No and Me Read online

  We sit down. No keeps her hands under the table. I order a Coke, she asks for vodka. The waiter hesitates for a few seconds. Any second now he’s going to ask her how old she is, but she meets his eye with an incredible insolence that I’m sure means ‘don’t give me any shit, dickhead’. It’s as clear as on a big sign. Then he sees the holes in her jacket, the one she’s wearing on top. He sees how dirty it is, and says OK and off he goes.

  I often see what’s going on in people’s heads – it’s like a treasure hunt, a black thread that you just have to slip between your fingers, a fragile one that leads to the Truth of the world, the one that’ll never be revealed. My father once told me that it alarmed him, that I shouldn’t play at that, that I ought to lower my eyes to keep the look of a child. But I can’t close my eyes. They’re wide open and sometimes I cover them with my hands so as not to see.

  The waiter comes back and puts the glasses down in front of us. No grabs hers impatiently. And I see her black hands and the nails bitten till they’ve bled, the traces of scratches on her wrists. That makes me feel sick to the stomach.

  We drink in silence. I try to find something to say, but nothing comes. I look at her. She seems so tired, not only because of the dark circles round her eyes or her tangled hair gathered in an old scrunchie or her worn clothes. The word which comes into my head is ‘crushed’. That makes me feel bad. I’m not sure if she was like this the first time we met and I just didn’t notice. It’s like she’s changed in the space of a few days. She’s paler or dirtier; it’s harder to get her to look you in the eye.

  She speaks first.

  ‘You live round here?’

  ‘No, Filles du Calvaire. Near the Cirque d’Hiver. What about you?’

  She smiles. She opens her hands in front of her, her grimy empty hands, in a gesture of powerlessness which means: nothing, nowhere, here, I don’t know.

  I take a big mouthful of my Coke and ask, ‘So where do you sleep?’

  ‘Here and there. At people’s houses. People I know. Hardly ever more than three or four nights in the same place.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘I haven’t got any.’

  ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘No.’

  She asks me if she can have another drink. Her feet are fidgety under the table. She can’t lean back on the seat or let her hands settle anywhere. She’s watching me, noticing my clothes. She shifts position and then shifts back again. She’s turning an orange lighter over in her fingers. Her whole body’s sort of tense and agitated. We stay like that, waiting for the waiter to come back. I try to smile, to act natural, but there’s nothing harder than acting natural when that’s exactly what you’re thinking about, even though I’ve had lots of practice at it. I hold myself back from asking all the questions that are jostling around in my head: how old are you? When did you stop going to school? What do you do about food? Who are these people you stay with? But I’m afraid she’ll realise that being with me is a waste of time and leave.

  She starts drinking her second vodka, gets up to grab a cigarette from the next table (a man’s left his packet behind and gone to the toilet), takes a long drag and asks me to talk to her.

  She doesn’t say ‘how about you?’ or ‘what’s your life like?’ Her exact words are: ‘Can you talk to me?’

  I’m not too keen on talking. I always have the feeling that the words are getting away from me, escaping and scattering. It’s not to do with vocabulary or meanings, because I know quite a lot of words, but when I come out with them they get confused and scattered. That’s why I avoid stories and speeches and just stick to answering the questions I’m asked. All the extra words, the overflow, I keep to myself, the words that I silently multiply to get close to the truth.

  But No’s sitting in front of me and her expression is begging me to speak.

  So I plunge in any old how. Too bad if I feel like I’m stark naked, too bad if it’s stupid. ‘When I was young I used to hide a treasure chest beneath my bed with all sorts of souvenirs in it: a peacock’s feather from the Parc Floral, pine cones, multicoloured cotton-wool balls for taking make-up off, a flashing key-ring, that kind of thing. One day I put my last souvenir in it – I can’t tell you what it was – a very sad souvenir that marked the end of my childhood, and I closed the box, slid it under my bed and haven’t touched it since. All the same, I’ve got other boxes – one for each dream. In my new class the pupils call me ‘Brains’. They ignore me or avoid me, as if I had some contagious disease, but deep down I know that it’s because I can’t talk to them or laugh with them. I keep myself to myself. There’s this boy called Lucas, he sometimes comes to see me at the end of class. He smiles at me. He’s sort of the class leader, the person everybody looks up to. He’s very tall and handsome, you know? But I don’t dare talk to him. In the evening I do my homework and stuff. I look for new words. It makes my head spin, because there are thousands of them. I cut them out of the paper to capture them and stick them into big white notebooks that my mother gave me when she came out of the hospital. I’ve got tons of encyclopedias too, but I don’t use them much any more because I know them by heart. At the back of the cupboard I’ve got a secret hiding place with heaps of things that I’ve picked up in the street, things that have been lost or broken or abandoned, you know . . .’

  She’s looking at me like she’s amused. She doesn’t seem to think I’m weird. Nothing seems to surprise her. I can tell her my thoughts, even if they get mixed up and bump into one another. I can express the jumble in my head, I can say ‘you know’ without her picking me up for it, because she knows what that means, I’m sure, because she knows that ‘you know’ stands for all those things you could say, but which you skip over because you can’t be bothered or there’s no time or because there are some things that you can’t say.

