Bye Bye Blondie (8 page)

“Can you keep a secret?”

She couldn't prevent a little nervous giggle.

“Who do you think I'd tell, here?”

“When I woke up this morning, I could remember everything perfectly well. My name, my local disco, and even that I don't really like coffee first thing in the morning.”

“Oh really? But you still don't get it, do you? Your secret's neither here nor there, if you really want to be in here, you can tell them your real name. They'll keep you just the same. It's not as if people are fighting to get in here, it's not selective . . .”

“Yes, but I want us to get to know each other better.”

“Well, that's flattering . . .”

She didn't believe this for a second, and it must have been in her voice because he frowned, embarrassed.

“You're not very encouraging. Don't you want to get to know me?”

“I'd sit and chat with a German-speaking goat, I'm so lonely here.”

“Good, because I'm much more fun than a goat.”

“So how come you lost your memory?”

“I must have had too much Rohypnol.”

“I hate that kind of stuff. Last time I had some, I ended up head down, asleep on the floor, through a whole concert of the Cure.”

“In Vandoeuvre?”

“Were you there?”

“No, but I've got this friend, he talks about it all the time.”

“So you really
do
know about punk.”

“I keep up with stuff. But what I really like is Polnareff.”

“And you're not queer? Never mind, I get it.”

She made him laugh and he gave her some funny looks. Gloria was starting to feel disturbed, wondering on one hand whether she wanted to go to bed with him, and on the other whether he too was thinking of this, or whether he wasn't interested at all. She tried not to ask herself that question for the moment.

Eric must have read her thoughts, since he said, “Look, I'm not trying to chat you up or anything, I just wanted . . . I'd just like it if we could maybe have a smoke together, just talk a bit . . .”

“You've got some cigarettes?”

Her eagerness could not have been more obvious if she had rubbed her hands together. She suggested, “I've got a little stuff and some papers—spliff?”

He agreed and raised his hands in the air, arms up straight. Gloria said, “You look a bit like a cat.”

“I was doing a boxer who's won the fight, but okay, too bad.”

“Oh really? Sorry, but you did look like a cat.”

“You wouldn't be a castrating kind of girl would you?”

“Me? You must be joking? Well-known for it.”

She'd hidden in a pot of Nivea a little ball of dope that a friend had brought her, a boy she hardly knew but who had decided to take an interest in her case. He came to see her by car, brought her some rag dolls with funny faces, the Cabbage Patch Kids, and he hid little pieces of shit in their pockets. “That's really kind of you,” she had said with enthusiasm, wondering whether this guy was really cool, had nothing better to do, felt concerned, or just wanted to sleep with her. In which case it wasn't worth going to all the trouble. She liked the dolls anyway, they made her room look more cozy.

Her stay in a psychiatric hospital had become something weird, cool, all-or-nothing, as viewed by her friends, girls or boys. The ones who came to see her were not at all the ones she would have expected. Her best mates, the boys (and the one girl) for whom she would have gone to hell and back before she had been locked up, had never called or written. It was her school friends who had really been faithful. They would often phone, tell her funny stories, some sent newspapers or cassettes.

She pretended to be a girl who was neither surprised nor wounded, nothing that could make her mother say, “See I told you so.” She was determined to be Miss Josephine Cool, but actually it was weird that her wildest friends had dropped her so brutally. When one of them had gone to prison, she had written to him, even sent him some money. She'd learned as well that there were plenty of jerks out there who thought it quite normal that she was in here. “Yeah, Gloria, well she
dropped too much acid, she's fucked-up.” As if anything at all could justify her being locked up here with horrible and incompetent slimeballs who didn't even have the slightest idea how to put someone back on her feet. After all, you had to be soft in the head to expect a person without even a garden to walk and sit in to make a complete recovery of mental balance, if all you provided was a lousy canteen meal, an hour in the TV lounge, and a few sedatives.

When she'd found out that several people she knew had found the decision
understandable,
she'd had to stifle tears of rage, burying her head in the pillow.
Please God, don't let anyone come into my room just now
. Die, rather than admit how she felt. Hard to believe that these kids, who listen to punk music morning to night, could just accept it if one of their gang gets locked up. You had to suppose that it gave them street cred or something, she'd find out when she got out. Some of them, tucked in at night by their mamas, never having taken a risk in their lives, were now
pleased
about what was happening to her, because that made it all more serious: hey, we're punks, it's dangerous.

Eric had already discovered a secluded place where you could smoke in peace and quiet, cigarettes or even a joint. Gloria was amazed that he had found it so quickly.

It was an empty courtyard, entirely surrounded by buildings, and reached by corridors she didn't know about. There was a small bench in the middle, deep in the snow that was still covering everything. It must be a special place for people who wanted to smoke in summer. It was bitterly cold. Gloria stamped her feet against the bench. She rolled up, gritting her teeth, stuffing the joint as much as possible with frozen fingers. She asked him, “How come you've still got cigarettes? Did you buy some before you got here or what?”

“I had plenty of cash with me when I arrived. I bought some off Pierrot, don't know if you know him, he's the one who . . .”

“I don't talk to anyone here.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Two months, maybe not as much. Yeah, coming up to two months. Not hard to work out, I came in on January the third.”

“Must get pissed off if you don't talk to anyone.”

“At first I didn't plan to do that, but . . . what's he look like, your Pierrot?”

“He's a really nice guy.”

“Not weird, then?”

“Well, he is a bit, you know, away with the fairies. At first sight, he looks okay, just this guy that used to work in a bank. Mind you, after about five minutes he'll start telling you that he's being followed, for instance, he gets on the train, someone's following him—it's the government that's after him. If he goes to the swimming pool, they follow him, if he phones, they listen in. And now that they've got him up here, they're still following him. He told me for instance in his sessions with the shrink, they're taping him . . .”

