Summer of Reckoning

Marion Brunet, born in 1976 in the Vaucluse, is a well-known Young Adult author in France. Her YA novels have received over 30 prizes, including the 2017 UNICEF Prize for Youth Literature. Marion has previously worked as a special needs educator and now writes her fiction in Marseille. Summer of Reckoning is her first novel written for adults and her first work to be translated into English. It was the winner of the 2018 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the prestigious French crime fiction prize.

SUMMER OF RECKONING

Marion Brunet

Translated by Katherine Gregor

BITTER LEMON PRESS
LONDON

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

First published in French in 2018 as
L’ÉTÉ CIRCULAIRE by Editions Albin Michel, Paris

© Editions Albin Michel - Paris 2018

English translation © Katherine Gregor, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–1–912242–269

eBook ISBN 978–1–912242–276

Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England and the Centre National du Livre.

Typeset by Tetragon, London

Printed and bound by the CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To my sister

Then, no doubt responding to her own thought, she added, “You see, life is never as good or as bad as we think.”

Guy de Maupassant, A Life

Bitch

At home, Johanna remembers, a hand on the backside was friendly, like – a way of saying you had a nice one, meaning “You’ve got potential” – something between a caress and a slap on the rump of a mare. The girls held trump cards, like in a tarot game, and you could almost say that if they played them right, they’d win. Except that neither of them – not Jo and not her sister Céline – have ever won any game. But since they hadn’t drawn up the rules of the game, they were shafted whatever they did. Trump cards or bait, it was dead in the water before it even started.

For Céline, it’s not a hand on her backside tonight, but a slap across her face. Her father, furious, is almost choking on his anger. He doesn’t exactly have a wide range of vocabulary as it is, but this is worse. He turns his daughter’s face with his huge builder’s hand; she crashes down onto the kitchen floor – a heap of wet cloth. She makes an odd kind of sound, as though some bits of her have broken.

“Who is it?”

Céline couldn’t answer even if she wanted to. She tries to catch her breath. Her hair hangs straight over her face, so you can’t see her eyes or her mouth. Jo would like to help her but it’s as though her feet are screwed to the floor like a prison bed.

The kitchen smells of detergent and lavender, like an advert for the South of France, cicadas and all.

“Who’s the piece of shit that did this to you? Who’s the son of a bitch who dared?”

Their mother fills a glass with water. It slips out of her hand and rolls into the stainless-steel sink. She whispers Stop it, but without conviction. Actually, you don’t really know who she’s saying it to.

“Are you going to answer me or not?”

Then her father stops yelling. His chin starts to quiver and that’s even more threatening, so Jo looks away. Their mother crouches down, holding the glass of water, and lifts Céline’s face but with no tenderness. She’s never been shown any herself, after all. Just for a second, you wonder if she’s about to throw the water in her daughter’s face or help her drink it. Céline props herself up on the floor with one hand and clings to her mother with the other. The water spills and runs down her mother’s bare knee and she gets annoyed, pulls away, leaves the glass on the floor and stands back up with difficulty – a very old woman all of a sudden, though she always carries on as if she’s thirty. Céline lets go of her wrist and remains lying on her elbow. Her lip has swollen up and her nose looks crooked. Her father has never hit her so hard before. She takes the glass to drink from it but the water runs down the side, over her chin and onto her T-shirt that has a pink pattern with sequins around it, and there’s blood bubbling out of her right nostril. There’s a stabbing pain in her stomach, like a thousand darts.

Her father stands with his arms crossed, having regained his strength even in his body language, and challenges Céline with his glare. Her eyes are full of water, her cheeks hollow from gritting her teeth.

“She’s not going to tell,” her mother hisses. “The bitch isn’t going to tell us anything.”

Freed from Desire

They’d looked almost attractive when they left home earlier that evening. The mother, with her carrot-orange tan and her skin glowing with lotion, wore her gold chain with the dolphin charm. She looked so young nibbling at the animal with her front teeth, smiling absent-mindedly. The father smelled of soap and aftershave and was breathing heavily. He quickly put his soft packet of Marlboros in his shirt pocket – the collar was already drenched in sweat – and lit a cigarette in the early evening. He squinted in the still-bright, purplish light. He looked at the rows of vines as though he owned them.

