The Reader on the 6.27 (6 page)

From Monday to Friday, Guylain’s brain was numb from work. In the run-up to the Paris Book Fair in April, the stream of lorries swelled considerably. The bumper crop of autumn books and the prosperous prize season were long over. Space had to be made, the shelves emptied of all the unsold books. The newcomers were pushing the oldest towards the exit, assisted by the bulldozer’s blade. From dawn to dusk, they had to flatten again and again that damned mountain that continually rose up from the works floor. The containers filled at a rate of one every twenty minutes. They no longer even halted the Zerstor when they replaced the vats filled with pulp. ‘Wastes too much time,’ Kowalski had barked at the beginning of the week. ‘It slows things down too much and we lose containers with all the messing around.’ So they had to wade around in the sludge each time they changed the vats and feel the brunt, without flinching, of the Thing’s foul-smelling farts right in their faces as they stood behind it. And when it was finally time to go home, Guylain still had to put up with Kowalski, who came out to bawl the day’s tonnage proudly at them from up on his gangway. For Fatso, the only thing that mattered was the curve, that inconsequential red line with tonnes on the X-axis and euros on the Y-axis, which looked like a great blood-coloured gash across the nineteen-inch screen on his desk.

The weekend arrived like a haven in which to deposit all the fatigue built up during the week. Monique and Josette Delacôte were expecting him. The taxi ordered fifteen minutes earlier appeared at the top of the road and drew up at his feet.

Guylain clambered inside and gave the address to the driver, who gave an authoritative jerk of the steering wheel and joined the heavy Saturday morning traffic. Less than ten minutes later, the car turned onto a wide gravel drive. As they drove through the gate, Guylain was able to read the inscription in gilt lettering on the gleaming plate. ‘Magnolia Court.’ He immediately recalled the two words that had been crossed out on the Delacôte sisters’ visiting card. Catching sight of the imposing building surrounded by gardens, Guylain was unable to suppress a gasp of surprise. From the start, he had been expecting a little suburban house. As the taxi drove the last few metres, he remembered the elderly lady’s words:
We have lunch at half past eleven. Thursday’s no good because there’s rummy
.
Except Sundays, of course, because of the families.
It all made sense at the sight of the many silhouettes at the windows. He realized then that when she’d said ‘we’ she hadn’t meant just the two sisters. The sound of the gravel crunching under the wheels of the taxi died away as he walked with a hesitant step towards the house.

Monique came trotting out to meet him, with Josette close behind like her shadow. They were primped and preened as for their first ball. ‘We were afraid you’d changed your mind at the last minute and that you weren’t coming. Everyone’s dying to see you, you know.’

Guylain choked back his anxiety. How many people was ‘everyone’? Panic-stricken, he imagined a sea of purple rinses. He wished momentarily that he’d stayed under his duvet watching Rouget de Lisle blowing bubbles.

‘Come on, we’ll introduce you. By the way, we don’t even know your name.’

‘Guylain. Guylain Vignolles.’

‘Oh, Guylain, that’s a pretty name. Very pretty, isn’t it, Josette?’ Guylain told himself he could have been called Gérard, Anicet or Houcine and it would not have made a jot of difference to the way Josette devoured him with her eyes. He walked into Magnolia Court flanked by the two sisters hanging on his arms. In the spacious lobby there were half a dozen old folk slumped on seats, snoozing. The building looked new. Impersonal, functional and sterile were the three words that came to mind as Guylain discovered the place. The tap-tapping of walking sticks must echo as in a crypt, he thought with a shudder. It smelled of nothing, not even death.

‘This way,’ whispered Monique, steering him towards the dining room. ‘You’ll have to speak in a loud voice, of course.’

The room was packed. Around twenty men and women were herded in there, each older than the other. When he stepped through the door, they X-rayed him from head to foot. The staff were among them, recognizable not only by their youthful age but by their pink uniforms. The tables had been pushed back against the walls to make space. Guylain stared nervously at the armchair in the centre of the room, whose armrests invited him to be seated.

14

‘I am delighted to introduce Mr Guylain Gignolle, who is honouring us with his presence today and will kindly read to us. Please give him a warm welcome.’

