‘Get the hell out of here! Can’t you see you’re getting on my nerves? You’re always under my feet! … Now where on earth have I put the matches?’
She could not see clearly, or else she saw too clearly, as though looking through a magnifying glass. Every object appeared ridiculously large. Failing to judge distances, she kept knocking things over like skittles, until in the end she no longer dared touch anything and stood, panting and puffing like a whale, both hands flat on the table. A whistling sound came out of nowhere, boring into her eardrums, while a sickening smell turned her stomach and dulled her mind. She sank to her knees, bringing with her the oilcloth and everything on top of it.
‘What a godawful mess …’
She slumped forward, flat on her face. The life drained out of her body like oil from a drum.
‘Do you think you will actually visit Rose in Belgium?’
He did not respond.
‘She’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Better to be waiting for someone than for nothing at all.’
‘The reason I’m asking is I really like Rose. I’m glad she gets on well with Fiona and Violette. It means they’re not on their own any more. It’s like we’re a little family.’
‘Will you stop going on about your “little family”?’
‘Ah, come on, you say that but what about you and Rose?’
‘Would you mind your own business? You’ll see your girls again in two days. In the meantime, just let it drop, OK?’
‘All right, Monsieur Marechall, I won’t mention them again. It’s just that when you’re happy you want to shout about it, don’t you?’
Simon refrained from making a snide comment. There was no point. Bernard wore his new-found happiness like a shining suit of armour. The stupid fool couldn’t help smiling at everything: the other cars cutting him up; the leaden sky just waiting for a sign before erupting; the dingy, humdrum buildings that lined the road; the police cars lying in wait behind the plane trees. Simon could almost hear the needles clicking away inside his head, knitting together a bright little future with a little job, a little house, a little wife, a little daughter …
‘Will you stop thinking!’
‘I’m not thinking, Monsieur Marechall, I’m watching the road. Drat, there are road works; there’ll be traffic jams. Here comes the rain!’
Flashing signs forced the cars to slow down and get into one lane. The windscreen wipers swept the raindrops away, leaving fleeting fan shapes on the glass. Only one thing threatened to mar Bernard’s constant bliss, which was the task Simon planned to entrust him with. The slowing of the traffic seemed like an invitation to test the water.
‘What will you do after you go back to Fiona and the baby?’
‘We’re heading back up to Bron. My hand’s almost better so I can go back to my job. We’ll just have to find a bigger flat because my bedsit … well, when you put the key in the door you pretty much break the window, if you see what I mean. Rents are steep in town, but we’ll manage somehow. Fiona’s smart, she’ll find herself a little job.’
‘A little job, a little flat! Never been tempted to think big?’
‘Very funny … We get by as best we can! I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. You’ve seen my mother … I need to look after her as well. It won’t be easy, but love gives you strength. And the other half of my pay from you will be a good start.’
‘You won’t get very far with that.’
‘As far as Bron. Don’t you worry, I only lost two fingers, I’ve still got both arms!’
And he smiled, just as he had when Simon first met him on the bench and he had said: ‘It’s only my little finger and fourth finger. I never used them.’ The kid had a talent for survival, like newborn babies found alive in dustbins.
‘Listen, Bernard. Apart from yesterday’s escapade, which we’ll pass over, I’ve been very pleased with you. You’ve always delivered, even in, shall we say … “delicate” situations. So if you wanted—’
‘No, Monsieur Marechall, I’ll have to say no straight out. I like you very much, but your job, well, it’s just not for me. I’m sure it pays well, and maybe I’m just a pathetic person with pathetic dreams, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror every morning and not feel ashamed. I’m not criticising you, I know deep down you’re not such a bad person, but I don’t want to end up sad and lonely like you. Each to his own, Monsieur Marechall, each to his own.’
‘Hang on a minute, I’m not offering you a job! I was about to ask a favour.’
‘Oh. What kind of favour?’
‘The kind of favour you can only ask of a friend.’
The little Playmobile people were waving flags to direct the traffic. The cars gradually got back up to cruising speed.
They arrived in Vals-les-Bains late in the afternoon. It was still raining, not heavily, but persistently. Bernard found a parking space right outside the Grand Hôtel de Lyon. He was not smiling now. He kept his hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead.
‘OK, Bernard, so eight o’clock tomorrow morning? Right, Bernard?’
