At first, he accepted everything good-naturedly. He so wanted to believe things were going well. In fact, when he first showed up on her doorstep, he had almost panicked: Sylvie was stunning, she looked just like a Hitchcock heroine in a little black dress that fell just below the knee, high heels, and hair tied up in a chignon. Sylvie had been one of the great fantasies of his youth. Her apartment was pretty grim: shag-pile carpets, tacky gold highlights, framed landscapes – it was like visiting a staid maiden aunt back in the 1980s. But the sofa was comfortable and the flat-screen T.V. was gigantic. Money becomes women, and the fact that she was a little weathered by time made her all the more sexy, gave her a touch of vulnerability. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, looking up at him coyly, laughing at his every pronouncement, leaning forward to listen, pretending to be utterly fascinated. He had forgotten how alive you feel in that moment: when you sense that something has begun, and every gesture simply confirms the impression. He had felt his veins swell with a strange, distinctive euphoria: the delicious intoxication that comes before the first kiss.
Sylvie has a good memory. Vernon had been flattered that she remembered the parties and the gigs where they met up. Sylvie soothed an ache he had not known was so profound. He had not realised how lonely he had felt of late. They had listened to John Lee Hooker and Cassandra Wilson. There was some talk of Alex, she was clearly upset by his death, he realised that her pain was still raw and politely avoided saying that Alex rarely mentioned her, that she was not one of the girlfriends who had left an impression. Then she had said, it’s so late, you must be hungry, let me see what I have in the kitchen. Vernon had got up and was scrolling through her iPod looking for Thee Oh Sees – they found themselves face to face, she took a step forward, he leaned down and after that there was no talk of dinner until four in the morning.
The first night had been bliss. He had undressed her gently, between embraces. His every gesture was sensual, moving in slow motion. Between her pubis and her navel he discovered she had a little tattooed panther in black ink. Their flesh synchronised, in the darkness Sylvie’s voice became more guttural. Vernon had not fucked in years – when he got up to fetch his cigarettes, he caught his reflection in the hall mirror and saw that, without realising, he was smiling like a half-wit. And the funniest thing was that he could not get rid of the smile. He felt an ancient force stirring in him.
They got along well. There was a place for him in this house. She liked to cook for him, he loved her vast king-size bed, the little heart-shaped red metal box always full of weed, she liked him to choose the music, to take the remote control and decide what they should watch on television, they liked the same T.V. series and spent whole days with the curtains drawn lying in each other’s arms. He felt as though she had come to lick his wounds and he could bandage hers. He treated her with a gentle roughness, manhandling her body, he sensed her orgasms become less and less fake, more and more intense. Yet he knew from experience that you should be wary of women who feel the need to tell a man they love him ten times a day. It tends, as a rule, to hide something ugly.
But very quickly, the constant salvo of negativity demolished him. Her critical mind, which had made him laugh at first, crushed his natural good humour. Only old-school things – Billy Wilder movies, the music of Coltrane, Flaubert’s novels – did not prompt a furious barrage of criticism. And a few select designer labels. The rest of the time, regardless of the subject, and without pausing for breath, she reeled off a litany of phonies, hypocrites, morons, poseurs, genuine arseholes and fake stars . . . Vernon had started to lock himself in the toilet. Every half-hour he felt the need to go, just to get a bit of peace – but she would press herself against the door and continue to pester him. He no longed dared lift a finger – the fear of being bawled out left his back muscles in knots. Vernon would get up at six a.m. so he could have a quiet cup of coffee before she appeared.
Not only is Sylvie negative like a fine drizzle that can chill you to the marrow, she can quickly become nasty when roused. One afternoon, finding her crying after a visit to her son’s new apartment because it was “too much”, the way he treated her almost like she was a stranger, Vernon had tried to make light of things: “Yes, but remember how we were at his age, how much time we spent with our parents.” She had whipped round, her face contorted with hatred and hurled abuse at him – what the fuck did he know about being a mother? Why did he have to stick his oar in? – before giving him a few vicious kicks intended as an invitation to leave the room. He had left her to calm down and went to look in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom where he found some tranquillisers. From that day on, he took one every morning when he heard her getting up. He reminded himself of a girl whose blog he used to read who always swallowed half a temazepam before taking it up the arse. He no longer offered an opinion, on any subject. Sylvie had hit her stride: she would shift between periods of blissful infatuation and bouts of unhinged aggression, then insist on tenderness and sex as though nothing had happened. Vernon adapted himself to her demands, with the growing feeling that he was shrivelling up inside and feigning good humour simply to avoid hassle. He counted every thrust, careful to protect his lower back muscles – fucking had become a chore, the only way to keep her quiet for five minutes.
