Guylain was impressed with his old friend’s efficiency. He examined the little red dots which, if you joined them together, formed a magnificent ellipse from Aulnay in the north-east to Nanterre in the west, skirting south round the capital. Only Évry sat outside this imaginary curve and remained isolated at the bottom of the map. When Guylain ventured to suggest that Julie might well work in a centre in the provinces, Giuseppe was incensed.
‘Your memory stick, it wasn’t on the Paris–Bordeaux or the Paris–Lyon intercity train that you found it; it was on the commuter train, so it looks to me as if there’s a strong chance that your Julie isn’t cleaning loos anywhere but near Paris! And if I were you, I’d start looking in O’Parinor and Rosny 2 – they’re the closest.’
They spent the rest of the evening in front of an Italian TV dinner concocted by Giuseppe. On leaving his friend, Guylain promised he’d keep him up to date with his progress. He went home with the precious list tucked carefully away in his jacket pocket. And while Rouget VI wolfed down the flakes floating on the surface of his bowl, Guylain read to him the names of the eight centres upon which all his hopes were pinned: the eight stations of the cross.
23
Guylain spent the first half of the week checking out the shopping centres. As soon as he clocked off, he rushed away from the Zerstor, tore off his overalls and left the works without even showering, and ran for the train, bus or first suburban connection that came along, depending on that day’s target. Monday, O’Parinor at Aulnay. Tuesday, Rosny 2. Wednesday, Créteil Soleil. And the previous evening, La Défense – all mirages that vanished one by one. Each night, curious and impatient, Giuseppe inquired about Guylain’s progress.
‘Well?’
‘Well nothing.’ And each time he would explain wearily that yes, there were toilets, yes, there was a lavatory attendant but no one who even remotely resembled a nondescript twenty-eight-year-old woman. At Aulnay, he came across a sour-tempered old bag, at Rosny, a skinny guy with a moustache, at La Défense, a cheerful woman from the Ivory Coast wearing a multicoloured boubou, and finally, a girl with a shaven head covered in piercings. Giuseppe was even more crestfallen than he was.
‘It’s not possible,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘that’s the only place she can be.’ Guylain would reply that tomorrow was another day, then hang up and slump on his bed.
That morning, the old-man-in-slippers-and-pyjamas-under-his-raincoat greeted Guylain effusively. Balthus was back. A Balthus who was wearing himself out trying to water the roots of his favourite plane tree. ‘You were right,’ said his elated master, tapping Guylain on the shoulder as he drew level. ‘My Balthus is back to his old self. Just look at him.’ Guylain nodded, glancing warily at the mutt whose hindquarters were sagging and still trailing a little. That’s what death is like, he thought. The bitch was sometimes content to send out little barbs and then return to other occupations. But he was certain that it wouldn’t be long before she came back to finish off the job. In the meantime, Guylain reckoned that Balthus’s return augured well for the day. Once again, reading extracts from Julie’s diary on the train restored his optimism.
‘I shouldn’t boast about it but I did it, I screwed over the 10 a.m. lard-arse. And when I say screwed, I mean well and truly. It was easy. I roped in my friend Josy, who agreed to be my accomplice at once. I didn’t ask much of Josy, just to give me fifteen minutes of her time. I know that my favourite shampoo girl would have given me a whole day of her holiday to knock that oaf off his pedestal. It was auntologism number 3 that inspired me: In the toilets, power belongs to the person who has the paper.
