The Reader on the 6.27 (7 page)

Guylain quickly grabbed a third sheet before the avalanche of questions that was bound to follow if he waited too long. The clock over the double door already showed 11.15.

‘
The hitchhiker had told him her name was Gina.

John had desperately tried to catch the eye of the young woman hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses. For the umpteenth—
’

‘Monsieur Vagnol, I think Madame Lignon wants to ask you something,’ interrupted Monique.

The elderly lady in question was a tall, thin woman who sat stiff as a ramrod beside Monique. A Giacometti sculpture in flesh and bone, thought Guylain.

‘No problem, carry on reading.’

‘Go on, Huguette,’ encouraged Delacôte number one.

‘Well, I was a primary school teacher for nearly forty years and I always loved those reading aloud exercises. I’d be delighted to read a page.’

‘With the greatest of pleasure. Huguette, is that right? Come and make yourself comfortable, Huguette.’

She clawed the page from his fingers and she seated herself in the armchair. The steel-rimmed spectacles balanced on her nose made her look like a retired schoolmarm, which was very fitting, thought Guylain, because that’s what she was. The class immediately fell silent. Her voice was surprisingly clear except for a slight tremor, probably due to her emotion:

‘
The hitchhiker had told him her name was Gina.

John had desperately tried to catch the eye of the young woman hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses. For the umpteenth time since he had picked her up, Gina crossed her legs, shapely legs that seemed to go on forever. The silky rustle of her nylon stockings was torture.
’

Guylain jumped. That last sentence read by Huguette Lignon made him break out in a cold sweat. He instantly grasped that there was going to be a little problem. Since he had been rescuing live skins from the belly of the Zerstor, he had never taken the trouble to glance at them beforehand, preferring to deliver his reading without knowing the content in advance. In all these years, never until this moment had he come across the kind of excerpt that Huguette was reading, a Huguette in seventh heaven who was trying her utmost to find the right tone. So far she did not seem to have realized that she was heading down a slippery slope. Nor for that matter had the audience, who sat spellbound.

‘
As he forced himself to keep his eyes on the road ahead, the woman asked him for a light. Generally, he would not allow anyone to smoke inside his truck, but he found himself proffering her his lighter. She grasped his wrist in both hands and brought the flame close to the Chesterfield wedged between her lips, two full lips emphasized with a touch of gloss. She leaned forward towards the ashtray, brushing John’s muscular biceps with her nipple as she did so. John shivered at the contact with her delightfully firm breast.
’

Christ! It was what he feared. They were heading for disaster if he didn’t step in quickly. He had to stop this before John and Gina ended up lying stark naked on the bunk exchanging bodily fluids. And at this rate, it was likely to happen before the end of page two.

‘Huguette, I think it might be better to—’

‘Hush!’ was the unanimous response of the audience, who hadn’t missed a crumb of the story, making it plain to Guylain that any intervention on his part would be most unwelcome. He attracted Monique’s attention by clicking his fingers but she was utterly mesmerized. As for her little sister, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, she was lapping up the increasingly clear and less and less quavering voice of Huguette, who ploughed ahead without deviating from her course.

‘
Filled with a growing desire, the truck driver soon felt a little too constricted in his tight jeans. This woman was the devil, a desirable devil who flung her head back each time she exhaled, blowing out her cigarette smoke towards the ceiling light, arching her hips and thrusting her breasts forward. She removed her sunglasses, revealing two vivid blue eyes. Resting her elbow on the door, she turned towards John and partially opened her legs in a lascivious pose. Then, unable to control himself, he brought the thirty-eight-tonne vehicle to an abrupt halt on the hard shoulder, sending up a huge cloud of dust, and threw himself on the woman, who offered herself to him without any resistance. As he ripped off her lace panties, he tasted those lips parted to receive him. Gina slid an expert hand inside John’s trousers, seeking his turgescent cock.
’

A car hooting outside brought everyone back down to earth again. On the gravelled drive, the taxi was flashing its lights impatiently. A few of the residents came over to thank Guylain warmly for his visit, saying they were sorry it had been so brief. There was colour in their cheeks, a sparkle in their eyes. Huguette’s reading seemed to have brought a bit of life back to Magnolia Court. One dear old soul, her napkin already around her neck for lunch, asked anyone who happened to be listening what ‘turgescent’ meant. Guylain dashed off, not without promising to come back the following Saturday. He had not felt so alive for a long time.

