This is Life (18 page)

By this point Jean-Didier Delacroix had been drilled to perfection, and he gave no visible reaction. His father put the knife back into its sheath, and congratulated him. His work was done.

Jean-Didier Delacroix was grateful for these lessons. There can’t be many children whose fathers are prepared to give them such an immersive and effective programme of instruction in their
future career. As he stood in Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique, one of five hundred and thirty people waiting for Le Machine to appear, he knew that his father’s groundwork would be
more valuable than ever before. He checked his watch, and what a watch it was. There were two minutes to go. Sure enough, people had recognised him, and were casting glances in his direction.

He gave nothing away.

The audience had no idea how
Life
was going to begin. In all its previous presentations, Le Machine had simply walked on from the wings and stood centre stage, looking
out. This time though, he had worked in close collaboration with his lighting and sound designers, and his appearance was going to be much more dramatic.

At six fifty-nine the house lights and the stage lights were shut off, and the room was plunged into total darkness. Silence fell. And then, at exactly seven o’clock, and yet so suddenly
that people jumped with shock,
Life
began.

In a single, perfectly timed burst, the stage lights and the speakers came on. The room was filled with the heavily amplified sound of a body at work. And there in the middle of the crowd, at
the very end of the runway, stood Le Machine: naked, hairless and still.

This was not what they had been expecting. From his name, and the posters they had been seeing around the city for weeks, they had thought they were going to see someone who
was as much automaton as human, something like the Silver Surfer. To see Le Machine this close was disorientating. They could see the lines on his fingers, the texture of his skin. But most
unexpected of all were his eyes: he looked out at the people surrounding him, not with the eyes of a robot, but with eyes that had real expression to them. Eyes that were seeing them, just as they
were seeing him. As he surveyed his new home, these eyes made fleeting contact with those of the people who had come to see him.

At once the audience was struck by the reality of what was going on. Le Machine was a man. As one, they wondered why they had expected anything else. People were not machines. They had paid
money and taken time out from their lives to stand in a darkened room and look at another human being.

They were mesmerised.

Their preconceptions already dispatched, they waited to see what would happen next. There was a palpable tension in the air.

A few tiny state-of-the-art flesh-coloured radio microphones of the kind popular in Hollywood and Moscow were attached to various parts of his body. There were also ultra-sensitive microphones
dotted around the stage, and the sound designer could switch from one source to the next. He was able to channel different sound sources into different speakers, to divide or blend the noises
together in any way he thought sounded right. There would be plenty of scope for improvisation in the coming weeks, but he and Le Machine had decided to begin
Life
with a concentration on
individual sounds, the same one coming from each corner of the room. He had begun with the pounding of his heart, and minutes later had faded this into the sound of his breath. Then the sound
coming through the speakers changed to the gurgle of his stomach. It let out a long whine. Le Machine had not eaten very much at all that day. Already it was time for some food.

He walked back along the runway to the stage, and over to the whiteboard, where he picked up the marker pen, and wrote:

There was a runner on the staff ready to fulfil such requests. Le Machine stood on the edge of the stage and looked out at all the faces staring up at him. He rarely drank alcohol during
Life
, but today he felt he needed a beer. Maybe he would order some more bottles later on. It was Friday night, after all.

Very few people in the audience had anticipated this aspect of the exhibition. Again they wondered what they
had
been expecting, and supposed that they had thought he would be fed via a
tube, or that he would eat some kind of pill-based astronaut food that would be delivered to him once a day by a robot dog. They wondered why they had thought so little about what it was they had
bought tickets for, and why they had come with such basic and misguided expectations. They stood spellbound, waiting to see how this would all unfold.

They were no longer too bothered whether or not they witnessed Le Machine going to the toilet. Of course they still hoped he would, but it didn’t matter nearly as much as they had thought;
this strange and wonderful display was enough. The sound of his beating heart would have drowned out any attempts at conversation, but it made no difference. Nobody felt like speaking anyway, they
were all too busy taking it in. They could feel something incredible was going on, but they weren’t quite sure what it was. They didn’t worry though; they just let it all happen.

Five hundred and thirty pairs of eyes looked to the stage as a naked man waited for his pizza to arrive.

W
ith everything that had been going on, Aurélie still hadn’t made it to a children’s boutique, so Herbert was back in his Mona
Lisa and Eiffel Tower pyjamas for the third night in a row. It was eight o’clock, and since getting back home she had managed to get on top of her chores. On opening the door she had been
struck by the rancid atmosphere. The smell of the soiled nappies had begun to seep out of the plastic sacks they had been tied into, so she had taken them out with the rest of her rubbish and
opened the window until the smell had gone. She handwashed some of Herbert’s clothes and hung them up to dry, and the dirty sheets were soaking in a bucket in the shower room. She wiped down
the tiny stretch of work surface in her kitchen, and when this was done she saw that Herbert had fallen asleep in his nest of pillows on the bed. He had only had one nap all day, and she
wasn’t surprised that he had fizzled out.

She looked at him from across the room. He was absolutely motionless, lying on his back with his mouth a little open and his head slumped to one side. She felt a rush of panic. She darted over
and lay on the bed beside him. She stared at him. She was under no illusion about what she was doing: she was checking to make sure he was breathing, that he was still alive. He was so still that
she couldn’t tell. What if she had somehow managed to kill him by mistake? What if he was severely allergic to fast food, or the fumes from her cleaning products? She was about to prod him to
see if there was any response, but the rising terror abated when he closed his mouth, licked his lips, opened his mouth again and sighed. He was fine.

