The Front Seat Passenger Read online

  Praise for Pascal Garnier:

  The combination of sudden violence, surreal touches and bone-dry humour have led to Garnier’s work being compared with the films of Tarantino and the Coen brothers, but perhaps more apposite would be the thrillers of Claude Chabrol, a filmmaker who could make the ordinary seethe with menace. When the denouement suddenly begins in The Panda Theory, it is so unexpected that I read the page twice in shocked disbelief. This might be classed as a genre novel, but Garnier’s take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality.

  Sunday Times

  The final descent into violence is worthy of J G Ballard.

  The Independent

  This often bleak, often funny and never predictable narrative is written in a precise style; Garnier chooses to decorate his text with philosophical musings rather than description. He does, however, combine a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit, and this lightens the mood as he condemns his characters to the kind of miserable existence you might find in a Cormac McCarthy novel.

  The Observer

  For those with a taste for Georges Simenon or Patricia Highsmith, Garnier’s recently translated oeuvre will strike a chord … While this is an undeniably steely work … occasional outbreaks of dark humour suddenly pierce the clouds of encroaching existential gloom

  The Independent

  A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony.

  Sunday Telegraph

  A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon.

  TLS

  The Front Seat Passenger

  Pascal Garnier

  Translated from the French by Jane Aitken

  For my brother Philippe

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Front Seat Passenger

  About the Author

  Also by Pascal Garnier:

  Copyright

  ‘Love stories usually end in tears …’

  An index finger with a bitten nail abruptly cut Rita Mitsouko off. The sudden return to silence hurt. Ten fingers began to tap the steering wheel, making a dull, monotonous, rhythmic sound. Like rain. The dashboard dials glowed fluorescent green. There was no other light for miles around. No stars. Just a very faint gleam, over there, behind the hills, revealing a faraway town. The right hand moved from the steering wheel, caressing the gear lever, as one might the head of a cat, or the handle of a gun. It was a good car, powerful, reliable, grey. Eleven thirty, they shouldn’t be long now. Staring at the second hand made it seem as if it had stopped. But no, it was continuing its relentless passage, like a donkey turning the grindstone of a mill.

  Then suddenly coming over the hill, the beam of headlights, night paling, receding … The right hand grasped the lever and changed up a gear. The left hand gripped the steering wheel. The right headlamp of the car hurtling over the hill was skewed towards the verge. The grey car, all its lights off, accelerated forward like a bagatelle ball. It was definitely them: right time, same wonky headlight.

  In the forest a fox had just ripped open a rabbit. It pricked up its ears when it heard the squealing of tyres on tarmac and the clang of metal in the ravine. But that only lasted a few seconds. Then silence descended again. With one bite, the fox disembowelled the rabbit and plunged its muzzle into the steaming innards. All around it, thousands of animals, large and small, were eating or climbing on top of each other for the sole purpose of perpetuating their species.

  ‘You eat your vegetables with your meat?’

  ‘Uh … yes.’

  ‘When you were little, you used to do the same as me: first the meat, then the vegetables … People change.’

  His father had a habit of punctuating his speech with little platitudes like ‘People change … When you got to go, you got to go … That’s life … That’s the way it goes.’ He made them sound like wise maxims. People change … It was true that the old man had taken it hard when he heard that Charlotte had died, even though he hadn’t seen her for thirty-five years. He seemed to shrink in on himself, collapsing as if someone had just whisked a stool out from under him. He appeared hollowed out. Had you tapped him on the back he would have uttered a sound like owls in a dead tree. Fabien had noticed it last week on the phone, a sort of strange echo in his father’s voice, like a far-off appeal.

  ‘There’s a car-boot sale at Ferranville next Sunday – do you want to give me a hand? To get rid of some stuff …’ And then just before hanging up: ‘Charlotte’s dead.’

  From the moment she had left them when Fabien was five, she was always referred to as Charlotte, never ‘Maman’. Fabien had never heard his father say a bad word about her, nor a good word; he simply didn’t mention her. Like Dreyfus, he had exiled her to a place in his memory as distant as Devil’s Island.

  His nose practically touching the end of his fork as he bent over his plate, the old man was making little heaps of carrots, potatoes and green beans, neat and tidy the way they grew in his vegetable patch.

  ‘It went quite well today. How much did you make?’

  ‘Not sure … Five hundred francs, six hundred maybe. It was really just to make space.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you had kept all that stuff up there.’

  ‘All what stuff?’

  ‘Charlotte’s things.’

  His father shrugged, rose and went to scrape his barely touched plate into the compost bin. Fabien had the impression that it was so that he could turn away and wipe a tear. He bit his lip. He shouldn’t have mentioned Charlotte, but he’d been here for three days now and he was still waiting for his father to say something about her. He couldn’t help suspecting that for the last thirty years the old man had secretly been hoping that one fine day Charlotte would reappear to collect her possessions. Her possessions … Ghosts didn’t have possessions; they didn’t have lizard-skin shoes or red handbags. A young girl had bought the shoes and bag that morning at the sale. Seventy francs altogether. His father hadn’t tried to push the price up. His hand hadn’t trembled as he handed over the thirty francs’ change. But he had gazed after the girl until long after she had disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘What time’s your train?’

