The bread was as bad as could be found in any supermarket, but at least the coffee was hot. From time to time, the bell tinkled as other customers entered, tall, fat, small, thin, young and old, buying cigarettes, a magazine or bread, exchanging banal comments with Tinette about the weather or such-and-such’s health. Life in paradise. This was precisely how Marc saw it: insignificance taken to perfection. No one paid attention to him, as if he were invisible. As he melted into the warm, bovine atmosphere, he undressed his fellow customers with his eyes, peeling off their outer skins one by one, stripping them from head to foot, revealing them as God made them with their crooked, hairy legs and varicose veins, impressive rolls of pale flesh amassed around their guts, wormy blue veins wiggling up their arms, calves covered in shrivelled flesh, or taut enough to snap, flab, bones, fat, spots, vaccination scars, war wounds, moles, warts, hollow chests appearing empty of breath, others bursting with suppressed cries, hard nipples and nipples drooping sadly from empty, crumpled saddlebags, fanned, semi-webbed toes, and toes squashed together in narrow high heels, stranglers’ hands with knobbly fingers, hard as tools, fingers of church saints, as long and pale as candles. A full-on striptease: incredible!

Having got on to the topic of fingers, he inevitably remembered his own, which he contemplated with a look of bafflement as he rested his elbow on the table. He was not in pain, but the index finger was still just as swollen and had turned a strange orange colour which he put down to the product in which he was marinating it three times a day.

‘Was there something else you wanted?’

Marc jumped. His finger, held in the air like a schoolboy asking permission to speak, had caught Tinette’s attention.

‘No … umm, what do I owe you?’

The return leg always feels shorter than the way out. It’s because you know where you’re going. Marc already had his bearings – there was the little house with blue shutters, the farming co-op, the collapsed wall … He felt at home here. Only, his home appeared to have vanished. In the spot where the camper van had been parked, there were now only tyre tracks veering from the grass onto the tarmac of the road towards Agen.

Even though he was alone, Marc said aloud the last word we all resort to at times of extreme disarray: ‘Shit!’