Underground Time (16 page)

Apart from two cartons of condensed milk, the fridge is empty. In the cupboards, all he finds are tins of tuna and sardines. He returns to the dining room and goes over to her.

‘How long has it been since you were last able to go out, Mrs Driesman?’

‘I don’t know.’

He listened to her chest and took her blood pressure.

He told her that his preference would be to send her to hospital long enough to sort out some follow-up with the social services. That after that she would be able to go back home and would get a daily visit from a home help.

Mrs Driesman clutched the table top with both hands. She didn’t want to hear any of this. Leaving her apartment was out of the question.

He couldn’t force her. He didn’t have the right.

He got back in the car, having promised he’d call back tomorrow. Before he drove off, he called Audrey so that the base could file a report. A few months ago, Thibault had seen a patient in a similar condition. The old man refused to go into hospital and died of dehydration in the night.

As he turned the key in the ignition, he reflected that over the years his mistakes had coalesced to form a compact ball which he would never be rid of. A ball that would keep growing exponentially.

He’s a doctor in the city: that sums up his life. He’s never bought anything durable, he doesn’t own an apartment or a house in the country. He has no children and isn’t married. He doesn’t know why. Perhaps because he doesn’t have a ring finger on his left hand. No alliance is possible. He goes back to see his family only once a year.

He doesn’t know why he is so far in general, so far from everything apart from his work, which monopolises all his attention. He doesn’t know how the time has gone by so quickly. He will soon have been a doctor for fifteen years and nothing else has happened to him. Nothing significant.

Thibault looks at the shabby apartment block where this woman has lived for the last forty years.

He would like to go home. To draw the curtains and lie down.

His life is nothing like those of the characters in that French soap opera which was such a big hit in the 1980s. The doctors in that were brave and alert – they dashed through the night, parked on the pavement and ran up the stairs four at a time. There’s nothing heroic about him. He’s got his hands in the shit, and the shit sticks to them. His life does without sirens and flashing lights. His life is made up of sixty per cent cases of nasal inflammation and forty per cent loneliness. That’s all his life is: a ringside view of the full scale of the disaster.

The world has closed in around her. The windowless office, the business park, the whole space. Mathilde is no longer able to think, she no longer knows what she should do and shouldn’t do, what she should say and when she should keep quiet.

Her thoughts have shrivelled up.

Everything has become so small and restricted.

She can still hear Jacques’s irate voice saying: ‘Don’t speak to me in that tone.’ And his monologue which went on for several minutes, his voice loud and indignant, intended for others to hear.

Jacques has gone on the offensive. He won’t let it drop. She knows him. As these ordinary hours go by, something is afoot, though she doesn’t yet know what. She must guess his strategy, anticipate the next attack. Not only resist, defend yourself, Paul Vernon said.

Attack.

It’s perhaps four o’clock. Or maybe not quite. In spite of herself, Mathilde counts the time that’s left. She feels as though she is outside of her own body, at one remove. She can see herself, with her back against the backrest of her swivel chair, her hands flat on her desk, her head bent forward, in exactly the position she would assume if she were busy analysing data or studying a document.

Apart from the fact that all she has in front of her is a playing card.

The cupboard, the shelves, the brown stains on the carpet, the long crack above her, the halogen lamp, the coat stand askew, the position of the filing cabinet on wheels – every detail of this office has become familiar to her. In one day. She has had time to absorb it all, to put it all together, its smallest corner, its tiniest marks.

Objects don’t move. They are silent. Until now, she hadn’t thought about this, she hadn’t realised how true this is. They have a natural propensity to become worn out, damaged, ruined. If no one touches them, moves them or takes them away. If no one touches them, protects them, covers them up.

Like them, she has been relegated to the end of a corridor, banished from the new, open spaces.

In the midst of this dead, bare world, she is the last breathing thing, the last breath. She is in the process of going extinct. What’s more, that’s all that’s left for her to do. Melt into the background, adopt outdated shapes, press herself into them, flow into them like a fossil.

Her feet are swinging beneath her chair. She notices everything. Nothing escapes her. She’s in a state of heightened, singular consciousness. Each of her gestures, each of her movements, her hand in her hair, her breathing which causes her chest to rise, the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, the slightest flicker of her eyelashes, nothing moves without her being aware of it.

Neither around her nor within her.

Time has become denser. Time has amalgamated, fused: time has become blocked at the mouth of a funnel.

She’s going to leave the office. She’s going to hurry across the floor, her notepad under her arm, she’s going to pop up somewhere, burst in without warning, without knocking. She’ll say, ‘So, what’s new?’ or ‘Where are we up to?’ She’ll sit down opposite Éric or Nathalie. She’ll start to laugh. She’ll ask how their children are. She’ll arrange an extraordinary meeting, a crisis meeting. She’ll declare an end to hostilities, a new era of individual creativity, she’ll abolish gross margins. Or else she’ll wander the corridors barefoot, stopping every so often to stroke the walls with her empty hands. She’ll take the lift, press buttons at random, hum sad, nostalgic tunes. She’ll ask nothing, she’ll watch the others working. She’ll lie down on the carpet, propped up on one elbow. She’ll light a cigarette and tip the ash in the plant pots. She won’t answer questions. She’ll laugh when they look at her. She’ll smile.

