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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by le dilettante
First publication 2015 by Europa Editions
Translation by Jennifer Rappaport
Original Title: Billie
Translation copyright © 2014 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © BLOOM Image/Getty
ISBN 9781609452599
Anna Gavalda
BILLIE
Translated from the French
by Jennifer Rappaport
We looked at each other spitefully. He, because he must have thought it was all my fault, and I, because that was no reason to look at me in such a way. Stupid things. I’ve totally done them so many times since we’ve known each other, and he has totally enjoyed it and had such a laugh thanks to me—it was wrong of him to blame me just because this time it was going to end badly.
Shit, how could I have known?
I was crying.
“What’s up now? Feeling guilty?” he muttered, closing his eyes. “No, how stupid of me . . . guilt, you . . . ”
He was too exhausted to get completely mad at me. He didn’t have the energy. Plus it was pointless. On that score, we would always agree: Guilt . . . I don’t even know how to spell the word.
We were at the bottom of a crevice, or of something geologically very uncomfortable. A type of . . . of rockslide in the Cévennes National Park, where there was no cell phone signal, where there wasn’t a sheep’s rear end—let alone that of a shepherd—and where no one would ever find us. I had really bashed up my arm, but I could still move it, while he, it was clear, was in a thousand pieces.
I had always known he was brave, but there, really, he was giving me a lesson.
Another one.
He was lying on his back. At first, I had tried to make him a pillow with my sneakers, but as he practically passed out when I raised his head, I lowered it immediately and stopped touching him. It was actually the only moment when he freaked out—he thought he’d really messed up his spinal cord, and was so totally terrified of the idea of ending up paralyzed that he drove me crazy for hours trying to get me either to abandon him in that hole or to finish him off.
Fine. As I had nothing handy with which to properly do him in, we played doctor.
We hadn’t met when we were still young enough to play that game, alas, but we would certainly have gotten to it if we had. That thought amused him, which was good because, whether it was hell here or on the other side, that was all I wanted to take with me: a few small abortive smiles, snatched, like that one there.
The rest, frankly, I could leave it.
I pinched him all over, harder and harder. When he suffered, I was thrilled. It was proof his brain was functioning and I wouldn’t have to roll him to Saint-Pierre. If not, no problem, I was okay with smashing his skull. I loved him enough.
“Good, seems like everything’s working. All you do is squeal so everything’s okay, right? In my opinion, in addition to your leg, you’ve broken your hip or your pelvis. Well, something in this area . . . ”
“Hm.”
He didn’t seem convinced. I felt something was bothering him. I felt I wasn’t one hundred percent believable without a white coat and that thingamoscope around my neck. He looked at the sky, frowning and chewing his cheek like an old grump.
I knew that expression of his, I knew them all, in fact, and I understood that doubt was still pricking him.
Yeah, that was the right word.
“Naaaaaah, Francky, naaaah . . . I’m hallucinating, I don’t believe it. You don’t really want me to jerk you off to check it too?”
“ . . . ”
“Really?”
I could see he was struggling with all his might to give his best dying face, but as for me, I had no issues of decency. More of efficiency. The situation was serious and I really couldn’t take the risk of bumping him off just because I wasn’t his type.
“Uh . . . it’s not that I don’t want to, you know? But really, you . . . ”
It made me think of Jack Lemmon in the last scene of Some Like It Hot. Like him, I began to run out of arguments so I had to pull out the only thing I had left to stop him from busting my balls:
“I’m a girl, Franck.”
And then, you see . . . then, if I were in the middle of giving a very serious presentation on Friendship, the cross-disciplinary type with diagrams, slides, mini bottles of water and all the rest, to explain where it came from, out of what material it was made, and how to look out for fakes, well, I would say, “Please, freeze the frame,” and with my mouse, I would point to his reply:
Those three little rotten and cheerful words muttered with a super bad imitation of a smile by a human being who didn’t even know if he was going to live or die, or continue to suffer but without ever fucking again:
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Yes, for once, I was sure of myself and too bad for those who haven’t seen it, who understand nothing about the film, and who will never know how to recognize the virtuous friend in a poor transvestite. I can’t help them.
So, because it was him, because it was me, and because we had still managed to stick together and support each other in such a hopeless moment, I climbed over him in order to rest my good arm on his lower belly.
I just grazed it.
“Good,” he grumbled after a moment. “I’m not asking you to go all out, girl. Just touch it and we won’t talk about it anymore.”
“I don’t dare.”
He let out a deep sigh.
I understood his chagrin. We had both been through situations that were so much more embarrassing than this where I had hardly been at my best, and I had rocked him to sleep with so many really crude and abominable stories about my promiscuous sex life that I was hardly credible.
