Read Online Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi - Free Book Online Page A

measure them, weigh them, write them down, gauge them, they compare their average with the class average, why not with the national average while they’re at it? That’s the problem: we bring babies into the world and the world adopts them. We’re the incubators, that’s all, then they get away from us and it’s not long before someone tells us we’re no longer in on the act. Do I remember school? Do I remember being nine years old? I’ve forgotten everything. Apart from my father’s songs, I don’t remember anything. The psychiatrist at the health centre tries to dig up my memories, but nothing ever surfaces, nothing good or bad, nothing. I remember so clearly the sailor’s shoes and the bed with the river flowing through it, but where my father was when he sangthat to me, or my mother, my sisters, my brother – I couldn’t tell you. It’s lost. Fallen into a hole. You struggle to live as best you can but soon the whole lot disappears. We get up in the morning, but that morning doesn’t actually exist any more than the night before which everyone’s already forgotten. We’re all walking on the edge of a precipice, I’ve known that for a long time. One step forward, one step in the void. Over and over again. Going where? No one knows. No one gives a stuff.
    The rain was hurling its gobs of saliva against the window, tiny transparent flecks of spit, why were we being spat on? I didn’t know but I was convinced if I opened the window I’d soon be filthy from head to toe. Was the wall opposite covered in it, too? Were the windows below getting the same as us? Were we all sheltering from this spit from the sky? I didn’t want to know, nope, didn’t care, no, mustn’t think about it, never had thought of it, no, no and no again!
    Are they good? I asked Stan. He didn’t answer. He’s gone off somewhere, he’s good at that, Stan, slipping his moorings – oh, he’s mine alright. The teacher lends him books and it’s the same when he reads: he leaves us. Sometimes I think he carries on reading his books when he’s given them back, he still thinks about them, he can read them even without the words, he’s really very good at being somewhere else.
    I let him drift and turned back to the wall to try and forget that the rain had it in for me. I looked at the brown paint, some black marks, holes in the plaster, patches of mould, but the fear had decided not to let go of me, I would have liked someone to ask me for something – anything, a song, a silly face – someone to make me talk out loud, someone to see me. There were things written on that wall, too, but you couldn’t see them. I was like Stan, I could see in the dark, reading in a vacuum. It said on the wall that we weren’t the first people in that room, that lots of people had been through there, hours of rain and no light, people who didn’t know if outside was full up or just a void, who didn’t know if we’re too alone or there are too many of us, people who’d made love in this bed, lovingly or not, who’d fought too, thumping each other, lovingly or not, who’d said stupid things to each other, terrible things, the truth, and then lied to save themselves, to be believed… that bed up against that wall, that bed as big as the room, as small as it, that bed – what a piece of shit!
    I could hear the rain smacking away behind me, and Stan nibbling, his new little teeth on the biscuits. Are they good, Stan? I asked more loudly, I’d like to have talked about them, to have wasted a bit of time talking about biscuits and Is it nice eating in bed, and Do you like the hotel and Do you think the rain falls straight out of the sky orcomes swirling up from the middle of the earth? Yes, does it go upwards or does it fall? Does it spin round or fall flat? Stan! I begged him, are those fucking biscuits any good? I turned round and saw that Stan was talking to me, in the half-light I could see that he was looking at me and his lips were moving… I