After he’s emptied the room he calls Cat, who to his exasperation and sickening concern doesn’t answer. Thirst plagues him. After the day’s emotional start he forgot to bring a bottle of water. Since leaving him in the dead child’s room, the woman has not shown her face.
His large feet diagonal on the narrow stairs, he cautiously goes down. He knocks on the door and opens it on receiving her feeble permission. She’s sitting at a window looking out on the front garden, in a rattan chair with a tall back to it, smoking a cigarette. She glances round at him and waves at the cupboard above the sink when he asks for a glass of water. His thank-you doesn’t seem to get through to her. She’s staring at a blackbird on the window ledge, then she looks at her fingers, holding the burning stub of the cigarette, which she puts out amid the pile in the ashtray.
Still no one who feels like talking to me, he thinks. Perhaps it was something I used to have that’s gone. The blackbird flaps wildly against the glass.
In the room he looks again at the portrait of the little brother.
Insufficient daylight comes into the room and the chandelier is feeble. His hands are clumsier than normal and the results messy. When he tries to check whether a skirting board is firmly fixed to the wall it breaks in two without the slightest resistance, emitting a rotten burp.
He looks at the piece still attached to the wall by clusters of bent nails and curses the generations of DIY enthusiasts who make his work more difficult, and not just in this house. They hide the pipes of a defective floor-heating system but forget to release the pressure. They concrete over television cables, saw through supporting beams, brick up drains. Here the floor isn’t level, an imperfection that the unequal skirting boards are intended to resolve by means of an optical illusion but in fact only emphasize. And what have the weekend dabblers stuffed into the gap between wall and floor? Paper?
They’re letters, or at least full envelopes. He pulls them out of the groove one by one, all the way from the corner where two walls and the floor come together to a point where the skirting board is still clinging on. Perhaps there are more; he could wrench all the skirting loose. First he wants to see what’s inside. If it’s money, this may be a means of testing him, to see whether he’ll pocket it. Something like that happened to him once, at a previous job.
When he opens a letter, the graph paper tears in half. There’s a number at the top—‘1972’—the year perhaps. Then writing, in an irregular hand, switching from blue to black ballpoint halfway. People who manage to overcome dyslexia develop their brains more thoroughly than people who don’t suffer from the disorder, a teacher once impressed upon him. In his case the letters continue to jump over one another like playful lambs. Handwriting demands more effort than print, and Madeleine doesn’t seem to care about punctuation. It’s only when he reads the sentences for the fourth time that their meaning starts to come through.
‘i still see him every day after school i have to mum not any better dad no news and hes older than i was then no one can ever get used to it my Moustaki record broken in two dix-sept ans et vivre à chaque instant ses caprices d’enfant ses désirs exigeants but i am seventeen that doesnt matter itll stay the way it is tough luck’
He opens a second envelope, also unmarked. On the paper, ruled this time, is a neat ‘1987’ and the message: ‘everything the same without that shouting it would be different try to enjoy nature’.
It must be her abbreviated diary. In 1990 she writes: ‘he would have a deficiency something remarkable but it wouldnt show colour blindness for example i would always be the only one who could calm him the parents of his last girlfriend would have a riding school and after the relationship was over because she cheated on him i would say that i always thought she stank of the stables i would also inspect his clothes tennis hed have a talent for that but not enough ambition because he also benefitted from his youth and his trainer would have a hard time with that we would always like looking a lot at certain television programmes he and i but he less and less so we would slowly discuss less and less about them but talk a lot about the garden and sometimes about cooking and we wouldnt mind that’
His telephone fishes him out from among the letters. Cat. What is he reading, sitting here? He has to regain control, or at least hold chaos at bay. He puts the phone to his ear before he’s had a chance to read the name of the caller.
It’s not Cat, it’s Duran. He knows straight away that he’s talking to the young man of the finger but doesn’t immediately understand what he wants.
‘I got your number from the Yellow Pages,’ Duran begins. ‘It’s only because I have a chance to go to Sapporo. With a group from Argentina.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m going to Japan. It’s much bigger out there.’
‘What is?’
‘Ice sculpture. Sapporo, haven’t you heard about it? They found me via internet, the Argentines. They were selected months ago. They rang me on an old number and mailed me. I saw it just in time. So I can still go.’
‘Fantastic. I didn’t know your sculptures were on the internet. I thought no one was allowed to see them.’
‘I like to keep this separate from the shop,’ he says seriously. ‘Anyhow, I’m in the Argentine group. They’re very good. They want Durans from all over the world. And Shaka Duran is one of them.’
‘I can bring him round.’
‘I don’t like to ask. It was a present. I tried to make a new Shaka Duran but I can’t with my bandaged hand. Otherwise I’d make them there, like the other participants, but in the circumstances I’ll have to take them with me, see?’
‘When do you need him?’
‘As soon as possible. The moment I’m back from Japan he’ll be yours again. Thanks.’
‘I’ll be round tomorrow morning early, all right?’
‘That’s really very good of you.’
He has to go to Cat, even though he’s done far less work than he intended. It’s a long time since he felt a sense of embarrassment steal over him. It permeates the general unease of the day. Not only has he done little work, he’s breached this woman’s confidentiality, although that didn’t occur to him as he was reading. He decides it would be pathetic to stuff the envelopes back into the crack so he piles them up on the floor.
‘I’ve found some letters,’ he says as he walks into her living room.
She’s still sitting in the same position, but now with a flowery shawl over her shoulders.
‘Just take them with you,’ she says, her expression shrouded in cigarette smoke.
‘Ça va,’ he says, in no fit state to think of a better answer.
He doesn’t want to take the letters into the house so he leaves them on the passenger seat.
Cat has cooked. She talks about her parents, how she’ll go and see them this week after all, and about the translations she’s working on: a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and a folder for a timber company. She thinks it’s absurd that she finds herself financially obliged to take on the latter sort of jobs. As he’s aware.
He wants to ask her if she’s scared, but despite her communicative mood, which makes him think of Madeleine’s notes, she continues to avoid eye contact. In bed she falls asleep immediately. Several hours later he wakes aroused and confused with her lips around his member. She licks and glides, climbs him and rides him; he can’t keep up with her, wants to slow down, to turn on the light to see her, but she’s a whirlwind, a beast with a hundred tongues that gives him no chance and then suddenly escapes him again. He throws an arm around her warm stillness and hopes for a night without dreams.
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24
With the morning light, he strokes her back. He needs to talk