The Eskimo Solution

by Pascal Garnier

  After leaving her at Gare Saint-Lazare with a weak smile, Louis went into the nearest travel agent. The girl who sold him the ticket for Greece had lank hair, circles under her eyes and bad skin, a skin that bruised easily – poor circulation. He would have liked to know her parents.

  11

  Sometimes I wish I was dead or, better still, that I had never existed. I had an awful night filled with corpses hanging above my head like hams. And then this morning I remembered I had to get the corrections for one of my kids’ books in the post today. This one little chore suddenly seemed like the perfect opportunity to rejoin the land of the living. My salvation lay at the post office. I entered the building as if stepping inside a church (or more likely a mosque – I was losing my religion after all). There were three people ahead of me. An old man like origami, folded into eight, and two younger old women gossiping in low voices.

  ‘… and that’s exactly what I told her.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘I did!’

  ‘You mean you said—’

  ‘What I just told you, right to her face!’

  ‘Blimey, you’re a one …’

  What could the old tart have said, and to whom? Something nasty, no doubt. She had clearly been saying spiteful things all her life – they had twisted her mouth into a kind of harelip. There was plenty of other stuff in my upturned dustbin of a head that could have done with clearing up, but I simply had to have the answer.

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  The pair of grannies looked at me as if I had just spat in their faces.

  ‘Are you having a laugh? … Mind your own business! Really. It’s got nothing to do with you!’

  ‘Yes, it has! I might know the person you’ve been saying horrible things about.’

  ‘But … I didn’t say anything horrible! What’s the matter with you? You should see a doctor!’

  ‘Fine, I’m not going to push it, but it wouldn’t have cost you much to tell me, would it?’

  ‘That’s enough! Leave us alone!’

  I shrugged. Let her keep her little secrets. Nothing else happened after that; the talk turned to purely postal matters. The two old ladies looked daggers at me as they left, screwing their fingers into their temples.

  The post office having failed to deliver the serenity I’d been counting on, with my head spinning I try again by having a second breakfast and taking a second shower. I try to tell myself things are looking up. Nat’s still asleep, or dozing, tangled up in the bedclothes. I’m glad; I don’t know what I could think to say to her. I didn’t know what to say to Christophe either when he told me Nane had died. I could have answered, ‘You poor thing, I’m sorry; maybe it’s for the best. Do you want me to come over? Do you want to come here? Is there anything I can do?’ All I said was, ‘Oh’, followed by a silence that seemed to go on for ever. Christophe put an end to the exchange of sighs, saying he’d call me tomorrow; he needed to rest. I mumbled something incomprehensible and Christophe hung up. Nat raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  ‘Nane died.’

  ‘Shit … Do you want a coffee?’

  She was filtering it when the phone rang again. It was Hélène.

  ‘Nane died.’

  ‘I know. Christophe just called.’

  I couldn’t take in what Hélène was saying. My brain had become so slow, it struggled to process every single word. Nat was sulking, having realised it was her mother on the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘You weren’t saying anything. I thought we’d been cut off.’

  ‘No, I’m listening.’

  ‘Is there someone with you?’ (Silence.)

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just got that impression.’

  ‘No, it’s the kettle; I put some water on to boil. Sorry, I’m just a bit stunned.’

  ‘Me too, even though we were expecting it. OK, I’ll let you get on. Shall I call tomorrow? Oh, by the way, you haven’t heard anything from Nat, have you?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘That girl, she can be such a pain in the arse when she wants to be! Still, I’m not going to get the police on her back. Let me know if …’

  ‘Promise. Speak tomorrow.’

  I’ve lied a lot in my life, and come off none the worse for it, but this time I struggled to swallow my first mouthful of coffee. Nothing seemed to want to go in or out. Like a millstone around my neck, this enormous lie was going to drag me into the void, that is, into an endless succession of bigger and bigger lies, weighing on me more and more heavily.

