This is Life (36 page)

Still gliding backwards, Aurélie nodded. She would explain the situation, or at least some of the situation, to Madame Peypouquet when she had more time.

As she made her way downstairs, Madame Peypouquet’s voice reverberated around the building. ‘I can’t say I blame you – he’s got a good body. You know, you remind me
of me when I was your age. I was just like you – there was no stopping me. I went with anyone I could get my hands on. When you get back I want you to tell me every detail – and I mean
every
detail.’

It was nine fifteen. The Russian at last steered his haunting melody to a heart-rending finale, and without the rattle and drone the square seemed almost silent. He
didn’t start another tune; instead he gently packed his instrument back into its battered case, and clicked it shut. He stood up.

‘Well done,’ he said.

Aurélie looked up at him. ‘Pardon?’ she said.

‘Well done. You kept him alive.’

So he had witnessed the incident the week before. ‘Only just,’ she said.

‘I knew he would be OK,’ he said. ‘I could tell you weren’t the kind of person to mistreat a baby. Anyone could see you hadn’t meant to hit him with the stone. It
was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but I’ve always had a very low tolerance for people who don’t do incredibly stupid things from time to time. She’s right, you know –
you do have a kind face. She’s insane, but she was right about that.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘He and I had a good time together.’ She decided not to go into the darker details of Herbert’s time in her care. She changed the subject.
‘What’s your instrument called?’

He patted its case. ‘It’s a hurdy-gurdy,’ he said.

‘Is it . . . Russian?’ She’d noticed that The Russian didn’t sound particularly Russian.

‘Maybe a little bit. Nobody’s quite sure where it’s from; it seemed to evolve from all over the place. Maybe bits of it came from there . . .’ He realised why she had
asked. ‘Ah, I see. No, I’m not Russian, but my hat is. I was once working on a boat that docked in Vladivostok, and I got it there. I’ve worn it ever since. I feel naked without
it. As for the hurdy-gurdy, I won it in a dice game one night in Saint-Chartier three years ago. I’d never played a note of music on any instrument at that point in my life, but I thought
I’d give it a go, and I haven’t stopped since. Apparently it’s even older than I am, if you can imagine that.’

‘Are you busking?’

He shook his head. ‘I have a landlady whose nerves can’t stand the noise, so I come here every morning to play it. It’s as good a place as any.’

‘I really like the music.’

‘Thank you.’ He seemed genuinely gratified by the compliment. ‘Now I’d better get off to work.’

A part of her wanted to ask him where he worked, what he did when he wasn’t playing his hurdy-gurdy. But she stopped herself. She didn’t want to be like an old woman in a park,
asking unwelcome personal questions. She would have found out all about him if the stone had hit him instead of Herbert. He would barely have felt it land, too; it would have just bounced softly
off his Russian hat. He seemed friendly, and she was sure he would have let her follow him around.

She was glad it hadn’t hit him, though. There had been one or two bumps in the road, but the more she thought about it, the more confident she became that it had been a good week, that on
balance she had done the right thing in taking Herbert, rather than just running away from the situation. She had spent time with an incredible baby, she had managed to get herself a boyfriend, she
had got to know the Papavoines, and even though she wasn’t going to be doing the project she had set out to do, she had a good feeling that her new plan was going to go well. If the stone had
hit The Russian, or anyone else, she would have ended up producing an unfocused mixed-media mishmash. Now, though, her week was coming to an end, and her life was going to return to something
resembling normal.

‘Good luck with everything,’ he said.

‘Thanks. You too.’ She wanted him to stay for a few minutes, to wait with her until Herbert’s mother arrived, but she said nothing, and with a touch of his forelock, he left.
The rush had died down, and she was alone.

It was nine twenty-one. With one minute to go, there was no sign of Herbert’s mother.

Nine twenty-two came and went, and there was still no sign of her. Herbert slept on, and Aurélie started to wonder what to do.

L
e Machine could tell that
Life
was going very well. In all his previous presentations of the piece, the room had started to empty in the
early hours of the morning, and would only start filling up again around midday. In Paris, though, it had been full all the time. He had even found this a little disconcerting. Every night he fell
asleep to the thunderous sound of his heartbeat, or the gurgling that was picked up by the microphone deep inside his belly, and as he did he felt a thousand eyes upon him, and when he awoke he
felt a thousand eyes upon him, and if he ever got up for a glass of water he would look with bleary eyes at a room packed full of people watching him stumble from the bed to the sink and back
again.

In the mornings it always took a few moments for him to adjust to the new day, as he sat on the side of the bed, stretching and looking at his surroundings. When he was ready he would pick out
any sleep that had built up in his eyes, and sprinkle it from his fingertips into a jar. Then he would wash his face, brush his teeth and walk over to the urinal. His morning ritual had become
known as a highlight, and anybody who was there for it felt they had spent their time and money wisely.

Today he had slept late. It was almost half past nine by the time he woke. He went through his usual routine, which culminated in an extremely long wee. As it went on and on, the early morning
crowd began the chant that had become traditional at this point in the day, the combined volume of their voices just about beating the sound coming from the speakers:
Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine!
Le Ma-chine! Le Ma-chine!

It was a good feeling. The run was going to be a success, and when it was over his girl would be waiting for him. This warm feeling was interrupted by a shudder of doubt. What if she
wasn’t there as she had said she would be? What if she had second thoughts about being with him? What if she met somebody else? What if she fell ill? What if she was arrested, found guilty of
a serious crime and sent to jail for several years?

This last thought snapped him out of this state of mind. He was just worrying for the sake of it. Aurélie wasn’t going to be arrested, and he felt stupid for thinking such a thing.
As he shook off the final drops, and bathed in the cheer of the crowd, he smiled at his propensity to dwell on such far-fetched scenarios. He picked up the jug and poured its contents into the big
urine bottle, which was filling up very nicely.

