Chapter 5

When the last of his family died, Guy became a wealthy young man. He did what most twenty-year-olds would do: spend.
He bought himself a sports car: that was power. When the shiny red beast pulled up at the lights, people looked at him, differently. He was no longer a worm, he was a man with money in his pocket. It went to his head and he became very pretentious.
He went down to Cannes and booked into an expensive hotel. Here, it was different, the ridiculous prices meant he had to be somebody. And no stammering struggle to attract the waiter’s attention, they ran on oil. He could sit back, bask in the sun of his own self-satisfaction and feel superior.
He found he was attractive to women. Maybe it was his changed demeanour, taller inside, and well-dressed outside. They just sauntered up, casually asked for a light, and engaged him in conversation. But they were just being polite: moneyed people together.
One of them he remembered in particular. He was on the beach, not looking at her. She smiled at him. He looked away. Then looked back. He watched as she took a cigarette from her pack and stood up with the relaxed, determined confidence of beauty. She was coming towards him. He stiffened. She was coming towards him. He dug ferociously into his book, smearing the print with hot, sticky thumbs. She must know he’d read that bit before. She was going to tell him what she thought of him and his filthy ogling. She was... “Who do you think you are, you miserable little creep? I’ve been watching you, I’ve seen your sort before, you make me sick...“ Her mouth twisted into a sneer of contempt: “Do you seriously think that a pathetic...”
She asked him for a light too.
Her shadow lay across his legs, wrapping round his thigh like the curve of a hot iron.
She sat down...
A thin film of lotion whispered over her perfect body. Her skin smiled, beckoning his eyes, his hands, his lips. Again her shadow, the sensual intimacy of invisible contact, skin on skin in a caress slow enough for eternity.
... and then they were talking.
He never forgot that night, the night he understood the real meaning of love, the dissolution of sexual parts into melting bodies. It was the start of a beautiful relationship.
He woke late, purring and ready for more. More he got: the bed was empty, his wallet gone and his car had already changed hands twice.
It was an expensive lesson.

When it wasn’t money that got him the women he didn’t rent, it was arrogance. Money gave him the power to dismiss women as expendable. He no longer cared. In time, he lost his shyness too. With most women anyway: the ones he really wanted, he never dared approach.
He became contented in a vague sort of way. He bought himself a flat in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, invested in property and lived off the rent. He travelled, read, and kept himself to himself.
He had few people to talk to anyway. He had no friends. He didn’t know what friendship was. He’d seen it, but didn’t believe it. To him it was a façade, a crowbar for social manipulation, and he was good at that. He knew the smiles and lies and compliments that worked, and despised people all the more.
Women especially.
His occasional girlfriends were social cripples too. Anorexics, alcoholics, submission freaks, anything as long as they had a problem. One of them had been raped by her father from the age of nine. She had the morbid sexual gluttony of the ultimate victim. Daddy can’t be wrong, an inhuman monster, it must be me the depraved nymphomaniac who begged him for it.
She lasted the longest, her crumpled up insides were so destroyed, so self-abasing, she had to. And one day she disappeared too. Why, Guy neither knew nor cared. So he went on, from one partner to the next, giving nothing, and expecting nothing - except her inevitable departure.

And then he met Christina. He was sitting at a terrasse watching the sun work its wonders on womankind. The café was crowded and the streets were filled with Sunday. A baby was bawling its lungs out, and the waves of intense screaming were knotting Guy’s intestines into writhing coils of anguish. He hated crying babies. Why doesn’t the mother bloody do something?
A woman leaned over from her table and looked at it. And the waters abated. Guy was not the only one to heave a sigh. The mother was harassed enough with her other two and her husband still hadn’t come back from the chemist’s. A little help was appreciated.
What happened, Guy didn’t even realise. A scream, a red ball, the flash of yellow rompers and he was holding a little boy in his arms, joking with it “Aha! So you thought you’d escape the big, bad monster, did you?”
He waited till the mother had quietened down before returning the fidgeting knot of arms and legs. No need to get excited.
The other woman turned round to him and smiled with heart-beating relief, and he understood why the baby had stopped crying.
Behind her, warnings were in the air, then it came: a resounding slap. Guy went white and shivered. The woman closed her eyes momentarily. They exchanged strained angry glances. Then she smiled again.
Christina had a face built around a smile. As he got to know her better, he could hardly imagine her without it. Under normal circumstances at least. When aroused, she could shout and scream with astounding effect, but as soon as it was over, it was over: finished. It took Guy a while to get used to that.
They had some colourful rows at the beginning, she bombarding him with justifiable complaints, he hitting back with aggressive silence. It shouldn’t have worked, it should have ended there. But he actually trusted her. There was something unusual about her, it was never him she complained about, but his behaviour. And afterwards, it was forgotten. Unbelievably, there were no grudges, but smiles and explanations.
He began to open up, to talk about himself, a little. There was so much he couldn’t say. How could he? He was beyond the pale and knew it. But some things came out, then slammed back in again. Private. You don’t talk about yourself, it’s not the done thing. No self-pity, be a man. So there was no pity. When, after eight months, he told her a fraction of the truth about his mother’s death, it was cold, callous and distant. Then he smiled: “What else could you expect from a woman like that?” Christina was shocked. Guy could not understand why she cried.
It told her a lot about his silences though. It was beginning to look like snow on the tip of the iceberg. What else was there? His grandmother? Didn’t sound very nice, what he mentioned.
His grandmother. Murderous thoughts. The slightest reminder sent shivers through his body. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6. He remembered it well. In his mind, he had never stopped murdering her: the knife, the axe, the bullet, the rope, the oven, the garrotte, the knitting-needle in the eye, the Edward II, the stake, the acid, the flames, the broken glass, the cliff-top with jagged rocks beneath, the pillow, the stick of dynamite up the... But she was still there, her legacy of hate smouldering in his guts, biding its time.
His sense of humour was perhaps his saving-grace. He loved jokes and puns, knew Astérix off by heart and could, on occasions, be extremely witty. Jokes: excellent foil, keeps the bogey-man away. As long as he laughed, everything was hunky-dory. Jokes probably kept him from going mad.

