The following day Mathilde took Théo and Maxime to school. Then she went to her appointment at the hospital, where she had to wait a good hour before she was seen. Later that morning she went back home, where she took advantage of the free moment to tidy the boys’ cupboard and iron a few things. At one o’clock she bought a sandwich at the baker’s down below and then she went to the metro station. The trains were almost empty and her journey seemed to flow smoothly. She dropped in at the Brasserie de la Gare for a coffee at the bar. Bernard complimented her on how well she was looking. At 2 p.m. on the dot she walked into the building.
Jacques was waiting for her. Scarcely had Mathilde got out of the lift when he began shouting.
‘The article! What happened to the article?’
Mathilde felt the point of impact in her stomach.
‘I sent it to you last night. Didn’t you get it?’
‘No, I didn’t get anything. Not a thing. I waited all morning. I was looking for you everywhere and I had to cancel a lunch to write the bloody thing which I asked you to write on Friday night! I suppose you had better things to do than devote a few hours of your weekend to the company.’
‘I sent it to you last night.’
‘So you said.’
‘I sent it, Jacques. If that weren’t true, you know full well that I’d tell you.’
‘Well, maybe it’s time you worked out how your email system works.’
Faces appeared at half-open doors. There were furtive glances in the corridor. Stunned, Mathilde said nothing. Short of breath, she leaned against the wall. She had to retrace step by step what she had done after getting back on Sunday night, before she was able to visualise the scene: she had set the table, put the pizza in the oven and asked Simon to turn his music down. Then she switched on the laptop. Yes, she could see herself turning it on, sitting at the low table. Next she must have sent the article, nothing else was possible.
And then she began to have doubts. She was no longer sure. Perhaps she was interrupted and didn’t send the email. Maybe she pressed a wrong key or got the wrong recipient or forgot the attachment. She wasn’t sure about anything any more. Maybe she did forget to send the article. As simple as that.
The corridor was empty. Jacques had gone.
Mathilde rushed to her office, turned on her computer and entered her password. She waited for all the icons to appear and the anti-virus software to run. It felt like it was taking for ever. Her heart was in her mouth. At last she was able to open up her Sent box. There was the email on the first line, dated the night before at 19.45. She hadn’t forgotten the attachment.
From her office she called Jacques to ask him to come and see for himself, to which he responded loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘I didn’t receive anything and I don’t give a damn about salving your conscience.’
Jacques doubted her word.
Jacques spoke to her like a dog.
Jacques lied.
He had received her article. She knew that. He had probably used it as inspiration for his own.
Mathilde re-sent the email.
To prove to him that . . .
It was vain and ridiculous, a pitiful impulse to keep herself upright.
For the first time she imagined Jacques dead. His eyes upturned. For the first time she saw herself firing at point-blank range. She imagined the shot, powerful and irremediable. For the first time, she saw the hole in the middle of his forehead. Clean. And the burnt skin all around it.
Later, the image came back, and then came others: Jacques lying on the ground at the entrance to the building, a group of people gathered around his body, the trickle of white froth at the corner of his mouth.
Jacques in the blue light of the car park, dragging himself on his elbows, his legs broken, crushed, mangled, begging for forgiveness.
Jacques stabbed with his silver letter opener, pissing blood on his director’s chair.
At the time, the images made her feel better.
Later, Mathilde felt afraid. That something was out of her control, was carrying her along, something she couldn’t stop.
The images were so clear, so precise. Almost real.
Her own violence frightened her.
Thibault followed a case of gastro-enteritis on rue Bobillot with a panic attack on avenue Dorian and an earache on rue Sarrette.
At eleven o’clock he rang Rose to ask her if the controller was planning on having him shuttle between the two zones all day. He didn’t want to be awkward, but Francis should try to minimise the number of trips, at least a bit, especially when they were only level-4 emergencies.
In fact Francis wasn’t there. Francis was off sick. The base had had to call in a replacement controller. Rose went on: ‘He’s worked for SOS.’
Thibault was in a bad mood and couldn’t hold back a comment. Maybe the replacement had fun making SOS doctors run all over Paris, but if she could explain to him that this wasn’t their house style, he’d be really grateful.
Rose’s voice trembled: ‘Things are shit today, Thibault. I’m sorry. I might as well tell you right away that the direct line from the emergency services is ringing every three minutes. They’re offloading tons of patients on to us. And you’ve got to go to rue Liancourt. There’s a thirty-five-year-old man locked in his bathroom. He’s having hallucinations and threatening to slit his wrists. He’s already made four suicide attempts. His wife wants him hospitalised.’
That was all he needed. A ‘mission’. In their slang that was the name they gave to the calls that no one wanted. Because in general they took up half the day. At the top of the list of ‘missions’ are instances of sectioning, arrests and death certificates.
Thibault said he was on his way. Because he’s very fond of Rose and he is probably less worried than most about his hourly rate. He hung up.
