Underground Time (12 page)

‘Yes, my son had a dupe and gave it to me.’

‘I’ll buy it off you!’

‘Oh no, I couldn’t . . .’

‘Come on. I’ll give you ten euros.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’

‘Twenty?’

‘I’m really sorry. It was a gift. And anyway . . . I really need it.’

They say goodbye and go off.

She hears them laughing in the corridor.

She said she really needed it. As though her life depended on it.

Mathilde picks up the mouse and goes over to the keyboard. She clicks on Internet Explorer. The Google page comes up and she types ‘World of Warcraft’.

She has no difficulty in finding the rules. WoW was a video game and an online game before it became a card game. It has thousands of followers around the world.

She reads attentively.

On the other side of the Dark Portal, every player is a hero. The cards he holds allow him to equip himself with arms and armour, to use spells and talents, and to recruit allies to his group. In the course of the game, the cards allow you to inflict damage on opposing heroes or to protect against their attacks. The aim of the game is to kill your enemies. Each hero has a health value printed in the lower right corner, which tells you how much damage the hero can take. If your hero takes damage greater than or equal to his health (‘fatal damage’), you’re out of the game. Your hero can attack and defend against opposing characters, but to deal damage in combat, your hero must usually strike with a weapon. Dead cards – destroyed or discarded ones – go to a player’s cemetery.

In the cemetery, cards must be placed face down.

Mathilde looks at the Argent Defender.

His health value is 2,000 points.

As he is a defender, he can’t be used for attack.

The problem is that Mathilde has only one card.

The problem is that she has already suffered a certain amount of damage.

And she doesn’t know how many points she has left.

In the past, she used to have lunch with Éric, Jean or Nathalie. Sometimes they’d all have lunch together – the whole team.

Now they disperse – some go to the canteen, others to the restaurant. They don’t tell her.

Her allies have disappeared, they have taken the side roads. They are stealing out of Azeroth. They have ‘lunches out’, shopping to do. They grab a quick sandwich.

From time to time, Éric or Nathalie suggests going out with them. When Jacques is overseas. When they know he’s far away.

It’s one o’clock. The office has emptied all at once, like a school class when the bell goes.

For several weeks, Mathilde has generally had lunch with Laetitia, in the canteen or elsewhere. Laetitia works in Logistics. They met on an in-house course and they’ve kept in touch.

But this lunchtime Laetitia can’t make it. She has a dentist’s appointment; she’s sorry. If she had known . . . Today of all days, it’s such bad timing. Briefly, Mathilde tells her about Patricia Lethu’s impromptu visit. At the other end of the line, Laetitia gives a grim laugh.

‘It’s time they faced up to the problem, Mathilde. I can well understand that she’s caught between two stools, but hey, that’s part of her job. A sort of contradiction in terms if you see what I mean. She’s got to choose. Take responsibility. Because the time is coming when she won’t be able to look after the fox and the goose.’

‘The fox ate the goose a long time ago.’

‘That’s what you think, and that’s the problem. But you’re still there, Mathilde. You’ve held on for eight months in a situation where other people would have been destroyed. You’re holding on, Mathilde, but it’s time this stopped.’

Laetitia has a simple vision of the company. It’s quite similar to the one that rules Azeroth. The good fight to assert their rights. The good are not without ambition but refuse to cause devastation and use mean tricks to attain their ends. The good have ethics. They don’t trample on their neighbours. The evil have invested their lives in the quagmire of the company, and the only identity they have is the one written on their pay­slip. They are ready to do anything to climb the ladder or move up a grade. They long ago renounced their principles, if by chance they ever had any.

Laetitia’s speeches, her no-nonsense language, her way of dividing the world in two, used to make Mathilde smile. Sometimes they disagreed. Now she wonders if Laetitia hasn’t been right all along. If business isn’t the ultimate testing ground for morality. If business isn’t by definition a place of destruction. If business with its rituals, its hierarchy, its ways of functioning, is not quite simply the sovereign place of violence and impunity.

Every day Laetitia comes to work armed with the same jovial humour. She has drawn a clear line between her private and professional lives. They don’t mix. She’s impervious to the malicious gossip and office rumours, she couldn’t care less if Patricia Lethu is Pierre Chemin’s mistress or whether Thomas Fremont is homosexual. She walks the corridors, chin up, with a haughty air she’s made her own. She breathes different air, that’s purer and more refined. She clocks out at six thirty every evening. Her life is elsewhere.

Laetitia was the first to guess what was happening to Mathilde. Little by little. She caught snatches of conversations. Here and there. She realised what was going on even before Mathilde. She has never stopped asking her questions, insisting on details, hasn’t been fobbed off with evasive replies or lines that trail away. She has respected her silence, her sense of shame. But she has never let it drop.

The phone rang again. It was Patricia Lethu. The HR director wanted to let her know that she had things in hand. She’s sent her CV to all the subsidiaries in the group and picked out some internal job ads that might interest her. She’s seeing Jacques in the afternoon to raise some questions with him. Things will work themselves out. Just as Mathilde was about to hang up, Patricia Lethu stopped her. Her voice has recovered a sort of reassurance.

‘I perhaps didn’t appreciate your difficulties soon enough, Mathilde, and I’m sorry about that. But I want you to know that I am attending to it. I’m making it my personal business.’

It’s 1.20. Mathilde’s still waiting to try to go out. She doesn’t want to bump into Jacques or anyone else from her floor. She puts on her jacket, slips the Argent Defender into her bag and heads for the lift.

