. Everything is possible.
He pictures the Englishwoman, her small, untouchable face behind the teasing spectacles. He pictures that face as a flower, repeated lots of times like roses on a rose bush. He remembers a picture book at school, when he first went to school. A big book with scuffed, cardboard pages a teacher gave him to look at. There was a garden with a watering can and a green-eyed cat and all the flowers had happy, smiling faces encircled by petals. One of the faces had been changed by a naughty kid with a biro, perhaps a long time before. It had been changed into a filthy old woman with missing teeth and bushy eyebrows and hairy spots. Her name was written next to it with an arrow pointing back, but he wasn’t old enough to understand the letters. Jean-Luc couldn’t take his eyes off her. In the end, he had to cover her face with his hand.
He pictures that page right now, thirty years later. And all the flowers will have the Englishwoman’s face on them, except one. And that one will be my mother, Jean-Luc thinks.
He glances out of the window and, like a miracle, he sees her. Sees the Englishwoman, walking down the street with her husband and her kids, then turning off towards the café! His heart is thumping as if he’s run up a hill.
It thumped like that when he went out hunting in the old days. When the animal cleared cover and the gun was tucked into his shoulder, all ready. She disappears with her family into the café, like a mother duck leading her brood to water. Now that, thinks Jean-Luc, is God operating. And all the angels.
He waits with his binoculars by the window, until they come out again half an hour later. Her spectacles flash the sun into his eyes, like a message, as she turns her head. The girls all have purple mouths. That makes him smile, as he follows them, closing one eye against the lens that is cracked.
A few days later, getting back home from a cultural expedition during which Beans left a stellar splat of sick on a museum step, they heard a regular thumping that juddered off the walls. It was Jean-Luc, knocking wooden posts in. He was building a chicken-wire fence around the Zone.
‘I ought to give him a hand,’ murmured Nick, neck stiff from looking up at roof bosses.
Sarah filmed him, although he did nothing more than hold the unrolled chicken-wire upright. The girls watched with a quiet, almost awestruck concentration, as though something was being burnished into their brains. Afterwards, watching on the camera’s little screen, they noticed how Jean-Luc had his back turned almost the whole time, as if he couldn’t stand being filmed.
He came the following morning to sow the lawn and fiddle about with the pool. He had passed Sarah jogging up to the postbox, and she had given him a polite wave. The chicken-wire had, rather surprisingly, kept out the boars – or maybe they couldn’t be bothered with something they’d already dug over. Jean-Luc’s French amusingly implied that the pool still had ‘troubled waters’: it was certainly a bit green again. They would be able to swim in June, in the real heat, but for now he must keep the water clean and clear or algae would deposit green-and-black slime on the sides and in the filters. He told Nick there were 15,000 types of algae, which Nick found hard to believe. He’d always had problems with numbers in French.
Jean-Luc tipped in granules of something called Shock Chlorine. The smell of bleach was suffocating, it actually burnt in Nick’s nose. No swimming for two days, Jean-Luc told him: it was a joke, the water was still freezing cold. He explained to Nick how to test the pH levels, using a paper strip that turned from white to purple. The darker it is, the more acidic. The lighter, the more alkaline. He showed Nick which chemicals to use to adjust the pH levels. This was, Jean-Luc claimed, in case he was not around in a couple of days. Anyway, it needed testing at least once a week, maybe more if it started to cloud. Nick nodded, perturbed. He knew all about colonialism and its aftermath, but nothing about pools.
‘Jean-Luc has Simon-and-Garfunkel’d the pool,’ he joked in turn. His eyes stung. The song went round Sarah’s head all day.
They hadn’t yet found the alarm’s code. Tammy put up a reward poster with a stubbled face and letters coloured with her new Caran d’Ache crayons: REWARD. $10,000. WANTED ALIVE OR DEAD. JIMMY ‘THE DROUND’ CODE.
‘On purpose,’ she stated, when Nick pointed out the misspelling.
‘Shouldn’t the code man look nice,’ smiled her mother, ‘rather than nasty?’
Tammy went off in a huff, and Sarah felt bad. They were so exigent as parents, she realised. Nick pooh-poohed this: they were softies, he reckoned. Over-liberal, if anything. Not everything kids do has to be praised.
Sarah tested a small key she’d found in an ashtray; miraculously, it unlocked a drawer in the pantry, full of technical-looking papers and old string, but nothing to do with an alarm. The pool’s pump and filtration equipment were covered, as well as a food-mixer and an alarm clock, but the vital document was missing.
