Rose’s mother suggests they go for a swim, but Sixtine, looking wounded and pouting coyly, says she is ‘indisposed’. The announcement is met with respectful silence. Rose’s mother gets up. She hops up and down because the sand is boiling. Her breasts are round and white like two scoops of vanilla ice-cream, with pink creases from the raffia mat.
‘Are you coming with us, Monsieur Bihotz?’
Monsieur Bihotz wiggles his feet and then shakes his head.
‘But Monsieur Bihotz, you can go swimming, can’t you?’
Rose and her cousins burst into hysterical laughter.
Rose’s mother swims off straight away with a perfect freestyle stroke, diving under the breakers as if, between her and America, the ocean was nothing but a silly nuisance; off she shoots, further and further, released from her boots, which are right here, stinking in the sun. Rose and Sixtine are whispering, their hair mingling. Monsieur Bihotz has turned over onto his front, his arms pressed against his sides, his mammoth feet almost touching Rose’s bum. Doing his best to distribute his massive body, he occupies as circumspectly as possible his five billionth share of the Earth’s crust: right here, on some burning sand.
She’d like to swim off straight away, like Rose’s mother, into that watery element. She’d like to believe that between her and the sea there is some kind of transcendental pact that excludes the rest of humanity. Despite the fact that she scarcely knows how to swim, however, it seems to her as if she should stay and rescue Monsieur Bihotz here, on dry land. Something about the points of this triangle, Rose, Sixtine and Monsieur Bihotz, demands her urgent attention.
He’s got that dazed look about him, like when he’s having a coffee meltdown. Quivering, a slight shudder, as if he was trying to hold himself still.
Rose and Sixtine are red in the face from suppressed laughter. Sixtine doesn’t say anything, and when Rose lets forth she hides under her sarong.
‘He’s got an erection,’ hisses Rose. Solange is also keen to bury herself in her raffia mat, but is less successful.
Sixtine whispers a story that happened to her in the metro—she’s addressing Rose, but you can hear her over the sound of the sea and the children screaming—about a man jammed right up against her and she didn’t know if it was his briefcase or some other hard thing, that’s the trouble with public transport. She complained to her mother who now takes her everywhere by car. ‘It’s disgusting,’ sympathises Rose, ‘it’s vile, how horrible. I’ll never ever take the metro!’
‘Monsieur Bilost!’ Sixtine suddenly calls out. ‘Monsieur Bilost!’
Monsieur Bihotz twists his head around.
‘Monsieur Bilost, would you like to play volleyball with us?’
Rose looks at Sixtine as if she was magnificently mad. But her mother comes back, grabbing a T-shirt to dry herself quickly. Beneath her Bo Derek plaits, her brilliant white teeth reflect the sun’s glare. She gives a wet wave to a lifeguard.
Monsieur Bihotz goes for a swim, finally. By himself.
On the way back, they doze, stuck in the overheated shade of the van. The sun’s rays beat on the rear-vision mirrors and two square patches of light bounce off the inside panels.
‘What sort of music do you have?’ Rose’s mother asks, leaning on Monsieur Bihotz as she rummages among the cassettes, bumping against him and laughing and yelling, ‘YOU CAN SEE THE PYRENEES, GIRLS!’ over the top of look for your happiness everywhere-ere, say no to this selfish wo-orld.
‘Aren’t they beautiful, those silos,’ she continues, ‘typical of between-the-wars architecture, look at that stepped roof, right out of the housing co-operative style, the building itself expresses hope, social cohesion.’
The sun slips from one rear-vision mirror to the other, landscape, road, sky, Pyrenees, swirling slowly inside the van, a crest of jagged light glints with each corner taken, illuminating the forehead of Rose’s mother and becoming that forehead, those eyes, then leaving them in the shade while her thighs come alight and the glovebox and the whole windscreen and some of the reflected faces, the two youngest cousins asleep in the back, Rose daydreaming, Sixtine annoyed because it’s so hot, Rose’s mother delighted by a sudden passing thought, Monsieur Bihotz whose lips are moving in time with the song—and someone else, the youthful, round, red face of a girl sitting in the middle, stunned and staring, narrow shoulders and a blue bathing costume over two pointed nipples, looking in the rear-vision mirror between the six other faces to see who it could possibly be there in the van, with them as well, as well as the six of them and Monsieur Bihotz, until a shaft of sunlight straight from the west shatters the image and she understands—her blue bathing costume, her little breasts, her face, Solange, her, Solange, me in the rear-vision mirror calling myself Solange and coming back from the beach in my ten-year-old body, me at the foot of the Pyrenees waiting for the future.
