After leaving Sardinia, Minna flew to England to join Nick, and I spent the rest of my holidays in Florence. At the Uffizi, I went looking for Cranach’s Eve.
When I returned to Montpellier, there was a flyer in my letterbox. It was a photocopy of a hand, the white lines standing out on the black palm. One was labelled Ligne de vie and another Ligne du destin. There were white pictographs as well, on the palm and on the tip of each finger: a crescent moon, the symbols for ‘female’ and ‘male’. A scribble across the bottom read À plus tard!
I thought at once of Rinaldi’s babble about Destiny. But the flyers seemed to exceed his reach. For a while they were everywhere: stuck to lampposts, scattered in doorways, plastered against bollards by the wind. Once there was a little heap of them on the bar of my usual cafe. I asked the owner about them. The owner looked nothing like Sandrine but reminded me of her: the dry lips, the perky eyes in a lived-in face.
He’d found the flyers outside the door that morning, he told me. ‘C’est probablement une pub.’ Probably an ad. A palmist seemed obvious, but why didn’t the flyers carry an address or phone number? The owner’s mind moved on a higher plane. He was of the view that the flyers were intended to stir interest in a forthcoming avant-garde event – a play, perhaps, or an experimental film. That was the meaning of the scrawled See you later! A regular client would show up with an explanation, he assured me. ‘We’ll find out everything.’ But the next time I went to the cafe no one had come forward to claim the flyers, and the owner had thrown them away. Now he felt that they must have been ‘une blague de lycéens’ – a high school prank.
The flyers had stopped turning up when my mind clicked: whoever was responsible had been following me around and knew where I went. The flyers had been left where I was sure to find them: near the flea market, in Minna’s street, at the bus stops near the lycée. But that was stupid, I realised – of course I’d seen them only in places I frequented.
A storm came, bringing a huge silver wind. It left the air shifty and scented. The weathered remains of a flyer fluttered on a parking sign. Line of life. Line of destiny. See you later! I couldn’t decide if the message was sinister or jaunty. The hand was small and shapely, a woman’s hand, black and white like a badger. The Night the Bertys Cooked a Badger – the flyers were like that smell, something puzzling and unexplained.