‘It always is,’ Nick joked. ‘That’s why everything’s so approximate.’
Jean-Luc unhooks the chicken wire and rakes the earth, having watered it for an hour but not so much that it sticks to the tangs, then throws the grass-seed from a two-kilo plastic sack; he has gone to the agricultural merchant’s in Valdaron and bought seed adapted to drought areas. He has done this at least four times before, but the difference this time is the amount. It turns the earth white, and the little English girls pretend –or perhaps believe – that it has snowed. Then he comes back from the tool-cellar with a fan-shaped leaf-rake, which he draws steadily across the area until the seed is reasonably set in.
Inside himself, he knows it will fail. It is too late in the year, however much he waters it. It will either burn in the frost (which can occur as late as April, in normal times) or in the heat of the sun. The little girls watch him silently through the fence, which is as tall (or as low) as the eldest. He likes them watching. He gives them a handful of seed each to sow for themselves. He takes the small claw-tool and grubs up a patch for each of them on the edge of the yard, where there are lots of tiny nissoun leaves. He digs up one of the nissoun’s swollen roots and peels off the brown skin, then pops it into his mouth. The little girls look astonished as he crunches it up, its sweet taste of chestnut and hazelnut flooding his head with childhood memories, the aftertaste of spicy carrot as reliable as a moan from Maman. He explains to them, in the simplest French he can muster, snorting for the boars, that the yard was covered in these plants, and that’s why the boars come to turn it over, because they love the roots. The girls like his snorting.
He keeps repeating the name of the plant.
‘Neess-oon,’ they reply, giggling. He peels them each a root and they bite and chew and swallow. Only the middle one makes a face and spits it out.
They seed their miniature lawns, the youngest throwing hers up into the air so that most of it settles in her hair. He imagines their lawns as just big enough for their small bodies to stretch out on. Already the black ants are transporting the seeds one by one down a tiny crater in the dry earth. He could put insecticide in, but he is like his father, who hated all the rubbish they’d pour into the vineyards and still do pour, so that nothing lives that should live.
He fills the watering-can and dampens the kids’ seed-beds; they chatter to him and he feels he can understand it in the back of his mind. They have a little hoard of nissoun roots, like a pile of marbles. They are very excited.
By the time he’s finished, it is late enough to water properly. He sets the timer again and watches as the big sprinkler sputters into life. Swish, swish, swish, it goes. He likes the expression of wonder on the kids’ faces.
The middle one comes up to him and smiles and he pats her hair and thinks how much he’s enjoyed the day. Her hair is very soft, soft and golden over the hard skull. He can feel the wintry sun on it turning into spring.
He swivels and sees a face in one of the upper windows of the house, pulling back. It is her face, the Englishwoman’s face behind its spectacles. His heart leaps in his chest like a salmon and his face burns. He knows her face is gone, now. He sees the small black window out of the corner of his eye, high up.
Why is she shy about looking down at her children? He folds his arms and looks out at the watering. She is watching him, not the children: he is sure of it. She gave him a big wave when she passed him on the track, running. A nice smile. All these foreigners run instead of cycle. Cycling’s harder, he reckons.
The late afternoon light. Shy, she is.
He feels good about her watching him. She makes him feel good about himself. She is as perfect as a flower. He pictures her face stuck on a flower with petals all around, bare of her spectacles. Over and over.
The middle one takes his hand and they watch the sprinkler together. Her hand moves like a tiny baby rabbit in his.
* * *
Nick was attempting to read one of his oldest essays (on the Balfour Declaration) in front of the fire. It was too fresh to sit outside, despite the sun: March had turned cool, cooler than when they arrived. The essay’s wince-count was pleasingly low – some of the Marxisms apart. They were like a series of rusty hooks.
He looked at Sarah over his reading glasses. She had short sight, he had long, like Jack Sprat and his wife when it came to fat. She was telling him that it may be her paranoia but they should keep an eye on Jean-Luc vis-à-vis the girls.
‘Vis-à-vis.’
‘You look about ninety doing that,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
He had not been abused at his boarding school, unlike others. They didn’t call it abuse, then. He was trying to remember what they did call it. The notorious Malcolm Fettlewick was said to do it: the slurpy Head of Classics, with the beard that ran down his neck. Malcolm XX, they called him.
‘I don’t think he’s that type,’ he said.
