Lina Wolff - Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

‘That’s your basic algorithm of envy and pettiness,’ Geraldine maintained. ‘It sticks in their craws when they’re forced to confront the fact that others have been favoured in so many ways at the same time.’

Once she had said this, she allowed herself to sink back into her deck chair and fall asleep with a contented smile on her lips.

A bit further along the beach was the ice-cream parlour owned by a Frenchman called Monsieur Leval. From afar his stand looked like an old shed equipped with faded orange awnings from the post-war period. The walls were made of planks painted brown, but time and salt water had worn away at them so that the whole shed looked pale and bleached by the sun. Although the windows were so clean you could see yourself reflected in them, and that made for a strange contrast. The queue of ice-cream buyers at Monsieur Leval’s was always long, sometimes snaking all the way up the promenade to end in a little hook in front of Señor Javi’s parlour, which was usually all but deserted. Everyone wanted to buy their ice cream at Leval’s and when you saw people eating his ices you realised there had to be something really extraordinary about them. Some people emitted little groans of pleasure, others simply stared at one another as though spellbound and some people just shut their eyes and sat there with the sun in their faces, their entire being dissolving into the ice cream. Unfortunately Geraldine had a score to settle with Monsieur Leval. She always refused to discuss the details but it had something to do with the way Leval had once, a long time ago, placed his parlour in relation to the French windows of Geraldine’s sitting room.

‘He just dumped his shed on the beach like a lump of elephant shit and ruined the first fifty metres of my view,’ she told Mum.

This meant that none of us could buy ice cream from Monsieur Leval. Although Mum reproached Geraldine for falling out with someone who made such delicious ice cream, she continued to insist in my presence that there were any number of ice-cream parlours along the promenade and that we really didn’t need to rub salt into Geraldine’s wounds by choosing the parlour owned by her long-standing enemy. This was why I was the only customer at Señor Javi’s stand for several days that summer and whenever Javi handed me the ice creams, the people in Leval’s queue looked at me as though I was an idiot, or a tourist, someone who had only just arrived and had no inside knowledge at all.

The more they talked about Leval and how forbidden it was to buy ice cream from him, the more irresistible my craving for his ice cream became. After a week on the beach in Perpignan the only thing I could think about was the ice cream at Monsieur Leval’s. I woke up with a peculiar kind of hunger inside me and even though I ate breakfast on Geraldine’s terrace it was like pouring water through a sieve because when I got to the beach I felt just as hungry as when I woke up. I hung around the shed and watched people eating Leval’s ice cream. The children’s faces got all sticky when their tongues splashed into the soft, pastel flavours. One time I went into the parlour. I could feel the chill from the ice cream boxes and the aroma of the freshly baked cones. There was a large bowl of whipped cream on the counter that Madame Leval used as topping. Monsieur Leval looked at me coldly and said that if I wasn’t going to buy anything, I should leave.

The day Mercader turned up I saw myself reflected in the window of Leval’s bar. First you could see the row of mums, dads and kids in the reflection, and standing behind them — as though in a different plane — was me. With my pale and slightly awkward body I was standing outside the image like an extra. I think that was the first time I ever looked at myself properly. Properly and as I really was, I mean. And, as if I had seen something I shouldn’t have seen, or realised something too quickly and too soon, I backed away from the window and then turned round and ran towards Mum and Geraldine under the parasol.

‘You’ve got to give me some money for ice cream now,’ I said.

‘Not if you are going to get it from Monsieur Leval,’ said Geraldine.

I set off towards the ice-cream parlour again. Behind me I heard Geraldine shout that there was no point in my hanging around there if I wasn’t actually going to buy anything. A girl in the queue stuck her tongue out at me. The girl’s mother said that if I was going to buy an ice cream I had to go to the end of the queue.

‘Though she hasn’t got any money, has she,’ said the girl.

It really is hard to imagine any of it turning out differently when you think about the circumstances at that moment. All Candyman had to do was push against an open door. Suddenly there he was, in the picture. In the mirror of the window I saw him walking towards the post-war awnings, the row of kids, and me. I thought there is no chance in the world he walks towards me. No chance in the world that someone like that man would be walking towards me. But it was an odd day, a day when anything could happen. Because he definitely was walking towards me and he had his hands in his pockets, strolling along like a lord with a bored expression on his face, which appeared somewhat amused when he looked at me.

When he was only a few metres behind me, he stopped.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

Our eyes met in the window.

‘What’s yours?’ I replied.

He looked at the sea and laughed.

‘My name is Candyman,’ he said then.

I turned around. He smiled, and he was unshaven. He toyed a bit with his linen shirt, which was buttoned up at the neck.

‘Candyman isn’t a real name,’ I said.

‘It’s a name like any other name,’ he replied. ‘So what’s yours then?’

He took off his glasses and put the top of one side of the frame in his mouth.

‘My name is Candygirl,’ I said.

Candyman laughed and took a step closer. He bent down towards me and whispered in my ear:

‘That’s lucky. Because when Candyman meets Candygirl she is allowed to ask for whatever she wants from him. And he has to give it to her.’

His words were like warm bits of cotton wool in my ear. Over his shoulder I could see the beach and all its inhabitants stretching out. Kilometre upon kilometre of heavenly bodies and shamefaced shacks. Closest to us lay two women with surgically enhanced breasts that stuck straight up.

‘The ice cream in there,’ I said. ‘All the ice cream inside Monsieur Leval’s ice-cream parlour.’

Unlike ordinary men and their bullshit, Candyman didn’t back out. Candyman was a real gentleman who understood what you said right from the start. He didn’t say to Leval: Just give her a large ice cream and that’ll keep her quiet, and he didn’t wink at the other adults in a tacit conspiracy. Instead he took my hand, walked past the whole queue and into the ice-cream parlour. People muttered and someone called out in a muffled sort of way that the last place was at the very back. When we got to the front, he said to Monsieur Leval that he was going to buy all the ice cream in the entire parlour for the little lady at his side. If we could get it loaded onto a cart and driven over to the promenade, he’d be most obliged. At first Leval said it would be quite impossible. All the ice cream — all at one go and for a single customer? His wife came and stood beside him and asked: what would all the other people who were craving ice cream say — and what would she and her husband have to do for the rest of the day?

But objections of this kind posed not the slightest problem for Candyman. He said that surely this was a matter of money like everything else? People glared at us as we left. After a while Leval and his wife turned up on the promenade carrying the boxes. While I opened them Candyman sat on the wall and smoked. He smiled when he saw me eating with a spoon Leval had also provided. I tasted each and every one of the different flavours. Violet, liquorice, strawberry, condensed milk, chocolate. Passersby stared and laughed in disbelief; presumably they had never seen a child eating an ice-cream mountain with a cigar-smoking lord at her side. It was hot, although every now and then there was a breeze off the sea that brought a bit of coolness with it and the smell of salt.