Then things moved fast and in a couple of seconds her clothes were off and he was on top of her and fucking her. With great enthusiasm. They were both aroused by what had happened earlier. Having managed to escape so successfully, Gloria consented to return his passion, feeling for his skin with her mouth, scratching his back as if to mark out the territory. She didn’t take her eyes off him, his eyes were half-shut, concentrating, he was plowing into her as if his life depended on it. She would have preferred to go gently, more slowly, but she’d noticed that it wasn’t worth even trying to say that to a boy his age, not the first time anyway. They both fell asleep immediately.
In the morning, he fetched them two bowls of black coffee, a demi-baguette, and a pot of Nutella. She almost fainted with gratitude. A whole pot of Nutella, hardly started! “No one else is home.” They listened to the Meteors, then the Cramps, then “Surfin’ Bird,” at top volume in this bedroom belonging to a well-behaved little boy. They howled as they jumped on the bed. He kept putting his arms around her and hugging her too tightly. “I’m so glad I found you again, Gloria, I missed you.” She liked him to say that. And she felt it was resurfacing fast, the pleasure she felt at being with him. This time with nobody watching them.
They made love all day, sometimes on the carpeted floor like youngsters. She was finally getting used to him, wriggling, rubbing up against him, laughing with content. Since saying, “I didn’t know how much I wanted it,” they had had time to warm up. She came, almost inadvertently, which didn’t happen often. In fact, never with a guy. On her own, yes, anytime she wanted. But not with someone else. It hadn’t bothered her before. She was a girl, she wasn’t going to fuss, she wanted to please the boy, and was quite content if that made him happy. So it had taken her by surprise, and even disconcerted her a little now, to find that with him she could come. Just like the first time she’d masturbated, she knew what it would feel like, she wasn’t born yesterday. But she was puzzled that it was happening. At fifteen, she had imagined she would be frigid all her life. Which hadn’t surprised her then, there were so few things she got right. But Eric was feline, he undulated over her, worked on her to possess her, whatever the cost, to the far end of the end of something she didn’t yet know she could be. When they began again, she understood. It was almost frightening, another thing about him that would count for a lot with her. His tongue was diabolically competent. As often with her lovers, she’d learned in a day to appreciate what only the day before seemed a fault. As for him, he was like a kid at Christmas with a new toy, he wanted to play all day long.
His parents were back home, but they didn’t come to his room. She’d had enough now, cloistered in his pad, it felt like being held in a luxurious aquarium. “Come on, we’ll go out.” He disappeared to nick some cash from somewhere in the house and in ten minutes was back with five hundred francs.
“Where did you get that?”
“It was lying about.”
Later his mother would give him hell, discovering he’d pinched money from the household budget.
Outside in the street it was getting dark. Eric had taken Gloria by the hand, and she felt uncomfortable. Afraid of meeting anyone she knew. She wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge him. Too precious, too new, too teddy-boyish, too blond, too delicate, too everything. Now she was ill at ease. She was beginning to plan how to get rid of him and go join her usual friends. Then they’d bumped into Victor, and the two boys had got on fine. They’d gone over the bust-up of the day before and began to reenact it live, going mad with excitement, miming the actions, inventing extra twists. Gloria, feeling left out, chewed her lips, thinking about the flagrant injustice of male solidarity. Always ready to be best pals, just like that, whereas if she wanted to get three little sentences out of them and a bit of consideration, she was obliged to move mountains of motivation. Seeing how easily Eric fit in, she began to relax a little though, and was more willing to let him hold her hand. That evening, the three of them went to some practice rooms—the basement of a warehouse for fitted kitchens, fixed up for them by the father of one of the gang—to watch a band rehearsing. They’d bought several six-packs of beer. They sat in a corner, the band was doing a Joy Division cover. For Gloria, this kind of place, the atmosphere—deafening drum kit, electric guitar, amplifiers on full blast—felt like being a trout returning to its river. Wraparound sound, for once she was exactly where she wanted to be.
