All the Way (24 page)

But what if there weren't any more? It's already undreamed of that she has
a choice
. It would be better to know what the future will be, and then wait for it without doing anything anymore, like Lulu. A life of being pampered versus a life of adventure.

She has a vision of herself by the pool (the big, brick one) sipping a fruit cocktail while Bihotz is weeding, or by the phone, waiting for Arnaud—he's coming home, he's coming back. He puts his helmet down (he has a motorbike). He undoes the fly on his biker pants and nods at her. She runs over, panting, she takes out his dick and licks it, he remains impassive, grabs her hair and makes her gradually swallow up his inordinately large dick, deep into the back of her throat. He takes his time and she gets
wet like a bitch.

She stares up at the ceiling, a faraway look in her eyes and a faraway feeling in her body. Bihotz's voice interrupts her—‘Lunch is served.' For a while now he's been making jokes that are not funny. And his face is changing. He never stops smiling, as if he was a bit frightened. And when they've finished their
ding-dong
, he often says to her, half-laughing, ‘It wasn't me who taught you how to do all that.'

She puts her hand out to him (they'd had a fight earlier—he was missing a hundred francs and supposedly she'd taken them). She pulls down her underpants and sticks his face between her legs. When she's had enough, she can see that he looks different again: glistening, slimy, like a fish; that shrouded gaze, its impenetrable force, which sees nothing but wants everything, and wants an end to it—the emptiness of that gaze that has no name.

Bihotz.

He snaps out of it and looks at her now with a tenderness that is worse than the other look. A good old loving gaze from the old days, an incredibly sweet gaze for my angel, Solange.

She rolls over onto her belly, at least she doesn't have to look at him anymore. He pats her hair but she shakes her head—she pushes her hips in the air, inviting him. He throws himself into it immediately, enthusiastically, but that's not where she wants it, she guides him higher up. ‘Are you sure?' and ‘I'm not hurting you?' and lots of ‘Oh my darling'.

She starts squealing like the girls on Canal Plus, so he'll shut up. And that gives her a funny feeling, to be both directing the film and acting in it. She pushes her fingers down to rub herself, she lets Arnaud enter her, his biker pants, she focuses on the script—Angie, you've really got a lot of potential, bitch bitch bitch, soon she'll start yapping. It feels rough and hard, horribly abrasive, she's going to die if she doesn't come. She's got several minds, several bodies—one in the film, one on the couch, both looking at each other, one putting witty words into Arnaud's mouth, the other directing the right rhythm for Bihotz's hips—and a non-stop tick tock of an alarm clock running backwards, counting down this time of hers that is so exasperating, restricted, and fit to burst—

‘You are a strange girl, Solange,' he says when they get their breath again (in his accent that makes ‘ange' rhyme with ‘mange').

He's got a bit of poo on the end of his dick.

‘I'm so touched, Solange. It's such a token of your confidence that you have given me right now…' She's going to kill him if he doesn't shut up.

The next day, he leaves very early for the market in the clucking J7, to sell all his chickens. When he gets back they have a huge fight because he wants to give Lulu an injection, he says it's the only solution, she yells at him that she'll report him to the cops if he does.

‘Solange, I have to talk to you,' says Rose's mother when they're having afternoon tea at Rose's house.

She's always had trouble finding her way around Rose's house. It's an old farmhouse that they've gutted, in which (like inside a whale) you wander around along ramps, mezzanines, staircases—she's only just realised this instant that the father's study is right next to the kitchen, whereas she would have gone the long way round, room after room, unwinding the house like a ball of twine.

‘Is it true, what Rose has told me? Has someone hurt you, Solange?' What have Rose (and Nathalie) told her?

Rose's mother is very intimidating. But there's something in her red boots—this woman gets away with red boots when no one else wears them—something that suggests she might perhaps understand. Don't we have the right to do what we want? (What do you want, Solange?)

‘Is everything all right, Solange?'

It's Arnaud. But he lives in Bordeaux now, so everything's not
all right
.

