The Islanders: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir. Pascal Garnier

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СКАЧАТЬ do you know that?’

      ‘I met his great-grandson. And do you know how this brave shipwright died?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Drowned in a puddle a few years later, bladdered after a barn dance in Normandy.’

      ‘Why are you telling me this?’

      ‘To remind you there’s always someone looking out for you up there.’

      He listened gleefully to the old lady’s footsteps hurrying towards the exit. As often as he could, Rodolphe arranged to be dropped at the Louvre where he would make a beeline for Géricault’s painting and tell his anecdote to the first French-speaking person to sit next to him. His story made the greatest impression on the elderly, like the woman who had just scurried off. By the time they reached old age, people always had a few regrets, and had seen others carried off for the most minor of sins; they felt preyed upon, and they were.

      ‘Survivors, ha! Silly bitch. Life leaves no survivors.’

      People tended to forget this and act as if they were immortal, and Rodolphe took it upon himself to remind them. He did this not only for the pleasure of spoiling their day – though the sour smell of fear did bring him some satisfaction – but because he felt himself invested with a public service mission: ‘No use playing tough: you’re being watched and we’ll all pay our debts in the end.’

      He really had met the descendant of the Medusa’s shipwright in a bar five years earlier. He was one of those drunks who over the course of an evening give away a family secret, or rather spill it into their glass. To Rodolphe, the story was a revelation. It was his duty to pass it on. Was destiny not as blind as him, after all?

      Though he did not speak Italian, he gathered people were talking about food, and a gong sounded from his stomach. He had arranged to meet Jeanne at one o’clock and it was now quarter to. Jeanne was always on time but since he was always early, it was as if she was always late. He was already feeling annoyed with her.

      Since that morning, Jeanne had seen three dwarves: the first on her way out of Versailles, on Avenue de Paris, the second while dropping her brother off outside the Louvre and the third, a woman, shopping at La Samaritaine. Some days are like that. Other days, you keep seeing film actors or bumping into people you haven’t seen for a long time, or take the same taxi twice, or nothing happens at all.

      She was looking for a gift for Rodolphe but had no idea what to get. She would rather not give him anything, if she was honest. He had been even more odious than normal recently. But it was Christmas, and even naughty children were entitled to a present. She eventually opted for a set of bathroom scales, an unequivocally tasteless object covered in brown velour with a brass rim, Jules Verne style. It was a completely useless gift since Rodolphe didn’t care two hoots about his obesity and would not be able to see the reading anyway. But it was heavy and came in a big box, so it would make a nice present.

      Having made her selection, she could not resist a look at the toy section, in spite of the swarms of harassed parents and overexcited children. All the dolls looked as if they had walked out of horror films, they were so alarmingly lifelike. Some had teeth and spoke inane words with metallic voices. It was terrifying. The dolls of her childhood did not speak, eat, wee or poo. They were either stiff or floppy. The first black doll went on sale when she was twelve. She was sorry not to have had one, but it was too late by then. That was the age she became old overnight. One morning she got up and her toys no longer spoke to her. They had become objects, things. She touched them, turned them over in her hands as though seeing them for the first time, and began to cry. Her childhood had run away during the night.

      The pistols, rifles and submachine guns for boys looked more authentic than the real things. The kids were trying them out for size, making them rattle into action with expert ease. A mini Sarajevo. Had a terrorist slipped a real weapon among them, there would have been utter carnage. This was a truly false world. Anything could be forged, everything could be questioned; calves were being cloned and one could not even be sure of remaining the same person from one day to the next. Plagiarism had become the ultimate, fatal art form and illusion the universal religion.

      Jeanne couldn’t care less. What was wrong with sending a cloned Jeanne to work and to pick up Rodolphe from the Louvre? What would she do with herself in the meantime? Nothing. She would be dead and thanks to her double, everyone would think she was still alive.

      A child came along and threw himself at her legs. He already had the face of an old codger. With twenty years of teaching behind her, nothing surprised Jeanne any more. She had loved kids and then hated them, and now she was as indifferent to them as she was to adults. It was just a case of putting up with them and waving them away like flies from time to time.

      As Jeanne left the department store carrying the scales under her arm, the cold air struck her full in the face, in stark contrast to the stifling heat inside La Samaritaine. For a few seconds it took her breath away. She didn’t actually mind this weather – the coldest since the winter of 1917 – any more than she had the heat wave the previous summer. She liked extremes. It was the same with dwarves: they were out of the ordinary.

      She arrived in the room containing The Raft of the Medusa at exactly one o’clock. Rodolphe looked peeved.

      ‘It’s me.’

      ‘Yes, I know it’s you. You should change your perfume, then I could imagine I was meeting someone else.’

      ‘What difference would it make? You don’t like anybody.’

      ‘That’s not true. It’s them that don’t like me.’

      ‘Well, I like you. How about a nice choucroute?’

      It was all yellow, the yellow of old teeth which would soon turn brown. But it was clean, perfectly maintained by Madeleine, his mother’s cleaning lady. She was the one who had found her a few days earlier, lying in bed with her hands clutching the edge of the sheets and her eyes eternally trained on a crack in the ceiling in the shape of Corsica.

      Dead people don’t decorate the way we do. They put crocheted doilies with pineapple or spiral patterns all over the place – on top of the TV, underneath the phone, draped over cushions like spiders’ webs. Olivier was unsure where to put himself in the cramped, overheated flat he was setting foot in for the first time. Certain items of furniture and ornaments were familiar from his childhood, like the little writing desk he used to like to hide under. On its right foot, you could still see the mark where a pedal car had crashed into it. Or the brass lamp shade his father had proudly brought home one night, a gift from a client. These recollections aside, everything was foreign to him. On her husband’s death, Olivier’s mother had sold the house in Le Chesnay and moved into this small one bedroom flat. ‘Now that I’m all on my own’ (and she had really emphasised the ‘all on my own’) ‘it’s plenty big enough for me.’

      She would no doubt have liked Olivier to be up in arms at the idea of selling the family home, but in fact he couldn’t care less. He had completely wiped Versailles from the map.

      Getting off the train two hours earlier at the gloomy, silent, freezing Gare Rive Droite, he had been surprised to feel nothing at all. It could have been any other provincial town, curled up in its shell, hiding from the cold and dark. He was relieved, because he had been approaching his reunion with the place with a degree of apprehension. It was silly to have worried; after all, it was only stone, cobbles and bricks. And yet nothing had changed. Looking out of the window of the taxi taking him to his mother’s home, СКАЧАТЬ