Voice Over (26 page)

Every thirty minutes she has stood up, patrolled the station on her stiff legs, searching for the slightest clue, then returned to sit down in the same spot again, this corner of wall and floor. After seven hours of surveillance rounds, she leaves the station, slightly dazed, hunger in her belly. The night is pierced by the glow of headlights and streetlamps, not very different from the ones in Paris. In front of her is a stretch of pavement, a succession of roads and a staircase leading down to a grim-looking underpass that she feels incapable of going into. A black vehicle in the shape of an estate car with the word Taxi lit up on its roof. She signals to the driver, who pulls over on the other side of the street. The traffic doesn't slow down. After several attempts, she manages to cross at a run. She climbs into the taxi, which strikes her as over-spacious, more suited to bearing coffins than upright living people. Far in front of her, the driver has said something. She can only see the back of his head. Hotel. She articulates the word clearly, hoping to compensate for her lack of a British accent. An incomprehensible question from the driver, who turns round with a not very friendly look on his face. She wants to tell him that she's had a hard day, that he could at least be polite, but all she has at her disposal is the
word hotel and whatever patience she has left. Eventually, the driver takes off with a comment that ends in a sigh.

The bridge they take stretches across a wide river. Along its banks, lights from buildings of every kind, glass towers, domes, stone façades, historical moments set in the dominant materials of their days. She has never seen such a jumble of heights and styles. She never would have guessed that London looked like this. After the bridge, she closed her eyes. She doesn't know where this man is taking her; she has entrusted herself to him, has given him the task of deciding what her next stop will be. If he pulls over and orders her to get out, she'll do it because she will have nothing to say to him, no recourse to language to defend herself. She can gesticulate and utter sounds, but she will never convince him of anything by the precision and sharpness of her words. She hasn't felt so vulnerable in a long time.

The taxi has pulled up outside a building with a white façade, its front entrance flanked by two columns. On a small metal plaque on one of them she reads Beaumont House. She is ready to get out when the driver cuts her short. He says only one word, money. She understands, but she realizes to her horror that she has no money on her, at least not the right sort. Nevertheless, she takes her purse from her bag and from her purse a 20-euro banknote, which she holds out to the driver as innocently as she can. He shakes his head. She pretends not to understand. Pounds, not euros, pounds, not euros, the man says, hammering out his words, completely exasperated. Her head is going to explode. She so wishes he were with her; he could explain the problem to this idiot. She would like to sleep and forget everything. Her eyes close, her body topples sideways, and she feels the cold leather of the seat pressing against
her cheek. To stay there, stretched out for ever, rocked by the motion of the taxi taking her through London for all eternity. The door by her head has been flung open, a chill draught tickles the roots of her hair. The driver bombards her with words, demented, meaningless words, and drags her out of the car. She is standing on the pavement, her sports bag and handbag at her feet. The taxi has disappeared.

She has to ring to be let in. When she hears the buzzing in the lock, she pushes the door. A voice calls out, she follows it. She enters a small lounge furnished with two floral-patterned armchairs and a vending machine. No one. Jutting from a wall, she spots a small wooden counter with someone sitting behind it, a thinnish woman with short, sad hair, and a pair of glasses perched on the end of her nose. The woman is hunched over a magazine and fiddling with a bunch of keys. Behind her is a room filled with two paper-strewn desks. As she goes over, the woman gives her an odd sort of elongated smile before she starts to emit, as if in a nightmare, monstrous, incomprehensible words. Ai-don-un-deur-stin-de. The woman appears to grasp the message, holds up an index finger with a pointed nail and raises her eyebrows questioningly. She responds by tucking in her thumb and showing her four other fingers. She'll be staying here four nights. The woman goes to rummage in a drawer and comes back to show her a bank card. She takes hers out of her purse and hands it over.

