Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 65
Of course, he already knew me.
“Good morning, Madame Simon,” he said in a polite, ironic voice. “What can I do for you? I’ve got a lovely burger américain if you’d care to try it.”
I was angry, but I tried not to show it. His smile showed that he was expecting trouble, and that he felt confident to withstand it. I gave him one of my sweetest.
“Not today, thank you,” I told him. “But I would be grateful if you’d consider turning your radio down. My customers-”
“But of course.” His voice was smooth and cultured, his eyes gleaming porcelain blue. “I had no idea I was disturbing anyone.”
Beside me, the girl with the pierced nose made an incredulous sound. I heard her say to a companion, another girl in a halter and shorts so small that fleshy half-moons showed beneath the hem,
“Did you hear what she said to me? Did you hear?”
The young blond man smiled, and reluctantly I saw charm there, and intelligence, and something oh-so-familiar that needled and nibbled. Leaning over to turn the music down. Gold chain around the neck. Sweat stains on a gray T-shirt. Hands too smooth for a cook, oh there was something wrong about him, about the whole thing, and for the first time I felt not anger but a kind of fear…
Solicitous: “Is that all right for you, Madame Simon?”
I nodded.
“I’d hate to be thought an intrusive neighbor.”
The words were all right, but I still couldn’t shake the thought that there was something wrong, some mockery in that cool, courteous tone that I’d missed somehow, and though I’d got what I wanted, I fled the place, almost turning my ankle on the gravel of the verge, with the press of young bodies against me – there must have been forty of them now, maybe more – and the sound of their voices drowning me. I got out quickly – I never liked to be touched – and as I went back into Crêpe Framboise I heard the sound of raucous laughter, as if he had waited for me to leave to make some comment. I looked back sharply, but he had his back to me by then and was flipping a row of burgers with practiced ease.
But still that feeling of wrongness remained. I found myself watching out of the window more than usual, and when Marie Fenouil and Charlotte Dupré, the customers who had complained about noise the previous day, did not arrive at their usual time, I began to feel edgy. It might be nothing, I told myself. There was only a single empty table, after all. The majority of my customers was here as usual. And yet I found myself watching the Snack-Wagon with a reluctant fascination, watching him as he worked, watching the crowd that remained by the roadside, young people eating from paper cones and polystyrene boxes while he held court… He seemed on friendly terms with everyone. Half a dozen girls – the one with the pierced nose among them – propped up the counter, some with cans of soda in their hands. Others lolled in languid attitudes nearby, and there was much studied perking-out of bosoms and flicking of hips. Those eyes, it seemed, had touched softer hearts than mine.
At twelve thirty I heard the sound of motorcycles from the kitchen. A terrible sound, like pneumatic drills in unison, and I dropped the skillet with which I was turning a row of bolets farcis to run out into the road. The sound was unbearable. I clapped my hands over my ears and even then felt sharp pain lancing my eardrums, made sensitive from so many years of diving in the old Loire. Five motorcycles, which I had last seen propped against the sides of the Snack-Wagon, were now parked on the road just opposite, and their owners-three with girls perched delicately behind them-were revving up to leave, each trying to outdo the rest in volume and attitude. I shouted at them, but could hear nothing but the tortured screech of the machines. Some of the young customers at the Snack-Wagon laughed and clapped. I waved my arms furiously, unable to make myself heard against the din, and the riders saluted me mockingly, one rising onto his back wheels like a prancing horse in a redoubled gale of sound.