  Nat was perfect. I expected nothing, she gave nothing. After this second phone call, she threw her head back and blew out an invisible puff of smoke. ‘Right, shall we go to bed then? That’ll do for today.’ She put the mugs in the sink and gave the table a wipe. If you didn’t look too closely, you could mistake this for a normal house with normal people in it. ‘You’ could; I couldn’t. There was nothing normal about the way her rump wiggled its way upstairs, or her presence in my bedroom or her body under the sheets; still less my body, which did not feel like my own, and struck me as fairly unappealing.

  ‘You know, if you’ve changed your mind, it’s OK.’

  I turned to face her. I wished I could say a word to her, ‘the’ word, the one you’d take with you to a desert island, the word before words, that would say everything and nothing all at once. It was silenced before it was said, an oblong speech bubble on the edge of her lips. I had never tasted her lips, only her cheek. It was enough to make me go back for another helping. I thought of all those people in war-torn countries with nothing to do after the curfew but make love. No electricity, no TV, no heating, just fucking, with the glorious energy of despair. But I was at war with no one but myself. The best part of me, or the least worst, had refused to enter the bedroom and stood scowling in the doorway as the other part of me tired itself out with weary embraces.

  ‘Forget it, you’ve had too much to drink.’

  I didn’t try to persuade her otherwise or apologise. I simply made a mental note of the fact it was two in the morning and I had at least a few hours of sleep ahead of me, during which the rest of the world could crumble for all I cared.

  Sadly, the world did not crumble, and here it is again in the guise of Arlette Vidal, whose shadow I can see through the curtain. Knock, knock …

  ‘Morning! Here, I’ve brought a pot of jam for our young friend – it’s home-made! They love sweet stuff at her age.’ (Circular glance over my shoulder in search of evidence of debauchery.) ‘Listen, we’ve just had a new TV delivered, but Louis can’t seem to tune the thing. He’s not very technical, and on top of that he’s a bit off colour this morning. I don’t suppose you’d be able to pop round and have a look?’

  It’s that or stare into my breakfast bowl.

  ‘I’ll be round in two tics, Arlette.’

  Louis does have an odd-looking complexion, a nasty pair of bags under his eyes and shortness of breath.

  ‘Not feeling too great, are we, Monsieur Vidal?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, bit of a chest infection. It’s this sodding television that’s really not right. We can’t make head nor tail of it – it’s all written in American.’

  After a good fifteen minutes, I manage to get a steady picture and show the local news in glorious Technicolor. The Vidals are happy, channel-hopping like mad things with the remote control.

  ‘We didn’t have one with the old set. Now we’ll never have to stand up!’

  Louis’s spluttering with joy – who cares about the chest infection, he doesn’t have to stand up. If only I could spend the day here with them, sitting in front of the new TV and nibbling sponge fingers. The three notes of the doorbell chime along with the news theme tune. Arlette gets up and trots over to the door like a wind-up toy.

  ‘It’s your step-daughter … what’s her name again?’

  ‘Nathalie.’

>   She’s waiting on the doorstep, dishevelled, red-eyed, wrapped up in my parka.

  ‘Your friend Christophe has just arrived.’

  ‘Christophe! Excuse me, Madame Vidal. See you later.’

  ‘OK, see you later.’

  Nat utters a vague ‘M’dame’ which goes rolling into the gutter between an apple core and a crumpled packet of Winstons.

  ‘Man, it stinks of cabbage in there! Smells of old people.’

  ‘Has Christophe been here long?’

  ‘Half an hour. I was waiting for you to turn up – I didn’t know where you were. He’s got a weird look about him, your mate, as if the lights are on but no one’s home.’

  12

  Alice’s parents’ boat was anchored some way out from the coast. It was a huge effort to reach it and he was completely exhausted. His thigh muscles wouldn’t stop trembling. Watching other people glide past in their pedaloes, you would never guess how heavy those things were. The reflection of the midday sun on the crests of the waves was unbearable. Even though he wore dark glasses, all Louis could see was incandescent white. He had never liked the sun and the sun had never liked him. He hated this island and the people on it, imbecile islanders and grotesque tourists. For a week now, he had been burning his nose, his shoulders, his thighs, in close proximity to the holidaymakers who were dazed by day, hysterical by night. It had been a week of humiliations patiently borne because of the focal point – the white boat belonging to Alice’s parents.