  ‘Six something.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time. I’m going to take it easy for a bit. My back hurts. Leave all that, I’ll do the washing up this evening.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mind doing it. You go and rest.’

  It doesn’t take long to do the washing up for two. A pity – he wouldn’t have minded doing the washing up until it was time to leave. He didn’t like the house and the house had never liked him. His father had bought it and moved in after his retirement. Fabien always felt as if he were in a waiting room. He never knew where to put himself. Everything was square, angular, clean and functional. For want of anywhere better he sat back down in the chair he’d had lunch in. His father was snoozing on one of the vile armchairs that immediately made you think of hospitals and death. His glasses were pushed up on his forehead, his book, How to Survive Tragedy, open on his stomach. He had only ever read books like that, self-help books about survival: surviving the war, the cold, the heat, pollution, epidemics, atomic radiation. He read them with the zeal that others devoted to imagining life after death. What tragedy had he survived? Charlotte? No, it was something before that. Charlotte had only been confirmation of the dangers of living. In this hostile world, you could only ever count on yourself. When Fabien had lived with him it was like living underwater. Each time he left him, he felt stifled, experienced the need to breathe as after an attack of apnoea. When his father died, Fabien would inherit from him a mountain of silence.

  Once, in order to get him to talk, he’d taken
his father to a restaurant. His father hated restaurants, and cafés, and hotels, and anywhere there were other people. Fabien had hoped to talk to him man to man, like friends. He was a little old to believe in miracles, but he had decided to force his father to tell him a little bit, anything at all, about his youth, about Fabien’s youth, before Charlotte, after Charlotte. Had he had mistresses? Did he still have them? Just something to give Fabien a clue. To encourage him, Fabien had opened up about the more intimate details of his own life, and to give himself some Dutch courage had swallowed a few large glasses of white wine. He was comprehensively drunk before the meal was half finished, and was starting to talk nonsense, whilst his father had said no more than ‘Eat up, it will get cold.’

  As he paid the bill, and his father carefully folded his napkin, Fabien had felt horribly humiliated. Instead of encouraging his father to confide in him, he had spilt his own guts in the most obscene way. When he got home he was desperate to take a shower.

  That had been a good fifteen years ago. Today it was different. He knew that his father would never talk to him for the very good reason that he had nothing to say, and that was just fine. Fabien was the child of two phantoms, with the absence of one and the silence of the other providing his only experience of family. They had each carved out their own isolated little existence, that was all.

  For over thirty years, Charlotte had lain against his father’s right buttock between his social security card and his identity card in the name of ‘Fernand Delorme’ (the desiccated photo showed a young dark-haired woman in short white socks and sandals, smiling like mad against the backdrop of a forest path), and there had never been any room for him between those two.

  ‘For the love of God! How can you live with the ticking of that grandfather clock?’

  It was his father’s pride and joy, a Comtoise. An upright coffin. Exactly the right size for Charlotte.

  ‘Papa, it’s time to go.’

  ‘What? … Oh yes, right. When you got to go, you got to go.’

  The bright-yellow Renault 4 bought second-hand by his father from the post office (such a bargain!) gave two or three alarming splutters before coming to a halt outside the station.

  ‘We’re early. You’ve a good quarter of an hour still.’

  ‘Don’t wait, Papa, you go home.’

  ‘It’s strange that you can’t drive. You’d be more independent.’

  ‘What would I do that I don’t do now?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Well now, give my love to Sylvie and don’t forget the lilac. Tell her to put it straight into water as soon as you get there.’

  ‘I will, Papa. Goodbye. I’ll ring you next week.’

  ‘Speak to you then.’

  *

  Fabien was not the only one on the platform bearing lilac. The damp newspaper wrapped round the stems was slowly disintegrating between his fingers.

  He had never noticed that his father had such long hairs growing out of his ears. That was the only thing he retained from three days spent in his company.

  It’s always a little disappointing when you walk into an empty house expecting someone to be there, but actually, Sylvie’s absence suited him. He would have had to talk to her, to tell her about his trip, and he had absolutely nothing to say either to Sylvie or anyone else. He couldn’t even be bothered to listen to the messages on the answer machine. He was coming back from a world of silence, the great paternal depths, and he needed to decompress. Sylvie must have gone to the cinema with Laure. She always did that when he wasn’t there. Fabien didn’t like going to the cinema, especially not in the evening.

  She must have left in a hurry because there was no note on the kitchen table. Sylvie was often late; it reassured her to know that someone was waiting for her. The lilac had gone a bit limp, the newspaper now little more than grey mush. He looked around for the blue vase but couldn’t find it. He never knew where Sylvie kept things. Things were not his domain. It was she who made them appear and disappear at will. He couldn’t do that; he was too clumsy, he broke everything. When he was alone in the house, he spent ages playing hunt the thimble, or rather the tin-opener, or the socks or the extension lead. Turning away to avoid the smell, he thrust the lilac into the bin.