Technically, the trap was easy to set. I opened up the paper dispenser, removed the roll that was inside, sellotaped a single sheet to the edge and closed the lid, taking care to allow the sheet of toilet paper to poke through the slit – the reassuring evidence that there was a roll of paper inside. The classic schoolboy prank. Practically – and that’s where Josy came in – I had to make sure that the 10 a.m. lard-arse got caught in the trap and not an innocent passing customer. So all Josy had to do was occupy the gentleman’s favourite cubicle and wait, mobile phone in hand, for me to text her alerting her to the bastard’s arrival. On the dot of ten, his heavy footsteps echoed on the stairs. Light beige suit, green tie and a brown shirt. I beeped Josiane, who came out with her head down, having taken care to flush so as not to arouse suspicion. I don’t think old fatty even realized that a woman had just come out of the men’s toilets, so preoccupied was he with preparing to deposit his disgusting morning catch. Josy stuck around to watch what happened next. I’ll spare you the details, but judging from the noises we heard coming from number 8, it sounded as though he was letting rip as never before. The silence that followed was all the more hilarious. I thought I even heard a slight crackling of the toilet paper as it came away from the sellotape holding it in place. Less than two minutes later, the 10 a.m. lard-arse came out, his face purple, his shirt half tucked into his trousers, his jacket more crumpled than a two-week-old lettuce. He crossed my realm with the slow gait of a penguin crossing an ice floe. And for the first time, I caught the look on his face. It was the look of someone in shock, someone who had just seen pride spattered with his own shit. As he walked past, I jerked my head at the saucer and indulged in a ‘Service, thank you’. The 10 a.m. lard-arse didn’t put anything in it. Besides, he wasn’t in a state to put anything anywhere. But the sight Josy and I were treated to as he attempted to go up my stairs with his shit-covered buttocks clenched will forever be one of the best tips I’ve ever received.’
Surprised at first, Guylain greeted the applause that broke out in the compartment with a smile. The young woman’s revenge had delighted the audience. He had to force himself to put the picture of a Kowalski, scarlet with shame, out of his mind, so as to concentrate on the next excerpt:
‘Speed dating. The phrase itself sounds inoffensive, but it scares me. Josy knows it does, but she’d been on and on at me for days over our morning coffee and croissants before I finally agreed to sign up with her for this “date with love”, as she calls it. For discerning singles only, for an entrance fee of twenty euros with one complimentary drink, said the flyer. I don’t know why I said I would. Maybe Josy’s unshakeable enthusiasm. Or that little girl deep inside me who’s still waiting for her Prince Charming and makes me toss a coin in the fountain from time to time.
“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” she said.
“Meeting an arsehole who’s only come to get laid, who treats the whole thing like a cattle market?”
“So? You’re smart enough to clock him and tell him to go and have a wank like a poor lonesome cowboy.”
Josy’s always very forthright. What bothers me about the expression “speed dating” is mainly the word speed. It sounds like a quickie. I don’t like that wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am attitude. Of course, Josy and I were immediately accepted, given our backgrounds. Single, young, not too bad-looking based on current beauty criteria which favour curves over the emaciated forms of the anorexic models who have graced the fashion pages for years. On the job front, I had to cheat a bit, of course. I wasn’t going to write “Profession: lavatory attendant”. That would attract every weirdo on the planet and put off all the others. Lab assistant. Again, that was Josy’s idea.
“A lab assistant cleans tiles from dawn till dusk too,” she assured me. “It’s just that in your case, it’s loos and in hers it’s tiled work surfaces, but at the end of the day it boils down to the same thing.”
Seven dates, each lasting seven minutes – that’s what you get with speed dating. There are rules. You mustn’t exchange personal contact details, for example (no chance of me doing that anyway). After each seven-minute date, you have to give a confidential appraisal of your date and say whether you want to see them again or not.
Josy waited for me at the shopping centre exit. The ceremony – I don’t know what else to call it – was due to start at 8.30 p.m. That didn’t leave me
the time to go home, so I got changed at work. I had to redo my make-up several times. First I put on too much eye-shadow and not enough lipstick. Then I overdid the gloss, but didn’t apply enough mascara. Each time, I contemplated the painted tart in the mirror gazing back at me with annoyance. Result, I ended up wiping it all off with lashings of make-up remover and made do with a spritz of Lolita Lempicka in the hollow of my throat. Clothes-wise I’d decided that my Lee Coopers, ballerina pumps and the little white heather-effect blouse bought at the sales would do fine. For the finishing touch, a silk scarf knotted casually round my neck was supposed to make me look relaxed, which I wasn’t at all – far from it. The last time I felt so nervous was at my oral exams for the baccalaureate. Josy, on the other hand, had pulled out all the stops. Figure-hugging dress, hair extensions, heels and Chanel N° 5. A sexy, modern Cinderella. At the door, they checked our IDs and gave us a voucher for a free drink. Josy and I wished each other good luck.
