Under the Channel. Gilles Pétel

vacant. Up ahead, the English couple had finally settled down. She appeared to have gone to sleep, and he would most likely do the same once he finished the can of beer he was holding limply in his hand. His arm dangled over the armrest. Soundlessly flying through the night, the carriage was like a haven of peace, a happy parenthesis from the chaos of everyday life. John was struggling to keep his eyes open. He was sipping his third glass of champagne. He knew sleep would soon envelop him and was enjoying putting off the moment as long as he could. His mind was wandering. Ali meant nothing to him. He behaved like a spoilt child, and John was sick of it. With Erbil, it had been another story.

      Erbil was a young man, practically a boy, whom John had met back at the start of the summer, in early June. The encounter was to be a memorable one. Out on the pull in Soho, John had spotted a young, scruffy-looking guy lurking on the pavement opposite his regular hangout, The Duke of Edinburgh. The boy’s haunting features and deep, dark eyes caught John’s attention. There was a proud air about him, which made it difficult to watch him unnoticed. It was impossible to tell what kind of body he had, whether he was well built or not. When the boy’s piercing gaze fell on John, it hit him like a body blow. He had gone inside the pub as much to escape the guy’s unsettling presence as to get something to drink. Probably a rent boy, he thought to himself, sipping his first pint. That wasn’t the kind of fun John was seeking. When he came back outside, the guy he’d had his eye on had gone. In spite of himself, John felt a pang of disappointment. Nevertheless, he brushed himself off and moved on to another bar. It wasn’t until several hours later, when he was leaving a nightclub, that John caught sight of the boy again. Once again he was leaning against a wall like a cat on the prowl. Over the course of the night, John had repeatedly flirted and been flirted with, but he had moved on at the end of every dance. He left the club alone, worn out but still buzzing. Without a second’s thought, he made a beeline for the boy he took to be a gigolo and offered him a cigarette as a conversation starter. The rest of the night was vivid in his memory. He had taken the young man home, washed him, fed him, given him too much to drink. Having got the boy half-cut, John had forced himself on him twice in succession, more carried away than he had been for ages. As he now replayed the images of that night, how he had entered the boy despite his protests, playing with his flimsy, drowsy body as though turning a matchbox over and over in his hands, kissing him full on the lips and grabbing the back of his neck to pull him closer, how he had finally made the boy come as he struggled against sleep – vivid, unshakeable images all the more violent for their fixation on the same few objects, the same parts of the body he had more or less raped (as he eventually admitted to himself a few days later, when he had ceased to act like an old rutting male); as he sank into this sexual reverie, rocked by the motion of the train, John was faced with the realisation that, three months down the line, he still felt the same burning desire to embrace that flesh.

      His name was Erbil, or so he said. He came from Iraq and had entered England illegally, stowed away inside the fuel tank of an articulated lorry. He had paid top dollar for the privilege of this ‘seat’, and almost suffocated en route. But he had made it. He had succeeded, as he repeated often, beaming with childlike pride. Fate had been on his side. The lorry had got through the tunnel without being stopped. A few miles on, the driver had taken Erbil out of his hiding place and left him on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It was a beautiful day. Erbil saw England for the first time with the sun shining. He walked for a long time before hitching a lift with a couple from Brighton who were wise enough not to ask questions.

      ‘So what now?’ John had asked, torn between admiration and concern. Erbil dodged the question. They had gone on seeing one another almost every night for two weeks. Erbil would wait for John outside his flat in his habitual prowling cat pose. John would take him to dinner in a local trattoria; the kid was always starving. Having raced to finish their meal, they would head back to John’s place and roll on top of one another, each desperate to rip the other’s clothes off.

      ‘Or was it only me who was mad about him?’ wondered John. ‘Maybe I projected my own feelings onto him. All I can say for sure is that I’d lost it.’

      Several times John had tried to dig up more detail on his new lover’s life, but Erbil was always evasive. He lived in north London with relatives – sometimes cousins, sometimes an uncle, it was a different story every time – worked all over the place, did odd jobs. One evening, John put his foot down and demanded to know his address, but the answer he squeezed out of Erbil was vague. It was somewhere near Arnos Grove, not far from Woodside Park. Erbil knew how to get there but not the exact address. John had flown into a rage and kicked him out.

      The train was speeding along and all its passengers appeared to be asleep. ‘After that, I stopped seeing him. And stopped thinking about him.’ A few days after his outburst, John had consulted a map of Iraq, for fun, perhaps, or out of curiosity or nostalgia. Basra, Baghdad. Looking northwards, the name of a city made him sit up: Erbil. The little bastard had palmed him off with the name of some town. Everything else he had told John was probably a lie too. Erbil – John couldn’t think what else to call him – claimed to have celebrated his eighteenth birthday soon after his arrival on British soil. It had suited John to believe him. He had no desire to be picked up by the police consorting with a minor, and an illegal immigrant at that. Yet when he stroked the boy’s delicate skin, he knew perfectly well the kid could be no older than seventeen. Leaning his head against the window, John now thought it quite possible that Erbil had been under sixteen when he met him. He really was a kid. ‘What could I have turned him into?’

      The bottle of champagne had been empty for some time and the sandwich consumed without John even registering the fact. He had celebrated his forty-fifth birthday that August in Ibiza, accompanied by two guys he had met in London shortly beforehand. They had lived it up for a fortnight – eating out, going to clubs, having flings. Forty-five already, John thought to himself, sitting up straighter in his seat. He felt so old. He took out one of the two cans of beer he had stuffed into the pocket of the seat in front of him. He had just begun to sip it when the train slowed right down and lurched to a sudden halt. The fluorescent lights flickered and went out, plunging the carriage into darkness. A breakdown. This really wasn’t John’s day. He could hear raised voices around him. His fellow passengers were complaining about the lights. A Frenchman a few rows ahead cried foul. John’s beer had gone warm. He put the can down on the tray and stretched out his legs. Now was the perfect time for a nap. John was exhausted. Suddenly he felt something pass around his neck.

      ‘Fuck!’ he barely had time to shout.

       2

      Juliette was laying the table for dinner. It had just gone eight o’clock and Roland was late, as usual. The children, Ludivine and Corentin, were watching a cartoon. It was the only thing Juliette could find to keep them quiet. The last few days’ stormy weather and heavy atmosphere had been driving them up the wall. Wafts of the beef bourguignon bubbling on the stove were coming from the kitchen. It was a dish that could easily be reheated, she had told herself as she shopped, already anticipating that her husband would be held up at work. She had gone to buy the ingredients on her way home from the special school where she taught French. She liked her job, in spite of its challenges. While she waited in line at the butcher’s, the sound of a police siren had taken her back ten years, to when she first met Roland.

      It was chance that had thrown them together. Juliette was living in the tenth arrondissement at the time. One night, she had returned from the opera to find her flat had been burgled. Shock quickly gave way to panic and fear. She called the police, who told her to come and make a statement the following day or later in the week. Instead, she set off immediately, leaving the door to her flat wide open and falling off its hinges. She practically ran to the police station and arrived in a state of disarray, it having dawned on her en route that another thief might seize the opportunity to steal what little she had left: two pairs of jeans, three dresses and the bag she took to school. She was twenty-five and just starting out in her career. A junior officer took her into a small glass-walled room. It was past midnight and the man’s tiredness was showing. He began tapping out Juliette’s statement on an old typewriter in a perfunctory manner. Having expressed her surprise at the antiquated equipment