Honestly, not at all, not at all, not at all!
But I was serious . . . I didn’t dare.
We can never know in advance what’s going to happen when we nuzzle up to the sacred. My hand still steady, I suddenly realized there was a world of difference between my sexual escapades and his cock. I could have touched them all if necessary, but not his, no, not his; this time it was me who was giving the lesson all alone for once.
I always knew I adored him, but I had never had the occasion to measure how much I respected him, and now, the answer, I was holding it: a few millimeters.
Let it be the infinite measure of my modesty. Of our modesty.
Of course, I already knew I wasn’t going to let myself be hindered for very long by this pussycat of a problem but in the meantime, I was the first to be surprised. Seriously, I was shocked to see myself so squeamish. Intimidated, timid, almost a virgin again! It was like Christmas.
Okay, let’s go. Enough bullshit. Let’s get to work, virgin!
To relax him, I began by tapping around his belly button while humming a nursery rhyme: “Peck lil’ hen, peck all day. Raise your tail, then go away!” but it didn’t help much. Then I laid down beside him, closed my eyes, and rested my lips on his . . . uh . . . auditory canal. I concentrated and whispered very quietly, no, even quieter than that, while blowing saliva bubbles into his ear with all the necessary annoying little coos, what I guessed were the worst or
the best of his most locked-away fantasies, all while tracing with a lazy, distracted fingernail the U that formed the seams of his fly.
The hairs of his ears retracted in terror and my honor was saved.
He cursed. He smiled. He laughed. He said you’re a pest. He said give it a rest. He said you’re a jerk. He said it’s gonna work. He said, but you’re going to stop, right? He said I hate you and he said I adore you.
But all that was a long time ago. When he still had the energy to finish his sentences and I had no idea I would cry in front of him one day. Now, night was falling, I was cold, I was hungry, I was dying of thirst and I was going crazy because I didn’t want him to suffer. And if I were a little bit honest, I would finish those sentences for him, adding “because of me” at the end.
But I’m not honest.
I was sitting next to him, my back against a rock, and I was slowly wilting.
I was shedding guilty feeling after guilty feeling.
With an effort I could never have imagined, he peeled his arm from his body and his hand came to touch my knee. I rested mine on it and this made me even weaker.
I didn’t like him taking advantage of my better nature, the little vulture. It was disloyal.
After some time, I asked him:
“What’s that sound?”
“. . . ”
“Do you think it’s a wolf? Do you think there are wolves?”
And as he didn’t answer, I yelled:
“Answer me, for God’s sake! Say something! Tell me yes, tell me no, tell me to fuck off, but don’t leave me here alone. Not now . . . I’m begging you.”
It wasn’t him I was speaking to. It was to myself. To my stupidity. To my shame. To my lack of imagination. He would never have abandoned me, and if he didn’t speak, it was only because he had lost consciousness.
For the first time in a long time, he no longer had that reproachful look and the idea that he must be in less pain gave me courage: one way or another we were going to get out of this mess. It was inevitable. We hadn’t come all this way to play out a mini version of Into the Wild in a hole in the Lozère.
Fuck no, that would be too embarrassing.
I was reconsidering the situation. First of all, those weren’t wolves, but bird cries. Owls or something. Plus, you couldn’t die from a few broken bones. He didn’t have a fever, he wasn’t losing blood, he was complaining of pain, okay, but he wasn’t in danger. The best thing to do for the moment was to sleep in order to get my strength back and tomorrow, at dawn, when I would be fed up once again with this shitty countryside, I would leave.
I would go through that filth of a forest, I would go through that muck of a mountain, and I would drop a fucking helicopter into that valley.
That’s it. End of discussion. I would solemnly swear to move my derrière, and it would careen across the plateau. Because hiking with that family earlier, Left! Right! Left! Right!, with stupid, loaded donkeys and pack burros who were completely stressed out, that was fun for, like, two minutes.
Sorry, guys, but for us, all this hiking crap sucks!
Do you hear me, babe? Did you hear what I just said? Bet your life on it, as long as I’m alive, you won’t take your last breath in the boonies. Never. I’d rather die.
I stretched out again, grumbled, then got up to clean off my sleeping area and toss the pile of rocks that were digging into my back before wedging myself up against him again like a recumbent statue.
But I couldn’t fall sleep.
The little goblins living in my brain had dropped too much acid.
Up there, a Breton pipe-band was being remixed to a techno beat.
Hell.
I was concentrating so hard I could no longer hear myself think and no matter how much I clung to him and squeezed him with my arms, I was still cold.
I was freezing, DJ Grumpy was destroying the three courage neurons I had left, so a few tears more nimble than the others managed to slip out.
