by Dan Rhodes
He gave nothing away.
The audience had no idea how Life was going to begin. In all its previous presentations, Le Machine had simply walked on from the wings and stood centre stage, looking out. This time though, he had worked in close collaboration with his lighting and sound designers, and his appearance was going to be much more dramatic.
At six fifty-nine the house lights and the stage lights were shut off, and the room was plunged into total darkness. Silence fell. And then, at exactly seven o’clock, and yet so suddenly that people jumped with shock, Life began.
In a single, perfectly timed burst, the stage lights and the speakers came on. The room was filled with the heavily amplified sound of a body at work. And there in the middle of the crowd, at the very end of the runway, stood Le Machine: naked, hairless and still.
This was not what they had been expecting. From his name, and the posters they had been seeing around the city for weeks, they had thought they were going to see someone who was as much automaton as human, something like the Silver Surfer. To see Le Machine this close was disorientating. They could see the lines on his fingers, the texture of his skin. But most unexpected of all were his eyes: he looked out at the people surrounding him, not with the eyes of a robot, but with eyes that had real expression to them. Eyes that were seeing them, just as they were seeing him. As he surveyed his new home, these eyes made fleeting contact with those of the people who had come to see him.
At once the audience was struck by the reality of what was going on. Le Machine was a man. As one, they wondered why they had expected anything else. People were not machines. They had paid money and taken time out from their lives to stand in a darkened room and look at another human being.
They were mesmerised.
Their preconceptions already dispatched, they waited to see what would happen next. There was a palpable tension in the air.
A few tiny state-of-the-art flesh-coloured radio microphones of the kind popular in Hollywood and Moscow were attached to various parts of his body. There were also ultra-sensitive microphones dotted around the stage, and the sound designer could switch from one source to the next. He was able to channel different sound sources into different speakers, to divide or blend the noises together in any way he thought sounded right. There would be plenty of scope for improvisation in the coming weeks, but he and Le Machine had decided to begin Life with a concentration on individual sounds, the same one coming from each corner of the room. He had begun with the pounding of his heart, and minutes later had faded this into the sound of his breath. Then the sound coming through the speakers changed to the gurgle of his stomach. It let out a long whine. Le Machine had not eaten very much at all that day. Already it was time for some food.
He walked back along the runway to the stage, and over to the whiteboard, where he picked up the marker pen, and wrote:
PIZZA, THIN CRUST, FOUR CHEESE, EXTRA ANCHOVIES & JALAPEÑOS. SPARKLING WATER. THREE LARGE BOTTLES OF ITALIAN LAGER.
There was a runner on the staff ready to fulfil such requests. Le Machine stood on the edge of the stage and looked out at all the faces staring up at him. He rarely drank alcohol during Life, but today he felt he needed a beer. Maybe he would order some more bottles later on. It was Friday night, after all.
Very few people in the audience had anticipated this aspect of the exhibition. Again they wondered what they had been expecting, and supposed that they had thought he would be fed via a tube, or that he would eat some kind of pill-based astronaut food that would be delivered to him once a day by a robot dog. They wondered why they had thought so little about what it was they had bought tickets for, and why they had come with such basic and misguided expectations. They stood spellbound, waiting to see how this would all unfold.
They were no longer too bothered whether or not they witnessed Le Machine going to the toilet. Of course they still hoped he would, but it didn’t matter nearly as much as they had thought; this strange and wonderful display was enough. The sound of his beating heart would have drowned out any attempts at conversation, but it made no difference. Nobody felt like speaking anyway, they were all too busy taking it in. They could feel something incredible was going on, but they weren’t quite sure what it was. They didn’t worry though; they just let it all happen.
Five hundred and thirty pairs of eyes looked to the stage as a naked man waited for his pizza to arrive.
XIV
With everything that had been going on, Aurélie still hadn’t made it to a children’s boutique, so Herbert was back in his Mona Lisa and Eiffel Tower pyjamas for the third night in a row. It was eight o’clock, and since getting back home she had managed to get on top of her chores. On opening the door she had been struck by the rancid atmosphere. The smell of the soiled nappies had begun to seep out of the plastic sacks they had been tied into, so she had taken them out with the rest of her rubbish and opened the window until the smell had gone. She handwashed some of Herbert’s clothes and hung them up to dry, and the dirty sheets were soaking in a bucket in the shower room. She wiped down the tiny stretch of work surface in her kitchen, and when this was done she saw that Herbert had fallen asleep in his nest of pillows on the bed. He had only had one nap all day, and she wasn’t surprised that he had fizzled out.
She looked at him from across the room. He was absolutely motionless, lying on his back with his mouth a little open and his head slumped to one side. She felt a rush of panic. She darted over and lay on the bed beside him. She stared at him. She was under no illusion about what she was doing: she was checking to make sure he was breathing, that he was still alive. He was so still that she couldn’t tell. What if she had somehow managed to kill him by mistake? What if he was severely allergic to fast food, or the fumes from her cleaning products? She was about to prod him to see if there was any response, but the rising terror abated when he closed his mouth, licked his lips, opened his mouth again and sighed. He was fine.
