We All Ran into the Sunlight (20 page)

The white van that was parked under the pines was gone, leaving only a trail of angry tyre marks, like a game of brown dominoes in the mud.

On the table in the kitchen, beneath the bottle of vodka, there was a piece of a paper. It said, ‘Bye, bye. I’m going home,’ in his writing that was as bad as a child’s.

Baseema took the paper out from under the bottle. He had finished the bottle before leaving. And in her mind she saw him hunched behind the wheel, the spray of grey curls, those feeble fingers on the wheel. And she
wondered
, for a moment, about his intention. It was possible someone would find him in a day or two, the car gone down into a ravine, in between the dripping mountains; and buried in the mist and the forest, he would be fallen, hunched up over the wheel. They might wonder, peering in for a moment, what wild dog had been here for him and pinned him down, tried to rip out an eye. These
policemen
wouldn’t know it wasn’t him she had been after but the man in him, the deep stubborn unapologetic French man sunk down and drowning deep inside.

But she didn’t want that for her spouse. Of course she didn’t want that. She wanted him to be back where he felt safe, in the village, in his house with Sylvie, the house she had readied for his return.

And she knew that the chances were he’d have pulled over and fallen asleep somewhere. Then he’d wake with the first of the light and shake himself and gun the engine so that he could get to Sylvie’s in time for coffee, for bread and jam.

He’d shuffle in through the front door as if he’d never been away. He’d seat himself at the kitchen table and grin, looking around. He’d look at the line of Spanish plates falling on the wall, and he might remember, as Baseema couldn’t, who from the village it was who had made the gift.

The man would be back in his house then. Across the square he’d see the lights on in the café. He wouldn’t see the dark lumps of the chateau behind the wall. He would only see the café, and the women walking through the square with their baskets on their arms. He’d seat
himself
at his old table in the house that once was and would always be his, and he’d cross himself then and know that he was home.

Lollo Pépin didn’t say hello. He wasn’t smiling. The
waitress
had disappeared.

He leant forward over the bar. ‘I drove here. From the Pyrenees. I stopped and slept in the vehicle. All because my determination was to face you, finally.’

Daniel tried to focus on what the man was saying. On Lollo’s head was a black triangle of sweat. It looked as if his crown had been pressed with the tip of an iron. Daniel felt the advantage of his height, the length and breadth of his torso. The simple black T-shirt and jeans that he wore to work were effective by contrast with the stained collar and crumpled beige trousers before him.

‘They cut him down,’ Lollo said, staring shakily up into Daniel’s face. ‘I sat with his head for hours. I just sat there like a mug…. and you had disappeared.’

Daniel’s eyes filled up with tears very quickly in the shadows behind the bar. ‘He was my friend.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lollo. ‘Pissssssth,’ he said. Then he seemed to lose courage and he rocked on his elbows. He looked to the street, drew phlegm from the back of his throat. A coach load of pale staring tourists rumbled past the
window
.

In a moment, the kitchen door swung open and in came Suzette with armfuls of napkins. She smiled shyly at Daniel, unaware of his customer. Daniel watched as she settled herself at table 12 and began to fold the napkins. He stared at the brightness in her gleam of blonde hair.

Lollo had walked the entire stretch of the Boulevard St Michel to find the restaurant Daniel was working in. It was a shock for both of them. To come face to face like this, after so many years.

‘Who do you think you are?’

Daniel said nothing. He took the bottle of tequila down. Lollo’s jacket creaked as he leant over the bar. ‘Maghreb,’ he said. ‘Fucking Maghreb bastard. That is what you are.’

Daniel gave Lollo another drink.

‘Your biological mother was from Algeria. And… You know, don’t you? You know who I mean.’

‘I…’

‘Maghreb.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Fucking Maghreb bastard.’

Daniel stared at the clear liquid as it filled his own glass. Maghreb was a word that snagged in the throat. He didn’t know much about Algeria. In his mind, it was an area of confusion and unresolved pain. A bartender had told him once that the Algerians were waiting for an apology. Acknowledgement. Recognition. The bully who cut off relatives’ hands. But France, like the silent dad, refused to concede the damage done.

Daniel looked at Lollo’s face and saw how the years had hollowed him. Where once his eyes were slitty and hard, they now drooped at the corners and seemed pinned into the top of his face. The two men drank. Time had slowed down. Daniel nodded his head in the darkness, and he placed both hands on the bar and experienced some kind of emotion that felt a bit like wind. He hit the flesh on his chest and coughed the alcohol into his stomach.

It didn’t come as a surprise to him, what Lollo was
telling
him, drip by drip, about the truth of his birth. It was clear: Lucie was not his biological mother. His biological mother was the quiet woman with the dark chignon in the square. Lucie had kept him close and tried to keep him warm – he got so warm he nearly died for lack of air. Love to the point of asphyxiation; her timid little fretful voice breathing deep into the drum of his ear. From the balcony railings Baseema was far away; she was Frederic and Sylvie’s mother. She was strong, and calm, like lake water.

‘Why do you look at me like that, huh?’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Me? I don’t give a shit what you say.’

Lollo grunted for more tequila. He wasn’t finished. ‘Now the chateau is your property, Daniel, and you have a chance to make amends.’

Daniel’s gentle nodding was a tiny movement but there, nonetheless. Guilt was his reflex. He had felt it always, without knowing why.

‘What do you say?’

