The Islanders (10 page)

Olivier felt he was going back to square one, back to this flat he thought he would never set foot in again. It required an enormous effort to force himself not to think about anything, to live each minute without worrying about the last or the next. His gaze settled on the bottle of Ballantine’s but he refrained from unscrewing the cap. It contained all the courage he was lacking, but the situation demanded total lucidity. Unless … unless he picked up his bag and coat and took the first train or plane out of here. He seized the bottle and knocked the whisky back so quickly he almost choked. It was like a bomb going off in his stomach, a mushroom cloud rising to his brain and nuking all possibility of intelligent thought. It was exactly what he was hoping for. There were three short knocks at the door. He opened it with tears in his eyes. Jeanne looked like a faded watercolour.

‘Are you all right? … Here’s the key. Wait ten minutes for his programme to start … I love you.’

Olivier had just enough time to close the door and run to the sink. He threw up a yellowish liquid that burned his gullet but did him good, as did the water on his face. Now he felt empty, calm, cold. He changed his leather-soled shoes for a less noisy pair with rubber soles. He was ready to go. Just as he was about to close the door behind him, he realised he had forgotten his keys and ran back inside, cursing himself. There was no one on the stairs. The key turning in the lock made a slight click-clack but it merged with the sound of the TV, which was audible from the landing. Standing motionless in the dark hallway, Olivier got his breath back and ran his tongue over his cracked lips. He felt as if he was being held on a leash with a collar digging in around his neck. He approached the shaft of light on the threshold of the living room, and gently pushed the door. All he could see of Rodolphe was the top of his head and his fingers tapping on the arm of the chair. Olivier hugged the wall, inching towards the dining room.

‘Six letters? … Six letters as well. Over to you, Monsieur Menoux.’

‘Zombie.’

‘Monsieur Bismuth?’

‘Zombie as well.’

‘Great. Zombie: according to West Indian folklore, a corpse said to have been raised from the dead and manipulated by witchcraft. An apathetic or slow-witted person.’

Olivier was about to cross over into the dining room when Rodolphe suddenly stood up. He paused for a moment as if unsure where to go, all the while facing a petrified Olivier head-on. Eventually he went to pour himself a drink from the trolley beside the TV before returning to his armchair. The whole thing lasted only a minute or two, long enough for Olivier to see his whole life flash before his eyes.

‘One hundred and eighteen plus sixty-three times seven …’

All human thoughts had deserted Olivier’s brain. He
proceeded mechanically towards the window, sliding one foot in front of the other like the Horse Guards. His hands reached the catch and flung back both panes. A gust of icy air rushed in, so cold it was as if it had teeth. Olivier took three steps back and stood at attention.

‘What’s … Is someone there? … Who’s that?’

Rodolphe was on his feet again, the draught lifting one flap of his dressing gown.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Consonant … vowel … consonant …’

‘Damn it!’

Rodolphe came closer and closer … there was a shadow of doubt on his contorted face. His ears, nose, the pores of his skin were all on high alert. Olivier held his breath, as tightly wound as a spring. The blind man’s nostrils twitched as he passed fifty centimetres in front of him. It must be the whisky he could smell, but seeing as he had just had a glass himself … He opened his arms to the darkness like a bloated Christ and tried to pull the window closed, his belly touching the cast-iron guard rail. Olivier jumped forward, arms outstretched, eyes shut. He heard a kind of mooing followed almost immediately by a dull thud, and pressed his back against the wall.

‘Well done, Monsieur Bismuth! Spot on!’

The black butterflies fluttering beneath his eyelids turned bright yellow when he opened his eyes. He would never be able to shut them again. He crossed the room, turned off the TV, rushed out of the flat, turned the key twice in the door, crossed the landing and double-locked himself in. His ears were completely blocked up. The only sounds he heard came from within, glugs, fizzes, blubs … He sat down on a chair facing the wall and turned on the radio, eyes wide, body tingling with boiling blood.

‘I did it … Jesus, I did it!’

He had done it. Jeanne arrived at the same time as the police, who parked their van beside a group of four or five people gathered at the foot of the building. Madeleine, who was of course one of them, saw Jeanne coming a long way off and lunged towards her.

‘Oh, Mademoiselle Mangin, it’s awful! Your poor brother!’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s … I saw the whole thing! I was looking out of my window and all of a sudden I saw something falling, just like that, bam! Right before my eyes! It was me who called the emergency services, not five minutes ago. My God!’

