by Anna Gavalda
And then I met Amber.
All I have to do is say her name, and I feel good.
Amber.
The first time I saw her was at the recording studio on rue Guillaume Tell. We’d been in a bind all week and everyone was doing our heads in over money all because we were late.
You can’t plan for everything. It just can’t be done. Take us: When we paid a small fortune to bring that hotshot mixer over from the States to make all the fat cats at the record company happy, there’s no way we could’ve known he would croak on us on the first track.
‘The strain and the jet lag must not have agreed with him,’ said the medic.
Obviously, that was a load of bullshit, jet lag had nothing to do with it.
The jerk just had eyes that were bigger than his stomach, and so much the worse for him. Now he looked like an arsehole with his contract ‘to make the little Frenchies dance’ …
That was a hellish time. I hadn’t seen the light of day for weeks and I didn’t dare touch my hands to my face because it felt like my skin was going to crack or split open or something.
In the end I couldn’t even smoke anymore because my throat was too sore.
Fred was annoying the shit out of me going on about some friend of his sister’s. Some chick photographer who wanted to go along on tour with me – as a freelancer, but not to sell the photos. Just for herself.
‘Hey, Fred, give me a break about that. …’
‘Wait, why would you give a fuck if I brought her here one night, huh? Why would you give a fuck?’
‘I don’t like photographers, or artistic directors, or journalists – I don’t like people getting in my way, and I don’t like people looking at me. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘Shit, chill out. Just one night, two minutes. You won’t even have to talk to her, chances are you won’t even see her. Shit, do it for me. Obviously you don’t know my sister.’
Earlier I was telling you how I forget everything, but that, you see, no.
She came in through the little door that’s on the right when you’re looking at the mixing station. She looked apologetic, walking on tiptoe, and she was wearing a white tank top with narrow straps. From where I was, behind the glass, I didn’t see her face right away but when she sat down, I caught a glimpse of her small little breasts, and already I wanted to touch them.
Later she smiled at me. Not like the girls who usually smile at me, because they’re happy to see that I’m looking at them.
She just smiled at me, to make me happy. And the take that day seemed to last forever.
When I finally got out of my glass cage, she was gone.
I asked Fred:
‘That your sister’s friend?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Amber.’
‘She leave?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
She came back on the last day. Paul Ackermann had arranged a little party at the studio – ‘to celebrate your next gold disk,’ he’d said, that arsehole. I had just come out of the shower – I was still bare-chested, rubbing my head with an oversized towel, when Fred introduced us.
I couldn’t get a word out. It was like I was fifteen, and I let the towel drop to the floor.
She smiled at me again, just like before.
Pointing at a bass, she asked politely:
‘So, is this your favourite guitar?’
And I couldn’t figure out if the reason I wanted to kiss her was because she was so entirely clueless or because she asked nicely.
Everyone else just says ‘hey, you’ while cuffing me in the stomach. … From the president of the Republic down to the last arsehole, all of them, they all act as if we’d raised pigs together.
It’s the scene that does it.
‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘that’s my favourite.’
And I looked around for something to wear.
We talked for a while but it was hard because Ackermann had invited some journalists. I should have known.
She asked me about the tour and I said ‘yes’ to everything she asked, looking at her breasts on the sly. Then she said good-bye and I looked everywhere for Fred, or Ackermann, or somebody, anybody. … I wanted to break somebody’s neck because it was all boiling over inside.
There were ten dates to the tour, almost all of them outside France. We did two nights in Paris at the Cigale, and I get the rest all mixed up. We played Belgium, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland – but don’t ask me in what order. I won’t be able to give it to you.
Touring wears me out. I play my music, I sing, I try to stay clean (as much as I can), and I sleep in a Pullman.
Even if I start shitting gold I’ll still go on the road with my band in an air-conditioned Pullman car. The day you see me take a plane without them and then shake their hands just before we go onstage, you let me know because when that day comes, it means I don’t give a shit about anything here anymore and it’s time for me to move on.
Amber came with us but I didn’t know it at first.
She took her photos without anyone even noticing. She shared a room with the backup singers. You could hear them giggling in the hotel corridors sometimes when Jenny read their cards. Whenever I caught sight of her, I raised my head and tried to stand up straight. But in all those weeks, I never once went up to her.
I can’t mix work and sex anymore. I’m too old.
The last night was a Sunday. We wanted to go out with a bang, so we were at Belfort doing a special concert for the tenth anniversary of Eurock Festival.
I sat down next to her at the farewell dinner.
It’s like some kind of sacred thing … everyone respects it and keeps it just for us – the stage hands, the techies, the musicians, and everyone who helped us during the tour. It’s not the time to let some starlet or small-time reporter give us shit, you know … even Ackermann wouldn’t dare call Fred on his mobile to get the latest update or to ask about the takings.
I should probably also mention that, in general, it’s pretty bad for our image.
Among ourselves, we refer to these little parties as shroom fests, and that about says it all.