“It’s going to work,” she said, crossing her fingers.
To be honest, all I wanted to do was take to my heels, go home and snuggle under the duvet with a good book. Instead, I did as all the other girls did: I sat down at the first free table I could find and ordered a mint cordial. The first guy who came and sat opposite me told me he was a teacher of something or other. He did nothing but talk about himself, without asking me a single question. When the bell rang seven minutes later, I hadn’t even been able to get a word in. The only two words I’d uttered were hello and goodbye. For seven minutes I’d been sitting opposite a navel. A second guy sat down in the still-warm seat. Then a third. And every seven minutes, the bell rang throughout the bar, like a guillotine coming down. Next. It reminded me of a polite, friendly merry-go-round. Hello ma’am, goodbye ma’am, thank you ma’am. A sort of country dance where you have to change partners each time the moron holding the broom handle thumps the floor with it. Despite meeting seven men, I confess I was left feeling hungry, even though I hadn’t come here particularly famished. None of them seemed attractive enough for me to aspire to being carried off on his white steed. When they were OK physically, there was something wrong mentally, and vice versa. Some of them were very nice, like the cultured, interesting young man who had travelled widely but who had a gross, hairy wart on his chin which overshadowed all the rest. During the seven minutes, that’s all I saw, that bulbous growth covered in hideous, thick black hairs. On the form I just wrote “off-putting wart”, before going on to the next. There was this other guy – the third, I think – not bad-looking, very tall, but whose lisp gave his conversation a pathetically funny twist, a conversation in which each “s” was torture for the poor guy. The high point was when he told me his job. I simply couldn’t stop the giggles that I’d managed to stifle from erupting, which put an early end to our date. Staring down into my mint cordial, I took advantage of the two minutes’ respite before the jingling bell to pull myself together. But shit, when you’ve got a lisp, you don’t want to be a “thothial thientitht”! My fifth was called Adrien and he was so uptight that I was convinced he must be autistic. Unlike the first, who hadn’t let me get a word in edgeways, this one sat there silent as the tomb for the four hundred and twenty seconds of our date. Four hundred and twenty seconds during which he writhed on his chair and kneaded his hands as if trying to stop them flying away. When I asked him a question, he turned as red as if he were constipated and straining to have a shit. Constipated types have always made me feel uneasy. And in my job, there’s no shortage. As Aunty always says, “You can expect anything from a constipated person, even nothing. A constipated person is to the toilet as a mute is to singing, and vice versa.” The fourth and sixth were from the same mould. Middle-class, straight-A types and the manners of upwardly mobile executives, the sort who change their shirt and shave twice a day. As for the last one, he had a dick for a brain. His only concern seemed to be to find out whether I was vaginal or clitoral. I told him that my star sign was Pisces with ascendant Aquarius, but sex-wise I wasn’t yet sure where I stood. And I made it clear to that jerk that the day I made up my mind, I certainly wouldn’t be calling on him to check where my orgasm was going to come from. In the end, I found myself with an empty glass and seven appraisals that read like a chamber of horrors. 1: Navel of the world; 2: Off-putting wart; 3: Lisp; 4: Suit; 5: Chronic constipation; 6: Another suit; 7: Sex maniac. I had to go home by taxi because Josy was nowhere near done. After this first round, she had five requests. Five out of seven. Whereas two of my dates wanted to meet me again, the wart and suit number two. I left without replying. The latest Stephen King was waiting by my bed.’
Guylain remembered with amusement the first time he had skimmed through document number 70. The ten-minute read had been agonizing. A round of Russian roulette, tortured by the possibility that the Prince Charming Julie dreamed of might appear at any moment and steal her heart away. He had reached the end of that entry with a sigh of relief.
