We All Ran into the Sunlight (21 page)

When he got hungry he ate a roll with a tablet of butter he’d taken from the station café. He ate in small bites, savouring the taste of the bread in his mouth. Then he wiped the knife clean with the wrapper and folded the foil in half, then quarters. Then he slipped his knife through the fold. Then quarters again. Then he popped the tiny book of foil into his mouth and swallowed. From now on there would be no crumbs. There would be no clutter and no remnants. He would leave no trace of
himself
.

At Béziers, he got off the train. For a long time he sat on a bench in the square, his rucksack strapped to his back, his head moving all around. He saw how the trunk of the big olive tree split and then came together again, two trunks meeting above his head. He watched a small bird peck at the remains of a burger dropped on the ground. A woman walked past pushing an empty pushchair.

He checked himself into a hostel near the train
station
where the beds were laid out like hospital beds with plastic undersheets. It was four in the afternoon. He had no plan. Lollo had said you must go back and sell the chateau. There was an English bitch sniffing around the place, he said. Some rich cunt from London wanting to take it on. She would pay and when she handed the money over, Daniel would give a third to the mother who had carried him, and the sister whose life he destroyed. Lollo had spread his piece of paper out on the table. It wasn’t a contract. The paper had been torn out of an
exercise
book. But Daniel had said ok. He’d taken the
broken 
bit of biro, and he’d taken the piece of paper, but he hadn’t signed. There wasn’t any need. He knew the time had come, anyway. Lollo was half soaked on tequila by then, and hanging onto the bar.

Now he sat on the bed in the airless room and waited. The walls were white and had biro marks – swear words and hearts mostly, random scratch marks from a bunch of people who knew not very much about anything.
Nothing
on the soul, nothing important, nothing that might be a guide. He closed his eyes and saw himself as a boy in shorts and T-shirt, hurrying to buckle his sandals on the steps outside the chateau. It was high summer, early morning. Frederic was coming to play. They had arranged a secret meeting and through the gate the boy came,
wearing
a gold crown and carrying a plastic gun. He ran
towards
Daniel, waving the gun as he came. ‘Daniel,’ he shouted, then again, again, ‘Daniel, Daniel.’ Daniel was crouching on the steps with a finger to his mouth. ‘It’s me. It’s Frederic, the King!’

There was a thud of a can in the drinks machine. A girl with a shaved head and a sickle tattoo on her neck came in and offered him a piercing. Daniel looked at his watch. He looked at her reddish eyes and her nice smile and he slithered off the bed and went off to join her.

In the corridor he smoked pot with the girl. He watched while she kissed another girl, whose name was Mandy. They spoke softly. They were thinking about going to Morocco. They agreed there wasn’t much to believe in. Mandy had a balloon. She kept blowing air in and
letting
it go. And the girl with the shaved head put a hand on Daniel’s cheek and told him that his eyes were
beautiful
. One of the girls started giggling and kissing him but it tailed off, after a while, and so they sat and looked at the streetlight through the grimy windows, and heard the television blaring in the common room.

In the morning, Daniel got up early and went in search of some food. He tapped on the window of the bakery and bought a loaf from a woman in a dressing gown. She had covered her face in a green cream. She took his money and handed over a crusty baguette in a twist of grey
paper
. For a moment or two, he stood in the warmth of the shop with the smell of bread in his nostrils, then he went outside and sat down on the bench, eating the bread
slowly
; he pulled rough chunks from the stick and shook the crumbs out for the birds gathering around his feet. The sun cast a pale orange light on the shop fronts across the square. He thought of Carey and her soft, healing hands. He blinked. ‘I feel like I could put my finger through your skin and find that you’re not really there.’

He went into the church and stared up ahead at the light coming in through the stained-glass windows and onto the polished head of Christ. It was quiet and
orderly
in there. He watched an old woman kneeling in the front pew, anxiously tick-tacking the beads of her rosary. Tick tack knock knock are you there tick tack? Daniel sat down in a pew and put his chin on his hands. He looked at the knobbly protrusions of the woman’s vertebrae and felt her despair. Lucie rarely went into the church in the village for a moment’s respite and reflection but slept with her saints on her bed instead, bent like a stick in a
blue-and-white
nightdress with a ribbon around the waist. Like a little girl dreaming of martyrdom. That strangely
fantastic
version of Catholicism she had. Muttering to the Mother Mary and Saint Perpetua while fretfully avoiding God. And sixty already. That yellow summer, Daniel’s footsteps in the corridor, softly moving, one foot after the other, trying not to wake her – he who had become so accustomed to a mother sleeping – when he stopped at the window with his gift of sugared almonds and looked down on the courtyard where the birds were gathering, blackbirds mostly, looking up, their eyes full of rain and the grapes that Arnaud prayed over, season after season.

