Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 26

The only ghosts I believe in are memories. Whether real or imagined. For me, entities, specters, spirits, all such supernatural things only exist in the mind of the living.

Some people communicate with the dead, and I believe they are sincere, but when a person is dead, they’re dead. If they return, it’s a living person making them return through thought. If they speak, it’s a living person lending them their voice; if they appear, it’s a living person projecting them with their mind, like a hologram, a 3-D printer.

Loss, pain, the unbearable can make a person experience and feel things that are beyond the imagination. When someone has gone, they’ve gone. Except in the minds of those who remain. And the mind of just one man is much bigger than the universe.

At first, I told myself that the hardest thing would be learning to ride a unicycle. But I was wrong. The hardest thing was the fear. Controlling it, on the night I did it. Slowing my heartbeat. Not shaking. Not chickening out. Closing my eyes and going for it. I had to get rid of the problem. Otherwise, there’d be no end to it.

I’d tried everything. Kindness, intimidation, other people. I wasn’t sleeping anymore. That’s all I thought about: getting rid of the problem. But how?

On a bike, whether there’s one wheel or two, it’s almost the same, it’s a question of balance. On the other hand, to practice cycling on the gravel of the cemetery, it was best for me to do it at night. No one should see the keeper unicycling along the graves. So, I practiced once night had fallen, and the gates were closed, several days in a row. I had to work on the slowing down and the accelerating. It was unthinkable that, when the time came, I should fall.

What took longest, and was most fiddly, was sewing the shroud, that piece of material used to wrap around corpses. I collected meters and meters of white fabric: muslin, silk, cotton sheets, tulle. I spent a lot of time stitching it all, to make the ensemble both realistic and surreal. On the nights I was making the “thing,” I thought, with amusement, that it was the wedding dress I hadn’t worn on the day of my union with Philippe Toussaint. I’m sure we end up laughing at everything. Smiling, at any rate. We end up smiling at everything.

Next, I put the shroud through the washing machine, on cold, along with five hundred grams of sodium bicarbonate, so it would be fluorescent. Before sewing the lining, I stuck on photoluminescent strips that recharge when exposed to light. I had nicked several meters from the van of the highway maintenance men. Normally, they use them for outdoor signposting. They are highly luminescent. You only have to put them in the light just before using them. In sunshine, or, for longer, under a lamp.

My face and hair had to be completely concealed. I took one of Nono’s black hats from the hut. I cut into it at eye level, and slipped a bride’s veil over it. A visiting undertaker had given me a key ring in the form of an angel. It gave out a pretty strong light when you pinched the edges. A kind of safety flashlight, but small and soft. I wedged it between my lips.

When I saw myself in the mirror, I thought I looked scary. Really scary. I looked like something out of the horror film those youngsters were watching on Diane de Vigneron’s tomb, the day they left their computer behind after my whistleblowing. In this getup—long, white, ghostly dress, face hidden under bridal veil, body shining like snow in headlights, mouth lighting up, depending on whether I closed or pinched my lips—in a particular setting, that is, a cemetery at night, where the smallest twig snapping can assume irrational proportions, I could give someone a heart attack.

I was missing sound. I had the image, but not the soundtrack. That’s what I told myself once I’d finished laughing away, all on my own. There are several sounds that would terrify anyone in a cemetery at night. Groans, moans, a creak, the sound of the wind, footsteps, slowed-down music. I opted for a little radio on the wrong frequency. I hung it on my bike. When the time came, I’d switch it on.

At around 10 A.M., I hid inside a mortuary chapel, heart pounding under my getup, clutching my bike.

I didn’t have to wait long. Their voices preceded their steps. They came over the wall on the eastern side of the cemetery. There were five of them that evening. Three boys and two girls. It varied.

I waited for them to “settle in.” For them to start opening their cans of beer and using the potted plants as ashtrays. They stretched out on the tomb of Madame Cedilleau, a nice woman I’d got to know well when she came to put flowers on her daughter’s grave. The thought of them stretching out on that mother and daughter spurred me on.

I started by getting on my bike and arranging my long dress correctly—it mustn’t get caught in the wheels. My outfit could be seen from far away, I’d exposed my strips for two hours under a halogen lamp. I pushed open the door of the mortuary chapel, making a lot of noise, a grating noise. Their voices fell silent. I was several hundred meters away from the group. I began to pedal. Gently. As if carried by the breeze.

I was about four hundred meters away from them when one of the boys spotted me. I was petrified. I could feel the clamminess of my hands, the fabric around my legs, the heat of my head. The boy was incapable of uttering a word. But his expression, his horrified stupor, made one of the girls turned toward me, cigarette in mouth, and she, well, she screamed. She screamed so loud that my mouth went dry, very dry. Her screaming made the other three jump. They who, until then, had been laughing their heads off, stopped laughing.

All five of them stared at me. It lasted one or two seconds, no longer. I stopped abruptly, two hundred meters from them. I pinched my lips and the light shone right at them. I stretched my arms into a cross and again went straight for them, but this time much faster, more threateningly.

In my memory, all that happened in slow motion, and I had time to analyze every second. If I didn’t pull it off, if I was unmasked, if they, in turn, pursued me, I was done for. But they didn’t think. Once they realized that a fluttering ghost was heading straight for them, at a good clip, arms in a cross, they bolted quicker than lightning. Never has anyone got up so fast. Three of them headed for the gates, screaming, two for the back of the cemetery.

I opted to pursue the trio. One of them fell, but got back up immediately.

I don’t know how they managed to scale the gates, despite them being three-and-a-half meters high. Proof that fear gives you wings.

I never saw them again. I know that they told anyone who would listen that the cemetery was haunted. I collected their cigarette butts and empty beer cans. I doused Madame Cedilleau’s tomb with hot water.

I found it hard to get to sleep, I couldn’t stop laughing. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw them again, bolting like rabbits.

The following morning, I put the bike and my ghoulish disguise up in the attic. Before hiding it in a trunk, I thanked it. I put it away like you’d put away your wedding dress, taking it out from time to time to see if you can still get into it.