Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

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СКАЧАТЬ you still taking the medication Dr Boaert prescribed?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘Brice … you need help. You know quite well we’re going through the same as you. You mustn’t let yourself go. We’ll be stronger, the three of us together. I’m sure Emma would have agreed with me. Brice?’

      Silence.

      ‘Brice, are you listening to me?’

      ‘Yes, Myriam. I’m sorry but I have some eggs on the stove. I’ll have to hang up now.’

      ‘Think about what I’m saying, Brice. We’re very fond of you.’

      ‘Me too, Myriam. Give Simon a hug from me. Thanks. I’ll call you soon!’

      He threw down the receiver as if it were a dead animal and unplugged the cord.

      Emma’s picture joined the other photos scattered at his feet like a game of solitaire sprinkled with egg shells. He felt a heaviness in his stomach and stretched out on the camp bed he had set up just beside the boiler. If the truth be known, apart from the kitchen, toilet and bathroom, he scarcely went into the other rooms any more. What was the use of making hundreds of trips to and fro in order to distribute all these things, when he knew that Emma would rearrange them all when she got back? It was easier to settle down in their midst. The icy glow of the fluorescent light, whose timer switch he had craftily deactivated with a piece of sticky tape, didn’t bother him in the least, day or night. A kind of trench dug through the bric-a-brac allowed him to reach the staircase. It was enough. Thanks to this makeshift arrangement, he had everything within reach. This set-up was so much more practical, and it was obvious the objects had accepted him as one of their own.

      That morning in the post, among a pile of brochures advertising monster sales with prices cut, slashed, pared to the bone, there had been a letter from his editor who, while sympathising deeply with his situation, informed him of the urgent need to submit the final drawings for Sabine Does Something Silly. He would be eternally grateful if Brice could deliver them within a week.

      Brice could no longer bear the little girl, still less her creator, Mabel Hirsch. Admittedly the two of them had been his bread and butter for a number of years now, but after about ten volumes he had had enough: Sabine Loses Her Dog, Sabine Takes on Dracula, Sabine Sets Sail, Sabine … The little brat, whose face he riddled with freckles for sport, was seriously taking over his life. As for her creator, he must have killed her at least a hundred times in the course of troubled dreams. He would throttle her until her big frogspawn eyes burst out of their sockets and then tear off all her jewellery. She could no longer move her poor arthritic fingers, they were so weighed down with gold and diamonds. Strings of pearls disappeared into the soft fleshy folds of her double chin. Old, ugly and nasty with it! All that emerged from her scar of a mouth, slathered in blood-red honey, were barbed compliments which wound themselves round your neck, the better to jab you in the back. The widow of a senior civil servant, she had never had to earn a living. Yet she was one of the publishing house’s top sellers. Dominique Porte, the director, put up with the worst humiliations from her, and consequently so did Brice. How many times had she made him do the same illustration over and over again, only to come back to the first one in the end? And yet, according to what she told anyone who would listen, she adored him. That was perhaps true in a sense, for they both had a hatred of childhood, only for different reasons. She had probably never experienced it, while Brice had still not succeeded in leaving it behind.

      In the early days of his marriage to Emma, friends had warned him, ‘She’s thirty, she’ll be wanting to make a father out of you!’ They were wrong. He and Emma had barely so much as touched on the subject. Emma had nothing against children – other people’s, that is. When they visited friends who had children, she showed affectionate interest, never appearing to tire of playing silly games with them, but when it was time to go, no sooner had the car moved off than she gave a sigh of relief.

      Her friends and family were astonished by this state of affairs. To them it seemed abnormal that any perfectly healthy young woman should not wish to play mummy. Perhaps it was because of her career, having to jet off on trips at a moment’s notice, or perhaps one of the two was sterile. Brice and Emma laughed it off, content to leave their secret veiled by an artistic blur. The truth was so much simpler than that. Their love bound them together so closely that the smallest seed, the tiniest embryo would have come between them.

      Children had always frightened him, even when he was one himself. Those signs on the way into villages: ‘Beware Children!’ How were they to be interpreted? He feared them like the plague.

      ‘Children are ogres, vampires. You only have to look at their young parents – the mothers with their dried-up breasts, the empty-handed fathers – to grasp the sheer greed of these merciless cannibals. They get us in the prime of life and ruin our secret gardens with their red tricycles and bouncy balls that flatten everything like wrecking balls. They transform our lovers into fat women, drooling blissfully as they feel their bellies, and turn us into idiots numb with exhaustion, pushing supermarket trolleys overflowing with bland foodstuffs. They get angry with us because they’re midgets, obliging us to punish them and then regret it. On the beach they play at burying us or dig holes to push us into. That’s all they dream of: taking our place. They’re ashamed of us, are sorry they’re not orphans, but still ape us horribly. Later they ransack our drawers, and become more and more stupid as their beards grow, their breasts grow, their teeth grow. Soon, like past years, we no longer see them. They’ll reappear only to chuck a handful of earth or a withered rose on to our coffin and argue over the leftovers. Children are Nazis; they recognise only one race: their own.’

      The editor’s letter came to rest on a pile of envelopes he had not bothered to open. He stretched out on his camp bed and said to himself that this would be a good day to die.

      He was drowsing, drowsing, and then, quite without warning, he opened his eyes and woke up as someone different, someone who was having nothing more to do with Sabine, in this life or the next. It had just struck four, and it was still light. The hard-boiled eggs still lay heavy in his stomach and so it occurred to him to aid his digestion by going for a short walk in the open air for the first time since he had arrived. The choice on leaving his place was simple: either you went left and after 500 metres you hit the main road, where the terrifying articulated lorries would be more than happy to flatten a pedestrian, or you went right, taking the path that wound past the church, up among the vines. Naturally, that was the one he took, whistling to himself. Not for long. The section leading out of the village presented no problems, but very soon the slope became so steep it felt like scaling a vertical wall. His smart tan suede loafers were far from suited to this kind of terrain, muddy, full of pebbles and deep cracks. Every other step he stumbled, tripped and slid, enjoying none of the benefits of nature. He had to sit down to remove a stone from his left shoe. Vine stalks, twisted like the hoofs of a sick billy goat, clung to grey wooden posts; banks of brambles coiled beside the path like barbed wire; straggly trees pleaded with the sky, an occasional mocking crow perched on a branch; and the worst of it was this bitch of a red, slippery soil. There was nothing to stop him turning back except men’s obstinate need to see things through to the very end. He set off again, sliding on this Way of the Cross with no station at which to get off.

      A quarter of an hour later, exhausted and covered in mud, just as he was extracting a crown of thorns’ worth of spines from his palm, he heard the sound of a spring on his left. It was coming from a sort of gap in the undergrowth. Drawn on, as in a fairy tale, he ventured in. Despite the pitfalls, treacherous roots, half-buried stones, holes and mounds, nothing on earth could now have prevented him from getting closer to this primal gurgling; it had become as essential to him as a teat to a newborn baby. It was as he came round the final turn that he caught sight of it, new, exposed, gushing СКАЧАТЬ