‘Do you want to come and live at our place in the meantime?'

At their place? At Rose's house? But does Rose's father know about it? There he is in his study, devoted to his Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas. In this house that is full of such beautiful objects. And there are Rose's parents, who always do everything perfectly, who understand everything about everything. Her brain is completely scrambled—as soon as she has one idea another one comes and skittles it and it just keeps going like that, knocking over every square on the board, one by one; instead of making quick connections, she has to follow the whole path around the board and her brain gets stuck—as if it's between two mirrors, reflected all the way to the vanishing point, she and Bihotz, she and Arnaud.

‘Seriously, Solange, are you using contraception?'

Peggy Salami changed foster families quite a few times. She left Clèves recently and was placed in a hostel, (apparently) so that she wouldn't get pregnant (people like that should be sterilised, Georges said). Are they going to leave her with the Department of Human Services?

It's so itchy down there.
Rose's mother doesn't seem to understand.

She can feel the corners of her mouth forming creases, the creases that mean she's going to cry, her chin wobbles and a huge bucket of tears spills, they pour down her like seeds, she points between her thighs. It really is itchy. Perhaps it's (she's terrified now) the first symptoms of the disease, the disease where you die in two years?

‘Vaginal fungal infections are common in the beginning, it's nothing to worry about, just fungi, hasn't your mother taken you to see someone?'

Rose's mother opens a little notebook with a silver clasp. She talks on the phone while mushroom propagation is taking place in the humus of Solange's cunt: cep mushrooms, chanterelles, trumpet of death mushrooms and puffballs. Everything in this house is clean and tidy and scrubbed—it's another world, a world where these things down inside her, these
misfit
things, do not grow.

Arnaud is singing over the top of the radio: ‘Like a virgin, oh oh oh,' he's hamming it up, he's so funny. ‘That Madonna chick has really got it. She overdoes the virgin so she can play up the whore. She'll have an amazing career. If you can't see the difference between her and Kim Wilde, you're just not with it.'

He's forgotten to put in his contact lenses and he's driving with his nose against the windscreen. She'd like to stroke his back (but she doesn't dare). There's a copy of
Le Monde
scattered under the seats. She doesn't know any other boy who reads
Le Monde.
This is Clèves, fishing competitions, new roundabouts, diamond wedding anniversaries and cattle shows.

Kim Wilde is sweet, she's nicer. And I think she's much more
attractive.

‘Who gives a stuff about attractive? It's her tits that matter.'

He's making fun of the local louts. A bit like Madonna does with women. That's the problem when everything he says is tongue-in-cheek: you never know exactly what he's saying.

Kim Wilde shows her bra.

‘I'm sceptical. Kim Wilde is your typical good girl. A bit wimpy, not wild, the sort of girl who gets all reproachful after you've done it, and if you marry her she'll think she's won the lottery. Madonna will end up leaving you, but she'll be fun while you're having her.'

The car is heading towards a world without Kim Wilde. There's still time to go back to the cave with Bihotz (Bihotz loves Kim Wilde almost as much as France Gall, and he would know what she's trying to say, that the most important thing is
kindness
).

Arnaud lets go of the gearstick for a second to take her hand and plants a kiss on it, she could die of happiness. Then he puts it on his fly, she rummages inside boxer shorts full of pubic hair and pulls out the dick, she jerks him off the way he likes it, not too hard, not too tight.

He parks behind the new apartment block they've built on the site of the old gravel pit. In the village, the d'Urbide chateau used to be the only building over two storeys. This is not the moment to be wondering about the passage of time, right now he's urging her to suck him off as well, ‘If you love me, you have to swallow.' Whether or not that's tongue-in-cheek, he holds her head firmly so she doesn't miss a drop. Afterwards he's kind enough to offer her a piece of chewing gum. So that when the door opens and Jennifer greets Arnaud with a peck on the lips, she is chewing a gob of about fifty million spermatozoa, the population of France, strawberry-flavoured and swirling around in her mouth.

