This is Life (25 page)

‘So what are you going to give me, then? This is your only interview, and I’ve got nothing – just a load of drivel about microphones and thermostats and some repetitive whining
about how terrible it is to have to answer questions in interviews.’ Jean-Didier Delacroix folded his arms and waited.

‘OK.’ Le Machine thought. A part of him wanted to tell this strange and furious man what it was all about, to reveal the true reason why he did what he did. After all, he had already
told one person that day, and it had felt good to unburden himself. That had been in confidence though, and he knew he mustn’t tell the same story to a journalist. And even if he was to, they
only had a minute of interview time left. It had taken him a long time to tell the story to Professor Papavoine, and that had been the reason for his late arrival at the venue. It certainly
wasn’t something that could be dispatched in a sound bite. He stopped wavering, stuck by his principles and kept the story to himself.

He always liked to make sure he gave reporters something, though, even the ones he didn’t care for; it would be bad manners to send them away with nothing to work with. In his younger days
he would give them a rant about his rejection of Paris, or how he had embraced his position as an outcast from the art establishment. Those days were gone, though. Today the angle he gave the
reporter was straightforward: ‘After this run, I have no intention of presenting
Life
again.’

‘So this is the end?’

‘Yes, I believe it will be.’

He expected the reporter to ask him what his plans were. But he didn’t. Instead he switched off his Dictaphone.

The two men stood facing one another.

‘I am afraid I am unable to wish you well for your show,’ said Jean-Didier Delacroix. ‘I had thought you were a con artist, an old-fashioned grifter, but now I know
you’re not. It’s a shame really, because I would have had some respect for you if you were simply a scam merchant. There is an art to that sort of behaviour, after all. You have a real
sincerity about you though, don’t you? I think you truly believe that what you are doing has great artistic worth. You’re deluding yourself, of course.’

Le Machine looked him in the eye. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said. ‘I hope you have enough material for your article.’

The moment Jean-Didier Delacroix had left, there was a knock at the door. His manager introduced Le Machine to Doctor Élise Rousset, and left them alone. He did as he was asked, and took
off his robe. Once again he found himself naked in front of a woman he had only just met.

L
ucien sat with the Akiyamas as they finished their lunch in an old-style bistro. Already that day they had been to the Catacombs, and now they
were looking for a way to fill the afternoon. Lucien had bought a copy of
L’Univers
, and he pulled out the arts supplement, to find out what was going on around the city.

On the front cover was a photograph of Le Machine. He didn’t think he would be recommending his show to the Akiyamas. He had seen the posters and heard a lot of chatter about the man, and
like a lot of people he had already come to the conclusion that he was a pretentious attention-seeker who thought that just because he called what he did
art
that it suddenly made him an
artist. And what made it worse was that he was exactly the kind of pretentious attention-seeker that girls are suckers for, all moody expressions and meticulously tended musculature.

He smiled when he saw that the profile was by Jean-Didier Delacroix. Lucien enjoyed reading his work; for all his pomposity, he did have a brilliant mind, and he was always entertaining. He was
going to rip Le Machine to shreds.

As usual, the piece was as much about Jean-Didier Delacroix as it was about his subject: it started with a description of what he had eaten for lunch, then moved on to a detailed report on the
length and texture of his girlfriend’s legs, which he followed with an account of an altercation he had had with a valet at a top hotel. He had, of course, cut the valet down to size. It
wasn’t until the sixth paragraph that he even mentioned Le Machine:
The man who has famously, and in the name of ‘art’, gone to the toilet on stages around the world
.

Then he spent two paragraphs ruminating about a forthcoming trip to Vienna, before embarking on a short and savagely comical passage about his backstage meeting with Le Machine, during which his
subject had given very little away, presumably because there was very little to talk about. It had seemed to Jean-Didier Delacroix that he had attempted to create a reticent, enigmatic persona in
order to deflect attention away from the simple fact that he had nothing much to say. Lucien laughed at that; in his days of dating non-Japanese women he had lost plenty of girlfriends to people
like Le Machine – empty vessels hiding behind a facade of artistic mystery. And then, Jean-Didier Delacroix reported, the star of the show had announced that this was likely to be his final
presentation of
Life
:
He looked at me intently, evidently expecting me to ask what he planned to do next. I simply did not care. It took all my self-control not to laugh in his face and
wish him good riddance
.

