All the Way (21 page)

And how can she make the word
dyke
fit in with that moment in Lætitia's bedroom—a moment like the light from the candle jars, shimmering and hot, a moment she likes to recall, rekindle, even though neither of them has uttered a single word about it—not that they're embarrassed, no, but they just behave as if nothing happened.

‘It's a lamp made out of salt from the Himalayas,' the Kudeshayan mother is explaining to her son (the Himalayas, my arse). She's holding the lamp in her cupped hands and she tells him to put the tip of his tongue on the lamp.

Instead of stopping them, Solange lets them carry on. She's mesmerised. It's as if the mother was recalling memories of her times in the mountains, of paths among the glaciers, and with the tip of his tongue, her son, a loving son, was tasting the salt with a gesture both dutiful and playful. A loving son, yet another find in this curiosity shop—a mother and son laughing together over a little lamp, able to share the world, its continents, its exploration, its riches. Such exotic items, a lamp and a loving son.

‘What have you done with your key?' asks Bihotz.

Her house (her parents' house, or should she say from now on, her mother's house?) is locked. She has inflatable parents, just like those dolls. You pull out the plug and they float away, looping through the sky.

‘Ever since my mother died,' says Bihotz, who's using his ‘mystical' voice again, ‘everything's gone wrong. We don't know who lives where anymore. This arrangement, this sharing of roles, it's confusing. I'm even starting to wonder if Lulu is really a dog.'

Lulu is dying and her scruffy muzzle seems to be inhabited by an insane number of faces: Madame Bihotz and Solange's parents and Arnaud and Lætitia and Little Gregory and the other child under the tombstone and the old woman at the cemetery and Bihotz's weight-watching fat cousin—the dead and the living and the half-dead all mixed together, or as if they were all dead, and it makes Solange want to cry.

She brushes her teeth and puts on her Snoopy nightdress.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
is on TV. The film is terrifying and she buries her head in his shoulder.

‘Don't touch me,' he growls.

Such an overreaction when right in front of her eyes is the distinctive transformation of his fly into the pyramid shape. It's even more accentuated when she puts her hand on top of his (he pushes it away). It occurs to her to do what Arnaud is always asking her to do, but something doesn't seem right—her
sucking off
Bihotz, or Bihotz letting himself be—no, it's really not on.

What to do? What is a girl supposed to do?

She sticks her small breasts against his biceps just as a bridge of vines breaks under Indiana Jones's weight. Warmth floods her chest and her heart is aching, filled with all sorts of hidden things, like in the temples, tombs and sarcophagi of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. (But who would ever understand?)

‘I hope you went to visit Delphine in hospital?' grumbles Bihotz.

He visited her poor mother, who can't get over it. But it was nothing, right? An adolescent fling, and she just reacted without thinking—fancy doing that to her mother! She wraps her leg around his thigh. She'd like him to take her in his arms, right there,
shhh
, she'd like some rest and for it all to stop and for something (what?) to pick her up and carry her away without her having to do a thing—then she'd be ready and willing for anything.

‘Anyway, Solange, you don't like anyone, you have a heart of stone, that's the truth.'

Bihotz gets up. He's got his pharaoh silhouette, the profile of the pyramid sticking out from his dressing-gown. It's so pathetic how visible
nymphomania
is in men.

‘Your parents' marriage is about to disintegrate and you're just enjoying yourself, Mademoiselle thinks she's at a hotel, Mademoiselle just wants to have her nails done, Mademoiselle thinks everyone is there to serve her.'

It's so unfair that she bursts into tears. She's never worn nail polish in her life. It's all such a mess. After all the work she's done in the shop today, after everything she does for others, to help maintain the shop, the display,
appearances
, after everything she
gives
, her generosity, that total gift of herself, her absence of pride, when she thinks of how young she is, her
innocence
that's been
trampled on
—tears well up from deep inside her, from way down, she can't bear it anymore, she's suffocating, she's going to kill herself if that's what it's all about, it's so horribly, atrociously unfair!

‘My darling, my love, my Solange, my only angel.' So now he's trying to console her. Serves him right. ‘My Solange, my sunshine.' So he's kissing her on her eyes on her chin on her lips, he's wrapping his arms around her, his whole body is around her. She gives into it. She stops crying a bit. She starts to rock herself backwards and forwards on him, it feels good, she starts to work a bit harder at it, she sticks what she's got down there against what he's got down there, it's burning, it's melting, like rubbing sticks together, like molten wax, images appear in her mind (Arnaud, Indiana Jones, the Kudeshayan boy, Lætitia d'Urbide, the surfer with chapped lips), clothing and flesh part, it's a bit hard at first, she rocks forwards and repositions herself, See Saw Marjorie Daw—and something—
boing—
pops in place like a spring.

She's not crying anymore, she's concentrating very hard. She's sighing and panting. She's riding up and down, sitting squarely on his thighs, like on a horse but still not quite like that. He's kissing her
passionately
, she turns her head away and shuts her eyes but his mouth follows her, wet and gulping—
shhh!—
she sits up straight but not too straight, so the thing doesn't slip out, so that she's right up close, right there, so it rubs, when she goes down again she goes down hard, that's it, that's good, he mustn't move at all, she goes up and down but rocks backwards and forwards as well—she's got her whole life in front of her, her whole life to learn, to feel, her whole life to keep doing it.

