Magali

On the second night of the watches she came to the pens at one in the morning with two cups of coffee and said, "Papa's asleep on the step. I didn't wake him. He hasn't slept since Thursday," and sat down beside him on the bale.

He had the rifle across his knees. He had had it across his knees every night since the kitchen, on the step with Fredo or at the pens with Gaëtan, and he had grown used to the weight of it the way he had grown used to the weight of the crochet in his pocket, and to the cheap phone, and to the things he was not saying. He did not like it. He did not dislike it. It was there.

She gave him a cup. He took it in his left hand and kept his right on the stock.

"You can put that down," she said. "They're not coming tonight."

"How do you know?"

"Because they said ten days. Arnaud's a businessman. Businessmen keep appointments." She drank her coffee. "They'll come on the moon, or just before. Not on a Monday in the middle of the month when it's too hot to do anything."

He put the rifle down. He laid it on the bale beside him, on the side away from her, with the bolt up, and she watched him do it and did not say anything about how he did it, and he was grateful.

• • •

The near pen was quiet. Fangas stood at the far end of it under the corrugated roof, a black shape against the darker black, and every now and then he shifted his weight and blew out through his nose, a long slow sound like a man sighing in his sleep. The other bulls were out in the near pasture beyond the rails, and the dogs lay at the edge of the yard with their heads on their paws, their eyes open, catching the light from the single bulb over the stable door. Past the pens, past the pasture, past the black wall of the cypresses, the land went away under the stars in every direction, flat and silent, the frogs going, the ditches shining.

She did not say anything for a long time. Neither did he.

He had been alone with her before, in the stables, on the dike, in the far pasture with the herd. He had sat with her on the tailgate of a pickup in a lane behind a bodega with the jasmine hanging in the air. He had stood beside her at a grave. But he had never been alone with her like this, in the dark, with nothing to do and nowhere to be and the whole night in front of them, and he found that his body knew it before he did, the way it had known the bulls, and that it was holding very still.

"Toulouse," she said at last.

"What?"

"You didn't ask. Nobody asks. But I'll tell you anyway." She was looking at the bull. "I went to Toulouse, when I was nineteen. To the vet school. I'd wanted to be a vet since I was six. I got in. Papa drove me there in the truck with my things in the back, and he didn't say a word the whole way, three hours, and when he left he shook my hand. Like a man. Like I was somebody he'd sold a horse to."

"What happened?"

"Maman got ill." She drank her coffee. "In the November. They found it in the November and by Christmas they knew. Two years. That was what they gave her, and that was what she took, two years almost to the day. I came home at Christmas and I didn't go back." She shrugged. "Somebody had to do the work. Papa was at the hospital in Montpellier every day. Gaëtan was—Gaëtan. Somebody had to get up at five."

"And after?"

"After." She looked down into her cup. "After, there was the bank. And the debts from the hospital, because there are always debts from the hospital, even here. And the grants going down. And then a man in a linen jacket came to see Papa, and Papa sat at the table with him, and after that there were nights when the trucks went out with their lights off." She said it quite flatly. "I was twenty-one. I knew what it was. I helped. I've helped every time since." She turned the cup round in her hands. "So now you know the whole history of Magali Plantier. Twenty-nine years old. One term of vet school. Can tell you what's wrong with a cow by the way it stands. Can lift forty kilos of resin out of the sea and onto a horse in under a minute. Never been further than Toulouse."

"That's not the whole history."

"No?"

"No," he said, and did not know what he meant by it, and she looked at him sideways in the dark.

• • •

"Your turn," she said.

He had known it was coming. He had known it since she sat down on the bale. He had known it, perhaps, since the cab of the truck on the marsh road with the checkpoint behind them, since you knew they'd let us go, how?, since the tailgate in the lane. She had been coming towards it for weeks, he understood now, slowly, from the side, the way you come at a bull, and he had been turning with her, keeping his head to her, the whole time.

"There's nothing to tell."

"There's a lot to tell." She set her cup down on the bale between them. "You hold a gun like the gendarmes at the roundabout. Not like Papa. Not like the men who go after boar in the winter with a flask in the other pocket. Like the gendarmes. Like someone who's been taught by someone who teaches it for a living. I watched you in the kitchen. You opened it and looked inside and closed it before you'd even looked at Papa. And your finger." She reached out, in the dark, and touched the back of his right hand, lightly, the forefinger, the one that had lain along the trigger guard. "Your finger never went near the trigger. Not once. Not even by accident."

"I did security. In Lyon. Some of it armed. They train you."

"They train you," she repeated.

"Two weeks. A course. A man with a moustache who'd been in the army."

"You're very good," she said, "at that."

"At what?"