During a break, everyone shook hands all around and, standing with Roger, she told the drummer about what had happened the night before. She could hear Eric somewhere behind her asking if he could have a go on the guitar, and she stiffened with shame for him. She thought it was being a total twat to ask to play instruments when you didn’t know how. She could have done with a spade to dig a hole right there and jump inside and never come out.
When she heard him start to play, she remembered just in time to look cool with it. He played better than anyone she’d ever heard, holding the guitar the right way, low down. She listened, arms folded, unimpressed girl, just lending an ear. Inside she was thinking, Wow, I hadn’t got you down as this good. He wanted her to sleep at his place again, but when she called home to tell them she was staying with a girlfriend, her mother had answered icily that that very friend had been ringing the house all evening. “You should have warned her, my girl.”
Eric bought her a last glass at the bar by the bus stop. She tried not to be too enthusiastic, she thought she’d noticed that it put boys off if girls seemed too keen right away. But really she wanted to climb all over him, touch him, slip her hands under his sweater, make little loving sounds, kiss the back of his neck, stroke his back, and for want of being able to give way to her feelings, she started acting like the girlfriend from hell, finishing off her shandy while giving him the benefit of her theories.
“See, if you play guitar, it’s not quite so bad you being an upper-class snob, because being a guitarist trumps being a snob. See what I mean?”
“Are you that kind of girl? Groupie? Chases around after bands?”
“You bet! Drives me crazy when a guy can really play. Like you, if you saw a girl with super-sexy fishnet stockings, that’d turn you on, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, all right, I get that.”
“So okay, explain to me how it’s less stupid to get horny when you see a girl’s stockings than to get wet when you hear a guitar solo.”
“Getting you wet isn’t the point of the guitar solo . . .”
“Oh really, that’s what you think, is it?”
She caught the last bus, the twenty-one, eight o’clock, one that would take her straight home. Night had fallen during the journey, and she watched the streets she knew by heart as they went past. It was the first time a boy had been mad about her and at the same time impressed her this much. As a rule she attracted stupid assholes.
IN JUNE 1986 she read in Best that Bérurier Noir would be playing at Saint-Etienne with OTH. Eric had suggested they go see them. They were meeting every day now, one way or another. That they were meant for each other was beyond discussion for both of them. They weren’t old enough yet to realize that the future lasts a long time, and sooner or later things get complicated.
That evening, he’d gone home to fetch a rucksack and “some stuff” while she waited for him down in the street, a bottle of Kronenbourg in her hand. She’d wanted to show him how easy it would be to steal a Renault 5, but she got confused trying to hot-wire it, and in the end they’d taken the train, since Eric had enough on him to pay for both their tickets. Less exciting, but more reliable. It was a night train, hours and hours in an empty carriage. They fell on each other and to their great regret, nobody caught them at it.
She was used to coming every time with him now. She was convinced, like a good little Catholic at heart, that this was because she was in love. The future would tell her otherwise about orgasms, it was more complicated than yes or no.
In Lyon they trailed around the station and met a guy fr
om Longwy, easily spotted by his red Mohawk, who was going to the same concert and could take them by car. Eric had a knack for getting on with people, he wasn’t afraid of linking up with them, cracking jokes. Gloria was happy enough to go by road, but this guy drove in his own special way, and it was a miracle they didn’t have a head-on crash. He stopped at every gas station. She had a feeling of freedom, possibilities, intoxication. It was fun to look at the other people in their cars and be glad she wasn’t living their lives. She wasn’t that little girl being driven around without any choice, or that wife sitting alongside the hubby in the driver’s seat, or that secretary on her way to a course. She didn’t have to be someone normal. In the 1980s dyeing your hair green still caused a sensation. For lots of people it meant the unknown, danger, being part of something special, like knowing a secret.
