The A26 Read online

  ‘You wretch! Give up now, would you?’

  Yolande took hold of him by the collar and tried to get him on his feet again. Bernard opened his mouth but couldn’t make even the slightest sound. His body no longer responded to the orders issued by his brain. He was in unknown territory.

  ‘Shift your backside, will you! Hang on, have some wine, that’ll sort you out.’

  He saw his sister stride over him, her legs as spindly as a chair’s. He heard her uncorking a bottle. She came back and poured the wine straight from the bottle into his mouth. Bernard couldn’t swallow any longer. He could understand everything, see everything, hear everything but he no longer knew what to do to live. He didn’t have the instructions any more. Apart from this feeling of panic he wasn’t suffering, unless he’d forgotten how to do that as well.

  ‘Dance! You mustn’t stop dancing, not ever!’

  Dragging him like a broken puppet, Yolande hoisted him on to her back and walked him round the room. Bernard’s gaze fixed on the corner of the table, a patch of wall, a myriad of tiny details it seemed he was seeing for the first time, pencil marks on the doorframe with the legend ‘Bernard aged six, Yolande aged eight’, all the things a bull must see when the horses are dragging it out of the ring. Nothing hurt, there was just the strange feeling that he’d forgotten something, like when you leave the house and wonder whether you’ve turned the gas off properly.

  Exhausted, Yolande walked him round the table one last time before putting him down on his bed. She collapsed on to a bedside chair.

  ‘See where your stupid tricks have got you? Everyone who plays at war ends up like you. But you won’t listen to me, you will go out playing the hero. I’m going to make you a nice eggnog. There’s nothing like eggnog.’

  The last thing Bernard saw was a monstrous hen pecking away with the tip of its beak at an endless worm.

  ‘A settling of scores, I don’t think so!’

  ‘And why not? There’s a whole load of junkies hanging around the depot. The guy the police found was one of them. His arms were covered in needle marks, from what they’re saying.’

  ‘And the remains of the woman they found in the works on the A26, was she an addict? And the kid who’s never been found, she was one too, was she?’

  ‘There’s no connection, Roland.’

  ‘Hmm, well, I think there is, and I’ve got my own theory about it, what’s more.’

  ‘Out with it then!’

  ‘I know what I mean. And when the time comes, there’ll be quite a few who won’t know what’s hit them. Whose round is it?’

  There were just three of them left propping up the bar, noses in their beer. Roland was at the pump. He couldn’t wait for them to clear off. At this time of day he was as prickly as a hedgehog, everything got to him. All he wanted to do was sit down in front of the TV and stuff himself with sounds and pictures to the point of oblivion. The dog he’d bought to replace Féfé was a non-starter, he’d had to take it back to the kennels that afternoon. He’d given them a piece of his mind and no mistake. The Strasbourg–Monaco match scheduled for that evening had been postponed because of bad weather. And all these idiots could talk about was the young man who’d been found stabbed in the disused warehouse of the old goods station. No need to get upset over him. One little shit more or less – who was counting? But on his way back from his parents’ in Brissy, it was definitely Bernard’s Renault 5 that he’d seen parked near the shed. Naturally he hadn’t said a word to anyone. His little secret, he was hugging it close, so he could come out with it at the right moment. For years now he’d had him in his sights, that Bernard. Right family of lunatics, him and his tart of a sister. Never mind that they were local, one of these days it was all going to go up, and it would be him, Roland, who set it off. And that trollop Jacqueline would have to shut her big mouth. He’d always known he was a pervert, that bloke, with his ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ act. Even as a small child he’d been like that, doing things on the sly and hiding in his sister’s skirts as soon as things went badly for him. All the things that had happened in the neighbourhood, the kid who’d vanished, the body on the building site and that little toerag the other evening, it had all started the day Bernard left his job at the station. Always prowling around in his Renault 5, or disappearing off. If someone went to the bother of digging around in that direction they’d turn up some interesting things, that was for sure! You’d only had to see him put a bullet in poor Féfé’s head, hadn’t so much as batted an eyelid, not a moment’s hesitation, bang!

