The Eskimo Solution Read online

‘Yeah, yeah, I actually don’t give a shit who he is.’

  Louis’s wallet landed right beside his head. The two figures disappeared round the corner of the stall. Louis could no longer move. The machine was out of order. He was in pain but that wasn’t what worried him, it was the pocket of ink that had just exploded in his stomach and was filling him with night. ‘I’m leaking, gently deflating … I’m dying … I went to the fair with a little girl called Mylène and as a result, I’m dying … right here in the grass …’

  Close by two dogs were copulating conscientiously. They stopped for an instant, when a gurgle escaped the mouth of the man stretched out near the dustbins, then they resumed, their tongues hanging out, gazing at the moon.

  21

  There. Louis’s back in his ink pot. I turn off the typewriter, put down my glasses, rub the sides of my nose, pick up a cigarette but don’t light it. I hold the manuscript in my hand, reassured by the weight of the thing. Because this story has become a thing, a matter of so many grams. I thought Louis was going to unmask me when he said, ‘Someone is guiding my actions …’ He could have slipped away from me, away from himself. I can hear Hélène moving furniture around downstairs. She told me she was going to give the place a big clean-up this morning. Hélène always does as she says.

  I only stopped rolling through the grass when I touched the wheel of the car. I lay there, flat on my stomach, for a long while, filling my lungs with the smell of petrol and the warm engine, and then I lifted my head. It was light, only just, but enough to establish that Christophe was no longer standing on the edge of the cliff. I shouted his name twice, three times, simply because that’s what you do in those situations, but I had already realised what had happened. I knew exactly what I would see if I peered over the edge: a body lying broken on the rocks like an old alarm clock, a body that wasn’t mine. The whooshing of air I had sensed as I threw myself backwards had been Christophe being sucked into the void. My moving backwards must have thrown him off balance and …

  Sitting there on the grass open-mouthed, the enormous consequences of my panic struck me full in the face. The sky had been reduced to one huge zero, round and smooth. I think I stammered, ‘It wasn’t me,’ or else, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Then fear, or an instinct of self-preservation – whatever you want to call it – took over. I didn’t even check to make sure that Christophe really was at the foot of the cliff – what would have been the point? I was about to take the car, but once I got behind the wheel, I reconsidered. Why complicate the simplest of stories? ‘A man in a state of shock over the death of his wife kills his mother-in-law and goes to the coast to commit suicide.’

  A few lines in the local paper, no more. I wiped down the steering wheel, the bottles, the seats, the handle of my door. I walked to the village like an automaton, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, my legs stiff, the wind in my back. I waited there a good hour and a half for the bus to come. There was a café open – I could have gone in for a coffee but I didn’t. I felt as conspicuous as if I was painted red. I got on the bus without thinking. A girl came and sat next to me. I could hear the bzzzz bzzzz of her Walkman right in my ear. She moved her left foot to the beat, oblivious to the fact her knee was rubbing against mine. She must have taken me for a suitcase, some package or other. I moved my leg. Snatches of the night’s events came prowling around me; I waved them away like mosquitoes, sent them back one by one to the chaos they had emerged from. Later, tomorrow, but not now. The road hugged the coastline. I remembered those maps of France printed on transparent plastic; you had to trace the contours with the tip of a pencil: the receding hairline of Pas-de-Calais, the frowning eye of the Seine estuary, the wart of Cherbourg on the nose of Finistère, the pout of Gironde and the pointy chin of the Landes. I could have stayed on this bus all the way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz and never taken my eyes off the coast.

  I got off at the church with tears in my eyes, my nerves and muscles tight as the strings of an instrument. It was market day. The man I get my eggs and cheese from waved at me. I didn’t stop. Nothing could have prevented me getting home. Having reached my front door, for one awful moment I couldn’t find my keys. They had fallen inside the lining of my jacket. The first thing I did was clear the table of the previous day’s leftovers, the paper the brawn had been wrapped in, the empty bottles and wine-stained glasses, the end crust of bread. I washed everything. Then I changed the sheets on the bed Christophe had slept in. I didn’t want any trace of him left anywhere. Afterwards I took a shower and got changed. I went and tidied my study. I sat down in front of my typewriter and slipped a blank sheet into the carriage. There, nothing had happened; I had just got up and everything was fine and dandy. After a minute of staring like an idiot at the piece of paper, I began to feel dizzy. I filled in the empty space by typing meaningless words, among which AZERTYUIOP came up often. I had to do something, anything, to escape the silence and stillness. I threw words onto paper like twigs onto a fire, to avoid freezing on the spot; two, three, four pages of pretending to write until I heard a knock at my door. I slid behind the curtain to see who it was. I immediately recognised the Vidals’ daughter, the game-show champion. Beyond her, an ambulance was parked in the road behind a beige Renault 4. The girl tried again, took a couple of steps back to peer into my window. I stayed still; she shrugged, turned and left. Two male nurses emerged from the Vidals’ place carrying a stretcher on which a body lay entirely covered by a grey blanket. They slid it into the back of the ambulance the way a baker slips a batch of bread into the oven. Madame Vidal appeared, clutching her daughter’s arm, her face buried in a handkerchief. One of the nurses helped her into the ambulance while her daughter struggled to lock the gate. The ambulance drove off and the girl got into the Renault. I let the curtain fall back into place.

  Hélène is humming to herself while she does the hoovering. She’s happy to be here, to be doing the housework, to know that I’m in the study upstairs. She and Nat made up over the phone. They’ll see each other back in Paris. She thinks I was right to persuade Christophe to go and hand himself in to the police; it was the sensible thing to do. As for my neighbour’s death, it’s sad but, at that age, it’s only to be expected at some time or another … In short, as far as she’s concerned, everything is back to normal, only she doesn’t think I’m looking great. A week from now she’ll have me right as rain, I can count on her. What she would like more than anything is for me to be done with that damned book. She hates it without having read it; when it’s off my hands, we’ll go to England, or somewhere else.

  And the lake’s skin will heal over without a scar.

  About the Authors

  Pascal Garnier

  Pascal Garnier was born in Paris in 1949. The prizewinning author of more than sixty books, he remains a leading figure in contemporary French literature, in the tradition of Georges Simenon. He died in 2010.

  Emily Boyce

  Emily Boyce is in-house translator at Gallic Books. She has previously translated Too Close to the Edge.

  Jane Aitken

  Jane Aitken is founder of Gallic Books. She has previously translated The Front Seat Passenger.

  Also by Pascal Garnier:

  The Panda Theory

  How’s the Pain?

  The A26

  Moon in a Dead Eye

  The Islanders

  The Front Seat Passenger

  Boxes

  Too Close to the Edge

  Copyright

  First published in France as La Solution Esquimau

  by Éditions Zulma

  Copyright © Éditions Zulma, 2006

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,

  London, SW1W 0NZ

  This ebook edition first published in 2016

  All rights reserved

  © Gallic Books, 2016

  The right of Pascal Garnier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781910477397 epub

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