In the car, they prepared for the evening by listening to Macadam Massacre at full volume, yelling along with it: “Adonowonabébé adonowanabébémalo.” Speed, the motorway, a new friend, the bass beat banging out. This music, which she’d been listening to all the time for the last few years, had two contradictory effects: a fantastic sense of relief, a loss of repression, and yet, at the same time, it also conjured up deep anguish. Without resolving it, it spoke to her about that: being locked up, terrorized, being in the dark.
They completely lost their way and by the time they got to the concert, OTH had already started their gig. They were singing “Euthanasie pour les rockers”: “Tu finiras clodo, finiras clodo / Je finirai riche, et mon vieux chien aura sa niche / Heureusement y aura l’euthanasie pour les vieux rockers / Euthanasie pour les vieux rockers” (“You’ll end up on the streets, you’ll end up on the streets / I’ll make a pile of dough, my old dog will lie low / Old rockers, put ’em to sleep / Old rockers, put ’em to sleep!”). The concert was in a great hangar out in the middle of nowhere. Losers, pariahs, junkies, good-for-nothings, all quite happy to meet up in the same place. There was some sort of confrontation with a gang of skins, but Gloria was so out of it she couldn’t really remember afterward what had happened.
Beer, plenty of beer, Coca-Cola, whiskey, more beer, and as soon as the bass started up, a powerful primal basic sound, a thousand people jumping up and down. As if at a signal. A chaotic psychic crowd movement, a fabulous collective jam. All through the concert that energy had to come out, bodies against bodies, crashing into complete strangers, sweating and yelling. Letting go.
At the end of the concert, Eric, who always had an idea where he was heading, took her by the hand, there were fields all around. They had sex in the grass, like randy rabbits, it was scratchy on Gloria’s back, she could feel prickles on her thighs.
Hitchhiking back to Lyon took all night. They’d been picked up by a scary-looking soldier—is there any other kind?—who looked like he would rape young couples and then chop them up. Gloria didn’t close her eyes the whole trip. Eric, more relaxed, was snoring peacefully, head on her shoulder. The driver didn’t open his mouth the entire time, his hands gripping the wheel, jaw jutting out and determined. He dropped them off on a motorway exit just outside Lyon. They were stuck, because it was impossible to cross the road, and dangerous for motorists to slow down. Since they had no choice, they accepted it philosophically. The main thing was not to give up, they repeated to reassure themselves, stuck on the edge of a motorway with cars rushing past at top speed all around them. In the end an old banger took the crazy risk of stopping, four kids inside it, on their way back from the same concert, wearing polka-dot shirts and sailor’s caps, and still as drunk as skunks from the night before. They all piled in together as far as Lyon city center.
Eric and Gloria had tried to sneak onto the Nancy train without tickets, but were spotted very quickly by a zealous inspector who took the opportunity, when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, to make them get off. Night was falling. They set off on foot, trudging a long way, not anxious, but without any other option than to press on through the countryside. Finally, they reached an engine shed, where there was no one to find them.
She came straddling him, to sex it up. Dawn was breaking. It was like being on a journey, except that the train was stuck in a shed, with grass growing between the rails. Surreal. Both violent and very gentle. She tried to be as wicked as she could. She liked to feel that he was losing his head. She felt for caresses, movements so as to feel him trembling and clinging to her. The sensation of climbing, then opening like a lotus blossom inside. It took her by surprise every time, a great powerful wave surging up between her legs. Every color of the rainbow. Then the gallop. Just had to hang on, not to miss the climax, that was important. There was a huge space inside her that she’d never realized existed before. Sometimes, in spite of everything, she got distracted, started thinking of something else and missed the moment. It wasn’t automatic, it was even rather tricky to manage, taking off. So she sometimes faked it, struck attitudes, and although she’d never seen a porn film in her life—in those days only addicts and people with subscriptions to a certain TV channel did that, and they weren’t numerous—she spontaneously mimicked all the poses of the genre. Even when the earth didn’t shake, he was magnetic, embraced her, and transported her. He said it was because of her, she was a sexy witch. She pretended to believe him. But she knew it was the two of them, their coming together that took them to this fantastic place. They had fallen asleep huddled together.