  She puts her forehead on the table between her arms and I go on. I don’t know if this has ever happened to me before, I mean speaking for so long, like in a soliloquy in the theatre, without any response. And then she’s gone to sleep and I’ve finished my Coke and I’m sitting there watching her sleeping. At least she’s getting a bit of sleep, in the warmth of the café on the well-padded banquette that I made sure I let her have. I can’t complain – I fell asleep too when we went to the theatre to see L’École des femmes with school, even though it was really good. But I had too much in my head, and sometimes it’s like with computers, the system goes to sleep to save the memory.

  Around seven o’clock I begin to get really worried I’ll get told off and I shake her gently.

  She opens one eye and I whisper, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to go.’

  The imprint from the stitches of her pullover is tattooed on her cheek.

  ‘Have you paid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m going to stay here for a bit.’

  ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘If you want.’

  I put on my coat and leave. In the street I turn round to wave to her through the window, but No isn’t looking.

  .

  Chapter 5

  ‘Miss Bertignac, come and see me at the end of the lesson. I’ve done some research into your subject and I can give you the gist of it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  You have to say ‘yes, sir’. You have to come into the classroom in silence, take out your things, say ‘present’ when the register is taken, make sure Mr Marin can hear you, wait till he gives the sign to get up when the bell rings, not swing your feet beneath your chair, or look at your mobile in class, or glance at the clock in the hall, or twist your hair round your finger, or whisper to your neighbour. You mustn’t have your belly button showing, or the top of your bum. You must raise your hand if you want to speak, have your shoulders covered even if it’s 40°C, not chew your pen, never mind gum. I could go on. Mr Marin is th
e terror of the school. He’s against thongs, low waists, trousers that trail on the ground, hair gel and dyed hair. ‘Miss Dubosc, you will return to class when you are wearing a garment worthy of the name.’ ‘Mr Muller, here’s a comb. You have two minutes to comb your hair.’

  My A starred average doesn’t guarantee me immunity. From the first day he’s been on to me as soon as I look out of the window, the instant I drift off. It only takes two seconds. ‘Miss Bertignac, would you be so kind as to rejoin us. You’ll have plenty of time to return to your inner life. Tell me, what’s the weather like in your universe?’ Mr Marin must have a dozen pairs of invisible eyes all over his body, plus a not-paying-attention detector grafted into his nose and the antennae of a snail. He sees and hears everything – nothing gets past him. And yet, my stomach isn’t showing, my hair is smooth and tied back, I wear normal jeans and long-sleeved pullovers. I do what I can to blend into the background. I don’t make a sound, don’t speak unless he asks me a question, and am a foot shorter than most of the students in the class. No one tries it on with Mr Marin. Lucas is the only one who dares leave his class, his head held high, after answering, ‘Combs are like toothbrushes, Mr Marin. They’re not for lending.’

  ‘According to estimates, there are 200,000–300,000 homeless people in France, 40% of whom are women, and the figure is going up all the time. In the 16–18 age group, the proportion of women is as high as 70%. You’ve chosen a good subject, Miss Bertignac, even though it’s not an easy one. I’ve borrowed a very interesting book for you on social exclusion from the library. Here you are. And here’s a photocopy of a recent newspaper article from Libération. If you need help, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m counting on you to do a less unappealing presentation than your peers. You have the ability. I’ll let you go now. Enjoy your break.’

  My throat is tight and my eyes are smarting. In the playground I go to my little corner near the bench. I lean against the only tree around. It feels like it’s mine. After two months no one tries to come here any more. It’s my place. I watch the others from a distance, the girls laughing and nudging each other. Léa in her long skirt and lace-up boots. She wears make-up. Her eyes are blue and almond-shaped. She’s really quick-witted, and always has something funny or interesting to say. All the boys look at her. And at Axelle, even if she’s less pretty. You can tell she’s not afraid, not of anything. They drink alcohol in the café after school and phone and text each other. They go to parties. Chat on MSN in the evenings and go to H&M on Wednesday afternoons. One day, just after term started, they invited me to their birthday party. I was looking at my shoes as I said thank you. I said I’d go. I thought for a week about what I’d wear. I left nothing to chance. I practised dancing to music on the radio. I’d bought them both a present. And then the evening arrived. I put on my best jeans, a T-shirt I’d bought at Pimkie, my big boots and a black jacket. I’d washed my hair that morning to make it silkier. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was so small: I had little legs, little hands, little eyes, little arms. I was a little thing that didn’t look like anything. I imagined dancing in the living room at Léa Germain’s house in the middle of the others, and I put down the bag with the presents, took off my jacket and switched on the telly. My mother was sitting on the sofa. She’d been watching what I was doing. You could tell she was searching for something to say. It wouldn’t have taken much – for example, if she’d only said ‘you’re very pretty’ or even ‘you look nice’, I think I’d have found the strength to go out, to press the button for the lift and everything. But my mother said nothing and I watched that advert with the girl who puts on a magic deodorant and dances about. Cameras flash and she spins around in a flouncy skirt. I wanted to cry.

