French Leave Read Online Free PDF

hero is tired.”
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    I was speechless. This was the first time I’d ever seen him in such a state.
    If Simon was beginning to have his doubts, where were we headed?
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    Just then—and to me this was a miracle, although on the other hand it doesn’t surprise me, and I kiss the patron saint of brothers and sisters who has been watching over us now for nearly thirty-five years, and who has never been out of work, poor guy—his cell rang.
    It was Lola, who had finally made up her mind, and was asking him if he could stop and pick her up at the station in Châteauroux.
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    Our spirits immediately revived. Simon put his cell back in his pocket and asked me for a cigarette. Carine came back, scrubbing her arms right up to her elbows. She immediately reminded her husband of the precise number of cancer victims who had died because of . . . He gave a limp wave of his hand as if he were chasing a fly and she walked away, coughing.
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    Lola was coming. Lola would be with us. Lola hadn’t let us down, and the rest of the world could just go hang.
    Simon put on his dark glasses.
    He was smiling.
    His little Lola was on the train . . .
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    They have this special thing between them. First of all, they’re closest in age, only eighteen months apart, and they were really children together.
    They were the ones who were always getting up to mischief. Lola had an irrepressible imagination and Simon was pliant (already . . . ). They ran away. They got lost. They got into fights, tormented each other, made up. Mom likes to tell us how Lola would needle him all the time, always going into his bedroom to bug him, grabbing the book from his hands or kicking something straight into his Playmobil. My sister doesn’t like to recall these acts of war (she worries she’s being lumped in the same basket with Carine), so then our mom senses that she’d better change tack and she adds that Lola was always eager for something new, she’d invite all the kids in the neighborhood and invent all kinds of new games. She was like one of those cool scout leaders who can come up with a thousand ideas a minute, and she watched over her big brother like a broody hen. She’d make all sorts of inedible snacks for him with mustard and Nutella and she’d come and lift him out of his Legos when Grendizer or Captain Harlock was on television.
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    Lola and Simon grew up during the Golden Age. When there was Villiers. When we all lived out in the sticks and our parents were happy together. For them the world began outside the front door and ended on the far side of the village.
    They would streak across fields pursued by imaginary bulls, and creep into abandoned houses haunted by ghosts that weren’t imaginary at all.
    They rang the bell at old mother Margeval’s until she was ripe for the asylum; they destroyed the hunters’ traps; they pissed into washtubs, nicked the teacher’s dirty magazines, stole firecrackers, set off the ones called mammoth, and rescued little kittens that some bastard had sealed up alive in a plastic bag.
    Boom. Seven kittens all at once. You bet Pop was happy!
    And the day the Tour de France came through our village . . . Lola and Simon went and bought fifty baguettes and sold sandwiches by the dozen. With their earnings they bought practical jokes and gags, and sixty Malabar candies, and a jump-rope for me, and a little trumpet for Vincent (already!), and the latest Yoko Tsuno.
    Yes, childhood was different back then . . . They knew what an oarlock was, and they smoked creepers and knew the taste of gooseberries. And then there came the biggest major significant event of all, what a huge impact it had, and it happened right behind the door to the shed:
    Today Ar April 8 we saw the preist waring shorts.
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    Then they went through our parents’ divorce, together. Vincent and I were still too little. We only really figured out what a raw deal we were getting