Lucien was loving this. Le Machine would be reviewed all over the place, but it was Jean-Didier Delacroix that everybody would be looking to. Piece by piece, he was tearing
Life
down.
Muscle-boy would be a failure in Paris, and girls the world over would stop fancying men like him, and start taking an interest in slightly gawky interpreters instead.

The article moved on to a vivid, riotous and wildly snobbish account of Jean-Didier Delacroix’s experience of standing in the auditorium amid the kind of people whose idea of a great way
to spend a Friday night was to pay money to stare at a naked man while hoping they’ll get to see him go to the toilet. And then the lights went down.

Jean-Didier Delacroix confined his praise to the final paragraph. When the stage lights had come on, and the sound of a human body pulsed through the room, he had been stunned to find himself
profoundly moved. In a moment, he had understood why Le Machine had been so reluctant to talk about his work, for to try to explain
Life
would be to try to explain life. It was all there, in
front of him, and it was within him too, and he felt a oneness with the people around him, and that was something that had never happened to him before; he had never made a secret of his feelings
of almost superhuman superiority to people who happened to be around him, but now there he was, feeling a oneness with a group of strangers about whom only moments before he had been sculpting a
series of derisory
bons mots
. He had never been quite so aware of himself as a human being, and this was a feeling both incredible and unsettling.
The religious will point to
Life
as being sure proof of God’s presence in all of us; the atheists will point to it as an illustration of the human body as an amazing bag of chemicals. But don’t listen to them
,
he wrote.
Don’t listen to anybody, not even me, except as I implore you to go. And let us all hope that
Le Machine
does not mean what he says, that this is not the end of
Life.

Well
, thought Lucien,
that was unexpected
. Jean-Didier Delacroix had made him want to buy a ticket. He still wasn’t going to recommend
Life
to the
Akiyamas though.

‘Ah,’ said Madame Akiyama, noticing the photograph on the newspaper. ‘It’s that man. He came to Tokyo. Akiko went to see him, and said he was very good. Lucien, could you
book us tickets for today?’

‘Are you sure? Do you know what he does?’

‘Yes, he takes all his clothes off and does his business into a bottle.’

‘Well, if that’s what you really want to see . . .’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fun.’

Monsieur Akiyama shook his head, resigned to his fate. He had lost control of his life, but he wasn’t going to let it get him down.

There was a science to selling tickets for
Life
. Each one came with an allocated time slot for admission, but once inside, the ticket holder could stay as long as they
wanted. As no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium, the organisers banked on people getting hungry and thirsty, then drifting away. In the previous stagings, the average length of stay had
been between one hour and forty-three minutes (London) and two hours and four minutes (Tokyo), though some people stayed for much longer, even sneaking off to the toilets to eat discreetly hidden
snacks. One boy in São Paolo had stayed for four days. He hadn’t been quite as furtive as he had thought, and had become something of a celebrity among the crew; when he finally left
they surprised him with a free pass so he could come and go as he wished for the remainder of the run.

Following fairly predictable patterns, they were able to sell several thousand tickets a day. For the Paris run they were aiming to sell a total of two hundred thousand, at between ten and
fifteen euros a time. They saw no sense in anticipating a sell-out. Historically there had been most demand on weekends and in the evenings, and at off-peak times it was usually possible to simply
walk up and pay on the door. In the early hours of the morning the room would often be quite empty, but there would always be at least a few people there, watching the naked man as he slept, and
listening to him as he breathed, as his heart beat and his stomach gurgled.

