Bye Bye Blondie (4 page)

Gloria sighs, then realizes that she's suddenly been seized with a burst of enthusiasm. Part of her is rubbing her hands with glee and rolling up her sleeves:
Right, who's next?
Through suffering, by a mysterious kind of emotional alchemy, the heart generates its own bursts
of sunshine. Alas, they don't last long.

“Would you like some herbal tea?”

If Gloria wasn't sleeping here, she'd have snapped back: “That stuff? Stupid, money-saving, middle-class fad.”

Instead, she asked, “No beer left?”

Terrible feeling as night falls, a cold monster is prowling around her, wanting to grab hold of her and suck out what remains of her reason. Or self-control.

Véronique has pulled a pile of children's exercise books out of her big black satchel. She puts them on her desk and starts marking them. Gloria is interested in what she's doing.

“You give them grades? Even in nursery classes?”

“Yes, I draw a little red man with his mouth down when something's wrong, and a green one with a smile when it's right. If it's just peculiar, I draw an orange man with a funny nose.”

“Poor little kids,” Gloria says with sympathy, “even when they're five years old, they get to feel they're failures.”

“We have to assess them, it's compulsory. I don't know what to say really . . . it's not the worst thing we have to deal with just now.”

“Yeah right, that's why you're on strike all the time.”

“I'll let you take my place for a year, and you'd soon see whether we're on strike all the time. Three weeks and you'd be on your knees, then you'd know what I'm talking about.”

The telephone rings. Véronique freezes, glances at the time, and picks up, looking anxious. It's the sort of time when you get bad news. Gloria watches the expression on her face, praying that it's not some serious crisis. She wants to be able to cry herself to sleep on her pillow, not to have to comfort the friend who's putting her up. But Véro stands stock-still, opens her eyes so wide she looks like she's had a face-lift, gasps, replies, “Yes yes yes,” and holds out the phone, pointing to it and whispering excitedly, “It's
him
!” Gloria's heart is jumping under her ribs, she imagines it's Lucas.

“So, we meet for the first time in twenty years, and the first thing you do is stand me up!”

In other circumstances, indeed, she would be amused, or flattered, or mad with rage that he might imagine she'd forgotten the past . . . but this evening she's simply desperately disappointed that it's him.

She replies dully, “Sorry. I couldn't wait. But honestly, I didn't think you'd turn up.”

He's super excited, in a good mood, cheerful.

“You're not far away, is that right? Jérémy told me. Come over here and join us! I'd so like to see you again.”

He shouts the last bit, she pulls the phone away from her ear. If she had set out to impress Véro, she'd do exactly this. She wouldn't have minded basking in a little reflected glory, but all she feels is sad, like someone who's going to be sleeping alone because she's been thrown out again. She has tears brimming in her eyes and is in no mood to joke, she sighs and replies, “Listen, I'm going to be straight with you. What the fuck makes you think I want to see you?” She articulates every syllable. “You and your fucking stupid TV face, do you get it, go back to your studio and don't imagine for a
second
that I've forgotten anything, GET IT? ANYTHING AT ALL. Right, bye.”

She hangs up. Now, as well as feeling sad, she feels ridiculous. Véronique stares at her in astonishment. Gloria feels tears running down her cheeks, her confused feelings are upsetting.
She shrugs.

“Okay, it's silly to insult him. But it all started with him.”

“What? Insulting people?”

“Having
anything
to do with men. Him, that prick, he was the first Hiroshima in my life. You have to understand, I don't care if for him it's all buried in the past, but for me . . .”

She's weeping softly now. Sweet tears running down to her lips, she can feel the floodgates about to open, she'll be bawling soon. Véronique holds out a whole box of Kleenex and asks again, “Sure you don't want some herbal stuff?”

“You haven't got any pot left, have you?”

Véro goes to look in a drawer, finds a little joint and hands it over. Then she hesitates, but ends up asking all the same, “You really know each other
that
well?”

Funny how everyone's so interested in that
.

