Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  To the friends of our teenage years that we keep all our lives

  Time is a Killer

  MICHEL BUSSI

  Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Map

  Chapter 1

  I: Revellata

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  II: Saint Rose’s Day

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  III: Sempre giovanu

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Twenty-seven years later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Michel Bussi

  More on W&N

  Copyright

  1

  Arcanu Farm, 23 August 1989

  ‘Clo? Clo?’

  Clotilde slowly slipped the headphones from her ears. Irritated. The voice of Manu Chao and the horns of La Mano Negra crackled in the silence of the hot stones, barely louder than the crickets thrumming behind the walls of the farmyard.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We’re off …’

  Clotilde sighed but didn’t move from the bench where she was sitting – a tree-trunk split in two that grated against her buttocks. She didn’t care. She liked the relaxed position, just short of provocative, the stones that cut into her back beneath her cotton dress, the bark and the sharp bits of wood that scratched her thighs every time her leg beat out the rhythm of the horns. With her notebook on her knees, her biro between her fingers. Curled up in a ball. Elsewhere. Free. In total contrast to her father’s family – stiff, Corsican, corseted. She turned the volume up.

  These musicians were gods! Clotilde closed her eyes, opened her lips, she would give anything to be teleported to the front row of a Mano Negro concert, to be three years older, thirty centimetres taller and three bust sizes larger just for the duration of the lightning visit. To jiggle around good, big breasts beneath a sweat-drenched black T-shirt, under the noses of the spaced-out guitarists.

  She opened her eyes. Nicolas was still standing in front of her, looking extremely annoyed.

  ‘Clo, everyone’s waiting for you. Papa isn’t going to …’

  Nicolas was eighteen, three years older than she was. In years to come, her brother would become a lawyer. Or a union representative. Or a negotiator in one of the police’s special units, the kind of guy who would parley with criminals holed up in a bank, getting the hostages out one by one. Nicolas was like an anvil, absorbing the blows, taking it all on the chin. It must have given him the illusion that he was tougher than everyone else, more sensible, more trustworthy. Which would probably serve him well for the rest of his life.

  Clotilde looked away and for a moment studied the twin moons off the Revellata Peninsula, one sunk into the water, the other suspended in the dark sky; they looked like two fugitives pursued by the lighthouse on the peninsula, the first one quivering, the second one startled. She wanted to close her eyes again. It was really so easy to teleport yourself to another planet.

  Coordinate your eyelids.

  One, two, three … then curtain!

  But no, she had to keep them open, take advantage of the last few minutes, write everything down in the notebook on her knees before her dream flew away. Etch the words on to the white page. It was a matter of urgency. The utmost urgency.

  My dream takes place right near here, but a long way off in the future, on Oscelluccia beach. I recognise the cliffs, the sand, the shape of the bay, they’re always the same. But not me, I’ve turned into an old woman. A grandma!

  It took her how long? Only two minutes? The time for Clotilde to write another ten lines or so, and for ‘Rock Island Line’ to play. La Mano Negra’s songs weren’t very long.

  Her father took it as a provocation, but it wasn’t meant as one. Not this time. He seized her by the arm.

  Clotilde felt her headphones sliding off, the right earpiece getting tangled in a tuft of her gelled black hair. Her pen fell to the dusty ground. The notebook would remain on the bench until she had time to grab it, slip it into her bag or at least hide it.

  ‘Papa, you’re hurting me, shit …’

  Her father didn’t say anything. He was calm. Cold. Smooth. As usual … A fragment of an ice floe lost in the Mediterranean.

  ‘Get a move on, Clotilde. We’re going to Prezzuna. Everyone’s waiting for you.’

  Her father’s hairy hand gripped her wrist. Tugged it. Her bare thigh stung as it scraped along the wooden bench. Her only hope was that Mamy Lisabetta, her grandmother, would pick up her notebook and put it with the rest of her belongings, which were scattered at random around the farm, without opening it, without reading it. She would give it back to her tomorrow. She could trust Mamy.

  Only her …

  Her father dragged her along for a few metres, then pushed her in front of him, the way you let go of the hand of a baby who’s started to walk on its own, always staying a few steps behind, arms outstretched like pincers. In the courtyard of the sheepfold, around the large table, the entire holy family was watching her, faces frozen like wax dummies, the wine bottles now empty, the bouquets of yellow roses fading. Her grandfather Papé Cassanu, Mamy Lisabetta, the whole tribe … Like a tableau from the Grévin wax museum. The Corsican pavilion. Napoleon’s unknown cousins.

  Clotilde had to force herself not to burst out laughing.

