She listens to Barbara, “Tell me when you’ll be back, tell me at least that you know,” and it brings a tear to her eye. She takes advantage of the fact that he’s not around to play music. The old man didn’t like French songs, or poetry. At first, she assumed it was because he didn’t think he was able to understand what they were saying, like some kind of hang-up. Later, she thought it was mostly to annoy her, to stop her having something beautiful in her life, to keep her face pressed into the mud and the shit and it annoyed him that she might have access to something more beautiful than the street outside their door. Eventually, she realised that there was no hang-up, and no attempt to reduce her to the mediocre: he didn’t like music and poetry, he saw them as bourgeois hypocrisy. Her poems by Emily Dickinson and Alejandra Pizarnik, her Aznavour and Léo Ferré albums: shit for middle-class posers. So they can think they’re God’s gift. Smoke and mirrors. That’s how he saw things.
For old Charles, the cold hard truth of humanity was savagery. It was simply a matter of knowing who had the right to be cruel to whom. Everything else, according to him, was poetry – a way of masking the stench of the corpse that follows man wherever he goes. As misanthropes go, he was one of the best.
She puts away the bag, carefully aligned with those below, but she doesn’t have time to close the drawer before she has to run for the toilet. She throws up bile. It’s a long hard battle. Booze doesn’t sit with her well now. Must be the stress. All this paperwork she’s had to fill in.
She opens another bottle, because it’s no secret: if you get sick from drinking too much you need to drink a little more, put lead back in the plumbing. She pours herself a snifter, just enough to wet her lips. The old man is dead, she spent almost fifteen years with him, which means it’s not hard to do the maths: every day for more than fifteen years she’s sworn she’ll give up drinking. It’s not decent at her age, for God’s sake, it plays havoc with her insides. All good things come to an end, usually prematurely: the bottle has always been her friend, her passion, her one true love – and even that has started to cause her problems.
All this time with Charles, she made promises she didn’t keep. To stop drinking. Start studying again. Leave him, dump him, find a place of her own, make a new life for herself. Sometimes, he was drunk enough he’d get it into his head to climb on top of her and when he managed to get it up, she would kick him to leave her alone. He was old school: he thought it was normal for her to say no and for him to go ahead anyway. These days, people aren’t like that. They’re civilised. But in his generation, men were animals. She felt disgusted when he managed to stick it into her. Bloody hell, can’t you tell I’m not enjoying it. He would laugh. I’m not doing it for your enjoyment, I’m doing it to empty my balls. Shameless. Old school.
Before him, she had a thing for younger men. Young and handsome. Before him, she could still choose, more or less. But after Charles, she was too damaged to think she could have what she wanted. Good God, what does she look like now? Like nothing at all. She hated him for that, although none of it was his fault. She used to say that if she was happy with him, she would have taken care of her figure. She used to say that if she’d been on her own, she would have looked after herself better, would have made sure there were weeks when she didn’t drink, gone to the gym, gone on a diet, things that would have been good for her. Now he’s not here anymore, she’ll have to find someone else to blame. Or get herself into rehab somewhere. It feels strange, even thinking about it.
She still can’t believe it. She had her suspicions. But she never expected such a massive fortune. Still less that the old bastard would arrange for a civil partnership, so that she could claim it. Nor that he would leave that crazy letter in his spidery old-fashioned hand indicating his last wishes. His handwriting looks like his body – crooked, unable to walk in a straight line, every letter trembling, the feet of the Ps dangling in the void, the bars to the Ts skidding to the edge of the paper. Writing that is collapsing, crumbling, contradictory. But elegant too, the handwriting of someone who wanted to write correctly one day. He explained everything, calculated everything – the old fool, where did he find the lucidity to prepare his sneaky little surprise?
