Bye Bye Blondie (9 page)

Gloria didn't understand exactly whether it was seeing him standing there looking so cold and dignified, or whether it was because he was leaving, but for the first time, she regretted having always managed to avoid sleeping with him. She liked him, that was the truth.

She didn't want to be there without him. She preferred not to hang around watching him walk away and realizing what was happening. Alone again in the institution, for a time always unspecified. A day, a lifetime . . . it depended on other people.

He'd left her his Walkman when he went. She put the headphones on and began to cry.

SHE FINALLY GOT
out of the hospital about five weeks after him. The whole time she remained there, he'd written to her every day. He sent her little pellets of dope, hidden inside cassettes, cigarettes, or detective novels, which she read at once, it made the days go by quicker. Once he had left, she fell head over heels in love.

Every morning, a letter would arrive from him. At first she'd played casual, just looking for the gift. But soon she really wanted to read the letter and admitted it readily. She replied every day, he'd sent her envelopes and stamps, everything she needed. He was funny on paper, much more so than in the flesh. His writing was small and regular, sloping, very clear, a bit feminine, not too much, just enough to be seductive. He'd started talking dirty in his letters and that wowed her, it made her chuckle, all alone. She masturbated several times a day, thinking what they would do when she got out.

Overall, Eric provided her with a shield against the place, a shield against her pain. She thought about him when she woke up, the worst moment of the day: when she remembered where she was. He accompanied her virtually, helping to drive away the horror and anguish of the possibility that she might never get out.

Life went on. Every therapist she saw was just like the others: all self-satisfied and simpleminded. “And what do
you
think about it?” they would say, looking penetratingly at her. They liked to screw up their eyes as if they were deep in thought. But it was obvious they understood nothing. She felt like taking them by the shoulders and booting them outside. “Get a life! Meet people, travel, listen to music, read something, get your own mind sorted out, you might be ready after that to come back and meddle with other people's.”

The anger grew thicker inside her, took root in her heart, went in deep.

And then one day, the head doctor simply announced she was leaving. She bit back the comment: “Oh yeah, so you think I'm
cured
now, do you?”

Her father had brought two big sports bags to carry the stuff she'd acquired in four months. She felt blank as she packed up. Not anxious, not happy, not excited. Blank, as if broken.

In the car on the way back, the twenty kilometers to Nancy. Trees along the road, it wasn't yet a double highway. A few big stores, furniture, DIY warehouses. The snow had melted. It was spring already, with the first colors appearing. She and her father didn't exchange a word. She was no longer furious, or sad, or guilty. She was blank, as if in suspended animation, drained. She'd gone to earth, retreated inside herself somewhere. As if she'd been at the edge of icy water, or a polluted stream from which one has to retreat carefully. Her father seemed the same, as if scalded. She'd always known him with a beard, ever since she had been born he'd had a beard. Now he'd shaved it off, it made him look younger, naked, almost indecent. Vulnerable too. But if in her there was a glimmer of desperate tenderness for him, and if in him there was a twinge of regret or anxiety, neither one of them showed the slightest emotion. Two strangers, sitting very calmly in a spotless white Renault, going home a few days before Easter.

She didn't know it yet, but it takes time for critical events to register, developing like a plant in the soul, bearing their fruit and declaring themselves part of reality. To allow the symptoms to manifest themselves, as they would say in the hospital. Gloria would say, “The time it takes for it to hit.”

Nothing would ever be the same again. And at the back of her mind always the question,
Who would I have been if this hadn't happened to me?

Her mother, waiting for them at home, had cooked fries, Gloria's favorite, especially when she was little. She liked peeling the potatoes onto a newspaper spread across her lap, taking care not to peel too much off, but also trying to make a single peeling from one potato. Then wiping the potatoes with a clean tea towel—you had to take one from the drawer, next to the cutlery drawer under the tabletop. Then you put them in the wire basket to make the fries. The rest her mother did, handling the pan.