GLORIA WAS FASCINATED. Every time he took her to his place, his parents were appalled. And didn’t conceal it. Brilliant, exactly the effect she wanted to have on the old killjoys. Eric’s mother, a handsome dark-haired woman, elegant and authoritarian, gave her the kind of agonized stare that Gloria took as a compliment—it meant she’d made the right impact.
The summer holidays arrived. To Gloria and Eric, it was an ideal opportunity to go to London, to buy hair dye and records, striped tights and studded belts.
For the first few days of the holidays, the sun blazed down. Gloria had bought an orange wig and wore a fluorescent green miniskirt. She peered at herself in every shop window, thought she looked sensational. Eric, more restrained, had found a gray cloth cap and splurged on brand-new Doc Martens. They were on their way back from Parenthèses, a record shop, when Gloria started planning decisively.
“We’ll have to work through July. Got anything lined up? I can get a job at the Mammouth supermarket, my dad knows the guy who hires temps. That’s to pay for the ferry. Once we get over there we’ll work something out.”
Eric shook his head, obedient little boy.
“No, in July I’ll have to stay with my parents, we always go to our house in the country.”
“What about August, will they let you go then?”
“No, they won’t, but they’ll leave me alone. They want me to stay in Nancy with a tutor.”
“A what!”
“A tutor to help me study. It’s to get me up to the level of this place they’ve enrolled me in next term.”
“They’re going to pay someone to make you do your vacation assignments?”
“Well, yeah, that’s their plan. But I’ll talk to my father in July, try and get him to have a word with my mother.”
“And if she says no?”
“I’ll pretend to give in, but one morning I’ll get the train and by the time they tell the cops, we’ll be in London, cool. I’ve got a bit of money hidden away, I want to get a synthesizer.”
“A tutor! God, what a performance, just to pass your baccalauréat!”
GLORIA PUT IN a month’s work at Mammouth, shelving packets of biscuits from six in the morning. By the time the customers arrived pushing their trolleys and ready to complain, the packets had to be lined up properly. The first days were fine, she’d enjoyed taking risks on the sly, sampling all the biscuits. It was strictly forbidden to open any product, let alone eat it. Anything found open was taken out back and thrown in a bin—scrupulously mixed with inedible trash, in case it attracted groups of “scroungers” to t
he garbage. After ten days, she had tasted all the varieties they had on offer and was tired of them. She’d made friends with the gangling teenager—another temp—who was in charge of the candy department. She popped over to see him and pinched packets of Carambars or little chocolate bears. It gave her a thrill, like living dangerously.
It was her first paid job, she was just sixteen. It made her decide that once she was grown-up, she’d certainly rather tramp the streets than spend her life on her knees from dawn to dusk in a supermarket smelling of detergent, with artificial light beaming down on you, having to suffer in silence the nasty remarks of frustrated supervisors. (This was a youthful vow she was never able to keep. Her whole life thereafter consisted of dead-end jobs of the same kind.)
They were writing to each other every day again. The trip to London was taking on the dimensions of a honeymoon. Gloria didn’t even go out on weekends, so as not to spend a centime of the precious sum she was saving up for their departure. Eric was seething in the country house: “Last summer we didn’t know each other, but I was already fed up with it . . . This year it’s not just that it’s boring, I’m realizing how stupid they are, how arrogant, how cowardly . . . This is the last time I give in to them.”
Gloria said nothing to this, but found it peculiar anyway to be going on holiday with your parents when you were seventeen—more like a mama’s boy than a tough skinhead. He wrote: “My dad is so totally a stupid bastard. He said no to London right away. They really hate you. If you could hear them, you’d be proud of yourself. Anyone would think you were more of a threat than the entire Red Army, and let me tell you, around here the Red Army isn’t flavor of the month!”
Bye Bye Blondie Page 9