All the Way (22 page)

Politics is a sort of vast tilting globe of the world from which individual heads emerge, masses of them, appearing and disappearing. The grid lines are creased here and there around particular names and places. Clèves isn't marked at all. The past, made up of mountain ranges, takes up a lot of space, it's full of Egyptians and Chinese, and the future is a wide esplanade occupied by people who all have a cause. Rose's father, who reads
Le Monde Diplomatique
, moves his finger over the surface of the globe, tracing big circles that solve problems. The circles make huge fiery oil slicks around a microscopic central point: around her, Solange (peripheral and anxious, not central), Solange the
individual
(Solange is such a free spirit).

She can't help noticing Bihotz kneeling under his canna lilies, weeding madly, his trowel and spray beside him.

Doesn't everyone have a cause?

‘And what would be your cause?' Rose asks, annoyed.

Solange the free spirit, the individual, inside a snowball, her arms raised, calling for help.
I'm against racism. And against
the atomic bomb
(she declares in order to gain time).
And against
the killing of animals. Against the
systematic
killing of animals
(she adds) (one of her father's adjectives).

Rose's interest is sparked by
systematic
. ‘And what do you actually do, to resist it?'

I think about it
, she replies, with enough conviction to stand up to Rose's sniggering.

When her father was a pilot, she used to keep the planes in the air through the sheer power of her own thoughts, for as long as she could follow their flight path in the sky.

And she also gives butter to the birds in winter. Her mother has donated to the Ethiopians.
Of course
that's not the same thing, but alleviating suffering at home (and not simply tracing big circles with a compass), that's the way to change the world.

‘Charity begins at home,' Rose says ironically. She's always got the knack of plucking the perfect sentence out of nowhere.

If she only knew, if Rose could just
glimpse
the week that she has had, it would take her down a peg or two. With an adult man. Who is almost
twice
her age. (Obviously she mustn't say who.)

She flips through the homework notebook. The category ‘fantastic' is full of Boris Vian titles and so stuffed with ‘so's that it's like Rose has run out of steam, through a lack of words, or what? (Does enthusiasm have anything to do with
orgasms
?) (Does Rose have
orgasms
?) At the other end, filed under ‘lousy', there is only one book, Albert Cohen's
Belle
du Seigneur
(‘recommended by my mother').

His vision of women is so appalling, ridiculous, ludicrous. He
wants her to love him while he wears the mask of a repulsive old man,
whereas he would obviously not love her if she was horribly ugly or
even just a little bit ugly. Does he even ask himself that question? Can
you love a woman for her
inne beauty
her intelligence? Like when she
has separate toilets built so that their love will last, as if their love
had no real bodily functions. And the worst thing of all is the lack
of punctuation when you're in her head, as if she had no idea about
putting full stops at the end of sentences, it's such a phony sense of
style. And the height of ludicrousness is when she calls having an
orgasm taking her pleasure.

She stops there. (Orgasm?)

‘It's the most ludicrous book I've ever read, but you might learn a few things,' Rose suggests.

How should she respond? If she argues with her then here comes trouble.
It's not just about learning, but about things
going wrong. And it's not just about having a cosy little clean conscience. I've been through some traumatic stuff.

Rose doesn't get it. Or at least she doesn't get the connection.

You remember when my father flashed his dick at the carnival?

Rose still doesn't get it.

When he pulled out his thing? In front of everyone?

‘Your father has never been a flasher. He was just a loser.'

She's speaking about him as if he was dead. (A flasher?) (A loser?) It's always the same whenever she goes to Rose's: the planet shifts on its axis, there's ice at the equator and a thaw at both poles, everything's upside down up, unrecognisable—the oceans and the land, her father and her mother, and Clèves.

I saw him, right in front of me, in front of the priest, it was
midnight, he was with his mate Georges from the yacht club, and
everyone saw him and I was convinced that that was it, that I could
never face anyone ever again.

‘I do remember one carnival when your father and Georges were completely pissed, that's right. We'd gone on the dodgem cars with Christian (oh my God, we were so young!). But the rest of your story is complete bullshit, you must have been smoking too much dope. Firstly, it wasn't midnight (we weren't allowed out that late). Secondly, he never showed his dick, I would have remembered that.'

(The dodgem cars blinking under the electric sky. And Christian with his baby face.)

‘My mother says that your father is always trying to make out that he's got a big dick. But that's just an expression. It's not
literal
,' Rose continues (incomprehensible, as usual). She rummages in her bag (a real leather handbag, for women) and takes out a tampon, show-off, like it's a gutsy thing to do, as if she's the first girl in the world to be on the rag. She leaves the room without a word. There's a fragrance in the air—soap, roses and cleaning products.

As for her, she hasn't used a tampon yet. It must be a while since it's been that time of the month for her. Her cunt is driving her crazy, it's so itchy, sticky and swollen like an overripe pear. Too much fucking.

Bihotz takes her out for dinner. He's chosen a restaurant miles away. Of course everyone has seen them together in Clèves, but they weren't
together
like they are today. She's never thought of it like that before.

Attack of the itchy cunt again. By tipping her pubic bone forward and sliding her buttocks so her underpants are dragged to the side, she makes contact with the cold fake leather of the car seat and gets some relief. She likes the smell of this van. Of this Peugeot J7. Before, it used to smell of hay, petrol, rabbit. Now there's a smell that makes something leap inside her chest (not her heart, that would be
laughable
)
.

Clèves recedes in the rear-vision mirror, the J7 gains speed and she wants never to return to the village, to its mushroom houses and its child-eating children, she'd like to unwind from its ribbon road (and they all lived happily ever after and had, no, didn't have any children).