"At having the answer ready. You always have it ready." Her hand was still on the back of his. She had not taken it away. "Gaëtan tells stories. He always has. He tells them because he likes the sound of them, and because the real thing is usually duller, and because he's been telling them so long he doesn't always know any more which ones are true. You can hear him enjoying it. You don't tell stories. You tell answers. Short ones. Exactly the right size. And you never enjoy it at all." She was quiet a moment. "That's how I know."

"Know what?"

"That you're lying," she said simply. "About something. I don't know what. I don't think it's anything bad, or I'd have told Papa, and Papa would have put you on the road. I've watched you for six weeks. I've watched you with the horses and with Timéo and with that bull, and at the grave. You're not bad." Her fingers moved on the back of his hand, a small movement, not quite a caress. "But you're lying. All the time. To all of us. And it's hurting you. I can see it hurting you. It's like watching somebody walk on a bad foot and pretend they're not."

He did not say anything. He could not. The bull at the end of the pen shifted and blew out his long slow sigh. The frogs went on. Her hand lay on his.

• • •

He did not afterwards remember which of them moved.

He remembered that he turned his hand over under hers, so that their palms were together, and that hers was rough and hard and scored across with old scratches and warm, much warmer than the night. He remembered that she was very close, closer than in the lane behind the bodega, close enough that he could smell the woodsmoke and the cheap shampoo and the horses in her hair, and that her eyes in the light from the single bulb were very dark and very steady and not frightened of anything at all.

He remembered that the kiss, when it came, was not like anything in a film. It was careful. It was the kiss of two people who have both been holding something very still for a long time and are not sure, even now, whether it is safe to put it down. Her mouth tasted of coffee. Her hand came up and lay against the side of his face, the way Manolo's hands had held his face under the plane tree the first evening, rough as bark, holding him there, and he found that he could not breathe properly and did not care.

Then she leaned her forehead against his, and stayed there, with her eyes closed, and he could feel her breathing.

"Fada," she said softly. Mad. "You're mad. I'm mad. This is a very stupid thing to do in the middle of all this."

"Yes."

"Papa will kill you."

"Probably."

"Gaëtan will be unbearable."

"Gaëtan's always unbearable."

She laughed, very quietly, against his face, the short surprised sound like something knocked over that he had heard for the first time on the night they took the cows to the sea. He felt it more than heard it. Then she moved, and put her head down on his shoulder, in the hollow by his neck, and her arm went round him, and his went round her, and they sat like that on the bale in the dark with the rifle lying forgotten on the other side of him and the bull breathing at the end of the pen, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all.

He would have stayed like that until morning. He thought, sitting there, that he would have stayed like that for the rest of his life, if anyone had offered him the choice, and the thought was so clear and so simple and so impossible that it frightened him more than the checkpoint had, more than the captain's torch, more than the boat.

• • •

Later, much later, with the stars wheeling slowly over the cypresses and the first grey not yet in the east, she lifted her head from his shoulder.

"I'm not going to ask you," she said.

"Ask me what?"

"What it is. What you're lying about." She looked at him from very close in the dark. "I thought I would. I thought tonight I'd sit you down on this bale and make you tell me, the way Papa makes the bulls go left. But I'm not going to." She was quiet a moment. "I'm going to wait. And one day you're going to tell me. Not because I asked. Because you want to."

He looked at her. He looked at her face, which he had first seen at five in the morning by a water trough with her arms folded and the sun creases white at the corners of her eyes, and which he had seen since in every kind of light there was, and which was looking at him now with nothing on it at all but patience. And the words came up.

They came up from somewhere under his ribs, the place where Granier's questions went in, the place where his mother's laugh had gone in like a draught under a door. They came up through his chest and his throat and into his mouth, and he could feel the shape of them against his teeth, the first ones, the ones that would open everything: My name is Yassine Belkadi. I'm a lieutenant in the judicial police in Montpellier. I was sent here in June to—

He opened his mouth.

On the other side of the yard, by the step of the mas, a dog lifted its head and growled, low, at nothing, at the dark, at a hare in the pasture or a fox along the ditch or the wind turning in the cypresses, and the old man asleep on the step stirred and muttered and was still. Magali turned her head to look. The moment turned with her.

When she looked back he had closed his mouth, and the words had gone back down to where they lived, and he was reaching across himself for the rifle on the far side of the bale, and lifting it, and laying it across his knees again, his right hand on the stock and his finger along the outside of the trigger guard, where it belonged, where it had been taught to go.

She watched him do it. She did not say anything. After a while she put her head back on his shoulder, and he let her, and they sat there together in the last of the dark, waiting for whatever was coming up the track, and he did not tell her, and she did not ask.