She avoids talking about it, because it fascinates them so much, and that really drives them nuts.

“Big fucking deal. He's on TV, what's so special about that?”

“Well, to be honest, I really like his show.”

“Well, to be honest back, are you out of your mind?”

She feels as though she's stuck in the last century, the olden days, when if you did something at home, you didn't go telling everyone about it next day. One of Gloria's big problems is that recently she hasn't stirred outside her bar. She's not up to speed with the huge changes that have happened to her contemporaries. For instance, their recent passion for watching trashy TV shows. As if it were fun, as if it were innocent, as if it were anything but pure surrender, and as such, totally unacceptable. She could give them a hard time about it, but she senses that other people are tired and discouraged. Not everyone is like her: still ready to go mad with rage and smash the place up. Most people need rest and something to amuse them, otherwise they wouldn't get up in the morning.

Véronique is avoiding her eyes, looking unhappy and embarrassed to have brought it up. She brings a prebaked pie out of the oven and cuts them two large slices. Gloria's irritation vanishes as she watches her, with a slight feeling of shame. It's not because her friend likes watching stupid TV shows that she's in this state. Gloria pushes out her lips to look like a duck, as if it is going to help her think, then decides to try and tell the story. But it won't come out easily, it was all a long time ago, and she hasn't thought it through properly since.

“You know quite well where I met him. Everyone knows it, in this stinking town full of hicks with nothing better to do than gossip about everyone.”

At that moment, she understands what the “id” means that psychoanalysts go on about. Because right now, the id is talking through her. She can hear herself spitting out the words, spluttering as she speaks, aggressive and unhinged. But the moment when she “makes a decision” to express her anger, that exact moment, she can't quite reach it.

Once more, Véronique stiffens in her chair, embarrassed to have provoked this reaction. She apologizes: “I'm sorry, it's none of my business. I was acting like a groupie, it was indiscreet.”

The nicest people are always the only ones who ever apologize for being annoying. Pity, that
.

But Gloria's memory is stuck in a groove, she has a flashback to the same image, almost twenty years since it happened, the same image that stays with her: her father is standing in a corridor and watching her disappear. She's being dragged backward, held up under the arms by two men. Alongside her father are the doctor and her mother.

They too are looking wretched. The pain spreads around her. As usual, she's the one causing the pain . . . To get back into her memory, she has to get past the barrier of that image: she'd dropped to the floor screaming, the two men had picked her up and forced her into that place, the institution where they were going to deal with her. For her own good. She's looking at her father: “No, no, please!” Her screams are hardly noticed. In this place they're used to them, she finds out later. And he watches her vanishing, his eyes are sad—never has she caused him so much pain. But she's the one who's being locked up, and who won't be able to bear it.

She must try and keep that image at bay, stop it from turning into a loop, or else . . . But that's exactly what happens. She holds her head in her hands, the first hot tears burn her eyelids as they well up, then they roll, comfortingly, down her cheeks and fall on the table.

“It was just after dying that I met Eric.”

IT WAS IN
1985, days after Christmas. It had been snowing nonstop, the countryside was white everywhere, as it can be in eastern France.

An acquaintance, a fan of the Cure, always dressed in black, had taken advantage of his mother's absence to have parties at his place every night. He lived in Jarville, near the railway bridge. Gloria didn't know him well, but they'd bumped into each other that morning on the twenty-one bus. Impressed no doubt by her look, he'd invited her. Preferring to avoid long negotiations with her parents, she simply didn't tell them. As usual, and like many other teenagers at the time, she'd climbed out of the window and gone there on foot, it was only five minutes away.

They were listening to Lydia Lunch. Gloria was wearing a dog collar with a leash, far-out. She'd spent much of the evening walking around a bedroom, listening to the same song on loop. Other kids were out of it on the couch. Two of them were necking, covered with studs and chains, the pair of them, very thin, like two little birds who'd fallen into the water. The bedroom floor was covered with a dark blue fitted carpet, scratchy to the touch, when you put your hands on it. Next door, the TV was on, playing Madonna's “Like a Virgin.”