She puts her hand on Bihotz's shoulder and he turns to her (he's got the eyes of a gentle troll who has just captured the princess). What they need is for the night to swallow them up, for the night to become a cave where he can keep her concealed. Life in a cave with Bihotz.

Take her pleasure, what's wrong with saying take her pleasure?

‘In two or three years,' murmurs Bihotz as he gently peels her hands off him, ‘in two or three years we'll be able to go out together properly.'

She had clung to him, stupidly shy. She hadn't been expecting this kind of restaurant. Smart waiters and fancy white tablecloths. She'd imagined the sea, a toasted cheese sandwich with Australian surfers, bars filled with Kim Wilde's voice. Under the lampshades, Bihotz is glowing, smiling. He's tied back his hair, he looks different.

‘You are very pretty.'

She nicked Lætitia's eyeliner and worked out the right technique: smear it on the eyelid and then rub off the extra bit with a cotton bud. (Obviously no one must come into the bathroom during the procedure.)

‘The appetizer,' announces the waiter.

They dive into tiny bowls of orange mousse with lumpfish roe. She sticks up her little finger like rich people do; she's wearing the butterfly rings her father gave her the day of her twelfth birthday. It's so cool to eat without having to set the table. Bihotz orders the fish soup and the kidneys in Madeira sauce with
gratin dauphinois
(and he hesitates over the
confit de canard
). The waiter has seated them near the fireplace.

You could burn a whole tree in there.
Just like in castles in the Middle Ages.

The
confit
would have been a better choice after all.
The
gratin dauphinois
is to die for.
She'd like to ask for seconds but they're not at the school canteen.

‘I'm not going to go overboard with the lentils,' says Bihotz as he places his knife and fork across his plate. ‘They cause flatulence.'

She remembers Madame Bihotz saying, ‘It's tasty but it's a taste that leaves you wanting more.'

‘When you leave your cutlery like this,' he explains to her, ‘it means that you've had enough.'

Everything's shining. The waiters in black and white move back and forth, with little entrechat leaps as they twirl between the tables, performing some sort of acrobatics with their plates and their incredible sentences.

Suddenly all the lights go out and in the dark a blaze of yellow comes towards them—a cake for a neighbouring table crowded with uncles and grandmothers, a strawberry gateau specially ordered for the eleventh birthday of a virginal young girl who looks like she'd wear panty liners.

Can't I have a dessert?

He looks at her as if she's said something that was at the same time idiotic and inspired, as if she was a young queen who should be showered with chocolate, tiaras and kisses, glass slippers (which must really hurt your feet) and silver carriages. Something's bothering him but he can't find it in himself to ask her.

Yes, you can. Ask me.

She orders the chocolate fondant with crème anglaise and she'd like another glass of the 1978 Haut-Médoc.

‘How many boys have you already had relationships with?'

You'd think it was a lady with a perm asking her how many lollipops she'd like. The pretty English boy (what was his name again?), and the fireman? That'd make two. Three with him, Bihotz (but is she
going out
with Bihotz?). (If she's
going out
with anyone it's Arnaud—four.)

I don't know, around ten
? She licks the heavy solid-silver spoon.
First there was a surfer, and before that there was Christian
but we didn't fuck, and now there's Raphaël Bidegarraï who wants to
go out with me. But right now I've got Arnaud, you know that. That
makes
(she counts on her fingers)
three months and two weeks
and four days—my record.

She's crucifying him. Why is she doing it? Doesn't he want to stop her, can't he stand up for himself and show who the real man is, right now?

He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke up towards the ceiling. ‘How long will it be before you use the familiar form and say
tu
to me?'

The fire is glowing, red and gold, in the bottom of her glass of Haut-Médoc. It's raining now, pattering on the roof of the restaurant, the flames are dancing, and out the window nature is seething in a feverish sunset.

She focuses on the last spoonfuls of crème anglaise.

It's funny, I've already eaten the chocolate fondant and it's already
in my stomach and I still have the taste on my tongue and soon we're
going to leave the table and what I'm saying to you, right now, is like
the fine line, the very extreme limit between past and future. And, can't
you see, that's what we call the present? That's all it is! What we're
experiencing right now is already the past and we're straight into the
future. What we're experiencing now
literally
doesn't exist, can't you
see? It's already finished, it's already slipped between our fingers, like
the crème anglaise, it's nothing at all, how do I get to think this stuff ?

A big lump of emotion threatens to gag her (is she going to vomit?).

‘My mother didn't let me drink at your age.'

He's whispering but it's like he's screaming. The last thing she needs is for him to be his mother. He pays. He leaves a few five-franc coins, just like that, for show. She breathes deeply, leaning on his arm, scrutinised by the menagerie of waiters—no more playing cat and mouse for those sly foxes.

The countryside has melted in the rain. The horizon is quivering in the distance, the beaded light glancing back at them. Everything is misty, pretty, imitation Japanese. A soggy owl makes its
whoo ooh
and flaps its wings.

Primary school rhymes come back to her, about the rain in Spain and the honey and money, of the owl, the elegant fowl, and the pussycat, hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, eating with a runcible spoon, dancing by the light of the moon.

In the sweet-smelling J7, Bihotz goes for her, too hard, too fast, trying to grab her, hold her, so that instead of (it doesn't take much) thinking only about skewering herself on it (jamming it in, ramming it in, mounting it, milking it, moaning for it) she gives him a bit of a hand job (a bursting sausage in her butterfly-ringed fingers) and then she stops, we're not animals.

‘Oh, come on,' begs Bihotz.

She holds back for a bit when he chews the inside of her thighs, but it feels so good, and when he puts his tongue in and then rubs his palm there like she's shown him how to, it's absolutely unbearable—she pushes him back and sits on top of him, a
ding-dong
between the steering wheel and the gear stick, he comes very fast but so does she, that's lucky. Her itchy cunt is calm again.