This is Life

by Dan Rhodes

  He hoped she would give him another chance, but it wasn’t looking good. He tried to find a way forward. Maybe a break of a few weeks would work for them. He supposed she would need at least that long to stop being so angry with him. This train of thought juddered to a halt. He was fooling himself. In a few weeks’ time he would be nothing more to her than a faint and unpleasant memory, surviving in her life only as the subject of an anecdote that she would tell her friends when they were exchanging stories about disastrous dates.

  He walked on to the appointment he had been so nervous about explaining to her. He was going to the home of the only person he had ever really talked to about what happened in his life, the only one who knew everything there was to know about him. And today he would be talking about a girl called Aurélie Renard, and how right she was for him, and imploring them to ignore everything he had ever said before about how he would never fall in love. And then he would go on at some length about what a mess he had made, and how angry he was with himself.

  He picked up the path alongside the Canal Saint Martin, his canal. He was tempted to throw himself in, to swim down to the bottom and burrow into the silt, never to surface again. But he didn’t. Instead he walked on, every step taking him closer to the bedside of his best friend. To the bedside of Dominique Gravoir.

  Aurélie looked at a sleeping Herbert, and drank her wine. She knew she ought to be sleeping too, but she couldn’t. Her mind was too busy. She was having trouble reconciling the Léandre Martin of yesterday with the Léandre Martin of today. Yesterday they had seemed to belong together, but today he had been so different. Yesterday they had gazed into each other’s eyes, and kissed on bridges, but today he seemed only to look at his fingernails, or into the middle distance. Yesterday conversation and laughter had flowed so naturally between them as they talked about everything and nothing, as if they had been old friends picking up after a long break and feeling as if no time had passed at all. Today though, their conversation had fizzled out before it had even begun; on the rare occasions when he had spoken it had been in code, and she hadn’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to try to decipher it. She tried to tell herself it was just a bad second date like any other, but it was worse than that. Her hopes had been so high, and she felt so defeated, and alone. She blamed herself for having been so stupid as to let herself be carried away by romantic notions.

  Longing for company, she reached for her phone. She had switched it off before she had met Léandre Martin, not wanting their afternoon to be disturbed, and she hadn’t switched it back on since. There were two messages: one voice mail and one text. She listened to the voice mail first. It was from him. Aurélie, I’m so sorry about earlier, he said. I handled things so badly . . . She wasn’t going to listen to his insincere grovelling. She deleted him. He was right though, he had handled things badly. He had been with a girl who was all packed up and ready to fall in love with him, and he had let her slip through his fingers. At least, she thought to herself, she had found him out early on. It would have been terrible to have discovered his scheming ways too late.

  She scrolled through a few menus until she found out how to block his number. That was it. Done. She wouldn’t be hearing from him again.

  The text, though, was unexpected. It was from Sébastien.

  He wanted to see her: I’ve been thinking about you.

  So he’d had her number all this time.

  She thought back to the night they had spent together on this bed, and how wonderful she had felt as she had lain in his arms. Maybe something could be salvaged from the day. She took another swig of wine, and thought for a while. Then she texted back: Come right away.

  XV

  Le Machine’s pizza arrived, but before he ate it he picked up a small capsule from the table. It had been there all along, but nobody had paid it any attention until now. He tapped it, and the sound boomed around the room. It was a microphone. Whenever Life was staged, he and his team made sure they added a few new elements, and this was going to be the first time he had used the microphone outside a trial situation. He unscrewed the bottle of sparkling water, and took a swig. He held it in his cheeks, then put the microphone into his mouth and let it sit there. The crackle of the bubbles as they fizzed in his mouth swept through Screen One of Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique in full surround sound, and the audience was rapt. He swallowed, and the microphone was inside him. Its journey had only just begun.

  Le Machine sat at the table and readied his utensils, all of which were made of glass. He always wanted as much of the equipment on stage as possible to be made from glass, and wherever he went he made sure to have the pieces made by manufacturers from the host nation, and after a lot of research, he and his team had found the people they believed to be the finest bespoke glassmakers in France. In Tokyo he had felt the glass was too thin and delicate, that it might not be up to the task. He had been particularly worried that either the faeces bottle or the urine bottle would crack. If it had done, the mess would have been so great that the exhibition would have had to be abandoned. He had always been on edge about this, but his worry had been misplaced; the glass had been perfectly engineered, and fit for its purpose. He had no misgivings about the quality of the craftsmanship now though – all the glassware was visibly sturdy, and though it lacked the delicacy of the Japanese pieces, it had been beautifully designed. Pieces by the same glassmaker were on sale in the gift shop: cutlery, crockery, replica specimen jars and various unique pieces for collectors. Piles of extra stock were stored in a warehouse, and their factory was on standby to fulfil further orders. One of the utensils was a bottle-opener. He used it to snap the cap off a bottle of lager. He took a long drink, the sound thundering around the room.

