The Islanders: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir. Pascal Garnier

on her knees, drummed their fingertips. Her hands had a life of their own; they had no need of her. Only Rodolphe needed her, but she needed no one, not Rodolphe, not her hands. Just cigarettes, that was all. She wasn’t unhappy exactly, but she wasn’t happy either.

      She was Jeanne, an indestructible block of Jeanne apparently able to last for ever, standing flawlessly alone, her military demeanour no doubt inherited from her father, Colonel Mangin, who had fallen in battle somewhere on the other side of the world. She was twelve when he was killed, and his death made no impact on her. All through her childhood, the man with a constant tan and a crew cut had only hung around long enough to bark a few brief orders before disappearing again once he was satisfied they had been obeyed. One morning, two gendarmes came to the door. Her mother went pale reading the letter. The twins, Xavier and Denis, her eighteen-year-old big brothers, held their mother up and told Jeanne to go and look after Rodolphe. The only thing left of all this was a yellowed photo showing the hard-edged soldier smiling in front of a tank with sand dunes in the distance, in a fake lizard-skin frame in Rodolphe’s bedroom.

      ‘Look after your brother!’

      She had heard the same thing again and again throughout her childhood, a kind of refrain which was put on pause when the fuss happened and resumed fifteen years later, after boarding school, after the École normale, when her mother and the twins perished in a car accident on the way to Saint-Cyr military academy. She felt nothing then either. Neither the wizened vine stock of a mother nor her two idiot sons with skulls moulded by their army-issue kepis had left any kind of hole in her life.

      Propelled by some instinct, she left her job as an English teacher in Melun and came back to Versailles to look after Rodolphe, who was stubbornly refusing to take responsibility for himself. They sold the flat in Le Chesnay and moved close to Gare Rive Gauche, more convenient for getting to Viroflay where she had found work at a private school. She was thirty at the time; she would be forty at the beginning of February, an age when one might wish at last to stand alone in the world. Now there was only emptiness to fill her up.

      Everything had begun to go tits up the day he was born, much as it had for the scrawny Christ dying of boredom in the empty church of Notre-Dame de Versailles. Waking him around seven o’clock that morning, the priest had given Roland a bowl of coffee and a limp tartine, which he wolfed down, and then asked him to stay put and pray. He would be back with warm clothes, perhaps even a bit of money, but after that Roland really would have to leave. He was still young, he had so much to look forward to, he could build himself a proper life like other people, but he must do it somewhere else. He just had to roll up his sleeves and … Roland did not listen to the rest of this off-the-cuff sermon. The words tinkled under the rib vaults like ice cubes in the bottom of a glass. The priest just wanted to get rid of him. Preparations were afoot for midnight mass and there was no role for him in the Nativity. The scene was coloured khaki, grey, black and brown, with a few hopeful glimmers of gold here and there.

      Roland thought the frescos and sculptures representing hell were a hundred times more appealing than the pale, cold depictions of heaven. He had no time for either of them anyway. The only thing he was interested in was how much cash the priest was going to give him. A hundred? He was also wondering what the podgy cherubs flitting above his head would taste like, spit-roasted like suckling pigs. The morning’s lukewarm coffee and soggy bread had filled a hole but left him unsatisfied. Did people imagine the poor could not tell the difference between a shitty tartine and a choucroute garnie, between a tatty old jumper and a cashmere sweater?

      After leaving the station the previous night, he had headed to the church of Notre-Dame on Rue de la Paroisse, which was of course shut. God keeps set hours, after all. He skirted the building before hunkering down outside the presbytery door. It was a good place to die. The road was as empty as a dieting secretary’s fridge. He scrunched himself up like a letter destined for the bin – ‘Dear God, it has come to my attention …’ – and waited for the cold to set in. His brain shrank to a compact block with a vague image of his eight-year-old self suspended in the middle, like those lumps of resin with insects trapped inside that people use as paperweights. Then the priest arrived, red-faced, wrapped up in a bulky sheepskin coat and a woolly hat, his arms laden with packages.

      ‘What are you doing here, my child?’

      Through frozen lips, Roland stuttered something like, ‘I’m dying, Monsieur, I’m dying …’

      The priest looked around, as if caught doing something he shouldn’t.

      ‘This isn’t really the place for it … I mean …’

      What he meant was that it wasn’t proper, that it would attract vermin, that sort of thing. He was clearly uncomfortable with the situation, but what else could he do?

      ‘Help me carry all this into the sacristy.’

      ‘Can’t, M’sieur, can’t move.’

      The priest muttered something that sounded awfully like a profanity, put down his packages and opened the door.

      ‘Come, my child. Come in.’

      Roland slowly followed him inside. The warmth melted him. It was green and smelt of incense and old cardboard, like Aunt Margot’s house in Rouen.

      ‘Sit yourself down. I’ll make you a coffee.’

      Why the obsession with giving coffee to the poor, the drowned, the suicides …

      The priest asked him if he was Christian, if he had read the Bible, in short, if his papers were in order. Roland said yes to everything, nodding his head like an ass for convenience. All he wanted was to lie down and go to sleep – for ever, if possible.

      ‘Right, OK, well, you can stay the night, but that’s all. Theoretically …’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Tomorrow I’ll give you some addresses, some names of people who can help you.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You’re lucky I came by with my … Can I trust you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Good. Well, good night then.’

      ‘Yes.’

      There is such a thing as a full ‘yes’, like full nudity. The night was full too, dreamless, heavy, leaden, like nights of old.

      Someone entered the church. The sound of footsteps preceded by a tap-tap. Someone with a stick.

       The Islanders

      That old fossil Madeleine was right. The burial could not take place before the 27th; the undertaker had just told him so. The dead just kept coming and the ground was rock-hard.

      ‘What if we had her cremated?’

      ‘Monsieur! We must respect the deceased’s last wishes. Your mother had planned for everything.’

      ‘Except dying at Christmas. So there’s nothing we can do?’

      ‘I’m afraid not.’

      However careful the undertaker was to disguise his true feelings, Olivier was sure that he too took him for an ungrateful child. He followed the man to the coffin in which his mother lay, as woefully small and insignificant in death as she had been in life, clothed in a violet dress and plastered in ridiculous make-up with a fixed smile, a fungal tangle of white hair on her scalp and bony hands crossed over her belly as though trying to abort herself.

      He went straight from the undertaker’s to the train station to check the timetable. He was prepared to leave and come back again two days later, anything to avoid hanging around in this shithole. There was an unusual amount of kerfuffle, people gesticulating at ticket counters or spinning disoriented on the spot like mechanical toys. He was told there were no trains running on any of the main lines because of the icy conditions, and he had no chance of catching a plane either.

      ‘So