‘No, it’s probably just very sweet and touching, like an Edwardian novel. But I’ve suddenly gone anxious,’ she admitted. ‘Here I am, in Paradise, and I’m all nervy.’
‘Might I make a judgement on the Paradise bit, as being a touch exclusive of reality?’
She didn’t reply and Nick went back to his reading. Strange how his forehead took up most of his face in that position, as if it were a visor that could be drawn up when needed.
‘Maybe Midgard would be ontologically better,’ he added, all but murmuring to himself. ‘The Eden of Norse myth. As being earthy rather than heavenly, I mean.’
‘He gave them wild bulbs or something to eat,’ she said, impatiently. ‘I presume he knows what he’s doing.’
‘Wild bulbs?’
‘Like little prunes. Nissow or something. The French name. They said he told them that’s why the boars dug everything up. They understood his French, it seems.’
‘If pigs can eat them, so can we.’
‘They eat anything.’
He went back to his reading. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, eventually, in a soothing tone. ‘Old one-eye’s looking after us.’
‘Old one eye?’
He waved a hand at the African mask. Oh really, she thought, keeping her expression blank as she stared at the flames feebly licking the new logs. Oh really and truly just give me a long, wild night on the razzle.
Jean-Luc finds the baby pram while pissing in the underbrush behind the Mas, out of sight of the girls. It is nestling in the dead bracken, on the side of an animal-run (badger, most like). All that’s left apart from the handle is the undercarriage, four wheels in rusted metal. He thinks it is a toy pram, but he can’t be sure. The long handle has a pink bit of plastic on, moulded to small fingers, and a real pram is usually bigger, but it might be a very old pushchair. He’s seen photos of women pushing babies in four-wheel pushchairs with long handles next to old-fashioned cars in Paris.
Straightaway he knows he will take it back home. He feels that excitement in his belly. Luckily, he has brought the van today. He gingerly reaches into the undergrowth, tugging at the metal struts, which are wrapped round by those thorny creepers he hates. Ugly scratching tentacles, thin as wire, much thinner than brambles. As they release their hold they whip over his hands, leaving beads of blood on his knuckles and the fat underbit of his left thumb. The scratches sting; there is something in the thorns that irritates the skin. But he’s holding the find free, now. It’s his.
The wheels have bits of rubber left on them, dried out and crumbling. Maybe this belonged to one of the hippy kids. Or even before, before crazy Mamie Aubert and her goats. Before the war. Before Oncle Fernand was shot on the track. When there was a working family and the fields were cleared and the terraces put to onions and potatoes and leeks. But it can’t be that old, not with the moulded handle of pink plastic, loose on its metal rod.
He’s putting it in the back of the van and the English girls run up. From the sound of it, they think he’s got the pram for them.
He slams the doors shut and fastens them with the rope. He shakes his head and says ‘no’, in English. It isn’t a toy any more. He has the excitement in his belly. The girls pretend to cry, knuckling their eyes. Why do they like him so much? It’s a kind of mistake. His fingernails are black from the day’s work. He can smell his own sweat, the sharpness of it. He picks up the youngest one. She squirms, so he squeezes her tighter in the crook of his arm, then jigs her up and down. She likes that. All kids like that. He walks up and down by the van, jigging her. She’s chuckling, her hands spread wide and moving in time. She’s amazingly light, almost weightless. He wishes she was his kid. Her nose needs wiping, but he leaves it. The middle one wants the same game but not the eldest, who just watches with her hands on her head. The middle one is heavier, plumper. She squeezes his waist between her legs, squeezing him with her knees as he jigs up and down by the van making snorting noises. She throws her head back and watches the sky. She reminds him of his second cousin, little Priscilla. His back hurts from the raking. Their mother is walking towards them. He sweeps the one who is like Priscilla back onto the ground, her legs curling up so she rolls over, laughing. His face is burning, because the mother is coming up. He avoids her eyes, this time; he’s already opening the driver’s door.
‘Teatime!’ she says, stretching out her hands.
He knows that word. It makes him want to laugh. But when he glances at her face, it looks anxious. Her eyes meet his. His hand is on the door, he is ready to climb into the van. Her eyes are angry. He can feel it, as if they are spitting at him. She has dark, brown-black eyes and they are spitting at him over her smile, over her saying teatime in a stupid, high voice.
