I admit it. I don’t often write to you twice during the same day. I usually pick up my pen in the morning when everyone’s still asleep, or in the evening, hidden in the Cave of Sea-Calves, by the light of my torch, being devoured by mosquitoes just for you, my reader in the stars.

This morning, you’ll remember, I told you about the concert of polyphonic music instead of the anniversary meal at Casa di Stella. And Maman saying nothing. Nothing at all. Which was worse than anything. Nico and me watching the collateral damage.

Boom! The first bombs went off on the Island of Beauty.

Shall I tell you about it?

The whole of the holy Idrissi family had gathered this afternoon on Rue Clemenceau in Calvi, the big shopping street, for, what shall I call it? A game of poker? I think that life as a couple is pretty much that – a game of poker.

A game of bluff.

Imagine a narrow street, on a slope, absolutely crammed, worse than Mont-Saint-Michel on an Easter weekend.

That’s Calvi. This afternoon.

Maman is dawdling, waits, slows down, speeds up, always a bit ahead, or behind. Lingering just a little bit longer than usual in front of the shop windows. Just a little less chatty. While she’s doing this, Papa is frying in the sun at the bottom of the steps that lead up to the citadel, killing time as best he can with Nicolas, taking a few photographs of the harbour below, admiring the yachts, eyeing up the Italian girls. Maman seems magnetised by a shoe-shop. At last she regretfully drags herself away but stops again outside Benoa, a shop that sells Corsican clothes. They’re really classy and original. Scraps of fabric that look as if they’re worth a fortune, on plastic mannequins that don’t necessarily have better figures than my mother.

I watch. The Cure is playing through my headphones. I listen to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ and ‘Lovecats’ on a loop. I don’t care. My goal is up at the top.

I think it took us an hour to get to the ramparts, and Maman still wasn’t saying a word. The first thing she did say was just before we got to the drawbridge at the entrance to the citadel, by the column which claims that Christopher Columbus was born here (sometimes the Corsicans really make me laugh!).

‘Have you got the camera?’

Well spotted, Maman. The bag over Papa’s shoulder is open. No trace of the Kodak around his neck. My father stammers and stupidly looks down the hill towards the steps at the bottom.

‘Shit.’