He repeated himself, only much louder, and everyone left.
“José, if you want to make yourself useful, bring me some vodka, a glass filled to the brim.”
“But . . .”
“Quickly, or I’ll just have to do it myself.”
Nicolas was holding a napkin to his face. Sober, he would probably never have recovered from such a beating; but protected by drink, he was still conscious and holding out. He wanted to cry, to laugh, to calm everyone else down, to pretend it was nothing, to keep his dignity. There would be time enough to suffer tomorrow. José held out the glass of vodka and he drank it down in one slow draught, like medicine. That was what it was. His whole body was plagued with countless dull aches. He had lost the use of certain muscles, but, in spite of everything, he tried to stand up. The little drink had barely gone down his oesophagus and it was restoring the use of his limbs. It felt to him as if it had replaced the blood and all the other fluids in his body, from head to foot. Soon he experienced that feeling, so often described but hard to believe, of being somewhere else, outside this suffering body, far removed from this shame which should have made all his inner wounds bleed.
He was drunk.
“Do you really not want me to . . .”
“No.”
He headed for the door. The courtyard was empty and the Group had melted away. He took a few steps towards the guardrail to the car park, and leant against it for a moment while his battered face tried to identify the early summer breeze.
He hobbled over to the newspaper kiosk. Every step took several hours. There was blood trickling down his sleeve. What would the next stage be? Getting to the door of that building over there on the left? No, he was going to go for the big one, all the way to the beginning of the footbridge, then down it to get to the taxi rank. None of the drivers would open their doors to him, that was for sure. So he would take the Métro, at worst he would be taken for the tramp he had now become: unshaven, splattered with blood, blind drunk and out of work. He found the strength to step onto the footbridge, and walked along it slowly, his legs obeying him. The embankment of the Seine was deserted, he was alone dragging his carcass along it, and it was better that way.
But when he thought about it, he was not completely alone on that footbridge.
Right at the bottom he could see a small motionless figure.
Waiting.
The nasty premonition, which had survived every insult the day had thrown at him, suddenly felt more acute.
The stiff, rigid figure was looking towards him. This was not some illusion. His battered cheekbones were not clouding his view, his concussed brain was not distorting his senses, the little guy was there waiting for him, stiff as a poker, at the bottom of the footbridge. The image was still a long way off, but already familiar.
He made out the features without daring to recognize them.
He would have been so much happier for this to have been a hallucination, some evil creature surfacing from his worst nightmares. The little guy had small eyes, small hands and probably a small heart beating in his chest.
The little guy definitely was someone, and he had every right to go wherever he liked in the city. So what was he doing at the bottom of this footbridge, as if the fate of the man he was waiting for had no choice but to come past him.
When he drew level with him, Nicolas was exhausted and damp with his own blood. He turned to face him.
“What do you want, Bardane?”
Alain Bardane gave no reply. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt with several buttons undone and no tie.
“I expect you can tell,” said Nicolas, “I’m not feeling great . . . I’m still just about getting by because the vodka’s acting as an anaesthetic but soon . . . I . . .”
Bardane still did not break his silence, so Nicolas tried to get round him and continue on his way, but Bardane, thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket, did not give him a chance.
“Stay where you are.”
He took his hand back out clutching a small black metallic object which Nicolas could not immediately identify . . . for the simple reason that it was the first time he had seen one so close up.
“Is that a revolver you’ve got there?”
Bardane was silent again as he held up the tiny revolver, no more realistic than a child’s toy. Not something to be afraid of. Nicolas tried to control himself. The alcohol was still fuelling the fire in his skull. Was it tiredness or the hazy veil woven by the vodka that was coming between him and reality? He was not frightened yet. It was all so unthinkable. Nothing made any sense.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I want to disappear. Not be here any more. To be out of the picture. Let me pass and I promise no one will ever hear my name again. I’m going to take a plane to some impossible place and I’ll never come back. Give me a bloody break.”
“It was the friends who left first. My wife won’t stay much longer. I’ve had to sell everything that could be sold. The word that keeps cropping up is ‘depression’. As far as doctors are concerned ‘decline’ doesn’t really mean anything, but ‘depression’ does.”
“They’re right. Depression can be treated.”
“I didn’t realize everything would stop so quickly, I wasn’t ready. The children could fend for themselves, I thought I was in my prime. I’ve never done anything but work. It’s what I do. I could have gone on another ten or fifteen years. They told me I couldn’t be recycled. Like most rubbish.”