“That's just what I mean. I'm fed up with these people, their nutty ideas . . . it's all so trivial. I don't want to chat with someone who works in a bank, that would so totally depress me.”

“Working in a bank, that'd depress you?”

“Why, do you think it's
romantic
or something? It'd really turn me on, eh? Chatting to
him about how he gets up every morning to go and be yelled at in a stinking office with colleagues who hate him and then at the end of the month get just enough money to pay the bills? I'm too young, can't you see, too young for compromises. Why should I bore my ass off talking to old squares? They don't even know who the Stooges are.”

“So why are you here?”

“My parents.”

“And?”

“I don't know what got into them, but it was nothing to do with me.”

“Did they want to go away on holiday or something?”

“Dunno. They're pretty uptight anyway. I'd rather they'd've dumped me at the side of the road.”

She was acting the girl who's quite confident that she's here because her parents have somehow gone crazy. She sincerely thought she believed this. But deep inside, the intimate enemy was watching and collaborating with the shrinks and therapists, deep inside, she was convincing herself that there really was something wrong with her. You don't get locked up by chance. Not in places like this.

She'd pulled hard on the joint, enjoying the burning thrill in her throat and a lungful of nicotine.

“But how did you manage to find this place? I haven't had such a good time since, well, since I got here . . .”

“It's my Boy Scout training, be prepared . . .”

It was a long time since she'd been able to smoke and she found his remark funny enough almost to make her roll on the ground laughing. Once she'd calmed down, she breathed deeply with pleasure. She passed the joint to Eric and surprised herself smiling at him in a dopey way. Next moment, he had a coughing fit, and it set them both off in gales of laughter. They returned to the refectory for lunch, freezing cold, but ecstatic. Gloria was relieved he hadn't tried to put his arm around her to keep her warm. She didn't need someone who clung to her. He looked at her with wide eyes, finding she looked disturbingly like Greta Garbo. Every time she made some feeble joke, he'd fall about in delight, in fits of laughter. He was beyond in love with her. It was passion.

In other circumstances, she'd have avoided him. He was just too precious, physically and intellectually. He lacked seriousness, toughness, virility. She couldn't care less about guys who camped it up, except when they wanted to make love to her. Which, paradoxically, happened to her quite often. But she'd learned to be wary since one boy
like that
had really shaken her by jumping out of a second floor window, just to piss her off. At the time, she'd refused to feel guilty about this. It had even taken several other people to hold her back from running over to lay into him when he was lying on the ground. But since then, she'd avoided vulnerable-looking homosexuals because she was sure they'd get her into some inextricable trouble.

But for now she was only too glad to be able to talk to someone who'd heard of Stray Cats, Joy Division, and the Cramps, too relieved to be able to talk about what interested her. To have confidence in someone else's judgment. Eric was reattaching her to the world she loved. He knew about music. And that was fine by her.

They would stay in her room, with the door wide open, otherwise the staff would go ape worrying they were sleeping together. His own room was occupied by four people, one of them
an old man who wandered and never spoke, but occasionally broke out and became violent without a word, which was much more impressive than if he'd been yelling. Without a word, he'd head straight for a glass door and demolish it by crashing his head against it. She'd seen him do it once. In later years, she often modeled her style on his. For instance, if she really wanted to disrupt an evening, she'd adopt the old man's tactics and break a window—using some object so as not to hurt her head, but not saying a word.

Hervé, one of her mates from her “gang,” was one of the few who came to see her, but they wouldn't let him in—he was too drunk. Never mind, just to hear him chanting in the courtyard, “Let Gloria out, let Gloria out!” from two floors up, had cheered her spirits. Then he had taken up a position under her window, a stroke of luck, and played
Macadam Massacre
at top volume. She'd clung to her window bars, singing along at the top of her voice, hoping he could hear her. And since indeed that was the case, it had taken the police to get him away. He must have said to himself, since I've come all this way, might as well really mix it.

Lying across her bed, Eric listened to her stories. She wasn't usually talkative but she had some leeway to make up, weeks of silence, and above all she wanted to tell him more about her life outside, before, the kind of girl she was before this happened to her.

From the moment she and Eric got together, she forgot to spend all day raving about when they'd let her go and started playing jokes instead. For instance, following one of the attendants with her questions, especially if he blushed easily: “Tell me, would sodomy damage the brain?” Eric adored this, he had a talent for pushing her to do silly things. He made her talk, be funny. He was like the answer to a prayer, this boy arriving in the chamber of horrors.

But one afternoon, his parents finally found out where he was. Eric and Gloria were both in her room. They were listening to Wunderbach, she was humming, lying on her front, as she watched him draw on the cover of a notebook, squares inside triangles. He was telling her he'd seen Stray Cats live in concert. She replied she had this school friend—she wore a green-and-white Teddy jacket, this girl from her old school—she'd taped two whole cassettes for her of Stray Cats and drawn pretty covers for her, not bad at all. A doctor had come to fetch Eric. He didn't even warn them they should say goodbye. It must have been one of their therapeutic principles: never confuse an interned being with a human being.

Recognizing his parents at the end of the corridor, he'd simply said hello to them. Without pretending to be happy, or surprised, or furious, or not to remember. No fuss, but plenty of style. He was surrendering. He waved from the end of the corridor to Gloria, then quickly put his hand on his heart.

She looked at his parents, bourgeois, serious, looking out of place in this setting and appalled to find themselves there. The mother with her ponytail and casual clothes, the kind of woman who does her own gardening, and the husband who could have come straight off a golf course. Pathetic and very upright. Relieved to see him there and safe and sound—his mother had wanted to pat his forehead and he had just shied away and stared at her, quickly.