One speech ran into the next, as Yvon switched with virtuosity from a ranting Don Diego to an anguished Andromaque, then an impassioned Britannicus to a patriotic Iphigenia. Without taking her eyes off Yvon for a second, Monique asked Guylain what Yvon’s profession was.
‘Alexandrophile,’ he replied without batting an eyelid.
‘Alexandrophile,’ repeated the old lady softly, her eyes shining with admiration.
Guylain made himself scarce before the end of the session, leaving his friend in the care of the Delacôte sisters who had invited Yvon to have lunch with them. By way of acceptance, the thespian came out with a verse of his own composition:
‘Never would I dream that this fortune could be mine
To share in such feasting in company so fine.’
Less than ten minutes later, Guylain emerged from the taxi and dived into the station. Évry 2, its 100,000 square metres and its public toilet awaited him.
25
The suburban railway was deserted early on a Saturday afternoon. Shaken about by the train, Guylain spent the journey time thinking about Julie. What would he do if he actually found her?
‘Hello, umm . . . er, my name’s Guylain Vignolles, I’m thirty-six years old and I wanted to meet you.’ He could not allow himself the luxury of ruining the one chance he might have of making the young woman’s acquaintance by stuttering idiotically. There was an alternative solution which was to write a few ardent words in her visitors’ book. That might work but it was also taking the risk of seeing his declaration sandwiched between ‘Your loos are shit hot!’ and ‘Toilets nice and clean but the flush is a bit stiff’. The train pulled into the station, jolting Guylain out of his reverie.
Guylain turned up his collar as he came out of the station. There was a chill in the air despite the big, bright sun shining in the sky. The openwork cylindrical metal tower enclosing a big moving red ball with the shopping centre’s name on it towered above the rooftops, beckoning him, like a lighthouse sitting on the town. Évry 2 was less than five minutes’ walk away. As soon as he was through the sliding doors, Guylain slowed down, abandoning the brisk pace that had brought him to this point. He felt the urge to spin out this moment and delay the confrontation with the reality against which all his hopes risked being dashed once again.
He strolled idly up the central mall, oblivious of the crowds milling around him. He pictured Julie walking down this same mall first thing in the morning, alone, her footsteps echoing through the vast, empty cathedral. He was at that point in his musings when, above the faint buzz of the horde and the background music blaring out of the loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling, he made out the sound of a waterfall. Close by, a majestic fountain was spewing out its water in continuous heavy jets through the mouths of a group of four marble silurids at its centre. The voice of reason immediately tempered his mounting elation, reminding him that in any self-respecting shopping centre there was a fountain, as there was a children’s merry-go-round, a waffle-seller and a central escalator. But he cocked a snook at Miss Killjoy and allowed his heart to skip a beat. The fountain was at the intersection of three main malls, just as Julie had described. Right or left? A woman with a little girl trotted off to the right, the mother entreating the child to hold on, they were almost there. Guylain followed them. As he passed the fountain, he flung into the water of dubious limpidity a nice fat two-euro coin, to ward off bad luck. Less than thirty metres further on, the characteristic toilets sign glowed brightly. Miss Killjoy once again burst into his mind to try and dampen his excitement. Yes, he knew. It just indicated where the toilets were and didn’t spell out ‘Welcome to Julie, the lavatory attendant’s place’. All the same, so far, everything had been exactly as described. A staircase with around fifteen steps led down to the lower ground floor. The place was tiled from floor to ceiling. 14,717, wagered Guylain, crossing his fingers. To the right of the entrance was the camping table. A few magazines with half their pages torn out were scattered on it. A handful of small change lay in the china saucer. The chair next to the table was empty. A jacket was slung over the back of it.
She appeared as he was making for the men’s section. She was coming out of one of the cubicles, a floor cloth and mop in her pink-gloved hands. He was able to watch her at his leisure as she hurried over to the cupboard to put away her equipment. On the short side, well-padded, she had a face that, in her youth, had probably broken more than one heart. Her attractive ash-grey hair was scraped back into a tight bun. Guylain shot one last look at this woman on whom his illusions had been dashed before slipping into cubicle number 8. He sank down onto the seat which he would have sworn had received the buttocks of the 10 a.m. lard-arse not long before, and held his head in his hands. He had so believed that this was the one. He could have cried with disappointment.
‘Peeing is no laughing matter! How many times do you have to tell those little brats?’ The words rang out harshly against the tiled walls. Peeing is no laughing matter – Auntologism number 5, Julie’s favourite. A second voice, much softer, echoed the words. Even with the interference of all the sounds of flushing, taps and hand-driers, Guylain said to himself that it was the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.
‘Peeing is no laughing matter. Sorry I took so long, Aunty, but you know what it’s like when Josy cuts my hair. Half an hour for the trim, an hour for a natter.’
Guylain extricated himself from the cubicle and dragged himself over to the washbasins. Turn on the tap, squirt of soap, rub the palms together, lather. His body felt as if it no longer belonged to him. The mirror reflected the face of someone who looked as if they’d seen a ghost. He didn’t dare look round at the form on his right, on the periphery of his field of vision. After filling the sink with a mountain of lather, he gave his hands a brief shake, took a deep breath and headed for the exit. Julie was sitting on her chair again and, her head tilted slightly forward, was covering the page of her notebook in her rounded handwriting. Of her face, Guylain only managed to glimpse the regular bridge of her nose, the soft, rounded form of her cheekbones and the slightly fleshy bulge of her lips. The curtain of eyelashes revealed nothing of her eyes. With her free hand, a hand with short, but delicate fingers, she stroked the back of her bare neck. Her hair was the colour of honey, one of those mountain honeys with dark, shimmering glints. She looked up for a second, her gaze focused on the wall opposite, and sucked the tip of her pen before resuming her writing. The sarcastic ‘Thank you anyway’ that she shouted after him as he left pierced his heart. The only change he’d had on him on arrival at the shopping centre had been lying for nearly ten minutes in the fountain’s circular basin beneath fifty centimetres of water. In his head, there was no room for anything other than this revelation: Julie wasn’t beautiful, she was sublime.
