‘Uh … yes. I won’t be home late.’
‘Do as you like, mate. You’re free as a bird.’
I’m in a sort of cafeteria, a self-service – Formica and fluorescent lighting, people with trays. I’ve been waiting a long time, I’m annoyed. The man comes and sits at my table. I don’t know him, but I know that it’s him. I know that I hate him. He says something like ‘You know what you have to do?’ or maybe ‘You have to do it.’ It’s hard to hear what he’s saying over the clatter of cutlery. He suddenly gets up and runs across the room, knocking into people and overturning chairs as he goes. I hurry to chase him. Someone exclaims, ‘What’s got into those two?’ Outside I see him take the street on the left. He must be a hundred metres in front of me. He runs fast. I can barely keep up with him. The town is unfamiliar; it might be a port because everything is covered in a thick layer of salt which the sun has started to melt in places. The streets are busy. Perhaps there’s a fête. The pavement is terribly slippery because of the melting salt and it’s difficult to get through the sometimes dense crowds. It might take me the rest of my life, but I’ll catch him. He must feel my determination; he’s giving it everything he’s got. I see him knock into a bin, fall, roll and pick himself up again with incredible agility. Even so, I’ve gained a few metres on him. Merciless, I elbow or kick aside whatever’s in my way - invalid, pram, cat or dog. The blood is pounding in my temples, BOOM! BOOM! … I’m going to eviscerate him with my nails, sink my teeth into his neck … We reach a major road. The traffic is heavy, but the cars are moving fast, setting off in bursts as the light turns green. He hesitates, propels himself forward, just manages to avoid a bus, then a motorbike, but is hit by a big red lorry. Brakes and horns screech. Shit! He gets up, continues, limping now. My turn to plunge into the traffic. I’m sure I’ve got him now. A radiator grille of gleaming chrome shark’s teeth looms over me, enormous—
Fabien opened his eyes. His jaw was clenched, his muscles tensed and he was out of breath. The bedroom air filled his mouth like chalk dust, blue chalk dust. The rabbits on the wall stared at him menacingly. Léo’s soft toys bore down on his legs like dead animals. Above his head, the mobile, which he must have knocked with his arm, turned its circle of evil little ducks. The darkness was suddenly pierced by a shaft of yellow light. Gilles’s frame was silhouetted in the doorway.
‘Is something wrong? You’ve had a nightma— What on earth is that on your head?’
Fabien touched his head and his fingers came into contact with hair that was not his, dry, stringy.
‘You wear a wig in bed?’
‘No … It’s … I bought it to play a joke on Léo.’
‘Ah.’
‘I stupidly fell asleep with it on. I had a bad dream. Go back to bed, everything’s fine.’
‘Great, well, OK, see you in the morning.’
A few hours earlier, while Gilles was initiating his son into the delights of the Seven Mercenaries, Fabien had been climbing the stairs of 45 Rue Charlot, carrying a blue hyacinth wrapped in cellophane. He had considered the pot plant the height of camouflage. To his knowledge, no one had ever arrested a burglar carrying an old-lady plant. But he hadn’t bumped into anyone. It hadn’t been hard to pick the lock. That was a technique he owed to his father, devotee of DIY and repairs. He closed the door gently behind him. It must have been about eight o’clock – he could hear the theme tune for the news from neighbouring flats.
