Voice Over by Celine Curiol

Author:Celine Curiol
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

At the third stop, two teenage girls have entered the carriage and sit down opposite her. They don’t say a word and look so different that she wonders if they are together or not. The one on the right seems unable to cope with what has happened to her body, whose proportions have changed without her having any say in the matter. The girl on the left looks like one of those young models who appear in women’s magazines. Her hair is long, straight and layered. Shiny lips and eye-shadow. A real Barbie, with headphones on her ears and a CD-walkman in her hand, ignoring everyone and yet attracting the stares of the male passengers around her. The news report about young American girls comes to mind. Has this adolescent ever had a man’s penis in her mouth? She wonders if the girl is aware of the sexual attraction she incites. It isn’t because of her make-up or haughty expression—it’s her fragility, which is so badly concealed. And she realizes that at the same age, when she felt apart from the world of adults, she too must have been this walking temptation. There’s a bed with a spring mattress and a piano. Before her is the pink room. She screws her eyes shut to erase the image, then opens them again. It doesn’t help. The enormous, polished-wood wardrobe by the front door, the shelves stacked with perfect piles of dishcloths, towels, packets of lavender in the folds, the bed with the spring mattress, the metal bedposts she would grip as she invented storms that billowed up the ocean of carpet, the bed, the golden spheres at the end of the bedposts which became crystal balls whenever she played at being a fortune-teller, the night table with its marble top, the lampshade with the tassels she used to braid when she was bored. She sees herself in that room at thirteen, sitting on the wicker chair practising Mozart’s First Piano Sonata. She still knows the notes by heart, the rhythm and the melody, the look of the score on which stave, minims, crotchets, quavers, dots and bar lines made up a code she was proud to be able to decipher. And suddenly, it is no longer herself that she sees playing, but the teenage girl opposite her, sitting in her chair at the keyboard. She finds her so charming, so vulnerable, and all the more desirable for being unaware of her seductive power. It dawns on her that this was how she was seen even as she thought she was someone else. At the time, she didn’t know. A cruel injustice, a trap of ignorance. She has clenched her hands, and she notices that her nails have left small white-rimmed indentations on her skin.

The second teenager has let out a sigh. She is wearing jeans and a huge anorak. Her thick thighs stretch the material of her trousers and the anorak hangs loosely about her torso. Her hair is tied back with an elastic band.

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