She'd like a glass of water. She throws the chewing gum in the bin in the kitchenette. Then she retrieves it and sticks it inside a napkin ring monogrammed
Jeannine.

‘I'm sceptical,' says Arnaud. It's his new word. He's commenting on the wallpaper that was hung on the weekend by the fabulous Jennifer's parents. It's yellow. The curtains match, there's a black sofa bed, yellow and black pouffes, a low wicker table, and a hyperrealist poster of an enormous dripping tube of yellow paint. It looks like a painting on top of paint. It makes you a bit dizzy. As if the picture was a representation of itself. Or like when you see a truck transporting a truck. Or like when you think about thinking. It also vaguely conjures up sex. She'd have trouble explaining why.

She's hungry but there's nothing in the fridge. Not even a crust of bread. She's never seen a kitchen like it. From where she's standing, she can see Arnaud and this so-called Jennifer, sitting side by side sharing a beer. They look a bit like Solange's parents did when they were young, in their black-and-white wedding photo. From the louvre window she can see Arnaud's car (actually it's his mother's car). She feels like Kiki the soft toy monkey, nothing about any of this is really true.

They're supposed to be waiting for a guy called Fred and a guy called Jean-Marc who have apparently gone to find some dope, and also someone called Stéphane, who's in charge of booze. Véro should be arriving on her motorbike but it's not definite. Arnaud opens some more beers. ‘Come and sit with us, Angie.'

‘Is that her real name?' Jennifer asks.

Much later, another Jean-Marc (not the one they were expecting) comes by to tell them that there's a party at Franck's but that he doesn't have a car, and a guy with a girl studying nursing has set himself up in front of the cassette recorder to listen to the latest Police single, and Arnaud and Jennifer haven't stopped kissing on the sofa bed. But she's got to be broad-minded, Jennifer is in Year 12 and she's Arnaud's official girlfriend (in addition to the one from Bordeaux). She, Solange, is the secret favourite (not to mention how young she is). The only one who knows—she's the one he tells everything to.

That's what he explains to her in the kitchenette when she demands that he take her home. She was allowed out to midnight (and only because she told Bihotz that she was going to see
Flashdance
with Nathalie). Arnaud tells her that she's pissing him off with her whole Cinderella line. To which she replies that in fact she has to go home to
be with
her boyfriend.
With whom
she lives.

One thing leads to another and they're in the car park behind the building and Arnaud is saying again that he is sceptical, really sceptical. That he doesn't know who to trust anymore. Or what he should believe about how things seem. That it's not going to be possible. He doesn't share. How can a girl like you be shared? Who is the other guy?

She describes the surfer with the peeling lips and Arnaud pins her against the car, and while she outlines the plans for their trip and how they're fitting out their van, he has already pulled down her underpants and the car door is very hard against her buttocks—she can't feel much else but it's terribly exciting, metal on skin, glass and flesh, hot and cold—and the thrilling possibility that Jennifer is looking out the louvre window of the kitchenette! Or that someone will suddenly turn up in the car park!

He starts again a bit further away (in the Clèves forest). Arnaud says that he wants her all to himself, that it's driving him crazy. She lies back and moans: she is beautiful, desirable, a woman, a woman with you, I finally felt like a woooman, like in that Nicole Croisille song her mother loves, she arches back a bit more and her hair catches on the windscreen wipers, help, he's ramming it into her even harder, it hurts a bit and her coccyx is going
clunk-clunk
on the icy bonnet, but as long as he looks at her, and doesn't make a mess of it, as long as he screws her, gives it to her, works her over properly. As hard as she tries to picture herself in her mind—to picture the whole set-up, expanding the number of images and imagining herself as both Arnaud and this woman
offering herself
—she gets nowhere. Too bad, anyway he's finished.

‘Where will we go?' Arnaud asks.

She's recaptured that marvellous connection with him. Where they can talk
so
well together about things…The future will take shape at last, they'll be together again: after all these twists and turns they will finally be able to live together in love, he'll be all hers, and she'll be all his.