A few seconds later he heard the beep of the text message giving him the entry code, floor and name of the person who called it in. He checked all the same that it wasn’t a message from Lila. Just in case.
He knows what awaits him. If he doesn’t manage to persuade the patient to sign a consent form voluntarily, he’ll have to call the police, an ambulance and hope that it doesn’t end like the last time. The girl managed to escape over the rooftops. And then she jumped. She wasn’t even twenty.
That same evening, he remembers, he had arranged to see Lila. As soon as he was through the door, he wanted to throw himself into her arms, wanted her to gather him up, envelop him, wanted to feel the warmth of her body. To be free of himself for a few seconds. He made a movement towards her, a movement of abandon. And then in a fraction of a second, instinctively, the movement was cut short. Lila hadn’t moved. Lila stood there in front of him, her arms by her sides.
He’s been stuck for a good twenty minutes behind a van parked right in the middle of rue Mouton-Duvernet.
Two men are casually unloading clothes, sauntering, cigarettes in their hands. They disappear into a shop, then reappear several minutes later. They’re in no hurry.
Thibault looks behind him. The traffic has built up; he can’t reverse.
After the men’s sixth return trip made with the same, vaguely ostentatious slowness, Thibault sounds his horn. Immediately the other cars do the same, as though they’d been waiting for his signal. One of the two men turns round towards him, his arm bent and his middle finger raised.
For a fraction of a second, Thibault imagines getting out of the car, rushing at the man and beating him up.
So he switches on the radio and turns up the volume. He breathes in.
Thibault has always been keen on changing sector when he requests his shifts. He has criss-crossed them all in every direction and in every fashion possible. He knows their rhythms and their geometry. He knows the squats and the townhouses, the houses covered in ivy, the names of the estates, the numbers on the stairwells, the ageing tower blocks and the brand-new apartment complexes which look like show homes.
For a long time he’s
believed that the city belongs to him. Because he knows its smallest street, tiniest alleyway, little-known mazes, the names of its new arterial roads, unlit passages, and the new developments by the Seine that have sprung up from nowhere.
He plunges his hands as far into the city’s belly as possible. He knows the beating of its heart, its old aches which the damp reawakens, its moods and its pathology. He knows the colour of its bruises and the dizziness of its speed, its putrid secretions and its false modesty, its evenings of jubilation and the days after its celebrations.
He knows its princes and its beggars.
He lives above a square and never closes the curtains. He wants the light, the noise. The ceaseless circular movement.
He has long thought that he and the city beat to the same rhythm, are one and the same.
But today, after ten years behind the wheel of his white Clio, ten years of traffic jams, red lights, tunnels, one-way streets and double parking, it seems as though the city sometimes eludes him, that it has become hostile to him. It seems to him that because it is so over-crowded and because he recognises its fetid breath better than anyone, the city is waiting for its moment to vomit him up or spit him out, like a foreign body.
In her store cupboard, Mathilde checks that her phone line is working. She picks up the handset, dials zero and waits for the tone.
Reassured by the possibility of contact with the outside world, she hangs up.
She stretches on her chair, slides her palm over the Formica and listens for the sound of time silently passing. There are still two hours till lunch.
She would have liked to wear a skirt, to make her satin tights sparkle in the morning light. Because of her burn, she’s had to put on trousers. Because it was the twentieth of May, she chose the lightest, most flowing ones.
Had she but known.
The phone rings and she jumps. Simon’s mobile number appears on the screen, which confirms that her line has indeed been transferred.
His maths teacher is off and he wants to know if he can skip the canteen and go to his friend Hugo’s for lunch and then back to school for the afternoon.
She says yes.
She’d like to talk to him, to prolong their exchange, win a few minutes from boredom, find out what life outside is like today, on the twentieth of May. She’d like to know if he has noticed something unusual in the air, a humidity, a languor, something which resists the city and its eagerness, which opposes it.
She can’t ask him questions like that, as absurd as that – they’d scare him.
For a brief instant, she dreams that she could ask him to come home at once, to get his and his brothers’ things ready, one bag each, no more. Because they’re going away, right, now, all four of them. They’re going away somewhere the air is breathable, where she can start all over again.
In the background she can hear street noise. He’s going to his friend Hugo’s for lunch. She can tell he’s in a hurry. He’s fourteen, he’s got his life to live.
Mathilde sends him a kiss and hangs up.
She has her hands on either side of the phone. Her hands are like the rest of her body – inert.
Some way off, a photocopier is spitting out 150 sheets a minute. She listens to the machine’s regular rhythm. She tries to distinguish each note, each sound – the fan, the paper, the drive mechanism. She counts off – 112, 113, 114 . . . She remembers a winter’s evening a long time ago when she had to stay late with Nathalie to finish a presentation on the department’s activities. The office was empty. Before they left they had to print out four copies. Mathilde had pressed the green button and the repetitive, insistent noise of the machine had filled the whole place. And then the noise turned into music and they danced for as long as it lasted, barefoot on the carpet.
That was another time. A light, carefree time.
Today she has to pretend.
