Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  Fifteen minutes, compared with everything else, a quarter of an hour of compassion for my childhood, which was completely destroyed right here, dashed against these rocks which couldn’t give a shit, which have forgotten everything and will still be here in a thousand years’ time. Fifteen minutes of a life, is that really too much to ask?

  They allowed her ten.

  ‘Can we go, Papa?’ Valou pleaded once more.

  Franck nodded and the girl walked towards the Passat, her flip-flops clacking against the tarmac, her eyes searching every corner of the road three bends up the hill, as if searching for any trace of life amid this rocky desert.

  Franck turned towards Clotilde. The voice of reason, as always.

  ‘I know, Clo. I know. But you’ve got to understand Valou. She didn’t know your parents. I didn’t either. They died twenty-seven years ago. They had been gone for almost ten years when we met, almost fifteen when Valou was born. As far as she’s concerned they’re …’ He hesitated and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘They … they aren’t part of her life.’

  Clotilde didn’t reply.

  In fact, she would have preferred for Franck to keep his trap shut and at least allow her those last five minutes of silence.

  Now everything was ruined. Slipping into her head came the mean comparison with Mamy Jeanne and Papa André, Franck’s parents, who they visited one weekend out of four, at whose home Valou had spent every Wednesday until she was ten, and where she still sought refuge if her parents refused to indulge one of her whims.

  ‘She’s too young to understand, Clo.’

  Too young …

  Yet Clotilde nodded to indicate that she agreed.

  That she was listening to Franck. As she always did. As she often did. Less and less.

  That she was adhering to his ready-made solutions.

  Franck lowered his eyes and walked towards the Passat.

  Clotilde didn’t move. Not yet.

  Too young …

  They had weighed up the pros and cons a hundred times.

  Was it better to say nothing, not to involve her daughter in this old business of the accident? Just to keep it to herself? It wouldn’t have been a problem; she was used to chewing over her own disappointment.

  But on the other hand there was shrink-speak, women’s magazines, friends who dished out good advice. A modern mother had to be open with her children, spread out the family secrets on the table, explode all the taboos. Unwrap everything, without questioning it.

  You see, Valou, when I was your age, I had a very serious accident. Put yourself in my place for a second. Imagine that all three of us were in a crash, and that Papa and I were killed and you were left on your own.

  Just think about that, my girl … Maybe that will help you understand who your mother is. Why she has done everything she can to ensure that life slides over her without her ever getting wet.

  If that is of any interest to you …

  Clotilde stared one last time at the bay of La Revellata, the three little bunches of wild thyme, and then went to join her family.

  Franck was already sitting behind the wheel. He had turned off the car radio. Valentine had lowered her window all the way down and was fanning herself with the Guide du routard. Clotilde lightly ruffled her daughter’s hair, and she groaned. Then she forced herself to laugh brightly and climbed into the car beside her husband.

  The seats were scorching.

  Clotilde smiled apologetically at Franck; her conciliatory mask, the one she had inherited from Nicolas. It was the only thing she had left of her brother. Along with his anvil heart and that rake he used to gather together unsatisfactory love affairs.

  They set off. Clotilde rested a hand on Franck’s knee. Right by the hem of his shorts.

  The Passat rolled along gently between the sea and the mountain, with the sun at its zenith; the colours seemed almost too intense, saturated, like a landscape on an old postcard.

  A dream holiday, on a panoramic screen.

  Everything had been forgotten already. The wind would blow away the bunches of thyme before the night was over.

  Don’t turn back, Clotilde thought to herself. Move forward.

  Force yourself to love life; force yourself to love life.

  She lowered the window, allowing the breeze to blow through her long black hair, the sun to caress her bare legs.

  Thinking the way they do in magazines, like her best friends, like people selling happiness in ten easy lessons.

  Happiness is simple, you just have to believe in it!

  That’s what holidays are for, the cloudless sky, the sea, the sun.