  Before long, he had finished the first bottle of beer, and the large pizza was half eaten. Le Machine stood up, and walked to the end of the runway. He looked around at the people who had come to see him, and for the first time that day he felt comfortable with what he was doing. His worries that the show would seem stale were unfounded. Here were over five hundred people, and most of them would have been experiencing Life for the first time. For them it was fresh and new, and he knew that every one of them was coming to their own conclusions about what it was all about. It meant something different to everybody. He knew he had been right not to give the journalist from L’Univers what he had been looking for. He had been looking for a single answer to the question: What is the meaning of Life? He had told him only that there were as many answers as there were people who came through the door, and for him to tell people how they were supposed to feel would be to insult them, to blinker them and strip them of the joy of the experience. Looking out, he was glad that he had held his ground.

  The reporter had not been delighted by his subject’s reluctance to cooperate, but when had saying the right thing to reporters come to be considered a part of the artistic process, anyway? It was all nonsense.

  Le Machine wasn’t going to worry about him now. How much harm could one person do?

  The audience watched Le Machine as he walked back along the runway to the main body of the stage. With all the water and beer inside him, it was at last time for the exhibition to live up to its reputation. He walked over to the glass urinal, and held his penis in his left hand.

  The audience watched in wonder as it came out, a pale yellow that was highly visible in the stage lights. His bladder had been full, and as the stream went on and on the visitors began to cheer, so loud that it could be heard above the sound coming out of the speakers. Then they began to chant his name: Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine!

  When he had shaken the final drops away, Le Machine bent down and picked up the jug into which it had all drained. He held it up. He knew everybody would be keen to see how much had come out. He walked over to one of the large glass vats, then he stood on a stool, took off a stopper and poured in the contents of the jug. He waited until every drop was in, then he replaced the stopper. Life had reall
y begun now, and things seemed to be going well. For the first time in a long while he had a good feeling: he was doing something worthwhile.

  Somewhere towards the back of the room there was a flicker of movement. It caught Le Machine’s eye, and he watched the reporter from L’Univers push his way past the other onlookers and leave the auditorium. He tried to work out from the look on his face what he had thought of the little he had seen of Life. He couldn’t. He was unreadable. Still, there was nothing he could do about him now.

  He swept the reporter from his mind, and looked out at the hundreds of people who had come to see him. For a moment he allowed himself to feel imperial. Paris belongs to me, he thought to himself. But this moment passed. There was a piece of Paris, the most important piece of all, that would never belong to him. He was going to have to spend the coming twelve weeks trying his best not to think about it.

  The cheering died down, and Le Machine returned to his pizza. He cracked open a second bottle of lager, and tried to make himself comfortable.

  XVI

  Aurélie worked fast. She fashioned a makeshift crib for Herbert out of folded blankets, and placed it in the same place where she had hidden him from Old Widow Peypouquet, on the floor behind the bed. He stayed fast asleep as she lowered him down and tucked him in. She thought back to what she had been wearing on the night she had finally managed to get Sébastien into her bed. It had been a party night, and she had dressed accordingly, in a short skirt and high-heeled boots. She looked through her drawers for a similar outfit. She didn’t want to disappoint him.

  She chose a tight black minidress, and slipped into it. Then she put on a bit of lip gloss and checked herself in the full-length mirror. She knew she looked good. Just the way he liked her. She kept her feet bare. She remembered that once she had got him home and stepped out of her boots he had spent quite a lot of time on her feet. That seemed to be one of his things.

  She checked herself from a number of angles. Before meeting Sylvie she would never have had the confidence to dress this way. Sylvie had told her time and again how good she looked. I don’t have a lesbian bone in my body, she had said one time, when appraising her outfit for a night out, but if I did, even if it was one of those really small bones you get in your ear, I would be all over you right now. She had told her that there must have been something wrong with Sébastien for not wanting her. When Aurélie had bemoaned her uneven teeth, Sylvie had explained at extreme length why, on balance, they were a good thing, and that they only enhanced her looks. She knew that Sylvie had not been sparing her feelings; she was never a great one for sparing feelings, and had been absolutely sincere. Since that day, Aurélie had never felt self-conscious when she smiled, and she no longer regretted refusing the offer of braces when she was thirteen. She had no idea how her self-image would have fared if it hadn’t been for Sylvie. Maybe she would have ended up such a wretched mess of insecurities that she would even have yielded to the advances of her nine-hundred-year-old professor. She felt nauseous at the thought.

  And it turned out that Sébastien did want her. He wanted her badly, and as she looked in the mirror she could see why. She felt a pang of sadness when she thought of the Léandre Martin of yesterday. She had caught glimpses of the two of them reflected in shop windows, and even though he was so much taller than she was, she had thought they fitted together well. She wondered whether they would have spent the night together if it hadn’t been for Herbert. She would have been ready to. She’d had a lucky escape.

  She pushed these thoughts away. Sébastien was on his way over, and very soon she would be exacting her revenge on Léandre Martin.

  Aurélie and Sébastien exchanged a few more messages, and she told him to come up quietly, not to ring the bell or knock on the door. She didn’t tell him why it was so important to be quiet. Soon he texted her to say he was outside on the street, and she buzzed him in. Her heart raced as she opened her door to him.

