The A26 Read online

  ‘Would you like another beer?’

  ‘Yes, but somewhere else perhaps, it’s so … busy here …’

  ‘My name’s Bernard.’

  ‘And I’m Irène.’

  They had just had two more beers in a red, velvety bistro, as snug as a fur muff. They had reached the stage of sharing experiences they had never had, those exquisite falsehoods exchanged by people whose paths have crossed and who will never see each other again.

  Two insignificant lives transformed by the light filtering through the orange lampshades into unique and exotic existences, which still always brought them back in the end to: ‘What now?’

  Now all there was between them was two empty glasses and a skein of intertwined lives, the ends of which hung down pathetically on either side of the table. The sound system was on low, playing ‘My Funny Valentine’. Chet Baker’s voice comforted them in the great sorrow rising in their breast and bringing tears to their eyes.

  ‘Not a bad choice for the closing credits.’

  ‘Would you like me to see you back to your hotel?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘Why, when I’ve got my car outside?’

  ‘OK, if you wish.’

  The street was glistening after a slight drizzle. Irène slipped her arm through Bernard’s.

  ‘I think I’m a bit tiddly.’

  Awkwardly, each one tried to adjust to the other’s pace. Each step was a struggle, one step forwards and two steps back. The car was there waiting, though, as bright as a new pin. They got in. Irène’s hand alighted on Bernard’s as he went to start the ignition.

  ‘Bernard, I would like you to kiss me.’

  Their lips were cold, their tongues timid. There was a taste of the first time and dental braces. Irène dissolved in tears on Bernard’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s been such a long time. I thought that was never going to happen to me again. Everything I’ve told you this evening is a lie. I’ve never travelled, I’ve never known great emotion, all my life I’ve been afraid of suffering so I’ve never experienced anything momentous. Nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to me. Motorway, nothing but motorway, just grey monotony, with a few stops in lay-bys and breaks for frozen sandwiches. It’ll soon be time to pay at the tollbooth and I’ll have seen nothing, nothing at all. I don’t want to go back to my hotel. Take me home with you, Bernard. Just for this one night – I’ll leave in the morning, I promise!’

  Yolande, Yolande, why must you always stand between me and the sun?

  ‘Is that really what you want?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve slept on my own almost all my life but tonight I really don’t think I can face it.’

  Irène was asleep by the time they reached the outskirts of Lille. Bernard was envious of her trust, how she let herself go, the unusual quality of her sleep. The dashboard lights cast a greenish glow around her profile. She slept the way children sleep, mouth slightly open, plump-lidded, unreachable.

  Vimy, ten kilometres, diversion, roadworks … Bernard set off into the very midst of the night on an earth track, exuding inky dark. For several hundred metres now the headlights had picked up nothing at all. It was like the end of the earth.

  The end of the earth was a building site. People had decided that it wasn’t distant enough, and so they were extending it by spreading concrete over the nothingness. Bernard stopped and switched off the headlights. The absolute dark gathered in his eyes before, little by little, he began to make out the gigantic shapes of the machines, silent gaping mouths ready to gobble up the sky once they had swallowed the earth.

  He brushed Irène’s soft cheek with his fingers and whispered, ‘We’re here.’ Without waking, she moved her shoulder slightly as if to nudge a sheet back into place. Bernard could have sworn she was offering him her throat. Between his thumb and first finger, the Adam’s apple went in and out, in and out, in and out …

  There wasn’t much life left in the body. For a split second he saw Irène’s pupil flicker then grow cloudy like that of Roland’s dog. The life of one person had just passed into the body of the other. Bernard couldn’t loosen his grip. He made the orgasm last until the pain went all the way up his arm to his shoulder, then to the very highest point of his crown, until it blew the top of his head off.

  Then he got out of the car and fell on his knees in the mud.

  ‘It’s not my fault! I’m the only one who’s dying!’

  There was no echo in this place. The silence absorbed everything, like the sky, the earth, the concrete. Death mopped up life so that no trace of existence should sully the relentless onward march of the A26 autoroute.

