Breakfast at Midnight by Louis Armand

Author:Louis Armand [Armand, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780957121300
Publisher: Equus Press
Published: 2013-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

13. LA FIN DU MONDE

There’s a bar off rue Mouffetard in Paris, called La Fin du Monde. The end of the world. It doesn’t seem so long ago, the train from Le Havre, Blake’s atelier, the night of the Spanish whore. Just like old times. La Paz. The infirmary on the hill. The mad room with the dead tree sticking up through the floor. Waking on the Place de la Contrescarpe, slumped beneath a lamppost clutching my duffel bag. I thought, I’d got so far but still hadn’t made it home and probably never would. Though for what it’s worth, still in one piece. More or less.

I mustn’t have been asleep there long, but it was dawn already, voices along the street. I hoiked up a gob of bloodied phlegm and spat. Raw behind the eyes. I’d been sick by degrees since I boarded that first ship out. The rest was just a kind of refinement. Like the stamp collection every kid keeps under his bed.

I was halfway down rue Mouffetard when I noticed La Fin du Monde with its shutters up. I staggered in and leaned against the bar. A drunk in the corner was humming a tune to himself that could’ve been anything at all or nothing. I dug in my pockets for loose change and spilled what I had on the counter. The barman glanced at it with his one good eye, unimpressed. The other eye was fogged glass with something swimming in it. I asked for a brandy. He poured a demi and left it in front of me. Then pointed at my face. There was dried blood on my cheek, probably from a fight with that lamppost.

“Cops beat up some Arab kids last night.”

“Sure,” I said. “The cops are always beating up on someone.”

I tried to remember what’d happened the night before. Faces leering through brain fog. Blake, sitting there in that bar in the Marais exactly as if it’d been arranged. Perhaps he’d never left. Perhaps he’d been with me all along. Like a shadow. At one moment there ahead of me, at the next silently stalking me. Invisible. Anticipating me with every step. Mephistopheles-like.

“Don’t know what’s good for ‘em,” the barman grunted.

“You said it. Nothing like a boot in the arse to give a kid an education.”

He looked at me trying to catch on if I meant something by it. Figured I didn’t and wiped a dirty rag along the counter.

“Boot in the arse is too good for some. Want it handed on a platter. You know,” he hung the rag over his shoulder, “when I was a kid, people did like they were told.”

I knocked back the drink and pushed myself away from the counter.

“Yeah? What were you told?”

He grinned sideways, sliding the empty glass towards the slops in the sink.

“Travail, Famille, Patrie!” his right hand thumping his chest. “Nowadays,” he croaked, “nothing’s worth a damn. You’ll wake up one day with your throat slit.” Casually he popped his glass eye and started polishing it with the rag, moving his jaw side-to-side as he did.

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