  In the fridge he found four eggs, a slightly green slice of ham and three beers. He did not investigate any further for fear of encountering a wizened old lettuce or a carrot gone soft in the bottom of the vegetable drawer. He just had a beer. For the first two years of their life together the fridge had overflowed with calf’s liver, entrecôtes, spare ribs, poultry, fish, fresh vegetables, cream, desserts, and the cellar had always been full of Sancerre, burgundy and champagne. Half their time was spent in bed, the other half at table. They contemplated their rolls of fat with the complacent delight of a pregnant woman in front of the bathroom mirror. They were insatiable to the point of excess.

  Then one day she had decided that they were too happy, that it could not last, that it wasn’t normal. So they had let time elapse between them, slow but inexorable, like the advancing desert. They didn’t do anything or say anything about it. They didn’t have children or get a dog or a cat. They did nothing and their relationship withered.

  The beer tasted of metal, like his hands, gripping the balcony railing, and the stars up there in the sky, and the whole city spread out at his feet. Metal.

  ‘How many of us are there, looking out of our windows, holding a can of beer, asking ourselves if we could still make something of ourselves? What would that something be? Fame? Fortune? Love? All that remains from childhood is an indefinable vertigo, a slight regret.’

  The other day, on a café terrace, someone behind him had said, ‘I wonder if I could still fall in love?’ It had been a man his own age. On the pavement, girls went past, light as cigarettes, haloed by the June sun, and inaccessible.

  A few years ago, the sirocco had blown through Paris. The cars were covered with a fine layer of pink sand. Fabien had been in the same spot on his balcony. He had wished that a metre of it would fall, like the snow when he was little. But nothing lasted here; everything turned to mud. Doubtless his wishes weren’t strong enough.

  He didn’t understand television ads any more. He couldn’t make out what they were trying to sell him. A drink? A car? A cleaning product? He felt as if there was a whole world of fit guys running through the waves in their Speedos, gorgeous pneumatic girls dripping soap, adorable children smeared with jam, and dogs bouncing around as the family drank their breakfast Nesquik. A world that was nearby but inaccessible to him. The same went for the news (there still just seemed to be good and bad), and for games where he never knew who was supposed to be doing what. And for cop shows where the cop seemed mainly to focus on rear-ending all the cars in front of him. But that didn’t stop him thinking that television was man’s best friend, far ahead of dogs, horses and even Sylvie.

  He wondered if he was hungry. ‘Maybe,’ he thought. But the effort of managing frying pan, butter and eggs seemed too great. Instead he went and brushed his teeth to put an end to thoughts of eating. He wouldn’t go and visit his father again for a long time. Each visit crushed him. When he was young he never had time to brush his teeth at night. He fell asleep wherever he happened to be and in the morning picked up where he had left off. Now his days were divided into neat slices interspersed with the mechanics of living. He lay on his bed, the light off, Macha Béranger’s voice stealing into his ear like a hermit crab. He was nothing more than a toothpaste-flavoured empty mouth on the pillow. A little sweet-smelling corpse. Why couldn’t he fall asleep? Was he waiting for a key in the lock, or was it the annoying winking of the three messages on the answer machine?

  He knew perfectly well he would regret it, but he pressed the ‘Play’ button.

  The first message, ‘Hi Fabien, it’s Gilles … OK, you’re not at home … Um … Would have been great to have a drink with you … Bachelor life’s a bit dull … No worries … Another time. Give me a ring when you g
et back. Cheers then! … Love to Sylvie!’

  Second message: ‘Sylvie? … It’s me, Laure, Sylvie! … Where are you? … Are you in the loo? Well, anyway, you’re not there. Listen, since it’s Saturday evening and you said Fabien was away this weekend, I’d really like to go to a movie, so if you want to, it’s six o’clock now. See you later. Love you.’

  Third message: ‘This is an urgent message for Monsieur Fabien Delorme. Could you please ring Dijon University Hospital? Your wife has been in a serious road accident. The number to contact us on is …’

  *

  He played the tape three times. Three times he heard Gilles snivelling about being on his own, Laure repeating her invitation and Dijon Hospital giving out their number, which he eventually wrote down on the corner of an envelope. He didn’t for one moment think it was a joke or a case of mistaken identity. He didn’t call straightaway. His first reaction was to light a cigarette and go and smoke it naked by the open window. He had no idea what on earth she could have been doing in a car in Dijon, but he was certain of one thing, Sylvie was dead – it was as certain as the wind now ruffling the hair of his balls. He flicked his cigarette butt down five floors onto the roof of a black Twingo.

  ‘Shit … I’m a widower now, a different person. What should I wear?’

  Ever since the train had left the Gare de Lyon, a little Attila had been climbing all over his mother, pulling her hair and wiping his horrible chubby, sticky little hands on the knees of the other passengers. Fabien was not the least interested in the rapeseed-yellow, apple-green and boring blue countryside passing before his eyes. Sometimes in the tunnels he came face to face with his own reflection, like two rams ready to charge at each other.