Gone to Pieces by Rachel Cosyns

Author:Rachel Cosyns [Cosyns, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Annie’s friend Charlotte came to stay. She flew into Bergerac with Sam. Rebecca and Annie drove to the airport to pick them up.

Rebecca always felt France was her and Annie’s special place. She understood the silence.

‘You understand it,’ she often told her.

‘I get it. D’you get me?’ said Annie.

‘You get it, I get it. D’you get us?’ they asked Sam, in unison.

‘You’re like Clarice and Cora,’ said Sam.

‘You’re like Steerpike,’ Rebecca told him. Sam was waving his phone around looking for Pokémon. ‘Charlotte, you can be Fuchsia.’

‘I get it,’ said Charlotte, looking out at the lines of vines climbing the muscular rolling hills, ‘but who’s Fuchsia?’

‘Gormenghast,’ said Rebecca.

‘All I can get is a Pidgey,’ said Sam.

For supper they had tarte aux oignons scattered with rosemary leaves and great creamy lumps of goat’s cheese. They baked some of the neighbour’s tomatoes with whole garlic cloves and they drank pale Provençal rosé under a sky the colour of a blush.

‘Mum, I thought you weren’t drinking,’ said Annie.

Rebecca shrugged. ‘I’ll be all right now,’ she said. ‘Sam’s here.’

Rebecca wasn’t all right though. She wasn’t even slightly all right. She swam in the pool in the cool of the morning. She ate no breakfast or lunch. She cooked and shopped and sang along to Amy Winehouse on the way to and from the supermarket, choosing the scuffed CD from the car’s glove compartment.

Sam sat exhausted in the salon and watched Netflix.

He had work to do.

‘Just one interview to write up,’ he told Rebecca, but it took him days.

Annie and Charlotte drifted around the pool in the heat of the afternoon while Rebecca lay in the shade of the grapevine that rambled over the pergola. She tried to read a book while watching the small grey lizards hunting flies until she fell asleep, lulled by the girls’ laughter and glass after glass of wine.

Rebecca couldn’t go home. It was a hopeless situation. She couldn’t go back to London. She would die if she went. She didn’t know how to be there.

Or anywhere actually, whispered Betty.

She couldn’t go, though. Her stomach turned to concrete at the thought.

Sam shrugged. ‘So what will you do? Stay here for the winter?’

At night, Rebecca poured with sweat. She drank water from a bottle on her bedside table and when her body succumbed to a drug-induced sleep, she dreamed of quicksand and death.

One afternoon, they all piled into the hot car, wound down the windows and went treasure hunting in the local brocantes, buying embroidered, hand-loomed linen sheets and admiring ancient carved dressers.

‘C’est très vieux, de l’époque d’Henri II,’ they were told as they gazed in admiration at a particularly ornate example in heavy, caramel-coloured walnut.

‘It’s older than God,’ said Sam, turning to an astounded Rebecca.

‘It’s bigger too,’ she said.

‘That,’ said Annie, ‘is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’

Sam ran his hand over the age-scarred cupboard doors and opened the drawers one by one. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It has all its keys with tassels.’

Afterwards, they drove to a bastide town that had been entirely colonised by the English and sat in the square eating omelettes and frites.

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