Jeanne pushed two or three onlookers out of the way. Two officers were kneeling beside Rodolphe. His eyes were staring up at the empty sky and a bubble of blood was forming at the corner of his mouth. His right leg was jerking.

‘Please, Madame …’

‘I’m his sister. Is he …’

‘No, but it’s not looking good. Francis, call an ambulance.’

‘What happened?’

Madeleine elbowed her way to the front to chime in again.

‘I saw the whole thing! He fell like a stone, right before my eyes! Not five minutes ago!’

‘Is anyone else at home?’

‘No. He was alone when I went out about twenty minutes ago.’

‘Francis, Gérard, stay here and wait for the ambulance. I’ll go upstairs with the lady.’

Jeanne climbed the stairs followed first by the police officer and second by Madeleine, who would not stop saying ‘My God’.

Jeanne breathed a little more easily when the key turned twice in the lock.

‘Do you lock it when you go out?’

‘No – he does. My brother’s a very anxious person.’

The three of them entered the flat. The dining-room window
was wide open and the wind was billowing the curtains. Jeanne went to shut it, but the police officer stopped her. For the time being, they were not to touch anything.

‘Who does this white stick belong to?’

‘My brother. Rodolphe’s blind.’

‘Ah … so it was an accident?’

‘I doubt it. Rodolphe has been blind since birth. He’s very independent.’

Shame – the cop would clearly rather have gone with his own neat hypothesis. He took a cursory look around the room before the ambulance siren was heard blaring.

‘Here they are. I imagine you’d like to go with your brother?’

‘Yes, of course. Can I close the window? It’ll be freezing later.’

‘Yeah, go ahead.’

Out on the landing, the officer briefly took down Madeleine’s statement and had to tell her three times he had no further need of her. Jeanne did not need anything either; nobody required her services. Disappointed, Madeleine watched them go downstairs but could not bring herself to do the same. It couldn’t just end like this! She planted her finger firmly on Olivier’s doorbell.

‘Ah, you’re home! So you haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what? What is it?’

‘Your neighbours across the hall, your friends …’

‘What about them?’

‘The gentleman, the blind one, well, he’s thrown himself out of the window!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I saw the whole thing! I saw him falling right before my eyes, plain as I see you now! Bam! Like a stone!’

‘Is he … is he dead?’

‘Near enough! It’s not a pretty sight, blood all over the pavement.’

‘He’s not dead? Are you sure?’

‘He was still moving, but … what a question.’

‘I’m just surprised, from this height …’

‘You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you? I heard all about it from your poor maman. She thought you’d given up.’

‘I had. What about Jeanne – I mean his sister?’

‘Well, she’s at the hospital, of course!’

‘Yes, of course. Thanks, Madeleine, thank you.’

‘Thanks for what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t need anything?’

‘No, nothing. Goodbye.’

The old lady stared open-mouthed at the closed door before making up her mind to go home.

‘They drink, they lark about, they throw themselves out of windows … What’s the world coming to?’

It was a question of minutes, maybe hours if the heart held out, but beyond that there was no hope. She could stay if she wanted, but she was better off going home; they would call her when the time came. One of the laces on the junior doctor’s trainers was undone. Jeanne was about to point this out to him when two stretcher-bearers came rushing through the waiting area of the emergency ward. A pale hand stuck out from under a sheet along with two feet in odd socks, one grey and the other with red and black stripes. A woman with a blue rinse who was there with her husband, whose hand was wrapped in a big bloodied bandage, muttered, ‘That’s a car crash, if ever I saw one.’

‘And how would you know?’

‘I just do.’

‘Think you’re so clever, don’t you?’

‘Well, if you’d only listened to me instead of carrying on with that electric carving knife, we wouldn’t be here, would we?’

‘Oh, is that right?’

Of course there was no point staying, with her bottom squeezed into this moulded plastic chair, watching the nurses’ Scholl clogs dancing in front of her, but Jeanne wanted to be certain Rodolphe was dead. He was capable of anything, even coming back to life. She would not breathe freely until her brother had breathed his last. She wasn’t worried about anything else. The police would pay her a visit tomorrow, that was obvious, but so what? She would just repeat everything the officer had seen with his own eyes. If necessary, she would call in Rodolphe’s psychiatrist. As for the guy they had found in the woods, she
knew nothing about it. All of this seemed so clear and logical it didn’t even feel like lying. Destiny could get it wrong, and it was perfectly reasonable to rewrite the script if the scene wasn’t up to scratch. She hadn’t doubted Olivier for a moment. In spite of his fears and failings, he had risen to the task, and she thought all the better of him for it. Though he had been battered and wounded along the way, he had lost none of the fighting spirit that made them plough through life together like a horse and cart. Nobody, nothing could stand in their way.

