This is Life (10 page)

Sylvie nodded. ‘I suppose so.’ But the only body she was interested in was the one that belonged to Toshiro Akiyama. ‘I prefer a man with eyebrows.’ Toshiro Akiyama had
eyebrows. ‘So where to now?’

‘The shop.’

‘You mean you actually want to go shopping?’

‘Kind of.’

‘What for?’

‘Baby stuff, mainly. We’re running out. There’s a supermarket around here somewhere. Do they sell baby stuff in supermarkets?’

‘I can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought. I suppose they must do. Let’s find out.’

The three of them carried on, past the sex shops, the peep shows and the sushi bars.

Before she had applied to go to art college Aurélie had visited it on an open day, in the hope of finding out what it was all about and seeing whether or not she would
be happy there. She had come into the city on her own for the first time, and had been nervously milling around the refreshments table, trying to work out whether to have some bread and cheese or a
biscuit. She had even begun to wonder whether she could find it within herself to be so daring as to have some bread and cheese
and
a biscuit, when she had felt a presence by her side. A
smiling girl had appeared, and proceeded to stuff her shoulder bag with as much food as she could. Bread, big chunks of cheese and handfuls of biscuits. It all went into a plastic bag within the
shoulder bag, as if the girl had planned the heist in advance.

‘I’m hungry,’ the girl explained. ‘Well, I’m not
actually
hungry, but I expect I will be at some point. It’s best to stock up while you can.’

Aurélie didn’t know what to say. The girl had such an innocent face that it seemed almost surreal to see her doing something so mischievous. The girl zipped her bag shut, and
without a word she took Aurélie by the hair. She inspected it, rummaging through it in a way that was so natural that Aurélie didn’t feel affronted or alarmed. There was even
something reassuring about her touch.

‘Are you checking for lice? I think I’m clear.’

‘No, I’m just having a look at your roots. I’m thinking about becoming a hairdresser if I don’t get in here,’ she explained. ‘What would you say your natural
colour is?’

Aurélie had bleached her hair a few weeks earlier, and it was time for a touch-up. ‘Er . . . mousy, I suppose. A kind of nothing colour.’

‘No, it’s blonde.’

‘No, it’s mousy.’

‘Listen to me – I’m the professional. Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean. It’s dark blonde, but still – you’re a natural blonde. What could be better
than that?’

‘To be a natural light blonde?’

The girl thought for a while. ‘Yes, I suppose that would be ideal. But still, your hair is a much better colour than you think it is. What’s your name?’

‘Aurélie. Aurélie Renard.’

‘Sylvie. Sylvie Dupont.’ She extended her hand. Aurélie offered hers in return, and Sylvie pumped it in a businesslike manner. ‘Aurélie . . . that means golden,
doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a lucky name for your hair colour. I wouldn’t say your hair is actually golden, let’s not get carried away, but it’s not too far off.’

‘Well, that’s good to know.’ Aurélie meant it, too. She resolved to have a long think about her hair; maybe she would even start liking it for the first time in her
life. ‘I have a cousin called Blondelle who had the fairest hair when she was born, but by the time she was three it had turned about your colour – really dark brown. Imagine if you
were called Blondelle.’

‘That would be really funny for everybody else.’

‘I know. She never knows what to do with it – I think it’s ruined her life.’

Sylvie couldn’t help but laugh at this tale of poor Blon-delle’s misfortune, and she and Aurélie spent the rest of the day together, walking around the college, attending
talks and looking at the work of the current students. After the open day they went to a bar, and then to save money they headed back to the small hotel room that Aurélie’s dad had
booked for her, where they talked, ate their way through Sylvie’s stash of food and drained glasses of cheap red wine.

Those had been Sylvie’s serious drinking days, and Aurélie found it hard to keep up. Aurélie had decided that art college was absolutely for her, and Sylvie had decided that
it absolutely wasn’t for her. Sylvie wasn’t surprised by this. She hadn’t expected to end up applying, and she explained that she had only really gone along to make her art
therapist happy and to get some free food. Besides, you didn’t get paid to go to art college, and she needed money to get by. She was having second thoughts about hairdressing too. Its main
appeal had been that there would always be hair so there would always be work, but she wasn’t sure she quite had the feeling for it. Her personal ambitions were set in stone, but
professionally she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

As the night went on they had opened up to one another, bonding over all sorts of things. Aurélie told Sylvie about the boyfriend she had in her home town, saying they were going to stay together even though she was moving away.