“Put that gun away and let’s go and talk about this somewhere.”
“At first, I thought it was to do with money, to do with living standards, but that doesn’t actually matter very much, I can cope without all that, but I’ve got nothing else to live for except my work. It must be my fault.”
“Put that gun away.”
Bardane started to sob. Nicolas could feel the effects of the vodka seeping away and he knew that soon he would be left alone and more terrified than ever.
“I’ve been sacked too,” he said. “The position’s vacant. Broaters might take you back.” Nicolas was backing away as he spoke and Bardane was furious when he realized.
“Don’t move, Gredzinski!”
“Go and talk to him, he’ll understand . . .” said Nicolas, taking another step back, then another, unable to stop himself.
“Don’t move, I said!”
Nicolas thought Bardane was going to drop his arm and point his toy at the ground.
Instead, he heard a bang and his chest buckled with the impact.
Winded, he brought his hand up to his heart.
Fell to the ground.
His eyes closed involuntarily.
There must have been some logic to all this, everything made sense. He had never had any talent for living. As a child, he had watched others live.
What a shame . . .
Everything could have been so different.
All he had to do was to get over that footbridge, and then, straight after that, the world.
But it was getting dark, far too early for the time of year.
His cheek against the tarmac.
The greatest fear, the thing he had been so afraid of for all these years . . . is this all it was? Just this?
In a few minutes Nicolas Gredzinski would no longer be afraid of anything, he had all eternity to recover from this practical joke. No one would be able to get to him there, the little coyote was not allowed in, nor were any of the other pains . . .
A warm liquid, oozing from his heart, ran down his neck.
Is this all it was was? Just this? I’ve spent so long being frightened of . . . this?
A slick of liquid wet his chin and lips.
He would know the taste of his own blood before dying.
The tip of his tongue found a drip at the corner of his lips.
Hot and sharp at the same time.
Yes, it was hot.
But why sharp . . .?
Why was his blood sharp?
It wasn�
��t blood.
It wasn’t blood . . .
He knew that taste.
I know that taste . . . It’s . . .
It definitely was what he thought it was.
Is it vodka . . .?
It definitely was vodka.
His heart was oozing vodka.
Heaven? Hell? What was this place where he had vodka instead of blood?
He checked through every part of his body; his arms, legs, lungs, head – everything was working. Laboriously, broken, smashed, dislocated, but working. He could even try opening his eyes.
It was light.
It was a long time until nightfall.
He managed to stand up and found he was at the bottom of the footbridge. There was no one now to stand in his way.
He looked at his chest and could find absolutely no traces of blood. He thrust his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out his dripping flask, which had a hole pierced through it.
Alcohol had been killing people since forever. But, amongst the millions of lives it took, it occasionally happened to save the odd one.
*
He pressed his forehead against the shop window as he waited for her to turn round.
She eventually came out and looked him up and down to assess the full extent of the damage.
“. . . I miss you, Loraine.”
She did not say anything alarming. Or anything amusing either. Just: “Let’s go back to my place.”
Epilogue
They had said 9 o’clock.
Nicolas remembered, in spite of the state he was in that evening. How could he forget that feeling of taking his life into his own hands, like a freed slave, utterly surprised by the sudden freedom. In the three years since that night of June 23rd, he had experienced the drunken thrill of the peaks and the troughs; he had unleashed his own strengths which had been held back for too long, he had even looked death in the face. All of this could have encouraged him to miss a rendezvous he had not believed in anyway.
The announcement in the newspaper about Blin’s disappearance had persuaded him to go. The words “left us” seemed to him to be a confirmation, a logical conclusion to a sequence of events for which he had been the pretext. Only a dead man, returning from the dead, could respect the terms of their bet.
Nicolas arrived with plenty of time to spare and this was intentional: he wanted to have a look round the Feuillants Tennis Club. Half pilgrimage, half nostalgia trip – nostalgia for his own physical fitness, which he might never see again. The alcohol might not have made his hands shake or taken his legs from beneath him, but it had slackened his reflexes and his general mobility. However much his doctor reassured him, his good old habit of worrying had regained the upper hand, he could already see himself as a breathless old man who would soon not manage just one flight of stairs. Coming back to the Feuillants, he wanted to see players moving, having sudden bursts of speed and playing winning shots. Perhaps the magic of tennis would reawaken something in him and give him a taste for physical exertion again. He spent a few minutes watching a mixed doubles match where the combined age of the players was around the 300 mark. Septuagenarians dressed all in white exchanging vicious shots and making jokes about the more litigious points. Exactly what he needed to watch. Then he walked all round the club hoping to see a dash of true brilliance, which he did here and there on the various courts. He felt the urge to play again.