  Louis felt his heartbeat return to normal and his leg muscles finally relax. The only sounds were the lapping of the water that was as clear as in a travel advertisement, and the laughter of the people picnicking on the rocks, on the beach, or in other boats. Louis stood up and placed both hands on the shell of the enormous white egg that was swaying gently. Someone had just tossed melon skins off the bridge. He watched them float away like little gondolas. Alice’s parents had finished lunch. Now they would move to the front of the boat. That was their routine every day. Louis had been watching them since he’d arrived. At eight o’clock, they left the port of Pothia and went to anchor a few inlets away for the day. Of course, Louis also knew their house, as pretty as a postcard, blue and white, with flowers exactly where they should be and a stunning view across the bay, very isolated. It could have taken place there, but Louis thought the boat was better. Alice and he had had such a good time in that house, barely a year ago. But the boat, on the other hand, he had never liked. He had been out on it once or twice in the beginning, to charm Alice’s father, but as that had never worked, he had quickly found good reasons not to set foot on it again. Why had that man never liked him? Louis didn’t mind him, even though he thought him an absolute cretin. It’s perfectly possible to like morons; they also need affection, in fact more than most … But Louis had no money and Alice’s father could accept nothing from a poor man, not even friendship; it just wasn’t done. It would probably be more difficult to kill someone who didn’t like you.

  Noiselessly, he tied his pedalo to the rope ladder and climbed the rungs one by one. His damp feet left little haloes on the wood, which the heat immediately erased. The two old people were taking their siesta under the blue awning. They looked like two smoked chickens. There was a smell of Ambre Solaire, salt and melon. The rocking of the boat was imperceptible but even so it made him seasick, or maybe it was that music, a salsa, coming from a boat in the distance. Louis was less than two metres from them, but he hadn’t given any thought as to how he was going to kill them. He’d forgotten, which was stupid; he couldn’t really explain it. He hadn’t brought a bludgeon, or a rope, or a knife or a gun. He’d only got as far as working out how he would get near them, as if his mere presence could kill them. Suddenly Alice’s mother sat up. A fly was caught in her hair. As she shooed it away, she saw Louis over her dark glasses. Curiously, no sound escaped her. She put her hand over her naked breasts, two poor flaccid, wrinkled things. Her husband beside her had not moved. He was asleep, his arm across his eyes. Louis tried an embarrassed little smile.

  ‘Louis? What are you doing here?’

  Louis put a finger to his lips and signalled to her to come with him. Alice’s mother hesitated a moment, wrapped herself in a towel, rose and followed him to the back of the boat.

  ‘Is Alice with you? Why didn’t you tel—’

  ‘Let’s go down to the cabin. Come on, please.’

  It was unbearably hot. Alice’s mother stopped at the foot of the stairs to adjust her towel.

  ‘Louis, are you going to explain what’s going on?’

  Louis looked desperately round him; there were kitchen knives and bottles. The most anodyne of objects could become a weapon. That large cushion, for example.

  ‘Louis, what are you doing? Lou—’

  He rushed at her, threw her down on the bunk, the cushion jammed over her face. One by one the old lady’s false nails broke against Louis’s shoulders without doing him the slightest damage. The almost naked body struggling under his gave him an incredible erection. He leant with all his weight on the cushion. This lasted until a large red cloud burst in his head and in his swimming trunks, then everything went soft, damp and sticky. With a last jerk, the old woman knocked a table lamp to the floor where it shattered.

  ‘Éliane? Éliane, what’s going on?’

