This is Life (20 page)

Somewhere towards the back of the room there was a flicker of movement. It caught Le Machine’s eye, and he watched the reporter from
L’Univers
push his way past the other
onlookers and leave the auditorium. He tried to work out from the look on his face what he had thought of the little he had seen of
Life
. He couldn’t. He was unreadable. Still, there
was nothing he could do about him now.

He swept the reporter from his mind, and looked out at the hundreds of people who had come to see him. For a moment he allowed himself to feel imperial.
Paris belongs to me
, he thought to
himself. But this moment passed. There was a piece of Paris, the most important piece of all, that would never belong to him. He was going to have to spend the coming twelve weeks trying his best
not to think about it.

The cheering died down, and Le Machine returned to his pizza. He cracked open a second bottle of lager, and tried to make himself comfortable.

A
urélie worked fast. She fashioned a makeshift crib for Herbert out of folded blankets, and placed it in the same place where she had hidden
him from Old Widow Peypouquet, on the floor behind the bed. He stayed fast asleep as she lowered him down and tucked him in. She thought back to what she had been wearing on the night she had
finally managed to get Sébastien into her bed. It had been a party night, and she had dressed accordingly, in a short skirt and high-heeled boots. She looked through her drawers for a
similar outfit. She didn’t want to disappoint him.

She chose a tight black minidress, and slipped into it. Then she put on a bit of lip gloss and checked herself in the full-length mirror. She knew she looked good. Just the way he liked her. She
kept her feet bare. She remembered that once she had got him home and stepped out of her boots he had spent quite a lot of time on her feet. That seemed to be one of his things.

She checked herself from a number of angles. Before meeting Sylvie she would never have had the confidence to dress this way. Sylvie had told her time and again how good she looked.
I
don’t have a lesbian bone in my body
, she had said one time, when appraising her outfit for a night out,
but if I did, even if it was one of those really small bones you get in your
ear, I would be all over you right now
. She had told her that there must have been something wrong with Sébastien for not wanting her. When Aurélie had bemoaned her uneven teeth,
Sylvie had explained at extreme length why, on balance, they were a good thing, and that they only enhanced her looks. She knew that Sylvie had not been sparing her feelings; she was never a great
one for sparing feelings, and had been absolutely sincere. Since that day, Aurélie had never felt self-conscious when she smiled, and she no longer regretted refusing the offer of braces
when she was thirteen. She had no idea how her self-image would have fared if it hadn’t been for Sylvie. Maybe she would have ended up such a wretched mess of insecurities that she would even
have yielded to the advances of her nine-hundred-year-old professor. She felt nauseous at the thought.

And it turned out that Sébastien did want her. He wanted her badly, and as she looked in the mirror she could see why. She felt a pang of sadness when she thought of the Léandre
Martin of yesterday. She had caught glimpses of the two of them reflected in shop windows, and even though he was so much taller than she was, she had thought they fitted together well. She
wondered whether they would have spent the night together if it hadn’t been for Herbert. She would have been ready to. She’d had a lucky escape.

She pushed these thoughts away. Sébastien was on his way over, and very soon she would be exacting her revenge on Léandre Martin.

Aurélie and Sébastien exchanged a few more messages, and she told him to come up quietly, not to ring the bell or knock on the door. She didn’t tell him why it was so
important to be quiet. Soon he texted her to say he was outside on the street, and she buzzed him in. Her heart raced as she opened her door to him.

And there he was, back again, all cheekbones and height, and expensive clothes. He smelled good, too.

Aurélie motioned for him to whisper, mouthing that the walls between the apartments were thin. She directed him to the kitchen, where she shut the door behind them and
perched on the worktop, crossing her legs. The room was so small that she and Sébastien had no choice but to be close together, almost touching.

‘You look good,’ he said.

She acknowledged this with a smile. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ she asked.

‘I think you know.’

‘Oh, do I?’

‘I want you, Aurélie.’

‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ she said. She knew he would be expecting a demand for an explanation, and she didn’t want him to think she was being a pushover.
‘You’ve been ignoring me ever since you were last here.’

‘Things have been complicated.’

‘And now they’re not complicated any more?’ She smiled. ‘So you’re getting rid of Sculpture Girl?’

He looked her in the eye. At least he had the decency to do this. ‘No,’ he said.

Aurélie was unsurprised by this revelation, and she was glad. It was going to make things so much easier, and more fun.

‘She and I are going places,’ he said. ‘We make a good partnership – we’re both artists on the rise, we’re both highly cerebral people.’

‘And me?’

‘Well, you know . . . I wouldn’t say we were compatible artistically, or cerebrally. I mean, your drawings are nice, I suppose, but they’re not really . . . out there, like our
work. They’re charming, in their own way, but it’s obvious that you lack our ambition, our fire. And that’s fine; we can’t expect everybody to be working at our level.
There’s only room for so many people at the forefront of contemporary art – it’s basic mathematics.’

She looked at him and smiled.
Typical Sébastien
, she thought.

‘Hey, what’s this?’ he asked.

She realised that the list of Sébastien’s qualities that she had written on the back of an envelope was still stuck to the fridge door by a magnet. She hadn’t made much of an
effort with it, and had forgotten all about it very shortly after writing it. She really should have taken it down before he got here, and she tried to work out a plausible explanation.

He took it off the fridge and looked at it. She read it too, to remind herself of what she had written:

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. I mean, you got the first one right, and that’s the main thing for a girl, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘You’re such a charmer.’

‘You know what I want, Aurélie.’

‘I think I do. You want to stay with Sculpture Girl, but you also want a bit of blonde in your life.’

‘I’m so glad you understand me. And you know it’s got to be secret. Nobody must know. Especially not her.’

‘So let’s strike a deal,’ she said, fixing his gaze. ‘Whatever happens in this apartment stays in this apartment. OK?’

‘That sounds fine by me.’ It sounded more than fine. It was exactly what he had wanted.

She surprised him by holding out a hand, to shake on the agreement. This was getting better and better. He took it. It was soft, and smooth, and he was pleased to think about where her fingers
would soon be.

He moved towards her, and took her in his arms. She could feel that he was ready to go. ‘I’m so glad we’ve been able to come to an understanding,’ he said.

‘Oh, we’ve come to an understanding,’ she said.

He felt a blunt jab in his side. He looked down, and straight away his burgeoning excitement shrivelled to nothing. The barrel of a gun was pressed against his ribs.

‘Don’t make a sound, Sébastien. As I said, these walls are paper thin and we wouldn’t want your squealing to disturb the neighbours.’

He trembled, and nodded. She lifted the gun, pointing it at his head, and he took a step back. That was as far as he could go – he was pressed up against the kitchen door.

‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t blow your brains out, you sleazy piece of shit,’ she whispered.

‘Because . . . because . . .’ His mind was blank. ‘Aurélie, put the gun down, please. Let’s just . . . talk.’

This was great. The wine had really kicked in, she was feeling sexy in her dress, and Sébastien was getting the fright he deserved. He would think twice about sneaking around behind
girls’ backs from now on.

‘This is what happens when you don’t call for months, and then come crawling round for sex, Sébastien.’ She took a step towards him. All the anger she felt for him, for
Léandre Martin and for Professor Papavoine merged into one delicious chunk of revenge.

He took a step back, turned the door handle and darted into the main room. Aurélie followed him. In his haste to get away he had taken a wrong turning and fallen on to the bed. She
pointed the gun at him and, for dramatic effect, she released the safety catch. The clunk sounded beautiful.

He looked up at her, pale as a ghost. There were tears running down his face. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Shhh . . .’ she said, putting her left forefinger to her glossy lips. And with her right hand she pointed the gun at his head.

‘Oh God,’ he whispered. ‘No.’

