“If your father finds out —”

“Are you scared?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it? Have you got an issue with my father I should know about?”

A brown lock falls aggressively over her blue eye. The green one challenges the young man.

“No, not at all. It’s just that I’d rather not at your place…”

He senses that she’s taken offence, so he looks at her for a few seconds without replying, a little wildly. Crap, he was nearly there. She pulls back her strap with a finger, moves away and gets up, a contemptuous pout on her lips. “No, you’re right. It’s so much better to feel each other up quickly in a shed that stinks of piss. Or shut up in a bathroom full of dead cats.”

“Jo…”

She stands, slightly arched, one hand on the sink, the other on her hip. “Never mind. I’m off.”

“No, wait.”

He straightens up and tries to put his arms around her. She wrenches herself free, arm outstretched, hand open.

“Get off, you’re pathetic.”

Jo leaves the bathroom, gritting her teeth. He rushes after her. “Wait, please!”

“In your dreams! Touch yourself while thinking about my pussy. Next time, you’ll be quicker off the mark.”

She emerges into the light. People are small, the world without limits.

Coffee in an Algerian-Style Mug

Every morning, Séverine drops Céline off at her parents’. She never goes in. Sundays are more than enough. It’s only just over a mile between their street and the grandparents’ farmhouse, but Céline can’t cycle while she’s pregnant unless she wants to lose the child, which, after all, could be a solution. Except he might survive and be born deformed, or maybe an idiot. Nobody wants the same thing to happen to Céline as to the canteen manager’s sister-in-law, the one who had a problem in her sixth month, now stuck with her daft kid, a backward face on a tortoise neck, all wrinkled and revolting. No school, goes to stay in a specialized centre for a bit of respite, but her life is over, finished, and her only occupation is her dribbling little monster who screams at every visit. So Séverine makes the detour on her way to work.

July is stretching out. Céline’s pregnancy is very obvious now, as though acceptance has given her body permission to spread out. She’s still kidding herself, but it’s over: her belly has now placed her among the untouchables.

The old folks’ property stands between a field of cherry trees and the vineyard. Nothing extraordinary, no swimming pool or grand verandahs or soft deckchairs. Stone and trees, muddy machines in the shed, earth-clotted tools standing against the west-facing wall. Austere, unchanged for years, since Séverine’s childhood. A red tractor is parked beneath the branches of a huge linden tree. The other one, the one her father uses for sowing, isn’t here. And the large table has pride of place under the window, the large table for family meals.

Séverine is feeling a strong wave of tiredness this morning, so when her mother motions to her to come in, she decides that, yes, it might be nice to be in her childhood kitchen with her mother and her daughter, drinking a coffee that’s too white, in an Algerian-style pottery mug.