Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

      Bernard parked on the verge. A car hooted as it went by. The lower part of the sky was turquoise with a tinge of gold right at the top.

      ‘OK, well, thanks a lot anyway.’

      ‘What’s your name?’

      ‘Vanessa.’

      ‘Goodbye, Vanessa. Very nice to have met you.’

      Vanessa, the motorcyclist, Jacqueline, all of them in the rear-view mirror, in one small piece of mirror which saw things back to front. A life wasn’t very much, not much at all. Giving, taking away. It was so easy. Sometimes death spares people.

      Yolande was making pancakes, dozens of them, building them up into an enormous stack. There were enough to feed at least fifty. It was her only way of combating the successive waves of ‘outside’ which had been beating against the walls of the house non-stop since the morning. For almost two hours now she had been busy, frying pan in hand at the stove. To begin with, she had counted them, as people count sheep to fall asleep, but then it had become mechanical, like breathing: a ladle of batter, turn the pan, wait, toss the pancake, wait, put it on the pile, a ladle of batter, turn the pan … They were like the skin of faces, faces she could put names to: Lyse, Fernand, Camille … She saw them go past one after the other, the way they used to lean over her cradle, gigantic, stinking of beer or cheap perfume, and belching out their slobbering coochie-coos, disgusting. Even then she had hated them, was nothing to do with them. She had only had to look at her father’s face or her mother’s belly to know for certain that she did not come from ‘that’. Each time she tossed a pancake bubbling with dark craters, she said, ‘Nice one.’

      An hour after Bernard had gone out, the clock-radio in his room had come on by itself: ‘Stock market news now, and all week the CAC 40 has been on a continual Yolande had jumped in her chair. She had been in the middle of copying a map of France, concentrating, tongue sticking out, on making a good job of the shades of blue along the coast with a coloured pencil.

      ‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’

      She had taken the poker from where it hung on the handle of the stove and burst into Bernard’s room, brandishing it aloft. The metallic voice coming from the small plastic box by the unmade bed had metamorphosed into an unbearable loud rasping with the first blow of the poker. But the creature was not dead and Yolande had had to finish it off with her heel to silence it for good. It had been some time before her nerves recovered and she was able to pick up her pencil again to draw the outline of Finistère.

      The ‘nose of France’ was so hard to manage, with all the little ins and outs of the coastline from Saint-Brieuc to Vannes. She had always got ten out of ten for her maps; they would be pinned up in the classroom they were so beautiful. For that she’d needed to sharpen her coloured pencils really well and wet their points with spit. It was Brittany Yolande took the greatest pains over, because of the holidays. There were cousins in Pénerf, a little village near Vannes. Yolande used to have a thin frock in embroidered muslin from St Gallen, with tulle trim at the shoulders and waist, and a sky-blue straw cloche hat. But most of the time she would be in her bathing suit, barefoot, spattered with sand up to her knees. Every day, crowds of workers would pour out of excursion trains for their first visit to the seaside. Only the villa residents held themselves aloof from this display of overwhelming joy. It seemed as if the holidays would never end, like the Paradise they learnt about at First Communion classes. Yolande had a constant humming in her head. Perhaps it was from pressing seashells to her ear, or maybe the water from all the swimming. Yannick had white-blond hair, dry as straw. They would have play fights with sticky seaweed, and, squealing wildly, feel for each other with outstretched arms, under cover of the foam. That was the first time she had kissed using her tongue. For everything it was the first time.

      A thudding at the door had ripped through the iridescent haze of her holidays at Pénerf. Her pencil point had snapped clean off on the south of Brittany. Yolande had pressed her eye up to the world’s arsehole; two women, one stout and the other small, were rummaging in the letter box. They had waited, while Yolande held her breath. She had rumbled them, they were Boches disguised as French. Unless they were the girls from the Resistance done up to look like Boches … You could never tell, there was no difference. Either way, playing dead was the thing if you wanted to stay alive. The two women had taken a step back and then moved off. Yolande had waited for a long time before retrieving the piece of paper from the letter box: ‘Do you know the Bible?’ Yolande hadn’t read to the end of the text because it was obviously written in code, the proof being that it was signed ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses’. What a bunch of losers! There would never be witnesses at her trial, because there would never be a trial. Bernard had promised her that. But they kept on trying all the same; they needed guilty people, even guilty people who were innocent, to fuel their morbid obsession with stamping out clandestine goings-on. That being so, she had to be on her guard; they would be back, they always were. That was her day shot to pieces. The only way to ward off the misfortune was to make pancakes, pancakes and more pancakes.

      ‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Bonnet. We are all …’ His boss had searched for the appropriate word – ‘Mortal? Alike?’ – but held back, from embarrassment, perhaps, or fear. ‘OK. Have some rest and come back to us soon.’

      Right, that was sorted, indefinite sick leave. It seemed just like any other day, however. Bernard felt no worse than the day before. Decidedly better in fact. The two days after Serge’s First Communion had been a veritable agony: vomiting, migraines, an intense feeling of malaise. Then, on making this decision, a sort of respite. ‘It’s a question of attitude, Monsieur Bonnet,’ Machon said. Perhaps he was right; they were mysterious, the body and the mind. Of those two days spent at the mercy of Yolande’s whims and the vagaries of his physical condition, all he had left was ‘room’ in his life, ‘room’ like in a garment which is too big. Someone who knew about such things had once told him you shouldn’t be able to see any light between two good dancers. His dancing days were over, and that was that, except with Yolande, of course, for the light had never been visible between them. As for his boss and his colleagues, he knew he wouldn’t be seeing them again. It was no sadder than casting off an old pair of slippers. In taking leave, he had married death, and death fitted him like a glove. Sorrow came from denial – that was why life had so often made him suffer. Now he would say ‘yes’ to everything, good and bad, sunshine and grey skies alike; this November afternoon it was the latter.

      Sitting behind the wheel of his car in the station car park, he felt desperately free. Doubtless this was how someone felt on the first day of unemployment: ‘I could go here, or there, do nothing, go home and be bored stiff, go mad …’ The excess of freedom knocked him sideways. Maybe he should start collecting stamps, or keep pigeons like the retired men in these parts? Or build model ships? It was too much, too …

      An urgent rapping on the window made him jump. Roland’s face, squashed up against the glass, looked strangely distorted, like a portrait by Bacon, streaming with rain.

      ‘Bernard, help me! Féfé’s just been run over by a lorry.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Féfé, my gun dog. Let me in.’

      A smell of frying came off Roland as he got in beside Bernard. His eyes were glassy from tears and the rain. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

      Bernard let him drum his fingers on the dashboard.

      ‘He’s one of a kind, that dog!’

      ‘Calm down. What’s going on?’

      ‘My parents just phoned. I left Féfé with them for the weekend. I told them to keep him tied up! He always goes chasing after lorries!’

      ‘Is he dead?’

      ‘If only! I have to go and finish him off. I’m not brave enough. I saw you getting into your car and thought you …’

      ‘I’d what?’

      ‘Well … that you’d be able to … Don’t make me do this on my own.’

      Roland