The A26 (8 page)

‘Yes, yes. I’m coming, but I can’t come like this. I’ve got to do my make-up first.’

Jean-Claude was a sales rep in ladies’ lingerie. He had just laid the wife of an unemployed man, after getting her to sign an order worth 1,500 francs. He was happy. He was on his way home to Douai. At the side of the road, his headlamps picked out a woman’s outline, a blonde, Harlow-esque. He slowed down and drew up alongside. Second helpings, maybe?

‘Can I do anything for you?’

The face which appeared in his wound-down window left him open-mouthed: the McDonald’s clown, with far too much rouge, false eyelashes and a layer of cracking plaster all over the cheeks.

‘Darling?’

‘No, nothing, thanks.’

Jean-Claude sped off. He was to be involved in an accident three kilometres further on as he joined the motorway. The last thing he saw in this life would be the leering after-image of Yolande on his retina.

Outside, it was like being on the inside of a wall. All that darkness, on every side. Yolande never grew tired, she could go on walking for hours. In the house, she had given the rooms names, the five-step room, the three-step room and so on, but here you could go on walking until the end of time. You didn’t feel the cold when walking. You would need always to be underway. The far-off was so intoxicating. No matter where you were going, you always got there. One, two, one, two …Walking, that’s what mattered. There were those hiking songs:
‘Un kilomètre à pied, ça use, ça use …’
That wasn’t true, it didn’t wear you out, not even your toes. It was the getting there that
did the wearing. Yolande wasn’t going to get there, ever. On leaving the house, she’d turned right, taking the road that she’d used to take to the village. It was the same, and yet not the same. There were loads of different houses which hadn’t been there before, ugly, pointed bungalows with dogs howling at the gate. Often, coming home from a dance, she’d taken this road. There hadn’t been all those rakes on the roofs. What did they want to go raking the sky for? To grow what? The fields hadn’t changed much, with their rabbits, eyes red from the headlamps, and that fine smell of fertiliser. The soil was good, it made you want to lie down in it like a trusty old bed when you’re tired.

Kneeling on the verge, Yolande grasped handfuls of earth, smearing it on her face.

She got the same pleasure from it as when she buried her nose in a hunk of freshly baked bread. She flung handfuls skywards, calling out, ‘Again! Again!’

At the edge of a wood, a fox watched her go on her way singing at the top of her voice, ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood …’

The Café de la Gare still had its lights on. Roland was asleep at a table, his head on his arms and his hunting rifle leaning on the moleskin seat. He was having a dream about hunting. He had killed all the animals in the forest and was continuing his destruction with the trees, but they were refusing to fall down. Soon he would have run out of cartridges and there were still so many trees …

Yolande’s path could lead nowhere else. There was only one and it led inexorably to Place de la Gare. Everything had changed: the shops, most of the houses, the lines of
certain streets, arresting advertising photographs in which naked girls who looked like her cavorted, new streetlights looking like strings of sorrowful moons along the paths. And yet nothing had changed. The same familiar ennui covered the house fronts, cocooning the threadbare dreams of those who were asleep behind. The three kilometres she’d covered had given her a momentum which no force on earth could stop. She wasn’t going anywhere, she was simply on her way, she could cross walls, rivers, slag heaps, time itself. The end of the night was always further off, receding with every step she took. Each of her steps pushed the horizon further away. A cat sprang from one pavement to the other. He had mistaken her for a car, she was going so fast, eyes scouring the darkness for any signs of the past. It was still there, its lines faintly visible beneath the badly applied transparent layer of the present.

‘Bastards! They’re trying to make me believe …Well, I don’t believe anything and I never have.’

The remains of shouts, of taunts still hung from the leafless branches of trees: ‘Slut! Whore! Give your arse to a Boche, would you? Shave her head!’ They were like the tatters of burst balloons. She had never been frightened. She’d known she’d be back one day, one day which would be like a night. She went by, waving like the Queen of England.

