Bye Bye Blondie (12 page)

Beer, plenty of beer, Coca-Cola, whiskey, more beer, and as soon as the bass started up, a powerful primal basic sound, a thousand people jumping up and down. As if at a signal. A chaotic psychic crowd movement, a fabulous collective jam. All through the concert that energy had to come out, bodies against bodies, crashing into complete strangers, sweating and yelling. Letting go.

At the end of the concert, Eric, who always had an idea where he was heading, took her by the hand, there were fields all around. They had sex in the grass, like randy rabbits, it was scratchy on Gloria's back, she could feel prickles on her thighs.

Hitchhiking back to Lyon took all night. They'd been picked up by a scary-looking
soldier—is there any other kind?—who looked like he would rape young couples and then chop them up. Gloria didn't close her eyes the whole trip. Eric, more relaxed, was snoring peacefully, head on her shoulder. The driver didn't open his mouth the entire time, his hands gripping the wheel, jaw jutting out and determined. He dropped them off on a motorway exit just outside Lyon. They were stuck, because it was impossible to cross the road, and dangerous for motorists to slow down. Since they had no choice, they accepted it philosophically. The main thing was not to give up, they repeated to reassure themselves, stuck on the edge of a motorway with cars rushing past at top speed all around them. In the end an old banger took the crazy risk of stopping, four kids inside it, on their way back from the same concert, wearing polka-dot shirts and sailor's caps, and still as drunk as skunks from the night before. They all piled in together as far as Lyon city center.

Eric and Gloria had tried to sneak onto the Nancy train without tickets, but were spotted very quickly by a zealous inspector who took the opportunity, when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, to make them get off. Night was falling. They set off on foot, trudging a long way, not anxious, but without any other option than to press on through the countryside. Finally, they reached an engine shed, where there was no one to find them.

She came straddling him, to sex it up. Dawn was breaking. It was like being on a journey, except that the train was stuck in a shed, with grass growing between the rails. Surreal. Both violent and very gentle. She tried to be as wicked as she could. She liked to feel that he was losing his head. She felt for caresses, movements so as to feel him trembling and clinging to her. The sensation of climbing, then opening like a lotus blossom inside. It took her by surprise every time, a great powerful wave surging up between her legs. Every color of the rainbow. Then the gallop. Just had to hang on, not to miss the climax, that was important. There was a huge space inside her that she'd never realized existed before. Sometimes, in spite of everything, she got distracted, started thinking of something else and missed the moment. It wasn't automatic, it was even rather tricky to manage, taking off. So she sometimes faked it, struck attitudes, and although she'd never seen a porn film in her life—in those days only addicts and people with subscriptions to a certain TV channel did that, and they weren't numerous—she spontaneously mimicked all the poses of the genre. Even when the earth didn't shake, he was magnetic, embraced her, and transported her. He said it was because of her, she was a sexy witch. She pretended to believe him. But she knew it was the two of them, their coming together that took them to this fantastic place. They had fallen asleep huddled together.

GLORIA WAS FASCINATED
. Every time he took her to his place, his parents were appalled. And didn't conceal it. Brilliant, exactly the effect she wanted to have on the old killjoys. Eric's mother, a handsome dark-haired woman, elegant and authoritarian, gave her the kind of agonized stare that Gloria took as a compliment—it meant she'd made the right impact.

The summer holidays arrived. To Gloria and Eric, it was an ideal opportunity to go to London, to buy hair dye and records, striped tights and studded belts.

For the first few days of the holidays, the sun blazed down. Gloria had bought an orange wig and wore a fluorescent green miniskirt. She peered at herself in every shop window, thought she looked sensational. Eric, more restrained, had found a gray cloth cap and splurged on brand-new Doc Martens. They were on their way back from Parenthèses, a record shop, when Gloria started planning decisively.

“We'll have to work through July. Got anything lined up? I can get a job at the Mammouth supermarket, my dad knows the guy who hires temps. That's to pay for the ferry. Once we get over there we'll work something out.”