Mathilde gets up and without closing her door goes to the lift. She’s going down for a breath of fresh air. To breathe. She presses the button, goes closer to the mirror to look at her face.

She looks old. Tired. She has aged ten years in a few months. She doesn’t recognise herself any more.

There’s nothing left of the self-possessed, confident woman she used to be.

She recognises the smokers in front of the entrance. Always the same. They go down several times a day, alone or in groups. They form a little circle around the ashtray, talking, lingering. For the first time in ages she wants a cigarette. She wants to feel the smoke burning her throat, her lungs, invading her body, anaesthetising her. She could go over to them but she keeps her distance. But not too far away. With the sun at this angle, she can only make out their silhouettes, their dark suits, light shirts and shiny shoes. She catches snippets of conversation. They’re talking about ISO standards and certification procedures.

These people put on their disguise and go to the office every day. They walk in the same direction, pursue a common objective, speak the same language, inhabit the same tower, use the same lifts, eat their lunch at the same table, share the same conventions, they have a job, a pay grade, they pay social-security contributions, they save holiday and overtime, which they carry over to the next year, they collect a travel allowance and declare their net taxable income at the end of the year.

They work.

Here, spread over ten floors, there are three hundred of them.

Elsewhere there are millions.

These people in their disguise no longer recognise her. They smoke their cigarettes without even seeing her. Then they flick their stubs on the ground and go back into the building.

Back in her office, she looked at the Argent Defender. He hadn’t moved. Not so much as a hair. He was standing in the same parrying posture, brandishing his shield against the enemy, braced against the wind. She thought about the balance sheet for the twentieth of May so far: Jacques had transferred her to a store cupboard without any forewarning and had hung up on her after having given the impression that she had insulted him.

The twentieth of May was a day of chaos and violence, she thought, nothing like the day that had been predicted for her.

When she went to use the computer again, it didn’t respond. Neither the mouse nor the keyboard.

The fish had drowned. The screen was black.

Mathilde pressed ALT and F4 simultaneously to restart the machine. Then she waited a few seconds for it to go off before starting up the system. She thought of keyboard shortcuts, mentally listing the ones she knew, using the ALT and CTRL keys, which enabled you to copy, paste, save. She wondered if there were any comparable functions in daily life, ways of going quicker, of avoiding problems, of overriding.

She thought that the time she wasted waiting for her machine – waiting for its goodwill, its slowness, its whims – those minutes which used to horrify her, enrage her, today were comforting.

Waiting for the machine filled the time.

Mathilde is facing the screen, her hands poised above the keyboard.

An error message appears, signalled by a sort of chime. She gives a start. She reads it once and doesn’t understand it at all. She reads it again:

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

She could weep. Right here and now. After all she’s been through. No one would see her. No one would hear. She could sob uncontrollably, without shame, let her sorrows flood on to the keyboard, between the keys, get into the circuits. But she knows how that would end. Moments like that. When you open the box. When you let yourself go. She knows that tears bring more tears, bring old tears to mind, that they all have the same salty taste. When she cries, she misses Philippe. Philippe’s absence becomes palpable within her body, begins to throb like an atrophied organ, an organ of pain.

So she rereads the message and she laughs. She laughs all alone in her windowless office.

She dials the number for computer maintenance. This time she doesn’t recognise the voice of the man who replies. She asks to speak to the other one. She says, ‘He’s the tall fair-haired man who came this morning. With the pale blue shirt. And the glasses.’

He’s on a call. They’ll let him know. He’ll call back as soon as possible.

She’s waiting again. In this space of muted dislocation and silent collapse, amid the imminence of her own downfall.

Today, every one of her gestures and movements, each of her words, her laughter in the silence, converge on a single point: a breach in the sequence of days, a fault line from which she won’t emerge unscathed.

She’ll phone the train company. While she’s waiting. She’ll book tickets to go away, anywhere, at the end of term. She’ll take a train to the south with the boys, she’ll go to the seaside, to Nice, or Marseilles or Perpignan, it doesn’t matter. She’ll find a hotel or a place to rent. She needs to book the tickets, to have a fixed point of anchorage, a date that she’ll write in her diary, beyond today and tomorrow, in the opaque extension of time. She checks the date of the school holidays, then dials the number.

After a few seconds of music, a woman’s voice announces that she is listening. This voice doesn’t belong to anyone, it comes from a highly sophisticated computer system. It’s the voice you hear in every station, recognisable among thousands, a voice that pretends to be listening.

Would this voice listen to her if she said that she couldn’t go on? If she said, ‘I’ve made a mistake; get me out of here.’ Would this voice listen to her if she said, ‘Come and fetch me’?

The voice recognition system asks her to specify her request. Mathilde follows the instructions.

She speaks clearly, separating out the syllables. In the almost empty office, her voice echoes.

She says: ‘Tickets’.

She says: ‘Leisure’.

She says: ‘France’.

She’s sitting at the back of her office, speaking to someone who is no one. Someone who has the merit of answering her nicely, of getting her to repeat without becoming irritated, who doesn’t start shouting, who doesn’t claim that she insulted her. Someone who tells her what to do, step by step, who says: ‘I didn’t understand your answer’ in the same patient, benevolent tone.

Someone who informs her that an adviser will be taking care of her request. Her waiting time is estimated at less than three minutes. Mathilde holds.