Rodolphe was her brother, but Rodolphe had lost. Or perhaps he had won. He had never enjoyed life; it caused him too much pain. He always knew he wasn’t cut out for it. He didn’t have the knack. He couldn’t bear the keen ones at the Institute for the Blind who were self-sufficient, excelled at everything, accomplished all kinds of feats without the aid of white sticks or dogs! He had made minimal effort, ensuring he remained as dependent as possible. Everyone had to know what a terrible handicap it was to be blind.

Jeanne fully understood and respected Rodolphe’s point of view. He had never tried to be like other people; he shouted from the rooftops that he was different. It was the best strategy to adopt. One way or another, he was always going to lose. Even if Olivier had left, his victory would have killed him, and he knew it. Something had snapped between him and his sister, like an overstretched elastic band. Things could never go back to the way they were.

A homeless man was brought in, blind drunk and covered in bruises. His clothes, skin and hair were the colour of the streets, greenish, brown-black, grey. He smelt like it too, everything from petrol to urine. He kept falling over. Was his fate really more enviable than Rodolphe’s?

At 21.37, the junior doctor informed her that her brother had succumbed to his injuries.

Olivier realised he had nothing left to drink just before eight o’clock.

He hurtled downstairs at breakneck speed but it was when he reached the shop that he came a cropper: the metal shutter was down. There was a trickle of yellow light coming out from underneath it. The old woman must still be inside. He knocked three times, then harder three times more, until the shutter came halfway up and the shopkeeper poked her head out.

‘What are you banging on the shutter like that for? What do you want?’

‘It’s very good of you to open up for me. There are more of us than I was expecting this evening, and I’m a bit short on whisky …’

‘The same one as this morning?’

‘Er … yes.’

‘Stay there.’

He couldn’t help justifying himself, telling a fib before buying every bottle. It was pointless since the shopkeeper knew perfectly well he was a drunk and couldn’t have cared less. And he knew that she knew. But that didn’t matter, it was all part of the game, like hiding the bottles even when he was by himself. With the whisky safely in his pocket, he felt reassured, equipped for anything. He had no desire to go back up. There was no way Jeanne would be home from the hospital yet. He headed towards Le Départ, the café at Gare Rive Gauche. As a youngster, he never came here. People said it attracted the wrong sort of crowd. Instead he would meet his friends at L’Arrivée, in Gare Rive Droite. Sons of surgeons and lawyers with aristocratic names like de Beauvaroc, de Clérice, d’Alban-Michau. They probably still met up there – them, or their children. People like that had it made from birth. For a while, he had been proud to be admitted into their circle despite the fact his father was a lowly
public servant. It was Jeanne who opened his eyes with a single word:

‘Those guys? Cocky dodos.’

That was exactly what they were, the last survivors of their race who were inflated with pride but would never take off. L’Arrivée or Le Départ, that was the choice you had to make in Versailles. He himself had never known anything but departures. The few times he felt he had arrived corresponded with periods of total lethargy when he had no desire to go anywhere, like with Odile.

What about Rodolphe? How could he not have arrived yet? After a fall like that, he should have turned into an omelette on the pavement. What if he didn’t die? What if he was only paralysed? Paralysed and mute was OK; they could stick him in a corner somewhere, but if he talked … Olivier ducked into a doorway and opened his bottle. He needed a pick-me-up before entering the café, like people who take a little nap before going to bed.

Those drinking in the café had nothing to do at home: bachelors, widowers, drunks, all on their own, except for one couple snuggled up in a corner of a banquette at the back of the room. Olivier copied the man at the next table and ordered a Ricard. Since Rodolphe wasn’t dead, he would have to kill him a second time. This didn’t seem an insurmountable task. It was just a pain in the arse, like having to redo your homework. One day, when he was little, he had gone fishing for frogs. In order to slay them, you had to grab them by their back legs and whack their heads against a stone. The one which took Olivier’s bait stubbornly refused to die. He had had to crush the creature between two slabs to finish it off. Only afterwards did someone point out it was a toad. The two lovebirds stood up. The girl had tears in her eyes and the boy was holding a suitcase. The other customers watched them go, some nursing a half-pint, some a
Ricard, some – the most hopeless cases – a small café crème, all expecting the words ‘THE END’ to appear traced on the bistro’s steamed-up window.

