Not registering the deep hostility in Manuel’s eyes, or his shaking hands, Séverine sits behind the wheel. She starts the engine as if running away, avoiding her mother’s eyes. Manuel climbs into the passenger seat and sticks his elbow out of the window while his wife manoeuvres through the gravel. He’s relieved that the old man doesn’t see that he’s not the one driving. He hasn’t got the energy for a row, and Séverine can be tough, especially when her mother’s nearby. The girls, slumped in the rear seat, slap each other so they can grab more space for themselves and stretch their legs until they start kicking each other with bare feet, children that they are. Manuel, too, wishes he could sleep now. Go home and sleep the whole afternoon. Let the rest of the world melt away in the already stifling, dense July heat. He doesn’t want to think about anything – just sleep, sleep and silence the rising lava that’s burning him like hell. He must go and see his father. But not today, no. He’ll go later. He shuts his eyes.

Boredom

Boredom

Johanna is walking under the sun. She was born of this heat, of sudden, slightly jerky lovemaking, on an evening of wine and clammy sleeplessness. She was born somewhat by chance, like Céline, but a year later. Her arrival into the world caused less of a stir than that of her sister: Séverine’s youth was no longer as brazen, and anyway, her hip-swaying days at the Privilège were over. So another birth was in the natural order of things really. People even expected it to carry on – after all, the father was Spanish, so she was going to pop one out every year; Spaniards and Arabs, it was always the immigrants who were competing as to who’d produce more kids. The little girl’s two-tone eyes weren’t noticed at first. The doctor from the Mother and Baby Council didn’t notice anything, and in any case he was more focused on the mother during the final check-up before the discharge from hospital, with a grimace halfway between dismay – second child and she’s barely eighteen – and fascination: Séverine was still beautiful. It happened later, when she was about one: the blue iris turned grey-green; they said she must have seen something her childish eyes couldn’t bear, they said it was a punishment, they said it was a magic eye that saw what others couldn’t see; that her iris had turned inwards and that she had been changed by it. They said it was weird, that it was the omen of a future disaster. Here, anything even slightly unusual is commented on, dissected, and becomes a conversation topic. Through the lens of bar talk, self-righteous and drunk, there’s no expedient apart from habit. Only habit can make something banal when it isn’t.