Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi Page B

a glacier exactly? Maybe we should have gone to see the sea of ice… were there buses to takeyou there? And beaches? And what colour was the water? White? Blue? Grey? A sea without waves, then, without noise, a sea that never stirred, never went away, was that it? Would Stan have been able to walk on it? Would it have made him happy?
    It was too late now. Maybe we’d got the wrong bus and the wrong hotel, it was too late. They were here. In the clean but old sheets. Don’t sleep at the bottom of the bed, Kevin said, sleep with us. I promise, I said, but without meaning to, I broke the word in half, pro… mise, pro… mise, I coughed a bit, there was a huge lump blocking my throat. Quietly, very very quietly, I said I’m not going to bed yet, I’m staying here but not going to bed yet, okay? I’m watching the moon. But it was them I watched, I watched them go to sleep.
    Kevin took a while, he was all wound up, his legs twitched all by themselves, making little kicking movements annoying his brother, but Stan was the first to get to sleep. Curled up, curled up so tight he looked like a little lump, a boy with no legs. If I’d had any voice instead of that knot blocking the way, if I’d had any voice I’d have sung a song to Kevin so he could sleep, too. But I was full of spiteful little aches and pains, biting away at me. My throat, my heart, my stomach and my hands were all wet. The rain had crept between my clothes and my skin, so that I’d never forget it, maybe it would leave scars, like an illness.
    I could see the children’s faces clearly thanks to the special night light provided by the moon. Kevin was looking at the wall, was he seeing the same things I saw earlier? Or was it a whole different story? What stories did Kevin tell himself to get to sleep – or to avoid getting to sleep? Sometimes he would say, I’m not going to sleep tonight, he was proud of that, but he never managed it and Stan would tease him. Kevin was like me, he wanted to know where we went to at night, where it took us. He ran his finger over the wall, maybe he was inventing drawings, words, cuddles, or just nothing, maybe his finger was moving all on its own, maybe the rest, all the rest was going to sleep and his finger would go on… what was I going to do if a little bit of him never went to sleep? Is that sort of thing possible?
    But his finger eventually slipped down the wall, and fell onto the bed, I heard the littl’un sucking his noonoo faster and he went to sleep. All of him. He was holding his noonoo against his mouth and his nose, all I could see now was his wet hair and his forehead… there were my boys… Both asleep and I didn’t know where they were any more. In their dreams, each in his own dream, far away from me, somewhere else. With the moon overhead, wanting me to look at it, to look up, not down at the mud, the girls who sold shoes, the mechanics, the shopkeepers, the nightwatchmen and the menwho served hot chocolate. Nothing down there could do us any harm now.
    Why hadn’t I watched the red car? Why hadn’t I seen my two cowboys in their dodgem? Did they bump into lots of people? Were they the kings of the road? Were they brave enough to pay with my stupid bloody coins or did they get rid of them behind a truck, in a bin full of burst balloons and half-eaten bags of candyfloss? Had they lied to me? Did they already know how to pretend? Was it already too late?
    The rain kept knocking on the window, insistent, wanting me to notice it, I couldn’t give a stuff about it now, it was the moon I was looking at. The rain falls down, it’s for all those people down below, I’m on the top floor. Higher up than the big wheel, higher than the sea, and anyway the sea had left town, it had got the picture long ago and pissed off, where the waves used to be there was nothing left but sand, with empty seashells, open ones, broken ones, not the sort you could give to anyone.
    I remembered Kevin in the toilets at the