Guylain gratified Monique with an indulgent smile for mangling his name and greeted the gathering with a curt nod. Mademoiselle Delacôte number two fluttered her eyelids at him in a flash of pearly salmon-pink eyeshadow and jerked her chin at the armchair inviting him to be seated. Like a robot, Guylain walked across the room with a gait he intended to be casual but which was stilted and unsteady due to the huge bag he was carrying. The room was as hot as a pizza oven, minus the aroma. Guylain sat down on the padded velvet Louis-something-or-other armchair and took the little bundle of loose pages from his satchel. Then, with all eyes staring at him through their cataracts or incipient cataracts, he began reading the first live skin:

‘
Ilsa watched the fly. The dog gazed, fascinated, at the insect as it continually buzzed in and out of the man’s gaping mouth. It was always the same little game. The fly rose up into the air for a moment, with that funny way flies have of flying and which irritated Ilsa, veering off at right angles as if imprisoned in an invisible cube and then returning to its starting point. It was a plump bluebottle, its shiny blue abdomen swollen to bursting with hundreds of eggs that were just waiting to hatch as soon as they were deposited in the midst of all that dead meat. The dog had never noticed just how interesting a fly could be. She usually just chased them by moving her head, seeing them simply as little black specks that buzzed through the air. Her jaws often snapped shut on thin air. When winter came, the flies vanished as if by magic, leaving behind them the occasional desiccated corpse on the windowsill. In winter, the dog forgot about flies until the following summer.

‘
The fly landed on the man’s lower lip, marched up and down like a soldier patrolling the battlements, then went in and wandered over the purple tongue. It vanished completely from Ilsa’s sight as it disappeared into the dark, moist depths to go and lay its new clutch of eggs in the cold flesh. From time to time, the fly abandoned the corpse to go and settle on the pot of jam sitting on the table. The dog could see its tiny proboscis attach itself to the translucent surface of the redcurrant jelly. The smell of coffee still hung in the air, heavy and sweet. When the bowl had shattered, it left a pretty star-shaped puddle . . .
’

A muted purring reached Guylain’s ears from the third row where a dear lady, her head lolling back and her mouth wide open, seemed to be inviting the fly to come and visit her next. The rest of the audience, sitting stock-still, waited in reverent silence to hear more. Beaming with delight, Monique gave him the thumbs up. As he turned the page over to read the other side, a lady bleated a question: ‘But do we know what this man died of?’ This was the cue for others to pipe up. Questions and suppositions rained down from all sides.

‘From an attack; it’s bound to be an attack.’

‘What kind of attack? And why would it be an attack, can you tell us that, André?’ sniped a sickly-looking lady.

Guylain did not know what André had done or not done to this fury in a sky-blue quilted dressing gown, but the reply had the sting of a hard slap.

‘How on earth would I know? An aneurysmal rupture or a heart attack. Some sort of attack,’ mumbled the old fellow.

‘Ye-es, but why doesn’t his wife call an ambulance?’ asked another.

‘What wife? It’s not his wife, it’s his dog. Lisa, her name is,’ chipped in an old man wearing a baseball hat.

‘Lisa’s no name for a dog.’

‘Why not? Look at Germaine – she called her canary Roger, like her late husband.’ The Germaine in question squirmed in her chair with embarrassment.

‘I thought it was the fly that was called Lisa, I did,’ stuttered an old bod dressed in black from head to toe.

‘Please, please, maybe we could let Monsieur Gignal read us the next bit, which I’m sure will tell us more,’ cut in Monique authoritatively.

Clearly, thought Guylain, Mademoiselle Delacôte number one had the art of truncating his name every time she opened her mouth. Taking advantage of the brief lull, he jumped into the breach of silence that she had opened up to carry on reading:

‘
. . . and splattered the chair legs and the man’s socks. But beneath the fragrant aroma rising from the floor, Ilsa detected another much headier smell. It was the lingering odour of blood. It was everywhere, imbuing every molecule of air that the dog breathed, a prisoner like her of the tiny enclosed space. Ilsa could not get away from it. This smell was driving her crazy. The bright red pool had rapidly spread on the Formica top, first surrounding the pot of jam and then reaching the edge of the table and dripping slowly onto the floor. Litres of blood had gushed out in a beautiful scarlet geyser through the tiny bullet hole . . .
’

‘Ha! You see, André, it wasn’t an attack.’

‘Shh!’

‘
. . . in the man’s temple. When the shot rang out, Ilsa curled up into a tight ball, her heart pounding wildly. She was unable to take her eyes off the smoking muzzle of the gun which had clattered onto the wooden floor. The man was slumped forward onto the table like a sandbag, his head turned towards her, his wide-open eyes staring. For three days now, his eyelids had not blinked. Once again, the dog scrambled up the narrow staircase to the door, which its paws had scratched with all the energy of despair, achieving nothing but chipping the varnish. Ilsa gulped at the warm, moisture-laden air surging through the keyhole. It had a stale, briny tang.
’

End of the first sheet. Usually, when he read on the train in the mornings, Guylain immediately went on to the next page, but today – was it their burning gaze or the depth of the silence that had fallen? – he paused and looked up. Every single person was staring at him, even the lady-who-snored-with-her-head-thrown-back who was back among them. He had the sense that there were too many questions left hanging in the air, too many mysteries that needed resolving, or at least containing.

