The Reader on the 6.27 (3 page)

The lorry drew up with the long whistle of a tired whale, inches from the lowered barrier. Yvon abandoned Don Rodrigo and Chimene while he glanced up and noted that it was past the cut-off time for deliveries, and then dived back into Act III, Scene 4. The rules stipulated that out of consideration for the local residents, TERN had to cease all activity between 12.00 and 1.30 p.m., a rule that also included halting the comings and goings of the lorries whose job was to feed the Thing. The drivers all knew this and those who arrived after midday ended up having to park in the street until after lunch. Only a few rare reckless souls like this one occasionally tried to bend the rules and blag their way through.

Confident in the power of his thirty-eight-tonne truck, the driver pressed his horn and barked impatiently through his lowered window: ‘Hey, I haven’t got all day, you know!’ Stonewalled by the security guard, the driver got down from the cab and marched angrily over to the hut. ‘Hey, you! Are you deaf or what?’ Without looking up from the book in front of him, Yvon raised his hand, palm facing forwards, to indicate that for the moment his attention was occupied by something more important than listening to the insults of a truck driver having a hissy fit. Guylain had always seen Yvon apply this principle, which consisted of never stopping midsentence, for any reason whatsoever.
Never lose the thread of the Word, kiddo! Go right to the end; glide through the speech until the final full stop releases you!
Tapping on the window in annoyance, the driver said, even more contemptuously, ‘When the fuck are you going to lift the barrier?’

A new guy, thought Guylain. Only a newcomer would dare to speak to Yvon Grimbert like that! Slipping a bookmark into his 1953 edition of
The Cid
, Yvon gave Guylain a meaningful look and pointed to the box on the shelf running the length of the hut. It contained years of versifications from his own pen, carefully stowed away. Guylain brought it to him. The box on his knees, Yvon thumbed through his repertoire watched by the furious driver. His moustache quivering with triumph, Yvon picked out sheet number 24 entitled ‘Lateness and Punishment’. Adjusting his tie with an expert hand, he glanced cursorily at the text, just long enough to immerse himself in the role. He smoothed his silver hair with the palm of his hand and cleared his throat. Then, Yvon Grimbert, former pupil of the Alphonse Daubin school at Saint-Michel-sur-l’Ognon, class of 1970, subscriber to
Le Français
since 1976, fired his first salvo:

‘
Midday is long since past, look up at the great clock.

The big hand’s on the half hour and it will not stop!

Leave off your arrogance, your disdain disavow,

You might still have a chance that I could open now.
’

The bafflement on the driver’s face erased all traces of anger. His stubbly chin dropped as Yvon recited the quatrain in his booming voice. Guylain smiled. This guy was definitely a newbie. Yvon’s verse often had this effect the first time. The alexandrine caught them off guard. The rhymes assailed them, suffocating them as surely as a hail of blows to the solar plexus. ‘An alexandrine is as direct as a sword,’ Yvon had explained to him one day. ‘Its job is to hit the target, but it must be used wisely. Don’t deliver it like common prose. Recite it standing. Take in plenty of air to give the words impact. Enunciate each syllable with passion and fire; declaim it as if making love, with sonorous hemistichs, broken up by caesuras. The alexandrine demands dedication from an actor. No room for improvisation. You can’t cheat with a line of twelve syllables, kiddo.’ After so many years of practice, Yvon had become a master in the art of delivery. Drawing himself up to his full height, the security guard came out of his hut:

‘
Many a supplier has come to know my wrath,

But just get here on time and my voice will be soft.

Unload your consignment, and don’t look so amazed,

Ended is the torment you caused with this delay.

‘
Do try in the future to turn up here on time,

Legendary patience will not always be mine.

No matter what the hour, no nuisance is so great

As to accept receipt of new freight at this gate.

‘
Do not drive me crazy, warning is now given,

Within lovely ladies, furies can be hidden.

I remain your servant, yet hardly need to state

That within this precinct, I’m master of your fate.
’

By now, the lorry driver was looking seriously worried. All of a sudden, he was no longer watching Yvon Grimbert, lowly security guard, but the all-powerful high priest of the temple. Beneath his greying moustache, Yvon’s crimson lips delivered the defiant lines without trembling. The driver ventured a guarded reply and tiptoed back in his cowboy boots to the cab of his Volvo for protection against the avalanche of rhymes. Yvon pursued him. Standing on the running board, he hurled great volleys of verse into the cab while the panic-stricken young driver frantically wound up the window:

‘
When you are in distress, a juggernaut will serve

To hide your shame and stress until you find your nerve.

If you wish to silence the language of the muse,

Do not look so aghast and present your excuse!
’

Defeated, his forehead resting on the wheel in an attitude of submission, the driver mumbled a string of garbled words that sounded like an apology. As he made his way back to his glassed-in shelter, Yvon fired off one parting quatrain:

‘
I’m on my way right now to raise up this barrier

And quietly bring down my level of anger.

Now move this truck along, empty out its contents

May the shredder live long, after you are gone hence.
’

So saying, Yvon opened the way for the huge vehicle, which snorted a cloud of exhaust fumes. Guylain deserted his poet friend for a moment to supervise the unloading. Still in shock, the driver disgorged his load half onto the platform, half onto the car park. His delivery note stamped, he left, only too happy to see the barrier rise without his having to suffer further assaults from Yvon Grimbert, who was already back in his kingdom of Castile watching out for the Moors by Chimene’s side.