She wondered what she would have done if he hadn’t been fine. Maybe she wouldn’t be so lucky next time. There was no getting away from it: she had got herself into a terrible situation, and at any moment it could get even worse. She supposed she ought to give up while he was still alive, and take him to the police, and tell them how she had come to be in charge of him.
I see, they would say. So why did this stranger give you the baby?
Because I threw a stone at his face.
Is that how he got the bruise? It was still there. It had started to turn yellow. That morning she had been about to apply some concealer to his face when she had stopped, as if she was being prevented from continuing by an invisible force. She had accepted there and then that the invisible force had a point – it would never be right to put make-up on a baby.
Yes, that’s how he got the bruise.
So am I right to conclude from what you have told me that you are the kind of person who throws stones at babies’ faces?
Yes, I suppose I am.
Are you aware that society doesn’t look kindly on the likes of you?
And so it would go on. They would take Herbert away from her, slap on the cuffs and bundle her off to a cell. Then they would search her apartment and find the gun, and then they would telephone her father, and he would race to see her.
It was this, above everything else, that was stopping her from confessing. She imagined the look of disappointment on her dad’s face as he saw her through prison bars. She knew how much he loved her, and how proud he was that she had gone to art college in Paris, and the thought of him seeing it all come crashing down this way was too much to bear. She had to get through the week.
There wasn’t much she could do around the apartment without risking waking Herbert, so she showered, shaved her legs and underarms and, wrapped in a towel, lay beside him. ‘Oh Herbert,’ she whispered, ‘you’re the only man I can trust. Well, that’s not strictly true. I trust my dad as well. But you two are the only ones I can trust.’
She had bought t
wo bottles of wine on her way home, and she was already near the bottom of the first. She got up from the bed, went over to the kitchen and poured what remained of the bottle into her glass.
Lunch with Léandre Martin had not gone well. She wouldn’t be seeing him again.
She felt stupid. She had really thought she had found a boyfriend, but with an efficiency that was almost impressive he had proved her wrong. He wasn’t even second date material, let alone boyfriend material.
She had been hoping that their lunch would gracefully segue into an afternoon together, the three of them throwing back their heads in laughter in a series of scenic locations, but before it had even begun she couldn’t wait for it to end. She wondered what had become of the man she had met the day before. It was as if he had exhausted his repertoire, using up anything about him that had been interesting, charming, funny or warm on their first meeting, and having nothing at all left over for the second.
He had been agitated and distracted from the outset, and had kept looking at his watch. When Aurélie asked him why, he told her that straight after lunch he had an appointment he couldn’t break. He didn’t offer any details about this appointment, he just looked away as he told her about it, and she hadn’t pursued it. It was obvious to her that it was with a woman, that he was already in a relationship, a relationship that he wasn’t going to give up for her, and that all he was doing was sounding her out in the hope of coming to some kind of arrangement. She despised men like that – the ones who slithered around behind women’s backs. Men like him and Professor Papavoine.
Conversation moved on to the menu, and they spoke blandly of favourite dishes while avoiding eye contact. He asked her how Herbert was doing, and she told him he was fine. She was glad that he was sleeping beside her in his buggy throughout this excruciating ordeal.
As if things weren’t already awkward enough, in the seconds before it turned one o’clock he had told her he was about to hold his breath for two minutes, that it was something he did twice a day, at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon and then again at one o’clock in the morning. He checked the second hand on his watch, took a deep breath and sat stock-still. The first minute passed uneventfully, but as the second minute progressed he began to look uncomfortable, then in some pain. When the time finally ended, he fought to regain his breath.
As this display had gone on, Aurélie had decided once and for all that he was a creepy weirdo, and even though he was an incredibly handsome creepy weirdo, his handsomeness wasn’t nearly enough. She resolved to get away from him at the first opportunity. She said nothing.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, in between gasps, ‘but I never miss my one o’clocks. I usually find somewhere private for them. Yesterday I went to the toilet at that café, remember?’
She recalled that he had excused himself at one point. She looked away, uninterested.
‘I have a reason for it,’ he said, his eyes closed, ‘but it’s always been something I haven’t talked about.’
‘Well, aren’t you mysterious and fascinating?’ she said.
The sarcasm was inescapable. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m obviously not very good at this kind of thing. I . . . I should tell you all about it, though. I would like to. May I?’
She yawned. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘I really couldn’t care less.’ She stood up. There was no point in dragging this out any longer. ‘Come on, Herbert,’ she said. The baby was still asleep, but she spoke to him anyway. ‘Let’s leave the hairy man to his enigmatic routines and mystery appointments.’
‘Aurélie, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please stay.’ He stood up as well. ‘I’ll tell you absolutely everything. I don’t want to hide things from you.’
Aurélie wasn’t in the mood to hear him talk about his other lovers or his pathetic hippie rituals. ‘No, forget it,’ she said. ‘Thanks for lunch. It’s been fun.’ The food had only just arrived, and it sat there barely eaten. ‘You can finish mine.’