  Irène was not to have the same grave as Maryse. Despite scouring the whole of the building site, the best place Bernard could find was the latrines covered by a small yellow corrugated-iron hut, which the workmen used as their dustbin and lavatories. Just at the moment the body sank into the cesspit, releasing appalling vapours, he remembered: Irène Lefébure. They used to have lunch across from each other in the school canteen. She wasn’t an unpleasant girl but she’d repelled him a bit because of her bulimia, which meant that she used to finish everyone’s leftovers. They’d called her ‘the dustbin’.

  As he was about to get back into the car, Bernard felt as if someone’s gaze was burning the back of his neck. The moon pierced the clouds like a cigarette burn in a blackout curtain. As with Maryse, the moon was full. Pure chance. It wouldn’t stop them talking of a serial killer, the full-moon murderer.

  WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SITE OF A26 WORKS Workmen on the site made the grisly discovery late on Tuesday afternoon. The police have carried out initial investigations, which are proving very difficult. There has been so much digging and compacting of the ground by machinery that the state of the corpse makes identification impossible for the moment. It will be necessary to wait for the results of the…

  Yolande was reading the newspaper, tracing the words with her finger. From another finger she let the pendant ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow’ swing like a pendulum. She was speaking in a singsong voice, like a child reciting a fable. Bernard kept his eyes fixed on the pendant.

  …the time to complete additional investigations…

  I’ll tell you what, shall I bake an angel-hair cake tonight? You know, with lots of sugar. It’s ages since I did that.’

  ‘I’m not really very hungry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I feel like making a cake. It’s a day for it, and besides there are a lot of ends of packets.’

  ‘As you like. Pass me some water, please. Thanks. Help me to drink, I can’t lift my head.’

  Bernard was searching for the rim of the glass. His vision was deteriorating. A whirl of rings with wavy outlines and dark insides was dancing in front of his eyes. The two mouthfuls of water came back up, and dribbled down his chin through his beard.

  ‘You pig!’

  Yolande went back to her reading.

  With the information currently available to the police and magistrates…

  (What’s she going to do with my dead body? Stuff it into the bottom of the wardrobe? Bodies everywhere, in the mud of the building site, at the back of cupboards…)

  It would be rash to make a link with the disappearance of the young woman Maryse L …

  What’s the point of me reading to you, Bernard, if you’re not going to listen? Your mind’s somewhere else. If you go on pretending to be dead like this, you really will die, so there. You’re horrible to me, I’m going.’

  Yolande was angry. He’d become a right pain with his illness, no time for anyone but himself. He’d been like that when he was little, snivelling at the slightest bump. Yolande had never been ill, ever. Let him get on and die, and that would be an end to it. She didn’t know what he wanted, to be sure. He could always hang himself if it was taking too long. People were always like that, complaining about their lives: it was ‘it’s too hot’ and ‘it’s too cold’, ‘I’m too you
ng’, ‘I’m too old’, etc. They only had to be as she was and not like anything, that way you were never disappointed and other people got a bit of peace as well. She had nothing against her brother, mind you. All their lives the two of them had been like one and the same person, but whether you lost a tooth, a brother or an arm, there was no need to go overboard about it! In any case, it was for his benefit that she was making the angel-hair cake. It was a favourite recipe from La Semaine de Suzette. It was tasty, easy to make and filled you up nicely.

  She trotted off into the kitchen, and poured all the packet ends of vermicelli into a salad bowl. There was an amazing amount. Pulling a saucepan out from under a heap of dirty dishes, she set off an avalanche of metalware.

  ‘Oh shit! Filthy rotten bastards! Damn bitch of a saucepan!!!’

  She kicked the floor clear. Of course, he was wallowing in bed all day, savouring each remaining drop of life, so obviously she was left to see to everything. Shaking with fury, she gave the saucepan, still coated with residue from last night’s noodles, a quick rinse under the tap.

  ‘What’ve you done with the sugar? Ho hum!’

