The radio announcer is summoning up last night’s tally. This time, it’s the downtown shopping streets that have been hit. A dozen buildings on the rue des Augustins firebombed, forty-some cars burned. Eleven people held for questioning in the Place Cassanyes murder.

It all started two weeks ago, in the middle of the Sunday market. An Algerian man caught a Gypsy boy trying to break into his car, and when he went after the kid with a knife, a bunch of Gypsies chased him and beat him to death. Broad daylight, dozens of people watching. Week later, a second Arab was shot dead in a drive-by shooting, and now the city’s exploded into race riots.

Every night, kids are out with crowbars, baseball bats, jerry cans of gasoline, looking for Gypsies. But the Gypsies have all fled, so instead they’re smashing up the city center, burning cars. And now everybody else is taking advantage of the mayhem—artful grannies rolling out of broken-glassed supermarkets, their shopping carts loaded with free heating oil. The extreme right planting their own bombs to make the Arabs look bad.

That’s the idyllic South of France for you.

Rat doesn’t want to get out of bed. It’s May. Outside, in the noonday sun, it may feel hot as summer, but inside, early morning, it’s arctic. She can hear the Tramontane whipping through the windows, sirening under the doors.

It’s not easy wrenching herself out of bed and down the ladder into the cruel world. Tiled floors icy under her feet.

Roar of toilet flushing. In the living room, she almost bumps into Thierry, who is sleepwalking his way back to Vanessa’s bed. They stare right through each other, Rat trying not to look at his skinny white legs covered in black hair, or the yellow flecks of piss he leaves on the toilet seat.

That’s how she and her unofficial stepdad coexist these days. No more contact than two separate species inhabiting the same forest. Used to be, whenever Thierry shoved, Rat shoved back harder. But that’s too much trouble. Life’s too big to waste your time being petty as your adversary. If it weren’t for Morgan, she’d have been out of the house long ago.

Her first job is to light the woodstove. She breaks up the side of a fruit crate and arranges its splintered slats in a little teepee surmounted by a flying buttress of grapevine. Takes a match to a crumple of newspaper inside. Crouching down, Rat puffs, making her breath into a bellows until the flame from the fruit-crate splinters has turned the gnarled gray whirl of grapevine reliably aglow.