Six Months to Kill by Enzo Bartoli

Author:Enzo Bartoli [Bartoli, Enzo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542093767
Published: 2019-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

It’s been five days and I’ve had no news from Chloé. And let’s make no bones about it: it’s been five days of misery either sat in front of my TV . . . or sat in front of my TV. This is a situation that would have suited me down to the ground only a few weeks ago, but now it weighs heavier on my soul than the two murders I’ve committed in the meantime.

The programmes on offer are just dire. It’s the start of the school holidays and all my favourite games have been rescheduled to make way for sitcom repeats whose infantile humour would probably escape your average viewer, let alone someone like me.

I decide to follow the Tour de France instead. Every single second of it. It’s a struggle, though.

Hours later and I’m now more than capable of reciting the list of teams and the names of all the leaders’ managers. I’m also pretty much the expert on the right way to cook ruifard de Valbonnais or how to ripen Chabrirou du Velay cheese, for these are the sorts of interesting things you pick up in the commentating. I also manage to calculate to the nearest three seconds who will arrive in the top ten in the overall rankings, and the number of kilowatts released by each and every cyclist since leaving the Domancy coast.

So it’s not like I’m allowing brain rot to set in, and I do manage to catch a little bit of daylight. In the mornings I venture outside to buy a baguette and other bits and pieces to eat, and one evening, uncharacteristically, I wander down Rue de Rennes to the Virgin store at Montparnasse. It’s not that I have an irrepressible desire to buy a CD or read a book, it’s just that I left my laptop there weeks earlier to be repaired and I think it’s about time I picked it up. It’s on this little expedition of mine that something worrying occurs . . .

I spot a family exiting the Saint-Placide Métro station. The man is up front with his hands in his pockets and seems indifferent to the woman, who I presume is his wife, walking a dozen or so steps behind him. In her left arm, she’s carrying a little girl close to her body. The child can be no more than two or three years old and wears a distant, almost haunted look on her little face. In her other hand, the woman is holding a discount-supermarket carrier bag and it looks heavy – too heavy for her to manage properly.

The man turns back to look for his wife. She has stopped to put the child and the bag down on the ground so she can swap arms. I’m too far away to hear him, but I don’t have to. I can tell from his gestures that he’s hurling insults at her. I stop to watch the scene unfold and I notice that a young couple have stopped, too.

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