The A26 by Pascal Garnier

Author:Pascal Garnier [Garnier, Pascal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Euro Noir, Mystery & Crime
ISBN: 9781908313539
Google: gTVDAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00B3SGF84
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 1999-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

‘I find him more disgusting every day. He’s drunk by ten in the morning, and every evening I get a pasting because some customer has been giving me the eye, or for any old thing. Shall I tell you what? I wish he’d die.’

‘That’ll happen.’

‘Yes, but when?’

Jacqueline was making huge figures of eight with her cloth on the waxed tablecloth. There wasn’t so much as a crumb of Bernard’s lunch left, but she persisted, as if she were trying to get rid of the brown and yellow floral pattern on the tablecloth or something even more stubborn, Roland’s life for instance. She had her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Bernard had always loved her arms, strong, hands reddened from washing up. It must be good to sleep in arms like those.

‘You’re not listening to me – where are you?’

‘Yes, I am, I’m here.’

‘No, you’re here but you’re not here. You look like a plaster saint, smiling at everything but not seeing a thing.’

‘I don’t know. It’s as if I’d been away somewhere. I recognise things and people, but it’s all changed imperceptibly, like the tracing of a drawing that’s moved by a fraction of a millimetre. I don’t know how I can explain it to you.’

‘I’ve not heard from you for a whole week. Were you having a rough time?’

‘That’s putting it mildly. But yes, I really thought I’d had it. Death comes closer, like the sea, it hits me full in the face, a huge wave of black foam. I tell myself the time has come, in my head I’ve packed my bag, and then it recedes again. It’ll be back.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘Not any more. When I was a kid on holiday at the beach, I used to practise walking with my eyes closed, in case I went blind some day. It’s the same sort of thing.’

‘You’re going and then you come back – is that what you’re saying?’

‘If you like.’

‘If it was me, I wouldn’t come back.’

‘You don’t get to decide, you just have to go along with it.’

‘What about the pain?’

‘That’s what keeps us alive. Without the pain or even just the fear of pain we’d all be off at the first unhappy love affair.’

‘That might not be such a bad thing.’

‘I don’t know about that. While you’re here, it’s because you’ve got good reason to be here.’

‘Oh well, do enlighten me then, because I for one can’t see the ghost of one.’

‘Yet you are here.’

‘Barely …Why, Bernard, why have we spent our whole time walking alongside our own lives?’

Jacqueline’s lower lip was beginning to stick out and tremble, her eyes misted over. Her face was so close to Bernard’s that he could see nothing else, as if all there was in the world was this woman’s face, ravaged by regret and steeped in exhaustion. It was as though he were looking at her through a magnifying glass – wrinkles, hairs, blackheads – it was hardly proper. It was life that had caused all this damage, like a river wearing its way through a mountain, day after day, for so many days.

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