She spends the evening watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with her mother.
She plays back the moment when he had his expert fingers in her and she felt like she was going to drown. You look sort of wistful. She’s got to stop running her own movies in her head. She is a total egomaniac. Why would this straight-up high school guy call her at all? He’s probably forgotten her number. As if he didn’t have a pencil—so stupid.
There should be telephones with extendable cords that follow you wherever you go. Or actually without cords at all. Not that she has much to do, or places to go. Or even wants to.
‘I don’t recognise you,’ says Bihotz. ‘You used to be like a bee in a bonnet. Now you stay inside all the time, you look like Dracula. Come and help me with the corn.’
She feigns a headache.
‘What the hell? Don’t try the line about migraine.’
After two days of imprisonment, she really does have a headache. Her mother wants her to go to the doctor. She sounds so unbearably sympathetic.
A telephone cord to follow her bike, run along the roads after her, circle the village and come back here, a ball of twine winding tighter and tighter around her.
Bihotz puts on a shocking record, a slow dance song by the Scorpions: I’m still loving YIIIOUOUOU and his long hair sways as he shakes his head. ‘You can put on your own records if you don’t like it.’
23 57 01
Where should she be? Where should she go? Should she call him or not? What should she do? If only it would all stop. If only something would stop, so she didn’t have to think about it anymore. So she could move on. One month later, one year later, two years later, three years later. And be sixteen. Eighteen. Such an unbearable wait. To be an adult. To be whatever it means to be a woman. To know how life works, what direction her life will take, who she will be. Be able to come and go, make phone calls, speak, go away. Fuck. Fuck. Take hold of the entire Earth and fuck.
She pictures herself as a giantess clinging to the Earth, stuck on, rubbing herself, stopping the planet’s rotation and sinking down to the molten rock, who knows how far.
She no longer knows she’s there, she’s waited so long. She: nothing.
At the sound of the dring she is no longer disembodied. The ringing brings her to life again. Her head is throbbing unbearably. The atoms in her hand assemble on the receiver—it’s her mother, or Delphine, and she’s held fast by her own frustration.
Then she rescreens the movie of herself: she’s a tiny pulsating speck in a village in a country in a continent, a miserable speck. Time has wound back to zero, no past, no future.
She remembers the words of her childhood prayer:
Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, make Arnaud call me, please Holy Mary, I’ll do anything you want. Amen.
23 57 01
She lets it ring once and hangs up. The number is real. That has to be a sign.
‘Come and set the table!’ shouts Bihotz. The clanging of stainless steel cutlery.
She puts on a tape that Delphine made for her, turns the volume up loud. She doesn’t understand any of the lyrics but the music is all about her, her life. She presses her hands into her eyes and shakes her head around. Bihotz is there in a flash.
‘For someone who has a migraine…’
She presses Pause and sighs, waiting for him to please go away and leave her alone. If her father is only a porter, she won’t be getting a Walkman any time soon.
‘If I’m so annoying, go home to your mother.’
He slams the door. Charming.
She is alone on the edge of the world. Cast out by some centrifugal force, alone, a long way from the centre where everything’s happening.
23 57 01.
Just one ring. Hang up quickly.
23 57 01.
Just one more time.
‘Hello.’ A woman’s voice. Annoyed. She picked up as soon as the ringtone started.
Is Arnaud there?
‘Who is it?’
Her heart is pounding.
‘Whom shall I say is calling?’
It looks like her porter father didn’t teach her how to introduce herself.
It’s Solange.
What a horrible name she has.
She hears the sound of a flute, ‘Arnooooooo’, an elegant, mocking flute.
She hangs up. She opens the window and looks down. It’s only one storey but it’s pretty high. Cement paving. There’d be a fair amount of damage. She should try it with Lulu.
The telephone rings. She makes herself wait for three rings. One. Two. Three.
Yes? It’s more elegant than hello.
‘Solange?’
Yes?
‘Did you just call?’
No.