The hallway smelt of wax polish, honey-scented. The floor was covered with uneven red floor tiles, the ceiling crossed with brown beams, and the walls were white pebbledash, urban-rustic style. Country furniture, rush mats, ecru wool for sofa covers and curtains, old wood, old copper, old leather. Everything was scrubbed and shining, comfortable but ineffably dull. He put the hyacinth down on the kitchen table and opened the fridge. Frozen prepared dishes were piled like bricks in the freezer compartment. Nothing joyful here either. The only sign of life was the leftover ratatouille in an earthenware dish covered with cling film. He tasted it and found it delicious, each vegetable cooked separately as in the traditional recipe. This culinary subtlety clearly did not come from Martine; it must have been Madeleine. The two plates and two sets of cutlery drying in the rack proved that Madeleine had been here yesterday evening. He took a large swig from an opened bottle of Sancerre and went back to the sitting room where he tried out various chairs. He didn’t feel comfortable in any of them. He moved the sofa, the table and chairs, then the rug, and tilted the lampshades until he felt a little as if he were at home. Of course to feel totally at ease, he would have had to get rid of some of the knickknacks, like that set of ridiculous pewter jugs or those hammered copper saucepans which reminded him of his father’s Comtoise clock or, worse, those unspeakable pictures of autumnal pastoral scenes and stags at bay that shrieked from the walls. Truth be told, he would have had to redo everything. In the bedroom, he lifted the curtain and saw the Celtic, closed at this hour. With a little effort of concentration, he could almost see himself, sitting with a coffee, his eyes raised towards the window. That made him smile. When he opened the wardrobe a gust of repulsive scent greeted him. He saw beige, more beige, and some blue. Clothes that would make anyone look invisible. Arms outstretched he let himself fall onto the bed, which was puffed up like a brioche by a good-quality duvet.
It was exhilarating to inhabit the lives of others. Any others, it didn’t matter who. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was at BHV with Martine choosing a new colour to repaint the sitting room. It was very dark when he woke up. The square digits on the clock-radio told him it was 22.47. For a moment he wondered where he was. Somewhere else, as usual. He went for a pee, and was moved to recognise the toilet paper Martine had bought at Monoprix. Feeling a craving for a little taste of ratatouille, he went to the kitchen. As he finished the dish, washed down by Sancerre, Fabien reflected that there was not a single sign of Martial Arnoult – not a hint of cigar ash, not a hair on a comb, not a nail clipping. After he had washed the plate and put the empty bottle beside the refrigerator, he began to search through the drawers of a little desk that was obviously used for storing papers. In the middle of a heap of invoices, receipts and bank statements he came upon a sales rep’s card in the name of Martial Arnoult. Sylvie’s lover sold greenhouses, earthenware pots and other garden items; and he had a moustache. Dark-haired, square of jaw, big eyebrows, the look of a guy who liked to tell amusing stories at the end of dinner. A salt-of-the-earth salesman. He was smiling the smile of a man who didn’t know he was about to die. Fabien found that touching. Martial would have turned fifty the following month.
Fabien walked back to Gilles’s. It was very mild, and no one seemed in a hurry to go to bed. They wanted to savour the night in little sips. On Pont-Neuf, he envied a couple of tourists who were no doubt discovering Paris for the first time. He would have given anything to be seeing something for the first time. Gilles and Léo were cuddled up asleep on the sofa. Like puppies in a basket.
Fabien had turned off the TV and stretched out on his bed fully clothed and still wearing the wig.
‘Majorca? What the hell are you going to do in Majorca?’
‘Dunno … A holiday, sun, sea, like everyone else.’
‘Sun and sea … but you hate travelling! You practically have to bring a souvenir back if you get as far as the suburbs. You’re weird at the moment, always disappearing, and that thing with the wig the other day … I didn’t say anything, but …’
‘I just need a change of air. Ten days, it’s not the end of the world. You’re not going to make a scene!’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s only … With Fanchon taking Léo for the month and you buggering off to Majorca, what am I going to do hanging around here on my own?’
Fabien recognised that feeling of abandonment; he had felt the same that morning when the patron of the Celtic had announced to his customers that he was going to shut for the holidays and was happy to be going back to Aveyron. Loulou had had tear
s in his eyes at the thought of having to decamp to another bar for thirty days. What did he care about sodding holidays? The patron was just offering him a free round to make up for it when Martine and Madeleine came out of number 45.
Taken aback, Fabien followed them – like a kid who’d just let go of the string of his balloon – as far as Rue de Turbigo where they went into a travel agent’s. Hidden behind the palm tree of a poster advertising the incomparable beauty of the Seychelles, he waited for them to leave before hurrying into the agency and ordering, as if in a restaurant, ‘The same as those two ladies.’ They had booked ten days in the Hotel Los Pinos, Cale San Vincente, in Majorca. They were leaving in two days.