He has taken something off their land – off the land of the Sandlers, at any rate. The children chatter to their mother, tugging on her trousers and her sleeves, no doubt telling her about the old toy pram he’s taken without permission. It’s just scrap, he thinks, but he feels shifty. He still avoids her eyes. The sun turns her black hair reddish. He climbs into the driving seat and closes the door.
‘Merci,’ she cries out, as the engine coughs into life, as his seat squeaks and bounces under him. ‘Merci beaucoup!’
Why does she need to say that, when she doesn’t mean it? He raises his hand and nods through the open window. She has her arms around the two younger kids, as if protecting them from harm, pressing them against her and frowning at him.
They wave as he drives off. Even the mother waves. As if he isn’t coming back tomorrow, or the next day. All this troubles him. He stops by Oncle Fernand’s memorial and asks him for his advice. The flowers haven’t been nicked.
‘Just wait,’ the low voice says in his head. ‘Just wait and be patient, my little Jean-Luc. Go and have a pastis in the café. Have it on me.’
‘Thank you, Oncle Fernand,’ Jean-Luc murmurs, before he drives on too fast over the holes and bumps of the track, so that the rear-view mirror falls off onto his lap.
After he was cremated and turned into a ghost, people who saw him said he had a loose head, a dangling head, a head like a dead rabbit’s or hare’s, and he couldn’t lift it up however hard he tried. That’s what terrified them. Trying to look at them through his eyebrows, but he could never lift his head up high enough, or at all. His chin rolling against his breast-bone, but no noises, not even a moaning. Just his loose neck. Worse than a bull after the picadors have been at it and it can’t lift its horns higher than its tail.
That’s why no one local goes to Les Fosses, these days. Not even Gabrielle, the sister-in-law, who is supposed to be the cleaner.
But Jean-Luc knows it’s all rubbish. Oncle Fernand has told him so. It’s all stories. It had nothing to do with Oncle Fernand, the anniversary. It was the wet, the pressure.
He goes to the café before dinner, as instructed. The usual crowd, a good dozen of them, and they make him nervous, even though Marcel isn’t there. But once Jean-Luc opens the door, scraping its bottom edge over the lino, he can’t back off. Oncle Fernand would be disappointed. Jean-Luc even thinks he can feel him in the back of his head, a vague brown shape; a bit like the only photograph of him (taken in front of the new tractor) that Jean-Luc has ever seen. Maybe there are more, but if so they can’t be found – and Jean-Luc has looked in the cupboards, in all the suitcases and drawers. Oncle Fernand is thin and wiry in the photograph, with a sheepish smile, hand on the tractor’s tyre. Half his face is in the shadow of his hat, as the sun was bright, so Jean-Luc has never been able to tell what he really looked like. The tractor was purchased in 1938, by the cousin Oncle Fernand worked for, so he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Jean-Luc never pictures him as young, though; just old and wise. Not as old as if he were still alive –he’d be in his eighties, now – but around the age of Papa when he died. Seventy. Still fit enough to work in the vegetable patch.
Jean-Luc feels proud of his relationship with Oncle Fernand. Sometimes, when he passes the spot on the track, there is nothing. Not even a wink in the back of his mind. He imagines Oncle Fernand out in the hills, hunting. Even though he was never much of a hunter, according to Papa. ‘Fernand never liked guns,’ he’d say. ‘Too soft, soft as a girl. That’s why he helped in the bakery before he worked in the tannery. Fernand liked making cakes. Made a change from the fields. Don’t get blisters making cakes.’
Jean-Luc would always nod, then, because he understood why Oncle Fernand had preferred that job in the baker’s to labouring in the fields or hunting with his brother. If only Papa had been the one shot on the track! – but then there would have been no Jean-Luc. Might have been better like that, he’d think. Especially after Marcel Lagrange had pushed him about; because Jean-Luc, instead of seeing red, felt limp and useless, as if he didn’t have the right to exist.
Now, though, he is an object of interest; they want to know about the English up at Les Fosses. The English have been seen in the village, they went to the church and the cemetery the day before yesterday – no, three days back, how time flies –and then came in here. Louis nods in confirmation behind the bar.
‘They asked me questions,’ Louis says. ‘About the house. I pretended not to know.’
‘We’ll all be speaking sodding English soon,’ one of Marcel’s mates growls.
‘In French,’ says Louis. ‘The husband speaks French. The woman never opened her mouth. Never so much as opened her mouth. Not to me, at any rate.’
