The Road Down

The towers of La Paillade caught the sun before anything else in Montpellier. From the tram, coming out along the line in the early morning, you saw them first as a ridge of light above the plane trees, cream and ochre and the faded pink of old balconies, and only afterwards the rest of it: the long blocks bending around their car parks, the stadium like a dropped bowl in the valley, the hills behind going brown already with June.

Yassine got off at the end of the line and walked.

He had not meant to come. He had meant to spend the last morning doing practical things, which Granier had listed for him in a short email with no greeting: collect the car, collect the phone, read the file again, do not go anywhere you are known. He had collected the car. It was a grey Peugeot twelve years old with a dent in the rear door and a registration from the Rhône, and it smelled of someone else's cigarettes. The phone was in his pocket, a cheap black thing with nothing in it yet but three numbers and a photograph of a dog that the technician had put there, he said, so that it would look lived in. He had read the file again at four in the morning, sitting at his kitchen table with the window open on the noise of the street sweepers. And then he had found himself on the tram.

The estate had the particular quiet of a place where most people work early or not at all. A woman in a dressing gown was shaking a rug from a fourth-floor window. Two boys of about twelve sat on the low wall outside the pharmacy with a single phone between them, their heads together over it as if it were a fire. On the Grand Mail the shutters of the cafés were half up, and from one of them came the smell of coffee and frying dough and the voice of a radio talking about the heat.

He walked the way his feet remembered, which was not the shortest way. Past the school whose railings had been painted green since his time and then, it seemed, not painted again. Past the football pitch where the goals had no nets. Past a doorway where in February a man of twenty-six had been shot in the late afternoon, in front of children coming home with their schoolbags. There was nothing there now. Somebody had tied a bunch of plastic flowers to the railing and the sun had taken the colour out of them, so that they looked like the ghosts of flowers. He did not stop. He noticed that he wanted to, and that he walked a little faster to prevent himself, and he noticed that too, and kept walking.

He had been fourteen when the bus came.

It was a summer scheme run out of the social centre, the kind of thing that got funded one year and forgotten the next: twenty boys from the estate, a youth worker called Mourad with a whistle he never blew, and a day in the Camargue to see what the countryside was for. Yassine remembered almost nothing about the morning. He remembered a manade where a man in a black hat had let them stroke a horse's nose and shown them the brand on a bull's flank, and he remembered being bored, because he was fourteen and that was what he had decided to be. And he remembered the afternoon, at a small arena somewhere north of Aigues-Mortes, where some boys only a few years older than him in white trousers and white shirts were running at a young bull for practice, and one of them got it wrong and went over the barrier with the horns half a metre from his back, and landed in the dust at Yassine's feet laughing.

He remembered that the boy had been laughing. That was what had done it.

When the bus left, he had not been on it. Mourad had come back for him in a borrowed car at nine in the evening and found him sitting on the barrier beside an old man with a moustache and a face burnt the colour of a saddle, both of them watching the empty ring as if something might still happen in it. The old man had shaken Mourad's hand and said, the boy can come back if he wants, and he will need proper shoes.

He had gone back the next weekend. He had gone back for six years.

• • •

Samira's building was the third along on the Rue de Bari, and her balcony was on the seventh floor, on the side that got the morning. He could see from the street that she had been out there already. The geraniums in their plastic troughs were wet, and the washing was up on the rack, white sheets and a blue tablecloth, and the shutter of the kitchen was folded back. She would be inside now, at the table, with the coffee and the radio and the crossword from yesterday's paper that she did in pencil so that she could rub it out.

He stood under the plane tree on the other side of the street and took out his own phone, the real one, and called her.

"Yassine." She always said his name as if it were news. "Are you working?"

"In a minute. I wanted to catch you."

"You caught me." He heard the radio go quieter. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong."

"You never call in the morning."

"I'm calling in the morning." He watched the washing move in a breath of wind. "They're sending me on a course. In Paris. Two months, maybe a bit less."

There was a pause, not long. He knew her pauses. This one was not doubt, only the small adjustment of a woman who had lived alone for six years and had made her week around his Sundays.

"Paris," she said. "In this heat."

"It'll be air-conditioned."

"You'll catch cold from the air-conditioning. Your father always caught cold in offices." He could hear her moving now, the scrape of a chair. "Two months. Is it a promotion?"

"It's a course."

"Courses are for promotions."

"Maybe." He found that he had his free hand pressed flat against the bark of the tree, and he took it away. "I won't be able to call much. It's long days. I'll call when I can."

"You'll eat?"

"I'll eat."

"Properly. Not sandwiches."

"Not sandwiches."

On the seventh floor, the kitchen curtain moved. For a moment he thought she would come out onto the balcony to look at the weather, as she did a dozen times a day, and see him standing under the tree with the phone at his ear, and he took a step back into the shade without deciding to. The curtain stilled.

"I'll pray for you," she said. "Don't make the face."

"I'm not making a face."

"I can hear you making it." She laughed, and the laugh went through him like a draught under a door. "Go. Go to your course. Call me Sunday if you can."

"If I can."

He put the phone in his pocket and stood under the tree for a minute more, looking up at the washing. It had been easy. That was what he would remember about it afterwards: not the lie, which was a small one as these things went, but how little it had cost him to say it, how smoothly the words had come, how she had taken them and folded them into the shape of her week without a crease. He had been trained to do this. He had done it in Nîmes for eleven days to men who would have killed him if they had known. He had not expected it to be easier with her.

He walked back to the tram without looking at the building again.

• • •

In the afternoon he went to the fourth floor and signed.

