Heatwave Read online

  I wanted to take a shower. I hadn’t washed since the morning before. I was dirty. Too many different sweats were mixed up on my skin. Near the toilets, I saw my brother, Adrien, kissing a girl under a fake plant. He pulled away from her, looking embarrassed. “Hi, Leo. What are you doing here?”

  “Walking,” I said, pointing at the path. I looked at the girl who was waiting behind him. She looked embarrassed, too. She was about his age—fifteen. Pretty.

  Adrien lowered his voice. “Please don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  I looked at him, my brother, with his checkered espadrilles, his perfect tan, and his little blue bracelet that he hadn’t cut off, that didn’t fill him with shame. He was fine here. He blended into the landscape. He was on vacation, so distant from me. My brother the stranger, too happy to wonder anything. And now he was begging me with his puppy dog eyes, as if he knew nothing about all the poor and dying people in the world.

  “Why would it matter if I told them?”

  He was scared. “I don’t know… I’d just rather you didn’t say anything.”

  “You don’t think you’re allowed?”

  “Stop!”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

  I stepped to the side to get a better look at the girl. So this was the one he’d kissed, the one he’d make love with if he hadn’t already… Young people, I thought, are doing it earlier and earlier these days. How had they met? Who had made the first move? I felt a stab of envy. It was because of this, I knew, that nothing went right for me. It was because I didn’t have a girl who loved me that I had gone astray that night, walking the paths…

  “Why are you staring at her like that? Leo, you’re being weird.”

  “You can go,” I replied, like a policeman saying, Move along now.

  Adrien nodded coldly and they went. His girlfriend gave me a look that was shy at first, then suspicious, contemptuous, even, as if all it took was a change of angle and she no longer saw me as an authority figure but merely a failed older brother, backward, taller than Adrien but smaller in every other way. I hadn’t moved from under the plant. I felt pleased with myself, certain that getting them away from here would prevent them loving each other elsewhere.

  The showers were in a raised square covered with a Chinese-style roof. You went in directly from outside. While I was standing in line, a girl came up to me. It took me a moment to recognize her: it was Zoe. Louis’s Zoe. She took a big drag on her cigarette. One day she would suck the smoke so hard that it would kill her. I could tell that she was interested in me. It was a rare enough event that I felt pretty sure. I stared at a point close to her, which enabled me to watch as she shot furtive looks at me, never quite sure if I was looking at her, too. She couldn’t stand it anymore. I wasn’t the only one. People couldn’t leave here without having done anything—a cock in the pocket, as Louis put it. You had to fuck at least once, even if it was sad, just once to make the most of the vacation, so you could leave in peace, lightened, unburdened. Under the doors of the cubicles, I spotted the tensed feet of the ones who were masturbating. All the frustrated desires ended up here, discharged against the walls with a stifled yell, washed down into the drains below.

  “Hey, you’re Louis’s friend, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re lucky…”

  She waited for me to ask how she was. I let her simmer for a while, taking a cruel pleasure in her discomfort that wasn’t like me at all. In the end, she cracked: “I’m not doing so well. I’m not with Louis anymore.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. So… are you still with Luce?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head sadly. A cubicle was vacated.

  “Shall we go in together?” she said quickly, without looking at me. “It’ll save time.”

  I followed her inside. Some of the people in the line wolf-whistled. I stood under the cold water and closed my eyes. It was nice. I felt Zoe move closer. Her hands stroked my arms. Her thigh slid between mine. Her breasts pressed against my chest. She kissed me, immediately leveraging my mouth open and shoving her tongue inside. I felt like I was kissing an ashtray, but I kept going. I grew excited. An entire body was opening itself up to me. I could do it here, quickly, fill the void that weighed down my life so I wouldn’t have to talk about it anymore. My hands moved over her body, and our jerky movements soon got me hard. But then I thought about Luce and about Oscar, Luce and Oscar together, and there were so many moving parts that I suddenly had the impression that there were four of us in that cubicle, all trying to have sex. I opened my eyes. Zoe didn’t stop. She was rubbing me aggressively, pressing my hands against her body. She kept going, doggedly determined. The water streamed down her face. She looked like she was crying. Abruptly I pulled away. “I can’t.”

