The List of My Desires by Grégoire Delacourt Read Free Book Online Page A

white hair; it looks like a big snowball. She’s just got out of a train, she takes a few steps and then puts down her case, which is too heavy. She looks around her; the crowd bypasses her like water flowing round a pebble, and suddenly she’s all alone, tiny, forgotten. The woman is not an actress. The crowd is not a crowd of extras. It’s a real image. Real people. A real story. An ordinary defeat. As background music, Nadine has chosen the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and she has made that minute the most moving minute I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing; it says everything about the pain of abandonment. Loss. Fear. Death.
    I fold up the cheque, suppressing it in my clenched fist.

I ’m beginning to lose weight.
    I think it’s stress. I don’t go home in the middle of the day any more, I stay at the shop and I skip lunch. The twins are worried. I tell them I’m behind with my accounts, I have orders to deal with, and then there’s my blog. It gets almost eight thousand hits a day now. I agreed to have advertising on the blog, so I can pay Mado with the money that brings in. Since her grown-up daughter died of pneumonia in intensive care last month, Mado has had time on her hands. She has too many words now. Too much love left over. She’s brimming over with useless information, recipes she’ll never cook again (a leek tart, brown-sugar biscuits), nursery rhymes for the grandchildren she’ll never have. She still cries sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or when she hears a song, or when a girl comes in and asks for some twill or grosgrain ribbon for her mother. She’s working here these days. She replies to the messages left on tengoldfingers ; she takes orders and sends the stuff out now that we have a mini-sales site. Her grown-up daughter was called Barbara. She was the same age as Romain.
    Mado loves the twins; they’re crazy, she says, but they have such oomph , such get-up-and-go! She’s trying to bring her vocabulary up to date now that she helps me with the blog.
    That’s what I call chutzpah!
    Every Wednesday she goes to have lunch with Danièle and Françoise at the Deux Frères in the Rue de la Taillerie. They order a salad, Perrier water, sometimes a glass of wine, but most important of all they fill in their lottery tickets. They search their memory for lucky numbers. An anniversary. The date of an amorous encounter. Their ideal weight. Their social-security numbers. The numbers of the houses they grew up in. The date of a first kiss. The date, never to be forgotten, when inconsolable grief struck. A telephone number that never replies any more.
    Every Wednesday afternoon, when Mado comes back, her eyes are shining and as round as lottery balls. And every Wednesday afternoon she says, Oh, Jo, Jo, if I won, if I were to win, you’ve no idea of all the things I’d do!
    And today, for the first time, I ask her, What would you do, Mado? I don’t quite know, she replies. But it would be extraordinary.
    It was today that I began my list.

L ist of the things I need.
    A lamp for the hall table.
    A coat-and-hatstand (bistro-style).
    A board to hold keys and the post (from Cash Express?).
    Two Tefal saucepans.
    A new microwave.
    A vegetable rack.
    A bread knife.
    A potato peeler.
    Dusters.
    A couscous steamer.
    Two sets of sheets for our bedroom.
    A duvet and duvet cover.
    A non-slip mat to go in the bath.
    A shower curtain (not flowery!).
    A small medicine cupboard (for the bathroom wall).
    A magnifying mirror with a built-in light. (Saw it on the Internet, made by Babyliss. 62.56 euros plus delivery.)
    A new pair of tweezers.
    Slippers for Jo.
    Quiès earplugs (because one of us snores!).
    A small rug for Nadine’s room.
    A new handbag (Chanel? Look at Dior too).
    A new coat. (Go back to Caroll’s in the Rue Rouille for another look. Pretty coat there, 30% wool, 70% alpaca. Very comfortable. Has a slimming effect. 330 euros.)
    A BlackBerry (because of the blog).
    A train