Now, holed up in a hotel room, €40 a night, Vernon can finally breathe. He does what he used to do when he still had a home. He visits websites and makes a list of the new records being reviewed, then listens to them while knocking back a few beers. There’s no-one to say how many beers have you had today, don’t keep your socks on in bed, they’re filthy.
He does not have much time left if he is to get his belongings out of storage. He has not succeeded in discussing the problem with Sylvie. At first, he was waiting for the right time, but then he realised that if she gave him the money, it would be as if she were buying a puppy: she would never let him off the leash. He wonders whether the bailiffs packed his things into boxes or tossed it all into bin bags. All his worldly goods, what little he possesses – the Laguiole knives he took from his mother’s, the saucepans he bought at Ikea one day when someone drove him there, the genuine goose-down quilt he has been lugging around since he was thirty. The things he has cleaned, preserved, used. And the paperwork he has spent his life sifting through. A few photographs. His voting card. Never used. The letters he has kept. All this in strange hands that are neither hostile nor benevolent, hands whose job it is to flog off the lives of those in debt. It is being dead while still alive, his confiscated past. He is so vulnerable that he has the impression that an invisible thread ties him to these objects and, when they are scattered to the four winds, he will crumble to dust.
If he had talked to her honestly about the situation, Sylvie could have paid the thousand euros as easily as he might pay for a café crème. In her world, a thousand euros is a pair of shoes. A handbag costs more than that. She is always saying “I don’t give a toss about money” as though this were an exceptional quality. But she has never been without – after her divorce, she got the apartment, an alimony settlement equivalent to double the minimum wage while still spending the money generated by her parents’ property portfolio. Who would give a toss, in such circumstances? Vernon too would happily be a poet if he had never had to worry about paying the rent.
He could reply to her Facebook message: “Hey babe, thinking of you, can’t wait to see you again”, then leave her to stew and show up tomorrow morning with a couple of croissants, put on a hangdog expression and confess I’ve been lying to you, I don’t have an apartment anymore, I didn’t know how to tell you. Then sit back and let things take their course. She would take care of everything. He will have to discreetly replace the volumes of the Pléiades he “borrowed”, not to mention the gold watch he assumes belongs to her son. He grabbed everything he could, and cleared out while Sylvie was taking a bath. He tries to reassure himself, tells himself he will buy it all back as soon as he can. He reasons: it wasn’t premeditat
ed. She mentioned this dinner she was having, he knew he was going to do a runner, pictured himself on the streets without a cent in his pocket so he swiped a couple of things. An act of revenge that was petty. But pragmatic: he sold the five volumes from the Pléiades – two volumes of Stendhal, three of Karl Marx – at Gibert Jeune for €100. Cash. The baseness of his actions in no way detracted from the pleasure he felt as he walked back down the boulevard Saint-Michel looking for a cheap hotel where he could spend a peaceful night. He is getting by.
The cheapest available hotel room with free Wi-Fi was round the back of Bastille. He knows this street. Céline used to live here. That was the year of “Groove is in the Heart”. Céline had a screw loose, she couldn’t hold her liquor and she drank like a fish. But before she chucked him out, screaming insults because she thought (quite rightly, though he never admitted it) that he had been chatting up some other girl right under her nose, they had spent a pretty cool summer together. They went to the movies every day. Céline was a projectionist and had a card that admitted her and the guest of her choice to any cinema. It was a sweltering summer, they looked for those with air conditioning. They liked the Gaumont big-screen theatre on the place d’Italie, but they did not show the best films. She loved Carax and Téchiné; he preferred Scorsese and De Palma. Vernon had never thought about Céline again. She had amazing tits.
