Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 34

Jacques always acted like he was so much better than the rest of us, which is one of the reasons that I was so attracted to him. My mother used to joke that I only liked bad boys, and Jacques was as close to a bad boy as you got in the linguistics department of the University of Aix-Marseille, so it was only natural. We had only been on the same project for a few weeks, and we had only been seeing each other for days. I mean, really, we had kissed a few times, and other stuff, and then the static happened, and it was suddenly this big pressure cooker. People were going crazy outside – because you can’t hear God without there being implications, right? And no matter how many times people say, It might not be God, it might not be God, there was no proof, no evidence either way, so people were always going to overreact and refuse to stay calm. They gave the rest of us a bad name, I think.

We were watching France 24, and there was footage of a riot happening near Notre Dame, because there were so many people trying to get in to pray there. There were too many people in the streets, and they were too on edge for anything to stay simmering. That’s just the way it is with people. There had been so many riots over the years before it, so many people unhappy, and so much tension, because everything got worse after 9/11, you see, everything got so tense and kept on getting tenser and tenser, and that just meant that people were going to explode, sooner or later. You look at the riots in LA in the 1990s, in Seattle, in Athens, with the students, the ones in Egypt when they shut off their internet, the ones in London a couple of summers after they had the Olympics: you look at those; that’s a boiling point, and people reached it, and they were scared. How long had it been since I had last gone to church? A year, maybe. So why shouldn’t I have been scared as well?

We tried to stay focused, to get on with what we were doing before. (Now, I can’t even remember what that was. Something … No, I can’t remember.) We weren’t all happy to be there, though; some people around the offices wanted to leave, some wanted to stay. I wanted to stay, because I knew that Jacques wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I didn’t want to leave him alone. If everything was going to be fine, then there was no reason that I wouldn’t just stay there with him; and if everything wasn’t fine, then I wanted to be right there as well.