‘Yeah, right,’ said Sylvie. ‘Like that’s going to work.’

‘No, we really are staying together. We’ve discussed it.’

‘Well, good luck with that.’ She drained her wine, and topped up her glass.

That was the moment when it dawned on Aurélie that she hadn’t been honest with herself, or with her boyfriend. Sylvie was right: she really didn’t love him enough to keep
things going. How could Sylvie have known that? She wondered if she had psychic powers. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘He’s going to be so . . .’ She pictured the scene that she now knew had to happen. She was going to tear his world apart. ‘Poor Guillaume.’

‘He’ll survive. They usually do.’

Sylvie decided this wasn’t a good time to tell Aurélie about the exes of hers who hadn’t quite made it. Twice she had taken a call from a weeping mother. Both boys had
perished in what had been officially declared accidents. One had set up a warehouse dehumidifier in his bedroom, apparently in order to keep condensation off the windows while he slept. It had
sucked all the moisture from his body, and he was discovered a few days later, a paper-dry corpse. The other appeared to have slipped on a leaf and fallen head first into a barrel of water from
which he had been unable to escape.

Both, though, had left detailed recent wills, which suggested that these hadn’t been accidents at all. They had both expressed their wish for Sylvie to be at the church, and specified what
they wanted her to wear; both times it had been something inappropriate for the situation – too short and too tight, and bright red even though she never wore clothes that were short, tight
and bright red.

She didn’t see what she could do but accept these invitations and go along with their wishes. They had both requested that she sing as their coffins were lowered into the ground. She had a
beautiful voice, which she rarely used, and as she stood by their gravesides, singing like a lark in her slutty clothes, everybody wept.

On both occasions she had been approached by the boy’s mother, who very kindly told her that she was not to feel responsible and that she bore her no ill will. She was glad that they had
taken the time to do this, but even if they hadn’t, her sense of guilt would have been minimal. It was tragic, of course; they had both been nice boys and it was awful that they had died, but
her role in it all had merely been realising that she didn’t love them after all, and telling them so. She wasn’t to know they were going to end up this way, and she didn’t think
for a moment that she had done the wrong thing, that she should have stayed with them. She never spoke about these feelings to anyone, because she knew they would think her cold. She was just being
realistic though, and not burdening herself with a guilt that didn’t belong to her.

As the bottles emptied, Sylvie and Aurélie had started to dwell on their difficult backgrounds. Aurélie had drunk a lot more than she usually did, and she became maudlin as she
told Sylvie about her mother’s illness and her slow, sad death, which had finally come when she had been nine years old, and how from that day her father had raised her and her younger
brother alone.

Sylvie came in with a challenge to this: both her parents had died on her eighth birthday, victims of an unexpectedly pure batch of heroin that had hit the streets that summer. They had been
good people, she told Aurélie, and talented – her father a jazz drummer and her mother an accomplished stripper. They had loved her from the start, playing her jazz and classical music
while she had been in the womb, even though it hadn’t been trendy back then. She smiled as if recounting a trip to the seaside as she told Aurélie how she had been the one to find them
lying cold in bed, how from that day she had been alone, how her memories of them grew less and less distinct with each passing day, and how she had spent the rest of her childhood being batted
around between foster families, feckless distant relatives and children’s homes, and how she would often run away, inevitably into a situation that was worse than the one she had just escaped
from.

‘If your father was to drop dead tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I would still be more orphan than you’ll ever be.’

She made this pronouncement in such a way that Aurélie had to laugh and admit defeat. She had been comprehensively out-orphaned. She wondered how she would have coped if her father
hadn’t been there to love, support and encourage her, if she didn’t have her brother to live for – if, like Sylvie, she had been all alone in the world, without a safety net.

At the end of the night they parted company, but not before exchanging numbers. When Aurélie was alone again her heart filled with pity for the boy from back home, who right now would be
sleeping with her picture by his bedside, having gently kissed it goodnight. She cried.
At least
, she thought,
these tears prove I have a heart
. Soon she was reconciled to the
inevitable, and fell asleep.