  To make you believe in it.

  To fill the tank with illusions to last the rest of the year.

  *

  Clotilde’s hand climbed a little higher up Franck’s thigh as she leaned her head back, offering her throat to the too-blue sky, like an artificial backdrop. A screen. A curtain put up by a lying God.

  Franck shivered and Clotilde closed her eyes. On automatic. Disconnecting her fingers from her thoughts.

  Holidays do that too.

  Tanned skin, naked bodies, hot nights.

  Maintaining the illusion of desire.

  3

  Monday, 7 August 1989, the first day of the holidays

  Summer-blue sky

  Hi, I’m Clotilde.

  I’m introducing myself just to be polite, even if you can’t be polite back because I don’t know who you are, whoever it is reading this.

  That will be in a few years’ time, if I manage to hang on. Everything I write is Top Secret. Totally embargoed. Whoever you are, you’ve been warned! Besides, O my reader, in spite of all my precautions, I don’t know who you might be?

  My lover, the one I have chosen for the rest of my life, the one to whom – quivering on the morning after my first time – I will entrust the diary of my teenage years?

  Some idiot who has just found it, because being the total disaster I am, that was bound to happen?

  One of the thousands of fans who will rush to get their hands on this masterpiece by the latest literary genius (i.e. me!!!)?

  Or me … But an older me, in fifteen years’ time … Or even incredibly old, in thirty years. I’ve found this old diary at the back of a drawer and I’m reading it as if it were a time machine. Or a mirror that made me young again.

  But how will I ever know? So, when in doubt, I write at random, not knowing whose hands this notebook will fall into, or whose eyes will read it.

  You have lovely eyes, I hope, beautiful hands, a beautiful heart, my future reader? You won’t disappoint me, will you? Promise?

  *

  Shall I start with a few words about myself, so you can get to know me? Because we’re going to have quite a bit of time to find out about each other.

  So, Clotilde. Three points:

  Point 1. My age. Already getting on … Fifteen. Wow, that makes me feel dizzy!

  Point 2. My height. Still small … One metre forty-eight, enough to make me feel blue.

  Point 3. My look. Death warmed up, according to my mum. The effect I’m going for isn’t complicated, I want to look like Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. If you can’t picture her straight away, my reader on the planet Mars, then don’t panic: I’m going to bore you to death with Lydia Deetz at least one line out of three in this notebook, given that I’m a total fan of hers. In brief, she’s the coolest teenager in the world with her Gothic black lace, her spiky hair, her big panda eyes … and she talks to ghosts! I should add, handsome stranger, that she’s played by Winona Ryder, who isn’t yet eighteen but is the most beautiful actress in the world. I wanted to take all the posters from my room so I could hang them back up here, in our holiday bungalow, but Maman vetoed me sticking drawing pins in the partition walls.

  Yes, OK, fine, dear reader. I know I’m rambling on a bit. So let me get back to the first day of the holidays … The big adventure of the Idrissi family of Tourny in Papa’s red
Renault Fuego. Tourny, just so you know, is in the Vexin region, a beetroot-growing plain stuck between Normandy and Paris with a ridiculous river, the Epte, which, according to local sages, has caused more wars and led to more deaths than the Rhine. We live just north of it, in the middle of some tiny little hills that locals have christened the ‘Vexin Bossu’ – humpbacked Vexin. You couldn’t make it up!

  Anyway, for a long time I thought about how I was going to write about our grand departure for Corsica: piling up the luggage in the boot in the middle of the night, the endless journey from Normandy, sitting in the back with Nico, who can spend ten hours looking out at the cars, the trees and the road signs without ever seeming to get bored. The tunnel under Mont-Blanc and the ritual meal of quiche and salad in Chamonix, the journey down into Italy because, as Papa says, Genoa isn’t that much further than Nice, Toulon or Marseille, but the Italians never go on strike. Yes, I could have described all of that in detail but I’m not going to. It’s a narrative choice, dear intergalactic reader of mine. That’s just how it is!

