Consolation Read Free Page B

she’d taken the trouble – the immense trouble – to push a capsule into the coffee machine and press the little green button?
    Hey. I’m a bit obtuse myself, at times.
    And yet, when I think back –
    She was – how old, at the time? Seven, maybe eight, and she’d just lost in the finals at the gymkhana. I can still see her flinging her riding cap into the ditch, lowering her head and ploughing into me without warning. Bam. A battering ram. I even had to grab hold of a post to keep from falling over.
    I was dazed, moved, breathless, my hands all tied in knots and in the end I’d managed to pull the flaps of my coat around her while she spilled tears and snot and horse dung all over my shirt, with her arms squeezed round my girth as tight as could be.
    Could you call this gesture ‘taking someone in your arms’? Yes, I decided; yes. And it was the first time.
    The first time . . . and when I say she was eight, I’m almost certainly wrong. I’m hopeless with ages. Perhaps it was even later. Good Lord, it took years, then, didn’t it?
    But then she was there, really there. Her entire little self fitted inside the lining of my raincoat and I let it last as long as I could, despite my frozen feet and my aching legs, soon to be stuck at the edge of that bloody riding ring in Normandy, and I hid her from the world, with a silly smile on my face.
    Afterwards, in the car, she curled up in a ball on the rear seat, and I said, ‘What was your pony’s name again? Pistachio?’
    No reply.
    ‘Caramel?’
    Missed again.
    ‘Wait, I’ve got it! Popcorn.’
    Silence from the rear.
    ‘Hey, what could you expect from such an ugly stupid pony, with a name like Popcorn to boot . . . huh? Honestly. That was the first and last time he’ll ever make it to the finals, that fat Popcorn of yours, let me tell you!’
    I was useless. I was overdoing it and I wasn’t even sure of the animal’s name. Come to think of it, I seem to recall it was Peanut . . .
    Well, in any case she’d turned away.
    I straightened the rear view mirror and clenched my teeth.
    We had got up at dawn. I was exhausted, and cold, and I was scrambling to keep up and had to stop off at the agency that very evening for yet another all-nighter. And I’d always been afraid of horses. Even little ones. Especially little ones. Dear God . . . all of this did not bode well when you were stuck in a traffic jam. Not at all . . . And while I was at it, churning my thoughts round and round, irritated and tense and ready to burst, suddenly there came these words:
    ‘Sometimes I wish you were my father.’
    I didn’t say anything, afraid I might spoil it all. I’m not your father , or I’m like your father, or I’m better than your father, or no, what I mean is, I am . . . Phew . . . My silence, it seemed, would say all that much better than I ever could.
    But today? Now that life has become so . . . so what? So laborious, so
inflammable
in our one hundred and ten square metres. Now that we almost never made love any more, Laurence and I; now that I was losing my illusions at the rate of one a day, and a year of my life per construction site, and I found myself rambling away to Snoopy T-shirt while saying nothing, and I was obliged to key in my PIN code just to feel loved, I regretted not heeding those distress signals.
    I should have seen them that time, obviously.
    I should have pulled over onto the emergency lay-by, so aptly named, should have got out into the night and opened her door and pulled her out by the feet and gently smothered her in turn.
    What would it have cost me? Not a thing.
    Not a thing, because there wouldn’t have been any other words to say . . . Or at least, that’s how I imagine it, the botched scene: silent, and effective. Because words, for Christ’s sake, words – they’re not something I’ve ever been good at. I’ve never had the kit.
    Never.
    And now that I’m turning towards her, there outside the gate of the School of Medicine,