‘My mother said it was Solange.’
No.
‘Well, I only know one Solange…’
His deep voice, his voice that has two registers. Everything they’ve experienced together, every moment comes back to her, the blue bedroom and the river below. (Was it actually blue? With a Chinese screen.)
‘Do you want to get together?’
Yes.
‘When?’
Tomorrow?
‘I can’t tomorrow. The day after?’
Free.
She pedals as hard as she can. Town, silos, Milord’s, marina. She heads off into the wind, into a blank space, without images, all speed, leaving behind her the places on a map. An enormous energy is coursing through her body, every push against the pedals is one more step towards far away, faster, a breakthrough.
On the promontory over the lake there is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Thank you, Mary, thanks for Arnaud’s phone call. She has to go there with a pure heart, to appear as pure as possible before the goddess, who has X-ray vision and sees through our bodies right to the bottom of the cauldron that is our skull, focusing on our dreams and our desires like converging mirrors, amen. Because it’s clear to Mary that she (Solange) is pure, as pure as when she was little (even purer, when she thinks now about what she thought about then).
She freewheels down to the river. Looks at the chateau on the opposite shore. Tries to locate the window. The balcony, on the top floor. The blue bedroom. Something’s moving. Perhaps it’s just a reflection in the windows—she had noticed there were cracks in the panes (when she stayed under the sheet struggling against the urge to go and join him straight away, to run after him).
As she cycles down along the shore, it really does look like something’s moving. Lætitia d’Urbide? The servants? A rose garden. A tennis court. A swimming pool. An ensuite for each bedroom. A dressing room. There’s even a video room. And a leather lounge suite, pay by instalment. Designer carpet, cheaper by the yard.
Cheap Carpet—Lætitia d’Urbide, Lætitia d’U, Lady Di, Lady d’U.
Does she do it? Does she get like that too? Arched over and panting? Penetrated? Possessed? Does she make noises like on Canal+ TV? And Lady Di, does she?
Her mother. Her mother in that chateau. Waited on by servants. And why not? Her mother who drums into her that a woman must have a job. But the ideal would be not to work.
(Georges has a joke about sex on a posh couple’s wedding night, it goes something like this—snobbish accent—‘My dear, come in or go out but stop this ridiculous in and out business.’)
And the word fuckpad, which a friend of Arnaud’s used. Arnaud and this friend, seen from above when she was coming down the staircase. Their noses in their drinks, leaning in to each other. The friend had looked at her (arched over, panting) (as if he knew what she had just done, or not done).
Arnaud and her embracing, standing at the window. Lord and lady of their dominion.
Her arm around a tree like it’s an imaginary body, her mouth open and sending kisses into the air, slightly arched over, slightly panting, glancing around to check that the foliage is hiding her.
She drops
her bike and strides to the edge of the lake. Breathe and run. That’s exactly what youth is, she thinks: grab and dash; it’s fleeting, really fleeting, and hugely thrilling because it’s NOW.
She has two days to lose two kilos. Once again she makes the solemn resolution not to eat anymore (only apples, tomatoes and cigarettes).
Georges is rigging windsurfers and there is absolutely no one else around. He says he can lend her a windsurfer and a wet suit. ‘All those times I’ve offered you a go!’
She takes off her clothes as discreetly as possible behind the trailer. She hadn’t thought about bringing her swimsuit so she puts the wetsuit on with nothing underneath and Georges tells her that it’s not hygienic. ‘Keep your underpants on. Who do you think you are, miss? I’ve seen plenty of bums.’
The wind is strong and steady towards the middle of the lake. She is hanging by both arms from the boom, the sail lifts her up, her feet are barely holding on and she charges straight ahead. She’s so light. Lightly between sky and water. Anticipating the rhythm, bending her legs and absorbing the motion of the waves, taking off.
