Boxes: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir. Pascal Garnier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ burial plot for life, that’s what we’ve bought ourselves.’

      He went from room to room, forming a cross with his body at each window as his outspread arms flung the shutters wide. From outside he might have been taken for a Swiss cuckoo clock. Bong, the church clock struck the half-hour on his head.

      He set the electricity meter going, turned on the water heater and put on all the lights. Then, as there was no chair, he sat down on the stairs. There was something suspicious: the house had no smell, not even of damp, as is usual in houses which have been empty for months on end. Apart from some arachnid presences among the beams – and not many, at that – there was no sign of life. For the first time in his existence he was an owner. But an owner of what? Of an empty universe, round which the crackling of the match struck for his cigarette echoed in a semblance of the Big Bang.

      The removal men were on time. At exactly half past two – the church clock testified to that – the giant lorry occupied the Grande Rue. The four Atlases were in a cheerful mood.

      ‘Your little village is nice. It makes a change for us from estates and high-rises in Vénissieux or Villeurbanne. There it is, then. Wow, your house is big!’

      ‘Yes, it is rather on the large side.’

      ‘And you’ll be living here all on your own?’

      ‘No, my wife’s joining me.’

      ‘Even for two, it’s really big. Right … Let’s get on with it, lads, shall we?’

      Brice felt quite emotional at seeing them again. It was as if a boat had made landfall on his desert island. The man who had always been too proud to join a band, a group, any association whatsoever, found himself savouring the unquantifiable joy of merging into this mass of humans, one atom among many.

      After taking the men on a quick tour of the house, Brice stationed himself at the entrance to the garage and, as each of the large items appeared before him, pronounced with the confidence of a man who knows what he’s about: ‘Dining room’, ‘Living room’, ‘Yellow bedroom’, ‘Blue bedroom’, ‘Study’, ‘Studio’ and so on. As for the countless boxes marked ‘Kitchen’, ‘Bathroom’, ‘Clothes’, ‘Books’ and particularly those which, as their contents were unknown, were labelled vaguely ‘Misc.’, he had them piled up in the garage. They could be dealt with later. It took only a couple of hours. Once the essentials – beds, wardrobes, chests of drawers, tables, armchairs and sofas – had found appropriate places, it began to look like a real house. That is to say, you could sit in different parts of it, eat and maybe even sleep there.

      ‘There you are, home.’

      ‘Is that it?’

      ‘Well, yes.’

      Brice was struggling to get used to the idea that they were going, leaving him on his own. He was gripped by a sort of panic.

      ‘There’s a café on the main road. Can I buy you a drink?’

      ‘That’s kind, but we need to get back. We’ve a life outside the job.’

      ‘Of course, I quite understand.’

      Raymond proudly refused the tip Brice proffered, but consented to shake his hand. With the fifty-euro note still in his hand, and a tear in his eye, he watched the lorry manoeuvre then disappear round the corner of the road. A few drops of rain splashed down at his feet, and spread like ink on blotting paper. No two fell in the same spot.

      That evening he had to eat, not out of greed or pleasure, but simply because unless a human being takes nourishment, he dies. In the garage he counted no fewer than eleven boxes which belonged in the kitchen and – surprise, surprise – most of them were behind the ones filled with books, which he had to move at the risk of hurting his back. Emma was unreasonably fond of kitchenware. There was enough to fit out a restaurant: plates of all sizes, soup tureens, sauce boats, fruit bowls, tea and coffee services; dishes for tarts, fish and asparagus; dishes made of silver, porcelain and earthenware; water glasses, wine glasses, whisky glasses; canteens of cutlery both antique and contemporary; sets of saucepans, castiron casserole dishes, a wok, a rice cooker, a tagine … and all in pristine condition for the good reason that Emma never cooked, and preferred to invite friends to a restaurant rather than entertain them at home. The yoghurt maker, blender and various other gadgets had not even made it out of their original packaging. When it was just the two of them, something frozen went into the microwave and … ping!

      Box after box was slashed open with a Stanley knife in his search for a tin of food. Every five minutes, the light switch would time out and he would have to feel his way back across the garage to put it on again, bumping his foot or his shin against the scattered boxes. At last he found a tin, pike quenelles in ‘Nantua sauce’, only a few weeks past their use-by date. Sadly the tin was lacking the handy little ring which would have allowed him to free the contents without the aid of a tin-opener. The search through the boxes resumed, increasingly frantic now. Aside from a bottle of Bordeaux, he found virtually everything he did not need: pastry wheel, ice-cream scoop, nutcrackers, cake slice, olive pitter, snail tongs – but the tin-opener still evaded detection. Yet they did have one, he was sure of it, a fancy streamlined model which was the work of a famous designer, and not in fact terribly practical. They had bought it at vast expense in a specialist shop across from Les Halles in Lyon.

      Brice had first met Emma at a gallery during the private view of a Hungarian artist whose ‘thing’ was using varnish to fossilise the remains of goulash on plates. His work wasn’t bad, it just all looked the same. It was like an oven in the gallery packed with goulash lovers. The women’s perfumes mingled with the men’s sweat to produce a noxious mixture. Brice went outside and leant against the wing of a yellow Fiat, sipping lukewarm rosé from a plastic cup. One by one, people left the gallery, dripping with sweat like survivors of some kind of shipwreck, the men loosening their ties and the women slipping a finger into their low necklines. A tall, rangy brunette whose hair was pinned up with a pencil came to sit next to him, fanning herself with her invitation.

      ‘It’s like a sauna in there!’

      ‘Unbearable.’

      ‘Did you like it?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘The show.’

      ‘Oh … In this heat I’m not overly keen on goulash.’

      She laughed. A nose just sufficiently bent to miss perfection, dark eyes spangled with green, a perfectly ripe mouth, hardly any bust and unusually long, narrow feet which reminded him of pointed slippers.

      ‘Well, it’s given me an appetite. I could eat a raw elephant.’

      ‘Luckily I know a restaurant where that’s the speciality.’

      She hesitated for a moment, dangling one of her mules from her toes, before turning to him with a serious expression. ‘Are you sure their elephants are fresh?’

      ‘I can guarantee it; they’re picked every morning.’

      ‘Good. Is it a long way?’

      ‘No, in Africa. There’s a bush-taxi rank on the corner.’

      ‘I’d prefer to take my car.’

      ‘Where is it?’

СКАЧАТЬ