All the Way (15 page)

‘Aren't you hot in black?'

What a moron.

She's going to smell sweaty. As she stands in the blazing sun the sanitary napkin fills up bit by bit and that's going to stink too. What a drag. How many more years before she's rid of it? Thirty at least. If not forty.

Love itself. Under the tender gaze of Love.

It's going to take a while getting to the coast on the moped. She hasn't said anything to Bihotz (that Arnaud lives so far away) and how is she going to manage with her hat? Helmet plus hat, she hadn't thought about that.

Actually it's worked out quite well. The bleeding. She won't do it this time. According to Nathalie, you shouldn't sleep with a guy the first time, or the second time, or the third time. From the fourth time on, okay. By then the guy has shown that he'll pay the price. You've got to get him to respect you.

4.20. Still sitting out the front of his place, Bihotz is waving a piece of string while Lulu jumps at it like an arthritic cat.

She's not sure whether Arnaud is the type to wait. She's not sure whether she's worth waiting for that many times. It's hard to believe there are girls who are still virgins at twenty. How excruciating.

Bihotz shouts something else in her direction, waggling rabbit ears with his fingers.

Idiot.

On the other hand, Nathalie says that doing it while you've got it is the best form of contraception. Apparently the blood kills the sperm. Whatever, getting pregnant the first time you did it would be like losing at Russian roulette.

A faint buzzing in the distance, a moped, the noise gets louder and Bihotz yells, ‘HERE HE COMES!'

There he is. He's here.

Hi
, she says casually. He turns so she can give him a peck on both cheeks (a bad sign?).

She straddles the luggage carrier, Bihotz yells something else (he's tapping his head: the helmet), she jams her hat under her bum and sticks the thing on her head, she's going to have flat hair, what was the point of teasing it. She looks behind her for somewhere to hold on, Arnaud calls out something to her, she puts her arms around him, at first loosely then (it goes fast) right up close, and the Borsalino flies off.

He brakes. Stops. ‘Lean into the corners. Can't you feel it? If you don't lean you'll tip us over.'

She's such an idiot.

Anyway, it was just an old hat from the cellar.

Corner after corner, and the insides of her thighs are really starting to chafe, but he stops suddenly in front of a house (they are nowhere near the coast). Arnaud kicks out the stand,
clack
, takes off his helmet and shakes out his hair, the light sparkles in his green eyes and he looks so
mature.

They climb a staircase, a voice calls out, ‘Arnooooo?'

But he shuts the door. There are posters of Corto Maltese and of bands she doesn't know, and an entire wall of Polaroids—him and a whole bunch of people.

He gestures to her. ‘Can you put on the record?' He actually has a stereo in his room.

She concentrates on getting the stylus in the groove of the 45; it jumps.

‘Be careful!'

She starts again; that's it.

He tries to play along with the solo on his guitar.

Anyway, she shouldn't kid herself, they're just going to have a hot chocolate or something.

There's a knock at the door.

‘Yeeessss?' (He imitates a woman's voice, it's so funny.)

A loose perm and a bat-wing shirt and two hands carrying a tray with two orange juices—that's all she can see because Arnaud is blocking the doorway and saying, Yes, it's Solange and yes, hello, ‘say hello, Solange',
hello
, ‘hello,
Madame
',
hello, Madame
, ‘you have to be told how to do everything'. He laughs and she laughs too and the phantom disappears.

He turns up the music and locks the door. Something about this gesture grabs her. That bolt in its cylinder: just the two of them, all by themselves.

She sips her juice without making a sound, so refined. He mumbles over his chords.

‘Fuck!' He throws down the guitar. He stretches.

‘Look at the Ramones, or even Johnny Rotten, not one of them knows how to play. It's
energy
, that's what counts. Rebellion.'

He lights a cigarette. In his bedroom. With his mother just downstairs.