Eric shook his head, obedient little boy.

“No, in July I'll have to stay with my parents, we always go to our house in the country.”

“What about August, will they let you go then?”

“No, they won't, but they'll leave me alone. They want me to stay in Nancy with a tutor.”

“A what!”

“A tutor to help me study. It's to get me up to the level of this place they've enrolled me in next term.”

“They're going to
pay
someone to make you do your vacation assignments?”

“Well, yeah, that's their plan. But I'll talk to my father in July, try and get him to have a word with my mother.”

“And if she says no?”

“I'll pretend to give in, but one morning I'll get the train and by the time they tell the cops, we'll be in London, cool. I've got a bit of money hidden away, I want to get a synthesizer.”

“A tutor! God, what a performance, just to pass your baccalauréat!”

GLORIA PUT IN
a month's work at Mammouth, shelving packets of biscuits from six in the morning. By the time the customers arrived pushing their trolleys and ready to complain, the packets had to be lined up properly. The first days were fine, she'd enjoyed taking risks on the sly, sampling all the biscuits. It was strictly forbidden to open any product, let alone eat it. Anything found open was taken out back and thrown in a bin—scrupulously mixed with inedible trash, in case it attracted groups of “scroungers” to the garbage. After ten days, she had tasted all the varieties they had on offer and was tired of them. She'd made friends with the gangling teenager—another temp—who was in charge of the candy department. She popped over to see him and pinched packets of Carambars or little chocolate bears. It gave her a thrill, like living dangerously.

It was her first paid job, she was just sixteen. It made her decide that once she was grown-up, she'd certainly rather tramp the streets than spend her life on her knees from dawn to dusk in a supermarket smelling of detergent, with artificial light beaming down on you, having to suffer in silence the nasty remarks of frustrated supervisors. (This was a youthful vow she was never able to keep. Her whole life thereafter consisted of dead-end jobs of the same kind.)

They were writing to each other every day again. The trip to London was taking on the dimensions of a honeymoon. Gloria didn't even go out on weekends, so as not to spend a centime of the precious sum she was saving up for their departure. Eric was seething in the country house: “Last summer we didn't know each other, but I was already fed up with it . . . This year it's not just that it's boring, I'm realizing how stupid they are, how arrogant, how cowardly . . . This is the last time I give in to them.”

Gloria said nothing to this, but found it peculiar anyway to be going on holiday with your parents when you were seventeen—more like a mama's boy than a tough skinhead. He wrote:
“My dad is so totally a stupid bastard. He said no to London right away. They really hate you. If you could hear them, you'd be proud of yourself. Anyone would think you were more of a threat than the entire Red Army, and let me tell you, around here the Red Army isn't flavor of the month!”

She laughed when she read his letters. She sent him mixtapes.

On August 1 Gloria had completed her month, collected her pay. She was ready for a long lazy morning. But at dawn, Eric tapped on her window.

She lived in a housing estate where many people had converted their basements into bedrooms or offices or utility rooms. Her windows were barred because when she had moved into this room, she'd invited too many friends to come and sleep over.

She had gone upstairs to open the door, and met her mother—an insomniac—trailing around in a blue dressing gown, looking weary. Gloria had apologized. “It's just Eric, I don't know what he wants, but he's here.”

Her mother had simply rolled her eyes, without a word.

The time in the hospital had made the whole family calm down. Gloria asked for fewer outrageous permissions and no longer shouted at them. Her parents forbade fewer things. An uneasy status quo. Nobody wanted to go through the mental-ward stage again. As a result, her father, so as to keep himself out of the way, worked twice as many hours as before, which was some achievement. If he was never there, there was less risk of an explosion.

In Gloria's room she had an old barstool. Eric perched on it. He seemed disoriented.

“I've run away. I can't stand them anymore.”

