may not seem like it but I respect you. Look, if you want to, you can have her right here and now, before my very eyes, and I won’t say a thing. Scout’s honour.’
‘You’re talking rubbish, Roland. You’re drunk.’
‘Not at all! You’ll see. Jacqueline! Hey, Jacqueline!’
‘What’s the matter with you? You must be out of your mind, yelling like that!’
‘He won’t believe I respect him! Do your business, you two, and I won’t so much as raise my little finger. Go on!’
‘You must be mad! There are children present!’
‘So, there’s children. They’ve got to learn the facts of life, haven’t they? Like on the farm, the pigs with the sows, and the mares with the … I don’t know what, but that’s nature’s way, isn’t it, shit!’
‘Be quiet! It’s you who’s the pig – clear off, you’re ruining it all.’
The music had stopped, and so had the dancers. Some of them were sniggering behind their hands, others rolled their eyes. Only Serge, whose Communion they were celebrating, still moved around between them on his brand-new Rollerblades.
‘I’ve got to go, Jacqueline.’
‘No, you don’t, that’s stupid.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not because of him, I’m just tired. I was leaving anyway. Say goodbye to Serge from me.’
Out in the car park Bernard rubbed his eyes. The red sphere of the setting sun was pulsing on his retina.
Someone knocked on the window.
‘Hello. Which direction are you going?’
The girl was made up like someone from a silent film, hair all over the place, black and red, like a kid disguised as a witch.
‘Towards Arras, but I’m turning off in six kilometres.’
‘That’ll still be a help. Could you give me a lift?’
‘If you like.’
She was wearing such a lot of heavy perfume, she needn’t have bothered getting dressed.
‘On Sundays, the buses … Is it all right if I smoke?’
‘Of course.’
The girl lit a cigarette. The smoke lingered above their heads. They weren’t saying anything. Bernard was driving slowly. The sky took on streaks of purple and mauve.
‘It’s pretty. All this silence does you good.’
‘Yes, it’s like staring into a fire in the grate.’
‘Wasn’t there a war here?’
‘That’s right. The Great War and the other one. It’s taken a while for it to look alive again.’
‘Do you remember the war?’
‘Just a little. I was young then.’
‘All our lives we’ve heard people talking about it on TV, all over the world, but we can’t really take it in. We’re not quite sure it exists. It’s like fairytale monsters, and ogres and death. We know it exists but we don’t believe in it. We doubt everything, even ourselves. We’re never quite sure we’re not in a video game.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘No, you just have to get used to it. I spotted you just now during the shouting match. You were different from the others. Me too. I’d come with a mate of the boyfriend of … well, whatever, it’s a shame, he was cute. You look so sad … it’s nice.’
‘I’m not sad.’
‘You look it.’
The sound the girl’s stockings made as she crossed her legs caused him to jerk the wheel. But he was very swiftly back in control. She had noticed. He could just imagine the smile on her face as she crushed her cigarette end in the ashtray.
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m going to drop you off here.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Bernard parked on the verge. A car hooted as it went by. The lower part of the sky was turquoise with a tinge of gold right at the top.
‘OK, well, thanks a lot anyway.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Vanessa.’
‘Goodbye, Vanessa. Very nice to have met you.’
Vanessa, the motorcyclist, Jacqueline, all of them in the rear-view mirror, in one small piece of mirror which saw things back to front. A life wasn’t very much, not much at all. Giving, taking away. It was so easy. Sometimes death spares people.
Yolande was making pancakes, dozens of them, building them up into an enormous stack. There were enough to feed at least fifty. It was her only way of combating the successive waves of ‘outside’ which had been beating against the walls of the house non-stop since the morning. For almost two hours now she had been busy, frying pan in hand at the stove. To begin with, she had counted them, as people count sheep to fall asleep, but then it had become mechanical, like breathing: a ladle of batter, turn the pan, wait, toss the pancake, wait, put it on the pile, a ladle of batter, turn the pan … They were like the skin of faces, faces she could put names to: Lyse, Fernand, Camille … She saw them go past one after the other, the way they used to lean over her cradle, gigantic, stinking of beer or cheap perfume, and belching out their slobbering coochie-coos, disgusting. Even then she had hated them, was nothing to do with them. She had only had to look at her father’s face or her mother’s belly to know for certain that she did not come from ‘that’. Each time she tossed a pancake bubbling with dark craters, she said, ‘Nice one.’
An hour after Bernard had gone out, the clock-radio in his room had come on by itself: ‘Stock market news now, and all week the CAC 40 has been on a continual Yolande had jumped in her chair. She had been in the middle of copying a map of France, concentrating, tongue sticking out, on making a good job of the shades of blue along the coast with a coloured pencil.
‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’
She had taken the poker from where it hung on the handle of the stove and burst into Bernard’s room, brandishing it aloft. The metallic voice coming from the small plastic box by the unmade bed had metamorphosed into an unbearable loud rasping with the first blow of the poker. But the creature was not dead and Yolande had had to finish it off with her heel to silence it for good. It had been some time before her nerves recovered and she was able to pick up her pencil again to draw the outline of Finistère.
The ‘nose of France’ was so hard to manage, with all the little ins and outs of the coastline from Saint-Brieuc to Vannes. She had always got ten out of ten for her maps; they would be pinned up in the classroom they
