This is Life (19 page)

‘I’m sure it is. And you’ll be telling the gendarmerie about your old friend if you don’t leave me alone.’ She saw two policemen ahead, and started walking in their
direction. ‘And while you’re at it you can tell them why you’re harassing a woman and a baby.’

‘I’ll call you.’

‘Well, that’s good to know. As my grandmother says, it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.’

‘Please don’t give up on me. Aurélie . . .’

She walked away, but she heard what he said next, and it made her furious.

‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’

He was exactly the kind of vermin who would say that to a girl and not mean it. She didn’t look back until she was next to the policemen, to check that he wasn’t following. He was
standing where she had left him, looking at her.

‘Go away,’ she shouted.

He seemed to get the message. He had such a pained looked on his face that she almost felt sorry for him, but she knew he was only sad because his attempt to add her to his list of lovers had
come to nothing. He turned and walked back the way he had come. He must have been embarrassed at having his man-of-depth-and-mystery routine fall so comprehensively flat. She was glad she
hadn’t fallen for it, and that she had seen right through his attempt to turn things around by professing love; it was nothing more than a desperate attempt at emotional manipulation. And
anyway, what difference did it make even if he did love her? She didn’t love him, so that was the end of it. Until an hour ago she had been falling for him in a big way, she had been a bag of
nerves all morning, but she knew now that she’d had a lucky escape.

One of the policemen spoke to her. ‘Is that man bothering you, Madame?’

‘Not any more.’

She remembered she had a loaded gun in her coat pocket, and decided she had better not spend too much time hanging around with the gendarmerie. She walked on, and now she had left Léandre
Martin behind she realised how naïve she had been to surrender so quickly and so completely to such a cretin. It wasn’t as if it was the first time.

She banged a fist against her forehead, furious with herself for having failed to learn her lesson. She could feel she was about to cry, so she went into a fast food restaurant, found the
toilet, locked herself and Herbert into a cubicle and let it all out. After a few minutes he woke up, and looked at her, quizzically, as he came to. The sight of his big blue eyes, blinking in the
harsh light, made her realise she had to pull herself together, for his sake. She blew her nose, went back out and ordered some food.

She and Herbert ate fries together. He seemed to like them.

Léandre Martin punched himself on the forehead too. He had been such an idiot, and Aurélie had been absolutely right to react the way she did. He had deserved
every barbed comment and every withering look. He should have told her everything, but instead he hadn’t told her anything, and of course this had made her angry. Why wouldn’t it? Who
would want to spend time with someone as distracted, evasive and inarticulate as him?

He relived every uncomfortable silence, and replayed his mumbled dialogue, and he could only respect her all the more for walking away from someone who was such a waste of time. Whenever he had
spoken it was only to say something that made him sound like a dullard, or a ball of slime. He had become used to closing off chunks of his life, but he really had planned to tell her everything.
He had been waiting for the right moment, but it had all loomed too large, and shyness had taken hold of him and he hadn’t realised until it was too late that he should have taken her in his
arms the moment she arrived at the restaurant, kissed her, and said,
Aurélie, there’s something I have to tell you
.

He should have told her where he was going, and why he was going there, and all about everything else that had grown out of such a terrible situation. That way she would have been able to come
to a decision about him that was based on who he really was, not one based on him being a nervous, shifty mess.

He should even have invited her and Herbert to come along with him. But instead of doing this he had first avoided the subject altogether, then tiptoed around the edge of it. He wasn’t at
all accustomed to talking about it, particularly not to people he had only recently met, but that was no excuse. This was Aurélie. He wanted her to know, she
had
to know, and he had
gone absolutely the wrong way about telling her.

His regrets began to pile up on one another. For her, he should even have postponed his one o’clock breath-holding session, or at the very least he should have told her exactly what it was
all about beforehand. It could have been a way into his story. But instead he had just mumbled something about how it was time to hold his breath, and got on with it. He would never forget her face
as he had been timing himself. She had looked at him as if he was an attention-seeking bore, then looked away. He supposed she was right, too. That was all he was – an attention-seeking
bore.

With a jolt he realised that she must have thought he was involved in something preposterous – drug dealing, perhaps. He had been so secretive about his movements, why would she not have
thought that? Or maybe she thought he was part of a breath-holding sex cult, and was trying to recruit her and Herbert. Whichever way he looked at it, he knew that she had been right to give him
the cold shoulder. Her immediate refusal to take any shit from a man only elevated her in his esteem. If only he hadn’t been that man.

He hoped she would give him another chance, but it wasn’t looking good. He tried to find a way forward. Maybe a break of a few weeks would work for them. He supposed she would need at
least that long to stop being so angry with him. This train of thought juddered to a halt. He was fooling himself. In a few weeks’ time he would be nothing more to her than a faint and
unpleasant memory, surviving in her life only as the subject of an anecdote that she would tell her friends when they were exchanging stories about disastrous dates.

He walked on to the appointment he had been so nervous about explaining to her. He was going to the home of the only person he had ever really talked to about what happened in his life, the only
one who knew everything there was to know about him. And today he would be talking about a girl called Aurélie Renard, and how right she was for him, and imploring them to ignore everything
he had ever said before about how he would never fall in love. And then he would go on at some length about what a mess he had made, and how angry he was with himself.

He picked up the path alongside the Canal Saint Martin,
his
canal. He was tempted to throw himself in, to swim down to the bottom and burrow into the silt, never to surface again. But he
didn’t. Instead he walked on, every step taking him closer to the bedside of his best friend. To the bedside of Dominique Gravoir.

