All the Way (10 page)

Is he asking forgiveness for that as well, for when he talks too much (but no more than her father or even her mother, if she thinks about it), for the mark on her arm (which has already disappeared), for the fright he gave her, for the stink of his sweat, his dick, his fat belly, or what exactly is he sorry for?—later on she'll work out the meaning of this apology—he squeezes her too hard, ‘Solange, my Solange, my sunshine, my only angel,' sorry for that, for precisely what he's in the middle of saying, and sorry for squeezing her too hard, sorry for crying, sorry for saying sorry. She taps his head and murmurs sounds,
shhh, it's okay, come on, let's
go
, if she could take the wheel, she would drive him home,
home, Monsieur Bihotz
.

He rings the doorbell, she's barely awake, he rings again and wants to see her mother and she's not going to let that happen,
If you have something to say to her you can just say it to
me
, he pushes her aside, she moves ahead, she runs,
Coffee,
Maman?
, she selects the beans one by one, use the ground coffee, darling, I've got a bad headache.

‘Can you leave the room,' asks Monsieur Bihotz, it's more like a command—in her own home, you've got to be kidding. But her mother is at that point between sleeping tablets and her third coffee where even the thought of loud voices, of a fight—‘I can't look after her anymore,' announces Bihotz, he's going to spill the beans.

‘Who?' Her mother looks surprised.

For a split second, she and Monsieur Bihotz are standing opposite this woman who seems to think that he's referring to the dog, Lulu. Then the triangle realigns itself. ‘Solange'—her name spills out like a packet of flour.

‘I can't do without you, Monsieur Bihotz!' Her mother screams the truth. He replies that he has to find a real job. ‘Out of the question, Monsieur Bihotz, what with the financial crisis, especially around here.'

And Solange is watching out for the words that will determine the outcome,
sneak out, that night Solange, sequinned
T-shirt and whore's skirt.
Oddly enough, there's a look of hesitation on Monsieur Bihotz's face, in his eyes and on his lips. He doesn't seem to believe what her mother is saying.

‘Money shouldn't be a problem between us, Monsieur Bihotz'—‘Perhaps she's old enough to look after herself'—‘Old enough, out of the question'—‘Solange, go to your room!'

She starts climbing the stairs and they unfold around her; she has this vision of herself climbing the stairs that are unfolding around her, and it keeps going, her hand on the banister, her body turning, her eyes looking at her hand on the banister; something is vibrating between her and the walls as if she no longer knows where her body belongs; she is here, from now on she will remain here, without being able to touch, feel, or be in any particular place—in this body that's like a lifejacket—she picks up a piece of Playmobil, places it in the palm of her hand,
click
, nothing happens, it lasts forever, the gesture, her hand, as if she was watching the film of herself watching herself.

She hears a voice begging, whispering, ‘This child and me, all alone, you understand, Monsieur Bihotz.' She leans over the banister and sees a strange body, two shapeless heads, several arms, her mother leaning against Monsieur Bihotz, speaking into his navel, repeating ‘my husband', sobbing, disgraceful, sloppy and spilling over—she should
sneak out
forever but she has to stay, she still has to stay here.

There's a party on at the chateau, up there, at Delphine's. Next Saturday. She's not invited. Of course she's not invited. She hardly knows Delphine. But Rose is, invited, and even the cousins, Sixtine and Meredith (not Alma, who is doing a Baroque singing internship somewhere in the Ardèche).

Her suffering is almost unbearable. By herself in her bedroom, she falls to bits. Without people looking at her, without a witness to her existence, her atoms abandon her. Dust motes floating to the window panes, a fine cloud, a veil punctured by beams of light.

Riding her bike along the river, she sees the chateau up there, suspended in the air, like a transfer or a sticker. As if it wasn't real. She can't even bear dogs anymore. The way Lulu jumps up on her as soon as she arrives; whereas she (Solange) doesn't know what to do with herself anymore, go into the house, not go in, eat, not eat, go out, sleep, die.

The Tour de France and Bihotz in front of his TV.