To look busy in an empty office.
To look busy without a computer or an Internet connection.
To look busy when everyone knows that she isn’t doing anything.
When no one is waiting for her work any more, when her very presence is enough to make people look away.
Before, she used to check how her friends were getting on. She’d call them. A few stolen minutes when she got back after lunch or between two meetings later in the afternoon. She maintained the link, shared the day-to-day stuff. She’d talk about the children, her projects, where she’d been. Anecdotes and essentials. Now she doesn’t call any more. She doesn’t know what she’d say. She’s got nothing to tell. She refuses dinner invitations, evenings out, she doesn’t go to restaurants or the cinema any more. She doesn’t leave the house any more. She’s run out of excuses, she has got lost in ever vaguer justifications, has hidden herself from their questions, left their messages unanswered.
Because she can’t go on pretending.
Because there always comes a moment when they ask: ‘How’re things at work?’
Under their scrutiny, she feels even more helpless. They probably say there’s no smoke without fire, she must have done something wrong, slipped up. In their eyes, she’s the one who’s not doing so well. Who has problems. She’s no longer one of them. She can’t laugh about her boss any more, can’t talk about her colleagues, feel pleased that the company’s doing well, or worry about the difficulties it’s having with that concerned look. The look of someone who works. She doesn’t give a damn. She couldn’t care less any more. They don’t know the extent to which the little boxes they work in are hermetically sealed. The extent to which the air they breathe is polluted, saturated. Or else it’s her. Her who’s not doing well. Who is no longer adaptable. She who is too weak to get her way, mark her territory, defend her position. She whom the business has isolated for health reasons, like a tumour that’s discovered late, a collection of unhealthy cells cut from the body. In their eyes, she feels judged. And so she keeps quiet. No longer answers. Crosses the street when she runs into them. Waves from afar.
And so for weeks she has been living in a closed circle with her children, expending energy for them that she no longer possesses. Nothing else matters.
And when her mother rings, she tells her she’ll call back because she’s snowed under.
The photocopier has stopped and silence has returned.
Oppressive.
Mathilde looks around. She wishes she could talk to someone. Someone who knows nothing about her situation, who wouldn’t feel sorry for her.
Because she has time, all the time in the world in fact, she decides to call the insurance company. She’s been meaning to do it for several days to find out the amount she’ll be able to claim on the orthodontic treatment that Théo is starting soon.
That’s a good idea. That will occupy her.
Mathilde takes her insurance card out of her bag and dials the number. The recorded message tells her that her call will be charged at thirty-four cents per minute. Excluding waiting time. The computerised voice asks her to press # and then choose the reason for her call by pressing 1, 2 or 3. The computerised voice suggests different scenarios among which she is supposed to recognise her situation.
To speak to someone – a real person with a real voice capable of giving a real answer – you have to break free of the menu. Not yield to the suggestions. Resist. Not press 1, 2 or 3. Maybe 0? To speak to someone, you have to be different, not fit any box, any category. You have to lay claim to your difference, not correspond to anything, to be quite simply other, in fact: with another reason, another request, another operation.
By doing this you sometimes manage to exchange a few words with a real person. Other times the recorded message loops back on itself, returning you to the main menu and it’s impossible to get out.
The voice tells her that an adviser will respond in a few minutes. Mathilde smiles. She tries to identify the call-waiting music. She knows the tune, but that’s all; she can’t think what it is.
She waits.
At least
she’ll have spoken to someone.
She’s put the phone on loudspeaker. With her head in her hands she has closed her eyes. She hasn’t heard Patricia Lethu come quietly in. At the moment when their eyes meet, the music stops. The computerised voice announces that as all their advisers are currently busy, the company invites her to call back later.
Mathilde hangs up.
Patricia Lethu is blonde and tanned. She wears court shoes that match her suits and gold jewellery. She is one of those women who know that an outfit shouldn’t combine more than three colours and that you should wear an odd number of rings. In summer she wears white, beige or oatmeal, reserving dark colours for winter. Every Friday she locks the door of her office and flies off to Corsica or somewhere, somewhere in the south, somewhere with nice weather.
She’s said to be married to the number two in a big car manufacturer. She’s said to have got her job with the company because her husband is the best friend of the president of the subsidiary. She’s said to live in a vast apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement. She’s said to have a lover who’s younger than her, a senior manager in the holding company. Names do the rounds. Because, for several months, Patricia Lethu has been wearing shorter and shorter skirts.
In the holidays Patricia Lethu goes to Mauritius or the Seychelles with her husband. She comes back more tanned than ever.
The HR director only leaves her office for special occasions – retirement parties, company meetings, Christmas celebrations. The rest of the time she has lots of work. You need to make an appointment.
This morning there’s a bitter twist to her mouth. She looks around her with embarrassment.
Mathilde is silent. She has nothing to say.
The jet which a man releases when he urinates travels sufficiently far from his body to produce a splashing sound. Which covers the silence.
Underground Time Page 7