II
DOING IT
A few summers later, the same summer over again. Her breasts a bit bigger. Raphaël wants to finger Nathalie; Nathalie tells her and asks, should she let him?
I don’t know if you should, she replies casually.
They are playing Mastermind. It’s a rustic sun, yellow and green, hopeless. She imagines slimy fingers, fingers stuck up like when boys make rude gestures. Stay cool. Don’t look uptight.
‘Do you think you’re still a virgin after it?’ Nathalie presses the point.
Give an opinion. One finger, that’s smaller than a dick, isn’t it?
Nathalie has brought homemade cookies for her. Her nails are black with chocolate. No way in the world she’s eating those cookies.
‘I’d wet my pants,’ admits her cookie-baking friend.
Nathalie has already done so many cool things, tongue-kissing, letting them feel up her breasts and all that. If she gets wet, does that also mean she’s scared? And how many holes are there altogether? In the end, can you get into all of them? Do boys get into all of them? Do boys get wet, and scared, too?
At the fountain that used to be a public washing place, a group of Saint-Jacques pilgrims are drinking water out of their scallop shells.
Why? Her father gets to fly to Paris; why does she have to live here?
Language hovers above the house like a cloud. All it needs is one word for a disaster to strike them, a catastrophe, a Boeing aeroplane in pieces.
But Clèves is very pretty, says her father. Its eighteenth-century chateau. Its half-timbered houses. Its marina, its windsurfing. Its chestnut cakes. Its pewter-ware shops. Its statue of the Virgin Mary. Its scenic rock that you can climb on.
Its pharmacy woman, someone adds—no, that can’t be right. It’s the voice in her head, saying things accumulated in the cloud.
Under the arches there’s Christian on his moped, Rose and Sixtine, Nathalie and Delphine (the one who lives in the chateau), and Raphaël Bidegarraï. Raphaël is smoking a cigarette, which is pretty gutsy right in the middle of the village. He’s got a thin black moustache and pimples. Christian is giving him a hard time because he’s going out with Peggy Salami.
‘A hole is a hole and my dick can’t see,’ he retorts.
Sixtine is wearing 501s with a military belt under an XXL T-shirt, sleeves rolled-up; as if her little body had had to make do with old men’s clothes, from which her tanned, thin arms emerge, all the more graceful. Her ballerina flats under the frayed hem of her jeans make her feet look like they’re barely there. All legs, this girl would walk on air: no toes, no nails, no weight. And there she is, Solange, in a tracksuit, on a bike, in huge sneakers that aren’t even Adidas…
According to Rose, Sixtine has done it. Can you tell from looking at her? Something about her body, about her attitude? It’s probably the opposite: it’s because she has that look—classy—that she’s been able to do it.
The pilgrims are mesmerised. They can’t be looking at her, not the red-faced village girl—or are they sneaking looks? What’s the matter with that old guy? Has she got something on her face? Any mi
nute now he’ll be taking her photo, making an offer for her mother’s pewter and scoffing chestnut cake.
‘You look hot on that bike!’ he shouts at her in front of everyone.
She turns even redder. Embarrassing. So embarrassing. And not far away, just when she’s reached the steep path where there are always dogs, who should she see but the other lunatic with his scallop shell from a pack of frozen Coquilles Saint Jacques. In an attempt to regain her composure, she starts patting the dogs.
‘You’re kind to the dogs,’ says the pilgrim, ‘so what about me, don’t you want to be kind to me?’
She rushes home to Monsieur Bihotz; too bad about self-possession.