A nice evening, quite calm, until this boy called Léo arrived. He wasn't from Nancy, she'd never seen him before. In fact she'd never seen anything like him. A punkette's dreamboat: blond hair, androgynous beauty, but very masculine attitude, like a mischievous pixie. He was wearing a super-tight black biker jacket and short jeans over electric-blue creepers. She could hardly believe her eyes seeing him arrive. She'd stopped circling the room at once and joined his group of hangers-on. Even in her dreams, she hadn't imagined anyone looking like that. So perfectly perfect. A promise of total fulfilling happiness: a welcoming tropical jungle. Without even trying to speak directly to him, she'd found plenty of ways to be near the corner where he was. The little prince laughed a lot. Gloria wasn't the only one to be knocked out by his looks. The whole gang had spontaneously grouped itself around him. Whatever he said, there was always someone who found it hilarious and burst out laughing. He played it up, simpered, struck poses, came on a bit camp, but never lost anything of his masculine aura. Yet he was also acting the beautiful angel.

Luckily he ended up asking her, yes
her
, if she knew where he could find any acid. Gloria had shrugged, playing the girl who isn't shocked, knows her way around town, and likes to help visitors. Inside her head, everything was fizzing, exploding, going off like fireworks. But she stayed calm and just said, “Might be some at La Paix, it's a bar near the station, yeah, I think they might have some there. Or else the Campus, it's a club.” She wasn't bullshitting, but she wasn't as certain as she was pretending either. She passed him the bottle of whiskey she was holding by the neck. She congratulated herself on having worn her lacy white tights and vinyl miniskirt with holes, which was too tight so it made her behind look great. She'd almost turned up in bleached combats and dark red Doc Martens. She'd have scared him off then, for sure.

So he had followed her out. They couldn't find any driver willing to take them into town. Great, they'd have to walk, just the two of them, to the bus stop. In the cold, which made you want to link arms. They'd filled their pockets with Kronenbourg cans and left the party together. In the white expanse outside, the carpet of snow crunching under their steps, the expression “walking on air” had made her beam with happiness.

She'd waited till they got to the bus shelter before counting . . .
three, four
. . . “Wanna sleep together?” She'd taken a big deep breath first and clenched her fists in her pockets. Didn't take it the wrong way, visibly flattered, not dismissive. “Okay if you like, but let's do the acid first.” She'd stretched out her legs, sitting up against the glass panel of the bus shelter, stunned by the promise: they were going to sleep together. They sang “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” She was amazed that a guy like this could even exist, and her mind was blown by the thought that he was talking to her. So, okay, life was less crap than she had imagined.

On top of that, they did find some acid at the first bar they went to. She liked taking it, even if it made her freak out, ever since that memorable night when she'd found herself, who knew how, in the park by the garden center where some fairground folk were setting up their swings and roundabouts. Léo wasn't taking much initiative, but he let her caress and kiss him, amicably enough. Gloria looked sideways at him, hard to believe it was really true that she was having a laugh with this boy. He was going back to Paris on New Year's Day for a rock concert at Juvisy. She slapped her thighs: incredible, she'd been planning to go to Paris then too, they could take the train together. He was as sweet as he was easygoing. He'd said, “Yeah, that'd be cool,” without trying to get any advantage from his being so good-looking and exciting. They were waiting for the acid to work, hiding from the wind in another bus shelter, this time in the town center. When a car slowed down as it passed, Gloria had just noticed that the LSD was taking effect, because sounds were becoming a taste in her mouth and the air was full of colors. The car door slammed and her father surged up, a giant, raging with fury, he'd been driving around town for an hour looking for her—turned out someone had asked for her on the phone and they'd realized she wasn't in her room.

He had snatched her away—literally and roughly—from the arms of Prince Charming. She just had time to say, “See you tomorrow.” Then in the car, sitting by her father who was yelling and banging the wheel with his fists, she'd begun to realize the acid was really hot stuff.