Like at the start of every summer, Céline was revealing her indecent beauty with outfits that were too tight, her denim shorts cut so high the fold between her buttocks and thighs opened and closed with every step she took.

As for Jo, she couldn’t care less about what she was wearing; like every year since forever, she was going to a funfair feeling vaguely disgusted that she still found it somewhat exciting despite herself. So her skinny jeans dirty at the knees and black, shapeless tank top were good enough. She hung on her sister’s shoulder like dead algae. “Why can’t we take the car?”

Nobody replied. You could hear the bass thumping in the distance; it was a ten-minute walk at most.

The four of them were walking along the edge of the road together, a rare event. The girls picked up the pace to put some distance between them and their parents, the way they used to when they were little kids. Blades of dry grass penetrated their sandals and prickled their toes. They hopped on one foot and held on to each other’s shoulders to remove them. When they were in sight of the fair, walking past the stone cross, they slowed down a little so the others crowding around the rides wouldn’t think they were too impatient.

The village had been transformed: the funfair, set up for three days, altered the streets and offered contagious ecstasy and the smell of hot oil as far as the small central square right next to the church. The mother and father went up to the bar; the father’s mates and their wives were already there. There was loud, buoyant laughter. Patrick was trying to get his wife to dance but she was giggling and yelling that she didn’t feel like it and that he was already too drunk. They looked all lovey-dovey; you almost couldn’t tell any more that he’d smashed in her face the week before. She looked like a large moth, wriggling in her blue dress. The women ordered some rosé and the men pastis. They said hello to the girls, who didn’t linger.

“Better start keeping an eye on your eldest,” Patrick’s wife said with a grimace suggesting envy.

The father smiled proudly, his eyes following Céline’s small backside. Sixteen and promising. Patrick cleared his throat and ordered another drink.

The same people coming together again, like every year, gangs and families who ignore one another or blend in with the crackling and chaos of the entertainment. Once a year. Of course, there’s always St John’s Eve and the school fete. But the fair is a lot more fun. Céline, the belle of the ball, adulated by the boys – never mind from which gang – has always loved it. Even when she was younger, there were shady corners where she could rub up against a boyfriend’s body, playing at not going any further but stopping at the very edge. As for the boys, they’d dream of her pink fingernails on their erect little dicks; she would lovingly clutch large cuddly toys won in the shooting gallery, hoping for words of love. And if she had to let her breasts be clumsily fondled so she could obtain a miserable, stuttering I love you and other unimaginative derivatives, then she was up for it. She did want it, a little. Jo would be on the lookout.

But this evening, only her sister could see that Céline was pretending, opening her throat to laugh at Lucas’s nonsense, at Enzo’s half-baked jokes. She sparkled for the gallery.

They went to the Tarantula with the others. This ride first came here ten years ago, with its aluminium cars flashing red and yellow, small lights flickering to “Freed from Desire”. Vertigo, as always, and the screams when the metal structure starts and lifts the clusters of willing flyers. Even old folks find it entertaining to watch youngsters get up there to give themselves a fright. Nobody’s ever seemed to find it odd that the same dance track is played year after year, as though time had stopped in 1996, twenty years earlier.

Céline and Jo know it by heart. They’ve lost count of the number of times they’ve screamed all the way up there when the seats start turning slowly on themselves before falling down at a crazy speed then going back up as fast. But they keep coming back, for the thrill of it.

Lucas was already trying to overtake Enzo so he could get in with Céline.

She slid her hand across the nape of her neck to flick her hair back and time stood still in the eyes of the boys, between the lift and the slap as her hair cascaded down again. After that they started to breathe once more, a little less cocky but much braver than earlier, and with a slightly idiotic smile. But despite the game, despite the others, despite the pleasure of the sound being turned up to maximum – so you had to shout or glue your lips to the edge of an ear – the euphoria was just pretence. There was already this thing inside her which she was still pretending not to know about: a logical consequence, a cold logic that says trouble breeds nothing but trouble. She was still lying a little to herself, long enough for a ride, long enough to see two guys fight for the privilege of holding her tight by the waist while dizzy, absorbing her terrified screams and tangled hair as the machine descended, and hoping for more. And yet even as she turned to look at the large iron spider, her feet on the steps streaked with flashing colours, she felt sick. It was absurd: she wasn’t afraid of the void, or the speed, and she’d always loved the rides. A kind of clammy oppressiveness – perhaps primeval intuition?