He finds three private messages on Facebook from a journalist called Lydia Bazooka, who did not think it worthwhile to wait out an appropriate period of mourning before starting on a biography of Alex. Vultures start to circle around a corpse while it is still warm, grabbing the best places for the feeding frenzy. This bitch is scouring the internet looking for anyone who ever knew Bleach and Vernon is surprised that she has already tracked him down. He never appeared in any of the official portraits. Like a lot of people his age, Alex had been marked by the meteor that was Cobain. He would often say that, in the record industry, the ideal gig was working with a dead artist. That’s why they are so eager to push them towards an early grave. Lydia Bazooka remembers that Alex often mentioned Revolver in his interviews. When the record shop still existed, it was a useful piece of publicity, albeit the benefits were very short-term. It is strange, in retrospect, to realise how much Alex tried to support him, and how he had not thought of it as generosity but as a way of affirming his power. The journalist is insistent. He feels like telling her to fuck off. Death has kindled a tenderness in him that he has not felt in a long time. Vernon decides not to reply, then changes his mind and sends a message: “I’ll bet you’re earning peanuts to piss on his grave.” She is doing it to have her name on a book and considers it perfectly acceptable to exploit whatever comes to hand.
Vernon expects her to take offence, or try to justify herself. She replies instantly, “Don’t worry, I’m used to being paid peanuts. But meet up with me for a chat and I’ll buy you a coffee on expenses.” And since it takes him a moment to react, she adds: “I love your eyes in the photos. I’d like to see them for real.” She is funny. He googles images of Lydia Bazooka and finds only two. She is short-legged with a round, fat nose, downy hair and pale skin. But she makes up for it in her presentation: plunging necklines, long nails, short skirts. A geeky pin-up who makes the most of what she’s got. Perfect. In her case, being passably ugly works to her advantage, the effort she makes is touching. He asks her where she lives.
Searching the web, he finds several articles she has written about Alex. Her approach is impulsive, but better than he had expected. She has been a genuine fan from the very beginning. As he searches, he comes across a multitude of eulogies in praise of the dead singer. People have already moved on, there are no recent mentions of him on social media. But in the three days after his death, every blogger seemed to have something to say. Alex was thrown to the sharks, their jaws snapping in the void, churning out words that nobody reads.
Then Vernon turns his attention to a series of friendly messages from Louis, a former customer at the record shop to whom he was never particularly close. Louis writes to him with a rather curious eagerness – Vernon remembers him as a cheerful, thuggish lad, these two traits not being mutually exclusive. He is disturbed by the number of videos and photos of Charged GBH, The Exploited and Kortatu, the guy has posted on his page . . . How old would he be now? Forty? When he notices that Louis still lives in Cergy-Pontoise, he decides to keep the conversation polite but distant and does not mention that he has nowhere to crash. These days, Louis works in a bookshop, he likes hardcore crime fiction and offering his opinion on the state of the world. He is obsessed with Syria; he is convinced that Bashar al-Assad is a victim of a sickening campaign of propaganda orchestrated in Israel and Washington by the infamous Judeo-Masonic secret coalition. He is a part of the virulent left-wing, and clearly sufficiently involved to embrace the dark side of the force. What fascinates Vernon about Xavier, Sylvie and now Louis – three people who have nothing much in common – is that they have no doubts about anything. They are perfectly aware that no-one agrees about anything, something that might prompt them to wonder what to do in the face of so many contradictory views. Far from it, any challenge seems to reinforce their conviction that they are right.
Facebook these days is nothing like the chaotic free-for-all Vernon was a part of ten years ago. No-one quite knew whether it was a love shack, a night club or a repository for the emotional memories of the whole country. The internet has created a parallel space–time continuum where history is written hypnotically at a speed much too frantic to allow the heart to introduce an element of nostalgia. Before it has time to take hold, we have moved on. Vernon hangs around on Facebook the way he might a cemetery, the few remaining occupants are rabid zombies who rant like guinea-pigs locked up in cells, flayed alive and having salt rubbed into the bleeding flesh.