Back there the class has begun, four or five clowns and Georges like a king in his outboard, with his long blond hair, looking almost as good as her father. A big guy is with him, a distant cousin of Bihotz. She doesn’t like him at all because he’s always making idiotic jokes. And, sure enough, they head over in her direction. She has to turn around, to go about—but she falls in just when they get to her. Rusty-coloured slime oozes between her toes. Three mallards take off squealing and there are spiky reeds and the metallic taste of the water and the depressing absence of the sea.
‘You okay?’ asks Georges. Oddly enough, he offers her a cigarette. She takes one nonchalantly and pushes back a strand of wet hair. Everything’s normal.
‘It all depends on the positions’—the cousin is in full flight—‘but I’m here to tell you that I was using my calorie-burning quota to the max, especially given what a sexpot the girl was.’
‘He’s doing Weight Watchers,’ Georges translates.
‘Three times,’ continues the fat guy. ‘Three times eight hundred calories makes two thousand four hundred calories—just watch how much weight I’m going to lose on this diet!’
They tow her out of the reeds and she can’t wait for the day after tomorrow to come, so she can finally get back into her life.
Behind the trailer, she takes off the wetsuit and feels a weird warm spot. Did the rusty water seep inside? Blood. The wetsuit legs are full of it. What did she expect—there you go, it could only happen to her, her date is the day after tomorrow and she always gets it for at least five days.
Has it already been twenty-eight days since the last time? You could get your bearings if the calendar was in line with the moon, in girl months, and not their stupid imperial months of thirty or thirty-one days that get everything out of whack. Twenty-eight times thirteen makes exactly 364, plus an extra day for things like the 29th of February—so you can’t say it doesn’t work. If you followed that system you could actually organise dates.
She could have told him: I can’t the day after tomorrow. Be mysterious, busy. Next week, perhaps. If I’m free.
‘Be strategic. Be strategic,’ Nathalie always says. Nathalie was the one who lent her a tampon, to try. But it hurt like hell, even after she dipped it in oil the way Nathalie told her to. Still, the fireman put a whole finger in there, and a finger is pretty big (and if you think about the other thing, about the size of it…better not to think about it). ‘But you’ve got to be a bit wet,’ explained Nathalie. ‘That helps it slide in.’
She tried masturbating but even though she sighed, like her-mother-in-the-lotus-position, it didn’t work. And anyway, Nathalie warned her about tampons: a girl forgot she had one in, and the guy pushed the tampon so far up her that it tore her insides and she died in a pool of blood.
Why is she crying tonight? She has no idea.
‘I remember when I was your age, it wasn’t easy, I had my ups and downs, they say it’s the awkward age, my poor darling, but you can’t stay a little girl all your life, you’ve got to find a way through it, you’ll see, like a bed of thorns, and later you’ll have a job, and children, you’ll be fulfilled, you’ll have a good life, better than mine, don’t model yourself on me.’
She starts sobbing, distraught. Just having this conversation with her mother makes her hiccup. And—it happens every time—she says something she hadn’t thought of saying, something she absolutely shouldn’t say—that she knows the truth about Papa.
No reaction from her mother.
That Delphine said that Rose had seen him carrying suitcases. Papa.
As if it wasn’t, like, the scoop of the century.
It was when they were going on holiday in England (she clarifies).
‘Do you mean that Delphine said that Rose saw Papa looking after the suitcases of someone in particular?’ Her mother manages to utter the words, with that frown on her forehead, as if her head was going to split in two.
She wants to press Rewind, it’s the wrong conversation, the wrong runway for takeoff.
‘Is that what you want to tell me?’ insists her mother in this moment of complicity they’re having. ‘Is that why you’re crying? Because Rose saw Papa with someone?’
She’d like to kill her.
Rose says that Papa is a porter.
Something like laughter appears in between the two pieces of her mother’s face. She gets up to reheat the tisane of relaxing herbs that she leaves to infuse all day, and she massages her third eye with the tips of her fingers.
‘When you were little,’ she says from the kitchen, ‘you always thought he was a pilot. Like in The Little Prince.’
