In fact, dear reader on the edge of the galaxy, I think hell must be quite like the hold of a ferry. It’s at least a hundred and fifty degrees down there, and yet people jostle each other on the stairs, rushing to get there. As if all the dead people in the world were filing into the innards of a seething volcano. Subway to hell!

There’s a clanking of chains and the screech of metal; the Italians are back and they’re the only ones dressed in trousers and jackets, the only ones not sweating when all the holidaymakers wearing skimpy clothes are already dripping wet, mopping our faces.

We stay there, in that oven, for an eternity – perhaps we’re all stuck because some clever-clogs parked by the door hasn’t woken up yet. The person who turned up last the previous evening. Maybe that blond Swedish guy, annoying us all so much that I already adore him and want someone just like him when I’m older.

The Italians look like demons, all they lack is some whips. It was a trap, we’re all going to die here in the carbon monoxide, because some idiot has turned on his engine and everyone else has now done the same even though not a single car is moving.

And then the door of the ferry begins to fall with a loud metallic clang. A drawbridge coming down.

The army of the living dead escapes towards paradise.

Freedom!

Air, at last.

The tradition, in the Idrissi family, is to have breakfast on the terrace under the palm trees, in the Place Saint-Nicolas opposite the Port of Bastia.

Papa orders us the full continental: croissants, fresh fruit juice, chestnut spread. Suddenly we feel like a family. Even me, looking like a Goth hedgehog. Even Nico, who spun a globe before we left and pointed his finger at random, to find out which language the girl he was going to go out with at the campsite would speak.

Yes, a family, for twenty-one days, three weeks, in paradise.

Maman, Papa, Nicolas.

And me.

I will mostly talk about me in this diary, I’d rather warn you about that right from the beginning!

Will you excuse me? I’m going to put on my swimming costume.

I’ll see you again soon, my reader in the stars.

* * *

He gently closed the diary.

Puzzled.

He hadn’t opened it in years.

He was worried.

She had come back …

Twenty-seven years later.

Why?

It was obvious. She’d come back to stir up the past. To scratch. To dig. To look for what she had left behind. In another life.

He’d prepared for this. For years.

Without ever managing to answer this question. How far down would she want to dig? To which level of the sewers would she want to descend? How far along the foul tunnels of the Idrissi family secrets would she want to venture?

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