‘Rebellion. You know what?
Rebellion
(he puts on a serious voice) is a huge piece of commercial dishonesty. They lie, you buy. Open your eyes and you'll see how lies are the basis of our society. Take my mother. Do you think that's the real colour of her hair? It's all social conditioning. And you're conditioned, too—to want one thing and not another. You know what? You lie to yourself—you've been conditioned so much. All because why? So you'll want to buy stuff. Stuff you don't
need.
So that you'll want to
buy
yourself, buy you.
Okay, the Ramones, they're for real. But not Johnny Rotten. Not anymore.
No way.
'

He opens a window, grabs a pair of jeans off the floor and waves them in the air. She gets that it's to clear the smoke and she grabs a T-shirt and waves it around too.

‘As for my mother, perhaps that's not even her
real body
. Perhaps that's an alien conditioned to look like my real mother, who is wandering around somewhere after she's been brainwashed…No kidding, it pisses me off that she won't buy me a car. I'm eighteen in five and a half months, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life on a moped. It's insane. Stop doing that with the T-shirt.'

He sprays perfume round the room and puts some under his arms.
Azzaro for Men.
It's heavenly. Like a forest with sweetener added. Azzaro for Arnaud. He sits on the bed and pats the spot next to him. A cabin bed with drawers underneath. He smiles. ‘So do I have to do everything?' He kisses her. He pushes her onto the crumpled sheets and blankets. He whispers in her ear. That he is shy and he needs some affection.

I have to go to the toilet.

He unlocks the door. Luckily there's a basin and she washes herself without splashing too much water everywhere. There shouldn't be blood again straight away. She wishes she could call Nathalie to ask what she would do now.

She's got lines of some kind on her inner thighs. She's never noticed them before. They must be
stretch marks.
It's ridiculous. A ride on the back of a moped was all it took for the skin over her flesh to crack?

What to do with the pad? There's a rubbish bin, of course, a ceramic frog with a lily-pad lid. But they'd know who put it there. She rolls it up tight inside some toilet paper. There's no pocket in her skirt. She hides it in her fist. Pulls the chain—it's decorated with a macramé cap. Flips down the lid—it's also covered with a sort of tapestry material. The flush makes a hell of a noise.

She's startled—the mother is right there, outside the toilet door.

‘I knew it wasn't Arnaud. He never pulls the chain. Do you need anything? Is everything okay?'

Yes. No.

She goes back up the stairs, she'd like to run but that would be weird in front of the mother, and she's frightened she'll leak. She squeezes her hand tight over the pad, it barely sticks out at all.

Arnaud has put the record back on. He hugs her and she'd like to hug him too but she's only got one free hand and there's the helmet, right there—she'll hide the pad inside, under the visor. She manages to do it by wriggling around and there's a sort of quid pro quo, he kisses her on the nape of her neck, he lifts up her skirt and rubs his dick against her underpants. There's blood. Shit, there's blood. There's definitely
nothing
she can do, but he already has his fingers in her underpants.

‘Don't pull that trick on me again. You've actually got to do it the first time if you want to do it a second time.'

Fair enough. But it's not that, it's not that she's never done it before—he must definitely not think that—it's just that (watch out, she's going to say it, it's her turn, sad and serious)
I am indisposed.

‘Indisposed for what? You mean like girls?'

He pulls his hand back as if it's been bitten. He holds his bitten hand in front of him and unlocks the door again. She can hear the water running in the bathroom.

‘Arnooooo? Do you need anythiiiiing?'

She wipes herself with the sheet. Perhaps she should leave. Despite what her horoscope says. But if she goes home early, that would make Bihotz's day.

Arnaud comes back with the same look he had when he stuck his moped on the stand even though they weren't at the coast. A
mature
look. He locks the door again.

Fuck the horoscope. And fuck Bihotz. She leans over, lets herself fall onto the bed, he follows her, it's sweet, tender, they're lying on their sides like teaspoons. A long cuddle. She tilts her neck so that he can kiss her nape again, he rubs himself against her buttocks. She feels so happy. It's heavenly. All those painful years were worthwhile because of this single moment, this moment she was always destined for. That whole interminable past is emerging from an airless fog the colour of lake water and reeds, the slime of her infancy.

He sits up for a second to raise the volume, his dick is sticking out level with the record, as if he was playing it with the end of his penis
.
A musical penis. A penis with a stylus.