Aurélie had not been able to stop thinking about her day with Sylvie. It helped her to know that she would have a friend when she got to the city, someone who knew her
way around. Months later, when she arrived, she called her straight away. ‘It’s Aurélie,’ she said.

‘Aurélie? Aurélie who?’ Sylvie had encountered a fair number of Aurélies in her life.

Sylvie had spared her very little thought since they had parted company. She met a lot of people, and had no reason to assume that she would ever see the girl again. Very quickly her time had
filled up with work and drama, and their day together had been buried under a mound of subsequent experiences. Unlike Aurélie, she had not spent the intervening months longing for a
reunion.

‘Aurélie Renard.’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘You grabbed my hair.’

‘I used to grab everyone’s hair.’

Aurélie was crushed. Sylvie Dupont was slipping away from her. She carried on. ‘I’m the failed orphan you met at the art college. We drank wine in my hotel room.’

‘Oh. Let me think.’ A faint recollection had appeared, and begun to grow. ‘Yes, I remember. Blondelle’s cousin, right?’

‘That’s it.’ Aurélie had never felt so relieved.

‘How is Blondelle?’

‘She’s still pretty pissed off about her name.’

Sylvie laughed. ‘And how about you?’

‘Well, I’m in Paris now, and I was wondering if you were around at all?’

Sylvie could barely recall a thing about the girl, but she knew she had her filed in her memory alongside people she liked well enough. She didn’t want to be mean to her. She would invite
her out for coffee and be friendly for thirty minutes and then drop a heavy enough hint for her to leave her alone from then on. She was always happy to meet people, but she was wary about getting
close to anyone. She wasn’t in the market for making new friends, and she didn’t want this girl who was just in from the country to make a nuisance of herself by thinking they were
closer than they were. If necessary she would get her off her back by setting her up with an ex. They arranged to meet the following day.

Once she had put down the phone, Sylvie was surprised to find memories of her day with this Aurélie Renard coming back to her, as if they had really been friends, and she even surprised
herself by looking forward to seeing her again. She wanted to find out what had become of Guillaume.

Guillaume had met Aurélie at the railway station on her return from Paris, and though she had hoped to wait until they were in a private place before initiating the Big
Conversation, she found she couldn’t. As they walked through the town on the way back to her house he had kept making references to their future, and how wonderful it was that their love was
so strong that they were going to be able to stay together in spite of living hundreds of miles apart.

‘Ah, yes,’ she had said. ‘About that.’

‘About what?’

‘About our future together . . .’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking about that.’

‘Me too. It’s all I ever think about.’

‘No,’ she said. She stopped walking, and he stopped too, and she looked away and spoke softly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it in a new way.’

In an instant, Guillaume felt everything that was good about his life slip away. A tear ran down his cheek and, choking with emotion, he begged her to reconsider. Passers-by stopped to watch him
as he clung to the wreckage of love. He fell to his knees. ‘All I ask is that you give me one last chance.’

She hated to see him making such a spectacle of himself. ‘Well, OK then,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it some thought, but don’t hold out too much hope.’

He stood up, and they walked back to her house in silence. She waited until they were indoors before telling him he had to be brave, and ending things once and for all.

That night Guillaume built a fire on his front lawn, and fed into the flames everything he had that reminded him of her. Love letters, once cherished photographs, clothes she had left behind
when she had stayed over, gifts she had given him in happier times. He went back inside, but everything he saw reminded him of her. The pan he had used to make them hot chocolate, the mattress they
had lain on as he held her in his arms, and the television on which they had watched their favourite shows. By the end of the evening there was nothing left but the clothes he stood up in, and then
he realised she had helped him choose these clothes, she had touched them with her soft, slender and occasionally paint-splattered fingers, and so they came off too and went on to the fire. By this
point news had spread, and people had come to watch. They leaned on his fence. Some offered words of encouragement, urging him to think positively and telling him that there were plenty more fish
in the sea, while others were unkind, telling him they weren’t surprised that she had left, that she was probably going to look for somebody with a bigger penis.