All the Way (19 page)

But what sort of a moron are you, of course she wanted to
penetrate
me, I was the one who didn't want it. I'm not going to let
myself be raped by a dyke.

Lætitia had a sort of plastic dick that she wanted to put in Solange's bottom, well, in her cunt.

Concepción has her hand over her mouth.

‘There's no such thing as a plastic dick,' Nathalie declares.

Yes there is, you tie it on around your waist, like this.

‘Yeah, right. Stop talking bullshit.'

As usual, when the conversation gets serious, Rose launches into a speech with several points she wants to make, like how, firstly, her mother actually has a plastic dick too, Rose found it in the drawer of her bedside table; and that, secondly, it's not right to make fun of dykes, firstly (thirdly) it's a rude word, and that, fourthly, everyone does what they want, we live in a democracy, after all we're in France under a socialist president.

(‘My parents voted for Mitterand to help people like you,' she told Solange when half the village wanted to flee the country. ‘Personally, I would have voted Workers' Struggle. The socialists are hypocrites; at the end of the day they're just helping big business.' She seemed so intelligent, mature,
sexy
, when she said that. It's horrible that Rose's vote is charity for Solange's parents who are being
screwed
by voting for the right.)

‘It's cool to be
bisexual
,' chimes in Nathalie belatedly (she is now wearing her Super-Nathalie costume). ‘Anyway, everyone is bisexual. Boys are bisexual too.'

Protests all round.

‘Bisexual means two girls at the same time,' explains Nathalie.

Concepción confirms this: her female cousin from Saragossa did it with her girlfriend's boyfriend
and
her girlfriend. ‘The girlfriend was getting laid and my cousin gave him blowjob.'

Gave him A blowjob,
corrects Solange.
It's like Jane Birkin
saying she'll sing ‘UN chanson' instead of ‘UNE chanson' when she's
been living in France for two hundred years.

‘But was there only one penis?' Rose says, surprised. Her rapid logic—or her practical mind—makes everyone laugh (or maybe it was the word penis).

‘Do you know how you say vagina in Spanish?' says Nathalie. ‘
Esclusa
, a canal lock. Because that's where the peniche boats go through, get it—penis-peniche.'

Concé is too engrossed in the conversation to be insulted (or to understand).

Did the boy take it in turns? A go in the mouth, a go in the cunt? Everything seems possible.

Her three friends focus on the incident, which has captured their imaginations, mesmerised them. In the centre of the room their bodies vanish, leaving behind their schoolgirl shells. They look like the pale children in
The Village of
the Damned.

‘He was forty,' Concepción explains. ‘The girlfriend's boyfriend.'

It all adds up. But the images flickering there—naked bodies in the trembling space—are still tricky to hold steady in their minds, a bit like stubborn Playmobil pieces, they don't fit into what the girls have glimpsed of the world so far: a certain elasticity that is attractive, disturbing—or perhaps (Solange's great fear) just as limited as Clèves.

Concepción goes and finds her mother's shopping catalogue,
Trois Chuiches
. She flips through the lingerie pages. It's not there. They grab the catalogue from her. You have to look in the bathroom section, feminine health and hygiene and all that. Between breast pumps, shower caps and back-scratchers, there is a portable face massager—in an odd, pointed shape—that firms features and smoothes out nasolabial folds. Home delivery with two batteries.

‘That's it!' exclaims Rose. ‘See, I'm not making it up.' It's like she's completely forgotten that she, Solange, was raped by Lætitia.

A little shrapnel shell, longer than it is wide, like a suppository but bigger. The girl in the photo, some bimbo in white cotton, is holding it against her cheek, looking like she's just seen the Virgin Mary. She looks like her. She's struck by it. The same angle of the head, the same melancholic gaze, the same blank stare as in the photo of her when she was five or six. Against her cheek she's holding the cloth nappy that used to be her security blanket. So soft and fluffy, it was as light as a feather: a scrap of towelling, a relic from an extinct species.

‘Is that what d'Urbide wanted to put inside you?' Concepción is checking to make sure.