  Louis dived into the dark corner at the foot of the stairs and seized a bottle by its neck. The hurried footsteps on the bridge above his head made his heart stand still. Alice’s father appeared, bald head first, then his shoulders, covered in long grey hair. Louis hit him with all his strength, closing his eyes. The old man let out a raucous cry and fell to his knees, his hands on his head, covered in blood. He moaned like a child. Louis hit him with the bottle again, but the hands were like a helmet. The man was curled up on the floor kicking his feet. It was impossible to get his hands away from his head as he kicked. Blood had made everything slippery. And it was so narrow! Louis felt as if he were fighting in a cupboard; he couldn’t raise his arm high enough to deliver a fatal blow to the old man who was letting out strangled cries. He let the bottle fall and squeezed the old man’s throat, feeling the tendons and soft skin rolling under his fingers. Finally his mouth opened, with its displaced dentures, and his eyes bulged in terror, the corneas a bluish white. It was over. Louis couldn’t unclench his hands. They stayed in the shape of the man’s neck as he sat on the edge of the bunk and placed them on his thighs. He felt as if his head had been under the large bell of Notre Dame. All this blood, viscous, everywhere on his body; he wanted to cry, like a newborn. But instead of that, he urinated, without even getting up, and if his guts hadn’t been all knotted up, he would have defecated as well.

  In life, everything hinged on a matter of seconds; the merest millimetre could make the difference between success and failure.

  13

  ‘It was over in the space of a second. I didn’t even think about it. She was a metre from the window. It all happened in one movement: I took her by the waist, as if to make her dance, and threw her out of the window, not maliciously, but as if she was a thing, a dead plant.’

  As he tells me his story, Christophe knits his brow, like a child struggling in class.

  ‘It was so easy … one second she was there and the next she was gone from the room, gone from life, and I’d only had to move her a metre …’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then, nothing. I went downstairs, saw her body at the bottom of the building lying almost in the shape of a swastika, arms and legs all over the place. I got into my car and drove away.’

  ‘And you didn’t see anybody? … Nobody saw you? … She didn’t scream?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I didn’t even hear her body hit the pavement. Everything was quiet, or at least it seemed so … This is going to sound really clichéd, but it was as if I was dreaming. Even afterwards, when I took the kids round to my parents’, even in the car on the way here, even now talking to you. I can’t be sure I�
��m really here.’

  No wonder. I’m even beginning to doubt this peaceful Normandy beach is real. What a funny place to come to tell me you’ve just defenestrated your mother-in-law … The plus side of all this is that Christophe’s problems make mine pale into insignificance. Imagine Hélène turning up or my dear editor calling to chase me about something – before they even had a chance to start berating me, I’d tell them something to shut them up: ‘Sorry, my friend has just murdered his mother-in-law.’ That’s right, the tall, kind-eyed gentleman sitting beside me and getting his arse damp on the wet sand is a murderer, a real one! This is in a whole different league from Louis’s crimes, gory or otherwise, crimes on paper, petty offences that leave only ink on your hands. As for Christophe, he really killed the old bird, bish, bash, bosh, just like he said: a little dance step and off she goes, straight out of the window! … I feel like a little kid beside him. Why spend all this time trying to think up stories? I want him to tell me his, over and over, in more and more detail.

  ‘But why … I mean, did she say something to you? Were you planning to do it when you went over there?’

  ‘No, I just wanted to talk to her about Nane’s childhood, see some pictures of her when she was little. She said it was late, that I should call tomorrow.’

  ‘The old bitch!’

  ‘No, why? She looked tired; she didn’t say it in a nasty way. She lit a cigarette and turned towards the open window.’

  ‘She had her back to you?’

  ‘Yes. She adjusted her dressing gown and shivered, choking back a sob, moving awkwardly. It’s true it wasn’t warm, but the window was wide open. I realised she was the one taking her leave, not me. It was like chucking away a fag end, she was so light … Have you seen that seagull?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The big grey one. It’s only got one leg.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes, just the one.’

  The big grey bird hobbles at a distance from the others. As soon as it tries to approach the group, they all start pecking it and ruffling their feathers to drive it away. The sky behind them looks like the closing credits of a film.