Pilot or not, Papa is so much better looking than Maman…what’s she on about? You’ve got to go out with someone in the same league as you. (Even if he was just a street-sweeper Solange would have married him, for sure.)
23.23 p.m.
It annoys her that Arnaud would think she’s a virgin.
She slips on her sequinned T-shirt and tries it with her tube skirt. Or the jeans?
What she’d really like is if the barman or the DJ at Milord’s kissed her in front of Arnaud. And served her that Pineapple-Malibu cocktail she likes—‘the usual, Solange?’ The DJ would put on ‘Billie Jean’, wink at her, and she’d dance like a goddess and everyone would look and Arnaud would come up to her but she would rebuff him gently—she likes to dance by herself—he’d try to steal a kiss from her and the fireman would knock him to the ground and the DJ and the barman would have to intervene, Arnaud would have a bloody nose, she would keep dancing then she’d agree to go home with him and she’d pull him against her groin, her mouth open and her pelvis thrusting, he’d lift up her skirt and pull down her shiny gym leggings and her underpants (or perhaps she’d be wearing just her Prince of Wales check skirt and underpants) and he would penetrate her on the bonnet of the car, she would be teetering on high heels, which would really help when she was arching her back (but if she’s wearing jeans, is this actually possible when the jeans are pulled down?), and the fireman would be looking at them from the shadows, or (better?) the DJ and the barman would both be looking at her, they would think she was beautiful and a bit slutty, they would be jealous of Arnaud, she would open her mouth and arch backwards and Arnaud would slip his fingers between her teeth, she would bite them and groan and thrust her hips and hold him close (her arms folded over his back), wait, where would the fireman be (careful here), and Arnaud would possess her violently.
Once she’s come (not very intense, the whole fantasy got a bit complex) she feels less like going out, but the idea of staying alone in her bedroom, of sleeping there after having masturbated, is so depressing.
Bihotz must be watching ‘The Shrink Show’.
Her mother’s dozed off. Solange pinches her high-heeled shoes and leaves quietly by the French window. She folds back the shutter. It creaks a bit but her mother’
s sleeping pills are the real deal.
Bihotz drives in silence. He hunches over the cigar lighter and smokes.
On the side of the road, the eyes of a paralysed rabbit.
He’d been sitting on his front steps. You’d think he was spying on her, or on the lookout for her or something.
‘Were you really going to the airport?’
Yes.
A night bird grazes the bonnet of the car.
‘What do you want with your father?’
To see him take off.
‘On the last plane?’ He says that like it was a joke. Anyway, he’s taken the road to the airport.
She would have liked to go to the sea. Drive to the sea at night. She could have said to him: I’ve never seen the sea at night. It would have been true, and like in a film. Black waves. She would have had that feeling of finally being in the right film.
She wonders what he’s thinking about. It’s a bit of a freak-out to even think that. She slides a Marlboro out of the pack, puts it between her lips and lights it.
With a wave of his hand he knocks the cigarette away. She screams and twists around all over the place. It smells of scorched carpet, but her T-shirt is untouched.
You were already smoking when you were twelve, she protests. You used to hide in the chicken coop.
‘I was smoking when I changed your nappies. I filled your bum with smoke, if you really want to know.’
Go to hell.
What brilliant repartee. She takes another cigarette and feels invincible. There’s a cassette sticking out of the car radio, she pushes it in and it’s the band that Delphine recorded for her.
‘We’ve come to play in the happy house. We’re in a dream in the happy house...’
He’s singing over the top of the girl’s voice. With a really good accent.
So you’re stealing my cassette tapes?
‘I have a very broad taste in music.’
You don’t know anything.
She blows out the smoke and if he doesn’t watch out they’ll end up in the fucking ditch.
She watches him carefully. Only last week he took out a membership at the music section of the local library. And he’s a fanatic at Gym Tonic. Because, go figure, he might have a girlfriend. That’d be funny.
All the Way Page 10