7

It was time to clean up – the moment Guylain so loathed. It was no easy task being swallowed whole by the Thing in order to scour its innards. Every evening he had to force himself to go down into the tank, but it was the price he had to pay in order to carry out his mission with complete impunity. Since Kowalski had installed CCTV cameras all over the place, Guylain had not been able to remove samples as easily as before. Giuseppe’s accident had given the boss the excuse to equip the entire plant with six state-of-the-art digital cameras, tireless eyes that spied on the workers’ every movement all day long. ‘To prevent another such tragedy ever happening again,’ Fatso had said, his voice full of sorrow. A feigned sorrow that had not deceived Guylain. That bastard Felix Kowalski had never shown an iota of sympathy for the elderly Giuseppe Carminetti, considering him nothing but an unproductive alcoholic, a millstone. Above all he had taken advantage of the unhoped-for opportunity afforded by Giuseppe’s accident to carry out what he had always dreamt of doing: spying on his entire little kingdom without having to move his buttocks off the leather armchair he lounged in from dawn till dusk. To hell with Kowalski and his surveillance cameras.

After putting the Zerstor out of action, Guylain would slip down to the base of the funnel. The image of a panic-stricken rat clawing at the stainless steel sides often flashed through his mind at this point. He knew that the Thing was powerless to do any harm – the control unit was switched off, the fuel supply disconnected. But Guylain couldn’t help remaining on his guard, alert for the tiniest hint of a tremor, ready to tear himself out of the Thing’s clutches if it suddenly felt the urge to make a little snack of him. He released the cylinder housing and slid between the two rows of hammers. He still had to contort himself and crawl almost two metres to reach the lower rollers. He yelled to Brunner to pass him the grease gun through the side hatch. The gangly Brunner was too tall to be able to get inside the machine. It infuriated him not to be able to board the ship, to be forced to remain on the dock and be content with handing Guylain the 32-mm spanner, the oilcan or the hose. Guylain turned on his head lamp. It was here, in the still-warm steel belly, that he gathered the day’s harvest. There were a dozen or so pages waiting for him, always in the same spot between the stainless steel wall and the bracket of the last roller spiked with knives – the only place that was out of reach of the water jets. Flyaway pages that had been blown against the partition streaming with water and had landed on this spur of metal which had halted their fatal slide. Giuseppe called them live skins. ‘They’re the sole survivors of the massacre, kiddo,’ he would say, his voice emotional. Guylain hastily half-opened the zip of his boiler suit and slipped the dozen or so sopping pages under his T-shirt. After greasing the bearings one by one and thoroughly washing out the Thing’s stomach, he extracted himself from his prison with the day’s lucky pages snug and warm against his breast. As he often did, old Kowalski had torn himself out of his armchair to drag his mass of lard to the edge of the pigeon loft. He was tormented by the thought that one of his workers had been out of range of his spyhole for a few minutes. Despite the winking, blinking red lights on his cameras, he would never know what Vignolles got up to in the belly of the Zerstor. And that angelic smile that Guylain bestowed on him every evening on his way to the shower did nothing to reassure him.

Guylain stood under the scalding shower for nearly ten minutes. He was sick of the sludge he wallowed in all day long. He needed to cleanse himself of this muck, wash away his crime between these four yellow-stained walls. He stepped out into the street with the feeling that he had come back from hell. Once on the train taking him back to the fold, he brought out the rescued pages and laid them gently on the blotting paper that would free them of the moisture swelling their fibres. So that the next day, on this same train, the live skins would finally give up the ghost as he released them from their words.

8

Guylain did not read during the return commute. He had neither the energy nor the desire. Nor did he sit on the orange jump seat. After laying the live skins on their blotting paper and putting the folder in his bag, he closed his eyes and allowed himself gradually to come back to life as the carriage rocked his tired body. Twenty peaceful minutes during which life flowed back into him while the ballast streaming past under the train absorbed the day’s ill humour.

On exiting the station, Guylain walked up the avenue for nearly a kilometre then disappeared into the maze of pedestrian streets in the city centre. He lived on the third floor of an ancient apartment building at number 48, Allée des Charmilles. His cramped attic studio flat was spartan with its kitchenette from another era, Lilliputian bathroom and worn lino. When it rained, like today, the skylight let in water if there was a wind. In summer, the terracotta tiles greedily drank in the sun’s rays and transformed the thirty-six square metres into a furnace. And yet, each evening, Guylain arrived home with the same sense of relief, far from all the world’s Brunners and Kowalskis. Before even removing his jacket, Guylain went over and gave a pinch of food to Rouget de Lisle, the goldfish who shared his life, whose bowl stood on the bedside table.

‘Sorry I’m a bit late but the 18.48 should have been called the 19.02. I’m knackered. You don’t know how lucky you are, my friend. Sometimes I’d give anything to change places with you.’

He had caught himself talking to his fish more and more often. Guylain liked to think that Rouget de Lisle listened to him, suspended in the middle of his sphere, gills flapping, eager to hear about his day. Having a goldfish for a confidant meant expecting nothing from him other than to listen in passive silence, although Guylain sometimes thought he discerned in the stream of bubbles coming from the fish’s mouth the beginnings of a reply to his questions. Rouget de Lisle greeted him with a lap of honour then gulped down the food flakes floating on the surface of the water. All the lights on the telephone were winking. As he expected, Giuseppe’s voice erupted from the speaker as he listened to his answerphone messages:

‘Listen, kiddo!’ The old fellow’s elated tone at once swept away any shame that overcame Guylain at deceiving his old friend, as he was doing at present. After a long silence, beneath which he could hear the breathing of a Guiseppe almost fainting with emotion, the gravelly voice resumed:

‘Albert’s just called. We’ve got one! Call me as soon as you get in.’ The command brooked no evasion. Giuseppe picked up before the end of the first ring. Guylain smiled. The old boy was waiting for his call. He pictured him bundled up in the light-green blanket he always had wrapped around him, the telephone resting on what remained of his legs, his hand clenching the receiver.