Rose has done it, too. In England. ‘A guy, you don’t know him.’ She refuses to tell her any more, for the sake of decency. ‘We’re like sisters.’ But she told Nathalie, who tells Solange that Rose was gritting her teeth waiting for it to stop. That at first it wouldn’t go in at all. Then it went in all at once and that was so horrible. Like her insides were being torn apart. And then there was blood everywhere. So much that she had to run to the showers, wrapped in a towel, and it was pissing blood. His dick was covered in blood, too. He cleaned himself up and told her through the door that it was okay, that he wasn’t the one who was bleeding. She bled like that for two days without daring to tell anyone. Then it stopped but she was still in pain. She wondered whether she should go to the hospital to get some stitches or something, but she couldn’t talk about it; she was in England, after all.
‘Rose must be frigid,’ Nathalie reckons.
Concepción says that if you’re in love it doesn’t hurt as much. And Delphine says that if you have light periods, you don’t bleed or hardly at all.
Rose’s English exchange student is called Terry and he’s here for two weeks. He’s a creature from outer space. He’s eight inches taller than the rest of the village, and his hair is so blond, his eyes so pale, that you’d think he was visiting from the set of Village of the Damned. She practises pronouncing Terry, the soft ‘T’, the very soft ‘r’. Terry, with as much smoothness and elegance as possible, she allows the air to slip between the two syllables, with just a faint hint of the final ‘i’. She practises in front of the mirror, Terry. Then she says Christian. Terry. Christian.
How to choose? No, Terry, no, she murmurs into the mirror, refusing to be kissed. Then she’s holding Christian’s hand for ages, agonising with him over this impossible dilemma. She kisses her reflection, Christian is the one, Terry is the one. She kisses the back of her hand, then the inside of her arm, it’s warmer, more realistic, using her tongue, wrapping her other arm around her waist.
She’s allowed to stay at the carnival until half past twelve (the extra half hour on condition that she stays with Rose and Nathalie the whole time). She told her mother she’s sleeping at Monsieur Bihotz’s place, and told Monsieur Bihotz she’s sleeping at home.
Rose lets Terry walk three feet in front of them. She rolls her eyes theatrically: ‘He’s really good-looking, but he’s so clingy!’
He whips around when they laugh: ‘Excusez-moi?’
They’re laughing so hard they have to stop under a plane tree. The guy smoking under the plane tree goes to their high school and he’s a bass player and he blows a kiss to Rose and Nathalie.
She just puts her hands in the pockets of her jeans. But that looks dumb. Arms dangling, that’s even worse. She looks at her shoes, her summer pair, La Redoute mail-order, brown to go with everything.
The English exchange student also has weird clothes but perhaps that’s just because he’s English. If he’s caught a plane to get all the way over here, he should be able to afford some fashionable shoes. The more she looks at him, the better looking he gets. Better built, more manly than the boys from around here, even if he seems a bit shy. And a movie star’s face. That look of anguish and sadness.
She looks at his mouth, Terry, his upper lip. He always looks like he’s about to speak, but then he doesn’t. That lip keeps quivering—it’s an unusual shape, straight across, without that fold that ordinary mouths have—she watches it stretching like that, a hint of downy blond fuzz, sliding over impeccable teeth, hiding them, revealing them…She couldn’t care less about Rose and Nathalie, she couldn’t care less about the bass player talking to them, she could keep looking forever at the English exchange student’s upper lip, Terry’s upper lip.
‘Bunch of faggots.’ Raphaël Bidegarraï greets them all. ‘Shit, you’re starting to look hot.’ He tries to touch her bum, to give her a special greeting, but she hops sideways and Nathalie cackles, ‘You should have seen your face!’ What face, what face was she making? A hurt face like her mother’s? The face of a stuck-up bitch—when Raphaël is just having a laugh. He’s really nice when you get to know him.
There was that time at the swimming pool in Grade Five when he held her against the side and stuck his hands on her breasts and the shock paralysed her—she’s replayed the scene a thousand times, a good kick would have got him off her—and it’s the same Raphaël there in front of her now, with those same hands, one nonchalantly holding a smoke, the other in the pocket of his jeans. His appreciative gaze, his specialist’s gaze. Apparently he goes out with the bombshells at high school.