He was looking tanned from his holiday. Still half-asleep, Gloria didn't know what to say.

“You want us to leave for London right now?”

“London's out, I'm sorry, I don't want to get caught at the border on the way back. I don't want to go back home. EVER. Know what I mean?”

“What happened?”

“Everyone was so weird in the country. They were all being super nice to me, the uncles and aunts, but my mother and father too. Treating me like a prince, but putting on pressure as well. I think it must have been to make me go off you, you see? A new strategy, nastier but not stupid. Half emotional blackmail, half manipulation, half—”

“You can't have three halves, but go on.”

He smiled for the first time. But at once, he had to clench his teeth and his eyes filled with the tears he had been holding back.

“They didn't lecture me. I even tried to talk to them two or three times, get them to see my point of view. I was so goddamn stupid, I thought they were listening, and I told myself they'd come round in time . . .”

“So, what's the problem?”

“Let me finish. You don't know my sister, Amandine, well, generally she's a pain in the neck. Her tactics are always to say yes, yes, and then she does exactly what she wants behind their backs. She steals from them, she likes poking around, finding money, pills . . . That's the way she's always been, Amandine, since she was little, she pokes her nose into everything. She's sure there are family secrets, that's her romantic streak. And she's good at finding things out,
plenty of practice. Soon as anyone's back's turned, she'll be into their bag, soon as the house is empty, she's rooting around in drawers. There's less than four years between us, and yeah, we scrap a lot, but well, we
are
brother and sister, you understand?”

“No, I don't understand, I'm an only child.”

“Two kids in the same house, we may not always get along, but well, fact is we're fond of each other. So at the end of the holidays, I could
tell
something was wrong. She was being way too aggressive toward my parents. Never seen her like that before, usually she's more devious, Amandine, she very rarely tackles them head-on. So I didn't know what was going on, and with me, instead of teasing me and provoking me as usual, she was kind of embarrassed, looking at me sideways, watching me.”

“Hey, the suspense is killing me, get on with it.”

“So one night she comes to see me—big deal. She acts like the elder sister, asks me a lot of questions about myself, us, drugs, life, how I see things . . . just amazing from someone whose main aim in life since I've been around is to make me stay out of her way.”

“I know what it is, she's pregnant! And they're saying she's got to have an abortion?”

“No, no, nobody has abortions in our family. Or if they do, they keep it quiet. Let me finish, nearly there. So I'm suspicious, and I get ratty, I ask her questions too. She doesn't say anything, not even to tell me to get lost, or that I'm an idiot, etc., she just looks at me with tears in her eyes and trembling lips . . . and finally she lets me into the secret—that the rest of the family all knows about, except for her, and
she
only found out when she chanced on the enrollment forms—at the end of August, they're planning to send me to a military academy in Switzerland! With walls as high as a prison, no question of getting out, even for Christmas. The idea is to discipline me, put me back on the straight and narrow.”

“Are you sure your sister isn't making all this up?”

“Amandine found the fucking
forms
in my mother's desk. She usually keeps it locked, but that day one of the grooms had been injured, she'd had to go out in a hurry.”

“A groom? You're really weird, your family, you have grooms?”

“We keep horses, we're not going to hire lifeguards.”

“But is it just so we can't see each other, you and me? That's why they want you locked up?”

“Partly. My mother's terrified you'll get pregnant.”

“Well, you can set her mind at rest, we do abortions super quick in my family. Anyway I'm on the pill, what would I do with a kid, at my age?”

“She thinks you'd pressure me into marrying you and then . . .”

“Love you to bits, baby, but I don't want to marry anyone. She's nuts, your mother.”

“. . . for the child support, alimony.”

“Oh really, how does she know I haven't got a nice little job with good pay and everything?”

Gloria starts packing her bag, in other words collecting her cassettes and some makeup essentials.

“Right, well, the good news about all that is we can go off on our big adventure.”

“But I don't want to make you miss out on your final year exams, just because—”