Jean-Luc shrugs. ‘They’ve got a problem with boars,’ he says, to deflect them onto a problem that was shared by many. ‘I need to put a proper fence up.’
‘That’s right,’ says Louis.
‘We can go looking for them,’ says Petit Gaston, who used to work on the railways but now putters about on his mobilette all day, rifle over his shoulder, with some mysterious, state-supported invalidity. ‘We’ll take the dogs up there next week. The whole gang.’ He draws deeply on his yellow roll-up and coughs. ‘We haven’t done Les Fosses for a while. Didn’t think there was anything there.’
Jean-Luc curses himself for mentioning the boars. But it’s usually Marcel who decides where the hunt is to be, not a little runt like Gaston.
‘They were only babies,’ Jean-Luc fibs. ‘I saw them.’
‘How big?’ asks Gaston, creasing his eyes up suspiciously. He is a nasty, yapping terrier who never lets go. He starts drinking at eight in the morning; completely pickled inside, he must be. He floats in alcohol like a specimen.
Jean-Luc spreads his hands no more than a realistic metre. ‘About so. They’ll be fine in a year or two.’
‘They’ll have a mummy and a daddy,’ Gaston persists, picking tobacco off his invisible lips. ‘And big brothers and sisters.’
‘Hey,’ Aimé yelps, an enormous lump further down the bar, ‘has she opened her mouth to you, Jean-Luc?’ And Aimé, because it has taken him a few moments to think this one up, makes sure everyone understands what he meant by waggling his tongue.
They laugh. Jean-Luc blushes, unfortunately. Louis hands him his pastis, sliding it across the bar, and Jean-Luc blushes deeper and his hand trembles around the glass. Because everyone is looking at him. His left eyelid starts to twitch and he has to pretend to scratch it. All those private, naughty thoughts are dancing up and down for everyone to see. Scribbles, drawings like cartoons, a whole comic strip. The others, bunched in a line against the bar, wait for him to speak and make dirty remarks that trigger further laughter and cat-calls. Their smoke circles him, makes him crave a fag for himself. He sips his drink and lifts his eyes to the bottles behind the bar. One of them, almond syrup, has not shifted its level in twenty years.
Emile of the massive eyebags says that Jean-Luc has dug for all the Englishwomen in the commune. How many is that? someone asks. Others are snorting with laughter because of the age of some of these women. Louis, perhaps out of kindness, is having a serious go at counting. ‘It’s well into double figures,’ he says, wiping the bar with a cloth and trying to be serious about the number in order to calm it all down, ‘but they hardly ever come in here.’
This would have deflected the regulars into having a go at the English, normally; how they were too rich and too mean, while a defender would always put their case either because –like Jean-Paul Rohr the plumber or Yves Plantier the plasterer – they were making money out of them, or – like Jacques Evrard – they were old enough to remember the war. But not tonight. Marcel’s mates make sure of that, even in his absence. It isn’t often they have Jean-Luc Maille on the end of a fork. By the time Marcel himself comes in, Jean-Luc is ready to leave, although there’s something about the attention that he appreciates, deep inside. Only Marcel would turn it really nasty – which he does.
‘Here’s to Jean-Luc,’ he says, in his high, piercing voice, raising his glass. He stands two customers away, his huge, rough-cut face the focus of attention. Today his bottom lip has only the blister where the cigarette usually fits. ‘And his dear old mum. Who still rocks his cradle too close to the wall.’
‘At least I sleep in my own bed,’ Jean-Luc replies, without thinking, oiled by two pastis. It provokes a nervous scatter of laughs. Oncle Fernand is clapping in his head. Attaboy, he’s saying, you tell him. Let’s get our own back.
Marcel drinks and puts the glass down with a click on the zinc. Jean-Luc feels his gut beginning to liquefy. He thinks of the German boy and the way Marcel kills stray dogs with his iron bar, beating their skulls in – or so the rumour goes. But nothing more is said. Marcel turns silent and thoughtful, lighting up and blowing out the smoke as if he’s not fussed either way.
Louis changes the subject by bringing up the football results; and then nice Françoise, married to Aimé for some unknown reason, comes in with her well-educated friend Sophie, who works in a bank and never stops nattering about health scares. Tonight it is the dangers of batshit.
Jean-Luc slips out, pretending to look at the Ricard clock and be shocked by the time. When Marcel goes quiet, it’s best to get away, as far away as possible – even if that’s just a few houses up the street and not New Caledonia. Then hope it will all blow over.