Lucien tried calling the ticket hotline, but he couldn’t get through. Following the piece in
L’Univers
, their lines had jammed. He borrowed Madame Akiyama’s smartphone
and checked their website, but there was no availability until eight o’clock on the Tuesday morning, and they would be on their way to the airport by then. People were so impatient to find
out what it was all about that even the graveyard slots were full for the coming couple of days.

‘I’m so disappointed,’ she said. ‘Maybe, Lucien, you would be so kind as to make things better by taking your clothes off right now, standing on the table and . .
.’ She picked up their empty water bottle and held it out to him.

Lucien laughed, and Monsieur Akiyama looked startled. He was beginning to wonder who it was he had married all those years ago. And then he smiled, because he couldn’t help but be amused
by her bawdy humour.

‘We could send a photo to Akiko,’ she teased.

Lucien no longer felt like crying at the mention of Akiko’s name. He was even starting to wonder whether his love for her had run its course.

Madame Akiyama wasn’t going to let the lack of tickets for
Life
ruin her day. They settled on a trip up the Eiffel Tower instead. It had to be done. ‘And after that, where
should we eat our dinner?’

‘I know a good floating restaurant,’ answered Lucien.

A
urélie was woken by the smell of cooking. She had a long shower, using the very nice soap and shampoo that the Papavoines left for their
guests, then she dried herself on a towel that was just as soft as it looked. She put on the white bathrobe. There were white slippers for her too. She felt cleaner and dryer than she ever did
after showering in her own home. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was human again, and she felt an urgent need to see Herbert, to make sure he was OK. She opened the door, and stepped into
the corridor.

She followed the sound of laughter to the master bedroom, where she found him lying on the bed being amused by Madame Papavoine, who was repeatedly covering her head with a pillow case before
whipping it off to reveal a different funny face each time. She noticed Aurélie, and was all
How did you sleep?
and
Was the bed comfortable?
and
Are you sure you’re
ready to get up, because I can take Herbert for longer if you’d like?
and
Please, you really must call me Liliane
, and
You must stay for dinner – we’ve set a place
for you
.

Professor Papavoine was a good cook, and Aurélie, still in her robe, started on her soup, pleased to be eating a proper meal after days of grazing on whatever was close
at hand. Herbert sat in his high chair, eating peas with his fingers, banging his spoon against the tray and squawking. Newly bathed, he was doing a good job of making himself sticky again. Then
his eyes crossed, and he put down his spoon and started looking very serious. Madame Papavoine picked him up and whisked him away, and a minute later she walked back in, reporting that he was
taking a nap.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ she said, ‘how did he get that nasty scab he has just here?’ She ran her finger along the point where her shoulder met her neck. There
was no trace of accusation in her voice, nothing to suggest that she wasn’t just making general conversation.

Aurélie didn’t want to hide anything from the Papa-voines; they had been so good to her, and to Herbert.

‘I shot him,’ she said.

Professor and Madame Papavoine froze, Madame Papa-voine with her finger still pointing at her shoulder, and Professor Papavoine with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.

‘But he’s going to be OK,’ Aurélie reassured them.

They stared at her.

‘Everything’s gone a little bit out of control,’ she said, and once again it all caught up with her, and she buried her face in her hands.

Madame Papavoine unfroze. She walked up to Aurélie and put her arm around her shoulder. ‘What’s going on, Aurélie?’ she asked.

Aurélie pulled herself together and told them the bare bones of the story, from throwing the stone in the square to being given the baby, and then being given a gun by a
well-meaning friend, to Herbert being snatched away from her by the old lady in the Place des Vosges, to the rescue by a mystery man, to the visit from an unnamed ex, to the gun going off in her
hand, to the sleepless night.

‘And that’s why I came to you. I had nowhere else to turn.’

‘Even though I’m a sex pest, desperate to get my hands on young flesh.’

‘Exactly.’ The mood had lightened as Aurélie’s story went on, and they were joking again. ‘And since you’re already involved, I thought I might as well foist
myself on you.’