Free We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young Page A

the blankets from his mattress in the kitchen and slipped out to warm his car for the drive. He was gone all day, coming back at the sinking of the sun in the afternoon, his face burnt in the wind, his hands torn, his breath bitter with alcohol.
    Lucie watched the birds from behind the safety of the glass. She saw the way they strutted back and forth inspecting her wasteland and they reminded her of a teacher she had at school. Madame Tulson with her hair scraped back in a bun. It seemed that even the birds were ill-tempered, consumed with irritation for her lack of progress, mocking her inability to move on from the kitchen and into the other rooms. You have made a prison cell for yourself, it’s true . ‘Time to move on,’ Arnaud said. ‘We can’t live for ever in the kitchen.’
    But Lucie enjoyed her work in the kitchen. Going over and over the same things. Endlessly wiping the same surfaces , rearranging, moving things around. There was satisfaction to be drawn from this work and she lifted herself to the task. She put crates on the window ledges to store her fruit and vegetables, with tightly sealed jars of salt, flour, pickles and jam. In the centre of the kitchen the table was spotless and welcoming; on a strip of old lace she kept jars of mustard, thimbles of salt and pepper. Even their mattresses, as neatly made with blankets and cushions as beds in a doll’s house, lay side by side on the floor, in front of the fire.
    ‘We can’t stay for ever in the kitchen, Lucie. Not for ever. We can’t sleep in this room for ever.’
    ‘No,’ she said, but she didn’t move.
    ‘There is this whole house to live in.’
    ‘Yes.’

     
    A white winter morning. Arnaud and the men who worked with him came into the kitchen, unlaced their boots and sat around the table.
    Lucie stood with her back to them; she thought again of Marie and the women in the room above the hairdresser’s ; how they would all laugh at this bunch of men behind her, their animal wrinkled skins, their inability to speak. Often she wondered what she was doing here among these people who never spoke, among the village folk who had not come round to pay a visit, not one of the women from the shuttered houses. In the square, their faces twitched with interest on seeing her, otherwise they slunk back inside, kept themselves to themselves. She wanted to follow them, knock on their doors and shout through their letterboxes: I’m not a German, you know! I’ve got nothing contagious, no fear greater than your own .
    ‘Lucie,’ said Arnaud when the coffee came and the men rounded like bears over their tiny cups. ‘I’m going to go with one of these men to Toulouse to see about a new machine. I’ll be away one night. Our neighbour said you can stay with his family if you would rather not be here alone.’
    The men smiled knowingly and nodded their heads.
    Lucie smiled. ‘Of course I can sleep in my own house alone.’
    ‘You’ll need a gun,’ said one of the men in an accent so thickly southern she struggled to hear what he said.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    He grinned. His teeth were brown and spaced apart. ‘You’ll need a gun. There are looters. Big places like this. Get looted.’
    She laughed. ‘Monsieur, there is nothing in this place for anyone to steal.’
    ‘That’s what you think, Madame,’ he said and Arnaud’s response was drowned out in the sound of their laughing.

     
    They left in the early afternoon when the light was clean and calm in the kitchen and the crows had gone. Lucie busied herself in the silence after their departure, emboldened suddenly by her independence. In the overgrown garden behind the house, she worked until her fingers were numb and then she bathed in the stone sink, sitting with her hair wet by the fire. She didn’t let herself think about the rest of the house heaving and groaning around her like the great old ship she saw in her mind. In the kitchen she had found it easier to imagine that the rest of the