Free The A26 by Pascal Garnier

Yolande would eat the rats. With garden peas. She had loads of them. Bernard didn’t like them but he’d always got a tin when he did the week’s shopping. It was a tradition. There were sardines as well, plenty of them, and tomato sauce. She had all she needed, several times over. She had the wherewithal to live two lives here, two lives sheltered from others. She could do it all herself. She needed no one else. Music, for example, on that mandolin. She knew a tune: ‘Ramona … I’ll always remember the rambling rose you wore in your hair.’
    ‘Bugger off!’
    The mandolin narrowly missed the rat running across the table. The echo of the instrument made ripples on the surface of the silence. Yolande closed her eyes. The same movement in the darkness inside her head.
    ‘Don’t lean out of the window, Yoyo, you’ll get your head torn off if we go through a tunnel.’ It would all be going so fast that it was impossible to open your eyes or even breathe. Now and then you’d get tiny smuts in your face. The tears in the corner of your eyes would be drawn upwards and vanish into your hair, streaming backwards with the wind. It took a smack across the legs to make her come away from the window and sit quietly on the seat. The intoxication would last for quarter of an hour and then she’d be at it again, on the pretext that she felt travel sick. That’s how she would have liked to go through life, eyes closed, at the window of a train hurtling onwards, atthe risk of getting her head torn off in a tunnel. They’d made do with shaving it.
    Yolande had thought Bernard had moved, but no, it was a rat, a big fat rat under the bedcover. She hadn’t missed that one, eliminating it with one blow from the dictionary, open at the page with the D’s: deride, derision, derisory, etc. Afterwards she’d dissected the animal with her little sewing scissors, ever so neatly. She’d cooked it in red wine like a rabbit, a rabbit the right size for her, a one-portion rabbit.
    She was alone in the world now, surrounded by miniature rabbits, rather like Alice in Wonderland. After dinner she would play the little horse game, while she dipped biscuits into a thimbleful of red wine. She would be both Bernard and Yolande. When she was Yolande she would cheat, of course.
    The dice was stuck on five. Besides the unseen presence of mice and rats, nothing moved. The pendant lamp went on shedding its forty watts of greyish light over the board with its tiny racecourse, now lying in ruins. Bernard had got angry with Yolande who was cheating shamelessly. In an instant, the little horses had gone flying to every corner of the table. Only one was left standing, a green one, on the square marked 7.
    Yolande wasn’t going to play with Bernard any more. She was asleep, chin on her chest, arms hanging by the sides of the chair and a mauve crocheted shawl round her shoulders. She had quickly tired of being Bernard and Yolande, switching from one side of the table to the other. After a short while she had lost track of who she was.Then she had played the part of Bernard in a rage, simply to have done with it.
    Bernard had gone off to his room in a sulk. Yolande would have liked to continue. She hated things coming to an end. She’d always been like that. She’d never wanted to get off a merry-go-round. Later on when she’d go out partying all night, she took badly to the first glimmerings of dawn. She’d get angry with the people who left her and went off to bed. When there was a cake she liked, she wouldn’t eat just one but ten, even if it made her sick. Nothing was ever supposed to stop.
    Every night she struggled against sleep. She lost every time, but one day she’d win. She would keep her eyes open, like statues. She might be covered in moss and pigeon droppings but she would not let her eyelids fall. Generations of dribbling old men and snivelling babies would pass by and she wouldn’t so much as blink.
    Seeing her like this, wound in her