‘So it wasn’t an attack,’ rapped out the fat woman full of venom, who above all sounded thrilled to have caught André out. To her left, a woman raised her hand. Monique gave her a curt nod, permitting her to speak.

‘Is it a suicide?’

‘Well, it certainly looks like it,’ he was surprised to hear himself answer in a conciliatory tone.

‘I bet he did it with a .45,’ stated a short, tubby man with a rasping voice.

‘Nah, I reckon it was a .22. It says there was a tiny hole,’ piped up another.

‘And why wouldn’t it be a rifle?’ mumbled an elderly lady hunched in her wheelchair.

‘Come on, Madame Ramier, how can a person shoot themselves in the temple with a rifle?’

‘Or it’s a murder, but I don’t think so,’ suggested a little old man, looking dubious.

‘But where is this happening?’ asked the one called André.

‘Yes, where is it happening? And why did the man do it?’ added an old dear in a worried tone.

‘Well,
I
think it’s in a farmhouse in the middle of the woods.’

‘And why not an apartment in the city? It’s not unheard of. Every year they find people who’ve been dead for days, sometimes weeks, even though there were neighbours all around them.’

‘Well,
I
say that it’s on a boat. A sailing ship or a little yacht. The fellow’s set sail for the open seas with his dog before blowing his brains out. It says so: it talks about moisture-laden air with a stale, briny tang.’

Monique, who seemed embarrassed by the turn things had taken, went over to Guylain to whisper some advice.

‘Monsieur Vignal, it might be a good idea to carry on and start the second reading. Time’s getting on.’

‘You are right, Monette.’

‘No, I’m Monique.’

Monique’s thing must be contagious, thought Guylain. ‘Sorry, Monique.’

He regretted to say that although their questions were justified, they needed to move on and leave the corpse, the fly and the dog to carry on roaming the seas, the woods or Montmartre if they preferred. A little old lady in the front row who had been fidgeting for a good five minutes raised her hand.

‘Yes, Gisèle?’ asked Monique.

‘May I be excused?’

‘Of course you may, Gisèle.’

Guylain witnessed the flight of half a dozen old biddies amid a tapping of sticks and a scraping of chairs. The whole lot of them scurried, wheeled themselves or hobbled off in the direction of the toilets.

Monique signalled to him that it was getting late and that he should start a new reading. He selected a new live skin at random from the pile at his feet.

‘
For nearly ten minutes, Yvonne Pinchard’s voice had been pouring into the priest’s ear. The little latticework shutter behind which Father Duchaussoy was ensconced was barely able to filter the stream of whispered words that gushed into the confessional in a torrent of syllables. The woman’s whining tone conveyed great outbursts of repentance. From time to time, the priest murmured a discreet “yes” to encourage her. After several decades of priesthood, he excelled in that art which consists of inviting people to continue without ever interrupting them. Blowing gently on the embers, rekindling the transgression in order to spark penitence. Not putting the semblance of forgiveness in their path. No, let them go through with it to the end, until at last they crumple of their own accord under the burden of remorse. Despite the rapid pace of her confession, it took Yvonne Pinchard a good five minutes more to pour out her soul. Leaning against the partition, the man of the Church collected an umpteenth yawn in his hands while his stomach rumbled in protest. The elderly priest was hungry. Since the early years of his priesthood, he had grown accustomed to dining frugally on confession nights – a salad followed by fresh fruit was often sufficient. Not stuffing himself unreasonably and saving room for all the rest. The weight of sins was not a hollow expression, oh no. Two hours of penitential vigil could nourish you and satiate your body just as much as a communion banquet. A sink waste pipe – that was what he was when he found himself shut up with God in that tiny cubbyhole. No more and no less than one of those huge waste pipes that collected all the filth of the Earth in their metal bowl. People kneeled, placed their dirty little souls under his nose just as they would hold their mud-caked shoes under the kitchen tap. A quick absolution and they were done. They left with the light tread of the pure. Then he would leave the church with a laboured step, his head nauseous with the filth that had seeped into his ears. But now, inured over the years, he heard confession without joy, without sadness either, contenting himself with plunging into the semi-torpor inevitably induced in him by the cosy atmosphere of the confessional.
’