Underground Time (9 page)

She must have slipped by mistake into another reality. A reality she cannot understand or take in, a reality the truth of which she cannot grasp.

It’s not possible. Not like this.

Without anything ever being said. Nothing that would allow her to go beyond, to make amends.

She could phone Patricia Lethu, ask her to come down right away and show her that she doesn’t even have a computer any more.

She could throw her files around the room, fling them as hard as she can against the walls.

She could leave her new office, start shouting in the corridor, or sing Bowie at the top of her voice, play some chords on the air guitar, dance in the middle of the open-plan area, sway on her heels, roll on the ground so that people look at her, to prove that she exists.

She could call the managing director without going through his secretary, tell him she doesn’t give a fuck any more about proactiveness, the optimisation of interpersonal skills, win-win strategies, the transfer of competence, and all these fuzzy concepts he’s been feeding them for years, that he’d do better to get out of his office, to come and see what’s going on, to smell the sickening stench that’s invaded the corridors.

She could show up in Jacques’s office armed with a baseball bat and methodically destroy everything: his collection of Chinese vases, the talismans he brought back from Japan, his ‘director’s’ armchair in leather, his flat-screen and his CPU, his framed lithographs, the glass on his storage cabinet. She could tear down his Venetian blinds with her bare hands, with one gesture sweep all his marketing literature on to the floor and trample it in a fury.

Because there is this violence in her which surges up all at once: a continuous cry held back for too long.

This is not the first time.

The violence first appeared a few weeks ago when she realised what Jacques was capable of. When she understood that this had only just begun.

One Friday evening, when she had just got home, Mathilde received a call from Jacques’s secretary. Jacques was held up in the Czech Republic. He had agreed to write an article for the in-house journal on product innovation in the division, but he was snowed under, he wouldn’t have time. And so he’d asked Barbara to get in touch with Mathilde. The article had to be submitted by Monday morning at the latest.

For the first time in weeks, Jacques was asking something of her. Through an intermediary, it was true. But he was requesting her help. To do that, he must have uttered her first name, and recalled that she had written dozens of texts for him which he had signed without changing a single comma, or remembered at the very least that she was still part of his team.

The timing could have been better. Mathilde and the boys had planned to spend two days with friends. In addition, she was intending to take a half-day on Monday morning to go for an X-ray after the plaster came off her wrist.

She said yes. She’d cope somehow.

She took her laptop to the country and worked through most of the night from Saturday to Sunday. The rest of the time she laughed, played cards, helped prepare meals. She went walking by the river with the others, breathed in the smell of the earth in great lungfuls. And when people expressed concern about whether things at work had sorted themselves out, she said they had. Jacques’s request was enough for her to believe that the situation could change, go back to how it was before, to believe that ultimately it was just a bad patch, a crisis they would get over and which she would forget in the end, because that was how she was – she didn’t bear grudges.

On the Sunday night she sent the article to Jacques using the company’s internal mail, which she could access remotely. He would have it when he got in on Monday morning, or perhaps even that evening if he was back. She fell asleep with a feeling of achievement she hadn’t known in a long time.

The following day Mathilde took Théo and Maxime to school. Then she went to her appointment at the hospital, where she had to wait a good hour before she was seen. Later that morning she went back home, where she took advantage of the free moment to tidy the boys’ cupboard and iron a few things. At one o’clock she bought a sandwich at the baker’s down below and then she went to the metro station. The trains were almost empty and her journey seemed to flow smoothly. She dropped in at the Brasserie de la Gare for a coffee at the bar. Bernard complimented her on how well she was looking. At 2 p.m. on the dot she walked into the building.

Jacques was waiting for her. Scarcely had Mathilde got out of the lift when he began shouting.

‘The article! What happened to the article?’

Mathilde felt the point of impact in her stomach.

‘I sent it to you last night. Didn’t you get it?’

‘No, I didn’t get anything. Not a thing. I waited all morning. I was looking for you everywhere and I had to cancel a lunch to write the bloody thing which I asked you to write on Friday night! I suppose you had better things to do than devote a few hours of your weekend to the company.’

‘I sent it to you last night.’

‘So you said.’

‘I sent it, Jacques. If that weren’t true, you know full well that I’d tell you.’

‘Well, maybe it’s time you worked out how your email system works.’

Faces appeared at half-open doors. There were furtive glances in the corridor. Stunned, Mathilde said nothing. Short of breath, she leaned against the wall. She had to retrace step by step what she had done after getting back on Sunday night, before she was able to visualise the scene: she had set the table, put the pizza in the oven and asked Simon to turn his music down. Then she switched on the laptop. Yes, she could see herself turning it on, sitting at the low table. Next she must have sent the article, nothing else was possible.

And then she began to have doubts. She was no longer sure. Perhaps she was interrupted and didn’t send the email. Maybe she pressed a wrong key or got the wrong recipient or forgot the attachment. She wasn’t sure about anything any more. Maybe she did forget to send the article. As simple as that.

The corridor was empty. Jacques had gone.

Mathilde rushed to her office, turned on her computer and entered her password. She waited for all the icons to appear and the anti-virus software to run. It felt like it was taking for ever. Her heart was in her mouth. At last she was able to open up her Sent box. There was the email on the first line, dated the night before at 19.45. She hadn’t forgotten the attachment.

From her office she called Jacques to ask him to come and see for himself, to which he responded loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘I didn’t receive anything and I don’t give a damn about salving your conscience.’

