Bye Bye Blondie (14 page)

Something had given way inside her, making her less toxic. She had really enjoyed those two minutes of compassion, she had liked the gloved hand patting her back. Before she left, the old lady had slipped her a fifty-franc note. Like a kind, complicit grandmother. That had made Gloria cry even harder.

Eric must be back in Nancy. She waited for a through train, so as not to be chucked off at some isolated station on the way. When she arrived, she realized why she had been putting this moment off for so long: the terrible sensation of being back at square one, waking up—in a flea-bitten state what was more—from a beautiful dream of being together. The end of the idyll. She tried to convince herself that she was worrying about nothing.

She dragged herself all around town asking people she knew whether they had seen Eric, but no, nobody knew anything here either. She was wearing a big red anorak from the Salvation
Army store, and had picked up some kind of eczema, which disfigured her face. She felt a certain incomprehension in the eyes of her former friends. No one wanted to put her up. She slept in the railway station until it closed. And again, even in the state she was in, she had to keep walking the streets till the station reopened, because all the wolves on the prowl kept trying to pick her up, and unless she really insulted them, they kept on insisting. Once she started yelling at them, they called her a filthy whore or a stupid tramp and tried to attack her. As if it were totally scandalous that she dared refuse the help and company of the first dumb scumbag to come along. She was just a girl, with no right to be on the street at night, or any right to choose who she wanted to go along with. Nothing but a girl, who belonged to the first comer, no choice. So she had to walk as if she were heading somewhere, not talking to people because she had a date. The only way to avoid violence was to tell lies: “I'm waiting for someone.” “I'm already spoken for.”

She was so lonely that she felt stunned.

Next day, she sat down at a corner where she knew her father came past on his way to work every morning. When he arrived, she didn't dare look him in the eye. She had lost a lot of her arrogance. She was expecting a torrent of anger, like when she played truant from school as a little girl. But he just hugged her without a word, appalled to see the state she was in, and said nothing at all. Once more, she felt ashamed to be bringing all this on him. He had taken her home, called her mother to tell her Gloria was back, and had made her eggs and coffee. He was glad to see her, glad and sad at once. She had told herself it was really stupid the way they loved each other, without ever understanding or doing the right thing at the right time. Her parents asked nothing from her. Neither of them. They took her to the doctor for her skin disorder. She had to have some ultraviolet sessions at a dermatologist. She let herself be manipulated, like a little girl.

When she tried ringing Eric's house, his parents hung up. They soon changed their number. They must've known where he was, otherwise they would have cracked and asked her for news of him. But they didn't ask anything, just hung up. They knew where he was, all right.

Gloria worried away at the problem from every angle, and inevitably started to lose her head. They
must
be able to talk to each other, or at least write, know when they might meet. They must be able to communicate. She called hospitals, boarding schools, as soon as her parents were out she took down the directory and called anywhere she could think of, but with no result.

She found it strange that Eric hadn't even thought to write to her home address. She wondered if he was cloistered somewhere where he couldn't send letters, but even if you're in prison, you get to write. Not for a second, during the three weeks that this had lasted, not for a second did she imagine that perhaps he didn't want to write to her. The idea never occurred to her.

WAKING UP WAS
unbearable, after the first moment of oblivion. Then it became a ritual, she would think to herself,
I'm fine this morning
, before it would all come flooding back, why she wasn't fine at all. The corpse of a beast weighing many tons seemed to be pressing down on her body. She was suffocating, and at the same time harboring a panic attack, a creature with long talons, lodged in her throat trying to break out and scratching at her internal walls. Fury such as she had never before known that made her groan out loud, a wounded animal, blinded by her own blood, choking, fighting, spitting out her sense of loss and anguish, her back broken and pinning her to the bed. Later, every time she read some junkie's account of what it was like to come off hard drugs, she'd be reminded of those days. Except that in those descriptions of overcoming addiction, there wasn't that phenomenal hate, turned against herself
as much as against anyone else she met.

She waited anxiously for the postman, for a phone call. She haunted bars, simply in hopes of finding someone who might know something. Abandoning all dignity, any attempt at attitude, not caring what other people might think, she'd rush up to new arrivals: “You haven't seen Eric, have you? Heard anything about him?” But no, nobody, nothing.