Suddenly she feels very tired. She's been tied down or drugged, like the young girl in
The Most Important Thing: Love.
Lætitia—an older Lætitia, or perhaps Rose's mother (with her red boots)—is leaning above her (or behind her?) (she's on all fours?) and is going to
put it in, put it in her
. She'd like to be in her bed, falling asleep with her hand in her underpants. She's sick. She must be sick.

‘She's just a big dyke.' Nathalie winds up the conversation despite calls for
tolerance
from Rose. ‘A dirty fucking lesbian, carrying on like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.'

‘Arnaud calls her Cheap Carpet.' Concepción bursts out laughing. (Concepción
knows
Arnaud?)

(She's sliding on the surface of a planet that is spinning too fast. In the end, the only thing that is certain, the only thing to hold on to [besides the ballast of the dead, but that weight doesn't count] is the fleshy mass of the creature between her legs, alive and thick, pulsing, getting hairier and more and more autonomous, huge, intense, unknown, opening its moist, puckered and discerning maw to gobble up the history-geography textbook.)

(If she hangs back, frightened, studying in a bedroom with her wretched lifelong girlfriends, this creature will end up breaking away from her, crawling out on its belly with those hairy legs, hungry to devour the world. It will end up running around by itself, living its voracious bestial life, and return home to the den between her legs, to make her come, alone and miserable in her bed.)

‘I don't want to hurt you,' Arnaud says to her on the phone. ‘You absolutely mustn't fall in love with me, that's the worst thing that could happen to you, monogamy just isn't my thing, life's too short to be monogamous—what musician only plays one scale? Ah, my little Angie, you're sweet, you're good enough to eat, but the thing is you have to think of yourself, I'm about to leave for Bordeaux, didn't I tell you? I got into Philosophy, you should come and visit me, but my girlfriend might get angry, there's no way you can stay with me at the uni dorm, I'll come and visit you in your village, in your little village, in your bedroom with your dolls, I've got a feeling that will turn me on big time, what, you don't have dolls anymore? I'm joking, I've got a car now, I'll come by and pick you up, and you'll do things to me that I like, you know, with your tongue, you don't do it as well as my girlfriend but you get much more turned on, I adore how you let yourself go, do you like letting yourself go? You're a bit masochistic, I adore that. What are you wearing right now? Tell me what you're wearing. You mustn't wait for me, find yourself someone good, a reliable guy, a
big bloke
from your village. Kiss me, kiss me better, on the cock, come on, on my dick okay, I'm holding it hard here, go on suck me, quickly, I've gotta hang up, touch your breasts, touch yourself I'm telling you, put your finger in your arsehole—Ar Ar Arnooooo—go on, yes, go on, I've gotta hang up, think about me and wiggle your little arse, bitch oh oh—Arnoooooooo—think of me in your little arse Ar Ar…'

‘That guy's pretty classy.' Nathalie is impressed when she tells her about the rather unexpected phone call—his first phone call, the first time he's called her off his
own
bat
—that he even thought of calling her before he left for Bordeaux, already at uni, already
in a relationship—
a phone call that made her so happy and left her consumed with desire and filled with questions. ‘He's right about monogamy, you can't really expect a guy like that to stay celibate, come back to earth, my girl, you have to be more liberated, but doing it on the phone must be really really exciting, I'm not kidding, I'm so jealous.'

She ignored the bit about being masochistic, she didn't really understand it anyway and also the bit about her finger in her arsehole, that's a bit embarrassing (even though she normally tells Nathalie everything). In the end, when she thinks about it, maybe she is a little bit uptight.

Her mother gets dressed to go out, in her Liberty-print harem-pants jumpsuit. Won't Solange put hers on too? They have a job to do. Both of them. Women's business. It's important. Solange is old enough to understand now. It feels like they're wearing flowers to go and kill someone.

It's one of the mornings when the shop is shut, when it seems like her mother has some scores to settle. She doesn't have her customers to deal with, and it's like she's on the wrong setting, as if she wanted to persuade Solange to buy the stock from her—she's using proper grammar and a northern accent, Parisian, a threatening accent, her shop accent.