She started to manoeuvre Herbert’s buggy towards the door. Léandre Martin opened his wallet and threw some euros on to the table to settle the bill. She couldn’t help noticing that he carried a thick wad of cash. Of course he did. He didn’t want to leave a trail of evidence on a credit card statement for his real girlfriend to find and ask questions about. Maybe the poor woman was even his wife. Either way it was unfortunate for her that she had ended up with a man like this. Aurélie could sense him following her out of the restaurant.
‘Just go away,’ she said.
‘Aurélie, I’ve been an idiot.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘I’ve become so used to hiding things from people that it’s become second nature to me, but I’m not going to hide anything from you . . . I’m going to tell you everything about myself. For a start, my appointment is with an old friend . . .’
‘I’m sure it is. And you’ll be telling the gendarmerie about your old friend if you don’t leave me alone.’ She saw two policemen ahead, and started walking in their direction. ‘And while you’re at it you can tell them why you’re harassing a woman and a baby.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘Well, that’s good to know. As my grandmother says, it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.’
‘Please don’t give up on me. Aurélie . . .’
She walked away, but she heard what he said next, and it made her furious.
‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’
He was exactly the kind of vermin who would say that to a girl and not mean it. She didn’t look back until she was next to the policemen, to check that he wasn’t following. He was standing where she had left him, looking at her.
‘Go away,’ she shouted.
He seemed to get the message. He had such a pained looked on his face that she almost felt sorry for him, but she knew he was only sad because his attempt to add her to his list of lovers had come to nothing. He turned and walked back the way he had come. He must have been embarrassed at having his man-of-depth-and-mystery routine fall so comprehensively flat. She was glad she hadn’t fallen for it, and that she had seen right through his attempt to turn things around by professing love; it was nothing more than a desperate attempt at emotional manipulation. And anyway, what difference did it make even if he did love her? She didn’t love him, so that was the end of it. Until an hour ago she had been falling for him in a big way, she had been a bag of nerves all morning, but she knew now that she’d had a lucky escape.
One of the policemen spoke to her. ‘Is that man bothering you, Madame?’
‘Not any more.’
She remembered she had a loaded gun in her coat pocket, and decided she had better not spend too much time hanging around with the gendarmerie. She walked on, and now she had left Léandre Martin behind she realised how naïve she had been to surrender so quickly and so completely to such a cretin. It wasn’t as if it was the first time.
She banged a fist against her forehead, furious with herself for having failed to learn her lesson. She could feel she was about to cry, so she went into a fast food restaurant, found the toilet, locked herself and Herbert into a cubicle and let it all out. After a few minutes he woke up, and looked at her, quizzically, as he came to. The sight of his big blue eyes, blinking in the harsh light, made her realise she had to pull herself together, for his sake. She blew her nose, went back out and ordered some food.
She and Herbert ate fries together. He seemed to like them.
Léandre Martin punched himself on the forehead too. He had been such an idiot, and Aurélie had been absolutely right to react the way she did. He had deserved every barbed comment and every withering look. He should have told her everything, but instead he hadn’t told her anything, and of course this had made her angry. Why wouldn’t it? Who would want to spend time with someone as distracted, evasive and inarticulate as him?
He relived every uncomfortable silence, and replayed his mumbled dialogue, and he could only respect her al
l the more for walking away from someone who was such a waste of time. Whenever he had spoken it was only to say something that made him sound like a dullard, or a ball of slime. He had become used to closing off chunks of his life, but he really had planned to tell her everything. He had been waiting for the right moment, but it had all loomed too large, and shyness had taken hold of him and he hadn’t realised until it was too late that he should have taken her in his arms the moment she arrived at the restaurant, kissed her, and said, Aurélie, there’s something I have to tell you.
He should have told her where he was going, and why he was going there, and all about everything else that had grown out of such a terrible situation. That way she would have been able to come to a decision about him that was based on who he really was, not one based on him being a nervous, shifty mess.
He should even have invited her and Herbert to come along with him. But instead of doing this he had first avoided the subject altogether, then tiptoed around the edge of it. He wasn’t at all accustomed to talking about it, particularly not to people he had only recently met, but that was no excuse. This was Aurélie. He wanted her to know, she had to know, and he had gone absolutely the wrong way about telling her.
His regrets began to pile up on one another. For her, he should even have postponed his one o’clock breath-holding session, or at the very least he should have told her exactly what it was all about beforehand. It could have been a way into his story. But instead he had just mumbled something about how it was time to hold his breath, and got on with it. He would never forget her face as he had been timing himself. She had looked at him as if he was an attention-seeking bore, then looked away. He supposed she was right, too. That was all he was – an attention-seeking bore.
With a jolt he realised that she must have thought he was involved in something preposterous – drug dealing, perhaps. He had been so secretive about his movements, why would she not have thought that? Or maybe she thought he was part of a breath-holding sex cult, and was trying to recruit her and Herbert. Whichever way he looked at it, he knew that she had been right to give him the cold shoulder. Her immediate refusal to take any shit from a man only elevated her in his esteem. If only he hadn’t been that man.