The guys are blown away, almost sheepish for having made a fuss yesterday. A team leader who works harder than his men deserves respect. They give Manuel sly looks and shake their heads.

“She can christen it at her daughter’s wedding,” one of the men says, laughing.

“She’ll still have to wait a week for it to be completely dry,” Patrick says, “but it should be OK. She’s not going to piss us off.”

The team is reunited before the enemy.

Manuel says nothing. At the top of his large, gladiator’s body, his head is nodding gently from tiredness and his tic hasn’t stopped, it’s got worse, in fact: his cheek twitches involuntarily under his sunglasses. His wrecked hands are stuffed inside the pockets of his jacket, even though it’s actually too hot to be wearing one. He rubs his fingers together, bits of concrete crumbling against the fabric. His sore knuckles, chafed to the blood, remind him he’s alive.

He replays bits of the night on a loop. He buries the early part: too dark, too alcoholic, and besides, it’ll surface soon enough. For now, he’s rethinking the careful finishing stages of the decorative pond. First the bed of gravel, the body lying at the bottom, in a semicircle, and on top of it the scrap iron they carried together. And then the fifteen or so inches of cement poured over that, twenty for good measure, just to make sure, to be safe. They worked quickly, each and every movement calculated, efficient. It wasn’t just about a couple of hounded guys; they were – they thought – far removed from genre movies. In fact, preparing the cement in the middle of the night and fussing over the mixer gave them respite. Not thinking and just moving their bodies in familiar gestures. They didn’t look at each other.

By the time the sun rose on their filthy, shattered bodies and empty eyes, they’d finished. The little Voltaire armchair had its legs sawn off and its back broken; it’s lying in pieces under an old hunting parka and gnarled vine stocks in the bed of the pick-up truck. It’ll have to wait a while: leaves get burnt in the late autumn, sometimes even in the winter.

The concrete has now set enough for them to draw breath. And for hell to begin.

Turning his back on his team, Manuel takes out a cigarette and lights it in the cup of his hands as if the mistral was sweeping over everything. But there’s not even a breath of air on the hill – nothing but light, omnipresent heat and blueness.

Even in Our Own Backyard

Even in Our Own Backyard