  ‘OK, Roland, we’re off now. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Right, see you tomorrow.’

  Roland bolted the door and switched off the lights. He was about to leave the room when he met his own gaze looking back at him, that of a tall blond young man, a good head taller than the rest of the football team in a yellowing photo which had pride of place between two trophies and three pennants. Nothing got past him into the net in those days, people respected him. He could have turned professional if he’d wanted. Why hadn’t he wanted? Not finding an answer to that question, he told himself it was because of Jacqueline. She had to be of use for something. Couldn’t even give him kids – or do the dusting. Roland whisked the cloth from his shoulder and gave the two cups a polish. Then he turned out the lights and climbed wearily up the stairs to the flat.

  There were dozens of buttons, hundreds even, scattered over the table. Tiny ones in mother-of-pearl, little half-spheres with painted flowers on them, leather buttons, wooden buttons, some in horn and others covered with fabric. Yolande’s fingers caressed them, sorted through them, mixed them up, married and divorced them and began all over again, untiringly. She had boxes full. Before emptying out a new one she would plunge her hands into it, like a miser with his gold. Bernard had passed away at around one in the morning.

  She had not been at his bedside. Something like a gap had opened in the silence while she was making vigorous cuts in the SNCF overcoat. She had gone into his room. He had the same over-earnest look as in his school photographs, a complete act, anything for a quiet life. It hadn’t mattered what anyone thought of him just as long as they left him in peace. His watch had stopped at eleven forty-five. He must have said to himself that his train was late. He’d been looking at his watch constantly in recent days. She’d wondered momentarily where she was going to put him, before telling herself he was in as good a place as any. As for the escalopes, that was scuppered, he wouldn’t be buying any more now.

  The Big blue coat button family ran into the Mother-of-pearl shirt button family. ‘How are you today? Shall we go for a walk? Tip-tap-tip.’

  Four days of Siberian chill. Nothing was moving on the plain, the cold took even the wind’s breath away. Work on the A26 site had been brought to a standstill. The silence was such that you could hear a branch snap with the ice like a glass straw from a mile away. It no longer seemed like death even, more like the time before life, before life had even been thought of. Yolande spent hours face to face with the cooker, as rigid as the chair she was sitting on, chewing the inside of her cheeks. Four days, four years, four hundred years … And then the chap had rung the doorbell. When no one answered, he’d knocked several times. He took a few steps back and looked upwards. All the shutters were closed. He scribbled a quick note on his knee and slipped it under the door. Yolande was watching him through the world’s arsehole. She’d waited for him to disappear off in his little blue car before seizing on the note. ‘Hello Bernard! Down at the station we’re wondering how you are. Give us a ring or join us for a drink. See you soon, Simon.’

  Yolande folded the note in two, then in four, in six, then eight, till it was no bigger than a pill and she swallowed it. Others would come. She would swallow them all. She’d swallow everything. That’s what she’d do. Everything could be eaten. The rats were eating Bernard, Yolande would eat the rats. With garden peas. She had loads of them. Bernard didn’t like them but he’d always got a tin when he did the wee
k’s shopping. It was a tradition. There were sardines as well, plenty of them, and tomato sauce. She had all she needed, several times over. She had the wherewithal to live two lives here, two lives sheltered from others. She could do it all herself. She needed no one else. Music, for example, on that mandolin. She knew a tune: ‘Ramona … I’ll always remember the rambling rose you wore in your hair.’

  ‘Bugger off!’

  The mandolin narrowly missed the rat running across the table. The echo of the instrument made ripples on the surface of the silence. Yolande closed her eyes. The same movement in the darkness inside her head.

  ‘Don’t lean out of the window, Yoyo, you’ll get your head torn off if we go through a tunnel.’ It would all be going so fast that it was impossible to open your eyes or even breathe. Now and then you’d get tiny smuts in your face. The tears in the corner of your eyes would be drawn upwards and vanish into your hair, streaming backwards with the wind. It took a smack across the legs to make her come away from the window and sit quietly on the seat. The intoxication would last for quarter of an hour and then she’d be at it again, on the pretext that she felt travel sick. That’s how she would have liked to go through life, eyes closed, at the window of a train hurtling onwards, at the risk of getting her head torn off in a tunnel. They’d made do with shaving it.