Daniel had come to think he didn’t believe in God. But he liked the fact that Carey believed, and that it brought her comfort, and that when she put her hands on his hot and worried head, she was making some peaceful
connection
with a higher, holier power and transmitting
something
that might be able to save him. He had come to understand that, despite what he used to think, comfort wasn’t a bad thing, tinged as it was with deception and fear.

On the outskirts of Béziers, Daniel hitched a ride on the road heading north. The truck stopped at the crossroads on the heath above the village. Daniel had nothing to give the man in exchange for the ride, but he raised his fingers in a half-hearted salute and waved the vehicle on its way. A line of dust rose under the wheels as the truck spun on the crossroads and continued on a single-track road into the hills.

The air up on the heath was cooler and clear. He stood for a moment, listening to the sound of the engine as it died away. Then his ears flooded with the sounds of the countryside. He heard the scuttle and nest of insects, the chirrup of a bird. He heard the grass swish as the air moved through it and he bent down to touch it with his fingers. Across the heath was the air hangar. To the left of the hangar some clothing flapped around on a line. There was the turning field, the petrol pump and the
runway
. There was no one about. Daniel walked slowly
towards
the hangar to see if there were planes inside but the big doors were closed. The corrugated shelter rattled and ticked in the wind. He ambled quickly across the heath and cut through the line of trees to the hill-path. The ground was white here. He remembered. The heat of summer. The distance fading. Whiteness. Hiss, hiss; the grass that throbbed until nightfall.

From the ground he picked up a stone and rubbed the red earth from it with his thumb. Then he stooped to
collect
up a leaf, the underside pink as icing; and he put the leaf in his pocket with the stone, with a broken twist of vine, with the silvery leaf of an olive tree, several olives, green and hard. These were the things he had thought of over the years; this the stuff that had danced under his eyelids in the bleach of slow, restless thought.

He knew he wouldn’t be recognised in Canas. It’d been twenty years, at least. In his jeans and crisp shirt he was like a man from any city in Europe. He was a man from nowhere. They wouldn’t identify him now. Halfway down the hill path he stopped and sat on a rock. From here, he could see the whole village. The windows were all on
different
levels, like old people’s eyes peering out from their stone skins, cranky old shutters, roofs like the soft hats the old men wore in the square. There were fences laid out like teeth around patches of land and doorways – dark little openings – like a hundred chattering mouths.

Daniel closed his eyes for a moment or two. His feet slipped out in front of him, his ankles making grooves in the track. There was dry grass around him, wild
asparagus
growing, fennel, gorse. He swallowed and looked back down the hill, focusing his eyes on the chateau and the tower rising behind the wall.

He walked down into the village and he stopped in the square. The first thing he saw was the Pépin house. It looked the same. But paler somehow, and smaller. He saw that the door had changed colour. Sylvie would be there. He looked at his watch and walked towards
the-door
, and then he turned halfway across the square and slipped into the café.

Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Three, maybe four old men sat hunched over the bar top. Daniel went to the bar and said he was going to sit outside and he sat at one of the four zinc tables in front of the
fountain
. He folded his fingers together on the table, tensed the muscles in his wrists while he waited. From the
fountain
, water dribbled in greenish strings. Things loomed up. Looked strange. When he half closed his eyes it could all be here, just as it was. There were flowers on the
balconies
. Buildings were smaller, squatter, things seemed quieter.

Behind him, the church stood as it always had: big, and old and crumbling away. He remembered himself giggling in the shadows and Frederic, standing up in the fountain, his pants sliding down to his knees as the old women of the village appeared through the door from evening Mass. He saw Frederic rubbing his hand up and down and calling to the women to look over at him. But the thought of this boy tugged at Daniel’s heart now in a way that made him feel angry, so he closed his eyes and counted while the bad feeling leaked away.

‘Does Sylvie Pépin live in that house there?’ he said to the bartender, a little more roughly than he’d intended to, and he lifted his arm up and pointed across the square. Daniel felt how rickety and insecure the table was, how flimsy the chair, and he got up out of it and moved to sit in the other one.

‘Yes,’ said the barman. ‘You know Sylvie?’

‘I used to,’ said Daniel, and he shifted the chair by picking it up by the arms and dragging it onto more even ground. ‘I knew her once.’

The bartender’s head was marked with a zigzag shaved into the dark bristles of his hair. He hugged the tray against his chest. In a house across the square, a front door banged open and a slim woman in a long green dress tumbled out onto the steps. The dress was crinkled and silky and it swished elegantly around her ankles as she stopped and turned. She bent to sniff the roses outside the house and she tucked her hair behind her ears and then she went back into the house and banged the door behind her. Daniel had forgotten this, how mad people were down here. How they ferried about in their odd little lives doing things that the rest of the world would deem so unimportant with the pomp and ceremony of kings.