He lies down like a teaspoon again. She feels something really weird, something not at all
normal
but he hugs her very hard, she screams
stop
and he stops.

‘It's best like that. The best thing to do. Since you can't do it.'

Huh?

‘Don't make me spell out everything. It's annoying. We can, like, communicate without words. You girls have a very different relationship with your bodies. Straightforward. Whereas we guys need a bit more (he hesitates), a bit more time and tact from you. For example, people have been doing that forever. It's a cultural given. In the old days the Greeks did it all the time because the girls wanted to stay virgins, and right now, for example, I'm not criticising you, but since you don't want to, that is we can't, anyway it's easy, getting it to slip in I mean, so first you have to suck me and then it'll go in by itself.'

So first she has to suck him. The record stops, she gets (he gestures with his hand) that she has to start the music again. Keeping the dick in her mouth, she grabs the arm of the record player and tries to aim for the right groove while balancing on an elbow, it's not easy. ‘Come on,' she hears, ‘get going, it's killing me.' She feels a hot trickle between her legs. It's going to stain the carpet. Loose-perm is not going to be happy. The record starts up again, she's going to end up knowing it better than ‘Billie Jean', she should try to read the name of the band but it's spinning too quickly.

The dick slips out of her mouth. He groans—stuff it back in. There's something tickling at the back of her throat. She starts coughing and the blood spurts and she tries to stop it with her hand between her legs, she coughs and stops sucking for a second. He looks at her, gobsmacked. It's a pubic hair. Frizzy. No wonder it tickled. She gets back to it, her mouth busy and her hand too, between her legs, it feels good, she goes hard at it, come on, no slacking.

But he pushes her off, shuts his eyes and does yoga-style breathing (she wipes herself with the sheets). What does she do now, what does she do with all these bits of body—put them together again. An explosion—it would be good to have an
orgasm.

‘Okay,' he whispers.

On all fours behind her, he really does look like a dog. She sticks close to him so he won't see the blood (and the stretch marks). As long as they stay cuddled up like that it's fine, but all of a sudden (what a shock) it slides inside her. In that hole. Let's be clear about this: in the poo hole. The pain shoots right through her. He's holding on hard to her buttocks and saying something like, ‘Oohh, that's so good.' He repeats it and adds, ‘little bitch.' For once he seems to be speaking without irony. And the words are going inside there too, and it feels really odd and tight, irritating but not unpleasant, it's as if it's getting bigger bit by bit, something gets hot and stiff and feels pretty good (not the dick, it's her, her own body,
right there
).

She lowers her head and looks between her legs. She has balls. Balls hanging down from her and swinging,
gling
glong
. Pink and hairless, like her thighs, which are looking pretty good from this angle, slim, toned, strong, and her belly and her two little breasts and the feeling of being immense, spread out like a countryside, and of having this hanging thing bobbing around, a grasshopper, that's it, a big field and a little grasshopper.

Leaning further down, her buttocks in the air and her forehead on the mattress (if Bihotz could see her) she can see the dick clearly, it's funny, a snout nuzzling her, a long sausage body with a cloud of curly pubic hair—with the few pubic hairs she has it's like a poodle shaved everywhere except the head and the bum. A poodle that gets longer and then shorter, a poodle on a spring,
dzoing, dzoing.

He straightens her up, pulling on her hips and making a rasping sound. He's clutching at her, it's getting unpleasant. She tries to rub herself against something. She doesn't dare put her hands down there, apparently (Nathalie says) real women orgasm without using their hands (even
doing
this
?). She lowers her buttocks and looks for a pillow or a bunched-up blanket, it's not much fun—no, the shooting pain is too awful.

Stop.

Stop!

‘What?'

Stop, please. It's hurting a bit.

‘But I've almost finished, oh, please, oh wow, I've almost finished.' His sentence is lost as he keeps moving, it really does hurt, she should relax (Nathalie says that frigid women don't know how to relax), fortunately it doesn't last and exactly at the moment when the record stops he lets out a dreadful cry.