Nagasaki by Éric Faye Emily Boyce

Author:Éric Faye, Emily Boyce [Eric Faye]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908313751
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2014-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

While trying to get to sleep facing one way then the other, I couldn’t shake off a persistent thought. That woman, at any point during the hundreds of nights she had spent living close to me, could have got up and stabbed me as I slept. I knew nothing about her past or her inclinations, the reasons that might have led to her putting down roots here, soiling my sheets, drying herself with my towels, crapping in my toilet, and I was furious with her. I had been completely at her mercy, and wondered if it had ever occurred to her that she could bump me off, easy as that, just because, and get away with it? I was reminded of a story by Edogawa Rampo about a man secretly living inside a sofa. Did it end with a murder? I couldn’t remember and, besides, I had been living in an Edogawa novella of my own for several months and I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. The fact she had not battered me to death probably meant she had been looking for somewhere quiet, lived in and well maintained so that she could be spared too many anxieties in the senseless situation she found herself in, until a time when, perhaps, things might become clearer. She was therefore neither Madam Death nor Madam Fear. More like Madam Ordinary.

It was time I got to sleep and, lying on my back with my legs bent, I felt myself drifting off when my thoughts were hijacked again, scuppering my efforts. What if there was another woman hiding somewhere in the house? In the darkness, the absurdity of this idea made me smile, yet I began to imagine that every cupboard contained the ghost of a lost love, as though the woman caught red-handed in my house was the reflection of someone I had fallen for many years before – as a teenager, say – so long ago that I hadn’t recognised her. I resolved to take one of my sleeping tablets. A mock sleep, as heavy and grey as a bloated cloud, got the better of my thoughts. It was a sleep disturbed by tortuous dreams, like a rough sea crossing at night with lightning flashing all around.

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