where is it? Bloody hell!’
There it was, it was coming back to her now. The disused mine shaft, and the first hovels of this dump which might indeed be called ‘Bloody Hell’. Her right eye felt like a piping-hot fried egg stuck to her cheek. The only light in the windows she passed was from the bluish TV screens. One more right turn, all the way along, the very last house.
Others had sprung up in the meantime but it was easy to recognise, grey, unseeing, deaf. Jacqueline parked and switched off the engine. She hesitated then caught sight of Bernard’s Renault 5 squashed up against the gate like a fag end in an ashtray. A sliver of light came from the downstairs window.
A woman, even if she’s in her pinny and wearing a black eye, always tidies her hair in the rear-view mirror. The cold was nipping at her thighs, the points of her breasts. She ran across the road the way girls run, legs going out to the sides, holding her jacket closed across her chest with both hands. Even at fifty-five and counting, a woman is still a girl. She had to push open a rotting wooden gate with a letter box nailed to it: Yolande and Bernard BONNET.
The house seemed to hate her. She would be hard put to it to say in what way, why, and how it showed this, but it hated her. Its way of puffing out its walls as she approached, and swallowing her up in its covered doorway.
Jacqueline knocked three times, louder at each turn. All she got in reply was a dull thud as if the house wasn’t hollow inside, was without resonance.
‘Bernard! It’s me, Jacqueline! I’ve got to talk to you! Open up!’
The house retreated still further into itself. Jacqueline took a step backwards and flung a handful of gravel against the shutters. Nothing.
‘I know someone’s there. Yolande, open the door, it’s important!’
Despite the bedcover over Yolande’s head, the handful of gravel was like a volley of buckshot to her. Her head was still thrumming from the knocking at the door, which had dragged her from the sleep engulfing her, soft and black as soot. They were going to mount an attack, it was imminent. They would not pass by. All these years, one on top of the other, had made the walls of the house as thick as a blockhouse’s. Yolande stroked her hair. They wanted to take her back to the café, to do it all over again, that was why they’d sent Jacqueline. But Bernard had made her a promise, no one could get in, no one could see. It was like Switzerland here, the war would stay outside. To ward off ill fortune she sucked the ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow’ pendant. The gold didn’t taste of anything. It wasn’t worth the blood spilt for it. With a swift tug she snapped the chain and swallowed the pendant.
Jacqueline had found the key under the flowerpot. She was reluctant to use it. This house was out of bounds, but Roland would stop at nothing. He wouldn’t be sober again for a week, he’d be sprawling about at the police station. She didn’t believe a word of what he was saying of course, but Bernard was so weak. She wanted people to leave him in peace for what little time he had left. The key was rusty, it lay heavy in her hand like a weapon. She gave the door one last thump.
‘Bernard, Yolande, I’m begging you!’
The key grated, as if unwilling to do its job. Then the door opened.
It wasn’t the noise of the key in the lock that made Yolande jump but the icy draught, the breath of the outside. That shit Bernard had betrayed her. They were there! She could hear footsteps. In her head she was yelling, ‘Bastard, you bastard!’ She huddled still further into the corner of the room, wrapped in the bedcover, with only her eyes peeping out. She was no longer able to control the shivers rippling through her body from head to toe. Her right hand was looking for something, it didn’t matter what, as long as it could be used as a weapon. A Bic biro, a Cristal, with blue ink.
Jacqueline retched as she ventured into the hall, where an infernal stench leapt out at her like a wild cat.
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