Underground Time (4 page)

How many times has she wished she could fall seriously ill? How many symptoms, syndromes, ailments has she imagined so that she could legitimately stay at home, legitimately say, ‘I can’t take any more’? How many times has she dreamed of going off with her sons, without any plans, leaving no forwarding address, setting off with all her savings? To leave her path and begin a new life somewhere else.

How many times has she thought that you could die of what she was going through, die of having to survive ten hours a day in a hostile environment?

As she’s drying herself on the towel, she notices a dark mark on her left calf. She bends down and discovers a deep burn, three or four centimetres long. She straightens up and thinks. The night before she’d been frozen and had boiled some water to fill a hot water bottle, which she slipped into the bed before she went to sleep. She must have fallen asleep like that with her skin stuck to the rubber. She’s given herself a third-degree burn without realising. She looks again at the seeping wound. It’s not going to get better by itself. Two months ago she broke her wrist when she fell on the stairs on the metro. After a week she resigned herself to going for an X-ray because she couldn’t pick things up or hold on to them any more. The duty doctor held up her X-ray and told her off. Fortunately the fracture wasn’t dislocated. To test spaghetti or green beans, she quickly dips her hand into boiling water. She doesn’t feel anything. It’s as though she is developing a sort of resistance to pain. She’s getting tougher. She knows this when she looks at herself in the mirror. Her features have become so hollow. There’s something closed about them, stretched to the extreme, which she can no longer undo.

Mathilde looks in the medicine cabinet for the plasters. She chooses the biggest one and sticks it on. It’s ten past seven and she’s got to make it. Get the breakfast ready, catch the metro, then the RER and get to work.

She’s got to make it because she lives alone with three children, because they count on her to wake them up in the morning and they wait for her when they come home from school at the end of the day.

When she moved into this apartment, she sanded, repainted, put up shelves and bunk beds. She got on with things. She found a job, took the boys to the dentist, guitar lessons, basketball and judo.

She kept going.

Now they’re older and she’s proud of them, and of what she’s rebuilt, this little island of peace whose walls are covered in drawings and photos, perched above the street. This little island where she’s been able to introduce joy, to which joy has returned. Here all four of them have laughed, sung and played together. They’ve invented words and stories, made something that links them, joins them together. She’s often thought that she’s passed on to her children a kind of gaiety, a talent for joy. She’s often thought that she has nothing more important to offer them than her laugh, beyond the infinite chaos of the world.

Now it’s different. Now she’s irritable and tired. It takes a superhuman effort for her to follow a conversation for more than five minutes, to be interested in what they’re telling her. Sometimes she starts crying for no reason, when she’s alone in the kitchen, when she watches them sleeping, when she stretches out in the silence. Now she feels sick to the heart when she gets out of bed; she scribbles what she’s got to do on a notepad, sticks useful instructions, dates and appointments to mirrors. So that she doesn’t forget.

Now it’s her sons who are protecting her, and she knows that’s not good. Théo and Maxime tidy their room without being asked. They set the table, have their shower and put their pyjamas on. They’ve done their homework by the time she gets home and their bags are ready for the next day. When Simon goes out with his friends on a Saturday afternoon, he calls her to tell her where he is, wants to know she’s OK with it and doesn’t need him to get back sooner to look after the twins. Maybe she’d like to go out for a bit, to see friends or go to the cinema, he’ll suggest. All three of them watch her all the time, attentive to her tone of voice, her moods, the hesitation in her movements. She can tell they’re worried about her. They ask her several times a day how she is. She talked to them about it. At the beginning. She told them that she had some problems at work, but they’d pass. Later she tried to describe them, to explain the situation, the way she had gradually fallen into a trap and how hard it was to get herself out of it. With all the confidence of a fourteen-year-old, Simon wanted to go and punch Jacques right away, to slash the tyres of his car. He demanded revenge. That had made her smile back then, this adolescent revolt against the injustice done to his mother. But can they really understand? They don’t know what business is, its constraints and mean tricks, the hushed conversations. They’ve never heard the noise the drinks dispenser makes, or the lift, or seen the grey carpet. They don’t know about the superficial courtesy and the hidden resentments, the border skirmishes and the territorial battles, the secrets and the memos. Even for Simon, work is something abstract. And when she tries to translate things into a language they can understand – my boss, the woman who runs personnel, the man who looks after advertising, the big, big boss – it feels to her as though she might as well be telling them a story about barbarous Smurfs killing each other silently in a village cut off from the rest of the world.

She doesn’t even talk about it to her friends.

In the beginning she tried to describe the glances, the delays, the excuses. She tried to describe the things that went unspoken, the suspicions, the insinuations. The avoidance strategies. The accumulation of petty irritations, covert humiliations, tiny things. She tried to describe how it all fitted together, how it came about. And every time the story seemed ridiculous, risible. And every time she would break off.

She’d end up dismissing it with a vague wave of her hand, as though all this didn’t haunt her nights, didn’t eat away at her little by little, as if none of it ultimately mattered.

She should have told someone.

At the start. Way back then.

When Jacques started saying to her in the morning in that tone of concern that he was so good at faking, ‘You look dreadful.’ Once, then twice, a few days apart. The third time he had used the word ‘crap’. ‘You look like crap.’ But sounding vaguely worried.

What hate was contained in that word, hate she didn’t want to hear.

She should have told someone about the time he had kept her waiting for forty-five minutes on some godforsaken industrial estate, ostensibly while he went to get the car, when the car park was only a couple of hundred yards away.