The only person who is more or less amusing in this gallery of horrors is Lydia Bazooka. Vernon rips open a bag of crisps, pops a can of beer and browses for something worth watching on television. He knows he needs to keep Lydia on a slow simmer. If he replies as soon as he gets her messages the pleasurable sexual tension between them will snap like an old knicker elastic. He blocks Sylvie, who is sending worried, increasingly hysterical messages. He scatters crumbs everywhere as he munches the crisps, thinking about how Sylvie would shriek if she could see him now, how she would bombard him with insults and threats before nuzzling against him like a little girl and insisting he say I love you. It feels good, being on his own. He has enough money to pay for another night here, not counting the watch that he hasn’t sold yet, he has enough to survive for several days. Little Lydia Bazooka will have to be patient.
I FINK U FREEKY AND I LIKE YOU A LOT – THE SOUND OF DIE ANTWOORD floats vaguely in the background. The bar is rammed. On her smartphone screen – cracked because she dropped it even though she’d only just got it back – Lydia is simultaneously keeping track of her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter notifications. It is compulsive. Infobesity. Tonight, she’s waiting for a message from Vernon Subutex. It’s a work-related thing. He’s more or less agreed to meet up with her. But there is nothing work-related about her excitement. She wants him she wants him she wants him and she’s not imagining it: he is flirting with her. She has spent the past forty-eight hours glued to her Facebook page – every paltry “Like” is a pelvic thrust, every comment an orgasm, and every private message drives her into a frenzy. There has been nothing explicit about their exchanges, but she could swear he’s on the same wavelength: sex, sex, sex. But since Saturday, he has only briefly logged into Facebook to drop a random “Like”. She stares at his Facebook page, wondering what the fuck he’s up to. She hopes he hasn’t changed his mind. Apart from the fact he’s got her horny, she needs to see him for her book. Because right now, workwise, she’s not exactly off to a good start.
At her table, everyone is talking about telephone company call centres, each has a disaster story, complete with the usual jokes about the accents of the technica
l advisers. The line-up at her table is not exactly ideal; Lydia doesn’t like to be seen with people who are less than extraordinary. She does not believe in cosy relationships anymore than she would favour a pair of Nikes over stilettos. Trainers may be more comfortable and better for your back, but you make more of an impression in a pair of fuck-me heels. Friendships are the same: if people on the outside are not jealous, you’re sitting at the wrong table. Right now, for example, she’s just Ms Nobody sitting at a table with a bunch of badly dressed randoms. No potential kudos here.
Test message from Cassandre – they’re at the Mécano. Since she knows that this factoid alone will not be enough to convince Lydia to shift her arse, and since Cassandre wants her to come because she figures that Lydia will either have some coke on her or, failing that, the number of a dealer, she sends a second S.M.S.: “Paul’s just arrived. Alone.”
Okay. Lydia clicks off her iPhone, slips it into the pocket of the Balenciaga bag she always keeps on her lap – her one designer handbag cost her a kidney, if it gets stained or someone nicks it, she’ll immolate herself.
She doesn’t have any coke. Her dealer is still on holiday. When he’s not at some wedding in Normandy, he’s visiting his mother in the south of France, shopping in Amsterdam, seeing a friend in Berlin or at a wedding in Toulouse. Not to mention the fact that he disappears over Christmas, at Easter and for six weeks during the summer. A hundred and ten euros a gram it cost last time. Hardly surprising that you never see dealers campaigning for decriminalisation. It would make it harder for them to triple prices in the space of six months. A hundred and ten euros a gram – she half expected the friends she was buying for to throw her out of the party. Actually, he charged a hundred euros a gram, but Lydia figured that since she had to trek all the way out to Saint-Ouen, and she was the one wandering around carrying ten grams of coke, it was only fair that the others club together to buy a gram for her. But at €110, eyebrows were raised. Especially as the coke wasn’t particularly good. In fact, even calling it coke was a private joke; it was speed. By three in the morning they needed to dig out boxes of man-size tissues since everyone was on the brink of nasal collapse. Who knows what the hell it had been cut with. But the fact remains that, tonight, she has no dealer.
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