Jacques doubted her word.

Jacques spoke to her like a dog.

Jacques lied.

He
had
received her article. She knew that. He had probably used it as inspiration for his own.

Mathilde re-sent the email.

To prove to him that . . .

It was vain and ridiculous, a pitiful impulse to keep herself upright.

For the first time she imagined Jacques dead. His eyes upturned. For the first time she saw herself firing at point-blank range. She imagined the shot, powerful and irremediable. For the first time, she saw the hole in the middle of his forehead. Clean. And the burnt skin all around it.

Later, the image came back, and then came others: Jacques lying on the ground at the entrance to the building, a group of people gathered around his body, the trickle of white froth at the corner of his mouth.

Jacques in the blue light of the car park, dragging himself on his elbows, his legs broken, crushed, mangled, begging for forgiveness.

Jacques stabbed with his silver letter opener, pissing blood on his director’s chair.

At the time, the images made her feel better.

Later, Mathilde felt afraid. That something was out of her control, was carrying her along, something she couldn’t stop.

The images were so clear, so precise. Almost real.

Her own violence frightened her.

Thibault followed a case of gastro-enteritis on rue Bobillot with a panic attack on avenue Dorian and an earache on rue Sarrette.

At eleven o’clock he rang Rose to ask her if the controller was planning on having him shuttle between the two zones all day. He didn’t want to be awkward, but Francis should try to minimise the number of trips, at least a bit, especially when they were only level-4 emergencies.

In fact Francis wasn’t there. Francis was off sick. The base had had to call in a replacement controller. Rose went on: ‘He’s worked for SOS.’

Thibault was in a bad mood and couldn’t hold back a comment. Maybe the replacement had fun making SOS doctors run all over Paris, but if she could explain to him that this wasn’t their house style, he’d be really grateful.

Rose’s voice trembled: ‘Things are shit today, Thibault. I’m sorry. I might as well tell you right away that the direct line from the emergency services is ringing every three minutes. They’re offloading tons of patients on to us. And you’ve got to go to rue Liancourt. There’s a thirty-five-year-old man locked in his bathroom. He’s having hallucinations and threatening to slit his wrists. He’s already made four suicide attempts. His wife wants him hospitalised.’

That was all he needed. A ‘mission’. In their slang that was the name they gave to the calls that no one wanted. Because in general they took up half the day. At the top of the list of ‘missions’ are instances of sectioning, arrests and death certificates.

Thibault said he was on his way. Because he’s very fond of Rose and he is probably less worried than most about his hourly rate. He hung up.

A few seconds later he heard the beep of the text message giving him the entry code, floor and name of the person who called it in. He checked all the same that it wasn’t a message from Lila. Just in case.

He knows what awaits him. If he doesn’t manage to persuade the patient to sign a consent form voluntarily, he’ll have to call the police, an ambulance and hope that it doesn’t end like the last time. The girl managed to escape over the rooftops. And then she jumped. She wasn’t even twenty.

That same evening, he remembers, he had arranged to see Lila. As soon as he was through the door, he wanted to throw himself into her arms, wanted her to gather him up, envelop him, wanted to feel the warmth of her body. To be free of himself for a few seconds. He made a movement towards her, a movement of abandon. And then in a fraction of a second, instinctively, the movement was cut short. Lila hadn’t moved. Lila stood there in front of him, her arms by her sides.

He’s been stuck for a good twenty minutes behind a van parked right in the middle of rue Mouton-Duvernet.

Two men are casually unloading clothes, sauntering, cigarettes in their hands. They disappear into a shop, then reappear several minutes later. They’re in no hurry.

Thibault looks behind him. The traffic has built up; he can’t reverse.

After the men’s sixth return trip made with the same, vaguely ostentatious slowness, Thibault sounds his horn. Immediately the other cars do the same, as though they’d been waiting for his signal. One of the two men turns round towards him, his arm bent and his middle finger raised.

For a fraction of a second, Thibault imagines getting out of the car, rushing at the man and beating him up.

So he switches on the radio and turns up the volume. He breathes in.

Thibault has always been keen on changing sector when he requests his shifts. He has criss-crossed them all in every direction and in every fashion possible. He knows their rhythms and their geometry. He knows the squats and the townhouses, the houses covered in ivy, the names of the estates, the numbers on the stairwells, the ageing tower blocks and the brand-new apartment complexes which look like show homes.

For a long time he’s believed that the city belongs to him. Because he knows its smallest street, tiniest alleyway, little-known mazes, the names of its new arterial roads, unlit passages, and the new developments by the Seine that have sprung up from nowhere.

He plunges his hands as far into the city’s belly as possible. He knows the beating of its heart, its old aches which the damp reawakens, its moods and its pathology. He knows the colour of its bruises and the dizziness of its speed, its putrid secretions and its false modesty, its evenings of jubilation and the days after its celebrations.

He knows its princes and its beggars.

He lives above a square and never closes the curtains. He wants the light, the noise. The ceaseless circular movement.

He has long thought that he and the city beat to the same rhythm, are one and the same.

But today, after ten years behind the wheel of his white Clio, ten years of traffic jams, red lights, tunnels, one-way streets and double parking, it seems as though the city sometimes eludes him, that it has become hostile to him. It seems to him that because it is so over-crowded and because he recognises its fetid breath better than anyone, the city is waiting for its moment to vomit him up or spit him out, like a foreign body.