Free The A26 by Pascal Garnier Page A

mauve shawl like a withered bouquet, you wouldn’t think she was made of some indestructible substance. Time had been on her side since birth. Yolande was the great witness. Let them go and get buried in their lousy cemeteries. Their marble slabs and plastic flowers would rot before she’d lost a single tooth. There was nothing they could do to her, and that’s what really got to them. She was like the sea, they could throw anything they wanted at her, even an atom bomb.
Boom!
it would go, and then the surface would grow perfectly smooth again as if nothing had happened. Scarcely a ripple. And when she’d had enough of everyone swarming around, then she would overflow, in wave uponwave from her statue body. In her sleep, Yolande parted her thighs and revelled in peeing where she sat.
    Yolande had awoken with a start, a silent cry filling her mouth. Something had smashed on the floor. Her bowl half full of red wine. Some creature going past, no doubt. They were everywhere. You couldn’t see them but they were there, nibbling, scrabbling, gnawing even the very shadows. She pushed the shards of her bowl under the table with the toe of her slipper. Her back hurt, the chair had been pressing into her ribs. It was a horrible day. Although it had barely begun, she could sense that from a thousand tiny details, her itching head, the cold in her bones, the way things all seemed to have moved imperceptibly from their usual places so her hand had to feel around for them. The matches that needed striking ten times before she could light the gas. Yolande set the water to boil because she had to start somewhere. She pressed up against the cooker, her hands cupped round the small blue flames. She felt stiff, as rigid as the chair on which she had spent the night. Her neck and knees cracked with every movement. The water took a day and an age to come to the boil. Yolande poured in half a jar of instant coffee, added four or five sugar lumps and filled a cup that was as stained as an old pipe. The first scalding mouthful made her cough. Then she busied herself, moving things about for no reason, just so that she wouldn’t be paralysed by the light filtering through the world’s arsehole. She made heaps, heaps of little horses, heaps of biscuit crumbs, heaps of little balls of paper, heaps upon heaps, stacked up the plates with leftover food congealed on them, donnedcoat upon coat, and put socks on over her slippers.
    She ran from one place to another, bumping into stacks of newspapers which collapsed in her wake, raising clouds of outdated information. Everywhere she felt hunted by the pale light creeping in like smoke through the gaps in the shutters, and the keyholes. All those gaps had to be plugged with scrunched-up pages of newspaper. On one of them the distressing photo of Maryse L. crumpled and disappeared in her hands. As she went to plug one last slit in a shutter, Yolande had time to see the Germans hiding on the other side of the street and a handful of Resistance fighters springing from one dustbin to the next. They no longer had enough space outside to fight their war, now they wanted to do it in her house. In her terror she found cracks in every corner, one there, another one here! The daylight was pressing with all its might against the walls. She didn’t have enough arms to battle against the pressure from outside. There was cracking and banging on all sides. It was so powerful and she was so fragile. She rushed into Bernard’s room. A troop of rats fled at her approach. She began to lay into her brother with her fists.
    ‘Bastard! How can you abandon me now?’
    Shaking with fury, she grabbed the cover from the bed, put it over her head and huddled down behind the door, arms wrapped tightly, so tightly round her knees, a mass of shivers. On the mattress the exposed corpse gave a toothy grin.

 
     
    It was past nine at night, yet the lights were still on in the café. This was the only light in the darkness bathing