  Yolande had thought Bernard had moved, but no, it was a rat, a big fat rat under the bedcover. She hadn’t missed that one, eliminating it with one blow from the dictionary, open at the page with the D’s: deride, derision, derisory, etc. Afterwards she’d dissected the animal with her little sewing scissors, ever so neatly. She’d cooked it in red wine like a rabbit, a rabbit the right size for her, a one-portion rabbit.

  She was alone in the world now, surrounded by miniature rabbits, rather like Alice in Wonderland. After dinner she would play the little horse game, while she dipped biscuits into a thimbleful of red wine. She would be both Bernard and Yolande. When she was Yolande she would cheat, of course.

  The dice was stuck on five. Besides the unseen presence of mice and rats, nothing moved. The pendant lamp went on shedding its forty watts of greyish light over the board with its tiny racecourse, now lying in ruins. Bernard had got angry with Yolande who was cheating shamelessly. In an instant, the little horses had gone flying to every corner of the table. Only one was left standing, a green one, on the square marked 7.

  Yolande wasn’t going to play with Bernard any more. She was asleep, chin on her chest, arms hanging by the sides of the chair and a mauve crocheted shawl round her shoulders. She had quickly tired of being Bernard and Yolande, switching from one side of the table to the other. After a short while she had lost track of who she was. Then she had played the part of Bernard in a rage, simply to have done with it.

  Bernard had gone off to his room in a sulk. Yolande would have liked to continue. She hated things coming to an end. She’d always been like that. She’d never wanted to get off a merry-go-round. Later on when she’d go out partying all night, she took badly to the first glimmerings of dawn. She’d get angry with the people who left her and went off to bed. When there was a cake she liked, she wouldn’t eat just one but ten, even if it made her sick. Nothing was ever supposed to stop.

  Every night she struggled against sleep. She lost every time, but one day she’d win. She would keep her eyes open, like statues. She might be covered in moss and pigeon droppings but she would not let her eyelids fall. Generations of dribbling old men and snivelling babies would pass by and she wouldn’t so much as blink.

  Seeing her like this, wound in her mauve shawl like a withered bouquet, you wouldn’t think she was made of some indestructible substance. Time had been on her side since birth. Yolande was the great witness. Let them go and get buried in their lousy cemeteries. Their marble slabs and plastic flowers would rot before she’d lost a single tooth. There was nothing they could do to her, and that’s what really got to them. She was like the sea, they could throw anything they wanted at her, even an atom bomb. Boom! it would go, and then the surface would grow perfectly smooth again as if nothing had happened. Scarcely a ripple. And when she’d had enough of everyone swarming around, then she would overflow, in wave upon wave from her statue body. In her sleep, Yolande parted her thighs and revelled in peeing where she sat.

  Yolande had awoken with a start, a silent cry filling her mouth. Something had smashed on the floor. Her bowl half full of red wine. Some creature going past, no doubt. They were everywhere. You couldn’t see them but they were there, nibbling, scrabbling, gnawing even the very shadows. She pushed the shards of her bowl under the table with the toe of her slipper. Her back hurt, the chair had been pressing into her ribs. It was a horrible day. Although it had barely begun, she could sense that from a thousand tiny details, her itching head, the cold in her bones, the way things all seemed to have moved imperceptibly from their usual places so her hand had to feel around for them. The matches that needed striking ten times before she could light the gas. Yolande set the water to boil because she had to start somewhere. She pressed up against the cooker, her hands cupped round the small blue flames. She felt stiff, as rigid as the chair on which she had spent the night. Her neck and knees cracked with every movement. The water took a day and an age to come to the boil. Yolande poured in half a jar of instant coffee, added four or five sugar lumps and filled a cup that was as stained as an old pipe. The first scalding mouthful made her cough. Then she busied herself, moving things about for no reason, just so that she wouldn’t be paralysed by the light filtering through the world’s arsehole. She made heaps, heaps of little horses, heaps of biscuit crumbs, heaps of little balls of paper, heaps upon heaps, stacked up the plates with leftover food congealed on them, donned coat upon coat, and put socks on over her slippers.

