Even

He drove down at the end of August in his own car, a small blue Renault he had not driven since June, which smelled of nobody but himself.

The heat had broken a little. There had been a storm in the night, the first of the season, and the land on either side of the road south of Mauguio had a washed look, the vineyards dark and wet, the lagoons running with a light wind, the sky over the sea scrubbed to a hard pale blue with the last of the cloud going away eastward in long torn rags. The flamingos were still standing on their reflections. The pyramids of La Grande-Motte were still white and strange among the pines. At Le Grau-du-Roi the trawlers were coming in up the channel through the middle of the town, and the café terraces were half empty, because it was a Tuesday and the summer people were going home.

The radio was on the Montpellier station. He had turned it on without thinking when he started the car, and left it. A man and a woman were talking about the storm, about a tree down on the Avenue de Lodève, about the rentrée, which was coming, they said, whether anyone liked it or not.

He drove round the walls of Aigues-Mortes. Gold in the morning light, square and too large, built to keep out something that had never come. He did not look at the salt road below them, or the lay-by by the pans.

Somewhere past the walls, on the road north towards Saint-Laurent, the radio began to break up. He let it. The woman's laugh came and went. A jingle broke off in the middle of its tune. The voices sank down into the hiss as if into water, and he did not reach for the dial, and after a while there was only the hiss, and the fields on either side had opened out into pasture and reed and water, and very far off there were black shapes standing in a field that he knew were bulls before he could possibly have seen that they were bulls.

He did not turn the radio off. He drove the rest of the way with it hissing, softly, like rain on a roof.

• • •

He did not go by the school. He had thought about it all the way from Montpellier and at the turning he did not take it. He went on, past Saint-Laurent, onto the Le Cailar road, past the old wooden cross at the marsh turning with its faded plastic flowers where they had left Timéo, and onto the narrow road with no line down the middle, and then the narrower one, between the ditches, with the frogs quiet in the daylight and a heron lifting from the reeds as he passed and flying alongside the car a moment with its legs trailing, and then losing interest, and banking away.

The mas sat on its one-metre rise as it had always sat. The bone-coloured walls. The roof sagging like the back of a tired horse. The black wall of cypress. The plane tree. The two trucks side by side in its shade, the dented one and the other, PLANTIER in faded red.

The dogs came out from under the trucks as he turned into the yard.

They ran at the car barking, both of them, the way they barked at the post van and the vet and every stranger that had ever come up that track, and he stopped the car in the middle of the yard and turned off the engine and sat there with the hiss of the radio and the barking, and then he opened the door and got out, and the dogs came at him, and stopped. They stopped a metre away. The bigger one put its nose out towards his knee, and sniffed, and the barking went out of it like air out of a tyre. It stood there looking at him. Then it turned and went back to the shade under the trucks and lay down with its head on its paws, and the other one went with it.

Fredo was on the step.

He had been there the whole time, Yassine understood. Sitting on the step in the shade of the door with his hat on his knee and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, as he had sat every evening since the funeral. He did not get up. He looked at Yassine across the yard, at the blue car, at the man standing beside it with his hands at his sides, the long slow look from the horns to the hocks and back.

Then he stood up, and put his hat on, and came down the step.

"Not here," he said. "The far field."

• • •

They walked. Not on horses. The old man walked slowly, in his boots, across the near pasture and through the gate and along the edge of the ditch towards the far field, and Yassine walked beside him, half a pace behind, the way you walk beside someone at a funeral, and neither of them said anything at all.

The bulls were in the far field. Fangas stood a little apart from the others by the fence, as he always did, his head down, the scarred horn catching the light. He lifted his head as they came and looked at them, the dark eye, and blew once through his nose, and went back to grazing.

Fredo climbed up onto the top rail of the fence and sat, his boots hooked under the rail below. After a moment Yassine climbed up and sat beside him. The wood was warm from the morning sun. Below them in the ditch the water was the colour of tea and full of sky.

The old man took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it.

"I knew," he said. "Since the rifle."

Yassine said nothing.

"In the kitchen. When you opened it. Magali saw. I saw. You opened it like a man who's been taught by the state and paid for it." He tapped his ash onto the rail. "I didn't ask. You know why I didn't ask?"

"No."

"Because if I'd asked, you'd have had to lie to me, or not. If you'd lied, I'd have known, and I'd have had to put you on the road that night. And if you hadn't—" He shrugged. "So I didn't ask. And you sat at the end of my table and took the step with me every night with my father's rifle across your knees and said nothing, and I said nothing, and that's how we did it." He put the cigarette back. "Then that man on the dike shouted your name. Lieutenant. And Gaëtan heard. And it didn't matter any more whether I asked."

The bulls grazed. An egret came down among them, white as paper, and stalked between their legs.