  She couldn’t believe it. She tried to smile. “You want me to…”

  I left the cubicle in a hurry and the door hit me in the nose. I heard Zoe insulting me. Outside, the people in line stared at me and laughed like hyenas. I thought they were all vile, with their colored towels around their flabby, skinny, muscular bodies, all tanned up to their ears, happy to get cleaned up before drinking cocktails, happy to be happy, and yet all of them sad and lonely in the crowd, all of them as lonely as this crappy three-star campsite—it would lose all three stars instantly when Oscar’s corpse was found. At least I would have done something good.

  I fled. My nose was bleeding. Never tilt your head back! my father always said when I had a nosebleed, so I kept it bent forward, blood dripping on the paths. Like bread crumbs, so I could find my way back. What was making my nose bleed? Stress, the heat, a fragile constitution, a door in the face, or all of the above? Someone handed me a tissue. I stuffed it into my nostril, leaving a crack so that the blood could keep trickling out. I was emptying myself. I was still dirty and I didn’t care. Before, it had been a real pleasure—one of the few—to come out of the showers feeling clean and to dry myself perfectly from head to foot so there wasn’t a single grain of sand to rub against my flip-flops. Now I didn’t care. I had lost everything, down to my tiniest little obsessions.

  In the main square, they were getting ready for the evening concert. Bare-chested volunteers were building the stage. They’d brought trampolines for the bungee jump, bounce houses, slot machines, and arcade games. They’d kicked up a cloud of dust. People were getting annoyed. Ten hours of torpor in the sun were waiting to explode like the coming storm. The heat ran through our veins now. The sky was excessively blue, electric. Someone was tuning a guitar. The bunny was herding the campers, like doomed cattle, toward the noise of the machines, the speakers blaring music, the Coke, the fries, the sticky cotton candy, and all that stuff that made me vomit—and yet I was there, too: I was crossing the square. The others must have thought I was already drunk, with the tissue in my nose, my eyes wide open… She’s nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before… A police van was parked near the reception building. So there we were. It was an investigation now. The helicopter above the sea was no longer enough. They had to check whether Oscar was dead on land, strangled, dragged, folded, buried in the sand. They would find me. It was a news story. The papers were on the presses, waiting. My face would be plastered over the lurid hoardings of the campsite kiosk and beyond. My devastated parents would be asked if they could carry on living after this. If you typed my name into Google, the same photo would appear a hundred times over, my eyes filled with an imaginary horror; they would dig up my old kindergarten class photo and ring my face in red and say: “It was him, that one there…” They would forget all the rest. They’d forget these interminable hours and my love. Perhaps I would get a short Wikipedia entry, vaguely mentioning my birth before skipping straight to the crime, passing over sixteen years and arrowing in on Oscar’s death, the trial, prison.

  I looked for a policeman near the van.
I wanted to talk to him, to confess all, be done with this whole mess. But there was no one there. So I found myself looking at Yann, standing by the slots. He was serene—not a problem in the world—with his plastic cup of beer and his gang of friends and his smile, which never vanished. I headed toward them. “Hey, I need Luce’s number.”

  “Well, look who it is!”

  They all snickered at the state of my face.

  “What for?” asked Yann.

  “I want to text her.”

  “Why don’t you just talk to her in person?”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Just go and find her.”

  “Please just give me her number.”

  I relaxed, I let myself go. I heard myself speak, saw myself sway from side to side, tasted the blood in my mouth.

  “What do you want to say to her?” Yann demanded. He looked at the others while chewing some imaginary gum. How could they be so predictable, I thought, so ridiculous? Most kids our age united around guys like Yann. Something in their eyes or the timbre of their voice gave them the natural aura of a leader. They radiated something warm and incandescent from their surface, and that was enough to light up other people’s eyes, even if, inside, guys like Yann were always cold and empty, with no music in their souls.