  Her father would never have raised a hand to her, but there were still five days of holiday left. She couldn’t afford to push her luck if she didn’t want to see her Walkman, her headphones and her cassettes being chucked off the Revellata Peninsula into the sea, if she wanted to get her notebook back, if she wanted to see Natale again and maybe bump into Orophin, Idril and their baby dolphins, if she wanted to have the freedom to spy on Nicolas and Maria-Chjara’s gang …

  She got the message. Clotilde trotted over to the Fuego without dragging her feet. So, change of plan, we’re off to Prezzuna? OK, she would go along like a good girl and listen to the concert of polyphonic music in that chapel hidden away in the maquis, with her father, Maman, and Nicolas. She cou
ld sacrifice one evening, that was doable. Leaving her self-respect behind, that was a much more bitter pill to swallow.

  She could just see Papé Cassanu getting up, staring at Papa and Papa nodding to tell him that everything was all right. Papé’s expression frightened her. Well, even more than usual.

  The Fuego was parked down below, along the track that led down towards the Revellata. Maman and Nicolas were already sitting in the car. Nicolas shifted over to make room for her on the back seat, giving her a small complicit smile this time. He was also pissed off about this concert in the church out in the middle of the maquis, this obsession of their father’s.

  Even more than she was, in fact; much more than she was. But Nicolas was very good at not letting his feelings show. In years to come, after he’d got his licence as a qualified anvil, he might even become President of the Republic. Like Mitterrand, he would learn to put up with everything for seven years without flinching, and hold his nose to be re-elected … just for the sheer pleasure of being punched in the face for another seven years.

  Papa was driving fast, as he often did since he’d bought his red Fuego. As he often did, when he was annoyed. A silent rage. From time to time Maman rested her hand on his knee, on his fingers when he exceeded the speed limit. He was the only one who wanted to go and listen to this bloody concert. His head must have been buzzing, his ungrateful kids, his wife who always ran to defend them, his roots here on this island that nobody cared about, their culture, their name and the respect that was due to it, his tolerance, his patience; ‘for once, just for one evening, is that too much to ask, damn it?’

  They sped around the bends. Clotilde put her headphones back on. She was always a little scared on the Corsican roads, even during the daylight, when they encountered a coach or a camper van; the cliff roads on this island were crazy. She thought that at the speed at which her father was driving – whether it was to calm his nerves, or to avoid being late, or because he wanted to sit in the front row – if they came across a goat, or a boar, or any kind of animal roaming about, it would all be over …

  *

  There was no animal. Or at least Clotilde didn’t see one. And no one ever found the slightest trace of one either. Even if that was one of the hypotheses suggested by the police.

  It was a tight curve at the end of a long straight section, past Revellata; a bend high above a twenty-metre ravine. A pile of fallen rocks called Petra Coda.

  During the day, the viewpoint was dizzying.

  The Fuego crashed into the wooden barrier at full speed.

  The three planks separating the road from the precipice did all they could. They twisted under the impact of the crash; they burst the two headlights of the Fuego; they scraped the bumper.

  Before yielding.

  They barely slowed the car down at all. It continued in a straight line, like a cartoon, the hero running out into the void, then stopping, looking down at his feet in astonishment … then panic as he plummets like a stone.

  Clotilde felt all those things. The Fuego losing contact with the earth. The real world disappearing beneath her. Like a flaw in logic, something that could not happen, not really, not to them, not to her.

  She thought those things for a fraction of a second, before reality exploded, and the Fuego hit the rocks for the first time, before bouncing twice.

  Her father’s ribcage and head exploded against the steering wheel when the car crashed vertically against the rocks. Her mother was crushed during the second somersault, by a rock that smashed through the door. With the third, the roof was torn open above them, like a steel jaw.

  The final impact.

  The Fuego stopped there, balanced uneasily ten metres above the tranquil sea.

  Then silence.

  Nicolas was still sitting beside her. Back straight. Drenched in blood.

  He would never become president; never become even a staff representative in some stupid factory. Nipped in the bud. Not like an anvil; more like an eggshell, the cartilage of a sparrow in the maw of a monster. His puppet body demolished by a roof which had exploded like a star.

  His eyelids shut. Somewhere else, for ever.

  One, two, three. Curtain.

  Strangely, Clotilde didn’t hurt anywhere. The police later explained that the three somersaults had caused three points of impact, one per passenger. Like a killer who had only three bullets in his magazine.

  She barely weighed forty kilos. She slipped through the broken glass without even feeling the shards as they lacerated her arms, her legs, her dress. She crawled a few metres away from the Fuego as a reflex, leaving red marks on the slippery stones.

  She went no further than that. She just sat down and stared at the mixture of blood and petrol dripping from the bodies and the metal, the brains spilling from their skulls. It was there that the police, then the firemen, then the dozens of other emergency workers found her about twenty minutes later.

  Clotilde had a broken wrist, three cracked ribs, and a scraped knee … Nothing.

  A miracle.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ an elderly doctor confirmed, leaning towards her in the blue halo of the spinning lights.

