The List of My Desires Read Free Page A

for you.
    In summer, the children go to stay with friends and Jo and I have three weeks in the south of the country at Villeneuve-Loubet. We stay on the Sourire campsite, and we get together with JJ and Marielle Roussel. We met them there by chance five years ago – they’re from Dainville, only four kilometres from Arras! – and Michèle Henrion from Villeneuve-sur-Lot, the Agen prunes place, she’s older than us, still an old maid. Jo claims it’s because she sucks the prune stones when she should be sucking pricks. Pastis, barbecues, sardines; the beach at Cagnes opposite the hippodrome when it’s very hot, Marineland once or twice, dolphins, seals, and then water-tobogganing, our screams of alarm that always turn to laughter, childish pleasures.
    I’m happy with Jo.
    It’s not the life I dreamed of in my diary, when my mother was alive. My life isn’t as perfect as the one she wished for me when she came to sit on the side of my bed in the evenings, when she stroked my hair gently, murmuring: You’re an intelligent girl, Jo, you’ll have a good life.
    Even mothers tell lies. Because mothers are frightened too.

I t’s only in books that you can change your life. Wipe out everything at a stroke. Do away with the weight of things. Delete the nasty parts, and then at the end of a sentence suddenly find yourself on the far side of the world.
    Danièle and Françoise have been playing the lottery for eighteen years. Every week they stake ten euros and dream of twenty million. A villa on the Côte d’Azur. A cruise round the world. Even just a trip to Tuscany. An island. A facelift. A diamond, a Santos Dumont ladies watch from Cartier. A hundred pairs of Louboutins and Jimmy Choos. A pink Chanel suit. Pearls, real pearls, the kind Jackie Kennedy wore, oh, wasn’t she just lovely? They wait for the end of the week the way other people wait for the Messiah. Every Saturday their hearts are in their mouth as the balls go round. They hold their breath, they can’t breathe. We could die at any moment! they cry in chorus.
    Twelve years ago they won enough to open Coiff’Esthétique. They sent me a bunch of flowers every day while the building works went on, and we’ve been friends ever since, although I’ve developed a terrible allergy to flowers. They occupy the ground floor of a house that looks out over the Governor’s garden in the Avenue des Fusillés. Françoise has almost been engaged several times, but the idea of abandoning her sister has always made her decide to abandon the idea of love instead; on the other hand, in 2003 Danièle went to live with a rep for L’Oréal shampoos, hair colours and other haircare products, a tall handsome man with raven-black hair and a baritone voice, very exotic. She had fallen for the wild odour of his skin, she’d been bowled over by the black hairs on the backs of his long fingers; Danièle had dreamed of animal lovemaking, of struggles and sexy wrestling, their flesh merging, but although the great ape had well-stocked balls, you couldn’t deny that, he turned out to have a totally empty head – his ignorance was vast and positively tragic. The screwing was fine, she told me when she came back a month later, carrying her suitcase, it was screwing to die for, but after the screwing, that was it, the rep went to sleep and snored, then he was off again first thing in the morning on his hairy rounds, cultural level nil, and, said Danièle, whatever anyone says I do need to talk, I need to exchange ideas, we’re not brute beasts, are we, no, we have souls!
    The evening she came back we all went to have dinner at La Coupole, prawns on a bed of chicory for Françoise and me, Arras andouillettes for Danièle – there’s no denying it, as far as I’m concerned making a break leaves a hole in me, Danièle said, a yawning gap, I have to fill it somehow – and after a bottle of wine the twins were in fits of laughter, promising never to leave each other again, or if one of