His watch said twenty to nine. His rendezvous, even if it was only a symbolic one, was in no danger of being late. He got his car and went to the infamous American bar, which had not changed one iota; he paused in the doorway to look all round the room so as not to miss a single person. He might have drunk a lot these last few months, he might have gone a bit too far off the rails, scrambled his memory and forgotten who he had always been, but he still remembered Thierry Blin’s face. A little round face with dark, sly eyes, smothered by a beard and neglected looking hair. Here in this bar, at five past nine, there was no one who looked like that. He settled himself on a bench seat and crossed his arms, happy to be there although he could not have said why. No one asked him what he wanted to drink. New faces appeared, office workers, couples, a few tourists, nothing that looked like this Thierry Blin who had “left us”.
At twenty to ten he eventually resigned himself to the fact that the ghost would not appear and it was better that way; there are some mysteries that gain nothing by being explained, and some secrets it is better not to know.
The time had come to go back to the woman he loved. He stood up with a feeling of resignation, perhaps a little disappointed, and cast one last glance round the room. He would never set foot here again, in the place which had turned his life upside down in the space of a few hours; that was a long time ago now. His gaze lingered on one man’s head, or rather the nape of his neck, quite hairless and motionless, and set on shoulders dressed in light-coloured linen. The man had been there since he arrived, leaning over the counter, with his fingers around a huge orange and blue cocktail. As he approached him from the side, Nicolas recognized one of the members of the Feuillants that he had been watching an hour earlier.
“Excuse me, my name’s Nicolas Gredzinski, I watched a few of your rallies earlier at the Feuillants.”
“. . . And?”
Gredzinski did not recognize anything about this face, not even the sly little eyes.
“I had a strange impression when I watched you hitting the ball. Would you mind if I told you what I really thought?”
“Please do.”
“Your shots have quite good flowing style, you never miss an easy shot, but it’s clear that if things speed up at all, you have a slightly delayed reaction.”
“Well, that was very honest.”
“In a word, you’re an honourable player, but you wouldn’t get a ranking higher than fifteen.”
“I’ve never tried, that way I’ve never had to face the evidence.”
“All the same . . . there is something unique about your game: the backhand down the line.”
The other man raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“A wonderfully tactical shot, startlingly fast and with unbelievably straight action. A champion’s shot.”
Gredzinski paused, but got no response.
“There are only two people in the world capable of mastering a trump like that. There was Adriano Panatta, particularly during the 1976 Roland-Garros tournament. And there was someone, who’s not with us any more, called Thierry Blin.”
Paul Vermeiren said nothing. Holding back a smile, he gestured for Gredzinski to sit down on the stool next to him.
The waiter came over without being called.
“I’m going to have a vodka in a well chilled glass,” said Vermeiren. “How about you?”
Nicolas thought for a moment, and let the temptation wash over him. Later in the evening he had planned to open a bottle of some unknown wine discovered by Loraine; he had decided he would now drink only when he was with her; from now on she would be there to share in his moments of euphoria, and perhaps she would be for a long time to come.
“Nothing, thank you.”
They sat in silence until Vermeiren’s drink arrived.
“I thought I’d won the bet,” he said. “I fooled everyone who knows me, but then my mask falls in front of a complete stranger!”
Nicolas smiled, flattered.
“Do you remember what was at stake?” said Paul.
“Of course.”
“Bad luck on the loser. You can ask whatever you want of me.”
Nicolas had never thought about it. To his own surprise, he heard himself saying: “A revenge match on the tennis court.”
Paul burst out laughing but quickly contained himself. “When?”
“Why not straight away, then it’s done with.”
“The club will be closed soon, it’s almost dark,” said Vermeiren looking at his watch.
“The number four court has floodlights for tournaments. With
a good enough tip, Maurice will pull out all the stops for us.”
Paul raised his glass, there was no need to say anything else.
Half an hour later they were warming up. Nicolas was back on the court much sooner than he had imagined. He had learned to grab opportunities, and this was one which would never present itself again. After the toss, Paul chose to serve. They each swore to themselves that they would win.
Someone Else Page 27