  “Answer my question, man.”

  “I asked for her number.”

  “Luce doesn’t give a shit about you. What are you expecting? You think you might finally lose your virginity?”

  “Ooooooh!” moaned the others.

  “No, I love her,” I said with a little smile.

  That disturbed them. I enjoyed the moment. I wanted things to degenerate.

  “You’re completely fucking nuts! Go home.”

  “What, you don’t believe she loves me? Who does she love, then? Yann? No… Oscar, maybe?”

  Yann took a step forward and shoved himself against me. A jubilant murmur spread through the others and they gathered around us. Louis appeared from nowhere. He stumbled, then grabbed Yann by the arm. “Leave him alone!”

  “Fuck off, homo.”

  Louis was trembling, but he didn’t back down. He looked at me without recognizing me because I was smiling at him like I smiled at the others. Yann shoved him onto the ground. “FIGHT!” yelled someone behind me. I charged at Yann. A few people tried to stop me, but others defended me. All the punches I’d never thrown, all the punches I’d received, all the punches I’d dreamed about, and all those I’d seen given unfairly, all of this came down on Yann. I’d never been in a fight before because I was afraid of getting hurt, of damaging my fists. But without that fear, victory went to the maddest, to the one who really wanted to hurt, to mutilate. I hit Yann, and in his eyes I saw Oscar’s; I hit him harder and the memories returned: I saw myself watching Oscar and I hit out again. Arms grabbed me and pushed me away. The bunny and other staff members got involved. They broke up the fight. Yann lay on the ground, covered in blood. My face wasn’t bleeding. The blood was on my hands.

  “You belong in a fucking asylum, you nutcase!”

  The bunny took Yann to the infirmary. I walked away. No one dared approach me, not even Louis. I went down a path, one of those paths I’d walked along dozens of times that day. I couldn’t take it anymore. People stood like hedges and watched me pass. Some of them insulted me; they wanted to tear me apart, eat me. Maybe they knew. Maybe they guessed that Yann was nothing, that the few punches I’d thrown at his face were nothing compared to Oscar, who had died because of me. All around me, the net was closing. Yet no one came to arrest me. The police were busy searching elsewhere. I was still free and even the night was slow in coming, like a knife pressed gently against my throat.

  INSIDE MY SMALL tent, all was calm. Early evening. It was bearable. The shadows and the sounds slid over the canvas. People passed by, unsuspecting. I tried to breathe slowly. Visions of caresses and sand mingled in my mind. I couldn’t keep them away anymore. Outside, the waves kept crashing; I could hear them in the distance. It didn’t stop. The pink bunny would prance around tomorrow and the days that followed. After August, August would come around again. As during all those insomniac nights, the air thick with moisture and mosquitoes, my hand slipped inside my trunks. A dose of endorphins to help me fall asleep. Jerking off several times, without desire or pleasure, until exhaustion. But I couldn’t even do it anymore. Everything was limp. I heard singing through the canvas. They were having fun. A long line of people dancing around my tent. So what is the difference, I wondered, between this and all those other times when I’ve hidden here, waiting for people to go away? What has changed since then? I’m a little older. I kissed a girl, then lost her. Oscar died. Oscar is dead because he wanted to die, because he was sad and he had the idea of coiling the ropes around his neck to make something happen. Oscar is dead because of all those people who didn’t understand him. Oscar is dead because of me, because I did nothing. Because I didn’t move. And I didn’t move because, at that moment, I couldn’t. I would rather have died like him, and we could have watched each other die while the others danced.

  “LEO… LEO…”

  A hand touched my tent and opened the flap. Louis’s face appeared, his lip split by Yann’s fist. He had Bubble on a leash.

  “I found your dog… He was hiding under a bush… I’m going to tie him to a tree, okay?”

  Okay. He was calm. He wasn’t hassling me. The sun was lower in the sky; that was good. Louis tied Bubble to a pine and returned to the tent. “Can I come in?”

