The Watchers Read Free Page B

live in Lausanne.’
    Rochat trembled. His mother took his hand.
    ‘Don’t be afraid, Marc. I have to go away soon. Your father is a very nice man, he’ll take care of you. You’ll go to a very nice school with children like yourself.’
    ‘… septante, septante et un, septante-deux …’
    The kitchen opened on to a sitting room, and near the window there was a floor-stand globe of the world.
    ‘Tell me, do you enjoy studying the earth, Master Rochat?’
    ‘ Oui , Maman shows me places and tells me about them.’
    ‘Has your mother shown you Switzerland? Where your father lives, where you’ll go to school?’
    ‘Yes, it’s far away.’
    ‘ Pardonnez-moi? ’
    The look on Monsieur Gübeli’s face made Rochat laugh, his mother laughed too. The stranger removed the glasses from his nose and laid them on the table. He walked to the sitting room and returned with the globe. He stood it next to the table and gave it a spin to the west.
    ‘All this travelling has left me somewhat lost. I can’t quite find where I am in the world.’
    ‘Because you made the world go backwards, monsieur.’
    The stranger looked at Rochat and smiled.
    ‘Very good, Master Rochat. Perhaps you could show me the correct way to see where I am?’
    Rochat looked at his mother. She brushed his black hair from his forehead.
    ‘Go ahead, Marc. You can do it. Remember how I showed you to see things.’
    Rochat stopped the wrong-way world. He turned it slowly to the east and found a tiny dot along the St Lawrence River.
    ‘You’re here, monsieur, in Quebec City.’
    The stranger refitted his glasses for a better look, almost touching his long nose to the globe.
    ‘And this river on the globe would be the same river I see from your sitting room window?’
    ‘ Oui, monsieur .’
    ‘ D’accord . How do I find Switzerland?’
    Rochat turned the globe eastward again till he found a small country curving around a slender lake in the centre of Europe.
    ‘Switzerland is this place, the red one.’
    The man set the index finger of his left hand on the dot by the St Lawrence River in Canada and the index finger of his right hand at the lake in Switzerland. He studied the distance carefully.
    ‘Now, Master Rochat, I’m going to show you a little secret. Are you ready?’
    ‘ Oui .’
    Rochat watched the man trace the finger of his left hand along one of the thin lines drawn around the globe. From Quebec City, crossing the maritime provinces of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and then over the Atlantic Ocean. Then through France, to find the finger of his right hand waiting in Switzerland.
    ‘You see? Quebec City and Lausanne both lie on the forty-sixth latitude of planet Earth. So all we need do is travel along this little line from here to there. Why, it’s no distance at all. Look, I can touch the two places with one hand. Here, you try.’
    Rochat looked at his mother.
    ‘Go on, Marc, you can do it.’
    Rochat’s hand was very small and only stretched to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But he saw the thin line on the globe and it didn’t seem too much further beyond the tip of his little finger to the place he would go a few days later, after watching his mother’s coffin lowered into the winter ground of Cimetière Saint-Charles.
    And that day, the strangerman was there to hold Rochat’s small hand. And he helped Rochat pack his clothes, the photograph of his mother and father on the Plains of Abraham, some colouring books and a box of crayons. Special care was taken with the photograph of his mother and father to make sure it’d be safe as they travelled to Lausanne and nowtimes, climbing this wood staircase on a cobblestone hill in the icy rain.
    ‘… quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-un, quatre-vingt-deux …’
    There was a pedestrian passage under Rue Viret. Rochat never went that way. The neon lights flickered and made bad shadows on the graffiti-splattered walls. He took the wood stairs that climbed above the old market place,