Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

loosening a shower of old ivory paint flakes above the washbasin. The showerhead wept a few either icy or scalding tears, because the mixer had not yet invented warm water. Brice was just extracting a blackhead on the side of his nose in front of the mirror when the sound of voices reached him through the air vent. The bathroom was next to Blanche’s room.

      ‘You’re mad, my poor girl!’

      ‘I’m not your poor girl, Élie! Stop speaking to me as if you were my father! I’m thirty-nine years old, a grown woman!’

      ‘A woman! You’re not capable of managing on your own, you know that perfectly well.’

      ‘Exactly. I don’t want to be on my own any more.’

      ‘But I’m here, Blanche. Think about it. Brice could be your father.’

      ‘That’s what I like about him.’

      ‘You don’t know what you’re saying!’

      ‘We’ve got so much in common: things, TV, Viandox. We wouldn’t change anything. We’d go on living here.’

      ‘Then what would you gain by marrying him?’

      ‘I’d be able to sleep with him, like with Papa.’

      ‘You should forget all that, Blanche.’

      ‘But I can’t! My stomach hurts, and my head, and my heart. And I love him, I really do.’

      ‘What about him? He hasn’t finished grieving yet. He doesn’t know how to love any more.’

      Sobbing ensued, muffled no doubt on Élie’s chest. All Brice could see of himself now was a misty man in the steamed-up mirror over the washbasin, with a toothbrush stuck in his mouth.

      Brice managed to slip out on the pretext of an appointment with his insurer in town. Blanche had white-rabbit eyes, and Élie ice cubes in the back of his throat, when he left them after coffee.

      He lingered in the streets and did a bit of desultory windowshopping, his hands deep in his pockets. He visited the small museum which housed a few of a local artist’s daubings, the remains of some Gallo-Roman pottery, a gallery of fossils, shaped flints and arrowheads, and a plethora of stuffed animals in a piteous state in dusty cases: a grey heron, a beaver, a badger, a ferret, a magpie, a rat, the skulls of a bear, horse and rabbit, some frogs, toads and vipers in jars of formalin. The place smelled of wax and dust. He was the only visitor. The floor creaked. Sitting on a cracked leatherette bench, he meditated for a long time in front of the shell of a Polynesian turtle. Polynesia … islands, trade winds, boredom assured, syphilis guaranteed. Like Gauguin …

      Leaving on tiptoe so as not to wake the attendant asleep on a chair, he made straight for the nearest travel agent’s.

      ‘What’s the furthest away thing you’ve got?’

      ‘Furthest away from what?’

      ‘Here, of course!’

      ‘Australia, Tierra del Fuego …’

      ‘Oh yes, that’s good, Tierra del Fuego. How much is that?’

      ‘Well, we have fifteen-day tours.’

      ‘No, just a one-way ticket.’

      ‘I … Hold on, I’ll get you some information.’