For Once, Don't Count

I arrived in Heusy on Sunday at 11.04, without warning.

I hadn't slept. I had spent Saturday evening looking at the carnival photo on my phone. Vincent had let me photograph it, on the tea-room table, between the two identity cards. I had enlarged it, cropped it, enlarged it again. At 3 a.m. I had counted the confetti on my father's shoulder. At 7 I had showered. At 9.50 I was on the motorway.

Rue des Hêtres curves uphill from the main road, between sixties houses, each on its own plot, with its hedge and its garage. My father's is red brick, with white window frames he repaints every five years and a gravel yard in front. At the back of the yard is the double garage and, above it, the studio flat my parents fitted out for me when I was sixteen and wanted “my independence”. I slept there for two summers. You go up by an outside iron staircase, at the side. After I left for Liège, my father let it for a few years to girls from the nursing school; he had a separate electricity meter put in so that everyone paid for their own. Since then it has been a junk room, a spare room, then nothing.