She can’t believe it. More than a million. Deposited in a bank account, the total barely touched. She has trouble trying to work out the inheritance tax, but it doesn’t seem swingeing, unless her calculations are off she’ll have to pay twenty per cent of the total . . . There’ll be enough left to be going on with. She has suspected something for a while now, but she never made the connection. When he asked for a copy of her birth certificate to apply for a civil partnership at the court, she assumed it was to do with the illness, that he was terrified of being taken into hospital and her not being allowed to visit and bring him a pack of cigarettes and a bottle. He had insisted that the civil partnership take place as quickly as possible and she thought, you old fool, always have to make a fuss, don’t you? It never occurred to her that he was thinking about his succession. How could she be expected to know that the old shyster was sitting on such a fortune? She is very surprised that he was so determined that she should get the money. She knows he hated his sister, maybe that’s what was going through his mind: making sure she didn’t inherit. She finds everything about this business surprising.
*
It wasn’t really their style, as a couple, tenderness and generosity. It has to be said that he changed, towards the end. Not when he won the jackpot. She checked the dates. The jackpot was when he started buying trainers. The ugliest shoes ever conceived by the mind of man, and he bought them of his own free will. He used to say he felt comfortable in them. She will gather up his collection of trainers and throw them out on the street. No, it was later that he changed. With his gang.
When she read his last wishes letter, she was furious: if he really cared so much about those kids, why hadn’t he asked her to go find them when he had his first stroke? She was always taking the piss out of him, with his crackpot city friends living down the country. But they should have been there, during those last days. Maybe they would have come. For reasons she cannot understand, they were fond of him too. It was obvious.
The caravan of a Gypsy is burned in the days after death. So that the soul is not trapped inside, so they can be sure that it takes flight. Véro looks around her – she’d be surprised if old Charles was still clinging to his armchair like a leech. No point burning it. He probably went straight up as soon as he heaved his last breath, he never was one to hang around.
*
She had noticed that something about their budget had changed. It was the chicken that first got her thinking. Charles loved chicken. He brought a whole spit-roasted chicken back from the butcher’s one Sunday, and he did the same the following week, and again the week after that. She asked him straight out: who did you rob that you’ve still got money on the twentieth of the month? He dodged the question, he protested, in the end he claimed that the butcher let him have it on account. In Paris, in this day and age . . . On account? He was taking the piss. She figured he’d had a win on the horses he hadn’t told her about. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Then he discovered those fucking trainers, his Nike Airs. At that point, she gave him the third degree – this wasn’t normal, it had been going on for too long, this money he was plucking out of thin air and squandering. He didn’t give anything away. Even dead drunk, even lying in his own piss and vomit, as he was wont to do, in the toilets of some bar where she had to go and fetch him at closing time, snoring in a pool of bodily fluids – his and other people’s – curled up on his side like a puppy, cute, if you could ignore the circumstances and that ugly wino’s mug. She had tried, she had knelt down beside him so she could stroke his forehead, putting on the motherly voice so she could catch him off guard and get him to talk, and at other times, having a go at him when he woke up, direct, aggressive, threatening, telling him: I know everything, you bastard. Still he let nothing slip. The fridge wasn’t the s
ame, strange things began to appear in it, but what was most unsettling was that there was no longer any structure to the month. Didn’t matter whether it was the fifth or the thirtieth, the old man was at the bistro, propping up the bar, and he no longer flew into a rage the way he used to when an unexpected bill landed on the doormat. He grumbled, and it was paid. She could see that things weren’t normal. She suspected something. Obviously. But not a fortune like this.
*
Why didn’t you say anything? She has never wanted to talk to him as badly as she does now that he’s not here anymore. Why did you spend so little? And why did you stay with me? Why didn’t you go off and get yourself a younger woman, like all men your age do when they’ve got three euros in their pocket? It’s not like there’s a shortage of young dipsos in the bars, he could have had a buxom little number with that sort of cash. Véro looks at herself in the mirror and it’s painful. Booze makes you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed until you turn thirty, after that it’s a gentle slope until you hit fifty, and the last part of the journey is the ugliest. After the menopause, good God, she turned into a monster. Puffy, red-faced, her whole body deformed from cheap plonk, her eyes swimming in idiocy.