15

The memory stick came into Guylain Vignolles’s life through pure chance. He could so easily not have seen it, or even quite simply ignored it. It might also have ended up in other hands, met a different fate. The fact is that early one chilly March morning, it jumped out of the folding seat as he lowered it. A little plastic thing barely the size of a domino which bounced across the floor of the compartment and came to a halt between his feet. At first he thought it was a lighter before noticing that it was a USB stick – an ordinary dark red USB stick. He picked it up, turned it over in his hand not knowing what to do with it and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.

His ensuing reading of the live skins was automatic, so preoccupied was his mind by the condensed memory lying deep in his pocket. That day, he barely heard Kowalski yelling, paid scant attention to Brunner’s sardonic smiles. Even Yvon’s lunchtime soliloquies failed to distract him from his thoughts. And that evening, the first thing he did on reaching home was not to feed Rouget de Lisle, as was his wont, but to rush over to his laptop and insert the memory stick, opening it up with a double click.

Guylain glowered at the nineteen-inch screen in frustration. The stick opened up a desert. Lost in the midst of the luminescent wilderness, the only folder it contained was prosaically called ‘New folder’ and did not promise anything very exciting. A gentle pressure of his index finger on the mouse unlocked the gates to the unknown. There were seventy-two text files called only by their respective numbers. Intrigued, Guylain moved the cursor to the first one and clicked apprehensively.

1.doc

Once a year, at the spring equinox, I do a recount. Just to see, to make sure that nothing ever changes. At this very special time of year, when day and night share time equally, I do a recount with, lodged in the back of my mind, the ludicrous idea that perhaps, yes, perhaps one day, even something as unchanging as the number of tiles covering my dominion from floor to ceiling might change. It’s as hopeless and stupid as believing in the existence of Prince Charming, but deep down inside me is that little girl who refuses to die and who, once a year, wants to believe in miracles. I know every one of my white tiles by heart. Despite the daily assaults with the sponge and detergent, many of them are still as shiny as on the first day and have preserved intact that slightly milky glaze covering the terracotta. To be honest, those aren’t the ones I’m particularly interested in. There are so many of them that their perfection holds no charm. No, my attention is drawn rather to the injured, the cracked, the yellowing, the chipped, all those that time has maimed and which give the place, in addition to the slightly old-fashioned character that I’ve come to love, a touch of imperfection that I find strangely endearing. ‘It is in the scars on the faces of the veterans that you can see wars, Julie, not in the photos of the generals in their starched, freshly pressed uniforms,’ my aunt said to me once while we were vigorously polishing the tiles with shammies to restore their former lustre. Sometimes I say to myself that my aunt’s common sense should be taught at university. My war veterans testify to the fact that here, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as immortality. Naturally I have my favourites among this little population of the wounded, like the one above the third tap, to the left, whose missing sheen makes a pretty five-point star, or the other one whose lustre has gone forever and whose strangely dull look contrasts with the sparkling purity of its fellow tiles on the north wall.

So this early spring morning, I roamed my tiled domain, pen and notebook in hand, to embark on the great annual inventory of my terracotta tiles. My progress obeyed a Cartesian logic which consists of going from the easiest to the most difficult, from the most to the least accessible. The count also begins with the two huge walls running either side of the staircase down to my kingdom. Followed by the north and west walls, at the junction of which is the little table that serves as my desk. Not forgetting as I walk past to open the two cupboard doors to list the few tiles covering the partitions, white tiles plunged in darkness from dawn to dusk amid the brooms, buckets, bottles of detergent and floor cloths. From time to time, I have to suspend the counting operation to note down the results in my spiral notebook. I push open the big swing door to the women’s section with my shoulder.

There, I cast my sharp eyes over the mirror surround, the tiled surface around the washbasins, and the splashbacks. After inspecting each of the eight cubicles, gazing into the dark nooks and crannies to pick out the tiles hidden in the gloom, I do the same on the men’s side, which is identical to the women’s except for the six urinals gracing the back wall.