‘What’re you doing?’ he asks her, tilting his chin to exhale the smoke.
She hesitates: what’s she doing in the future (going into Year Ten), or what’s she doing there, in the present, right now, being a girl, at the carnival, this same carnival where her father flashed his dick—what’s she doing?
She decides to reply seriously, sincerely (she’s noticed that to sound sincere about what you think makes you seem interesting). She leans in to him: ‘I’d like to go out with the English guy.’
Raphaël looks at Terry. Then at her. He gives his verdict. ‘You can only go out with someone who’s in the same league as you.’
Does he really think he’s as good-looking as the girls he goes out with? It’s too late to answer.
Who do you think you are?
You think it’s only about looks?
The same league as your bullshit?
Like when you were going out with Peggy Salami?
She has no sense of repartee. She is hopeless.
Christian says it fucks you up, gives you cancer, but in the end he takes one and Nathalie does too and so does she. Her father has already made her take a drag of a Dunhill, to put her off. She lets her hand hang down along the seam of her jeans. Smoking—she’s been doing it all her life. No one coughs.
Some children are squirting them with a water pistol. Nathalie yells at them. On the merry-go-round other kids are fighting over the plane that goes up and down.
And then this amazing thing happens: Terry gives her a sign that he wants to talk with her. They sit down away from the others. Terry seems to be looking for his courage and his words, it’s not easy in Fwench. Firecrackers explode, he jumps out of his skin, they both laugh. He says Wose something—she can’t hear with all this noise.
Rose is the last person she wants to talk about—but let him talk as much as he likes, let his upper lip go up and down, ‘u’ pronounced ou, the warm breath exhaled by those lips that are not closing—let him talk, let him talk about Wose who is cwuel and ignaws him in the stweet, in the what, in the stweet.
Loud thuds from inside the booth they’re leaning against, like neighbours complaining. Heavy neighbours. It’s the animal enclosure, part of the circus that comes back every year for the carnival. Madame Bihotz used to take her along when she was little. There was an old lion the same colour as the beige carpet in her parents’ bedroom, a woolly camel, and an uncomfortable-looking sea lion. Animals so displaced (what on earth is that tewwible noise?) that they probably see this village (does Wose talk to you about me at all?) as just another moment of disillusion in the false promise of a round trip back home—but it’s never the savannah, the steppe, the desert, or the sea. She’s got to do it—Wose, Wose, the only
thing coming out of his mouth is Wose—just concentrate for a minute—kiss a boy, go out with a boy, him or another one, him rather than another one. And whatever happens, this Terry will leave the village, and whatever happens—she reminds herself suddenly—she too will leave the village one day.
Air rushes into her lungs. Air from way beyond the carnival and the circus and the clouds, air from the steppes and from the Milky Way.
Do you want to go out with me? she asks him clearly and super-comprehensibly, much more clearly and comprehensibly than she would have thought credible (cwedible).
‘Go out,’ he repeats, ‘yes, go out, gwate idea.’
He stretches to the full British extent of his height, she stretches her neck giraffe-like, but nothing happens.
They are going out.
They are going out of what? Of the carnival? Of the village? He’s walking fast, she scurries behind him.
But she’s pretty sure it’s the same in English: you say go out for kissing.
They’re going past Gym Tonic. Past the Cheap Carpet outlet. Past the junkyard and the gravel pit. The out is becoming gigantic, the misunderstanding endless, the out spreads from the edge of the village, encompasses the silos, the forest and the hills, and unfolds onto the black sky and the horizon.
They’re walking, he’s in front, she’s behind. The fields disappear under a grey fog that sweeps over the road and swirls around their calves, as if the planet was vaporising and then scattering into the night. Whoo ooh from the owls in the black trees. The green and pink sign of Milord’s comes into view, the top hat and cane in neon lights.
She trots up to him quickly, sweating, whoo ooh. Should she fall into his arms? Or feign an illness, low blood sugar? The Milord shakes his cane and his hat. Some sort of creature is rustling the shrubbery, a fox, perhaps? She grabs his arm, he trips, they bump into each other. ‘Tewwibly sowwy, you all wight?’
All the Way Page 5
