Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi Read Free Book Online Page B

I’d rather not believe in God, it’s too frightening and, anyway, how can I understand God when I don’t understand his representative, the Pope, that rich, crumbly old man? God must be like a bunch of popes put together, thousands of popes in one single person, terrifyingly powerful… yes, but knowing there are these monks thinking of me night and day, that’s reassuring.
    Kevin’s hungry, Stan said. I’ll go down and buy some biscuits, put the coins back in the tea tin, I told him. Are you going to pay with those little coins? He was worried, you’d have thought I was going to rob a bank. I’m not going to hang on tomy savings, Stan, I put them aside for this trip, I’ve got to spend them. He put the money back in the tin, judging by the noise it made you’d have thought there was a lot of it, but it was dead money, money no one trusted, I’d grasped that.
    Kevin was sucking on his noonoo more and more quickly, his eyes closing, opening, closing again, he was falling asleep, he felt safe. Keep an eye on your brother, Stan, I said… It was so obvious Stan would keep an eye on the littl’un, I don’t know why I needed to say it, some sentences are just like that. Be careful when you cross the road, Don’t talk to strangers, Keep an eye on your brother, such simple sentences, they belong to everyone and we say them all the time so they never go out of circulation. Our parents used to say them. And our parents’ parents. They’re sacred, compulsory, make you feel alive.
    I put my sodden jacket and muddy shoes back on, and left the two of them on their own.
    As I went down the stairs I realized I was leaving them in another world, a bubble about to burst. The further down I went, the closer I got to hell. The hell of other people. Of course, I have to go there every now and then, there are things I need to get. It must be like this in war: breaking cover, risking your life to survive. Kevin was hungry. And Stan, too, I was sure he was. Not me. I was poisoned, full of bile and sour saliva, the sea salt had got into my mouth.
    I went down those stairs, and the mist gathered a little closer round me with each floor, I missed steps, thinking they were further down than they were, falling slightly each time, like air pockets in the middle of a dream. With all that missing steps and seeing them too close or too far, my head started spinning, I clung to the banister, I could feel myself lurching to one side, someone must be pushing me from behind, I was sure they were. I stopped on one floor, I don’t remember which, they were all the same – brown, lit only by the neon of the fire exit signs, maybe that’s what was making me ill, all those endless floors, it drove me mad. My head was throbbing like the blood couldn’t wait to get out, I was out of breath. I’m used to that. It’s not the tiredness, it’s the panic. I’ve told them about it at the health centre. I’m not the only one, it does happen to people. You’ve got to reason with yourself. That’s what they say. In fact, all their sentences start like that: You’ve got to. It sounded to me like: You forgot to, you forgot to, you forgot to. Right! I couldn’t reason with myself, so the only way to deal with it was to piss off out of there as fast as possible and I hurtled down the stairs, with my fears chasing after me. Of course I tripped and twisted my wrist clinging on to the banister, I was like a ball thrown down from one of the upper floors, I bounced and I bumped but all the same… I reached the bottom.
    A feeling of having come a long, long way, my kids were far away from me now, a whole journey lay between us. There was a leatherette armchair in the foyer, and I slumped down into it. I should have felt relieved, proud of myself, proud of winning that round, but I felt worse by the minute. It must have shown. A man came over, probably the hotel manager, I didn’t see him coming, he startled me. I couldn’t actually make him out very well,