  On Monday I went to apologise for not coming. I made up some family excuse. Axelle said I’d missed the party of the year, and I looked down. Léa Germain and Axelle Vernoux haven’t spoken a single word to me since.

  One day Mrs Cortanze, a psychologist I saw for a few months, explained what ‘intellectually precocious’ meant. ‘Imagine that you’re an extremely modern car, equipped with a greater number of options and functions than most cars. You’re faster and higher performance. You’re very lucky. But it’s not easy. Because no one knows exactly the number of options you have or what they enable you to do. Only you can know. And speed can be dangerous. Like when you’re eight, you don’t necessarily know the highway code or how to drive. There are many things you have to learn: how to drive when it’s wet, when it’s snowy, to look out for other cars and respect them, to rest when you’ve been driving for too long. That’s what it means to be a grown-up.’

  I’m thirteen and I can see that I’m not managing to grow up in the right way: I can’t understand the road signs, I’m not in control of my vehicle, I keep taking wrong turnings and most of the time I feel like I’m stuck on the dodgems rather than on a race track.

  Leaning against my tree I’m trying to come up with an illness that I can contract for real around 10th December, something so serious that no one could possibly suspect that it’s got anything to do with my presentation. Tetanus or TB strike me as impractical because of the vaccines and whatnot. Broken bones hurt too much (I know because I broke my arm last year at my cousins’), and you can’t even be sure you’ll get to stay at home. Meningitis has the advantage that it would close the school, but it can kill you. Glandular fever means kissing boys and that’s not going to happen. So even if I drink the water from the gutter or jump head-first into the wheelie bins at home, I can’t be sure I’ll catch anything. And it’s not worth counting on an old classic like a cold or a throat infection. I get ill once every five years and it’s always during the school holidays. That only leaves a bomb scare at school to hope for, or better still a terrorist attack that means the whole place has to be rebuilt.

  The bell’s rung. The students are making their way up the stairs, chatting and high-fiving. Lucas is approaching. It looks like he’s coming towards me. I try to think of what I can do to look calm. I put my hands in my pockets. Why does it suddenly feel like it’s 50°C in my coat? If only I was equipped with an emergency cooling system, that would be convenient.

  ‘Hey, you’ve hit the bull’s eye with the homeless! Marin’s not going to give you any peace. It’s the kind of subject he’s right into.’

  I’m struck dumb. Like a carp. My neurons must have left by the back door. My heart’s thumping like I’ve just run half a mile. I’m incapable of making any response, not even a yes or a no. I’m pathetic.

  ‘Don’t worry, Chip, I’m sure it’ll turn out OK. You know, I had Marin last year too. He’s cool about presentations. He likes them when they’re unusual. And your interview idea is really good. You coming?’

  I don’t go after him. He’s a funny sort of boy. I’ve known that from the start. Not just because he seems angry and contemptuous or the way he walks like a tough guy. Because of his smile – it’s a child’s smile.

  The art teacher is giving back the work we did last week. I look out of the window. The clouds seem to be in free-fall. There are white trails all over the sky, a smell of sulphur. What if the earth were to start shaking? I’ve got to do a presentation.

  The sound of voices suddenly brings me back into the classroom. There’s nothing. No storm or hurricane, no natural disaster brewing. Axelle and Léa are swapping notes under the desk. And come to think of it, the smell is mainly chips from the canteen.

  I’ve still got to study the documents Mr Marin gave me. And to convince No to help me.

  .

  Chapter 6

  It’s a grey, wet day. I come out of the metro and I’m instantly swallowed up in the station. I spot her in the distance in front of the newspaper kiosk. She’s standing up. Not begging. I go towards her and she answers with a grunt when I say hello. No looks like she’s in a very bad mood. She agrees to come for a drink with me. I made sure I waved my purse to m
ake it clear that I was paying. In the café I try hard not to look at her hands. My feet are swinging at top speed beneath the banquette. I look around, trying to find something to fix my attention on. I go for the hard-boiled eggs on the counter. I think of the square egg I made with my cousins last year. They learned the trick in Pif Gadget. We had to cook it, peel it while it was still hot, slide it into a cardboard mould we made from the pattern in the magazine and leave it in the fridge for twenty-four hours. A square egg looks really funny, the way that anything unfamiliar does. I imagine other things – telescopic forks, see-through fruits, false breasts. But No is opposite me, frowning. This isn’t the time to drift off. I’ve got to get back to what I have to do. If only I had an immediate-return-to-reality button, that would be convenient.

  ‘I wanted to see you because I’ve got something to ask you.’ (That was my introduction. I’d thought ahead.)

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve got a presentation to do for my SES class . . .’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Social and economic sciences. You study lots of different things, like the economic situation in France, the stock market, growth, social classes, the underclass and so on . . . Know what I mean?’

  ‘Mmm.’