All the Way (14 page)

‘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.

You've never even slept with a girl, never even touched one.

To sound nastier, she'd have to say
tu
and not
vous
. Virgin. Faggot. Prick. The ruder, the funnier.

‘What would you know?'

I'm always here.

‘Not all the time.'

Stop the bullshit. At your age it's totally embarrassing. I wouldn't
want to be in your shoes. If I were you, I wouldn't even
dare
leave
the house.

He stops under a tree and she's a bit frightened again. He cuts the motor and silence descends. There's a strange vibe coming off him, as if he doesn't quite inhabit the same time zone as her, as if he knows things she doesn't know. And what she wants is to drive fast, to go towards something, in the future, further away, the sea.

I mean, you never go out. You can't live like that. Even my mother
says it—and my mother adores you. She says life is passing you by.

He leans over, takes her cigarette between his thumb and index finger, throws it away. Everything goes very slowly and she doesn't utter a word. They look at each other. He grabs her shoulders with both hands and she feels small and very strong. He leans over, a thread of vapour separates them, time suspended in tenderness. But he sits back. Starts the engine again. The music blares.

Rising through the darkness, broken only by the beam of the headlights, is a glow that is neither sunset nor dawn, but the airport.

‘There's something you need to know.'

As if she didn't already know everything.

One day she saw a porter, in a train station. The only time she's taken a train. It looked like begging was part of his job. She couldn't care less about her father. She never wants to work. Ever.

‘You are in love with your father.'

She bursts out laughing.
That's
what he wants to tell her?

‘You haven't
thought
about things enough. There are connections between things, connections that you might not have seen. It's what's called the butterfly effect. When a butterfly flutters its wings in China, there are repercussions as far as Clèves. It's the same thing in your life. Things that happened a long time ago or that your grandparents did or even people who lived during the Middle Ages but who are linked to you through pathways that you could not begin to imagine. It's the same thing with your father. And you have to work on this, very methodically, free your mind of it. Otherwise, you know what will happen? You're going to throw yourself on the first guy who fronts up. All because you're in love with your father. It's the inner tyrant.'

The in-her what?

‘The inner tyrant.'

She's laughing so much she's crying. Her head out the window, breathing big gulps of balmy air.

‘It's like your father's inside you and is masterminding you. He
makes
you do things but you don't even realise. It's very, very common, especially for girls. You internalise your inner tyrant so much that you become your own inner tyrant.'

Like a tapeworm?

‘A what?'

If you swallow one that's in bread that a pig has pissed on,
afterwards it makes you eat things you don't want to eat.

There's an awkward silence.

It's something I read. Anyway, it might be true.

He's big, hairy, familiar and, watching him drive, she thinks that yes, amazingly, he does have something of her father about him. Or her father has something of Bihotz about him. Now she'd like to apologise. For having made fun of him.

What would you have wanted to do—for a job?

She'd like to have a serious conversation and another cigarette.

‘If what?'

I dunno. If you had worked.

‘What do you think I'm doing with you?'

It's not a job.

‘Well, what do you think it is?'

I don't know. A mission?

He laughs. It's funny how talking to him makes her more
spiritual,
as if she knows he'll always approve of her.

There's a plane on the runway. It's the Caravelle flight to Paris. People are walking under the wing and they could be wearing hats and trench coats like in the olden days, or pink suits like that woman trying to protect her blood-drenched husband in the convertible. They've been leaving for Paris forever, boarding in the timeless night-time.

‘What'll we do? Will we get on? Go to Paris together?'

She laughs.

Through the automatic glass door she thinks she glimpses her father, straight ahead, behind an Air Inter counter. In his uniform and cap. The door opens him up into two and vaporises him at the edges, then he comes together again, scarcely disturbed at all, resuming his conversation with a flickering air hostess. It's him, it's her father. Her father is an air hostess—she realises she's always known it—whatever you call the men, steward, ground steward, at the check-in desk.

Time: parallel lines of unequal width along an undulating, hazy ribbon. And there's another dimension, which is not space, not airports or the sky, but a sort of pit, in which her father goes up and down—pilot, porter, a pea in a lift—yo-yoing in this secret passage, smuggled into the
upper classes.

And a bit later, sitting in the J7, she sees him opening the door of the Alpine for the air hostess, she sees him as if for the first time, tall, svelte, elegant, almost like in an advertisement, a man who is her father, a man who calls himself her father, that man there in the car park.

Arnaud is supposed to be coming to pick her up on his moped. She's waiting for him out the front of her place, between the two houses, holding a helmet Bihotz made her take that dates back to when he had a moped.

It's four o'clock. Tea time. Her mother is at the shop. No chance Arnaud will catch sight of her. It would be embarrassing if he saw Bihotz, but
she couldn't care less about Bihotz
.

A dramatic expression on her face, the helmet in her hand, standing in the sun, jiggling from one foot to the other in her black outfit (her father's Polo and a pencil skirt and a little gold chain she bought at Dames de France and mascara and a black Borsalino hat she found in the cellar, never worn but classy in the most totally natural way). It's the dramatic expression she's practised in front of the mirror but perhaps it conveys the truth about her. She wore black because she's dark and mysterious, and a little gold chain because she's chic. What sort of girl is she
really
and which is cooler, to be
damaged
or
dependable
? Solange is dependable, Solange is in a bad way, Solange is very stable, Solange plays her cards close to her chest, Solange is perverse—it reminds her of the
Martine
magazines she read when she was little.

She's in black because she's on her own, an orphan, and because if there's a leak, the blood will be less visible.

At 4.15 Bihotz is smoking on his front steps and calls out to say what a great spot it is for a breath of fresh air. The guy thinks he's so smart.

This morning she read her erotic horoscope in one of her mother's magazines. ‘Venus is in your sign and you will be ruled by your desire. Your partner, under the influence of Mars governed by Saturn, is likely to be amazed but no more than you would expect. Surprising combinations are not to be ruled out. You will be transformed into a powerful horsewoman and it will be Love itself that you be astride. Drunk with sensuality, overflowing with passion, you will not know which way to turn to satisfy your admirer. Ice is not your element and you will burn under the tender gaze of Love.'