A few minutes later, Clotilde emerged from the shower wrapped in her towel. She was alone in the block apart from a very brown teenage girl who was busy shaving her legs with an electric razor that sounded like a mosquito zapper. On the other side of the partition, the noisy laughter of a group of boys was accompanied by a relentless techno rhythm.

Clotilde took the time to look at herself in the huge mirror that ran the length of the wall. To smooth her long black hair that fell to below her breasts. This campsite took her back twenty-seven years, to the same body, the same face, in front of the same mirror, when she was fifteen.

To that girlish body that she had dragged around like a ball and chain; to that imagination of hers, which had been her only trump card with the boys, her only weapon. Pathetic. Like a water pistol.

5

Wednesday, 9 August 1989, third day of the holidays
Aquamarine sky

Sorry, my mysterious intergalactic reader, I’ve abandoned you for two days, and I can’t even hide behind the excuse of having had too much to do – I’ve been lounging around all day. I’ll be more conscientious over the next few days, I promise. I need time to get my bearings, check out the location, observe, to find out my position, like a little spy, or an anthropologist on a mission, a traveller from the year 2020 who’s been parachuted into 1989.

Incognito.

Hello, my galaxy? Lydia Deetz checking in. Captain’s log, live from an unknown planet where it’s more than thirty-five degrees during the day and where the locals walk around almost naked.

To tell you the truth, if I’ve neglected you for a while, it’s because I didn’t know where to start.

Where to plant my pen.

In the middle of our campsite, like a clothes line, right on the terrace of bungalow C29, the one we’ve been coming to every year since I was born?

At Papé and Mamy’s house, like a Moor’s Head flag, right in the middle of the yard at Arcanu Farm?

In the middle of Alga beach, like a parasol?

Shazam!

Let’s go for Alga beach. I’m going to paint a picture for you, like the kind of postcard you send just to make your friends who are stuck in the high-rises of Vernon salivate.

White sand. Turquoise water. Tanned skin.

And just one little black mark.

Me!

Little Lydia-Winona, with my convict’s T-shirt, my hedgehog hair and my zombie-head flip-flops. The crazy girl who keeps her T-shirt on at the beach even when it’s forty degrees! Admit it. You’re thinking like my mother. This girl’s completely round the bend.

But allow me to explain myself to you alone, my secret confidant.

You’re not going to make fun of me? Swear?