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes … no.’

The man at the neighbouring table wasn’t surprised by this response. He wasn’t seeking any response at all; Olivier was merely a pretext for him to begin talking to himself, as often happens in café-bars after a certain time of night.

‘In twenty-five years of marriage, my wife and I never left one another’s side. We did everything together – the shopping, the dishes, the housework, even nothing. We sometimes went whole days without saying a word to one another, doing nothing at all, but always together.’

‘Is she dead, your wife?’

‘No.’

‘Why are you talking about her in the past tense?’

‘One day she decided to take up crochet, starting with doilies, then tablecloths, curtains, bedcovers … bigger and bigger things. She hasn’t stopped. She’s like an insect weaving a thick cocoon around herself. It’s weird, you know, living with an insect. They don’t think the same way as us, they see things geometrically, always building things, piling them higher with one aim: to keep making ghastly little white rosettes, on and on to infinity. It’s unbelievable!’

‘They say insects can resist anything, even nuclear fallout.’

‘That’s exactly it, she’s resisting! She won’t take things as they are.’

‘My mother used to make doilies, head rests and things. She’s dead now though.’

‘Of course she is … it’s never a good sign when they start to crochet.’

They had said everything there was to say to one another. The man went back into his shell and Olivier stood up to leave.

Outside, the sky looked like a wall of shitters covered in graffiti and mottled with rust. Its reflection in the gutter was prettier, iridescent with oil patches like the northern lights in miniature. He stood on the edge of the pavement for a while, staring up at the liquid sky like the fool in a tarot game, one foot on the edge of the cliff, the other stepping into the void, with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder and dogs nipping at his heels. Someone had once told him you became an adult the day you started avoiding puddles. He jumped in with both feet.

It took him a long time to find his road. It had been shuffled together with dozens of other roads that all looked the same. He couldn’t even ask one of the few passers-by because he had forgotten what it was called. It had a corner shop on it – that was all he knew. He eventually stumbled on it when he had given up hope and resigned himself to wandering the dark maze of streets until the end of time. There was a light on at Jeanne’s.

‘He died around nine thirty. Nine thirty-seven, to be precise. Aren’t you going to take off your coat?’

‘What? … No, I’m fine.’

Olivier had slumped into Rodolphe’s armchair without even undoing his overcoat. He could not yet distinguish between inside and out. Jeanne was nibbling a slice of ham.

‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?’

‘No. So he’s really dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘So everything’s all right …’

‘For now, anyway. The police are bound to come tomorrow. They’ll have to conclude it was suicide.’

‘Yes … Aren’t you tired?’

‘No, no more than usual.’

‘I am. I mean, just my body. Part of me, the energy I used pushing Rodolphe, went out of the window with him. With little Luc, there were two of us, and it was an accident. Roland – well, beats me, but with Rodolphe I knew exactly what I was doing. It’s a whole different ball game.’

‘Are you feeling guilty? Do you regret it?’

‘No! Not at all. That’s probably what surprises me most, the fact it’s so easy, that it takes so little out of you, other than this tiredness …’

‘On the island, we’ll have all the time in the world to relax and recharge our batteries.’

‘Oh yes, the island …!’

Olivier looked down at his hands. The lines on his palms formed a muddled network of roads.

‘Don’t you believe in it any more?’

‘Yes, I just can’t see it.’

‘Maybe because we’re already there.’

Jeanne swept knife and fork, crumbs and yogurt pot onto her tray and stood up. Olivier followed her into the kitchen. On the way, he picked up Rodolphe’s crystal ball from a shelf and rolled it in his hands.

‘What are we going to do with all this freedom?’

‘We’ll learn.’

‘It’ll take time.’

‘Well, freedom is time.’

The tap swirl didn’t work very well. The water sprayed out in a fan shape like a cat’s whiskers, splattering the entire sink. Jeanne was wearing yellow rubber gloves. Olivier perched on the corner of the table. There was no future in the ball, only his grotesque face with a huge misshapen nose.

‘Where am I sleeping tonight?’

‘Across the hall. I think it’s best for the next few days.’

‘I like watching you do things, everyday, humdrum stuff.’

Jeanne pulled off her gloves, removed her apron and came to nestle against Olivier.

‘We’ll have days and days and days together.’

Olivier let go of the ball, which smashed on the tiled floor. Neither of them took this as a bad sign. At worst it might mean they cut themselves treading barefoot on a shard.