Céline turned to Enzo and her eyes appointed him for the first ride. Lucas was disappointed, but there would be others; they usually took ten rides a night at the funfair, and the evening was only just starting. The man with the first move didn’t necessarily win the chess game. He stepped away to roll a joint. The next ride would be his. Vanessa was clinging to Manon, unless it was the other way around. They were giggling, pushing away Antony, who was embracing them and whispering stuff in their ears they were pretending not to understand. They were shaking their heads and their hips. Their eyes were shining. The music saturated the air around them, made the ground vibrate and travelled up their legs – Want more and more, people just want more and more – even Jo’s. Her knees were vibrating slightly and she couldn’t tell exactly if she liked this kind of frenzy or hated it. Her eyes travelled from the cars, finally emptied, to her sister. “You sure you’re all right?” she said, forced to shout. Céline didn’t answer. She looked white as a sheet, eyes dilated by the hysterical lights. She nodded, kept her head down, hair over her face. “You don’t have to if you don’t feel well,” Jo continued. “It’s not like every time we have to make do with the same ride we’ve had for the past ten years.”

This managed to make Céline laugh. She bent down to scratch a mosquito bite on her calf. When she straightened up again she felt everything spinning, white dots in front of her eyes. Sweat bathed the back of her neck, already clammy with that mane of hair – she should have put it in a ponytail – and the beginning of summer. And then the crowd, the noise, the engine heat rising from the machine…

“Come on,” Jo insisted, “let’s get out of here. You look like shit.”

“OK, back off. Have you seen yourself?”

“Fuck you, Céline. Go ahead, take the ride, you’ll just throw up all over Enzo, bet he’ll love that.”

“What did you say?” Enzo shouted.

“Nothing,” they replied in unison, not looking at him.

The music started again, grafted to the spider like the call of an animal. In a loop, irreversibly stuck on repeat. It occurred to Jo that she was the only one to grasp the irony of the situation.

They stepped into the cars. Jo sat first and pulled down the safety barrier. She always preferred to take her adrenaline injections alone. The others got in two by two, in giggling pairs, fastened the straps over their bellies and handed their plastic tokens to Sauveur, the manager of the ride: it’s always been him, only now he has a tooth missing and thinner hair. He winked at Jo; he’s always been good at spotting the oddballs, and loves them like a brother.

The spider got going, lifting its legs to the sky. Jo looked down: the kids were pressing their noses to the glass tanks piled up with miniature soft toys, trying to catch a rabbit with pincers, losing it every time. Further away, the bar and its display of glasses looked like a toy tea set and her parents like little animals.

“Freed from Desire” reverberated even louder up there.

This lurch above the world was suddenly intoxicating. Jo had forgotten. She would have preferred a different soundtrack, something grandiose or coarse instead of this old-fashioned crap. Never mind; she enjoyed the spin and her legs feeling like cotton wool. It’s so fucking boring here that any strong emotion will do. At least if they shudder it means they’re not dead, stuck on repeat. Ahead, glued to Enzo, Céline was letting out little cries whenever the Tarantula gave them a jolt. Jo watched her sister, blurred by the speed: a year older, a birdbrain with the bearing of a queen. Sixteen years of thrashing in the world, glimpsing the abyss, blooming without maturing. Even prettier than the year before and a bit more stupid. Funny how it’s Céline who’s the eldest. Johanna isn’t exactly responsible, but even at fifteen she has some of that desperate weariness that sometimes stands in for maturity.

Suddenly, Céline’s head stopped bobbing about and fell onto Enzo’s shoulder. But it didn’t stay there, nestling like a girlfriend’s: she fell backwards, shaken by the speed. Enzo panicked and tried to lift her to face him. He was holding the back of her neck as though it was about to break, shouting and waving his free arm like everyone else around. Jo knew immediately that her sister had passed out, but she didn’t scream. She waited for it to be over, for the spider to complete its crazy dance; just a few minutes to go, no more. Time always feels slower when you’re perched up there but it would soon calm down, she knew it. Impossible to enjoy the dizziness at the moment. She was sure that idiot was going to be sick; it was written all over her face.