The Third Floorboard

The corridor at the rue des Tilleuls was seven metres forty long. I measured it one day, when I was nine, with the tape measure from my mother's sewing box, while they were at Mass and I was supposed to have a temperature.

It had an oak floor the previous owners had laid in the sixties, narrow boards, waxed, that had turned over the years the colour of dark honey. Eleven boards across. I no longer know how many lengthways. But there was one, just one, three steps from their bedroom door coming towards mine, that creaked.

The third. Counting from their door.

It didn't creak loudly. A small dry sound, a little hoarse, like an attic door being pushed open or a branch snapping under snow. The kind of sound you don't notice walking down a corridor in broad daylight with a basket of washing. My mother didn't notice it. Maxime, who was learning to walk, ran over it a hundred times a day, laughing, and it creaked under his little feet, and he never heard it.