started interfering in our lives. They think they can make certain adjustments to our lives.’
Dieter wants to interrupt. His mouth points in her direction and his lips purse several times, backed by an index finger describing the path of a powerful insect.
‘We don’t know that,’ he says eventually.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ says Alphonse.
They thank him, somewhat startled by the abrupt ending and slightly dismayed at how much they’ve divulged, but they haven’t told him the whole story yet.
Before he steps into the hall, he sees them, floating on a flying carpet above the garden wall: two thirteen-year-old girls, flinging their smiling faces forward and back.
He catches another glimpse of the girls through the window in the rear wall of the neighbours’ house before he’s led to an armchair. His clients sit in two separate chairs to his left, each with one leg thrown over the other. They’re slightly shorter and rounder than Els and Dieter. Between him and the couple, bubbles tinkle in the glass of tonic they’ve put on the coffee table for him. At his feet pants a small, attentive dog of an indeterminate breed. When Alphonse picks up the glass and puts it to his mouth, the animal seems to hold its breath.
‘Where are you from?’ the woman wants to know.
‘From Brussels,’ he says. ‘I’ve been living here for almost nine months now.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the woman enunciates. ‘But where are you really from?’
‘From Brussels, he said, didn’t he?’ Her husband stands up nervously. ‘Would you like an olive, Mr, er?’ he asks. ‘Cheese?’
‘No, thank you. And just call me Alphonse.’
‘We’re Sieglinde and Ronny. I’ll go and get some anyway,’ says the woman after her husband has sat down again. She goes to the kitchen, which is walled off from the living room. It sounds as if she’s emptying all the cupboards.
‘How did you get on next door?’ the man asks. He’s obviously trying to make the question sound neutral.
‘I think I’ll be finished there by tomorrow evening.’
‘Didn’t she say anything, Els, when she heard you were coming to see us?’ Sieglinde lays out little bowls of olives and cheese, putting cocktail sticks and a napkin holder beside them.
Alphonse isn’t immediately sure how to answer. ‘It seemed to interest them,’ he says.
Ronny sniffs. ‘No doubt!’ exclaims Sieglinde. ‘She’s crazy, Alfredo.’
They’re more forthright than he was expecting.
‘Alphonse,’ Ronny corrects her before he can.
‘Sorry. For years she’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that we’re copying them. We could say the same about them, but we don’t, because we’re still in command of our faculties.’
‘It all came out one evening, at a party,’ Ronny goes on. ‘A party right here in our house, actually. They were our guests. First they sulked in a corner for some reason or other … ’
‘Well. She did.’
‘Then they had too much to drink as usual and suddenly it was “another coincidence” that we had a dark-blue Peugeot. It’s not even the same model! And over there, didn’t that chandelier seem familiar to them, and that shrub at the bottom of the garden and I don’t know what else.’
‘Well, okay, but the idea that we brought Lana into the world purely because they’d just had a baby. Tell me, Albert, who would ever think that way?’
‘Alphonse.’
‘Pardon me. Who would think that way? I was in my late twenties. Everyone around us was having their first baby then. I was four months gone before I realized she was pregnant too. But no, we were copying them. How full of yourself do you have to be to think something like that is even within the bounds of possibility?’
While speaking, Sieglinde and Ronny have stood up to perform an angular dance that for Ronny now ends with a punch to his thigh and in Sieglinde’s case is still ebbing away in one index finger, which taps the centre of her forehead like a woodpecker’s beak.
Alphonse settles into the backrest of the chair. When a confession starts as energetically as this, it usually lasts a while.
‘If it’d stopped there, well … But no, no, it gets even more absurd.’ Sieglinde is now bending down onto the coffee table like a she-ape, weight on her fists, buttocks in the air, nostrils wide, like her eyes, magnified by her glasses. ‘Did she say anything about her pussy?’
Alphonse has to give the question time to sink in. ‘It’s dead, I believe?’
‘She said a bit more about it than that, I’ll bet. Her story is that we killed their cat.’
‘Yes, and the reason why is even more interesting. We killed it because our own cat was run over and because they think we think they did it—we, incidentally, don’t ask ourselves who was responsible, we assume it was an accident—and that’s why we, eye for an eye … ’
‘Cat for a cat!’
‘ … killed their pet—get this—by impaling it with a dart! A dart from a blowpipe! We shot a poisoned dart at it!’
‘Because that’s what we’re like, Alphonse! That’s the kind of thing we get up to!’
‘Alphonse,’ says Ronny.
‘That’s what I said.’
For the bedroom ceilings he recommends Balanced Mood, from the Colores del Mundo collection. They agree that the pale bluish-green he slides out of the colour swatch will do perfectly.
On his way home Alphonse crosses wide fields on narrow roads. The low sun gilds the stalks of tall grain and an indefinable longing. No one else knows that in the mornings, still brittle and directionless after the embrace of sleep, he rarely listens to music because he finds the immediacy of it almost impossible to bear. Now he puts on the radio and when he looks up there’s an oncoming vehicle, making no attempt to slow down. He drives right up to the edge of a maize field and stops the car to listen.
Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’, in a version by Dizzy Gillespie. He knows every note. Camels trek through the desert, but the trumpet sets fountains playing. The water flows over his shoulders, down his back. That strange violin solo, too. When the track finishes, he turns off the radio.
He eats the remains of yesterday’s pasta. Does it seem peaceful or merely quiet without Cat? He hopes the yoga retreat has given her what she expected from it, even if he doesn’t quite know what that was.
She’s not answering her phone. He needs to return Amadou’s call. Why does he keep putting that off? His friend getting in touch again after all these years made him so happy he immediately invited him to come and stay for a short holiday, bringing his new girlfriend with him. In a large part of his memory, Amadou walks at his side. There’s no reason to avoid him now.
Or