  He sat in my tent, cross-legged. The space was too cramped for two people unless they were lying next to each other.

  “He was near one of the bounce houses. There’s some cool air that comes out the back of it. Dogs love that.”

  I smiled to say thank you. It pulled on my skin.

  “Are you okay, Leo?”

  “I’m great.”

  “Thank you for protecting me… when I tried to protect you… earlier.”

  He looked at my body. He didn’t dare tell me that I was red and dirty.

  “After the fight, I saw Luce in the square. I talked with her. She told me what happened between you two, what you did… Anyway, I’m not judging you. But I could tell that she liked you and she thought it was a shame. I think you should go and see her, to say sorry. Maybe it’ll make things better.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, she does.”

  “Stop talking about it.”

  “I know you love her really.”

  I moved my head. It came suddenly, without warning.

  “Don’t cry, man.”

  I cried. It went on for a long time. It made furrows in the dust. Louis took me in his arms. I kept crying against him. His hands were on my shoulders. They went down my arms and held my hands. He touched his fingertips to mine. His head leaned against my neck. He kissed me there, trembling. I didn’t understand. I had never understood—never noticed—the way Louis had been looking at me, all that time. The sun had made me stupid. It had numbed my brain, leaving only my skin to feel. What had he been doing all day? He kissed me again so he wouldn’t have to look at me. I didn’t stop him. I just felt two wet lips—and all the sadness and loneliness that stirred in this campsite below the sound of laughter and waves. I gently withdrew my hands. He didn’t move. He was in suspense, his face against my neck. Finally he sat up. His eyes were red, too. He smiled to stop himself from crying. “Sorry.”

  “I need to sleep.”

  “I’ll go.”

  He left. His shadow passed to the other side of the canvas. I felt a sudden urge to tell him everything. He came back. “Leo, don’t say anything. Please.”

  I promise, I thought. Or maybe I said it, very quietly. I promise: I won’t say anything about you… or about Oscar. I won’t say anything at all except the usual clichés when people ask me how I am. I swallowed my confession like a ball of mucus. He waved his hand as if in farewell. He wasn’t going far, though. You c
ouldn’t leave the campsite just like that. There was one night left. This vacation would crush us in its grip until the very end.

  I lay down and fell asleep.

  MY PARENTS WOKE me. They’d just come back from an excellent bingo evening, with drinks. They’d won a coupon to come back to the campsite in October. They thought I seemed listless. The temperature was so pleasant at this time of day. Why wasn’t I outside with the others? To cheer me up, they suggested we go eat dinner at the best restaurant in Dax. We wouldn’t be back too late; I’d still have time to enjoy the last evening with my friends, maybe even my girlfriend…

  “Stop.”

  IT’S EASY TO spot other campers when they go out in town. They look around as if they’re rediscovering everything. They leave sand behind as they walk. They don’t pay attention to traffic lights when they cross the street, and sometimes they almost die, because they’re arriving from another world; they’ve forgotten the rest.

  The sun was setting. I, too, had forgotten. All that day, there had not been just the campsite, trapped between the road and the sea. I saw buildings again, buses, electric lights, I heard snatches of conversation as people walked past. Step by step, I expanded my loneliness. It wasn’t just at the campsite that no one knew. Everywhere, no one knew. I had forgotten about the streets and the other countries, this world that continued spinning while I was burying. Beneath the sand, Oscar was the center of that world. I could distance myself from it. When the horizon opened up, I saw other cities in the distance and highways. Escape routes. We had come here by car; we could leave by car, too. My family and Bubble were walking quietly alongside me. I could have suddenly thrown a fit: curled up in a ball and screamed like a child until they agreed to cancel this final night and go home immediately. It was feasible, if I forced it. But I was hungry. I’d hardly eaten anything since the day before. I wanted a steak and fries, with the obligatory salad that you never touch. One small pleasure, at least. Afterward, I thought, we’ll see.