Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The Flood

(4) The bed was uncomfortable.

(5) The girl had bad breath and sometimes smelt of perspiration.

(6) Time was passing, and he had to act fast.

In the morning he waited till Marthe had gone out to do the shopping, and then got his things together. The little boy, still in his dressing gown, was playing with some toy cars on the floor of the kitchen. After a while he got up and came over to Besson, who was just putting his razor into the beach-bag.

‘Where are you going?’ he said.

‘Out,’ Besson told him.

‘What for?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Besson.

‘What do you mean, nothing?’ the boy said. Then he went and fetched one of the toy cars, and began to push it round Besson’s feet, making broo-o-m-broom noises to simulate a car’s engine.

Besson put the last of his belongings in the beach-bag. The little boy came back again and scrutinized him with black, unwavering eyes.

‘Where are you going to, then?’ he repeated.

‘Outside,’ said Besson.

‘Going for a walk?’

‘Yes,’ Besson said. He strapped on his wristwatch and went to comb his hair. When he returned to pick up his bag the little red-haired boy was carefully staging an accident between two of the cars.

‘What are you up to?’ Besson asked him.

‘This one’s a Peugeot,’ the boy explained, ‘and this other one here’s a Citroën. It’s going very fast, so the driver of the Peugeot doesn’t see it. Now watch what happens.’

The little blue vehicle was travelling flat out across the kitchen floor; proportionately to its scaled-down size it must have been doing the equivalent of something like three hundred miles an hour. Then the other car appeared, coming in from the right. This one was bright red. It curved round the table-leg and cut right across the first car’s path. There was no time for anyone to brake: they crashed into each other with appalling violence, and both vehicles were hurled across the plastic-tiled floor, bouncing and somersaulting over and over, until at last they came to rest on their backs. If there had been any passengers on board they would have been killed on the spot. Next, the fire-engine came out of a corner at the other end of the kitchen. Zig-zagging over its imaginary highway, siren going full blast, it made flat out for the scene of the accident, stopping at each wrecked car to extinguish the fire before it could get under way. Then, after picking up the dead and wounded, it returned the way it had come, sounding its siren louder than ever. When it was back in its corner, two breakdown trucks drove across to the scene of the accident. When they got there they hooked up the two crashed cars by their bumpers and towed them away across the kitchen.

Besson still had a few minutes to spare before he left. He sat down and lit a cigarette, letting the little boy blow out the flame for him.

‘What’s your name?’ Besson asked.

The little red-haired boy made no reply.

‘Go on, what’s your name?’ Besson said again.

‘Lucas,’ said the little boy.

‘Lucas what?’

‘Lucas …’

‘And you live here, right?’

‘Yes …’

‘And how old are you?’

No answer.

‘You mean you’ve forgotten? You know how to count, anyway, don’t you? Go on, you know how to count, surely?’

The child wavered on his short podgy legs. He had a heavy head, with high forehead and a very bright pair of eyes under his red hair. His mouth was half-open, and two incisors were just visible, resting against the top of his lower lip. He was wearing a blue bathrobe, check trousers and floral-pattern slippers.

Besson bent down towards him and said: ‘Come on — try a bit of counting with me. One, two, three—’

‘Four—’

‘Five, six—’

‘Eight … eleven … fourteen—’

‘No, no! Six, seven, eight, nine … You go on from there.’

‘M’m…. Ten—’

‘Well done, that’s right—’

‘M’m…. Fourteen….’

‘No not, fourteen, you said that just now.’

‘Six….

‘No, not six…. Eleven, twelve, thirteen….’

‘Fourteen—’

‘What’s after that?’

‘I don’t know,’ the little red-haired boy said, and began to play with one of his cars again. Besson watched him crawling across the linoleum floor, and for a moment felt the urge to take him along too, have him as a companion wherever he went. He might even teach the kid something, just exactly what he wasn’t sure, but maybe, one day, he’d be able to teach him something really useful, like pilfering from shop-counters, or how to swim really fast. But it occurred to him that he’d soon have the police on his tail, with charges of child-abduction.

‘Why don’t you get in your little cars and drive them?’ Besson asked.

The child looked up and puzzled over this for a moment.

‘But they’re too small for me,’ he said. ‘Look—’

He held the toy car in front of his face.

‘Would you like a bigger car?’

‘I’d like a truck,’ the little boy said. ‘A big truck like that one.’

‘Where would you go in it?’

‘I’d take it to school. And I’d take Mama for drives round the garden in it.’

Besson flicked his cigarette-ash on the ground.

‘When you’re a big boy,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said the little boy. ‘When I’m eight. But — but why aren’t I eight?’

‘Because you’re four and a half,’ Besson said.

‘When I’m asleep at night I see lots of things,’ the little boy said. ‘Wolves, whole forests full of wolves. And Indians.’

‘Do the Indians kill the wolves?’

‘No, they can’t, they’re not big enough. But when I’m grown up I’ll take a stick and I’ll kill the wolves, I’ll, I’ll poke my stick into their eyes, that’s what I’ll do. There was one wolf wanted to eat me, but I said to him, no, wolf, don’t eat me, because — because I’m going to kill you. And he got terrible cross, and caught hold of my throat. So I grabbed a knife and slit him up the middle, right into two halves.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Then the wolf locked me in a dark room, and kept me there.’

‘Were you afraid of the dark?’

‘Oh yes, I was afraid, and then when it was light I jumped out of the window.’

‘Ever seen the Big Bad Wolf?’

‘Oh, I see him sometimes at night — he’s got a big stick and he goes through the forest with all the foxes. But I run away and he can’t catch me.’

‘Why can’t he catch you?’

‘Because I met an ogre who put me up in the top of a tree. The Big Bad Wolf couldn’t climb the tree because the ogre was protecting me.’

‘Didn’t the ogre try and eat you?’

‘Oh no, he was a nice ogre. He never ate little children. He was a kind good ogre.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Big, ever so big, with black legs and white hands and face.’

‘What about his nose?’

‘White’.

‘And his hair?’

‘Blue. No, bluey-green.’

‘Bluey-green?’

‘Yes.’

‘And his eyes?’

‘Yellow.’

‘So he was a handsome ogre, eh?’

‘Yes, he was. And I went on running for ages and ages.’

‘And what did the Big Bad Wolf do?’

‘The Big Bad Wolf tried to catch me, so I took a big stone and smashed his head in.’

‘Suppose he’d eaten you?’

‘Then I’d have cut open his tummy and got out.’

‘And why doesn’t the chicken you eat cut open your tummy?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

‘And you’re not dead, eh?’

‘Course not.’

‘Well, suppose the Big Bad Wolf ate you, would you be dead then?’