Granier had the papers ready on the desk, as before, squared to the edge. There was nothing ceremonial about it. Yassine read the paragraph that described what he was permitted to do and what he was not, which he knew already, and the dates, which he knew already, and the name of the juge, which meant nothing to him except a signature in blue at the foot of the page. Then he wrote his own name on the line that had been left empty for him and initialled each page in the corner where a small box had been printed for the purpose, as though the state were worried that someone might later slip in a page he had not seen.

"Your own name," Granier said, watching him do it. "Out there."

"Segura knows my name. Half the old men at the arenas will remember it if they think hard. If I turn up as somebody else, the first one who says hello finishes me."

"And the rest of it?"

"Lyon. Ten years. Warehouses, a bit of security work, a bit of nothing. Let go in the spring. Broke. Came home." Yassine capped the pen. "My father's dead, which is true, and there's nothing for me in the city, which is nearly true. I'll say I want to get back on a horse before I'm too old to. People will believe that. Everybody out there believes that."

"And Segura?"

"Segura knew I went to the academy." He had thought about this at four in the morning, too. "I'll tell him I left. That I didn't last. That it wasn't for me." He looked at Granier. "He'll be pleased. He told me at twenty I was making a mistake."

Granier nodded slowly. He did not ask whether Yassine thought the old man would keep it to himself. Perhaps he did not need to.

"Once a week," he said instead. "Whatever happens. Even if nothing happens. Especially if nothing happens."

"Once a week."

"And Yassine." Granier unfolded his hands and looked at them, as if they had something written on them. "You know what the boy in the canal looked like."

"I know."

"Good," said Granier, and that was all, and the fan turned its face away.

• • •

He left Montpellier at six, when the heat had begun to slacken and the light had gone long and yellow over the roofs. He did not take the motorway. He went out past the airport and through Mauguio, where the roundabouts were planted with oleander and lavender and the lorries were coming home, and then south towards the sea, through the flat land behind the coast where the vineyards ran right up to the edge of the lagoons and the lagoons ran out to the edge of the sky.

The radio was on the Montpellier station. A man and a woman were talking about the traffic and then about a concert on the Esplanade and then about the heat, which would last, they said, at least until the weekend, and possibly forever. He let them talk. He did not listen so much as keep them there, the way you keep a light on in another room.

At La Grande-Motte the pyramids of the apartment blocks stood up out of the pines white and strange, like something left behind by a civilisation that had worshipped the sun and then gone indoors. He drove past them with the window down. The air came in warm and smelling of salt and pine resin and, under that, faintly, of something sweeter and rotten that he had forgotten and then remembered: the marsh. The lagoons on either side of the road were very still, the colour of pewter going to rose, and on one of them a line of flamingos stood on their own reflections, so motionless that they might have been planted there.

At Le Grau-du-Roi the trawlers were tied up along the channel in the middle of the town, and the café terraces were full, and children with ice creams were leaning over the railings to look at the boats. He crossed the bridge slowly behind a camper van with Dutch plates and a bicycle strapped to its back.

Then there was the long straight road across the salt to Aigues-Mortes, and the ramparts rising ahead of him out of the flats, square and golden and too large for the little town inside them, as if they had been built to keep out something that had never come. To his left, beyond the reeds, the pans of the salt works lay in sheets of pink and white, and the evening light did something to them that made them look less like water than like the inside of a shell.

He drove around the walls. Somewhere past them, on the road north towards Saint-Laurent, the radio began to break up.

At first it was only a crackle under the voices, a fizz like rain on a roof. Then the voices themselves started to come and go: the woman's laugh, half a sentence about a tailback on the A9, a jingle that broke off in the middle of its tune. He reached out and touched the dial without turning it, as if that would help. A Spanish station came through for a moment, a man singing, and was gone. Then the Montpellier voices again, very faint, as though they were speaking from the bottom of a well. Then nothing but the hiss.

He let it hiss for a while. The fields on either side had changed. The vines were gone, and the land had opened out into pasture and reed and water, divided by ditches and lines of tamarisk, and very far off, under a sky that was beginning to go green at the edges, there were black shapes standing in a field that he knew were bulls before he could possibly have seen that they were bulls. He turned the radio off. The silence that came into the car was not empty. It was full of the engine and the tyres on the warm road and the frogs starting up in the ditches and, under all of it, his own breathing, which he noticed had changed too.

Saint-Laurent was a small town with a big arena, which is to say it was like every town out here. He drove through it without stopping, past the plane trees of the square and the bar where old men sat outside under a faded awning, and out the other side, where the road narrowed and the houses gave way to sheds and paddocks and a scrapyard full of rusting farm machinery.

The bull school was where it had always been, behind a line of poplars, at the end of a track that had not been resurfaced in his lifetime. The little practice arena was the same: a ring of sand inside a red barrier painted and repainted so often that the paint stood out from the wood in blisters, a few rows of concrete steps on one side, a corrugated roof over the pens at the back. Two boys in white were sitting on the barrier swinging their legs. A third was in the ring, walking in slow circles, his crochet dangling from his hand, practising a run at nothing.

And under the plane tree by the gate, in a white plastic chair, with a newspaper folded on his knee and a glass of something on the ground beside him, sat an old man.

Yassine stopped the car on the verge, a long way short of the gate. He turned the engine off. He sat with his hands on the wheel, as he had sat on the edge of the bed at four in the morning, preparing his face.

He had not finished preparing it when the old man looked up. He did not get up. He did not shade his eyes. He simply lifted his head from the newspaper and looked straight at the grey Peugeot with its Lyon plates and its dented door, through the windscreen, through the dust and the evening glare, as if he had been sitting there twelve years expecting it, and Yassine saw his mouth move around a name before his own hand had found the handle of the door.