Tons of stress melting away, the satisfaction of a job well done, all those reels snug in their cases, and my manager just beginning to smile for the first time in months … it’s too much all at once, and it doesn’t take much for it to get out of hand. …
*
At first I tried to get chatty with Amber, but then when I realised I was too far gone to fuck her decently, I let it go.
She didn’t say a thing, but I know she knew exactly what was going on.
At one point, when I was in the bog at the restaurant, I stood in front of the mirror by the sinks and said her name slowly. Instead of taking a good deep breath and splashing some cold water on my face and going to tell her to her face: ‘When I look at you, my gut aches like I’m in front of ten thousand people. … Please, make it stop … and just take me in your arms. …’ No, instead of doing that, I turned around and got some from the dealer on duty, three hundred euros and I was gone.
Months went by, the album came out … I won’t tell you any more about it. It’s a period I handle worse and worse … when I can’t be alone anymore with my pointless questions and music.
As usual, Fred was the one who took me to her. He picked me up on his black Vmax.
She wanted to show us her work from the tour.
I was feeling good. I was glad to see Vickie, Nat, and Francesca again – they all used to sing live with me. They were all going their separate ways now, every one of them. Francesca wanted to do a solo album, so I got down on my knees and promised her, one more time, to write her something unforgettable.
Her apartment was minuscule and we were all tripping over each other. We drank some sort of pink tequila that the neighbour down the hall had scrounged up. He was Arge
ntinean, at least six foot six, and he smiled all the time.
I was dumbfounded by his tattoos.
I got up. I knew she was in the kitchen. She asked:
‘You’ve come to help me?’
I said no.
She asked:
‘You want to see my photos?’
I wanted to say no again, but I said:
‘Yeah, I’d like that.’
She went into her room. When she came back, she locked the door and cleared everything off the table with a sweep of her arm. It made quite a racket, thanks to some aluminium trays.
She set her box of pictures down flat, and she sat down across from me.
I opened it. All I saw were my hands.
Hundreds of black-and-white photos of nothing but my hands.
My hands on guitar strings, my hands around the mike, my hands beside my body, my hands caressing the crowd, my hands shaking other hands backstage, my hands holding a cigarette, my hands touching my face, my hands signing autographs, my hands feverish, my hands beseeching, my hands throwing kisses, and my hands shooting up, too.
Big, thin hands with veins like little rivers.
Amber was toying with a bottle cap, crushing crumbs.
‘That’s it?’ I said.
For the first time, I looked her in the eyes for more than a second.
‘You disappointed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I took your hands because that’s the only thing about you that’s not falling apart.’
‘You think so?’
She nodded her head yes and I caught the scent of her hair.
‘What about my heart?’
She smiled at me and leaned across the table. ‘You’re telling me your heart’s not falling apart?’ she answered with a doubting little pout.
We heard laughter and tapping on the other side of the door. I recognised Luis’s voice shrieking: ‘We need i-eece!’
I said:
‘I don’t know, have to see. …’
I thought they were going to break down the door with the shit they were pulling.
She put her hands on mine and looked at them as if she were seeing them for the first time. She said:
‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’
Leave
WHENEVER I DO anything, I think of my brother, and whenever I think of my brother, I realise he’d have done it better than me.
Twenty-three years this has been going on.
You can’t really say that makes me bitter; no, it just makes me lucid.
Now, for instance, I’m on train 1458 from Nancy, in north-eastern France. I’m on leave – my first in three months.
Okay, for starters, I’m doing my military service like some measly errand boy, whereas my brother went through officer training. He always ate at the officers’ table, and he got to come home every weekend. Let’s move on.
I’m coming back by train. I’ve reserved a seat facing forward, but when I get to it, there’s some woman sitting in my place with a whole jumble of embroidery spread out over her knees. I don’t dare say anything. I swing my huge canvas bag up onto the luggage rack and sit down across from her. There’s a girl in the same carriage who’s kind of pretty, reading a bestselling novel about ants. She has a spot at the corner of her lip. Pity; otherwise she’s not bad.
I go and buy myself a sandwich from the buffet car.
And here’s how that would have worked if it had been my brother: He’d have flashed the lady a big charming smile and shown her his ticket with an excuse me, madame, listen, I may have made a mistake but it seems to me … And she’d have apologised like crazy, stuffing all her pieces of thread in her bag and getting up in a hurry.
For the sandwich, he’d have made some kind of scene with the guy, saying that for four euros, really, they could at least give him a little thicker slice of ham. And the waiter, with his ridiculous black waistcoat, would’ve changed the sandwich pronto. I should know, I’ve seen my brother in action.
As for the girl, it’s even more perverse. He would have given her one of those looks so she’d have known right away he was interested.
But she’d have known at exactly the same time that he had also noticed her little pimple. And then she’d have had a hard time concentrating on her novel, and she’d try to play it cool just in case.