"You came here to take us," Fredo said. "That was your job. In June. A man in an office in Montpellier sent you to take us. You sat on my land and ate my food and rode my horses and went into the sea with my children and wrote it all down for him, I suppose, every night, in your book." He did not look at Yassine. "And then you gave us back. On the dike. With the herd. And afterwards." He paused. "Magali went to Montpellier last week, to see a lawyer about the bank. The lawyer had a friend who has a friend at the palais. The file on us is closed. For want of evidence. The friend said the policeman who was inside withdrew everything he'd written. Said he couldn't see in the dark." The old man almost smiled. "In the dark. You."

"It was very dark."

"It was." Fredo was quiet a moment. "So. You came to take us, and you gave us back. And Manolo's in the ground because of what you are. And Timéo has a hand he'll never run with properly again. And my son has six stitches in his head and a bone in his shoulder in three pieces and won't come out of his room. And the boat's gone, and Arnaud's gone, and the bank's still there with its letters, and we'll lose the summer grass, probably, and keep the mas, maybe, if Magali's lawyer is as clever as he thinks he is." He drew on the cigarette. "That's the account."

"I know."

"You don't. Let me finish." The old man turned his head and looked at him, for the first time since they had sat down. "What you did to us, and what you did for us. I've been sitting on this fence every night for two weeks putting them on the scales. One side and the other. Like weighing a calf." He held up his two big hands, palms up, a little apart, and let them hang there in the air between them, level. "They come out even."

Yassine looked at the hands.

"Even," Fredo said. "You understand what that means, out here? It means nobody owes anybody. Not you to us, not us to you. Nothing. You don't owe me a debt and I don't owe you my thanks. I'm not going to forgive you, because there's nothing to forgive. And I'm not going to punish you, because there's nothing to punish." He lowered his hands to his knees. "Even is nothing. Even is the end of the account."

The egret had found something in the grass. It struck, and lifted its head, and swallowed.

"And it means you can't stay," the old man said. He said it quite gently. "You know that. Even means there's nothing holding you here. Not a debt. Not a welcome. Nothing. You were Manolo's boy and you were a good hand and you ran at the fête like the old ones, and you were a policeman in my house for seven weeks, and all of that's true at once, and none of it cancels out the rest, except that it does." He looked back at the bulls. "So you go. Today. And you don't come back. Not to the mas. Not to the fête. Not to Manolo's grave, if you can help it. Not because I hate you. Because there's no place here for a man who's even."

Yassine sat on the fence beside him in the morning sun and looked at the field. At the bulls. At Fangas, standing by the far fence with his head down and the rust along his spine, eleven years old, two more seasons, maybe three, if nothing happened to him.

"He'll run next year," Fredo said, following his look. "At Lunel. At Beaucaire. He'll top the bill." He threw the end of his cigarette down into the ditch, where it hissed. "Arnaud asked me how long they live. You heard him."

"I heard."

"Twenty years," the old man said. "If nothing happens to them." He climbed down off the fence, stiffly, and stood with one hand on the post. "Go and say goodbye to my daughter. She's in the stables. She's been in the stables since half past five, pretending she didn't hear your car."

• • •

She was with Mistrau.

She was in his stall at the end of the row with a brush in her hand, working it in long strokes down the white flank, and the horse was standing with its eyes half shut and its weight resting on one hind leg, and neither of them looked round when his shadow fell across the doorway.

"He came to the gate for you," she said, to the horse. "That night. Did you know? He's never done that. Not for anyone. Not for me."

"I know."

"Nobody wanted him." The brush went on moving. "And then you came, and he put you on the ground eleven times, and then he carried you through the marsh in the dark with men shooting, and didn't move." She stopped. She put the brush down on the edge of the manger and turned round, at last, and looked at him. Her face was very still. The sun creases at the corners of her eyes. The small white scar at the edge of her jaw. "I said I'd wait. On the bale. I said I'd wait until you wanted to tell me."

"You did."

"You never told me." She said it without anger. "Somebody else did. A man in a black vest, with a loudhailer voice, standing on the dike over my brother's head. Lieutenant Belkadi. That's how I found out your name. Your other name. The real one." She looked at him. "Was it ever going to be you?"

He thought about it. He thought about the bale, and the dog growling at the dark, and the words coming up against his teeth.

"I don't know," he said. "I think so. I wanted it to be."

She nodded slowly, as if this were an answer she could use, and put it somewhere, and came out of the stall.

She did not kiss him. She stood in front of him in the doorway of the stables with the dust turning in the bar of sunlight and the smell of horses and straw and old leather all round them, and lifted her hand and laid it against the side of his face, the way she had on the bale, the way Manolo had on the first evening under the plane tree, rough as bark, holding him there. She held him like that for a long moment. She looked at him the way she looked at the cattle, at a horse she knew, as if she were reading him and would remember what she read.

Then she took her hand away.

"Go on," she said. "Timéo's in the tack room. He's been waiting since seven. Don't make him wait any more."

• • •

The boy was sitting on his upturned bucket among the bridles. His right hand was out of the splint now, the two fingers strapped together with tape, held stiff and a little crooked against his knee. When Yassine came in he jumped up, and grinned, and the grin was crooked too, because of the scar at the corner of his lip, and it was still the widest thing in the room.

