The Islanders Read Online Free PDF

a year with. Fanchon was headmistress of the secondary school in Melun, the man a BNP bank clerk in the same town, and the teenager, the first …
    The hairbrush fell out of her hands. The stale whiff of the past wafted back to her only very rarely. She made do with living in an eternal present, odourless, colourless and tasteless. The hairdryer put her thoughts back in order, a great gust of wind blasting through her head.
    ‘A drowned rat’, that was how the twins used to describe her.They had no more weight on them than she did; lean and tough, like their father – and their mother. Rodolphe was the odd one out. He had gone from being a fat baby to a fat little boy and grew up to become obese. Was it linked to his blindness? That was a mystery to chew over. Like all children, he first started exploring the world with his mouth, and had never stopped. As soon as he was introduced to someone, he would smack his flabby, sugar-coated lips against their cheek like a suction cup, hoovering them into his wide-open mouth. Children were afraid of him. But Rodolphe was not an intrinsically bad person. It was only repeated rejection that had made him that way. Sometimes she wished he would die, for his own good. Unlike her, he could not bear the solitude nature had inflicted on him. But despite the layer of fat strangling it, his heart carried on mercilessly beating.
     
    Jeanne had just put on a jumper and a pair of black trousers when the doorbell rang.
    ‘Hi, I’m your neighbour, or rather, your neighbour’s son, and I …’
    Olivier shrank back. The black pupils in the eyes of the woman who had just opened the door to him looked like two great lead wrecking balls. An entire wall of his past went crashing to the ground, leaving nothing behind it.
    ‘Have we met?’
    No matter how prepared you are, there are some things you cannot see coming. Jeanne was face to face with Olivier. An Olivier disguised as a respectable gentleman with salt and pepper hair, dressed in a suit and tie, but Olivier all the same. She could not speak or make a sound, but two beads of salt water began welling beneath her eyelids. The man standing before her wobbled as if gripped with vertigo.
    ‘I don’t believe it … Jeanne?’
    ‘Come in.’
    This was not real life in the everyday world where you could come and go as you pleased; Olivier knew what a massive step he was taking. This was not a matter of chance. What it was a matter of, he did not know. He had set foot on a slippery slope and he was sliding, yes, sliding. He had come round to ask his neighbour for the phone book and found himself face to face with his past, with Jeanne, his Jeanne, the Jeanne of his youth, with whom his life had turned upside down, and again he felt knocked off balance. It was scary and wonderful all at once.
    ‘Sit down.’
    Olivier fell back onto a sofa. He couldn’t take anything in. The smell of soap and shampoo wafted from Jeanne, who had hardly changed after all these years. He felt the urge to laugh; the whole thing was so unlikely, it was as if he had dreamed it.
    ‘I … I don’t know what to say.’
    ‘Don’t say anything.’
    There he was, in front of her. He was there. He wasn’t dead. He was crossing and uncrossing his legs. He had wrinkles, white hair, a tic that made the corner of his mouth twitch, but he was there. The past lay ahead of her, opening its closets to reveal the resident skeletons …
    ‘Do you want something to drink?’
    ‘No, thank you. It’s so … What are you doing here?’
    ‘What are
you
doing here?’
    He could have told her his mother had died and he had come up for the funeral, but he settled for raising his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Beats me.’ There clearly was a reason for his being here, but putting it into words was beyond him. It was the same for Jeanne: the whys and wherefores seemed superfluous, they were there, after …
    ‘How long has it been?’
    ‘A long time.’
    Jeanne had settled into an armchair