  Nothing.

  Exactly!

  That was what she was left with now.

  Papa, Maman and Nicolas’s bodies were wrapped up in large white bin-bags. Men walked around the red rocks, heads lowered, as if they were searching for other bits of them scattered about.

  ‘You have to live,’ a young policeman had said, settling a silver survival blanket around her shoulders. ‘You have to live for them. So you don’t forget them.’

  She had looked at him as if he were an idiot, as if he were a priest talking about heaven. But he was right. Even the very worst memories are forgotten in the end, if you pile other ones on top of them, lots of other memories. Even the ones that have been etched on your heart, the ones that have left scars on your brain, even the most private ones. Particularly the most private ones.

  Because no one else cares about those.

  Twenty-seven years later …

  I

  Revellata

  2

  12 August 2016

  ‘This is it.’

  Clotilde placed her little bunch of wild thyme beside the iron barrier. She had asked Franck to stop a few bends back along the road, so she could pick the mauve flowers from among the gorse that grew between the rocks of Petra Coda.

  Enough for three people.

  Franck did the same now, without taking his eyes off the road for a minute. The Passat was parked to one side, the hazard lights flashing.

  Valentine was the last to stoop down, clearly reluctant, as if bending all one metre seventy of her was an unreasonable demand to make.

  They all stood there, facing the twenty-metre drop. The roiling sea hurled itself at the red boulders, filling the fissures in the rocks with brown microalgae, like liver spots on old wrinkled skin.

  Clotilde turned towards her daughter. At fifteen, Valentine was already a good fifteen centimetres taller than her. She was wearing a pair of jeans cut off above the knee and a House of Cards T-shirt. Not exactly ideal for visiting a mausoleum, leaving a bunch of flowers and respecting a minute’s silence.

  Clotilde let it go. Her voice softened.

  ‘It was here, Valentine. It was here that your Grandpa and Grandma died. And your Uncle Nicolas as well.’

  Valentine’s gaze was looking off into the distance, at a jet-ski leaping the waves off the Revellata Peninsula. Franck, leaning on the barrier, kept squinting between the ravine and the Passat’s hazard lights.

  Time stretched, as if lengthened by the heatwave. The sun liquefied the seconds in slow drops. A car passed them in a halo of heat. A driver, naked to the waist, looked out at them with surprised eyes.

  Clotilde hadn’t been back here since the summer of 1989.

  But she had thought of this place thousands of times, had thought of this precise moment. What she would say, what s
he would think, when faced with this gaping void. The memories that would come rushing back to her. How to present the pilgrimage. As a sign of respect. A way of sharing something.

  And here they were, messing the whole thing up for her!

  Clotilde had imagined an act of communion, a few delicate questions, an emotion shared with Franck and Valentine. Together, united. But here they stood, pressed against the barrier beneath the blazing sun, as if the Passat had had a flat tyre and they were getting bored waiting for the tow truck, lowering their eyes towards their watches or raising them to the sky; looking anywhere at all but those blood-coloured volcanic rocks.

  Clotilde urged her daughter on.

  ‘Your grandfather’s name was Paul. Your grandmother’s name was Palma.’

  ‘I know that, Maman …’

  Thanks, Valentine! That was cool of you.

  Her daughter had said the phrase ‘I know’ in the long, drawn-out way that was her standard response to her mother’s habitual requests.

  Tidy your clothes away. Turn off your phone. Shift yourself.

  Her usual minimal effort at being conciliatory …

  I know, Maman …

  OK, Valou, Clotilde thought. OK, it isn’t the most fun part of the holiday. OK, I’m doing your head in with an accident that happened almost thirty years ago. But also, fuck it, Valou, I have waited fifteen years to bring you here! I’ve waited for you to grow up, so that you’re old enough to understand. So I didn’t ruin your life with it prematurely.

  The jet-ski had disappeared. Or been caught by a wave and sunk.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Valentine asked.

  Without even the minimal effort this time. Not even trying to hide her boredom under an affected mask of melancholy.

  ‘No!’

  Clotilde had raised her voice. For the first time Franck took his eyes off the Passat that was winking at him like an obsessive flirt.

  No! Clotilde repeated in her head. For fifteen years I’ve been taking the brunt of it all, for fifteen years I’ve been defusing the bomb, my girl. For twenty years I’ve been playing the cool woman, Franckie boy, the one who never complains, the one with the broad grin, the crazy lady, the funny girl, the one who’s great in a crisis, the one who puts the bits back together, the one who’s reassuring, the one who keeps a steady course, who holds the steering wheel of everyday life, singing to make the journey seem shorter. And what have I asked for in return? Fifteen minutes! Just fifteen minutes of your fortnight’s holiday! Fifteen minutes of your fifteen years of life, my girl! Fifteen minutes of our twenty years of love, my darling!