The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent Page A

no special reason. Over time, the Thursday evening phone call had become a ritual which he was duty-bound to honour. He knew she was there, comfortably ensconced in the living-room armchair, staring at the TV without really seeing it, locked in a permanent stupor since the departure of her husband that day in August 1984.
    Twenty-eight years had now passed, but Guylain still couldn’t say the word ‘dead’ when he spoke of his father. A child at the time, Guylain had visited his father for the last time a few days after the accident. He remembered an inert body lying in a hospital bed. For several long minutes, Guylain had been mesmerized by the tube entering his father’s mouth. He had gazed in fascination at his face, which trembled with each movement of the infernal ventilator to the right of the bed. A man in a white coat had come to fetch his grandfather and had spoken of an imminent departure amid a stream of whisperings. So when two days later the little boy had seen on the TV those helmeted men in their impressive orange spacesuits waving to the crowds from the top of the gangway, his heart had leapt. Their lowered visors made it impossible to see their faces. They all had the same tube he had seen in the hospital coming out of their helmets. He was absolutely certain that his father was among those forms wading clumsily towards the hatch before vanishing inside the belly of the great spaceship. At 12.41 on 30 August 1984, before Guylain’s eyes, the Discovery space shuttle took off from its launch pad with a deafening roar, carrying the six men up into space.
    And when one hour later his grandmother came to tell him in an anguished voice that his father had departed, the only two words he could say in reply were ‘I know’. All these years, the eight-year-old boy inside him had clung to the absurd hope that this father who was roving from star to star would come back one day. Nothing, not even the shovelfuls of earth thudding against the lacquered wood of the coffin, had managed to convince him otherwise.
    His mother never answered before the third ring. Three rings, the time it took to rouse herself from her absence.
    ‘Hello, Mum.’
    ‘Oh! It’s you.’
    He smiled. Every week, she came out with the same reply as a prelude to the great game of questions and answers. What’s the weather like in Paris? Had the latest transport strike caused him problems? Questions which he answered in the same evasive manner, already fearing the moment when he was going to have to lie to his own mother. The dreaded subject came up, as always: ‘Still working in books?’
    His mother knew nothing. Nothing of the pulping plant nor of his job of evil murderer. Years of deception, keeping quiet about the horror and inventing a better job, building an artificial life, just for her. The life of a Guylain who ate and drank things other than tasteless cereals and insipid tea; a Guylain who did not spend his days reducing tonnes of books to mush. This Guylain Vignolles did not share his life with a goldfish. Assistant publications manager at a print works, the Guylain he portrayed every Thursday evening, embraced life with open arms. The lie became more and more elaborate with each phone call, and each time he dreaded deep down that she would eventually get wind of his deceit when he faltered, despite the 400 kilometres between them. Guylain only went back to the village once or twice a year. Brief trips during which he spent most of his time escaping. Escaping his mother’s questions; escaping unhappy memories and all the people who still called him Vilain Guignol, reviving the painful recollections it had taken him years to shake off; escaping a grave in which he had never believed.
    And again this evening, as he put the receiver back after having pulled the wool over his mother’s eyes once more, Guylain was unable to hold back any longer the rush of bile that assailed his throat.

19
    The grey of the concrete has disappeared