The door to Jacques’s office is shut.

As Mathilde leaves the building, she hesitates to go to the company restaurant. From where she is, she can see the queue running a few yards along the outside of the building.

Finally she goes over and takes her place in it. She’ll eat lunch quickly and then go to Bernard’s for a coffee. She checks she hasn’t forgotten her swipe card for the self-service.

She waits behind the others, looking at her feet. Her turn comes and she slips through the door. Once she’s inside, she has a few more minutes to wait till she gets to the food.

You have to take a tray, slide it along the rails, and choose between the weightwatcher’s menu, the gastronomic menu and the exotic menu. Choose between beetroot decorated with a thin slice of lemon, grated carrots with egg mayonnaise on top, or celeriac salad and parsley flowers. You pick up a bread roll with tongs, one or two sachets of salt and wait for the cashier. You give them your card and take your receipt. Say hello, bon appétit, thanks, wave, smiles fading. You choose a table, eat amid the hubbub of office conversations, unchanging, gone bad.

Mathilde has sat down by herself behind a pillar. She keeps her eyes fixed on her plate, swallowing mechanically. She allows herself to drift off into the noise, and then the words come back: the world keeps turning like the hem of a flowery dress, Jacques Pelletier says that, I didn’t know, I’m going to take care of it, you show signs of resistance, the train for Melun will arrive at platform 3, I’m going to take care of it, cards allow you to recruit allies to your group, you’re not on-message with the direction of the business, you’re only here temporarily, because there comes a point when you can’t look after the fox and the goose any more, I didn’t appreciate your difficulties soon enough, I’m going to start by calling IT, this can’t go on, the damage done is permanent and irreversible. The damage done is permanent and irreversible.

Mathilde got up without finishing her lunch, put her tray on the trolley and left. She walked to the Brasserie de la Gare and sat down at a small table in the middle. Bernard came out from behind the counter to greet her.

He’s sitting opposite her, smiling.

He can tell that she has lost points, several hundred, since this morning.

She’d like him to take her in his arms. Just like that, without a word, only for a moment. To rest for a few seconds, to get support. To feel her body relax. Breathe in the smell of a man.

At work, they say that the café owner is in love with her. That he asked her to marry him. They say that every morning he waits for the moment when Mathilde comes in for her coffee. That he’s hoping that one day she’ll change her mind.

Bernard has gone back behind the counter and is rinsing glasses.

Sometimes she dreams of a man she could ask: could you love me? With all her tired life behind her, its strength and its fragility. A man who would have known dizziness, fear and joy. Who wouldn’t be afraid of the tears behind her smile, nor of her laughter amid the tears. A man who would understand.

But desperate people don’t meet. Or maybe only in films. In real life, their paths cross, they brush shoulders, perhaps collide. And often they repel each other like the identical poles of two magnets. She’s known that a long time.

Now Mathilde is watching a girl and a boy at the back of the café, their legs intertwined under the table. They are young. The girl’s wearing a really short skirt and is talking loudly. The boy’s eyes are devouring her. They are sharing a plate of spaghetti. The boy’s hand is stroking the girl’s thigh.

Mathilde’s waiting for her coffee. She’s thinking about the question that Simon asked her the other day point-blank: ‘How do you know you’re a couple?’

She was preparing dinner and he’d sat down near her to do his homework. The twins were in their room.

She knew that he had been going out with a girl for a while, that he was in love.

She tried to find an answer, a proper one, for a long time.

She said, ‘Wait, I’m thinking.’ Then, a few seconds later: ‘When you think about the other person every day, when you need to hear their voice, when you worry about whether they’re all right.’

Simon was looking at her. This wasn’t enough. He was waiting for something more.

‘When you’re able to love the other person just as they are, when you’re the only one who can see what they are capable of becoming, when you want to share what’s essential, and to project it onto a new surface which you’ve invented . . . I don’t know. When it has become more important than everything else.’

She wished there could have been two of them to answer these questions.

That
she
was still part of a couple, in fact.

She’s alone and she replies with just one voice. A voice that’s diminished and stunted. Her sons are growing up and they lack a father. His male perspective, his way of looking at the world, his experience.

She’s a woman faced with three boys who will continue to grow up, change, transform. She’s alone, faced with their strangeness.

Philippe died ten years ago.

Ten years.

Philippe’s death is part of her. It’s inscribed in every cell of her body. In the memory of fluids, bones and stomach. In the memory of her senses. And that first day of spring, bathed in sunlight. A pale scar that blends in with her skin.

For the first time since the birth of the twins they were going away for the weekend without the children. Just the two of them. Théo and Maxime had just turned one. It had been a year of broken nights, sleepwalking, vegetable purées and bottles at the right temperature. A year of machines to fill, washing to hang out, overflowing shopping trolleys pushed up and down the aisles of Carrefour.

They had just left the three boys with Philippe’s parents at their house in Normandy and were driving towards the sea. They felt exhausted. Mathilde had booked them in to a hotel in Honfleur. Philippe was driving. She watched the trees by the roadside go by and then she fell asleep.

And then there was a high-pitched noise, the screeching of tyres on tarmac, like a shriek. The numbness of sleep ripped apart. When Mathilde opened her eyes, they were in the middle of a field, down below the level of the road. The front of the car was smashed in and Philippe’s legs were beneath it. All the lower part of his body below his waist had been swallowed up in the metal.

Philippe was conscious. He wasn’t in pain.