She should have told someone about the meetings cancelled at the last minute or relocated without telling her, the sighs, the sharp remarks under the guise of humour, and her calls which he no longer took, even when he was in his office.

Oversights, mistakes, irritations which, taken on their own, were just part of normal office life. Ridiculous incidents without any drama or fracas, which added together had ended up destroying her.

She thought she could resist.

She thought she could face up to it.

Little by little she got used to it without realising. She ended up forgetting how it had been before, even what her job was about. She ended up forgetting she used to work ten hours a day without looking up.

She hadn’t realised that things could collapse like that, with no prospect of going back to how they were before.

She didn’t know that a company could tolerate such violence, however surreptitious.

To permit this tumour to grow exponentially in its breast, without reacting or trying to cure it.

Often Mathilde thinks of that Ten-Can-Knockdown game which the boys love. They lay into those cans every year at the school fête, aiming at the bottom until the last of them tumble down.

Well, she’s the target and today there’s nothing left.

But when she thinks about it in the evenings, lying in bed or in the scalding water of the bath, she knows full well why she keeps silent.

She keeps silent because she’s ashamed.

Mathilde opens the cupboard, grabs some knickers, trousers and a blouse. In the room next door, Simon’s radio has come on. A few minutes later he knocks on the door and offers to wake up the twins. She glances at the time; she’s doing OK. She goes into the kitchen, stops for a moment to think about what she has to do, the order she has to do things in. She doesn’t switch on the old transistor. She’s concentrating. Théo and Maxime burst in behind her and fling themselves at her for a kiss. Their bodies still have that night-time warmth. She strokes their sleep-crumpled faces and breathes in their smell. In the creases of their necks the arrangement of her own life seems simple to her. Her place is here beside them. Nothing else matters. She’ll call the doctor, get him to come out, explain it to him. He’ll examine her and agree that her body has no strength left, that there’s nothing left – not an atom nor a wave. After he goes, she’ll stay in bed till lunchtime and then she’ll get up and go and do the shopping. Or she’ll stay out all afternoon, filling herself with other people’s noise, their colours and movements. She’ll make a meal that the boys will love, in which everything’s the same colour or every ingredient begins with the same letter. She’ll make the table look nice, she’ll wait for them to come home, she’ll . . .

She’ll call the doctor as soon as the boys have gone.

At the end of the table, half out of his seat, Théo has started talking. He’s always been the chatty one; he knows dozens of jokes, funny stories, or sad ones, or ones that keep you up at night, scary stories. He’s asking them to be quiet. This morning he’s telling his brothers about a programme about the
Guinness Book of Records
that he saw a few days ago at a friend’s house. Mathilde half listens at the start, watching the three of them. They’re so beautiful. Théo and Maxime are ten. They’re developing their own personalities. Simon’s already taller than her. He’s got his father’s shoulders, the same way of sitting on the edge of a chair, off-balance. Their laughter brings her back to the conversation. They’re talking about a man who holds the record for the number of bras he can undo one-handed in one minute. And another one who in the same amount of time can put his pants on and take them off again eighty times.

‘Tell us some more feats!’ shouts Maxime in a state of high excitement. Théo goes on. There’s a man who can tie a knot in cherry stalks with his tongue, and one who catches Smarties between two sticks. The other two burst out laughing simultaneously. Mathilde interrupts them to point out that these are not really feats and asks them to think about what these people are actually doing: don’t they think that there’s something humiliating in taking your pants off and putting them back on dozens of times to become the world champion in your category? They think about it and nod. And then Théo adds in all seriousness: ‘Yes, but the guy who cuts bananas in two with his hand, just like that, skin and all, that’s a real feat, isn’t it, Mum?’

Mathilde strokes Théo’s cheek and laughs.

And then they laugh too, all three of them, astonished to hear her laugh.

For weeks, in the morning light, as they sit round the kitchen table, hoping to hear her voice, searching her face for the smile that’s no longer there, she has felt as though her sons are looking at her like she were a time bomb.

But not today.

Today’s the twentieth of May, and all three of them have gone off, bags and satchels on their backs, reassured and calm.

Today’s the twentieth of May, and she’s started the day by laughing.

Lila put her bag in the boot and got into the car beside him. Before he pulled off, Thibault called in to say he’d be starting his shift half an hour late. Rose said that they’d cope with the doctors they had. It hasn’t got crazy yet.

They drove in silence. After an hour Lila fell asleep, her head against the window and a fine trickle of saliva running from her mouth to the top of her neck.

He reflected that he loved her, loved everything about her, her fluids, her substance, her taste. He felt as though he had never loved in this way, with this constant feeling of loss, with this feeling that nothing could be foreseen, nothing could be held on to.

On the outskirts of Paris the traffic got heavier. A few miles from the ring road, they almost came to a standstill. Stuck behind a lorry, he relived each moment of last night’s dinner. He could see himself leaning across the table, his body inclining forward, reaching towards her. And Lila sitting back in her chair, distant as always. He could see himself and the way he had sunk in little by little, trying to give the right answers to the questions she kept asking – what are you looking for? What do you want? What do you need ideally, and what if . . .? A barrage of questions so that she didn’t have to say anything about herself, about what she was seeking, so as not to disturb her own silence.

Him, trying to look good, be funny and witty and nice and relaxed.

Him, his mystery removed, stripped bare.

Him, a fly trapped under a glass.

He had forgotten how vulnerable he was. Was that what being in love meant, this feeling of fragility? This fear that you could lose everything at any time, through a slip or a wrong answer or an unfortunate word? Was this uncertainty about oneself the same at forty as at twenty? And if so, was there anything more pitiful, more vain?