Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

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СКАЧАТЬ a little village near Vannes. Yolande used to have a thin frock in embroidered muslin from St Gallen, with tulle trim at the shoulders and waist, and a sky-blue straw cloche hat. But most of the time she would be in her bathing suit, barefoot, spattered with sand up to her knees. Every day, crowds of workers would pour out of excursion trains for their first visit to the seaside. Only the villa residents held themselves aloof from this display of overwhelming joy. It seemed as if the holidays would never end, like the Paradise they learnt about at First Communion classes. Yolande had a constant humming in her head. Perhaps it was from pressing seashells to her ear, or maybe the water from all the swimming. Yannick had white-blond hair, dry as straw. They would have play fights with sticky seaweed, and, squealing wildly, feel for each other with outstretched arms, under cover of the foam. That was the first time she had kissed using her tongue. For everything it was the first time.

      A thudding at the door had ripped through the iridescent haze of her holidays at Pénerf. Her pencil point had snapped clean off on the south of Brittany. Yolande had pressed her eye up to the world’s arsehole; two women, one stout and the other small, were rummaging in the letter box. They had waited, while Yolande held her breath. She had rumbled them, they were Boches disguised as French. Unless they were the girls from the Resistance done up to look like Boches … You could never tell, there was no difference. Either way, playing dead was the thing if you wanted to stay alive. The two women had taken a step back and then moved off. Yolande had waited for a long time before retrieving the piece of paper from the letter box: ‘Do you know the Bible?’ Yolande hadn’t read to the end of the text because it was obviously written in code, the proof being that it was signed ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses’. What a bunch of losers! There would never be witnesses at her trial, because there would never be a trial. Bernard had promised her that. But they kept on trying all the same; they needed guilty people, even guilty people who were innocent, to fuel their morbid obsession with stamping out clandestine goings-on. That being so, she had to be on her guard; they would be back, they always were. That was her day shot to pieces. The only way to ward off the misfortune was to make pancakes, pancakes and more pancakes.

      ‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Bonnet. We are all …’ His boss had searched for the appropriate word – ‘Mortal? Alike?’ – but held back, from embarrassment, perhaps, or fear. ‘OK. Have some rest and come back to us soon.’

      Right, that was sorted, indefinite sick leave. It seemed just like any other day, however. Bernard felt no worse than the day before. Decidedly better in fact. The two days after Serge’s First Communion had been a veritable agony: vomiting, migraines, an intense feeling of malaise. Then, on making this decision, a sort of respite. ‘It’s a question of attitude, Monsieur Bonnet,’ Machon said. Perhaps he was right; they were mysterious, the body and the mind. Of those two days spent at the mercy of Yolande’s whims and the vagaries of his physical condition, all he had left was ‘room’ in his life, ‘room’ like in a garment which is too big. Someone who knew about such things had once told him you shouldn’t be able to see any light between two good dancers. His dancing days were over, and that was that, except with Yolande, of course, for the light had never been visible between them. As for his boss and his colleagues, he knew he wouldn’t be seeing them again. It was no sadder than casting off an old pair of slippers. In taking leave, he had married death, and death fitted him like a glove. Sorrow came from denial – that was why life had so often made him suffer. Now he would say ‘yes’ to everything, good and bad, sunshine and grey skies alike; this November afternoon it was the latter.

      Sitting behind the wheel of his car in the station car park, he felt desperately free. Doubtless this was how someone felt on the first day of unemployment: ‘I could go here, or there, do nothing, go home and be bored stiff, go mad …’ The excess of freedom knocked him sideways. Maybe he should start collecting stamps, or keep pigeons like the retired men in these parts? Or build model ships? It was too much, too …

      An urgent rapping on the window made him jump. Roland’s face, squashed up against the glass, looked strangely distorted, like a portrait by Bacon, streaming with rain.

      ‘Bernard, help me! Féfé’s just been run over by a lorry.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Féfé, my gun dog. Let me in.’

      A smell of frying came off Roland as he got in beside Bernard. His eyes were glassy from tears and the rain. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

      Bernard let him drum his fingers on the dashboard.

      ‘He’s one of a kind, that dog!’

      ‘Calm down. What’s going on?’

      ‘My parents just phoned. I left Féfé with them for the weekend. I told them to keep him tied up! He always goes chasing after lorries!’

      ‘Is he dead?’

      ‘If only! I have to go and finish him off. I’m not brave enough. I saw you getting into your car and thought you …’

      ‘I’d what?’

      ‘Well … that you’d be able to … Don’t make me do this on my own.’

      Roland was leaking all over, from his eyes, nose and hair. He was the last of that ridiculous breed, the Sunday huntsmen who shoot at anything that moves, or not, as the case might be (he was the one to thank for the shot-riddled ‘Caution. Children’ sign on the way into the village), and now he was crying over his Féfé, half flattened by a lorry. A man who would swear on his deathbed that he loved animals. His own. He was a stupid, sad bastard, but at this moment Bernard could not bring himself to treat him as such. He knew he was a stupid bastard, a stupid bastard who hated him, but a stupid bastard who was weeping, the way the sky weeps, sometimes.

      ‘Why me?’

      ‘I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Féfé and I … I just couldn’t. But you know death.’

      ‘Not yet, I don’t.’

      ‘You’ve seen it. I can tell you’ve seen it!’

      ‘You’re still drunk, Roland.’

      ‘True, but it’s because I’m suffering. You’re the only one who can do it. Bernard, please …’

      ‘Where d’your parents live?’

      ‘Over by Brissy.’

      Black and white like an old Chaplin film, minus the laughs. The sky could not decide whether to be bright or not. Most annoying. They parked outside Roland’s parents’ place, a once elegant house, which had been revamped with garden gnomes and fake wells made from tyres, like something out of a bad novel. Roland emerged, carrying a .22 rifle.

      ‘Over there, by the bridge.’

      Bernard parked. As they got out, Roland handed him the gun. They walked along the verge, the grass green against a backdrop of grey sky. It was a little slippery. In a dip in the bank, the tan and white dog, with a vacant look and his tongue lolling, was lying stretched out on his side. His back legs were now just a wet mush of hair and blood.

      ‘Oh damn! Kill him, kill him!’

      Bernard aimed the barrel at the back of the animal’s ear, as it looked up at him, eyes growing dim. Why me?

      It was a small rifle and the noise it made going off was no louder than a fart under the bedclothes. One click – and lights out. The dog’s head fell back on to the soft grass. A gully СКАЧАТЬ