She wondered what she would have done if he
hadn’t
been fine. Maybe she wouldn’t be so lucky next time. There was no getting away from it: she had got herself into a terrible
situation, and at any moment it could get even worse. She supposed she ought to give up while he was still alive, and take him to the police, and tell them how she had come to be in charge of
him.

I see
, they would say.
So why did this stranger give you the baby?

Because I threw a stone at his face
.

Is that how he got the bruise?
It was still there. It had started to turn yellow. That morning she had been about to apply some concealer to his face when she had stopped, as if she was
being prevented from continuing by an invisible force. She had accepted there and then that the invisible force had a point – it would never be right to put make-up on a baby.

Yes, that’s how he got the bruise
.

So am I right to conclude from what you have told me that you are the kind of person who throws stones at babies’ faces?

Yes, I suppose I am
.

Are you aware that society doesn’t look kindly on the likes of you?

And so it would go on. They would take Herbert away from her, slap on the cuffs and bundle her off to a cell. Then they would search her apartment and find the gun, and then they would telephone
her father, and he would race to see her.

It was this, above everything else, that was stopping her from confessing. She imagined the look of disappointment on her dad’s face as he saw her through prison bars. She knew how much he
loved her, and how proud he was that she had gone to art college in Paris, and the thought of him seeing it all come crashing down this way was too much to bear. She had to get through the
week.

There wasn’t much she could do around the apartment without risking waking Herbert, so she showered, shaved her legs and underarms and, wrapped in a towel, lay beside
him. ‘Oh Herbert,’ she whispered, ‘you’re the only man I can trust. Well, that’s not strictly true. I trust my dad as well. But you two are the only ones I can
trust.’

She had bought two bottles of wine on her way home, and she was already near the bottom of the first. She got up from the bed, went over to the kitchen and poured what remained of the bottle
into her glass.

Lunch with Léandre Martin had not gone well. She wouldn’t be seeing him again.

She felt stupid. She had really thought she had found a boyfriend, but with an efficiency that was almost impressive he had proved her wrong. He wasn’t even second date
material, let alone boyfriend material.

She had been hoping that their lunch would gracefully segue into an afternoon together, the three of them throwing back their heads in laughter in a series of scenic locations, but before it had
even begun she couldn’t wait for it to end. She wondered what had become of the man she had met the day before. It was as if he had exhausted his repertoire, using up anything about him that
had been interesting, charming, funny or warm on their first meeting, and having nothing at all left over for the second.

He had been agitated and distracted from the outset, and had kept looking at his watch. When Aurélie asked him why, he told her that straight after lunch he had an appointment he
couldn’t break. He didn’t offer any details about this
appointment
, he just looked away as he told her about it, and she hadn’t pursued it. It was obvious to her that it
was with a woman, that he was already in a relationship, a relationship that he wasn’t going to give up for her, and that all he was doing was sounding her out in the hope of coming to some
kind of arrangement. She despised men like that – the ones who slithered around behind women’s backs. Men like him and Professor Papavoine.

Conversation moved on to the menu, and they spoke blandly of favourite dishes while avoiding eye contact. He asked her how Herbert was doing, and she told him he was fine. She was glad that he
was sleeping beside her in his buggy throughout this excruciating ordeal.

As if things weren’t already awkward enough, in the seconds before it turned one o’clock he had told her he was about to hold his breath for two minutes, that it was something he did
twice a day, at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon and then again at one o’clock in the morning. He checked the second hand on his watch, took a deep breath and sat stock-still. The
first minute passed uneventfully, but as the second minute progressed he began to look uncomfortable, then in some pain. When the time finally ended, he fought to regain his breath.

As this display had gone on, Aurélie had decided once and for all that he was a creepy weirdo, and even though he was an incredibly handsome creepy weirdo, his handsomeness wasn’t
nearly enough. She resolved to get away from him at the first opportunity. She said nothing.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, in between gasps, ‘but I never miss my one o’clocks. I usually find somewhere private for them. Yesterday I went to the toilet at that café,
remember?’

She recalled that he had excused himself at one point. She looked away, uninterested.

‘I have a reason for it,’ he said, his eyes closed, ‘but it’s always been something I haven’t talked about.’

‘Well, aren’t you mysterious and fascinating?’ she said.

The sarcasm was inescapable. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m obviously not very good at this kind of thing. I . . . I should tell you all about it, though. I would like
to. May I?’

She yawned. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘I really couldn’t care less.’ She stood up. There was no point in dragging this out any longer. ‘Come on,
Herbert,’ she said. The baby was still asleep, but she spoke to him anyway. ‘Let’s leave the hairy man to his enigmatic routines and mystery appointments.’

‘Aurélie, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please stay.’ He stood up as well. ‘I’ll tell you absolutely everything. I don’t want to hide things from
you.’

Aurélie wasn’t in the mood to hear him talk about his other lovers or his pathetic hippie rituals. ‘No, forget it,’ she said. ‘Thanks for lunch. It’s been
fun.’ The food had only just arrived, and it sat there barely eaten. ‘You can finish mine.’

She started to manoeuvre Herbert’s buggy towards the door. Léandre Martin opened his wallet and threw some euros on to the table to settle the bill. She couldn’t help noticing
that he carried a thick wad of cash. Of course he did. He didn’t want to leave a trail of evidence on a credit card statement for his real girlfriend to find and ask questions about. Maybe
the poor woman was even his wife. Either way it was unfortunate for her that she had ended up with a man like this. Aurélie could sense him following her out of the restaurant.

‘Just go away,’ she said.

‘Aurélie, I’ve been an idiot.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘I’ve become so used to hiding things from people that it’s become second nature to me, but I’m not going to hide anything from you . . . I’m going to tell you
everything about myself. For a start, my appointment is with an old friend . . .’