‘Yes! Eight o’clock tomorrow morning. You really are messed-up though, Monsieur Marechall.’
‘Let’s shake hands.’
Before getting out of the car, they both noticed the child seat still strapped to the back seat. Simon shook his head, smiling.
‘Handy, those things.’
They parted on the pavement, one stepping into the hotel lobby, the other heading towards the old town. Neither looked back.
French noir fiction
With European police dramas Spiral and The Killing the cult TV successes of 2011, and translated crime fiction enjoying a post-Larsson boom, noir may just be the new black.
Despite the name, the origins of noir are largely rooted in the American hardboiled fiction of the 1930s and 40s. When French publisher, Gallimard, founded its famous Série Noire imprint in 1944, it focused on translations of thrillers by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
The number of French writers on the list grew, but the influence of the US remained strong; many authors translated American crime novels alongside their own work, or wrote under American-sounding pseudonyms. The US is still a source of fascination for many French crime writers; we published a short, shocking story of high school massacres, Carnage by Maxime Chattam in Spring 2012.
The 1970s saw the birth of the ‘néopolar’ (the new crime novel), with writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette using the form to critique French society and explore existential questions. His tale of a hit woman working her way into small-town life, Fatale, was published by New York Review Books in 2011.
Thierry Jonquet took a similarly political, darkly satirical approach. Serpent’s Tail have reissued his twisted revenge tale, Mygale, under the title Tarantula: The Skin I Live In, to coincide with the release of Almodóvar’s film adaptation.
There’s an overlap with cinema in the work of many French noir writers. The novels of Tonino Benacquista, award-winning screenwriter of gritty 2005 film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, are published by foreign crime specialists, Bitter Lemon Press. The English title of his most recently translated novel, Badfellas, plays on the Scorsese film, and the story transports a Sopranos-esque American crime family to a witness protection programme in Normandy, cleverly tying together the tropes of the genre with an unconventional setting.
Benacquista’s darkly comic observations of crime in everyday, unglamorous settings (far from the smoky LA nightclubs we’re used to seeing) have much in common with one of our own noir writers, Pascal Garnier. Garnier’s plots may revolve around hit men and road trips, but the settings are supermarkets, service stations and campsites in provincial France, the cultural references decidedly Gallic.
Like Manchette and Benacquista, Garnier drops his criminal protagonists (charming sociopaths in the Ripley vein) into unfamiliar places, outsiders looking in. In How’s the Pain? ‘vermin exterminator’ Simon breaks h
is journey in the spa town of Vals-les-Bains, where he meets Bernard, the naïve drifter who becomes his accidental accomplice. We see the town and its people through Simon’s ironic gaze. The cast of unremarkable characters are plunged into extraordinary situations, whose incongruity can be very amusing.
It’s this shifting tone, conveyed with beautifully pared-back prose, that’s Garnier’s hallmark. With their stark violence and tendency towards the surreal, his novels have echoes of Tarantino or the black comedy of the Coen brothers. You often don’t know whether to laugh or cry, leading some to label his genre the roman gris, with touches of brightness lightening the grim outlook of noir.
With Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries and Dominique Manotti’s studies of corruption regularly fêted at the CWA International Dagger Awards for crime fiction, French noir writers are taking centre stage. While prolific Belgian writer, Georges Simenon, whose work spanned several decades of the twentieth century, remains the best-known Francophone exponent of noir (and provided its most famous detective character in Maigret), his literary inheritors are proving it’s not just the Scandinavians who can do dark.
Emily Boyce
About the Author
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.
Emily Boyce
Emily Boyce is in-house translator for Gallic Books. She lives in London.
Copyright
First published in 2012
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Gallic Books, 2012
The right of Pascal Garnier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1-908313–30–0 epub
ISBN 978–1–908313–31–7 pdf
The Panda Theory
“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
The A26
The future is on its way to Picardy with the construction of a huge motorway.
But nearby is a house where nothing has changed since 1945. Traumatised by events that year, Yolande hasn’t left her home since.
And life has not been kinder to Bernard, her brother, who is now in the final months of a terminal illness.
Realising that he has so little time left, Bernard’s gloom suddenly lifts. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless – and murderous…
To be published January 2013
ISBN: 978–1–908313–16–4
£6.99 paperback
How's the Pain? Page 11