  And there he was, back again, all cheekbones and height, and expensive clothes. He smelled good, too.

  Aurélie motioned for him to whisper, mouthing that the walls between the apartments were thin. She directed him to the kitchen, where she shut the door behind them and perched on the worktop, crossing her legs. The room was so small that she and Sébastien had no choice but to be close together, almost touching.

  ‘You look good,’ he said.

  She acknowledged this with a smile. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ she asked.

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘Oh, do I?’

  ‘I want you, Aurélie.’

  ‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ she said. She knew he would be expecting a demand for an explanation, and she didn’t want him to think she was being a pushover. ‘You’ve been ignoring me ever since you were last here.’

  ‘Things have been complicated.’

  ‘And now they’re not complicated any more?’ She smiled. ‘So you’re getting rid of Sculpture Girl?’

  He looked her in the eye. At least he had the decency to do this. ‘No,’ he said.

  Aurélie was unsurprised by this revelation, and she was glad. It was going to make things so much easier, and more fun.

  ‘She and I are going places,’ he said. ‘We make a good partnership – we’re both artists on the rise, we’re both highly cerebral people.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘Well, you know . . . I wouldn’t say we were compatible artistically, or cerebrally. I mean, your drawings are nice, I suppose, but they’re not really . . . out there, like our work. They’re charming, in their own way, but it’s obvious that you lack our ambition, our fire. And that’s fine; we can’t expect everybody to be working at our level. There’s only room for so many people at the forefront of contemporary art – it’s basic mathematics.’

  She looked at him and smiled. Typical Sébastien, she thought.

  ‘Hey, what’s this?’ he asked.

  She realised that the list of Sébastien’s qualities that she had written on the back of an envelope was still stuck to the fridge door by a magnet. She hadn’t made much of an effort with it, and had forgotten all about it very shortly after writing it. She really should have taken it down before he got here, and she tried to work out a plausible explanation.

  He took it off the fridge and looked at it. She read it too, to remind herself of what she had written:

  Positives: Good-looking.

  Negatives: Bad at art, nobody likes work, stupid, horrible, only ever talks shit, embarrassment to self, no real friends, will amount to nothing.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. I mean, you got the first one right, and that’s the main thing for a girl, isn’t it?’

  She smiled. ‘You’re such a charmer.’

  ‘You know what I want, Aurélie.’

  ‘I think I do. You want to stay with Sculpture Girl, but you also want a bit of blonde in your life.’

  ‘I’m so glad you understand me. And you know it’s got to be secret. Nobody must know. Especially not her.’

  ‘So let’s strike a deal,’ she said, fixing his gaze. ‘Whatever happens in this apartment stays in this apartment. OK?’

  ‘That sounds fine by me.’ It sounded more than fine. It was exactly what he had wanted.

  She surprised him by holding out a hand, to shake on the agreement. This was getting better and better. He took it. It was soft, and smooth, and he was pleased to think about where her fingers would soon be.

  He moved towards her, and took her in his arms. She could feel that he was ready to go. ‘I’m so glad we’ve been able to come to an understanding,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, we’ve come to an understanding,’ she said.

  He felt a blunt jab in his side. He looked down, and straight away his burgeoning excitement shrivelled to nothing. The barrel of a gun was pressed against his ribs.

  ‘Don’t make a sound, Sébastien. As I said, these walls are paper thin and we wouldn’t want your squ
ealing to disturb the neighbours.’

  He trembled, and nodded. She lifted the gun, pointing it at his head, and he took a step back. That was as far as he could go – he was pressed up against the kitchen door.

  ‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t blow your brains out, you sleazy piece of shit,’ she whispered.

  ‘Because . . . because . . .’ His mind was blank. ‘Aurélie, put the gun down, please. Let’s just . . . talk.’

  This was great. The wine had really kicked in, she was feeling sexy in her dress, and Sébastien was getting the fright he deserved. He would think twice about sneaking around behind girls’ backs from now on.

  ‘This is what happens when you don’t call for months, and then come crawling round for sex, Sébastien.’ She took a step towards him. All the anger she felt for him, for Léandre Martin and for Professor Papavoine merged into one delicious chunk of revenge.

  He took a step back, turned the door handle and darted into the main room. Aurélie followed him. In his haste to get away he had taken a wrong turning and fallen on to the bed. She pointed the gun at him and, for dramatic effect, she released the safety catch. The clunk sounded beautiful.

  He looked up at her, pale as a ghost. There were tears running down his face. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Shhh . . .’ she said, putting her left forefinger to her glossy lips. And with her right hand she pointed the gun at his head.

  ‘Oh God,’ he whispered. ‘No.’

  She was surprised by just how little pressure had been needed to fire the gun. Whenever she thought back to this moment, she knew that she really hadn’t meant it to go off. She only had her finger on the trigger for the sake of appearances, but after what had seemed like the slightest of squeezes the bullet had come out.