He spent those two days regretting his impulsiveness and putting up with Gilles’s sarcasm as he tried on swimming trunks and summer clothes in front of him.
‘And a camera? You haven’t got a camera. A real tourist always has a camera.’
‘Shut up, Gilles.’
And then it was the day of departure. He refused to let Gilles come with him to the airport, for fear that he would be noticed. He didn’t see the two women either at the bag check-in or at Gate F where he waited to board among a crowd of irritated passengers. Time went slowly by and he began to concoct a paranoid scenario which went something like, ‘The woman in the travel agent’s was suspicious of me. She deliberately sent me somewhere Martine and Madeleine weren’t going. Probably in cahoots with them. Shit! What the hell am I going to do for ten days in that fucking hotel on that sodding island?’ They arrived just as he was about to give up and go home.
With his new haircut (which had made Gilles roar with laughter) and his dark glasses, he felt like Peter Brady. He went to the toilet twice on the journey to see if the two women would notice him. He couldn’t have been more invisible to them had he been wrapped in bandages. He congratulated himself on this, but he was a bit put out. He mustn’t stay anonymous for too long. Perhaps Gilles was right and his new haircut really didn’t suit him. For the rest of the journey he kept running his hand through his hair.
The heat in Palma hit him like a hairdryer blowing in his face. And in the coach that drove them to the hotel fifty kilometres away in the north of the island, the air conditioning set to maximum turned his sweat icy. So at nine o’clock in the evening Fabien ordered aspirin from room service and did not go down for dinner. His fever did not abate until the third day.
Most of the people who had arrived at the same time as him had already started to tan and seemed completely at home. Some were on first-name terms, others were discussing excursions and where the best restaurants were. Fabien felt as if he were arriving in the middle of a film, especially on the beach, where he had to pick his way over the burning sand, as pale as a ghost, under the mocking stares of those bronzed cretins. He found a spot to spread out his towel right at the end against the rocks. You couldn’t go any further. It took him quite a while to recognise Martine and Madeleine since naked people emerging from the water all look the same. Martine was in better shape than he would have imagined, almost androgynous. But Madeleine looked all of her fifty years. They had set up only a few feet from him. Fabien thought of a thousand and one excuses to approach them, but quickly cast them all aside. He wasn’t shown to best advantage on the beach. He was better off keeping a low profile and waiting for the evening, in the hotel restaurant for example, to appear at his sparkling best. He had never known how to act on a beach. He couldn’t get comfortable in any position, not sitting, nor lying on his stomach, nor on his back. The water didn’t particularly attract him either; he was as ill at ease there as he was on the sand, but the heat was becoming unbearable.
He only just managed to dodge a Frisbee and a volleyball before plunging into the waves. The sea was warm, and as clear as in the most idealised advert. He began to swim straight ahead, churning the water with all his strength as if trying to escape it. Ten minutes later, he was out of breath and horrified to see how far he was from the shore. There was no one anywhere near him, apart from a few sailing boats off the coast. Panic was starting to cramp his calves and his back. What a ridiculous idea to swim so far out after three days of fever! For a fraction of a second he thought of letting go completely. Drowning, the pure, simple return to the great void, was said to be so peaceful. But his body did not appear to be ready for that celestial siesta, and his arms and legs began a prudent breaststroke towards the beach. He didn’t feel he was making any progress and his lungs felt clogged up by a whole carton of cigarettes. Salt water and little shards of sunlight combined to burn his eyes. He was having to work really hard to convince himself that the shore was coming closer. He began to succumb to a vague somnolence. What was that large white thing floating in front of him?
‘Are you all right, Monsieur? Hold on to the float … There, you’re safe now.’
Madeleine and Martine were staring down at him over their sunglasses from a pedalo.
True, he had almost died, but he would never, even in his most Machiavellian schemes, have been able to come up with a better pretext for finding himself at their table. All he had had to do was let them take charge, which they did beyond his wildest dreams. The authenticity of his sinking and the way he had collapsed on the beach like a great trembling jellyfish meant there was no danger of arousing even the slightest suspicion in either woman. On the contrary, they felt a certain pride in his rescue and already he thought he could detect a little maternal affection towards him.