  And yet the day had begun on a positive note, she’d been in a good mood when she’d got up. A shaft of light coming through a crack in the shutters had bounced off the white enamel of her bowl. That was all it had taken to reawaken in her a whole stream of good moments. Life was the way it was, but sometimes it gave gifts, even to people who didn’t deserve them, even to wrong ’uns like her. That was in the way of things. After all, life killed off plenty of fine people, by wars, road accidents or illness. It was only right that it should make up for its stupid tricks.

  The day they had drowned the cat belonging to that old imbecile Fernande, a lovely day. The old bag was always spreading evil gossip about her, hands clutching her windowsill, with her mangy cat wedged between her huge tits.

  ‘That Yolande’s been seen leaving the dance with …’

  Yolande wouldn’t have minded going with all the local boys she talked about. There hadn’t been as many as all that, but it still got her a tanning with the razor strop as soon as her father got to hear about it. Titi, that cat’s name was. It stank. By promising Bernard a lollipop, she had talked him into distracting the old girl long enough for her to stuff the tomcat into a potato sack. Then they’d run to the bomb crater, the one where you could fish for frogs, and she had weighted the sack with pebbles. Inside the cloth, Titi had made a token effort at wriggling. Perhaps he thought it was a game – you could never tell, where children were concerned.

  Yolande had whirled the sack round above her head before flinging it right into the middle of the pool with a loud ‘ha!’ The water had broken into a rippling smile before it grew perfectly impassive again, like a pool of oblivion. Bernard had clung to his sister’s skirt.

  ‘That’s a crime, isn’t it, Yoyo? You’ve committed a crime.’

  ‘Of course not, it’s only a cat. Serves it right, ugly beast.’

  Yolande had lain full length on the bank, hands behind her head, serene, in the satisfaction of a job well done. Her skirt was hitched up to her thighs, letting in the soft April breeze. A flock of white clouds grazed on the blue overhead. Soon it would be Easter. She was seventeen and longing to get stuck in to all that the world had to offer. On the wireless the talk was of nothing but war, today, tomorrow, or the day after, and of Chancellor Hitler who was frightening everyone except her. If he was really such a bogeyman, that chap, then all the big noises spouting into the microphones had only to do what she’d done, stick him in a sack and throw it into a bomb crater. But oh no, they preferred to scare one another, holding up the spectre of war at arm’s length like a scarecrow forming a perch for crows. War, in weather like this, it was a joke! Here, war, 1870, 1914, and earlier still, was just a part of life. All it had left behind were holes you could drown feline collaborators in and where kids fished for frogs. No need to get so worked up about it! In any case, people didn’t go to war when the weather was so fine. All these people needed was a good lay and they’d forget about fighting. Backside, pussy, prick, eating, sleeping, like in primitive paintings or on the walls of the toilets in the station or cafés, nothing but pleasure, then, at the end, a sack weighted with stones and a hole in the water. That was what life meant for her, and that should be enough for the whole of humanity.

  The foolish young sun drying its rays above the pale-green shoots carpeting the fields seemed to agree with her. The less you thought, the more you lived, and whatever you could take was one fewer thing for the Boches to get. The Boches or someone else, stupidity didn’t stop at borders. She was at this point in her reflections when Bernard had started yelling: ‘Yoyo! Help, Yoyo, I’m drowning!’ The sack with Titi in it was lying by the edge of the water near a long wooden rod, and in the middle of the pond her brother was flailing about as he went under. Yolande had leapt into the thick black liquid. It wasn’t very deep, maybe two metres in the centre, but the little idiot had got his foot caught in some scrap metal and couldn’t get free of it again. She had had trouble extricating him, he was panicking and yelling at the top of his voice. Finally she’d succeeded in pulling him to the bank by his hair. They had flopped down, panting, beside the sack swollen with water, stones and Titi, now defunct. They stank of mud. Black bubbles were still bursting on the surface of the crater, letting off smells of infernal farts.

  ‘Are you mad or something? It’s full of goodness knows what in there. Why d’you do that?’

  ‘I just slipped, Yoyo. I didn’t want Titi to die. I thought a good ducking would be enough.’

