Bonjour pouvez-vous m’aider s’il vous plaît


Rosemary Dye turned into the small sandwich shop to which she always went. She stopped at the door to let a handsome young man in a green suit pass by. He, struck by the flush of her face and neck, smiled flirtatiously and held the door open with a vaguely gallant air. She smirked happily and stepped under his arm. She turned to murmur some thanks and stopped existing. The largest part of one of the glass display cases 1 blasted in her direction. Though fragmented before it reached her, the pieces of shrapnel and glass were still large enough to kill her instantly. […]

The young man who had opened the door for her – he was thirty-four but still had unlined skin and thick hair, had always been thought younger than he was but what had irritated him in his early twenties now delighted 2 him, as he saw his old schoolfriends married or bald and he could still comfortably date girls ten years younger than he was – was also killed, though he took nearly twenty seconds to stop existing. […] Inside the sandwich shop (how unglamorous, how untremendous 3 – Northern Ireland has never dealt in epic murder sites) […], Kevin McCafferty stopped existing.

[…] So, thus, in short, an intricate, say some, mix of history, politics, circumstance and ordnance 4 resulted in the detonation of a one-hundred-pound bomb in the enclosed space of the front part of a small sandwich shop measuring twenty-two feet by twelve.

Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson, 1996.

1) Who are the characters present in the excerpt? What nationality could they be?

2) Find a title for each paragraph

3) Read l.1-6 and l.13-19. How are the characters presented? What effect does it produce?

4) Present this text and the situation it depicts. How does it make you feel?

Useful vocabulary: This is quite + adj... I fi nd this story very + adj...