‘It’s Spanish champagne, but that’s all they have. So … to my two saviours!’
‘It wasn’t anything really. Santé!’
The champagne was disgusting but all three declared it ‘not bad at all’. Yes, he had arrived on the same plane as they had (Madeleine had noticed him; his face seemed familiar) but the reason he hadn’t been to the beach before was that he’d had to stay in his room for three days because the air con in the coach had made him ill. He really didn’t have much luck. Yes, he did! Because otherwise he would never have met them. Polite smiles, lowered eyes and a gulp of champagne. He shouldn’t have fallen asleep on the beach after his near-death experience – wasn’t his sunburn painful? Not at all! Although actually, the vicious sunburn, which had given him a curious vanilla-strawberry appearance, was stinging atrociously.
‘You should put some cream on.’
‘I don’t have any. I’ll buy some tomorrow. You know how it is, men on their own …’
‘You’re single?’
‘I’m a widower.’
‘Ah.’
The women exchanged a glance and Fabien bit the inside of his cheek. It was a bit too soon to mention that. Luckily their calamari a la plancha arrived and the conversation moved off in a lighter direction. Martine had a strange little voice that put him in mind of a child learning the recorder. But she rarely spoke. Madeleine took it upon herself to provide almost all the conversation. She had a gift for ending all her sentences with question marks, dangerous little interrogatory hooks that forced Fabien into cerebral contortions in order not to get caught on them. He stayed calm as he submitted to the cross-examination. And apart from his surname, which he changed to ‘Descombres’, he managed to answer the trickiest questions without entangling himself in lies which might eventually trip him up. The exercise was as dangerous as it was exhausting. Madeleine showed fearsome perspicacity. But by subtle use of a masculine awkwardness, which might pass for a pleasing timidity, and with a few carefully placed witticisms, he finally won her round and saw a glimmer of interest in Martine’s eye that made him think of a drop of oil gleaming in a puddle of water. He knew that he had passed the test when Madeleine invited him to come with them the next day to Valldemossa, a charming, flowery village in the mountains. Madeleine had organised a car for nine o’clock.
‘Nine o’clock? Perfect. See you tomorrow then, and thank you for a delightful evening.’
‘Thank you for the champagne!’
By the time he reached his room, Fabien was spent, as i
f he had just run a marathon. He ordered up two large gin and tonics that he downed one after another to calm his nerves. He lay down on his back, his arms crossed over his chest, and sank into a dreamless sleep.
They visited Valldemossa and, over the following days, the caves of Arta, the glassworks of Gordiola, Cap de Formentor, Palma cathedral, etc. Always all three of them. The moments Fabien could be alone with Martine never lasted longer than the time it took Madeleine to go to the toilet. Not enough to create any kind of intimacy. But was that even possible? She didn’t seem to have a life of her own. Everything she said or did was prompted by her friend. To the point that Fabien sometimes felt as if he were in the company of a ventriloquist and her dummy. He had to play a close game, never look too hard at Martine, nor take her hand when they separated without also assuming an air of indifference. Madeleine was sharp-witted and it would have been an error to play her like a fool. On the contrary, he had to try to foster a sort of complicity with her. In other words he had to seduce the one to reach the other. That was until the day that Madeleine sprained her ankle going down the gangplank of a boat. She could no longer leave her room except to be installed on a chaise-longue on the hotel terrace. Martine and Fabien spent their days at the beach saying nothing, stretched out one beside the other. It wasn’t exactly captivating but, after all those excursions, Fabien felt a certain wellbeing as he lay beside the young woman. And now they had something in common: the absence of Madeleine. They looked like any other couple, sprawled on their towels. It was actually she who pointed this out one day when she returned from the beach bar with two ice creams.
‘The barman thought you were my husband.’
‘Did you correct him?’
‘No. Why? There are so many couples here, one more or less …’
‘Well, it doesn’t bother me. In fact I would be proud to be your husband.’
The Front Seat Passenger Page 4