‘What's the matter?' Bihotz asks. ‘What's wrong with you?'

She's started calling him Bihotz and it drives him mad.

‘Delphine? The Peyreborde girl, from up there? She'll call you. She's just forgotten. My mother did the cleaning there, at the chateau, and she used to take you with her. You used to say there were ghosts there. During August they had white sheets draped over all the armchairs.'

So she's compelled to reminisce along with him, and the memories come back. And she talks to him and he makes her feel better, this hick, this
metalhead
who listens to Iron Maiden.

The white shapes, the windows open onto a sky of dense, leafy green trees, the colour and the slant of those hazy days. There was a swimming pool. She was absolutely forbidden to go near it.

She's sharing all this with him and it's so annoying. This guy who has nothing to do with any of it. This
anomaly
(these days she's learning new words).

‘But the Peyreborde girl is not from the chateau,' he says. ‘The d'Urbide family lives in the chateau. The Peyreborde family lives in the concierge's lodge.'

He's carrying on as if he knows her girlfriends better than she does. And probably her whole life while he's at it. (No, no one will ever understand her, not the real her.)

‘But what's the matter with you?' wails Bihotz. ‘You weren't like this before. You don't have to act all grown up. No one's looking at us.'

It infuriates her how he makes a scene about everything, while she just deals with it. When she remembers how Nathalie told her that Rose thought that she (Solange) was
perverse
, supposedly because she was worried about her, but how happy she (Rose) must have been showing off with
perverse
! (She looked it up in the dictionary, it means almost neurotic.
Perverse
, what a joke. Rose has just got a really big head, that's all, she's so full of herself, she uses those words to make herself seem interesting, like she's the centre of the world.)

‘Are you listening to me?' says Bihotz. ‘You're like the girl in
The Exorcist
. Are you going to start speaking backwards or what?'

Nathalie says that if you listen to Iron Maiden backwards, you hear messages from the Devil.

‘Call Delphine. Invite her to afternoon tea. It's a misunderstanding. A complete misunderstanding. Do you want me to call her? I know her mother.'

When he was little, Monsieur d'Urbide smacked him because he was picking plums in the garden, plums that were on the ground, plums from the chateau, with Delphine's mother…

That's the forty-eighth time you've told me that, change the record.

He picks up the phone and he does it: he calls the chateau.

Delphine is coming for afternoon tea. That bitch who is having a party and not inviting her. She chooses the music carefully. Jimi Hendrix, that's cool; no one knows it, but she listened to it with him when she was little, so she arranges for Delphine's knock at the window to occur at exactly the same time as a guitar riff, a riff that shocks fat Delphine.

And from four until six, they finally talk properly. Obviously there's the old reflex of showing off, so there's a fair amount of crap in their chat, but at six o'clock Delphine has to leave and there's been no mention of the party.

If she mentioned it first, that would ruin everything, she understands that now: the need to respect social convention in order to respect yourself, even if Delphine is not the sort of girl you'd respect, she's not at all
a popular girl
, whatever, she knows what she's getting at. Anyway, you have to have a lot of experiences like this, have afternoon tea with lots of really different girls, you learn what people are like, you shape your identity in relation to them; that is, you learn who you are. It's really creepy how Rose and Nathalie are so narrow-minded, it's racism, pure and simple. They should open their eyes and look around: there are miserable people everywhere!

Still, you're allowed to have parties, aren't you?

‘No,' says Delphine. ‘My mother is a real bitch.'

But the party this Saturday?

‘No, it's the landlady's daughter who's having the party. They're the only parties my mother lets me go to. It's an act of
charity
from the d'Urbide girl. Just like my clothes: she gives me her old stuff. But she's thinner than I am.'

So you don't live in the chateau?

‘Yes, I do, in front of it.'

In front?

‘The place at the front is the concierge's lodge.'

Oh my God, you are such a liar!

‘I do live at the chateau, just in front of it.'

All those years you carried on like you were the princess of the
chateau.

Delphine denies it, says she's never pretended that.

But you let people think that.

‘If people believed it, that's their problem.'

Right from kindergarten.

