Smoking Kills by Antoine Laurain

Author:Antoine Laurain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

On the evening of that dark day, I accompanied the women in my life to the airport. We rode to Orly in a people-carrier taxi. Sidonie was taking flight 675544 to New York; Emma, flight 997261, to Barcelona. Seated beside the driver was Benjamin, Emma’s boyfriend, a youth with ambitions to become an author of comic books. I had taken little interest in the doodlings and scribblings of the object of my daughter’s affections, but rather more in his family. My paternal question: ‘And what do this young man’s parents do?’ had received a satisfactory response: his father was a big shot in advertising, and his mother was a journalist for Elle. We had avoided the worst. The boy’s ambitions could have indicated a dubious second-rate artistic milieu: his father a singer of nostalgic rock standards in provincial concert halls, his mother a vaped-out ex-hippy devotee of Hare Krishna and heaven knows what besides. Not so. A point in Benjamin’s favour. The boy seemed pleasant enough and well brought up. There was nothing in his appearance or physique that could possibly offend and, yet, I could not help but feel a degree of caution and distrust towards him. Mingled with a touch of dislike. A curious cocktail. One I think every father of a daughter has tasted at least once. Even if our daughters break away from us in adolescence, to an extent, they are forever the children whose outpouring of affection once changed our world. The taxi sped through the dark and I remembered Emma as a little girl, looking at me with her big, adoring eyes; her displays of temper if I refused to pick her up, and so many other moments from that time when I had been her hero. Fathers are unwitting objects of fascination for their daughters, and the interlude of their childhood leaves a bittersweet taste: never again, for anyone else, will we be domestic demi-gods, greeted like long-awaited saviours when we come home for dinner at the end of the working day. The years go by and their joy becomes less and less palpable, until one day they fail to greet us at all. That time has passed, and the countdown reaches zero. We had known it would happen. We just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.

The taxi sped beneath the repeating light of the lamps on the Périphérique. I would be alone tonight, and for a week, but the prospect was unenticing. I thought of calling Gold to suggest dinner, but decided against it. In our profession, there can be no sign of weakness, still less defeat. If the Old Guard found itself meeting outside work to grumble over confit de canard, it would mark the beginning of the end. I would dine alone in front of some rubbish or other on TV. The taxi hummed and the pulse of the street lamps lit Sidonie’s face with regular flashes of orange. I studied her profile. Forehead, nose, mouth, upper lip, lower lip, chin, neck.

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