Significance by Jo Mazelis Read Free Book Online Page A

expression that suggested she was embarrassed, but didn’t want to show it. Michael described the same look as a smirk, a smile with indications of cruelty and coldness.
    Each of them was absolutely certain of the words the man had spoken. Michael said he had heard the man say, ‘I follow strange women and I fuck them.’
    Hilda disagreed; she was infuriated with Michael because she knew he was wrong. What Hilda heard was, ‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them.’
    â€˜I remembered you see, because it struck me how unusual it was. I’ve been reading the French theorists – Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva – so I was immediately struck by the seeming passivity of the man’s words. Or rather by the contradictory nature of the sentence: “I let strange women follow me” is a passive statement and therefore feminine. “Then I fuck them” is active and thus masculine. The young woman did indeed smile, but it was a conflicted smile, defensive, and when the man got up and left the table she looked very confused, and deflated.’
    â€˜But,’ Michael said, ‘when the young woman came to the café she was alone. The man joined her sometime after. So he must have followed her, mustn’t he?’
    â€˜That may be,’ said Hilda, ‘but I am certain of what I heard.’
    â€˜And so am I,’ Michael said, and neither of them would stand down, or be shaken from their respective positions. Each of them was used to being disbelieved by others due to their long involvement with politics – they had warned of the threat of pollution, of the dangers of pesticides and other scientific adjustments to nature, they had spoken of a future with government cameras on every street corner, and bugs (that was how they had described it in the seventies) which monitored every member of the population, seeing what it read or bought, what it watched on TV. They had made grim statements about the blind hedonism of the western world and the effects of its endless consumerism and bullying in the Third World. They had lectured and written pamphlets, and marched and joined organisations. And they had been laughed at. There was not much consolation in finally being proved right.
    This overheard fragment of conversation on a French café terrace was one of the few things they disagreed on.
    The police inspector, a man by the name of Vivier, believed (just as Hilda might have predicted) Michael. The plain - clothes female officer (Hilda wasn’t sure of her rank) whose name was Sabine, seemed to believe Hilda.
    On the whole however, the police didn’t see that there was any great difference; a man had been overheard saying the words ‘follow’, ‘strange women’ and ‘fuck them’. And the woman he had said them to was dead. The finer points of syntax, the groundbreaking work of French literary theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray, ideas based around l’ é criture feminine and Hilda’s absolute certainty were as chaff in a hurricane; irrelevances, superficialities and distractions that should not be attended to lest they sway the investigation and the course of justice.

Miroir Noir
    With her empty wine glass on the table in front of her, Lucy considered her options. Scott was still inside the café chatting amiably with the staff and customers. She felt envious of him because he seemed to have formed bonds here in this small town. It was something she would have liked for herself.
    She lit a cigarette – the last from her pack – and smoked it reflectively. That was what she liked about smoking, it provided an interval of time in which one could stop and consider the next move. She was also consciously using the cigarette to make decisions. If he doesn’t come out before I’ve finished this cigarette, she thought, I’ll stub this out, pick up my lighter, my bag, my cardigan and be on my way.