‘Yeah, like when Bidegarraï said a parachutist had landed on the roof of his house. Same thing. We were kids.'

In her mind's eye, she had always pictured that parachutist on the Bidegarraï house, as clearly as the church tower in the village square (there never was a parachutist?). So what, back to the party business. She should offer to go with Delphine as if it was an act of
charity
, to this loser girl, so weirdly dressed, so
concierge
(‘to the council holiday camp, with the kids of concierges?' Sixtine had exclaimed when Rose went there). But Delphine seems strangely self-assured and gives her a look of defiance (or pity?):

‘Shit, Solange, do you really think there are people who still believe your father's a pilot?'

Her face catches fire.

‘Your father is a
porter
. Do you think I didn't know? Rose saw him carrying her bag when she went to England.'

Suddenly there is no more oxygen in the room. Pretend nothing has happened. Pretend to be what she has always been: the daughter of an Air Inter pilot and a shopkeeper from Clèves-le-Haut.

The girl who's having the party is called Lætitia, Lætitia d'Urbide; that means
Happiness
in Latin. There are at least fifty people, even high school kids and guys from the coast, and punch in salad bowls with ladles.

Stand up straight, like an air hostess.

Rose doesn't seem surprised to see her. Nor embarrassed, or anything. Perhaps she's already drunk a fair bit. But it's impossible to have any contact with Rose now. To get anywhere near her, to be in the same space as her. It's as if a river separated them: Rose and her Parisian cousins and Lætitia d'Urbide on one bank, she and Delphine on the other bank. The same bank as Peggy Salami. With the weirdos, the hicks, the concierges, the badly dressed, the
perverse
, the squalid, those with big chins, the families with ten kids, the outliers, the people who've had the same car forever and a yard full of tyres. Like at the Bihotz place. To be labelled a Bihotz.

She serves herself a ladle of punch, drinks it in one go and starts to sway her hips.
Let's Dance
. She knows the lyrics by heart; she learned them off the record sleeve, at Rose's, as it happens. ‘That girl is gifted,' Rose's mother had said.

She will never go to Rose's again. Never again.

Rose's father is a teacher and her mother is a sort of assistant art teacher. Sure, they don't live in a chateau but their house is definitely cool and so, what's the word, welcoming.

She wants to cry.

Let's Dance.

Her skirt is falling down, it's so awkward. First she had put on her shiny gym leggings, and thrown together a very short skirt and a white jersey hooded top, with just a narrow band showing under her V-neck pullover, which she'd worn back to front, and a fake leather belt that sits perfectly on her hips, very Madonna, and some pink spray in her hair and her fake Dockside shoes. And then she took the whole thing off (just as well she'd got started early); she borrowed her mother's Prince of Wales check skirt, her father's black Polo shirt, and it ends up being a really fantastic outfit that looks neat,
New Wave,
with her imitation Docksides and big white clips in her hair to liven up the effect, and black mascara, and she's teased her hair to give it lots of volume. But in no time it's all hanging flat again. And the skirt is slipping.

She bought some Kool menthol cigarettes and managed to get hold of some Get 27 liqueur; they go well together. Perhaps she shouldn't have drunk it on top of the punch because she's starting to freak out. Which is bad when you want to have a good time at a party and go really crazy.

She heads to the toilet so she can hitch the skirt up a bit higher. She is too fat. She makes a solemn resolution, on the spot, to replace a meal a day with cigarettes.

The d'Urbide parents don't seem to be at the chateau. They
really
are called d'Urbide, with an apostrophe—‘fucking toffs,' says Delphine, who is disgustingly vulgar, a real fishwife. The only adult in the vicinity is Delphine's mother, who hangs round the whole time, cleaning up glasses. Right now, in fact, she is wiping the floor. Can Delphine do anything she wants in front of her
fucking bitch
of a mother? It must be difficult. Like when Rose's father was Rose's teacher.

She says hello to Delphine's mother so as not to appear a snob. Someone has put on Sade, the soft voice that envelops everything; it's nice and some of the bad vibe of the evening dissipates.