  ‘Well, he’s dead anyway, and you could have ended up the same way, you little brat. Let’s see your ankle.’

  It was all swollen, bleeding like raw steak. Yolande had torn a strip from her dress to use as a bandage.

  ‘Yoyo?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You stink.’

  ‘So do you.’

  They’d rolled around on the grass, laughing like things possessed. Coated in mud all over, they’d slithered into each other’s arms like eels. Yolande had poked her tongue into his mouth to make him be quiet. Her brother’s body had juddered between her thighs and then for one brief moment everything was still. War itself could not have divided them. The silence had something of eternity about it. Then a frog jumped into the water. Yolande sat up again, the blue of her eyes had darkened to violet. Bernard was smiling, eyes closed like a child asleep, lips slightly apart. Yolande had remembered a poem she’d read at school, about a young soldier lying dead in a verdant spot bathed in sunlight. It had ended with ‘Nature, cradle him gently, he is cold’ or some such.

  ‘You’ll never do that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fight their stupid war. You’ll be like me, you’ll live for ever.’

  With one kick, she’d consigned Titi to his ineluctable fate once more and they’d gone home. For that one day, Yolande had been treated like a queen, she had saved her little brother’s life. No one had picked quarrels with her. The best thing of all had been hearing fat Fernande calling for her cat.

  Now Bernard had spoilt everything. His illness had made him selfish, he had no time for her any more. At a corner of the table, Yolande was mixing vermicelli and caster sugar.

  Even seen full on, Bernard was now only a profile, with a lipless black hole in place of a mouth. What life he had left was lurking there, in that well of shadows, evident only in shallow gusts of foul-smelling breath. He no longer knew whether he was awake or asleep, there was no difference, just the same state on repeat for almost a week now. Fragments of the newspaper article would come back to him: ‘Grisly discovery, police, woman’s body …’ Each word was so charged with meaning that a whole sentence would throw him into complete and utter confusion. He wasn’t afraid for himself, the A26 was swarming with foreign workers – Spaniards, Turks, North Africans – almost 250 firms were at work on the section, 700 workers, that was where the finger of suspicion pointe
d. And in any case, what could they do to him? Life had already condemned him for a crime he had not committed, being born without intent. There were a lot of words ending in ‘ion’ in the article: ‘investigations, identification, conclusions, etc’. After that he amused himself by making a string of other words ending in ‘ion’: circulation, ascension, passion, circumvolution. That one was a beauty, a graceful swirl. Recitation: ‘La cigale ayant chanté tout l’été se trouva fort dépourvue quand la bise fut venue.’ Mademoiselle Leny, his primary school teacher, used to pronounce it ‘la Biiiise!’ Her eyebrows would shoot right up to the top of her forehead when she said ‘la Biiise!’

  Yolande had been the one to teach him how to kiss, and to masturbate, but that was later. They’d almost gone the whole way once. One Thursday afternoon, when he’d had flu. It was winter, in the last year of the war. She was cold and had lain down next to him in the bed. People were cold the whole time, coal was hard to find. He was worried that she would catch his germs, but she’d said she didn’t care, she was stronger than they were. They’d been looking at a film magazine. She was deliberately lingering over the pages showing scantily dressed film stars: ‘What about her, doesn’t that make you feel anything when you look at her? Her legs, there …’ In a flash, one fever had been replaced by another. There were no flies on his pyjamas, the cord at his waist was cutting into him. It was Yolande who had undone it. Slowly, Bernard’s hand had made its way up under his sister’s skirt. He’d stopped at the first hairs, at the top of her thighs, not daring to venture further, into the unknown jungle. The elastic material of her knickers was stretched tight, a yielding shell which fitted neatly into the palm of his hand. He had lain on top of her, burning up, drenched in sweat. Yolande had opened her legs and pulled her pants out of the way, while her other hand guided Bernard into place. But at the moment of penetration, she had pushed him sharply away.

  As for the rest, he no longer remembered. He must have masturbated, in all probability.