  She ran from one place to another, bumping into stacks of newspapers which collapsed in her wake, raising clouds of outdated information. Everywhere she felt hunted by the pale light creeping in like smoke through the gaps in the shutters, and the keyholes. All those gaps had to be plugged with scrunched-up pages of newspaper. On one of them the distressing photo of Maryse L. crumpled and disappeared in her hands. As she went to plug one last slit in a shutter, Yolande had time to see the Germans hiding on the other side of the street and a handful of Resistance fighters springing from one dustbin to the next. They no longer had enough space outside to fight their war, now they wanted to do it in her house. In her terror she found cracks in every corner, one there, another one here! The daylight was pressing with all its might against the walls. She didn’t have enough arms to battle against the pressure from outside. There was cracking and banging on all sides. It was so powerful and she was so fragile. She rushed into Bernard’s room. A troop of rats fled at her approach. She began to lay into her brother with her fists.

  ‘Bastard! How can you abandon me now?’

  Shaking with fury, she grabbed the cover from the bed, put it over her head and huddled down behind the door, arms wrapped tightly, so tightly round her knees, a mass of shivers. On the mattress the exposed corpse gave a toothy grin.

  It was past nine at night, yet the lights were still on in the café. This was the only light in the darkness bathing Place de la Gare. It looked like a fish tank filled with yellow oil, inside which Roland was darting about. He was going back and forth, giving things a wipe down with his cloth, a bullfighter’s cape without a bull; it was lovely and idiotic at the same time, as he was alone amid the tables and chairs. A car zoomed away from behind the premises. Jacqueline was at the wheel. She hadn’t even taken off her apron, just put on a big woollen jacket on top. Her hair was a mess, there was anxiety in her gestures. In the rear-view mirror she glanced at her swollen right eye.

  ‘Poor bastard!’

  She could no longer remember what had started it, something insignificant as usual, a few centimes out on a bill, a disagreement over what to watch on TV, a word in the wrong place. In recent months she and Roland had been sitting on a powder
keg, the tiniest spark was enough to blow it all sky high. That evening they’d reached the very end of the road. It wasn’t Féfé’s head Bernard should have put a bullet in, but that idiot’s.

  ‘Just take a look at yourself, with your big fat beer belly hanging out everywhere, your furred-up tongue and your bulging eyes. What a handsome footballer!’

  ‘You’re fed up with me! Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’ve got tits like floppy flannels and hair like a floorcloth. Even the most miserable migrant building the motorway wouldn’t be turned on by you. You’re ancient, old girl, you’re ugly, and you smell of dishwater.’

  ‘Maybe not to everyone.’

  ‘All right, you bring that Bernard here, then, the poofter, and I’ll get my own back on him. I may be the way I am, but at least I don’t rape young girls, kill women and murder kids!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m saying what I know. Young Maryse who’s never been found, the murdered woman on the building site, all that started at precisely the time Monsieur Bernard began prowling about the area.’

  ‘Oh poor Roland, you really should stop drinking, it’s sad …’

  ‘We’ll see about that. And what was your precious Bernard up to beside the warehouse when the kid got himself stabbed? I saw him! I was driving past and I saw him even if he did turn away when I slowed down. That’s taken the wind out of your sails, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You’re just talking nonsense.’

  ‘We’ll see who’s talking nonsense tomorrow when I go to the police.’

  ‘You’re not going to do that?’

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘Leave him alone. You know perfectly well he’s ill.’

  ‘Ill, my foot! He’s a dirty, rotten, deceitful murderer! Ill or not, he’ll pay for it, just like his trollop of a sister did, even if she did get off too lightly!’