She had boxes full. Before emptying out a new one she would plunge her hands into it, like a miser with his gold. Bernard had passed away at around one in the morning.
She had not been at his bedside. A kind of gap had opened in the silence while she was making vigorous cuts in the SNCF overcoat. She had gone into his room. He had the same over-earnest look as in his school photographs. A complete act, anything for a quiet life. It hadn’t mattered what anyone thought of him just as long as they left him in peace. His watch had stopped at eleven forty-five. He must have said to himself that his train was late. He’d been looking at his watch constantly in recent days. She’d wondered momentarily where she was going to put him, before telling herself he was in as good a place as any. As for the escalopes, that was scuppered, he wouldn’t be buying any more now.
The Big blue coat button family ran into the Mother-of-pearl shirt button family. ‘How are you today? Shall we go for a walk? Tip-tap-tip.’
Four days of Siberian chill. Nothing was moving on the plain, the cold took even the wind’s breath away. Work on the A26 site had been brought to a standstill. The silence was such that you could hear a frozen branch snap like a glass straw from a mile away. It no longer seemed like death even, more like the time before life, before life had even been thought of. Yolande spent hours face-to-face with the cooker, as rigid as the chair she was sitting on, chewing the inside of her cheeks. Four days, four years, four hundred years … And then the chap had rung the doorbell. When no one answered, he’d knocked several times. He took a few steps back and looked upwards. All the shutters were closed. He scribbled a quick note on his knee and slipped it under the door. Yolande was watching him through the world’s arsehole. She’d waited for him to disappear off in his little blue car before seizing on the note. ‘Hello Bernard! Down at the station we’re wondering how you are. Give us a ring or join us for a drink. See you soon, Simon.’
Yolande folded the note in two, then in four, in six, then eight, till it was no bigger than a pill and she swallowed it. Others would come. She would swallow them all. She’d swallow everything. That’s what she’d do. Everything could be eaten. The rats were eating Bernard, Yolande would eat the rats. With garden peas. She had loads of them. Bernard didn’t like them but he’d always got a tin when he did the week’s shopping. It was a tradition. There were sardines as well, plenty of them, and tomato sauce. She had all she needed, several times over. She had the wherewithal to live two lives here, two lives sheltered from others. She could do it all herself. She needed no one else. Music, for example, on that mandolin. She knew a tune: ‘Ramona … I’ll always remember the rambling rose you wore in your hair.’
‘Bugger off!’
The mandolin narrowly missed the rat running across the table. The echo of the instrument made ripples on the surface of the silence. Yolande closed her eyes. The same movement in the darkness inside her head.
‘Don’t lean out of the window, Yoyo, you’ll get your head torn off if we go through a tunnel.’ It would all be going so fast that it was impossible to open your eyes or even breathe. Now and then you’d get tiny smuts in your face. The tears in the corners of your eyes would be drawn upwards and vanish into your hair, streaming backwards with the wind. It took a smack across the legs to make her come away from the window and sit quietly on the seat. The intoxication would last for quarter of an hour and then she’d be at it again, on the pretext that she felt travel sick. That’s how she would have liked to go through life, eyes closed, at the window of a train hurtling onwards, at the risk of getting her head torn off in a tunnel. They’d made do with shaving it.
Yolande had thought Bernard had moved, but no, it was a rat, a big fat rat under the bedcover. She hadn’t missed that one, eliminating it with one blow from the dictionary, open at the page with the D’s: deride, derision, derisory, etc. Afterwards she’d dissected the animal with her little sewing scissors, ever so neatly. She’d cooked it in red wine like a rabbit, a rabbit the right size for her, a one-portion rabbit.
She was alone in the world now, surrounded by miniature rabbits, rather like Alice in Wonderland. After dinner she would play the little horse game, while she dipped biscuits into a thimbleful of red wine. She would be both Bernard and Yolande. When she was Yolande she would cheat, of course.
The dice was stuck on five. Besides the unseen presence of mice and rats, nothing moved. The pendant lamp still cast its forty watts of greyish light on the board with its tiny racecourse, now lying in ruins. Bernard had got angry with Yolande who was cheating shamelessly. In an instant, the little horses had gone flying to every corner of the table. Only one was left standing, a green one, on the square marked 7.
Yolande wasn’t going to play with Bernard any more. She was asleep, chin on her chest, arms hanging by the sides of the chair and a mauve crocheted shawl round her shoulders. She had quickly tired of being Bernard and Yolande, switching from one side of the table to the other. After a short while she had lost track of who she was. Then she had played the part of Bernard in a rage, simply to have done with it.
Bernard had gone off to his room in a sulk. Yolande would have liked to play on. She hated things coming to an end. She’d always been like that. She’d never wanted to get off a merry-go-round. Later on when she’d go out partying all night, she took badly to the first glimmerings of dawn. She’d get angry with the people who left her and went off to bed. When there was a biscuit she liked, she wouldn’t eat just one but ten, even if it made her sick. Nothing was ever supposed to stop.
Every night she struggled against sleep. She lost every time, but one day she’d win. She would keep her eyes open, like statues do. She might be covered in moss and pigeon droppings but she would not let her eyelids close. Generations of dribbling old men and snivelling babies would pass by and she wouldn’t so much as blink.
Seeing her like this, wound in her mauve shawl like a withered bouquet, you’d never know she was made of indestructible stuff. Time had been on her side since birth. Yolande was life’s great witness. Let them go and get buried in their lousy cemeteries. Their marble slabs and plastic flowers would rot before she’d lost a single tooth. There was nothing they could do to her, and that’s what really got to them. She was like the sea, they could throw anything they wanted at her, even an atom bomb. Boom! it would go, and then the surface would grow perfectly smooth again as if nothing had happened. Scarcely a ripple. And when she’d had enough of everyone swarming around, then she would overflow, in wave upon wave from her statue body. In her sleep, Yolande parted her thighs and revelled in peeing where she sat.
Yolande had awoken with a start, a silent cry filling her mouth. Something had smashed on the floor. Her bowl half full of red wine. Some creature going past, no doubt. They were everywhere. You couldn’t see them but they were there, nibbling, scrabbling, gnawing even the very shadows. She pushed the shards of her bowl under the table with the toe of her slipper. Her back hurt, the chair had been pressing into her ribs. It was a horrible day. Although it had barely begun, she could sense that from a thousand tiny details, her itching head, the cold in her bones, the way things all seemed to have moved imperceptibly from their usual places so her hand had to feel around for them. The matches that needed striking ten times before she could light the gas. Yolande set the water to boil because she had to start somewhere. She pressed up against the cooker, her hands cupped round the small blue flames. She felt stiff, as rigid as the chair on which she had spent the night. Her neck and knees cracked with every movement. The water took for ever to come to the boil. Yolande poured in half a jar of instant coffee, added four or five sugar lumps and filled a cup that was as stained as an old pipe. The first scalding mouthful made her cough. Then she busied herself, moving things about for no reason, just to avoid being paralysed by the light filtering through the world’s arsehole. She made heaps, heaps of little horses, heaps of biscuit crumbs, heaps of little balls of paper, heaps upon heaps, stacked up the plates with leftover food congealed on them, donned coat upon coat, and put socks on over her slippers.
She