I sat down at the table, grabbed the electronic calculator from the drawer and impatiently entered the figures written down in my notebook. As always, my heart began to race as my finger pressed the EXE key for the grand total. And of course, as always, the same depressing number appeared on the screen: 14,717. I’m still dreaming of a warmer, rounder number, a more visually appealing number. A number containing a few nice bulbous zeros, even some deliciously plump eights, sixes or nines. A curvaceous three, as ample as a wet nurse’s bosom, would be enough to make me happy. A number like 14,717, is all bones. It exposes its skinniness directly, assails your retina with its sharp angles. Whatever you do, once written down, it always remains a series of fractured straight lines. It would only take one tile more or less to give that unappealing number the beginnings of an attractive curve.

I put the calculator back in its case with a sigh. 14,717. Once again I’m going to have to be content with that ungainly number for the coming twelve months.

Guylain reread the piece three times, even though his eyes smarted with exhaustion from his day’s labour. And each time, he felt the same enchantment in this woman’s company. He made himself a strong black tea and printed all the documents out, then snuggled under the duvet to start on the second file. Late into the night, Guylain read each of the seventy-two entries, devouring them with pleasure. After skimming over the last page, he fell asleep, full of this Julie, and her little tiled world, who had just burst into his life.

16

That morning, Guylain counted nothing on his way to the station. Nothing. Not his footsteps or the plane trees, or the parked cars. For the first time, he didn’t feel the need. In the dawn light, the graffiti tag on the metal shutter of
La Concorde
bookshop seemed more colourful than usual. He felt the pleasant weight of his leather briefcase in his right hand, swinging to the rhythm of his strides. Further down, he cleaved through the billows of hot fat spewing out non-stop from the small basement window of the butcher’s shop, Meyer & Son, without the slightest feeling of nausea. Everything around him glistened and twinkled. The shower in the middle of the night had glazed each object, making it beautiful. At number 154, he did not fail to greet the old-man-in-slippers-and-pyjamas-under-his-raincoat. The old boy smiled with pleasure at the sight of Balthus, who was watering the base of his tree with a long, powerful stream.

Guylain climbed up the steps to the platform and stood on his white line. It stretched out into the greyness, whiter than ever. The 6.27 arrived on the dot of 6.27. The folding seat opened without protest when he lowered it. He took the cardboard folder out of the briefcase at his feet. Although the ritual was no different from any other day, it was plain to the more sharp-eyed observers that the young man’s movements were less mechanical than usual. The disquiet that habitually set his features in a sad mask had vanished. Those same observers could also see that the blotting paper and onion skins had been replaced by ordinary A4 sheets. Without even waiting for the train to depart, Guylain began reading the first extract, labelled 8.doc, in a steady voice:

‘
I like to get to the shopping centre early. Slide my pass into the electronic lock of the little side door at the far end of the car park. The unprepossessing steel door completely covered in graffiti is my entry point. As I walk down the central mall towards my domain, the only sound is that of my footsteps echoing off the shops’ metal shutters. For the rest of my life, I will remember what my aunt said to me one day when she took me to work with her. All of eight years old, I scampered along beside her down this same mall. “You are the princess, my little Julie, the princess of the palace!” The princess has grown older, but the realm has barely changed. A completely deserted realm of over 100,000 square metres, awaiting only its subjects. I greet in passing the two beefy night security guards finishing their final walkabout before going home. They often say something nice about me. I always stop and stroke the head of their muzzled sheepdog as I go past. He’s really a big softie, Nourredine, his master once told me. I love this particular moment when the planet seems to have stopped spinning, suspended between the nascent daylight and the darkness of the fading night. I tell myself that one day perhaps the earth will not resume its rotation and will stay frozen forever as night and day each stand firm in their respective positions, plunging us into a permanent dawn. Then I tell myself that, bathed in this crepuscular glow that gives everything a pastel hue, wars will perhaps be less ugly, famines less unbearable, peace more everlasting, the idea of having a lie-in less appealing and the evenings longer, and that only the white of my tiles will remain unchanged, preserving its lustre under the cold neon lights.