Next summer, they went on holiday together. They arrived late to find the streets teeming with last-minute preparations and no-parking signs. They eventually found somewhere, left the luggage in the boot and went off to get something to eat. Afterwards, they wandered among the crowds, immersing themselves, and let the sweltering holiday atmosphere suck them into thoughtless sensuality.
And long, easy afternoons on the beach. While Christina lay on her belly reading, tanning her back a golden brown, Guy sat back and watched the riches of the sea emerge onto dry land, sparkling diamonds trickling down the anointed flesh. He was very discreet.
Christina was born in La Rochelle and had grown up with the sea. They took a catamaran out. Unbelievable bliss, warm wind, warm water, warm sun, the twin hulls plunged and leaped through the blue, sending up splashing spume and taking them away, anywhere, nowhere, to the inconceivable horizon and back to a beach of naked desire. The sails bulged like swollen breasts, a reservoir of inexhaustible plenitude, and the wake disappeared like forgotten sorrow for the resurrected. It was a joy of pure, untrammelled beauty. No power, no desire for more, just lay back and let the water lick your shoulders, become a fish, water, salt and sea.
They swam out beyond the breakwaters and made love in the sea. Salt kisses and jerky tread-water as sharks swam jealously about, nibbling at their toes. Mouths glued to one another, they sank down to the colder, heavier water below and their skin tightened and tingled. He almost wished to drown, to end his life in total happiness and fill the void with life- and love-giving sea.
Underwater, fuzzy forms chased each other, tickling the soles and kissing the midriff, diving and swirling in arcs of easy smoothness, then surfaced, gleaming in their watery mantles, washed pure.
The word was in his heart. The incomprehensible, unnameable emotion. He could never say it.
Alone in the raucous crowds of evening, they danced and smooched. Part of the crowd, they sat at wet tables, drank wine and ate olives and fat Iberian ham. They listened to the Beatles sung in Catalan. Christina had strands of coloured thread woven into her hair, Guy had yet another mustardy hot-dog and, little by little, the bands became hoarse, the guitars twanged out a farewell dirge, the lights dimmed and the squares slowly emptied. Ambling down the low-buildinged streets, they drifted away, past the lovesick youth playing his last card of soulful glances, past the sleeping man stretching his buttons with beer and breathing. It was calm, the air was cool. A spiral of paper garland, the colour of begonia, rolled gently along the pavement. Arms full, bellies touching, legs intertwined, they slept till morning.

Guy left her a month later. It was all too foreign. Sickened by his weakness, his mind filled up with hate again. The patching-up was furious. The hatred boiled beneath his skin, blisters burst in the flames and red-hot streaks of molten fury lashed his sides. In the mornings, his bed was drenched with sweat and his palms were indented with the livid imprint of his nails.
He started smoking again, filling his lungs with asthmatic tar, three, four packs a day of obsessive sucking and heaving.
In his desperate contradiction of need and hate, of desire and loathing, the only solution he knew was destruction.
He raped and butchered a solitary hitch-hiker and left her mutilated flesh in the woods. But she was never dead enough, not even the second, purple-faced girl he raped cold.
Only the strangling hatred was real. To crush with all his might until the very bones squeezed between his fingers.
His unbearable solitude was eating at him again, chewing at him with big red teeth. Christina’s impossible love was tearing him apart. He had to do something. It was starting again, implacably this time. He had to change, completely. ¶ 2:06 AM