  Instead I’m going to concentrate on the ferry.

  A person who has never taken a ferry to an island can’t really know what the first day of the holidays is.

  I swear it, on Lydia Deetz!

  It’s a trial by four elements.

  Water, first of all.

  The giant yellow-and-white ferry with the giant Moor’s Head – the symbol of Corsica – is magnificent at first sight. But when it opens its great mouth it isn’t so much fun.

  At least, for Papa it isn’t. And I can understand that driving for ten hours just to be yelled at when you get there by a gang of over-excited Italians might get on your nerves.

  Destra!

  Sinistra!

  Italians shouting and waving their arms about as if Papa were taking his first driving lesson.

  Avanti Avanti Avanti!

  Papa manoeuvring the car among dozens of other terrified drivers, with their trailers and their jet-skis on the roof, their convertible sports cars with the surfboard sticking out, their Renault Espaces crammed to the gills with rubber rings and lilos and towels piled so high they can’t see anything through the mirror.

  Avvicina avvicina!

  The lorries, the cars, the camper vans, the motorbikes. But everything fits in! Always. To the centimetre. That’s the first miracle of the holidays.

  Stop stop stop!

  When they were little, I imagine these Italians on the ferry were experts at things that locked together. So for them, getting three thousand cars onto a boat in less than an hour is just a giant game of Lego.

  An Italian smiles and raises his thumb.

  Perfetto!

  Papa’s Fuego is one of the three thousand pieces of this game. He opens his door, trying not to scratch the Corsa to his left, and sucks in his stomach to make his way over to us.

  Earth, next.

  The real change happens between the moment when you take off your things and lie down in your cabin, and when you get up four or five hours later; it’s a bit like a snake sloughing off its skin.

  Often I’m the first to put on my flip-flops, a pair of shorts, a Van Halen T-shirt, dark sunglasses and emerge out on deck.

  Terra! Terra!

  Everyone stands by the railings to admire the coast, from the Biguglia lagoon to Cap Corse. The sun is starting to fire its laser beams at anything that moves out of the shadows, and I slip down the corridors of the boat, sniffing unfamiliar smells. I step over a large groggy-looking guy with fair hair who is lying in the corridor on his rucksack. He’s so hot! The girl attached to him is still asleep, her back bare, her mane tousled, one hand under the Swedish guy’s open shirt.

  One day I’ll be the bare-backed girl. And I too will have an unshaven backpacker for a mattress, with blond hair on his chest to act as my comfort blanket.

  Life, you aren’t going to disappoint me, are you?

  For now I’ll settle for the salty air of the Mediterranean. Leaning against the railings, all one metre forty of me.

  Breathing in freedom on the tips of my toes.

  Fire, alas.

  Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your vehicles.

  The fires of hell!

  In fact, dear reader on the edge of the galaxy, I think hell must be quite like the hold of a ferry. It’s at least a hundred and fifty degrees down there, and yet people jostle each other on the stairs, rushing to get there. As if all the dead people in the world were filing into the innards of a seething volcano. Subway to hell!

  There’s a clanking of chains and the screech of metal; the Italians are back and they’re the only ones dressed in trousers and jackets, the only ones not sweating when all the holidaymakers wearing skimpy clothes are already dripping wet, mopping our faces.

  We stay there, in that oven, for an eternity – perhaps we’re all stuck because some clever-clogs parked by the door hasn’t woken up yet. The person who turned up last the previous evening. Maybe that blond Swedish guy, annoying us all so much that I already adore him and want someone just like him when I’m older.

  The Italians look like demons, all they lack is some whips. It was a trap, we’re all going to die here in the carbon monoxide, because some idiot has turned on his engine and everyone else has now done the same even though not a single car is moving.

  And then the door of the ferry begins to fall with a loud metallic clang. A drawbridge coming down.