That is, if he intended to take an interest in her.
Because, anyway, junior officers travel first class, and how many girls in first have spots?
As for me, I never even found out if this chick was impressed with my crew cut and ranger boots, because I fell asleep almost right away. They had dragged us out of bed at four again this morning to make us do some boneheaded drill.
Marc, my brother, did his military service after three years of college, before he started his engineering studies. He was twenty.
Me, I’m doing it after two years of vocational training, and when I finish I’ll be looking for a job in electronics. I’m twenty-three.
What’s more, tomorrow’s my birthday.
My mother insisted that I come home. I’m not big on birthdays – I’m too old for that. But whatever. I’m doing it for her.
She’s lived alone ever since my father ran off with the lady next door on their nineteenth anniversary. Symbolically, you could say, that was rich.
I don’t really understand why she hasn’t started again with someone else. She could have – actually, she still could, but … I don’t know. Marc and I only talked about it just one time and we agreed: we think she’s afraid now. She doesn’t want to risk being abandoned all over again. At one point, we tried to coax her into signing up for one of those dating things, but she never wanted to.
Since then, she’s taken in two dogs and a cat, so you can imagine … with a menagerie like that, finding a nice guy is pretty much Mission Impossible.
*
We live just south of Paris, near the suburb of Corbeil, in a little villa on Highway 7. It’s okay. It’s quiet.
My brother never says villa, he says house. He thinks the word villa is naff.
My brother will never get over the fact that he wasn’t born in Paris.
Paris. It’s all he ever talks about. I think the best day of his life was when he bought his first Paris network season pass so he could go into the city. For me – Paris, Corbeil – it’s all the same.
One of the few things I remember from school is a theory by one of those ancient philosophers, who said the important thing isn’t where you are, it’s the state of mind you’re in.
I remember he wrote that to one of his friends who had the hump and wanted to travel. He basically told him, in so many words, that it wasn’t worth the trouble since he was bound to lug his load of problems around wherever he went. The day the teacher told us that, my life changed.
That’s one of the reasons I chose a career in manual labour.
I’d rather let my hands do the thinking. It’s easier.
In the army, you meet your fair share of morons. I live with guys I never could have imagined. I bunk with them, get dressed with them, eat with them, clown around with them, sometimes even play cards with them … but still, it’s like everything about them makes me sick. I’m not a snob or anything, it’s just that these guys have zilch. And I’m not talking about being deep or whatever – that’s like some kind of insult. I’m talking about weighing something.
I know I’m not doing a very good job explaining myself, but I know what I mean. If you took one of these guys and put him on a scale, obviously you’d have his weight, but really, he doesn’t weigh anything. …
It’s like there’s nothing in these guys that has any real substance. They’re like ghosts – you can stick your arm right through them and all you’ll touch is a big, noisy void. Of course, if you tell them that, they’ll say if you try to stick your arm through, you’re asking for it. Har har.
At first, I couldn’t sleep at night because of all the stuff they did and all
the crazy things they’d say. But now I’m used to it. They say the army makes a man of you, but in my case it’s only made me even more pessimistic.
I’m not inclined to believe in God or some Superior Thing, because it’s hard to imagine that anyone could have purposely created what I see every day in the barracks at Nancy-Bellefond.
It’s funny, I do more thinking when I’m on the train … like why the army’s not all bad. …
When I get to the Paris station, Gare de l’Est, I always secretly hope there’ll be someone waiting for me. It’s stupid. I already know my mum’s at work, and Marc’s not the kind of guy to come slogging across the suburbs just so he can carry my bag. But still, I always have this idiotic hope.
This time’s no different. Before I take the escalator down to the metro, I take a quick look around, just in case there’s anyone there. … And when I get on the escalator, my bag seems a little heavier, same as always.
I wish someone were waiting for me somewhere. … Is that so much to ask?
Fine, whatever. It’s time for me to get to the house. I could use a good scuffle with Marc – I’m starting to think too much and I’m about to blow a gasket. While I’m waiting for the train, I’m going to light up on the platform. I know it’s forbidden, but just let them mess with me – I’ll pull the military card.
I work for Peace, monsieur! I get up at four in the morning for France, madame.
No one at the station in Corbeil … that’s a little harder to take. Maybe they forgot I was coming tonight. …
I’ll walk the rest of the way. I’m sick of communal transportation. In fact, I think I’m sick of everything communal.
I run into some guys I went to school with. They’re in no big hurry to shake my hand. Face it, the army sucks.
I stop in at the café on the corner of my street. If I’d spent less time in this café growing up, maybe now I wouldn’t be in danger of having to go down to the unemployment agency in another six months. There was a time when I used to spend more hours behind this pinball machine than in the classroom … I’d play until five o’clock, and then when the other kids showed up, the ones who’d had to listen to the teachers blabbering all day, I’d sell them my bonus rounds. It was a good deal for them: they paid half price and had a chance to get their initials on the high score list.
