Читать книгу Breaking Away - Анна Гавальда - Страница 4

I hadn’t even sat down yet, one buttock still hovering, my hand on the car door, and already my sister-in-law was on the attack.

‘At last! Didn’t you hear us hooting? We’ve been waiting here for ten minutes!’

‘Good morning,’ I replied.

My brother turned round. A little wink.

‘You okay, sweetie?’

‘I’m good.’

‘You want me to put your things in the boot?’

‘No, thanks. All I have is this little bag, and my dress. I’ll stick it on the back shelf.’

‘Is that your dress?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow at the ball of chiffon on my lap.

‘Yes.’

‘What … what is it?’

‘A sari.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t see,’ I corrected her gently, ‘you’ll see when I put it on.’

She pulled a little face.

‘Can we get going?’ asked my brother.

‘Yes. I mean, no. Can you stop off at the corner shop, there’s something I need to get.’

My sister-in-law sighed.

‘Now what do you need?’

‘Some hair-removal cream.’

‘And you get that at the corner shop?’

‘Oh, I get everything from Rashid! Absolutely everything!’

She didn’t believe me.

‘Are you ready? Can we go?’

‘Yes.’

‘Aren’t you going to fasten your seatbelt?’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t you fasten it?’

‘Claustrophobia,’ I replied.

And before she could start going on about failed skin grafts and the horrors of public hospitals, I added, ‘Besides, I want to sleep a little. I’m exhausted.’

My brother smiled.

‘Have you just got up?’

‘I never went to bed,’ I explained, yawning.

Which was a patent lie, of course. I had slept for a few hours. But I said it to annoy my sister-in-law. And I was right on target, bingo. That’s what I like about her: I’m always right on target.

‘Where were you this time?’ she asked predictably, raising her eyes to heaven.

‘At home.’

‘You were partying?’

‘No, I was playing cards.’

‘Playing cards!’

‘Yes. Poker.’

She shook her head. Not too hard, though. Wouldn’t want to mess up that blow-dry.

‘How much did you lose?’ asked my brother, amused.

‘Nothing. This time I won.’

Deafening silence.

‘Might we ask how much?’ she relented, adjusting her designer shades.

‘Three thousand.’

‘Three thousand! Three thousand what?’

‘Well … euros,’ I said, acting naïve. ‘Roubles wouldn’t be much use, now, would they?’

I chuckled as I curled up. I had just given my little Carine something to mull over for the rest of the trip.

I could hear the cogs turning in her brain: three thousand euros … click click click click … How many dry shampoos and aspirin tablets would she have to sell to earn three thousand euros? … click click click click … Not to mention employee benefits, and business tax, and local taxes, and her lease, subtract the VAT … How many times did she have to put on her white coat to earn three thousand euros, net? And the Social Security? … add eight, take away two … and paid holiday … makes ten, multiply by three … click click click …

Yes. I was chuckling. Lulled by the purr of their saloon car, my nose buried in the crook of my arm, legs tucked up under my chin, I was pretty proud of myself, because my sister-in-law, she’s a piece of work.

My sister-in-law Carine studied pharmacy, but she’d rather you said medicine, so she’s a pharmacist, and she has a chemist’s shop, but she’d rather you said pharmacy.

She likes to complain about her bookkeeping just when it’s time for dessert, and she wears a white coat buttoned up to her chin with a thermal adhesive label that has her name stitched between two blue medical logos. These days she sells mostly firming creams for buttocks and carotene capsules because that’s what brings in the most cash; she likes to say that she has ‘optimised the potential of her health and beauty section’.

My sister-in-law Carine is fairly predictable.

When we heard about our stroke of luck – that we were about to have a purveyor of anti-wrinkle creams in our own family, a licensed Clinique vendor and Guerlain reseller – my sister Lola and I fell on her with shrieks of joy. Oh! What a warm welcome we gave her that day! We promised that from then on we would always go to her for our shopping, and we were even willing to call her Doctor or Professor Lariot-Molinoux so we’d be in her good books.

We’d even take the RER just to go out to see her! That’s really a big deal for Lola and me, to take the train all the way out to Poissy.

Whenever we go out beyond the Boulevards des Maréchaux, we begin to feel a bit peculiar.