  The army of the living dead escapes towards paradise.

  Freedom!

  Air, at last.

  The tradition, in the Idrissi family, is to have breakfast on the terrace under the palm trees, in the Place Saint-Nicolas opposite the Port of Bastia.

  Papa orders us the full continental: croissants, fresh fruit juice, chestnut spread. Suddenly we feel like a family. Even me, looking like a Goth hedgehog. Even Nico, who spun a globe before we left and pointed his finger at random, to find out which language the girl he was going to go out with at the campsite would speak.

  Yes, a family, for twenty-one days, three weeks, in paradise.

  Maman, Papa, Nicolas.

  And me.

  I will mostly talk about me in this diary, I’d rather warn you about that right from the beginning!

  Will you excuse me? I’m going to put on my swimming costume.

  I’ll see you again soon, my reader in the stars.

  * * *

  He gently closed the diary.

  Puzzled.

  He hadn’t opened it in years.

  He was worried.

  She had come back …

  Twenty-seven years later.

  Why?

  It was obvious. She’d come back to stir up the past. To scratch. To dig. To look for what she had left behind. In another life.

  He’d prepared for this. For years.

  Without ever managing to answer this question. How far down would she want to dig? To which level of the sewers would she want to descend? How far along the foul tunnels of the Idrissi family secrets would she want to venture?

  4

  12 August 2016, 10 p.m.

  ‘My father didn’t turn the wheel.’

  Clotilde had set down her book and was sitting on the chair, her bare feet and her red toenails digging into the mixture of sand, soil and grass. The lamp hanging from the olive branch above the green plastic furniture made the darkness sway. They had an area of fifteen metres by ten at their disposal, set slightly apart from the others, slightly shaded, to compensate for the absence of nearby washing facilities and the ridiculous size of the rented bungalow, even though it was supposed to be for three adults. We live outside here, Miss Idrissi, the boss of the Euproctes campsite had assured her obsequiously when she had booked the site the previous winter. Clearly Cervone Spinello hadn’t changed.

  ‘What?’ said Franck.

  He was balanced awkwardly and didn’t bother turning around. He had spread out a newspaper on the back seat so that he could put his bare feet on it; hi
s left hand was gripping one of the bars on top of the Passat while his right struggled to unscrew a bolt on the roof box.

  ‘My father,’ Clotilde went on. When we got to the corner at Petra Coda, he didn’t turn the wheel. That’s my very clear memory of it. A long straight line, a tight bend, and my father drives straight at the wooden barriers.

  Only Franck’s neck turned. His hand went on blindly unscrewing the bolt with the wrench.

  ‘What do you mean, Clo? What are you implying?’

  Clotilde took a moment to reply. She was studying Franck. The first thing her husband always did on the evening of the first day of the holidays was remove the roofbox and the rack from the car. He would justify his eagerness with a whole list of perfectly rational arguments – increased petrol consumption, wind resistance, the feet of the roofrack marking the bodywork. Clotilde saw it as giving them one more bit of clutter to stash away in their holiday patch. And basically it wasn’t even that. She didn’t give a damn about the roofbox that had to be taken down, put away, covered up. She thought the whole thing was genuinely idiotic. Boring yourself half to death taking out all the little screws one by one and putting them in little bags with little numbers corresponding to the little holes.

  At such times, Valou wasn’t about to play the role of peacemaker. Their teenager had already set off to explore the campsite, assess the average age of the holiday-makers and take an inventory of their nationalities.

  ‘Never mind, Franck. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know.’

  Clotilde replied in a slightly weary voice. Franck had switched holes and was grumbling about the idiot who had screwed on the bolts too tightly.

  That was him, yesterday.

  Franck’s sense of humour.

  Clotilde leaned forward and flicked through the pages of her book, A Climate of Fear, the latest Vargas. It occurred to her that A Nice Cool Climate of Fear would have been a better title for a summer best-seller.