The voice cuts through her sleep and hovers on the surface. The woman is stroking some playing cards which are face down on the table. She repeats several times with conviction: ‘On the twentieth of May your life will change.’

Mathilde doesn’t know if she’s still dreaming or has already begun the new day. She glances at the radio-alarm. It’s four in the morning.

She
was
dreaming. The dream was about the woman she saw a few weeks ago. She was a clairvoyant – there, she’s admitted it – she didn’t have a shawl or crystal ball, but she was a clairvoyant none the less. Mathilde took the metro all the way across Paris, sat behind the thick curtains of a ground-floor flat in the sixteenth arrondissement and handed over
€
150 to have her palm and her numbers read. She went there because she had nothing else left: no glimmer of light to reach towards, no future tense, no prospect of anything after. She went because you need something to hang on to.

Afterwards she went off with her handbag swinging from her hand and that ridiculous prediction, as if it were written in the lines of her palm, her date of birth or the eight letters of her first name, as if it were visible to the naked eye: a man on 20 May. A man who would save her at this turning point in her life. It just goes to show, you can hold a masters in econometrics and applied statistics and still consult a clairvoyant. A few days later it dawned on her that she’d thrown
€
150 down the drain, it was as simple as that. That’s what she was thinking as she went through her monthly bank statement with a red pen, and that she didn’t give a damn about 20 May or any other day for that matter.

But 20 May remained a sort of vague promise hanging over the abyss.

Today’s the day.

Today something could happen, something important. An event that would change the course of her life, mark a point of departure, a break with the past. For several weeks it’s been there in her diary in black ink. An Event with a capital E, which she’s been waiting for like a rescue on the high seas.

Today, 20 May, because she has reached the end, the end of what she can bear, the end of what it’s humanly possible to bear. It’s written in the book of life. In the shifting sky, in the conjunction of the planets, in the shimmer of numbers. It’s written that today she will have reached this exact point, the point of no return, where nothing ordinary can change the passage of the hours, where nothing can happen without threatening her whole universe, without calling everything into question. Something has got to happen. Something completely exceptional. To get her out of this. To make it stop.

In the past few weeks she’s imagined everything: the possible and the impossible, the best and the worst. That she would be the victim of an attack, that in the middle of the long corridor between the metro and the RER a powerful bomb would go off, that it would blow everything up. Her body would be annihilated, she would be scattered in the stifling air of the morning rush hour, blown to the four corners of the station. Later they’d find pieces of her floral print dress and her travelcard. Or she’d break her ankle. She’d slip stupidly on one of those greasy patches you sometimes have to walk around that look shiny on the light tiles, or else she’d miss the first step of the escalator and fall awkwardly. They’d have to call the fire brigade, operate on her, screw in plates and pins. She’d be unable to move for months. Or she’d be kidnapped by mistake in broad daylight by some obscure splinter group. Or she’d meet a man on the train or in the station café, a man who’d say to her, ‘Madam, you can’t go on like this. Give me your hand. Take my arm. Let’s go back. Put your bag down. Don’t stay standing there. Sit down here. It’s over. You’re not going to go back there any more. You can’t. You’re going to fight.
We’re
going to fight. I’ll be by your side.’ A man or a woman, in fact – it didn’t matter. Someone who’d understand that she couldn’t go on any more, that with every passing day she was eating into her very substance, into her essence. Someone who’d stroke her cheek or hair, who’d murmur as though to himself, ‘How have you managed to keep going so long? How did you find the courage, the strength?’ Someone who’d rebel. Who’d say, ‘Enough.’ Who would take charge of her. Someone who would make her get off one stop early or who’d sit down opposite her at the back of a bar. Who would watch the hours go by on the wall clock. At noon, he or she would smile at her and say: ‘There, it’s over.’

It’s night. The night before the day that she’s been waiting for against her better judgement. It’s four in the morning. Mathilde knows she won’t get back to sleep, she knows the scenario off by heart, the positions she’ll try one by one, the effort she’ll make to calm her breathing, the pillow she’ll wedge under her neck. And then she’ll end up turning on the light, picking up a book she won’t manage to get into. She’ll look at her children’s drawings pinned to the wall, so as not to think, not to anticipate the day ahead.

Not see herself getting off the train,

Not see herself saying good morning while wanting to scream,

Not see herself walking soundlessly across the grey carpet,

Not see herself sitting at that desk.

She stretches her limbs one by one. She feels hot. The dream is still there. The woman is holding her upturned palm. She repeats one last time: 20 May.

Mathilde hasn’t been able to sleep for ages. Nearly every night at the same time anxiety wakes her. She knows the order in which she will have to cope with the images, the doubts, the questions. She knows by heart the twists and turns of insomnia. She knows she’ll have to run through everything from the start: how it began, how it got worse, how she got here, and how she cannot go back. Already her heart is beating more quickly. The machine that crushes everything is up and running, and everything goes through it: the shopping she has to do, the appointments she needs to make, the friends she must call, the bills she mustn’t forget, somewhere to rent for the summer . . . All the things that used to be so easy which have now become so hard.

Lying in the sweaty sheets, she always comes to the same conclusion: she’s not going to make it.

Surely he isn't going to cry like an idiot, sitting on the toilet seat in a hotel bathroom at four in the morning?

He's wearing the dressing gown that Lila put on when she got out of the shower. He smells the fabric, seeking the perfume he loves so much. He looks at himself in the mirror. He's almost as pale as the sink. On the floor his feet search out the softness of the rug. Lila's asleep in the bedroom, her arms folded. She fell asleep after they made love, straight away. She began snoring softly. She always snores when she's been drinking.

As she fell asleep she murmured âthank you'. That's what did for him. It went right through him. She said thank you.

She says thank you for everything. Thank you for the meal, for the night, for the weekend, for making love, for calling. Thank you when he asks how she is.

She grants him her body, some of her time, and her rather remote presence. She knows that he gives, and she doesn't reveal anything of herself, nothing that really matters.

He got up carefully so as not to wake her and felt his way to the bathroom in the dark. When he got there, he stretched out his hand to turn on the light and closed the door.

A little while earlier, when they got back from dinner, as she was undressing, she asked, âWhat is it you need?'

What do you need, what do you lack, what would you like, what do you dream of? Through some sort of blindness that may be temporary or permanent she often asks him these questions. This type of question. With all the candour of a twenty-eight-year-old. This evening he almost answered: âI need to grip the balcony rail and scream until I'm out of breath. Do you think that would be possible?'

But he didn't.

They've spent the weekend in Honfleur. They walked along the beach, wandered around town. He bought her a dress and some flip-flops. They had some wine, ate in a restaurant, stayed in bed with the curtains drawn amid the mingled smells of perfume and sex. They'll leave tomorrow morning first thing and he'll drop her off outside her building. Rose's voice will tell him where his first appointment is. His Renault Clio will take him to his first patient, then to a second. He'll drown as he does every day in a tide of symptoms and loneliness, sink into the sticky grey city.

They've had other weekends like this one.

BOOK: Underground Time

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