Set in the darkness, the Café de la Gare shone like a cheap piece of costume jewellery in a La Redoute catalogue. It was cheap, bargain basement even. Yolande pushed the door, perfectly naturally. It opened, unleashing a half-hearted chime. The man slumped over the table hadn’t
reacted at all. He was snoring. The glass in front of him shuddered every time he breathed. Yolande blinked, the neon lighting was oppressive, boring into her retina. There was too much electricity in this new world, electricity everywhere, as soon as she touched the edge of a table or the back of a chair. Current, current like during a storm, blue-green zigzags snaking all around her. This world had no place for her. She wasn’t electric. She didn’t have little lights to come on all over like that pinball machine which flashed ‘Game over!’ This world was a Christmas, and she wasn’t invited. She no longer understood, everything had changed, the murals had turned into enormous photographs, undergrowth in which she couldn’t keep track of herself. She would have liked to go home, shut herself up and no longer see. She had no reference points, even the teaspoon lying on the counter wasn’t like the one she knew. She felt hemmed in by a crowd of objects whose uses she didn’t know. Only the man flat out at the table resembled something she might have been familiar with. Timidly she went and huddled up against him, propping the rifle between her knees. The chap groaned, and shifted the shoulder with Yolande’s head resting on it.

‘… don’t, Jacqueline … Jacque— Shit! What the hell???’

Roland had started up.

‘But…Who are you? What the hell are you doing here?’

‘André?’

‘I’m not André!’

He rubbed his eyes. The person speaking to him, who thought he was his father, didn’t have a real face, but
rather a mush of chalk and redcurrant juice brightened by two mint-green eyes.

‘What do you want with me?’

‘André??? Why haven’t you got old like all the others?’

‘I’m not André, I’m Roland …’

Before he had time to say anything else, Yolande was on her feet again, pointing the gun in his face.

‘Why aren’t you dead, you fat bastard? Everyone else dies – why not you?’

‘You’re mistaken, I’m Roland. André was my father.’

Yolande cocked the gun.

‘You’re an idiot, André, you always were.’

‘Don’t do that! Yolande, you’re Yolande!’

At the front the bullet didn’t do too much damage. It was at the back that it all burst out, sending a shower of brain and bone all over the undergrowth. On the shelves, the bottles had shrunk closer. Not a table or a chair so much as breathed. Silence had possessed the scene once more.

All of a sudden Yolande felt very weary. Her shoulder still trembled from the kick of the rifle. She flopped down on to a chair across from what was left of Roland.

‘It’s a cold world out there and I’m going to make sure they know it.’

Exhausted, Yolande went to sleep.

“You’ve only been here for a few days but you already know loads of people. You walk into people’s lives, just like that.”

Gabriel is a stranger in a small Breton town.

Nobody knows where he came from or why he’s here. Yet his small acts of kindness, and exceptional cooking, quickly earn him acceptance from the locals.

His new friends grow fond of Gabriel, who seems as reserved and benign as the toy panda he wins at the funfair.

But unlike Gabriel, the fluffy toy is not haunted by his past…

ISBN 978-1-9060-4042-0
£6.99 paperback

Death is Simon’s business. And now the ageing vermin exterminator is preparing to die.

But he still has one last job down on the coast and he needs a driver.

Bernard is twenty-one. He can drive and he’s never seen the sea. He can’t pass up the chance to chauffeur for Simon, whatever his mother may say.

As the unlikely pair set off on their journey, Bernard soon finds that Simon’s definition of vermin is broader than he’d expected…

Veering from the hilarious to the horrific, this offbeat story from master stylist, Pascal Garnier, is at heart an affecting study of human frailty.

ISBN 978-1-9083-1303-4
£6.99 paperback

To be published Autumn 2013

Given the choice, Martial would not have moved to
Les
Conviviales
. But Odette loved the idea of a brand-new retirement village in the south of France.

So that was that.

At first it feels like a terrible mistake: they’re the only residents and it’s raining non-stop. Then three neighbours arrive, the sun comes out, and life becomes far more interesting and agreeable.

Until, that is, some gypsies set up camp just outside their gated community…

ISBN 978-1-9083-1349-2
£6.99 paperback

Pascal Garnier
Pascal Garnier was born in Paris in 1949. The prize-winning author of over sixty books, he remains a leading figure in contemporary French literature, in the tradition of Georges Simenon. He died in 2010.

Melanie Florence
Melanie Florence teaches at The University of Oxford and translates from the French.