Problem is, booze takes time to kill you. It’ll get there, that’s for sure, and you know it. But it’s so slow, it’s horrendous. At least with cigarettes, the day you’re diagnosed, a kick up the arse and that’s that, you’re dead and buried. Not booze. From the first time a doctor says, if you carry on you’re going to die, to the day you finally snuff it – you’ve got ten years left, easy. And not the best ones. She’s no oil painting, Véro. She wouldn’t live with herself if she had the choice. She wouldn’t want to wake up and see her face on the pillow. Charles was ugly too. But she had no-one else to bring to her bed. You have to be pragmatic, and she hates being alone.
Now she understands. The day he threw up blood and went to the doctor, who said, it’s a minor haemorrhage, nothing serious, he just needed to eat bland food and boiled carrots. She had thought it was weird, but she watched as he cracked open a beer and said that, in moderation, alcohol wouldn’t do him any harm, and she said nothing. Now, she suspects that the doctor didn’t tell him it was benign. Charles knew. And he said nothing. Silence was practically a religion with the man. People call it reticence, but it’s more like verbal constipation. When it came to talking shit, he could open his big gob not once but several times a day. But for the things that mattered. Nothing.
This was the point when he dragged her down to the court for the civil partnership. And it must have been around then that he went to see a lawyer. It’s right there in his letter, “my lawyer”, with the address and everything. She called him. She was asked to come in and sign some papers and from the deferential tone of the lawyer, she realised that he knew the file perfectly well. A pile of cash like that is not something you forget, even if you’re a lawyer.
In his letter, Charles asks that she divide the money – half for her, and half for Vernon Subutex’s gang. Hold your horses . . . If he was so determined to shower his new friends with cash, why didn’t he adopt them? There, Véro thinks, that’s what he would have done if he’d been serious about this notion of splitting the inheritance in two.
She never really liked his friends at parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It pissed her off to see him happy. Might as well admit it. Charles was never one for going all sentimental. So, when he suddenly demonstrated this crass naivety Véro had never seen in him, this sickening joy at having friends and spending time with them, it made her uncomfortable. She was jealous, for one thing. Seeing him suddenly happy about something while she had nothing to cling to made her feel alone and hopeless. And it hurt her, for him to carve out a life that she had no part in. Above all, it worried her. Anything beautiful always becomes something ugly and disgusting, it’s something you learn when you get to her age, and she wondered what kind of rotten trick they would play on Charles that would destroy him. At his age, getting attached and showing it makes you vulnerable. She hated to see him lowering himself to such things.
In the past few months, he regularly caught the bus and went into the country to spend a few days with them. This from a man who hated anything to do with suitcases and travelling, anything that implied sleeping in a house other than his own.
It’s been bugging her. She can’t believe the old duffer was serious when he wrote this letter: did he really imagine Véro would bust a gut going to see lawyers and dealing with mountains of paperwork and, after all that, give away half the money? She’s keeping the lot! Bollocks! This is the simplest thing for all concerned.
*
She and Charles met in a bar. Unsurprisingly. They were hardly likely to meet at the cinema, given neither of them ever went. He was funny. He was up-front. He was hideously ugly. Véro likes handsome men, she has a passion for them. She likes a man’s skin when it has that smooth texture, she likes sinewy bodies, square shoulders, broad chests, bulging thigh muscles, she likes fleshy lips, long eyelashes when they don’t impinge on masculinity, large, gentle yet powerful hands. She likes watching fire fighters running in a group, wearing those little shorts that show off their handsome thighs and, when they sweat, you can see their back muscles outlined beneath the fabric of their T-shirt.
Charles was ugly as sin. She had never been attracted to him. But he was persistent. It had been a long time since anyone had made such an effort to chat her up. Be realistic, she thought, it’s not like you can do much better with what you’ve got. At least the old bastard had a silver tongue. He managed to persuade her to come back with him that night. And the following nights. She never understood what he saw in her.
