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behind their ears! They’d eat it, they’d fill their lungs with it.
    That’s all they deserve, to choke on Baton’s shit, nice and runny, totally disgusting. Flies would be glued to their skin; they’d do their job before the maggots set to work. Paris like a vast squat toilet with the Seine in the middle. All those litres and litres of Baton’s runny shit flowing into the sea. It would get into the buildings, the infernal tidewould seep under the doors until it reached the hallways. A vile stench clinging to the walls like the most persistent grubs. Puke too, Victor’s puke, which doesn’t help matters. It’s tough, that vomit, the bile of a pro, thickened by years and years of suffering. Yes, that would be a glorious, magnificent revenge, the world coming to an end awash with human puke and dog shit. The tidal wave people were waiting for! Liberated by the unspeakable , the stinking poison secreted by those two, Victor and Baton, cesspools of shit, chasms of puke. Here we come, take cover! Put your boots on, pull down your visors! We’re all psyched up. Just this one little pleasure and we’ll leave you in peace, promise, it won’t last long. Let it all out in one go and we’re done. There, it’s not much, we just need to expel the litres of bile from our bodies. Trust me, we’ve been holding them in from birth.

    There is no tsunami. Only those two shadows whose walk is haunted by apocalyptic fantasies. They walk, as is their habit. It will be a walk like thousands of previous walks. Nothing sensational, nothing astonishing, just two shadows, the first on two feet, the second on a leash. No one noticesthem. They progress one step at a time, two lives in which nothing changes. They stumble more and more frequently, they roll like two little polished glass marbles on an imaginary slope. The two shadows fly over people, Victor and Baton, invisible to the world.
    Another day dawns. They move forward in time the way they walk through the streets. Baton isn’t dead, but he’s sixteen and it won’t be long.

    ‘I’ve got a dog. Can he come with us?’
    ‘You want to do things with your mutt?’
    ‘No, I don’t want to leave him in the street. He’s going to die. He’ll lie still. His name’s Baton.’
    ‘All right, let’s go then, Baton can come too.’

    When I get home, I’m going to burn all this. I don’t want anyone to read it. So why write? I don’t know, it’s stupid.
    Like pretty much everything around me. I’ve given up trying to figure it out. I’d rather think about my coffee, Jeannot, or the owner of the Zenith Hotel. These everyday human stories are comforting, the little snippets of gossip that are our salvation. You feel alive, you think about something other than the blood running through your veins. You think about what they said or what they did – it’s a bit like watching an animated postcard. Life as a TV soap that offers an escape.

    I will have managed to talk about myself, though, a few pages of self-indulgence. I didn’t think I was capable of it.
    Forgive my style and my mistakes. Don’t feel sorry for me either, that’s not why I’m doing this. Like I already said, I write to kill time, so don’t go thinking it’s for sentimental reasons or anything like that.

    I love the colour of the tarmac when it rains. The pavements sparkle as if they’d been mopped clean. If itweren’t for the muddy puddles and the dirty cracks, you really might think that the ground you’re walking on, the pavement where I wait and work, was radiating something new. As if we were the first people ever to walk on it. Urban adventurers, we could scratch our initials on it with a penknife. It won’t graze you if you stumble. It’s as smooth and slippery as an imitation-leather banquette.
    I drop my cigarette butts on the pavement. I dirty it. When the lighted end lands on the ground it makes a pretty sound,
psschit
. The tobacco goes soggy, the lighted end gives up the ghost. It’s no