But this time she hadn't been there to help prepare everything. And she wasn't a little girl anymore. She hadn't thought properly, not at all. She had imagined this day, coming out of the hospital, thousands of times. Everything she was going to do the minute her nose was outside, the people she'd call, all the stuff she'd find in her bedroom. She would play a 45 on the record player, find her old clothes, put on makeup, telephone her friend Florence. Even taking a bus had seemed like something special when she was locked up.

Only now she was back home, it felt like nothing at all. Tomato ketchup on the little kitchen table, just big enough for the three of them to eat at. Nothing, ever, the same again. Her mother had prepared this celebration meal, but her features were drawn, she was avoiding Gloria's eyes. She was ill at ease. Nothing ever the same again. No appetite, just enough to nibble a few fries.

She felt confused, as if drained, neither aggressive nor amused, observing things almost automatically. Her parents looked tired. She would have preferred them to be full of energy and hostile to her, so that she could start hating them. But it wasn't so simple. In families, things are rarely cut and dried.

There was a new fridge. The old one had been on its last legs for a while. Life had gone on.

She found the courage to say, “No thanks, I'm not hungry,” when she was offered the chocolate cake, a little overbaked, which her mother had made. This false birthday meal reminded her of the tea parties in the hospital, oddly enough. Full circle. When she saw her father's face on hearing she had no appetite, she'd immediately said, “Oh well, perhaps just a little piece.” As if she couldn't “do that to them,” refuse them the pleasure of seeing her eat what they had prepared.

She had been away four months, and on her return it was spooky, she found everyone both exactly the same and changed, all the people she'd been dreaming of seeing. Everything seemed kind of disjointed, she was out of sync. At first, coming out of the hospital, her feeling was fury at everything she'd been missing. But while she had been making herself sick thinking this way, of all the good times she'd lost out on, nothing had really changed. People she'd adored just “before,” now seemed boring and stupid. Superficial. This word, which would never have occurred to her six months earlier, now kept occurring apropos of everything. Superficial. She'd lost her flexibility and tolerance for her immediate group of friends. She was damaged. Nothing was as she had hoped and imagined for four months.

In town, she'd bumped into Frédérique, a young bisexual well known in the district, bold, brilliant, often funny, and usually surprising. He came from Haut du Lièvre, a low-income neighborhood, and was intriguingly beautiful. He could make music with a washing machine and sing without opening his mouth. Naïveté, thinking it was decadent, the insouciance of the 1980s . . . His voice was always husky, and he cultivated an air of vagueness. Everyone knew he spent hours cruising around Place Carnot, looking for men. He'd thrown his arms around Gloria and
given her a big hug. He was a sufficiently odd person for her not to resent him for never writing to her, and anyway they didn't know each other that well. But at last, someone seemed to understand where she was coming from. A sad place. So he hugged her, this guy who was always sarcastic, a crook really, with absolutely no moral sense. But he was the only
fucking
person who offered her some tenderness, right there in the street, who saw she needed something to hang on to.
Hold me, never let me go
.

To celebrate, he'd pulled out a little matchbox, two tabs of acid and slipped them into her hand: “To help you get your bearings, good to see you back, big girl.”

Just a little acid and bingo—all the joys of a really bad trip. Before it had even started working, she'd walked away from her friend Laura without warning. Bursting with overvivid ideas, she felt on the point of exploding, bombarded with crazy absurdities, images, and concepts, all visually unbearable. She was wearing her high-laced Doc Martens and they began to make her freak out, she was walking along the street and the sun was beating down and the Docs seemed to have a will of their own, as if some Nazi punk spell had been cast on them and they were going to force her to cut children's throats. Where they led she would have to follow.