It was during that fortnight that Michel had approached her. One night she had ended up in the Téméraire, a nightclub in the old town, having met up that evening with Roger, who said it was important for her to have some fun, and had dragged her there. She had sat sulking while sinking several beers. Tears in her eyes, she couldn't stand anything those days, she found people noisy, self-centered, phony. She had no desire anymore to joke or take any interest in the thousands of tedious things everyone else found fascinating. In the end, a boorish local had pushed up too close against her, and she had spat in his face before leaving the bar like the poor distracted wretch she was becoming. Michel, who had been standing at the counter alone, had followed her out and taken her arm. They had never spoken, but she knew perfectly well who he was. Michel was a fixture, everyone knew him. To start with his legend, he'd been there when the Sex Pistols played the Chalet du Lac in 1976. People said he'd met Patrick Eudeline, Johnny Thunders, Siouxsie, and Lux Interior. His look was always irreproachable, and he had a wicked attitude: sexy, cold, and cultivated. If Michel decided some record was cool, the rest of Nancy nodded in agreement. Same way, if Michel said a film sucked, they all sneered at it. He was the cat who knew where it was at. He was capable of making everyone listen to the “fridge” track of a record made by Ganz Neit, a local group that had recorded the sound of a fridge for twenty minutes. If Michel found that worthwhile, then the sound of a fridge became really exciting. Even in the improbable swamp where she found herself, Gloria was well aware of her luck, to be picked up by Michel in the street. That he was interested in her, when she wouldn't have dared even ask him the time. In the small number of things she respected, Michel's opinion would have come top of the list. His concern for her had taken her absolutely by surprise. For two whole minutes she'd stopped wanting to die.

Later, when she knew him better, he'd tell her many times that he'd been struck by the expression on her face when she'd come into the bar. Her fury and pain, obvious all over the room, had seemed familiar and admirable to him. At any rate, he'd caught up with her and asked, “Are you okay? Do you want to be alone?” She couldn't stop crying, and he deployed all his charm to console her. Flattered and intrigued, she'd repeated between sniffs that she should be going home, while wishing he'd hold her back, which he had done. He wasn't trying to pick her up, there was no ambiguity about it, he was acting more like her big brother. She told him her story and he was touched. The urban romantic myth of despair. He was truly kind, she could hardly believe it. The feeling between them then wasn't exactly peace and love, a bit more hard-edged than that, sharper, each watching their words.

He'd walked her along, talking about this and that, going to some lengths to distract her, and had taken her to a bar near where he lived at the time, behind La Pépinière, the big park in the city center. The owner was a jovial, old-fashioned guy in shirtsleeves and suspenders who served them sandwiches with a little glass of Côtes du Rhône. Michel had the reputation of being
on heroin, which was quite true and even that day when he was clean, he barely sipped a little wine. It was extraordinary that a guy as furiously punk as this could be on good terms with the old-world café proprietor, just as it was amazing that his brain didn't miss a trick. When she mentioned that Eric had a nineteen-year-old sister who was in the advanced
hypokhâgne
class in the Lycée Poincaré, his face lit up.

“Well, you should go and see her!”

“I tried, they wouldn't let me set foot in the fucking lycée!”

“Do you know her, have you ever seen her?”

“Just for a moment, in a corridor once. How could I know that one day I'd need to ask her something, a girl like that?”

She made him smile. She could sense that she attracted him, like an adopted little sister. She hadn't tried to be clever or to act the punkette, yet it was obvious that she and her story appealed to him. He'd decided to help her, and at midday next day he called her: “Listen, it's great, my ex-fiancée is in the same class, she knows who your boyfriend's sister is. She's going to have a word with her today, I'll know more tonight. Do you want to come around for supper?”

Well, of course she did, with a feeling that her blood was starting to flow again through her veins and waking up her brain. Of course she did.

Michel's apartment was candlelit, it had a spooky atmosphere, like going to eat with a vampire. There were posters from a Cramps concert, another of the film
Out of the Blue
, piles of books taller than Gloria, discs by Gainsbourg on the floor with some by Trisomie 21. The curtains were heavy, thick, wine colored. They listened to an experimental Hungarian group.

