You and me against the world. We have to take control. And I’m going to tell you how.’ Aramon stood now near the Lunel tomb in the cemetery at La Callune. He found that he was holding in his hands a small wreath of plastic flowers, but he wasn’t certain how his hands had come by this. Had they taken it from another family’s mausoleum? Had they found it lying in the grass? He told himself that it didn’t really matter, that a plastic wreath was the kind of thing nobody cared a fig about, and he set it down distractedly at the foot of the granite tomb that contained his parents and his Lunel grandparents, Guillaume and Marthe, all on top of one another, with his mother and father jammed in last, up against the roof. And it seemed fantastical to Aramon that he was now older than Serge had been when he’d died. Time, he thought, was so unstable, it was surprising anybody had been able to carve out any rational existence within it at all. Deep in Aramon’s heart lay the knowledge that both their lives – his and Serge’s – had been warped and damaged by what they’d chosen to do after Bernadette was gone.
