Vernon Subutex 3: A Novel by Frank Wynne

Author:Frank Wynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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She still hangs out with the same people she used to—but she no longer invites them back to her place. She lies. She says she’s moved because, without Lancelot, she finds the house depressing. That it’s too big, that it’s pointless, that she needed a change of scene, that she loves her new neighborhood. She says she’s found a beautiful little two-room apartment just outside the Marais. She lives in Parmentier. She tells her girlfriends, I’ll have you over soon, but I’m not finished decorating. In her friends’ eyes, there is no cachet to social disgrace. Any more than it had in hers, before. But she does not have as much fun as she used to when she meets up with old friends.

The conversations haven’t changed. It is her ear that has shifted. Comments she would previously not have noticed, she finds unsettling. There is always someone around the table to tell stories about the local yokel in the village where he has his country house, the one who lives on handouts rather than looking for work. The scrounger, the layabout, the welfare cheat—all of her rich friends seem to know at least one. He is an archetype. He twiddles his thumbs and rakes in fifteen hundred euros a month. He is a spendthrift. Two years ago, Sylvie had her own tame pauper, her cleaner’s husband who had spent years lying around at home and knew every trick for getting money from the state. But now that she no longer has a cleaner, now that she has been personally forced to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops to get the allowances and the benefits to which she is entitled, she has never managed to rake in the mythical monthly fortune so talked about at the dinner parties of the rich. She is not a spendthrift, since every bill that lands on the mat is a blow to the solar plexus. She doesn’t dare bang her fist on the table and scream, will you for God’s sake stop spouting such rubbish, you go try and wheedle money from the state, go and screw the poor, shiftless people you’re always talking about … Why don’t you see how easy it is to make ends meet on less than a thousand euros a month? But she says nothing. She who was always so quick to open her big mouth has discovered shame. It is also because she knows these people: reality does not affect them. All that matters are the stories they tell each other over a bottle of fine wine. She was once one of them. A member of that left-wing faction. The left that is suspicious of the poor. That cares about them, granted, but knows them too well to be duped. Too nice for their own good. And can see no other way than to whip them into shape. Because that is what they’re like, the poor, they’re ungrateful dogs. They bite the hand that so lovingly strokes them.

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