It's the first of November, All Saints Day, but it's as hot as a summer's day. The sky is deep blue. The plane trees have red leaves. The American oaks are an overstated red (everything is overstated in America). It's like a trick of the light: the sharply defined lobes on the leaves, embossed by the scorching wind. And she feels excluded from the scenery, as if the world was inaccessible to her beneath its froth of colours.

Her mother has bought huge pots of flowers to match the trees. Red, brown and golden. Every year Solange sees these pots in the garage. They rattle around in the back of the Renault 5. Papa's Alpine wasn't in the garage. It wasn't in front of the pharmacy either (you never know).

They go past the Cheap Carpet outlet and Milord's and the silos. They even go past the marina, but they don't take the road to the sea. They drive through all the vineyards on the d'Urbide estate. After that there are still kilometres of corn.

‘Corn is so ugly. Right at eye level like that. At least wheat can wave. And the sea has a horizon. But because of your father, we had to be next to the airport. Trapped in corn country. We're not chickens!' Her mother clucks, hoping to make her laugh.

All of a sudden they go downhill, and it's the beginning of another country, on another contour line, as if her mother had found the entrance to another dimension, science-fiction style. It's a land of pine trees, with sand dunes. She listens distractedly while her mother explains to her that this forest was planted by hand. Every now and then a yellow clearing appears, with heather and red ferns, and it's like witnessing a moment without mankind, a glimpse into an earlier time: seeing the earth pared of all thought, of any human gaze. She breathes deeply through her mouth, trying to get in touch with this, with Nature from a time before
homo sapiens
. As soon as she sees a clearing, she concentrates and it passes into her body, matter from the beginning, the original atoms.

‘Do you want me to stop? Are you feeling sick?'

She'd like to go to America. In America there must be heaps of places where no man (or woman) has ever set foot (have ever set feet). Actually, her head's spinning (or puffed-up) from trying to think about the Earth without human beings. And about the atoms of dead Indians, who were themselves made out of dinosaur atoms carried by the wind and the sea, and from which she herself is constituted at this very moment as she breathes in.

Her mother parks in front of a stone wall and greets an old woman who has a lot of watering-cans. ‘I'd like you to meet my daughter, Solange.' Hello to the lady, whose atoms look authentically old. ‘I was just saying to myself that I knew you would come,' said the lady. ‘You've never missed a year. And your husband? Men, always working. All Saints Day, and already we're seeing buds on the pine trees.'

It's a small cemetery with lopsided graves that are not so much covered in soil as silted up. Her mother, in the harem jumpsuit, has loaded herself up with flower pots and given Solange a watering-can to fill at the tap over there. There are graves with the date 1857 and 1864 and even 1893, the year they chopped off Marie Antoinette's head. Amazing she can remember anything from her boring history classes.

There's no border between the sand she's treading on and the sand covering the dead bodies. Nothing but a little gravel to bear the weight of the living as they walk past. If not for that she'd sink right down into the graves, or a hand would reach out from the sand, like in
Carrie
, and grab her by the ankle. The gravel keeps her above the abyss, just like circles of ashes keep vampires at bay.

‘Solange?'

Her mother. She gets started with the watering-can, the tap sticks, hurry up. The old woman's shadow is laughing on the wall. She runs across to her mother, spilling water as she goes, jumping over the glass caskets of the immortals, the ceramic flowers, the angels in faded shades and the In Memoriams in flaky engraving. She mustn't walk on the graves. Walk
between
the graves.

Her head is buried in her mother's harem jumpsuit and everything has shrunk: they're miniature tombs now. Her mother is tending the dead, digging over the sand, planting things, pulling out weeds and knotted grass, gauzy strands, tangled bits and pieces that she replants and buries. She unpots the big flowers, telling Solange to water them as she digs them into the soil, jabbing her nails in. When her mother rinses her hands under the tap, the water sweeps her sweat, cells, atoms into the sand where they can regenerate, intermingled with the dead of this place.

The photo in the seal on the tombstone is the same as the one on her mother's bedside table. Now that she tries to think about it again in the car, she's getting the photo confused with the one she sees everywhere, in the newspapers and on the TV, of the little boy who was thrown into the river and whose name is Grégory, Little Grégory.