Outside, the loudspeakers announced between jingles that spring was around the corner. Tuesday 20 March, this coming Tuesday. Guylain smiled. He knew at once what he had to do.
26
When the delivery man turned up, I thought at first that it was a mistake. That the guy had come in the wrong door or that he was just popping into my toilets to relieve an urgent need that wouldn’t wait till later. But when he plonked himself in front of me and asked me, chomping away on his chewing gum, if I was Julie, I had no alternative but to stammer a guarded yes. Two seconds later, I found myself holding this crazy thing. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A bouquet, here, for me. And what a bouquet! A cascade of fresh flowers that filled almost the entire surface of the table, one of those enormous arrangements with the stems immersed in a big transparent sachet of water. I immediately called Josy, who ditched her customer in the middle of colouring her hair to whizz down and admire the thing. When she saw it, she exclaimed that any guy capable of sending flowers like that could only be either a nutter or the most extraordinary guy on earth. ‘Looks like you’ve hit the jackpot,’ she said, her eyes full of envy, before going back to finish her customer’s colour and making me promise to tell her ev
erything. This had never happened to me before, such an incredible gesture in such an inappropriate place, nor had it ever happened to my aunt either, in her career spanning nearly forty years. Except the time when, she told me after the event, a gentleman had given her a rose one Valentine’s Day, because his girlfriend had just dumped him and he didn’t know what to do with the thorny stem that was a nuisance. Stapled to the cellophane around the flowers was this fat brown envelope with the words ‘For Julie’ written in black ink. My hands were trembling a little when I opened it. The earthenware tile it contained was strangely like my tiles. Same size, same slightly milky colour. Utterly baffled, I turned the tile over and over until I read the handwritten letter that went with it:
Dear Ms Julie,
I am not exactly what one might call a Prince Charming. For what it’s worth, I find that Prince Charmings all tend to be rather smug, which annoys me and does not particularly endear them to me. I am no Prince Charming, and I have no white steed either. I too sometimes throw coins into fountains when the opportunity arises. I don’t have an unsightly wart on my chin, nor do I lisp, but I do have a really stupid name which alone is equal to all the warts and lisps of the world. I love books, even though I spend most of my waking hours destroying them. My worldly goods amount to a goldfish called Rouget de Lisle, and my only friends are a legless cripple who spends his time searching for his limbs, and a versifier who only speaks in alexandrines. I should add that a little while ago, I discovered that in this world there was a person who had the power of making colours brighter, things less serious, winter less harsh, the unbearable more bearable, the beautiful more beautiful, the ugly less ugly . . . in other words, the power to make my life more beautiful. That person, Julie, is you. So even though I’m no fan of speed dating, I am asking you – no, imploring you – to please grant me eight minutes of your life (I find that seven isn’t a very attractive number, especially for a date).
So now I must plead guilty. Guilty of having entered your life via this memory stick which I found on the train three weeks ago. But know that if I entered your life in this way, initially it was with the sole intention of finding you so I could return the stick and the writings it contained, even though that intention gradually turned into a profound desire to meet you. So to earn your forgiveness, allow me to give you this additional tile to add to your inventory tomorrow. For, whatever you may think, nothing in life is ever written in stone. Even a number as ugly as 14,717 can one day be transformed into a beautiful number with a little bit of help. I shall end with this expression which, I admit, is a bit pompous but I fear I’ll never have the opportunity or the desire to say it to anyone else but you: My fate is in your hands.
It was signed Guylain Vignolles, and underneath was a simple phone number. Maybe this guy was crazy, but he had made me feel very churned up. I shook the envelope and the memory stick fell onto the table. The dark red one. I’d been hunting everywhere for it for three weeks, since the day I took the train to go to Josy’s place. I reread the letter once, then twice. I think I spent the entire day rereading that wretched letter. Returning to it constantly, dipping into it at the slightest opportunity, between wiping down the surfaces and squirts of bleach. Savouring every word, trying to put a face, a voice, to this guy and his stupid name, as he calls it. Today, curiously, the tinkle of the coins in my china saucer sounded different, the hours sped by, the neon light was warmer, and even the people seemed nicer than usual. In the evening, snuggled under my duvet, I read it again from beginning to end, until I knew every word by heart. Before I fell asleep, I knew that I was going to call Guylain Vignolles. I believe I had actually made up my mind before I’d finished reading the letter for the second time. Call him to tell him that it wasn’t eight pathetic minutes that I would grant him, but three hours, the time it took me to get to sleep. Three hours to tell me about himself, to tell each other about ourselves, and venture perhaps where our words have never been.
This morning, the spring equinox, I hummed as I counted my tiles. Guylain Vignolles’s tile, tucked in the pocket of my overalls, knocked pleasantly against my hip. When I came to the final totting up, I set it gently down on the table and included it at the bottom of the sheet before adding up the numbers. Even though I was expecting it, I couldn’t help being amazed when I saw the total. Then I picked up the phone, thinking that 14,718 was a really beautiful number on which to begin a love affair.
With thanks to Ruth Diver
for translating the alexandrines.
First published 2015 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2015 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-4472-7650-0
Copyright © Éditions Au diable vauvert, 2014
Translation copyright © Ros Schwartz 2015
Jacket illustration © Jonny Hannah
Originally published in French 2014 as Le Liseur du 6h27 by Au diable vauvert, 2014
The right of Jean-Paul Didierlaurent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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