Сандрин Коллетт - Just After the Wave

“Let’s go there. Perrine is really sick.”

“What if…”

Noah doesn’t finish his sentence. Louie nods his head, knowingly.

If it’s people who want to get rid of us?

But he hasn’t erased from his memory the despair that only minutes before made him imagine a terrifying outcome, a vision that will return to him if they don’t find any help, because the fatigue is there, deep inside him, and it’s more than fatigue: it’s renunciation. If he had to explain to Noah, he would just say that he can’t cope anymore. That his thoughts have shut down, that he has no more solutions to suggest, nothing, just emptiness of a kind he’s never known, vast and frightening, saturating all the space.

This is why they have to go there.

If it’s people who… ? We’ll see.

And anyway, at this stage…

The house looks like a huge wooden skeleton perched on the sea. Louie knows Noah is afraid, and he also feels an unpleasant tingling all over his body.

The two figures have come to the edge of the terrace, their hands on the railing to watch the boat come nearer. Louie narrows his eyes to try and see them better. Suddenly he says:

“Old ladies.”

Noah sits up. What?

Louie observes them. Yes: grannies , Pata used to call them, in the beginning, because they’d never known their grandparents. At the same time as he repeats it to himself, a flood of joy inside him.

Before the tidal wave, there were old ladies in the village. Sometimes on his way to and from school, he would help them carry their shopping, or pick up a scarf they’d dropped, and they would ruffle his hair. Give him some candy. They all had a particular perfume, of face creams and another era, and that faint tremor in their voices—or was it just Louie who couldn’t hear them properly, used to the clamor of a family of nine children, where you have to shout to make yourself heard.

And then the wrinkles on their faces, at the corner of their eyes as they looked at you, around their mouth as they smiled at you. It’s giving Louie shivers just to see them there now. Madie said all the old ladies had died during the deluge. He’s glad to see that it’s not altogether true. Noah, who is also looking at them, nudges him with his elbow.

The old ladies wave. Both of them are tiny, or so it looks, reduced by years and as shriveled as the crabapples from that tree they had at the end of the garden. One of them is thin, the other is round. They have identical hair, short and curly, white as snow with blue highlights— Like the sea , whispers Noah, fascinated.

The boat comes to bump against a pillar on the terrace and Louie doesn’t dare throw them the rope to moor it. In the eyes of the first old lady, who is right there next to him, he can see a terrible weariness, her resignation betrayed by a sigh; and yet, after a few seconds have gone by, she says, Well hello, children. What on earth are you doing here?

Louie detects that tremor in her voice, which brings back so many memories.

“My sister is sick.”

He adds, with a frown, to look serious:

“Really sick.”

He can see the old ladies shifting their gaze to the bottom of the boat, past the hens and onto Perrine, with the sweat on her brow and the cloth on her face. Their eyes open wide, their mouths forming an “o.”

“Goodness, that little girl is in a bad way.”

The first old lady, the thin one, turns to the other one:

“If you have the strength, Lucette, bring a towel and a bowl of water, quick. And you, children, come on up here, don’t stay there on your boat.”

She holds out her arms, feebly. Louie and Noah help Perrine up onto the terrace; the girl is whimpering, and she curls up in a ball on the ground the moment the first granny leans over her, while the other one hurries with tired little steps toward the house. Noah kneels by his sister. Louie, undecided, hesitates between joining him and keeping watch on the boat. Deep down, his wariness has not gone away; he looks at the old ladies out of the corner of his eye, the one who is examining Perrine in spite of the little girl’s fingers clutching at her face, and the one who, before long, comes back from the house carrying a basin; he wonders if they too will set a trap—he dreams of lying down and sleeping without fear—fear of water, of men—and his eyes ringed with shadows watch as the old women come and go, watch the things they carry, their furtive glances at him.

“Are you all right, son?” asks Lucette, without pausing in what she is doing.

A timid little nod.

Around them, the elated hens have left the boat and are ferreting, pecking on the terrace, he can hear their tap tap , and his head is spinning.

“Adele, there’s one last tube of aspirin in the cupboard in the bathroom, if you need it. I can go and get it.”

The thin old lady straightens up slowly, looks at the other one, awkward.

“Lucette, you’re the one who needs it most.”

The round granny brushes this off: Oh, with the time I’ve got left… don’t tell me otherwise, we both know it perfectly well.

Only then does Louie notice the sweat on Lucette’s forehead, the sound of her breathing like a saw cutting into a metal beam, the pale, drawn features on her deceptively round face. Adele lowers her head, hunts for her words.

“Just one, then. For the fever.”

“Good. Good.”

The old lady seems to be in so much pain when she walks that Louie leaps forward.

“I’ll go, if you’d like.”

“But you don’t know where it is,” says Lucette with surprise.

He has caught up with her and puts his arm under hers.

“Then you can show me.”

A few minutes that seem like an eternity, the time for Lucette to lead him to the end of the corridor in the house and point to a tiny closed cabinet.

“There. In the white and green tube on the left. You have to take a whole tablet and dissolve it in a glass of water.”

When they come back, Adele explains fretfully that she has to prepare a poultice.

“We don’t have much left in the way of first aid, but it will do a lot of good. It may seem a bit obsolete, but don’t let that fool you, it will work wonders.”

Noah and Louie watch her in silence, their eyes open wide: they don’t know what obsolete means. It sounds nice. It’s bound to work.

Adele bends over Perrine.

“I’m going to put something over your eye to reduce the swelling and remove the infection. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, it’s just lukewarm. But you have to keep it on, I’ll put a bandage over it and you’ll look like a pirate. All right?”

Attentive and trembling, Perrine doesn’t answer. Noah squeezes her hand: She’s going to make you all better!

“Tell me, your other eye…” says the lady, “is it already blind?”

This time Perrine murmurs almost inaudibly, “Yes.”

“Right. Then we’ll leave it alone, we have to take care of the other one, which is precious. Here. Drink this glass of water, there’s some medication in it, it doesn’t taste good but it will make you feel better.”

“I’ve had aspirin,” whispers Perrine.

“Perfect. Drink it all down, your fever is very high. Lucette, are you there?”

The round old lady is sitting on a plastic chair behind them. Her voice is no louder than a murmur.

“I’m here.”

“I’ll leave her to you for a few minutes. Look after her.”

As soon as she is out of earshot Noah goes over to Lucette.

“Are you sick, too?”

“Noah!” says Louie.

The old lady smiles, wipes the sweat from her temples with an embroidered blue handkerchief.

“He is right to ask. Yes, I’m a little bit sick and a little bit old. But it’s not too serious.”