The Circle Read Free Page B

to his spot.
    His neighbours were shouting, things like, ‘Go on!’ ‘Pass the ball, fuck, pass it!’ ‘On the right, on the riiight!’ which meant that at least something was happening, finally, when he felt a familiar vibration in his pocket. He reached into his trousers and took out his phone. Not a smartphone, but a good old Nokia. The mobile had already transferred the call to his voicemail, and the text read ‘888’.
    Servaz dialled the number to access the message.
    And froze.
    The voice on the line
… It took him half a second to recognise it. Half a second of eternity. Time-space contracting, as if the twenty years separating him from the last time he had heard it could be erased in two heartbeats. Even after all this time, he felt something tunnelling deep into his belly.
    It was as if the room were beginning to spin. The cries, the shouts of encouragement, the buzzing of the vuvuzelas all receded, lost in a mist. The present contracted, became tiny. The voice was saying, ‘Martin? It’s me, Marianne. Call me, please. It’s very important. I beg you, call me back as soon as you get this message.’
    A voice from the past – but also a voice in which he could hear fear.
    Samira Cheung tossed the leather jacket onto the bed and looked at the fat man who was leaning against the pillows, smoking.
    â€˜You’ve got to go. I have to go to work.’
    The man sitting in her bed was at least thirty years older than she was, had an unmistakeable potbelly and white hair on his chest, but Samira didn’t care. He was a good lay, and that, in her opinion, was all that mattered. She herself was no beauty queen. Ever since the lycée she had known that most men found her ugly – or rather that they thought her face was ugly and her body was singularly attractive. Given the strange ambivalence she aroused in them, the scales tipped sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Samira Cheung made up for it by sleeping with as many men as she could; she had known for a long time that the most handsome were not necessarily the best lovers, and she was looking for men who were good in bed, not Prince Charming.
    The big bed creaked as her round-bellied lover lifted his legs out from under the sheets and leaned over to retrieve his neatly folded clothes. Samira pulled on a pair of knickers and a T-shirt then disappeared through the trap door in the floor.
    â€˜Booze or coffee?’ she shouted from below.
    She made her way through the little red kitchen that was so narrow it looked like a ship’s galley, and switched on the capsule coffee maker. With the exception of the bare bulb over her head, the big house was plunged into darkness. And for a reason: Samirahad bought the ruin twenty kilometres from Toulouse the year before. She was gradually restoring it, choosing her occasional lovers from various trades – electricians, plumbers, masons, painters, roofers – and for the time being she lived in only one-fifth of the inhabitable space. The rooms on the ground floor were completely empty of furniture, draped in plastic tarpaulins, the walls covered with scaffolding, pots of dripping paint and tools, as was half of the first floor, and she had made the attic into a bedroom for the time being.
    The man went heavily down the ladder. She handed him a steaming espresso and took a bite from an apple that had already been started and was going brown on the countertop. Then she vanished into the bathroom. Five minutes later she went into the ‘dressing room’. All her clothes were hanging temporarily from long metal rods encased in thin plastic covers, while her underwear and T-shirts were stored in small dressers with plastic drawers, and dozens of pairs of boots stood in a row against the wall.
    She pulled on a pair of jeans with holes in, flat-heeled ankle boots, a clean T-shirt and a leather belt with studs. Then the holster for her service weapon. And a