The Islanders Read Free

inane words with metallic voices. It was terrifying. The dolls of her childhood did not speak, eat, wee or poo. They were either stiff or floppy. The first black doll went on sale when she was twelve. She was sorry not to have had one, but it was too late by then. That was the age she became old overnight. One morning she got up and her toys no longer spoke to her. They had become objects, things. She touched them, turned them over in her hands as though seeing them for the first time, and began to cry. Her childhood had run away during the night.
    The pistols, rifles and submachine guns for boys looked more authentic than the real things. The kids were trying them out for size, making them rattle into action with expert ease. A mini Sarajevo. Had a terrorist slipped a real weapon among them, there would have been utter carnage. This was a truly false world. Anything could be forged, everything could be questioned; calves were being cloned and one could not even be sure of remaining the same person from one day to the next. Plagiarism had become the ultimate, fatal art form and illusion the universal religion.
    Jeanne couldn’t care less. What was wrong with sending a cloned Jeanne to work and to pick up Rodolphe from the Louvre? What would she do with herself in the meantime? Nothing. She would be dead and thanks to her double, everyone would think she was still alive.
    A child came along and threw himself at her legs. He already had the face of an old codger. With twenty years of teaching behind her, nothing surprised Jeanne any more. She had loved kids and then hated them, and now she was as indifferent to them as she was to adults. It was just a case of putting up with them and waving them away like flies from time to time.
    As Jeanne left the department store carrying the scales under her arm, the cold air struck her full in the face, in stark contrast to the stifling heat inside La Samaritaine. For a few seconds it took her breath away. She didn’t actually mind this weather – the coldest since the winter of 1917 – any more than she had the heat wave the previous summer. She liked extremes. It was the same with dwarves: they were out of the ordinary.
    She arrived in the room containing
The Raft of the Medusa
at exactly one o’clock. Rodolphe looked peeved.
    ‘It’s me.’
    ‘Yes, I know it’s you. You should change your perfume, then I could imagine I was meeting someone else.’
    ‘What difference would it make? You don’t like anybody.’
    ‘That’s not true. It’s them that don’t like me.’
    ‘Well, I like you. How about a nice
choucroute
?’
     
    It was all yellow, the yellow of old teeth which would soon turn brown. But it was clean, perfectly maintained by Madeleine, his mother’s cleaning lady. She was the one who had found her a few days earlier, lying in bed with her hands clutching the edge of the sheets and her eyes eternally trained on a crack in the ceiling in the shape of Corsica.
    Dead people don’t decorate the way we do. They put crocheted doilies with pineapple or spiral patterns all over the place – on top of the TV, underneath the phone, draped over cushions like spiders’ webs. Olivier was unsure where to put himself in the cramped, overheated flat he was setting foot in for the first time. Certain items of furniture and ornaments were familiar from his childhood, like the little writing desk he used to like to hide under. On its right foot, you could still see the mark where a pedal car had crashed into it. Or the brass lamp shade his father had proudly brought home one night, a gift from a client. These recollections aside, everything was foreign to him.On her husband’s death, Olivier’s mother had sold the house in Le Chesnay and moved into this small one bedroom flat. ‘Now that I’m
all on my own
’ (and she had really emphasised the ‘all on my own’) ‘it’s plenty big enough for me.’
    She would no doubt have liked Olivier to be up in arms at the idea of