By that point, Véro had already been fired from her job as a teacher. In Charles’ eyes, this gave her a certain prestige: “You’re a real champion, you are . . . I’ve never heard of a teacher being fired . . . Did you rape a whole class of kids, I can’t see it happening otherwise?”
She had not become a teacher out of a sense of vocation. It was the logical result of having studied literature. She sat the exam for her teacher’s diploma without a second thought because she needed to put food on the table. On her first day in class, she wore a brand-new beige raincoat bought specially for the occasion. On another woman it could have looked sophisticated and given her the air of an inscrutable grande dame. On Véro, it was a disaster, she looked like a sack of potatoes. She looked like a madwoman escaped from an asylum. Nothing suited her. Not the coat, not the elegant pumps that reminded her of Audrey Hepburn but that, on her, looked like hideous carpet slippers. She had faced her first day in class like a woman mounting the scaffold, convinced that the children would notice her deception, the grotesque figure she cut. She expected to be booed, showered with insults, sent home. On her second day, when the little blonde boy in the third row disrupted the class, she told him to gather up his things, go to the back of the class and stop interrupting. “Or what?” the boy said, and she coolly replied, “Or, chicken, I’ll rip your eyes out with my teeth.” She was sure she would not see out the week. The boy flashed her a little smile and did as he was told, to shocked, delighted laughter from the rest of the class. She had waited for him to complain when he went home and for his parents to insist that she be suspended. Nothing of the kind happened. But she had earned her place in the mythology of the school. She had become the fearsome Madame Breton, the French teacher with balls of steel who knew how to put troublemakers in their place. The sort of teacher you don’t mess with. Firm but fair. The times were very different from what they would become. Adults were rarely insulted. Véro became a good teacher, or at least one capable of getting her pupils interested in the subject she taught. She loved the kids’ energy. Then the parents changed. By the 1990s, a generation of arseholes force-fed sugar since the cradle had grown up to be a horde of degenerates. Suddenly there appeared the figure of the lobotomised helicopter parent who comes to a parent–teacher meeting and says, if my son isn’t doing his work it’s your fault. Ho
w are you supposed to respond to that? A kid who takes home a bad grade to be told, don’t worry, darling, it’s your teacher’s fault, is tough to motivate. She asked to be transferred to a school in an underprivileged area. She claimed it was for the bonus pay, but deep down it was because she couldn’t bear to spend another second with parents called Chantal and Charles-Edouard and their shitty offspring who had to be treated like the eighth wonder of the world when actually they would never be able to grasp a concept like the simple past.
In the 1990s, there were kids in deprived neighbourhoods who still believed that “knowledge is a weapon”, that the ability to use a dictionary was a bonus. You could look at them without blushing and tell them that, if they carried on with their studies, their professional life would be very different than if they dropped out after a vocational training certificate in boiler maintenance. This was a lie, their postcode meant they were doomed to a lack of job security, but they didn’t realise this. Véro was experienced, she easily withstood the culture shock of the northern district of Bourges where she taught. She had a good working knowledge of the immigrant population. She was what people these days call a B.M.W. – a black man’s whore. From east to west, from north to south, she knew all of Africa (in the biblical sense). Say what you like about immigration, but when it comes to women’s sexual fulfilment, these men did a lot for France. This gave her a certain advantage over her colleagues: she had some idea what was going on inside the kids’ heads. And not a single parent came to see her to complain that she got the kids to read Chester Himes, Bunker or Calaferte, which was hardly classic literature. The students didn’t talk about their French lessons at home, and the adults never asked what they were reading. That way no-one bothered anyone and some of the pupils came to enjoy reading. Later, she would wean them on to Rousseau, the radical for the great unwashed, and every year she managed to persuade a handful of students that libraries could be useful to them. She got along well with those who were resistant to her teaching. In those days, they were noisy, they were boisterous, they were funny. She had learned not to burst out laughing as she listened to the stream of quips and jibes. There was a sort of weird poetry in their banter.
Vernon Subutex Three Page 4
