Kites twirled like commas in a sky so clear you could see into its depths. Some flew so high it looked as if they would never come down, but in the end their strings always pulled them back to the beach where they jolted, clumsy and pitiful when not in the air. Fat little people bundled up in garish coats pulled the kites towards them, laughing. Marc felt like giving them a slap. In their chubby hands, the kites were no more than skinny, floundering flat fish. As the tiny, arrogant cosmonauts trampled the grey sand, their fathers ran towards them, big and stupid, drunk on themselves and their progeny, kneeling before the remains of the great birds now reduced to silk squares on a pair of sticks. If only someone would invent special scissors to cut the strings that bind us so tightly to one another – and abolish the laws of gravity while they’re at it.

Marc was convinced that Anne had tried to get rid of Boudu: the missing pillowcase was proof. Yet he had left them curled up together when he left the room an hour earlier. We all become attached. The victim to his tormentor, the tormentor to his victim, the father to his child, the child to his kite … All attached. All strung together … After discovering the absent pillowcase, Marc looked out at the cloudless sky to see a web of threads stretched between the stars, the way the signs of the zodiac are depicted in astrology books. Only here, all the figurative symbols had disappeared, replaced by tangled lines like a doodle you might draw while on the phone, a meaningless scribble in which only the Great Bear remained, recognisable by its saucepan shape. Chloé had once bought a picture like this at a flea market, a hideous object with gold thread embroidered on a black velvet background in the shape of a horse’s head.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s … very kitsch.’

‘I love it!’

She had hung it in the loo, behind the door, facing the toilet. It was fine if he was taking a piss, otherwise … A horse’s head?

Chloé … He typed her number into his mobile and let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. Of course she could no longer answer him, because she was no longer part of the story. He should have made a run for it yesterday, should have answered the call of the revolving doors as he approached reception. Now new lines had begun to form, ties that bound him slowly but surely to a future that was no longer in his hands. He felt like a trapeze artist bouncing into the net after a failed trick, caught in a spider’s web he could no longer escape from, lumbering, ashamed, in a trap of his own making. Perhaps there was still time … He could leave some money for Anne at the hotel, jump in the car … He could – but already he knew he would not. He was lacking the one small thing that saves a man from drowning, the kick of rage that lifts you up from the bottom and propels you to the surface. It was still a long, long way off. He was not there yet.