But there was no need to go out there because she took us by the arm at the end of that first Sunday dinner and confessed, lowering her eyes, ‘You know … uh … I can’t give you any discount because … uh … if I start with you, after that … well, you understand … after that I … after that you don’t know where it will end, do you?’ ‘Not even a teeny tiny percentage?’ replied Lola with a laugh. ‘Not even any samples?’ ‘Oh, yes … yes, samples, yes. No problem.’

And when Carine left that day, clinging to our brother so he wouldn’t fly away, Lola muttered as she blew kisses all the while from the balcony, ‘She can stick her samples you-know-where.’

I totally agreed with her, and we shook out the tablecloth, and changed the subject.

Now we never stop teasing her about it. Every time we see her, I tell her about my friend Sandrine who is a flight attendant and the discounts she can get us at the duty-free.

For example:

‘Hey, Carine, give me a price for Estée Lauder’s Double Exfoliating Nitrogen Generator with Vitamin B12.’

You should see our Carine, lost in thought. She concentrates, closes her eyes, thinks of her list, calculates her margin, deducts the VAT, and eventually goes: ‘Forty-five?’

I turn to Lola. ‘Do you remember how much you paid?’

‘Hmm … Sorry? What are you talking about?’

‘Estée Lauder’s Double Exfoliating Nitrogen Generator with Vitamin B12, the one Sandrine brought back for you the other day?’

‘What about it?’

‘How much did you pay?’

‘Gosh, how do you expect me to remember? Around twenty euros, I think.’

Carine repeats what Lola has said, choking on her words. ‘Twenty euros! Estée Lauder’s D-E-N-G with Vitamin B12! Are you sure about that?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’m sorry, but at that price it’s got to be fake! What a shame, girls, you’ve been taken for a ride. They often put Nivea in a counterfeit jar and no one’s the wiser. I hate to tell you,’ she insists, triumphant, ‘but your cream is just some old rubbish. Absolute rubbish!’

Lola looks totally devastated. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Ab-so-lutely sure. I know what the production costs are, after all! They only use essential oils at Estée—’

This is where I turn to my sister and say, ‘You don’t happen to have it with you, do you?’

‘Have what?’

‘The cream.’

‘No, I don’t think so … Oh, yes! I just might … Wait, let me look in my bag.’

She comes back with a jar and hands it to the expert.

Said expert puts on her half-moon glasses and inspects the offending item from every angle. We watch her in silence, waiting with bated breath, vaguely uneasy.

‘Well, Doctor?’ ventures Lola.

‘Yes, yes, it’s Estée Lauder all right … I recognise the smell … and the texture. Lauder has a very special texture. It’s incredible. How much did you say you paid? Twenty euros? That’s incredible,’ sighs Carine, putting her glasses back in their case, and the case back in her Biotherm pouch, and the Biotherm pouch back in her Tod’s handbag. ‘That’s incredible! That must be cost price. How do they expect the rest of us to survive if they undercut prices like that? That’s unfair practices. No more, no less. It’s … there’s no more margin so they … It’s downright disgusting. It saddens me, you know …’

Carine is utterly perplexed. She consoles herself by stirring sugarless sugar into a coffee without caffeine.

After that, the hardest part is to keep our cool as far as the kitchen, but when we finally get there, we begin cackling like turkey hens on heat. If our mother happens to walk by, she says despairingly, ‘You two can be so nasty,’ and Lola replies, offended, ‘Hey, what do you mean? I actually paid seventy-two euros for that piece of shit!’ And we stand over the dishwasher splitting our sides with laughter.

‘Well, that’s good, with everything you won last night you’ll be able to contribute to the petrol, for once.’

‘Petrol AND péage,’ I said, rubbing my nose.

I couldn’t see her, but I could sense her smug little smile and both hands placed nice and flat on her tightly squeezed knees.

I raised my hips to pull a big note out of my jeans pocket.

‘Put that away,’ said my brother.

Up she piped: ‘But, uh … really, Simon, I don’t see why—’

‘I said put it away,’ my brother said, without raising his voice.

She opened her mouth, closed it, wriggled a little, opened her mouth again, dusted off her thigh, fiddled with her sapphire, inspected her nails, opened her mouth to say something … and then closed it again.

Things were not going too smoothly. If she was keeping her mouth shut, it meant they’d had a fight. If she was keeping her mouth shut, it meant that my brother had raised his voice.

Which is a rare thing.

My brother never gets annoyed, never says anthing bad about anybody, hasn’t an unkind bone in his body, and does not judge his fellow man. My brother is from another planet. Venus, maybe.