Gloria had drunk nothing, she was paralyzed with shyness. The ex-fiancée was friendly enough, but intimidatingly beautiful. Two older people with that confidence and the way of exchanging clever witty remarks that more grown-up people seem to have when you're only sixteen. A tall creature, red-haired with pale skin, blood-red nails, wearing mittens and a long vintage skirt. She had pale eyes, you couldn't see exactly whether they were blue or green. She spoke very slowly and expressed herself impeccably.

Gloria had perched on the edge of a chair and was afraid of falling off, of doing something ludicrous, clumsy. Michel was heating up water for pasta. It was so improbable to watch this local punk hero do something as ordinary and domestic as cook pasta. And at the same time it was sublime. It meant he had nothing to prove, or else that you could be a punk and still do boring everyday stuff.

She had asked the older girl with her eyes, and the Goth had almost smiled. “Yes, I had a talk with Amandine.” She felt better already, at last something was happening, she felt more at home, she felt she was coming back to life.

Just as well, because what followed wasn't going to be much to her liking.

“He's in Switzerland, in a high-discipline school.”

“His shitty family! I knew it, I was sure. Did she say where?”

“No, I tried, but she was very cagey. I don't know what her brother's like, but Amandine is pretty smart.”

“Yeah, he's clever too. And he has an ordinary name. What kind of a name is Amandine, for God's sake? In that family they don't seem to realize . . . They think they're living in a fairy tale. But do you know her well?”

The beautiful creature smiled again. Gloria wondered what it was about her that made
everyone laugh. The older girl went on.

“No, but we're in the same class, I went to see her about some homework. And I brought up the subject of my little brother, Eloy. I said he knew her brother from Saint-Cyr and was wondering what he was doing now.”

“Oh really, your brother?” said Gloria, opening a fresh packet of Camels, surprised by all these coincidences.

“No, it's completely false,” Michel commented with a sly grin, “but Sylvie lies like a trooper.” This struck a false note, too deliberate if it was meant as a compliment, and they exchanged a short but not entirely friendly look, before she carried on.

“I don't even have a little brother. But I do know a younger boy called Eloy who went to Saint-Cyr. Well, anyway,” Sylvie went on, “Amandine dodged the question: ‘Oh, he's in another school now, don't want to talk about it.' Well, it excited me, I love it when people clam up.”

Michel remarked, “Yeah, when people stand up to you, you love it. It's when they give in that it's harder.”

And Gloria started to tell herself that it suited him to have an excuse to ask this former girlfriend for a favor. It wasn't hard to see that she still had an effect on him.

“So I started to look concerned, and I tried acting very sad: ‘Oh, boys that age, they can be so difficult can't they?' I was almost in tears over this, and she kept on being distant for a bit, but in the end we found ourselves having a nice cup of tea in the Excel, and she told me everything. How he took drugs, how he'd picked up all these STDs.”

The Goth put her hand on Gloria's arm.

“I'm just saying what
she
said, I'm not saying we need to believe her.”

Gloria, who didn't see any harm in it, said, “So what, I'm a punk, I'm not scared of getting crabs.”

It had been a spontaneous remark, but she saw that she'd scored another point with Michel. It pleased her greatly, though she was far from suspecting that twenty years later he'd still be her best friend. He liked her attitude, her abruptness, and he appreciated her pale eyes and blond hair. He liked the way she looked at record covers, turning them over and over and asking off-the-wall questions. He liked it that she was in love, and desperately unhappy in love, that she had burned her wings and was suffering, and that she made a loud noise falling to earth. She reminded him of himself: she was a version, in the shape of a 1980s girl, of the way he had been as a teenager. He was feeling lonely at the time. A lot of his friends had died, others had left Nancy for Paris or to go abroad. His sweetheart had abandoned him for someone else the year before, and he wasn't over it yet, but too proud to let that show. He liked this Gloria kid, a blond punkette with a child's round cheeks, who sulked in bars and was looking everywhere for her boyfriend. The Goth went on.