Bihotz starts mewling like a cat and something incredibly wet and sticky spills out and he wants to take his thing out but that is absolutely not going to happen, she's much stronger than he is, she holds on to him and moves up and down and rubs at the top the bottom in front at the back and keeps going and weirdly the thing is a bit soft, she wonders where it's gone, but she's already in flight, on her supersonic, roaring aeroplane, and off she goes.

When she puts her underpants back on, she sees a tiny spot of blood. Hardly worth making a fuss about.

She falls asleep watching the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Bihotz has disappeared then Bihotz comes back. The sky is clear in the east. He shouts about how idiotic it is that he's been kicked out of his own home when, fuck it, he lives here. She says, no way, she's never kicked him out, just like she doesn't paint her nails (she shows him), is he pretending she's someone else or what? The TV makes a
chrrrrrr
sound and the picture goes fuzzy. At her age she needs to sleep so why doesn't he just go out for a walk—walk as much as he wants. After that there's a strange lurching of the room as it folds in on them, the walls squash against each other and push them together, the ceiling has swapped places with the floor, and they have rolled, one on top of the other, one inside the other.

It's actually right inside her body (she can feel it), it must reach up to about where her bellybutton is, she'll have to measure it, she can't feel it all the way along but more or less at different spots. She manages to get him to plead with her about where she wants it (‘tell me what you want'—if he'd just shut up with it now), it's not always easy to make him understand her, so she sits on top of him, it's so much more convenient, she goes at the rhythm she wants, she stretches back bit by bit like a bow (or like that alarm clock she used to wind up until it started ratcheting back on itself in a racket of tiny frenzied bells). Every single part of the tubular, layered, round, hollow and bulging area (like Barbapapa's house) of her cunt has been touched, rubbed, filled and emptied, pressed and squeezed—and it's really good, even better than when she masturbates, it's totally great.

Vulva
n.
The external genital organs of the woman and of the female in advanced animal species.
ENCYCL
. The vulva is formed on either side by the labia majora and the labia minor, and in the centre, front and back by the clitoris, urethra and the opening of the vagina, the latter partially sealed by the hymen in the case of virgins.
Vagina
n.
(lat.
vagina
, sheath). The passage leading from the opening of the vulva to the cervix of the uterus.
ENCYCL
. The vagina is the female organ of copulation; it is situated between the urethral opening and the anus.
Copulation
n. (lat.
copulatio
, union). Coitus or sexual intercourse between a male and a female.

And a few days and nights and sunrises and late-night TV programmes later, they are still at it, having a go, trying to understand, doing it again so they can understand better, and so that—according to Bihotz—they can be done with it. Doing it again one last time, getting to the end of it, finishing up for good. As soon as they've put an end to it, it starts up again, they come together to be done with it, they struggle, entwined together, but the thing draws even more strength from their struggle. When they chop off one head, two more shoot forth; when they try to excise some of its flesh it redoubles its growth. Sometimes he yells that it's all his fault, or all her fault, that he only wanted to help out—what can they do, how can they get out of this thing. They start up again. She shows him how to press right here and slip his finger in there and lick her with his tongue right there, his dick grows big and fat again, so what can they do? Sometimes it's him on top and she rubs herself against his belly, sometimes it's him underneath and she rubs herself against him and it's even better.

They stop to eat and she goes to school and they sleep a bit and they take the dog outside and they play cards. Sometimes it doesn't work so they start up again, sometimes it's pretty ordinary so they start up again, sometimes they've had enough so they start up again, sometimes it's
so
great they start up again, she's really got to stop using ‘so' all the time. In between their
ding-dongs
(they have invented their own vocabulary) the rest of the time is almost business as usual.

Rose has worked out a system, in a homework notebook, for filing her reading. Seven categories of books, from worst to best, arranged according to the days of the week. Monday, lousy. Tuesday, poor. Wednesday, average. Thursday, good. Friday, very good. Saturday, excellent. And Sunday, fantastic.

Her head is spinning. It's as if Rose is talking about her, her and Bihotz, about their week, but no, that's impossible.

Rose's characteristic enthusiasm means that she has catalogued most of the books under Friday and Saturday, very good and excellent. She's also created subdivisions, ‘very good+' and ‘excellent+'. She has been filing her reading since she was eleven, since she read
The Diary of Anne Frank
, which she liked so much that she invented the category ‘super+' and decided that no other book could ever be better than that one.

That's a bit like sanitary napkins.

‘You have a sick mind. Anyway, Anne Frank is the first writer ever in the world to have written about periods. There's nothing dirty about it at all.'

It's getting harder and harder to talk to Rose.

I thought she wrote about the concentration camps.

Rose's mouth opens wide, then she condescends to explain to her childhood friend, to her ignoramus childhood friend: ‘She didn't write about the concentration camps,
precisely
because her diary stops when she's deported.' Rose is the keeper of knowledge that is so much more important than periods and fucking; it's knowledge that separates adults from non-adults,
historical
and
political
knowledge
.