Sometimes one of the bolder kids will approach Rat and Jérôme and ask, “Do you want to play?” but they have evidently been trained to stay within their parents’ eyeshot, and if you suggest venturing further—into the dunes, or up on the bunker—they get nervous. Once she and Jérôme played with a boy who started teasing them about the way they spoke—“Why do you say ‘de-meng’ for ‘demain’?”—and only shut up when Rat pinned him to the ground and threatened to pour sand down his throat.

Tonight Rat and Jérôme find themselves spying on two kids who are swinging in Chez Ernest’s hammock. The little girl is trying forcibly to eject her big brother. She pushes at his low-swinging bottom, encased in hammock netting, but she can’t budge him. Failing, she runs back to the restaurant, bawling for their mother.

The mother intervenes.

The boy, sighing theatrically, surrenders his place to the little girl. Swings her as high as the hammock will go, and, as soon as their mother is out of sight, turns it upside down, depositing his sister hard in the sand. “You go running to Mama once more, and I’m going to take the biggest hairiest spider I can find, and put it in your bed tonight.”

Rat and Jérôme by now are losing interest.

“We should go home,” says Jérôme, reluctantly.

“Not yet. We need to check first that the enemy’s not approaching by sea.” That’s their signal to head for the bunker.

The bunker is a cement block, just out of sight of Chez Ernest, built by the Germans towards the end of the war in readiness for an Allied landing on this stretch of Mediterranean. There are hundreds of bunkers up and down the coast. Originally this one was sand-colored, but now it is so solidly spray-painted in graffiti—dark blue, red, yellow—that it looks like one big tattoo.

There’s a room inside where the German gunners would have hidden, and where today older kids go to smoke pot and kiss, but it’s dank and dark, and it gives Rat the creeps. Even when her friends dare her to crawl inside, she goes only with reluctance. Later on, after a girl from Fitou is raped in it, the municipality cements the entrance shut, and it becomes like a Pharaonic pyramid that holds a curse.

The bunker is oddly configured, shaped like a turnover, with one side not sheer but sharply slanting. Rat and Jérôme like to scale its cliff face. When you get to the top, you can see the entire coast, from the white limestone crags of the Corbières down south to the dark-green wall of the Albères, the Pyrenean foothills that mark the Spanish frontier. In between, is a harsh blazing Mediterranean flatland of marsh, delta, bulrushes, sandy plain.