She was surprised by just how little pressure had been needed to fire the gun. Whenever she thought back to this moment, she knew that she really hadn’t meant it to go
off. She only had her finger on the trigger for the sake of appearances, but after what had seemed like the slightest of squeezes the bullet had come out.

She remembered being very calm as it had blasted from the barrel. She felt the kick, and the report rang in her ears, and then there was a silence so total it was eerie. Sébastien was
slumped on the bed, his face pressed into the duvet.

Slowly he opened his eyes, and looked up at her. She had missed. She could see he was unhurt, and she stood there smiling her sweetest smile. He was petrified. The silence continued, and now
there was something familiar about it. It seemed strange that an absence of noise could have a particular quality, and then she realised what it was. It was the same as the silence that had
followed the times when Herbert had been hurt, those awful quiet moments before he cried. But this time no cry had come.

Frantic, she scrambled past a whimpering Sébastien and looked on the floor on the other side of the bed.

She saw what she had done.

She had shot Herbert.

I
n a restaurant three streets away from Le Charmant Cinéma Érotique, Jean-Didier Delacroix sat in the private booth that his
assistant had reserved for him. He had a talent for typing with one hand and eating incredibly expensive food, paid for by
L’Univers
, with the other, and he had been doing this ever
since getting to his table over an hour before. He checked the clock on his computer screen, but unsatisfied with the quality of time it offered, he looked at his recently acquired 1974 Blancpain
watch instead. That, he thought, was much better. Both told him the same thing: he had three minutes until the deadline. Back at the office the sub-editor would be nervously staring at her inbox,
wondering if she would have to run the back-up article after all. This would be a disaster: Jean-Didier Delacroix’s piece on Le Machine had been heavily flagged all week, and to fail to run
it would irritate their readers and embarrass the paper in front of its competitors.

He had expected to have had it finished by this time, to have put the piece to bed at least fifteen minutes ahead of time. He should have been in a taxi by now, on his way back to his apartment
to have vigorous sex with his horrible girlfriend, but here he was, still wrestling with the copy. A white-gloved waiter refilled Jean-Didier Delacroix’s glass with wine from the very top of
the list as he read through the article, making adjustments here and there. Still acutely aware that he was in public and could be observed, his face betrayed nothing.

One minute to go. The sub-editor would be frantic by now. Thirty seconds. He opened a blank email, and attached the file. Twenty seconds. He wrote a brief covering note.
Add question mark to
title. It now reads: The End of Life?

Five, four, three, two, one . . . He pressed
send
. Jean-Didier Delacroix had never filed copy late. His reputation, for punctuality if nothing else, was intact.

He closed his computer, finished what remained of his food, and drank his wine. Normally he would have simply gathered his things and left, but he felt too exhausted to stand.
Never before had a job left him so drained. Very soon his wine glass was empty again.

He called for a brandy.

A
fter turning in for her customary early night, Old Widow Peypouquet had woken at the sound of a loud bang. Not one to be woken by a loud bang and
then just roll over and go back to sleep, she listened for further sounds. None came. She wondered for a moment whether it had been a car backfiring, or a frying pan falling in a neighbour’s
kitchen, but she dismissed these possibilities. She was accustomed to those sounds, and while she would sometimes be woken by them, it was never with quite such a jolt. There was something unusual
going on. In a flash she recalled her visit to the girl across the corridor, and she jumped out of bed and into her slippers.

She pulled on her robe, went out into the hall and pressed her ear to her neighbour’s door. She heard voices. Mademoiselle Renard had a man in there, and they were whispering. She
couldn’t work out what they were saying, but it didn’t feel as if she was eavesdropping on a romantic scene.

Herbert’s eyes were open, but they seemed not to be registering anything. He was completely still, and the tears that had followed his previous traumas had not come.
There was blood on his blanket, and a panicked Aurélie lifted it up to find out what had happened. The shoulder of his Eiffel Tower top was red, and she pulled it back to reveal the
wound.