Ah, fuck, I had really lost it.
To force them back, I tipped my head toward the sky and . . . ah then . . . Ooohh . . .
It wasn’t so much the stars that had made me speechless, we had already seen gobs of them on our trek, it was their choreography. Pling! They lit up Gling! one after the other in rhythm. I didn’t even know Ding! that it was possible.
They shone so brightly it was almost tacky.
As though they were LEDs or brand-new toys barely out of the box. As if someone had turned up the dimmer switch.
It was . . . magnificent . . .
Suddenly, I wasn’t alone, and I turned to Franck to wipe my face on his shoulder.
Ah, yes, have some decency, you deadbeat. You have to stop snuffling when God lends you his disco ball.
Are there spring tides for galaxies as for oceans or was this display just for me? A big up to me from the Milky Way? A tremendous rave party of Tinkerbells come to sprinkle a bundle of gold dust on my head to help me recharge my batteries?
They came from everywhere and it seemed like they were making the night warmer. I felt as though I were getting a tan in the dark. I felt the world had turned upside down. That I was no longer at the bottom of the abyss whining about my misery, but on stage . . .
Yes, no matter how low I went (how low I got?) (well, in short, even if I made myself flat as a crêpe), I was on top.
I was in a huge open-air concert hall, like the Zénith in Paris, the type that went from one end of the Earth to the other, right in the middle of a killer song, and with all those lighters, and those screens, and all those thousands of magic candles that the angels turned toward me, I had to show I was worthy. I was no longer entitled to cry about my plight, and I wished Francky could have enjoyed it too.
He wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper either, but he would have been so happy to see so much beauty, so happy. Because that was him, the artist of the two of us. It was thanks to his sensitivity that we had succeeded in getting out of our shithole and it was because of him that the universe had taken out its sparkly tuxedo.
To thank him.
To pay him respect.
To tell him: “You, little one, we know you. Yes, indeed, we know you . . . For a long time, we’ve been watching you and have noticed that you’re obsessed with beauty. All your life, you’ve done nothing but look for it, care for it, and invent it. And uh, well . . . look . . . for the effort you’ve made . . . Look at yourself in this mirror in the sky . . . This evening, we’re paying you back with interest. Your friend, she’s quite vulgar, she does nothing but spit all over the place and swear like an old slut. I wonder who let her in. While you . . . you’re family . . . Come, son . . . Come dance with us.”
I was speaking out loud.
In all modesty and for a boy who couldn’t hear me, I had just spoken on behalf of the universe!
It was stupid, but it was cute . . .
It showed how much I loved him.
Uh . . . otherwise . . . one last thing, Mr. Universe . . . (and right when I said that, I saw James Brown), no, two things, in fact.
First, you leave my friend there where he is. It’s not worth the trouble to call him, he won’t come. Even if I embarrass him, he’ll never leave me here. That’s how it is and even you can’t do anything about it.
Second, I apologize for the way I’m speaking.
It’s true, I overdo it, but every time I offend your ears, it’s not because I lack respect, it’s because of the frustration at not finding the right words quickly enough. It’s a man’s world, you know.
I feel good, he answered.
* * *
I was looking at all the stars, searching for ours.
Because we had one, for sure. Not one each, unfortunately, but one for the two of us. A little nightlight to share. Yes, a lit
tle lamp we’d found the day we met and who, in good years and bad, had done good work up to that point.
Sure, she’d screwed up a bit a few hours back, but everything had blown over since then . . .
She was getting all dolled up, the little doll.
She was using up all her Sephorus glitter spray.
Hey, it was only natural. She was our star! And if her friends were going off to the fireworks, she wasn’t going to be left behind.
I was looking for her.
I looked them all over in order to find her because I had stuff to say to her, to remind her about.
I was looking for her to convince her to help us one more time.
Despite us.
Despite me, especially.
Yes. Since I wasn’t infalliable…infalloble… Oh, fine, since everything was my fault, it was up to me to keep talking her pointy ears off so she would reactivate the hotline.
The others, they were beautiful too, but I really didn’t give a fuck about them—sorry, I mean, I couldn’t care less about them—while as for her, if I put all my heart and soul into describing the situation, I was sure she would soften up again.
I think I found her.
I think it was that one there, all the way up in the air, hovering above my fingertip, say, and billions of years away.
So little, so cute, like a teensy Swarovski crystal, and slightly misaligned in the sky.
Slightly set back from the herd . . .
Yes, she was the one. XXS, solitary and wary, but giving it all she had. The one who was twinkling with all her might. Who was too happy to be there. Who loved to sing and who knew all the lyrics by heart.
Who was sparkling beautifully in the night.