‘I said the chateau is nothing to do with me. I want nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah! Fuck this, fuck that. Don’t take responsibility for this or that. It’s all the same with your generation. Chiefly the rich cunts like you.’

Daniel turned away and looked again out the window.

‘But, see, the chateau at Canas is everything to do with you. It’s all there is. For all of us.’

Daniel swallowed. His stomach lurched. He looked at the man before him and tried to blur his eyes as if to fade him out of the picture.

‘What does it matter? I come from the same place as Frederic and Sylvie. I am the same.’

‘No.’

Daniel thought about Sylvie and the fire as it had flamed into her hair. She had tried to trace him. He’d received an email from her, to which he had never replied.

‘You can think what you like of me,’ he said calmly,
before
stepping out from behind the bar. ‘It doesn’t matter to me. Nor to anyone. Frederic killed himself. So there is nothing more for us to discuss on this or any other day.’

From the corner of his eye, Daniel saw the old man rise a little from the stool. He tried to tuck his T-shirt into his belt as he went through to the back. He took his apron off and hung it on the pegs outside the staff toilet rather than on the usual ones in the storeroom. Then he opened the door to the cleaning cupboard and closed it again. In the toilets, he looked briefly at his face in the white light. He pumped soap into his palm and closed his fingers around it. He closed his eyes but when he opened them his face was still there – big and startling and huge. He washed his hands and then held his wrists under the stream of cold water. The hand dryer wasn’t working so he left the water on his hands and yanked on the fire door and went out into the street.

He was carrying a paper bag full of plums when he rapped on his landlady’s door at eleven o’clock and found that she wasn’t asleep, but up with the television. He declined the offer of coffee and handed over the plums. Daniel told his landlady that he was leaving Paris for the south at first light in the morning. He would put his rubbish out in
advance
and if it was all right he would use one of her bins. There was no need to worry about the post and he would hold onto his key. He was going, he told her, to the village that he was born and raised in. First thing in the morning. To sell his father’s house. Most of the money he would be giving away to some members of his family who hadn’t done so well – he had a biological mother who lived in a hut in the Pyrenees and a half-sister with a burnt face. He would bring back some of the money for her, and he bowed slightly and apologised for falling behind on his rent. Then he said he would never forget her
understanding
and kindness.

Mrs Orlandini was pleased. She said that it sounded like a good plan. She teased him about all the girls who came to see him. All those skittish little hearts he was breaking, she said. Then she kissed his hands and he stumbled a little and fell into her cooking-smell arms.

Early the next morning, Daniel was the only one on the platform, standing right at the end, very still. The last
carriage
of the train was empty. He could see that. He smiled to himself in the glass sliding by. He was wearing the same black jeans, with a blue shirt that his girlfriend Carey had chosen because of the way it brought out the blue of his eyes. Daniel was mostly embarrassed by his eyes. An accident of birth; but a beautiful face was the best disguise in the world. Carey had moved into his flat and tried to love him for who he was. Lovely Carey. With her vegetarian burritos and her healing hands. But that was the problem, in the end. Carey laid her hands on him and tried to heal him and she got too close to the core. ‘
Sometimes
,’ she’d said, towards the end, ‘I feel like I could put my finger through your skin and find that you’re not
really
there.’

The train was air-conditioned and cool inside. There were all the seats in the carriage to choose from and Daniel went straight for the window seat, the second one on the right. He stowed his rucksack away on the overhead rack, and his watch, which was plastic and digital, he removed from his wrist and placed neatly on the table in front of him. Then he took a breath and closed his eyes as the train pulled out of the station. Lucie had said he was a genius. There were many waiters in the world who were geniuses. Lost souls. Into the restaurants they came,
looking
vaguely around for a peg, and an apron – and some other people with whom to attempt solidarity. He took a breath and opened his eyes. There was a money spider on the window. He glimpsed his own reflection again. It was Daniel, the Daniel he used to be – crunched-up features, shadows around the eyes, tension in the forehead; the one holding a pencil, chewing it, worried, towards the end. Something in his head, he said; like an eerie, open sound, like a rolling feeling – space was the
matter
– he had tried to tell Frederic about the pressure but found that he couldn’t explain.

Outside, the French countryside flattened and changed as the train clattered towards the south. Daniel watched the people leaving the train and new people coming on, settling themselves with their mobile phones, like strange little arm extensions, on the little tables in front of them, with newspapers and books and magazines, with music and food and gadgets and bottles of water and Coke, and he saw how the children did just the same, came armed with phones and games and drinks and sweets and
magazines
with coloured pens and pencils attached in
cellophane
packages, and how some of them even came on and sat with small computers with screens on which to watch their films. A little girl shrieked when she dropped her bag of things beside him and he bent down to help her and picked up a pencil case that had slipped under his seat. The little girl sniffed and said thank you, and stared at his hand, which had a cigarette stub in it.

Daniel looked out at the fields and all the hanging
greyness
and the cows pushing their bums against a five-bar gate. In one field a horse was taking a piss and the steam was rising around its flank. There were towns of houses piled up close to the tracks. Lanes twisting off towards bigger houses full of big families, he imagined. Little girls running about in rubber boots. Women milking cows. You could picture them in spring. Happy boys playing with caterwauls. Raincoats shining. The path to school. Gates. Leaning. Shouting white teeth laughing. Then, nothing. Flat land. For miles.