"They said you weren't coming back," he said. "Gaëtan said. I said you'd come back."

"I came back."

"I knew." Timéo looked at him, and the grin went, slowly, as he took in Yassine's face. "You're not staying."

"No."

The boy looked down at his strapped hand. He did not say anything.

Yassine put his hand in his pocket. He took out the crochet. The short steel claw, four-fingered, curved like a cat's paw. The leather strap, dried and darkened and cracked across the back, with two holes punched in it that no other hand but his had ever needed, and on the inside, burned into the hide with the end of a hot nail by a boy who had never done it before, two initials.

He held it out.

Timéo looked at it. He looked up at Yassine. He did not take it.

"That's yours," he said. "That's Manolo's. He told me. It belongs to an idiot."

"It belongs to whoever runs next."

He did not say anything else. He did not make a speech. He took the boy's left hand, the good one, and turned it over, and put the crochet into the palm, and closed the fingers over it, and let go.

Timéo stood in the tack room with the crochet in his hand and looked at it for a long time. Then he turned it over and found the initials on the inside of the strap, and ran his thumb across them, once, and looked up, and his face did something it had not done since the morning he walked up the track from the cross, and he did not say anything either.

• • •

He did not see Gaëtan.

As he crossed the yard to the car he looked up at the window of Gaëtan's room, at the end of the house, under the sagging roof. The shutter was half open. In the dimness behind it, for a moment, there was a shape: a man standing back from the glass with one arm strapped across his chest and a white dressing on his forehead, looking down into the yard. Yassine stopped.

The shape did not move. It did not come to the window. It did not lift a hand. It stood there in the half dark behind the shutter, looking down at him, for as long as he stood looking up, and then it stepped back, out of the light, and the shutter was only a shutter.

He got into the car.

The dogs lifted their heads from under the trucks and watched him start the engine, and did not bark. Fredo was on the step again with his hat on his knee and did not lift his hand. Magali did not come out of the stables. He turned the car under the plane tree and went away down the track, slowly, and at the bottom, where it met the road, he looked once in the mirror and saw the mas sitting on its rise with the cypresses black behind it and the land going away on every side flat and bright to the edge of the world, and then the road bent, and the tamarisks closed, and it was gone.

• • •

The radio was still hissing. He had not turned it off.

He drove south, the way he had come. Past the cross. Through Saint-Laurent, past the plane trees and the bar with the old men under the faded awning, and out the other side, and at the turning for the bull school he did not take it. Past the ramparts of Aigues-Mortes, gold in the full noon. And somewhere on the long straight road across the salt towards the sea, with the pink pans lying on either side of him like the inside of a shell, the hiss on the radio began to break up.

A voice came through it. Very faint, as if from the bottom of a well. Then another. The woman's laugh, and a jingle, and the man saying something about a tailback on the A9, and the rentrée, which was coming whether anyone liked it or not. The voices came up out of the hiss like swimmers coming up out of deep water, clearer and clearer, until they were in the car with him, ordinary and cheerful and quite close. Montpellier.

He listened to them for a kilometre. Then he reached out and turned the radio off.

At La Grande-Motte he pulled into a lay-by among the pines, where the road ran close to the lagoon and the flamingos stood on their reflections, and turned off the engine, and took out his phone. His own phone. The real one. He had taken it out of the drawer in his flat in Montpellier on the night he signed, and charged it, and turned it on, and looked at the forty-one missed calls, and turned it off again.

He turned it on now. He found the number. He held the phone in his hand for a long time, looking out through the windscreen at the lagoon and the birds and the white pyramids among the pines, and then he pressed it.

She answered on the second ring. She always did.

"Yassine." As if it were news.

"Maman."

"Where are you? Are you in Paris? The commandant said—"

"I'm not in Paris," he said. "I was never in Paris." He watched a flamingo lift one leg out of the water and fold it up under itself and stand there, perfectly balanced, on the other. "I've left the police, Maman. On Friday. I was working, all summer, but not on a course. I was in the Camargue. I'll tell you. All of it. I'll tell you properly."

There was a pause on the line. Not long. He knew her pauses. This one was not doubt.

"Are you eating?" she said.

He laughed. He had not known he was going to. It came up out of him the way the sound at the fence had come up out of him, from the same place, and went on longer than he meant it to, and when it stopped his face was wet.

"Come and eat," his mother said. "Come now. I'll make something. You can tell me while you eat."

He looked at the road. North, to Montpellier, to the seventh floor of a building on the Rue de Bari with geraniums on the balcony, and an empty flat across the city with a drawer in it and nothing else he wanted, and a fourth floor he would never go up to again. South and east behind him, the salt and the walls and the long flat land with its black bulls and its white horses and its one-metre rise, where there was no place for a man who was even. He sat in the lay-by between them with the phone at his ear and his mother breathing on the other end of it, waiting, and the flamingo standing on one leg in the lagoon, and for a long moment he could not think of a single road from where he was that went anywhere he could call home.

"Yassine?" she said.

"I'm here," he said. "I'm coming." And he did not start the car.