White Lies. Dexter Petley

like this’ meant: we must get proper firewood. I still thought we were brave and authentic in letting ourselves slip down the evolutionary scale. From benefits to hunter-gatherers and, by that winter, scavengers. By nightfall on our last few days together, the cold was dangerous, minus sixteen. Our firewood pile was scrap from dumps, hedgerows and collapsed buildings. It had nails, rusty iron hinges, staples and barbed wire in it. It was frozen now and weighed twice what it should. It snapped the teeth off our chainsaw so we couldn’t cut it to size for the stove. Instead, we made an inferno in the open fireplace, pulled up our stolen armchairs and cooked on trivets and cauldrons.

      So I had no appetite for buying food at Leclerc that day. My trolley looked like the one parked near the exits, the one with the cardboard sign tied on with string: Red Cross, give a tin to the poor. Gone were the falafals and yoghurt, the corn pone bread and salads of marriage. In came the tins of sauerkraut, cheap blended wine in consigned litre bottles, tinned fish and tinned peas. I scooped up two bags of potato chips big as coal sacks.

      I turned into the yard at midnight, expecting just a smashed window and some paltry disarray, but Le Haut Bois had been ransacked. It was like the house had regurgitated the previous hundred and fifty years, turned all the treasure it once contained back into rubbish. It looked just like it had the day we’d moved in, Juliette Macé’s sick-house, the windowsill rotting beside her bed, rats gnawing on the floorboards, mouldy black slug trails across the plaster and that sweet, deathly cloying dry decomposure.