We adore him. We ask him: ‘How do you manage to stay so calm?’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I don’t know.’ We ask him again: ‘Don’t you ever feel like letting go sometimes? Saying really mean, nasty things?’

‘But that’s why I have you, gorgeous,’ he replies, with an angelic smile.

Yes, we adore him. In fact, everybody adores him. Our nannies, his teachers, his professors, his colleagues at work, his neighbours … everybody.

When we were younger, we’d sprawl on the carpet in his bedroom, listening to his records and smothering him with kisses while he did our homework, and we played at imagining our future. Our predictions for Simon: ‘You are too nice … some evil cow will get her claws into you.’

Bingo.

*

I had a pretty good idea why they’d been arguing. It was probably because of me. I could reproduce their conversation down to the last sigh.

Yesterday afternoon, I asked my brother if they could give me a lift. ‘What a question,’ he said, politely offended, on the phone. After that, the little love must have thrown her tantrum, because coming to pick me up meant a major detour. My brother must have shrugged his shoulders, and she’d have laid it on even thicker. ‘But, darling, from her place to the road for Limousin … Place Clichy is not exactly a short cut, as far as I know.’

He had to force himself to be firm, they went to bed angry, and she slept at Hotel Cold Shoulder.

She got up in a bad mood. While drinking her organic chicory, she started up again. ‘No, really, your lazy sister could have made the effort and come out here. Honestly, it’s hardly her work that’s wearing her out, is it?’

He didn’t react. He was studying the map.

She went to sulk in her Kaufman & Broad bathroom (I remember our first visit. With some sort of purple chiffon scarf around her neck, she was twirling about among her pot plants and giving a running commentary on her Petit Trianon, absolutely gushing. ‘Here we have the kitchen … so functional. And now the dining room … utterly convivial. And as for the living room … so versatile. Here’s Léo’s bedroom … isn’t it playful? Now this is the laundry room … just indispensable. And this is the bathroom … double, obviously. And as for our bedroom … so luminous. Here’s …’ It was as if she wanted to sell it to us. Simon drove us back to the station and just as we were leaving, we said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful house.’ ‘Yes, it’s functional,’ he echoed, nodding his head. Neither Lola nor Vincent nor I uttered a single word on the way back. We were all kind of sad, each in our own corner; we were probably thinking the same thing, that we had lost our older brother, and that life would be a lot tougher without him), and then, she must have looked at her watch at least ten times between their house and my street, she must have groaned at every traffic light, and when finally she hooted the horn – because I’m sure she’s the one who hooted – I didn’t hear them.

Oh woe, oh woe is me.

My dear Simon, I am so sorry to have put you through all that.

Next time, I’ll make other arrangements, I promise you.

I’ll do better. I’ll go to bed early. I won’t drink any more. I won’t play cards.

By next time, I’ll have settled down, you know. Of course I will. I’ll find someone. A nice middle-class boy. An only son. A man who’s got a driving licence and a Toyota that runs on rapeseed oil.

I’ll get myself one who works at the post office, because his dad works at the post office, who’ll put in his twenty-nine hours a week and is never off sick. A non-smoker. That’s just what I’ll put on my Match.com profile. You don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see. Why are you laughing, you idiot?

That way I won’t pester you any more on Saturday mornings to go to the country. I’ll tell my little sweetie pie from the post office, ‘Hey, Sweetie Pie! Will you drive me to my cousin’s wedding with your beautiful sat nav that even has Corsica and Martinique and Tahiti?’ and at a stroke, problem solved, all taken care of.

And why are you laughing like a fool, now? Do you think I’m not clever enough to manage the way other people do? To find myself a nice guy with a yellow cardigan and a Disneyland Paris badge? A fiancé I can go and buy Celio boxer shorts for during my lunch break? Oh, yes, just thinking about it makes me go all wobbly … a decent sort. Serious. Simple. Batteries included, not to mention the building society passbook.

And he’d never worry about things. And his main concern would be to compare prices in-store with the ones in the catalogue and he’d say, ‘You know, darling, the difference between Casto and Leroy Merlin is really just the service …’

And we’ll enter the house through the basement so as not to get the hall dirty. And we’ll leave our shoes at the bottom of the stairs so as not to get the stairway dirty. And we’ll be friends with the neighbours, who will be incredibly nice. And we’ll have a built-in barbecue and it will be really great for the kids, because the housing estate will be super safe like my sister-in-law says and …

Oh, bliss.

It was too awful. I fell asleep.