Flesh-toned tights and grey mules precede her up the stairs, which groan beneath a thick layer of carpeting. At the top, the woman opens a door: a tiny room just large enough for a toilet. They take a second, narrower staircase that leads straight up to the first floor. They reach a landing where there is barely
enough space for the two of them. There are three doors, one of which is the door to her room. The woman pushes the light switch, motions her inside, says a few words with her stiff smile, and withdraws after placing the keys on the night table. She hears the door close, the woman's faint cough, nothing. Her first silence in the weak glow of the ceiling light. For a moment she remains where she is standing, looking around the characterless room, which doesn't have a single redeeming feature. Walls that are too bare, a ceiling that is too high, robbing the enclosed space of any sense of protection, a yellowish wardrobe and desk, which have been touched by too many hands but have never belonged to anyone. In one corner is a dismal sink; on the other side, an ugly and cumbersome plastic shower unit. And floating in the midst of it all, the mingled odors of a cleaning product, the starch from the sheets, stagnant water, enclosed air. First, open the window—or rather, in this case, pull up the window. As she leans over the railing, she sees that the hotel looks onto a small park. The fragrant humus is a relief, an olfactory balm, and for several minutes all she wants is to breath in its smell.

She opens the wardrobe doors, the desk drawers, all of them sadly empty, all waiting to be filled to give the occupant an impression of being at home. If he had been there, she would have removed her few things from the sports bag for the sheer pleasure of storing them next to his. Alone, there's no point. The television set is shut away in a special cabinet opposite the bed. She turns it on, flicks through the channels with the remote control: an English version of the same cathode-TV mush. She has no desire to know what is happening in the immense elsewhere, the opinions of strangers, the dramas of invented characters. In any
case, she doesn't understand a thing. She switches off, the screen swallows back its images, the deluge of aural soup comes to an end. Barefoot on the bed, curled up in a fetal position, she looks for a way to stop the current of speculation that keeps bringing her back to the same question. Why didn't they find each other? She has two answers and can't decide between them: an unfortunate cluster of circumstances or the result of an intentional act. She swings from one to the other, going back and forth as monotonously as the pendulum of a clock. Unlucky, cursed, predestined, irresponsible, she tries out these adjectives on herself in an attempt to explain her role in what happened. She has missed her entrance cue, the play will go on without her, she is standing in the wings, flabbergasted that she has failed at the very moment when she most needed to prove her competence. There ought to be a special probe to inspect the inside of her head, that undifferentiated, infinite space that sits miraculously within the confines of her skull. She isn't sure, but there might be something like an immense clod of dust jamming up a tiny gear. Something not quite right, as they say. She thinks she ought to be thinking about something else, but in thinking this she can't help thinking about the matter she is thinking about. Try to get some rest. She slips a pillow under her head, a hand under the pillow. Find the best position for sleep. Images march through her mind; above all she must not focus on them. She hears the muffled hum of a car engine in the distance, she's almost there, she feels her consciousness melting away. But she has to re-open her eyes, brought back to reality by a noise that wasn't there before, a breathing, a panting, on the other side of the wall. And the more she concentrates, the more she hears it, rhythmical, provocative. Two people are getting it on in the next room. She doesn't want to know, she
doesn't want to listen, she doesn't want to hear love, she doesn't want to know that it exists, she wants to be left alone. She could, but doesn't dare bang on the wall. Instead, she resigns herself to staying stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling light that undulates through her tears, imagining that dozens of tiny elves have tied her body to the mattress.

 

 

She wakes up. The light from a streetlamp is shining on the ceiling of the room, now plunged into darkness. She doesn't remember switching off the light. Her stomach gurgles. She thinks she hears the sound of a key in a lock.

She wakes up. Her mouth is dry. She gets out of bed and shuffles cautiously over to the sink. She brings her lips close to the tap. The water smells of bleach. Through the window, she glimpses a dark shape moving about in the park.

She wakes up. She can no longer ignore the promptings of her bladder. The door creaks as she opens it; the light makes her squint. She goes down the stairs as quickly as she can, afraid that she might meet someone. The timer-light sounds like the chirping of a cricket. The floor tiles in the toilets are cold. She thinks she has stepped on something wet. She doesn't dare sit down on the seat and pees standing astride the bowl. She finds no paper to wipe herself with.

 

 

She woke up. Day had dawned outside.