24
His head on the pillow, Guylain lay watching Rouget swimming round and round in his bowl. What dream could he be pursuing that kept him going without ever giving up? Perhaps he was chasing himself without realizing it, his head in the slipstream created by his own movement? During the past few days, Guylain had been afraid that he too was pursuing nothing but an illusion. The previous evening, his visit to Belle Épine in Thiais had been unsuccessful. A week of fruitless searching, chasing a phantom. He only believed that Julie was real because of her writing, just as Rouget believed there was an intruder in his bowl from swimming in its wake all day long.
Guylain had arranged to meet Yvon at the taxi rank at the top of the avenue. As usual, the security guard wore a beautifully tailored suit and proudly sported a white carnation in his buttonhole. The two men clambered into the taxi booked ten minutes earlier.
‘Drive on, my good coachman, avoiding jolts and bends.
With your expert handling take us to journey’s end.
Be lively and alert. Advance, for pity’s sake,
And lead this carriage forth, our gold is here at stake.’
The driver shot them an anxious look in his rear mirror before setting off. It took three red lights before the frown on his forehead disappeared completely.
With his immaculate pencil moustache, the majestic way he held his head and his impeccable dress, Yvon immediately made a strong impression on the fair sex at Magnolia Court. Even Josette, after rapidly depositing her excess lipstick on Guylain’s cheeks, was unable to resist the desire to join the cluster that had formed around the newcomer. When Yvon spoke, between hand-kissings, his resonant bass voice charmed even the most impervious of the ladies:
‘Ne’er did such a manor in these lands far away
Do me the great honour of having me to stay.’
‘Oh! Monsieur Grinder, you flatter us,’ breathed Josette Delacôte, choked with joy.
Welcome to the club of maimed surnames, thought Guylain. As tall Yvon strode regally towards the hall, surrounded by this court already won over to his cause, Guylain followed the procession, smiling, relegated to the role of footman that now seemed to be his. Yvon’s voice boomed through the hall, sending a thrill through the two rows of slumped bodies on either side of the door:
‘Lord, how great this hall is, so stately and so fine,
No entry is so close to the heavens sublime.
Happy are the tenants that may enjoy the chance
To have so fine a place to finish their last dance.’
Guylain feared for a moment that this noisy intrusion into the perpetual fog that filled the heads of the residents might cause a stroke or a heart attack. Even if no one contradicted Yvon, Guylain wasn’t convinced that all those poor drooling wretches in their incontinence pads were in a state to appreciate how lucky they were to finish their dance in such beautiful surroundings. After a tour of the upstairs, where some of the bolder residents insisted on showing the new visitor their rooms, Yvon commentated his visit in two succinct li
nes:
‘The apartments I’ve found are much like the tenants:
In some, distress abounds, others are quite pleasant.’
Although the rhyme scheme sometimes required a certain poetic licence that did not always reflect reality, Guylain had to admit that his assessment of the place and its occupants was spot on. Monique gave herself the honour of introducing Yvon to the audience, de-baptising him once by calling him Yvan Gerber and then Johan Gruber, before dubbing him Vernon Pinder, which was the name she finally adopted. Poor Yvon was no longer quite so high and mighty seeing his name mangled by the Delacôte sister. Guylain mounted the podium to read an excerpt from Julie. From the outset, it was apparent that he didn’t have the audience’s attention. Even though they sat silently amid the usual coughs, scraping of chairs and tapping of sticks, they were still unruly in anticipation of Yvon’s performance. Guylain decided to curtail his reading. End of the first half, and now the headline act. The king of the alexandrine pushed away the armchair that Guylain offered him with a theatrical gesture, reminding him of one of the fundamental rules for reciting poetry:
‘No matter who’s speaking, it is no mystery
One must be upstanding so the air can flow free.’
So with no script and no other safety net than his phenomenal memory, Yvon Grimbert, alias Vernon Pinder, subjected the ears of the astounded audience to a first blast. Phaedra’s speech declaring her love for Hippolytus, Act II, Scene 5:
‘Ah, yes for Theseus
I languish and I long, not as the Shades
Have seen him, of a thousand different forms
The fickle lover, and of Pluto’s bride
The would-be ravisher, but faithful, proud
E’en to a slight disdain, with youthful charms . . .’
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