Aurélie looked at a sleeping Herbert, and drank her wine. She knew she ought to be sleeping too, but she couldn’t. Her mind was too busy. She was having trouble
reconciling the Léandre Martin of yesterday with the Léandre Martin of today. Yesterday they had seemed to belong together, but today he had been so different. Yesterday they had
gazed into each other’s eyes, and kissed on bridges, but today he seemed only to look at his fingernails, or into the middle distance. Yesterday conversation and laughter had flowed so
naturally between them as they talked about everything and nothing, as if they had been old friends picking up after a long break and feeling as if no time had passed at all. Today though, their
conversation had fizzled out before it had even begun; on the rare occasions when he had spoken it had been in code, and she hadn’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to try to decipher it.
She tried to tell herself it was just a bad second date like any other, but it was worse than that. Her hopes had been so high, and she felt so defeated, and alone. She blamed herself for having
been so stupid as to let herself be carried away by romantic notions.

Longing for company, she reached for her phone. She had switched it off before she had met Léandre Martin, not wanting their afternoon to be disturbed, and she hadn’t switched it
back on since. There were two messages: one voice mail and one text. She listened to the voice mail first. It was from him.
Aurélie, I’m so sorry about earlier
, he said.
I
handled things so badly . . .
She wasn’t going to listen to his insincere grovelling. She deleted him. He was right though, he
had
handled things badly. He had been with a girl who
was all packed up and ready to fall in love with him, and he had let her slip through his fingers. At least, she thought to herself, she had found him out early on. It would have been terrible to
have discovered his scheming ways too late.

She scrolled through a few menus until she found out how to block his number. That was it. Done. She wouldn’t be hearing from him again.

The text, though, was unexpected. It was from Sébastien.

He wanted to see her:
I’ve been thinking about you
.

So he’d had her number all this time.

She thought back to the night they had spent together on this bed, and how wonderful she had felt as she had lain in his arms. Maybe something could be salvaged from the day. She took another
swig of wine, and thought for a while. Then she texted back:
Come right away
.

L
e Machine’s pizza arrived, but before he ate it he picked up a small capsule from the table. It had been there all along, but nobody had
paid it any attention until now. He tapped it, and the sound boomed around the room. It was a microphone. Whenever
Life
was staged, he and his team made sure they added a few new elements,
and this was going to be the first time he had used the microphone outside a trial situation. He unscrewed the bottle of sparkling water, and took a swig. He held it in his cheeks, then put the
microphone into his mouth and let it sit there. The crackle of the bubbles as they fizzed in his mouth swept through Screen One of Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique in full surround sound,
and the audience was rapt. He swallowed, and the microphone was inside him. Its journey had only just begun.

Le Machine sat at the table and readied his utensils, all of which were made of glass. He always wanted as much of the equipment on stage as possible to be made from glass, and wherever he went
he made sure to have the pieces made by manufacturers from the host nation, and after a lot of research, he and his team had found the people they believed to be the finest bespoke glassmakers in
France. In Tokyo he had felt the glass was too thin and delicate, that it might not be up to the task. He had been particularly worried that either the faeces bottle or the urine bottle would
crack. If it had done, the mess would have been so great that the exhibition would have had to be abandoned. He had always been on edge about this, but his worry had been misplaced; the glass had
been perfectly engineered, and fit for its purpose. He had no misgivings about the quality of the craftsmanship now though – all the glassware was visibly sturdy, and though it lacked the
delicacy of the Japanese pieces, it had been beautifully designed. Pieces by the same glassmaker were on sale in the gift shop: cutlery, crockery, replica specimen jars and various unique pieces
for collectors. Piles of extra stock were stored in a warehouse, and their factory was on standby to fulfil further orders. One of the utensils was a bottle-opener. He used it to snap the cap off a
bottle of lager. He took a long drink, the sound thundering around the room.

Before long, he had finished the first bottle of beer, and the large pizza was half eaten. Le Machine stood up, and walked to the end of the runway. He looked around at the
people who had come to see him, and for the first time that day he felt comfortable with what he was doing. His worries that the show would seem stale were unfounded. Here were over five hundred
people, and most of them would have been experiencing
Life
for the first time. For them it was fresh and new, and he knew that every one of them was coming to their own conclusions about
what it was all about. It meant something different to everybody. He knew he had been right not to give the journalist from
L’Univers
what he had been looking for. He had been looking
for a single answer to the question:
What is the meaning of
Life
?
He had told him only that there were as many answers as there were people who came through the door, and for him to
tell people how they were supposed to feel would be to insult them, to blinker them and strip them of the joy of the experience. Looking out, he was glad that he had held his ground.

The reporter had not been delighted by his subject’s reluctance to cooperate, but when had saying the right thing to reporters come to be considered a part of the artistic process, anyway?
It was all nonsense.

Le Machine wasn’t going to worry about him now. How much harm could one person do?

The audience watched Le Machine as he walked back along the runway to the main body of the stage. With all the water and beer inside him, it was at last time for the exhibition
to live up to its reputation. He walked over to the glass urinal, and held his penis in his left hand.

The audience watched in wonder as it came out, a pale yellow that was highly visible in the stage lights. His bladder had been full, and as the stream went on and on the visitors began to cheer,
so loud that it could be heard above the sound coming out of the speakers. Then they began to chant his name:
Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine!

When he had shaken the final drops away, Le Machine bent down and picked up the jug into which it had all drained. He held it up. He knew everybody would be keen to see how
much had come out. He walked over to one of the large glass vats, then he stood on a stool, took off a stopper and poured in the contents of the jug. He waited until every drop was in, then he
replaced the stopper.
Life
had really begun now, and things seemed to be going well. For the first time in a long while he had a good feeling: he was doing something worthwhile.