 

 

She left the room, carrying her handbag with her. At the front desk, she saw a pair of hands poking over the counter; she didn't drop off her key. To her surprise, she noticed that all the houses around the park were identical, with their white façades,
their columns, their raised front entrances, and their large windows. She wondered if the occupants all dressed the same, so as not to stand out. She headed right, although she could just as well have headed left. The few people passing by at that moment were all going in the same direction. She decided to do what they did, they obviously knew where they were going. She reached a crowded road, with shop fronts on either side. Unable to read the instructions, she had to try several combinations of buttons before she could withdraw four hundred pounds from a cash dispenser. She didn't know how much a pound was worth, but four hundred seemed to be an interesting number, probably because of the four. She then stopped in at some kind of café after reading, with the satisfaction of having understood, the word sandwich on the window. All the tables were empty, except for one, where a woman sat resting her elbows. She chose to sit as far away from her as possible. The place smelled of fried butter and cigarette smoke. A waitress took her time before coming over. She said sandwich and the waitress said something in response. She shrugged her shoulders, the waitress returned with a menu, she pointed randomly at the first line. A few minutes later, a mound of bread, ham, and cheese landed in front of her. She ate because she was hungry, the sandwich oozed mayonnaise. She noticed that the other customer had the face of a witch and was rolling cigarette after cigarette, half-smoking each one before stubbing it out in the ashtray, which she engaged in intimate conversation, without uttering a sound, merely by moving her lips. She left, feeling rather ill, and set off in search of a supermarket. Since she was afraid of getting lost, she decided to keep to the main commercial street. She ended up going inside a place that went by the bizarre name of Sainsbury's, where she
bought a dozen tomatoes, carrots, oranges and apples, a dozen yogurts, five packets of vacuum-packed cold cuts and two cellophane-wrapped loaves of bread. It took her a certain amount of time and struggle to get it all back to the hotel, after she lost her way turning into what she thought was her street. She made a dash for the stairs to avoid being spotted by the owner of the hotel. Back in her room, she put the yogurts and cold cuts inside two plastic bags, which she placed on the windowsill. The rest of the food she put away in the cupboard. She then brought a chair over to the window and settled down to observe the park and the street. The aim was simply to observe, perhaps even to comment on what she saw if she felt an inclination to formulate a thought, but above all not to reflect on anything that had to do with her. Seen from above, the people didn't look very different from the ones in Paris. She noticed a few squirrels in the park, as well as a bird she had never seen before. When the light started to fade, she was still in the same spot.

After eating a tomato and several slices of cured ham, accompanied by some bread and an apple, she lay down on the bed. She slept no better than she had the previous night and was woken up several times for no apparent reason. She didn't hear her neighbors making love, but when the door to the toilets was left open, there was the sound of water running in the flush. There was a murmur as well, as if two people were whispering somewhere in the room, unseen.

 

 

The next day, after some hesitation, she climbed out of her clothes. She took a cold shower in the plastic cabin. Removing some clean clothes from the sports bag, she rolled the dirty ones up into a ball before stuffing them into the desk drawer. Once again, she
installed herself at her observation post, nibbling on bread and from time to time crumbling little pieces onto the window sill.

Since moving into the room, she hasn't spoken. And now she feels as if her voice has been hidden somewhere inside her body, as if it were a living creature in the process of dying.

Later on, she heard a key in the lock. A young woman dressed in overalls appeared in the doorway and mumbled something with such ingenuousness that she immediately nodded in assent. The maid entered and began remaking the nearly untouched bed. She had done no more than cover herself with the blanket during the night when she felt cold. The maid passed a cloth over the night table, a sponge round the inside of the shower unit and the base of the sink, then picked up the white towel she had used to dry herself with. She watched these efficient movements without seeming to bother the maid who mechanically went about her tasks as if no one else was in the room: her body was at work, but her mind was elsewhere. It occurred to her that she could offer her services to the hotel and in exchange live here for an indeterminate length of time. There would be no need for her to talk, she would learn the two or three English phrases necessary for the job, that would be enough. She could have another life, and far more easily than she ever imagined before coming here. The maid put a clean towel on the bed before withdrawing in silence. She finished the rest of the bread then went out.