He wasn’t going to worry any more. She would be there.

Backstage, Le Machine’s manager was experiencing a tangle of emotions.
Life
was going exceptionally well. Most of the reviews were in, and with very few exceptions
the critics were agreed that it was something worth seeing. Among the naysayers,
Today’s Technology Now
magazine had declared that Le Machine’s reluctance to engage with social
media had fatally undermined
Life
’s status as art, and
Urban Puritan
had warned its readers that while the piece was not without its merits, the sight of a gentleman in all his
glory might be a bit much for their delicate sensibilities. On the whole, though, the reviewers, many of them waiting for Jean-Didier Delacroix’s verdict before following his lead, had been
very positive, and attendance had been exceptional.

They were only a few days into the run, but with the advance bookings and strong sales of merchandise they were already well on the way to breaking even. If they could just maintain this
momentum they would be making a lot more money than they had anticipated. That was all good, of course, but her worry was that after this it would all be over, and to drop a production that had so
much potential remaining went against her every instinct.

Le Machine had told his manager plenty of times that he was planning on quitting, that he couldn’t face another run, but his interview with
L’Univers
was the first time he had
expressed this in public. For years she had worked with musicians, and she knew that the dramatic retirement announcement was standard practice in show business, and that going back on that same
retirement announcement was as normal as having a cup of coffee. She hoped he would be the same, that his decision wasn’t final.

The trouble she had found since starting to work with artists, or people who regarded themselves as artists, was that they had a propensity to delude themselves, to think that what they did lay
beyond the boundaries of show business. Whenever she had found herself with such a client she had let them carry on thinking this, while handling their business affairs in exactly the same way she
would have done if she had been looking after a rock band, a conjurer or a gardening star. As with any branch of show business, the art world had its own context, and some of the details would be
unique to it, but the fundamentals of the business remained the same: her client did whatever it was they did, and it was her job to ensure that people paid them to do it. She hoped his decision
was a reversible one, that he wouldn’t feel he had some kind of high artistic obligation to stick to his declaration.

Paris had proved that there was still a large and appreciative audience for
Life
. Yesterday Sweden had called, offering an enormous amount of public money for him to appear on a plinth on
the concourse of Stockholm Central Station the coming year. She had wondered aloud whether it would be considered suitable for a naked man to be getting up to all sorts while children and old
people walked past on their way to catch trains, and she had been reassured that it wouldn’t be a problem at all, that nobody in the country had ever been shocked by anything. There was
already an offer on the table for him to present
Life
at Sydney Opera House the year after that, and a few weeks earlier she had received an invitation from somewhere called Aberystwyth,
where the manager of their camera obscura had written to her, saying that
Life
would be an ideal show to put on there in the winter months, when they were normally closed.
We have a
capacity of forty
, he had written,
though sadly the fire inspector will only allow twenty-six in at any one time, which I suspect is because my wife once ran over his foot. She didn’t
mean to do it, but try telling him that. As for facilities, we have a toilet (one cubicle – mixed ladies, gentlemen and disabled), and though our café will be closed for refurbishment,
there will be a machine. We also have a funicular railway to bring visitors to our cliff-top location; it offers stunning views of the bay, though sadly it doesn’t run during the winter
months and people would have to take the steps, or come up the back way along the road, though it’s only fair to point out that this is widely regarded as cheating. We would of course have to
get permission from the mayor, but she would have a cheek to give us too much trouble about the nudity aspect as she used to be an actress – you might have seen her in
The Life of
Brian
, where she takes all her clothes off, right down to her biffer.

Le Machine’s manager had gently turned this offer down.

Aberystwyth aside, there was a lot of money still to be made, but she would make no mention of that when she was persuading Le Machine to carry on. He liked to keep conversations about finances
to a minimum. Instead she would tell him how he had moved so many people, and had enriched so many lives. What everybody in show business really wants to hear is that they are making the world a
better place, to be reassured that they are so much more than a desperate, cash-hungry show-off. She would tell him how sad it would be for people in the future not to have their lives enriched by
his work, and then she would look at him with puppy-dog eyes, and sigh as she wondered out loud what would happen to his loyal crew.

She knew well enough, though, that his crew would all understand, and respect his decision. His lighting designer filled the time between exhibitions by touring the arenas of the world with
various acts, and he would have no trouble keeping himself busy. Prior to this run of
Life
, he had spent nine months on the road as a technician for Lady Gaga, during which time over three
million people had seen his work, and he had undergone sex with the star of the show four times – in her dressing room, on a plane, in a cupboard full of fire extinguishers and, best of all,
as part of a threesome under the bleachers at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, while an impatient audience stamped their feet, and chanted her name. Le Machine’s principal creative
collaborator, his sound designer, would be quite content to go back to his day-to-day life, playing his gigantic saxophone as part of a quartet in half-empty bars while living off the royalties
that still came in from some soft rock radio hits he had co-written back in the nineties. His manager knew she was the one who would miss
Life
the most, and it wouldn’t only be the
business side of things that she would be sad to see come to an end.

She had been with him from the beginning. Although he had been actively seeking representation, he had exhibited the artist’s customary wariness of people from the business side. She had
seen potential in what he planned to do, and gradually she had convinced him that they could work together. She didn’t really understand what
Life
was all about, and she had never felt
the need to know, but from the start she’d had a feeling that people would want to see it. She had never asked him about his motivations, and he had never volunteered to talk about them. Her
role was to see that the production ran smoothly, and to maximise the money it made. She had been able to convince him that her desire to turn a substantial profit was in no way in conflict with
his ambitions for the piece. There was no doubt that they were looking in the same direction: their conversations were often about how they both wanted it to reach as many people as possible.