Luckily they were content simply to take her back home, but the comedown was terrible. With the sun as well, brilliant, blinding, full in her face, scouring out the back of her eyes. On the way, she'd hallucinated she kept meeting the same guy, disguised as a painter, an office worker, a little boy, but always the same individual who stared at her and tried to make her understand—nonverbally of course—that some very bad stuff was about to happen. He was carrying a ladder, then two streets farther on she saw him with a briefcase, next, at the bus stop, the same man was standing with a baby clasped to his chest, and later there he was again, carrying a traveling bag. Told like that, it sounds like nothing, but at the time it was a nightmare. Luckily when she got home no one was in, she'd curled up in a ball in a corner of her room, and then, a false good idea or a real flash of intuition, she'd put on a 45 of the Béruriers, “Nada Nada,” on her record player, an old one, you just had to put the needle arm in the high position for the record to keep replaying as long as you wanted. Until night fell and her parents came home from work, “Nada Nada” on loop, a needle penetrating her brain, her guts, all her white corpuscles, loading them with fear, stifled anger, hate. Since then, every time she'd tried to drop acid, it hadn't been good. Yet it was something she'd really liked doing, acid trips. Simply a sign that all her neurons were poisoned with anguish.

Generally, once she was out of the hospital, she found the whole world disappointing, without daring to admit it or complain.

Almost as soon as she was back home, she'd written to Eric, but as it was the Easter holidays, he was away. This was in the days before mobile phones, so if someone wasn't there, you just had to wait for them to get back, nothing else for it.

She'd been enrolled now as a boarder in a school twenty minutes from Nancy by train. She'd have to go there without seeing him again. In the end, that suited her. She felt somehow embarrassed by their idyll. Like memories of exotic countries, fantastic in real sunshine, pathetic when you see them on TV. Out of its setting, their story lost much of its charm, and she felt apprehensive at the thought of seeing him in the streets of her hometown.

She'd thought obsessively about him for days. She'd written pages and pages to him, laying bare everything about herself, without being afraid of his opinion. She'd read his letters, she knew him better than any of her childhood friends. And he was crazy about her. That felt nice. He often spoke about the way she threw spectacular tantrums.
Good
, she thought,
just as
well, because I won't disappoint him on that score
. But it was astonishing—both tempting and terrifying—to be loved precisely for what she was most afraid of in herself. He spoke about what he was listening to while he wrote. Since they'd met, he'd started following more youth music, punk and psycho. There were a lot of things she liked about him, his laid-back quality, his ability to pick up on codes and issues, to come up with a view about different bands. But she didn't want to introduce him to her friends or go to concerts with him, or anything really. It had been a little hospital love affair, not something for the broad light of day.

The fifth day after she came home, she became a boarder in Lunéville, out in the sticks. She'd arrived at her new school with an orange crew cut, a safety pin in one ear, four piercings in the other, a heavy chain around her neck, wearing an army surplus coat with NUCLEAR YES PLEASE on the back in bleach and her old trainers—she'd given away the maroon Docs the day after the bad trip.

So after the Easter break, Gloria found herself sitting in the Lunéville train, on her way to school. The carriages hadn't changed since the 1950s: a musty smell, torn seats, black-and-white photos of landscapes above your head. There was no heating, so early every Monday morning she had to huddle in her seat. The windows were covered with icy condensation. She preferred to get up at dawn rather than take her time on Sunday night, because then the train was full of soldiers and she hated being in a compartment with a group of boys.

This state boarding school was a lot less horrendous than she'd expected. Not full of punk rockers, naturally, because it was out in the middle of nowhere. But the local teenagers were mostly good-natured, neither easily impressed nor wanting to show off. They could hold their alcohol well, had a sense of humor and patience. Nobody over-reacted about her appearance, or her record, or anything. Nothing like the nightmare she'd expected. She quickly made two friends among the girls, strong Lorraine accents but good company. They listened to Exploited, which, with cows and tractors all around, gave you an extra kick.

Eric was delighted she was out of the hospital. She wrote in reply that she wasn't allowed outside school grounds. In fact, she regularly escaped to go for a beer and have a night out. She could perfectly well have arranged to meet him.