No and Me by Delphine de Vigan

Author:Delphine de Vigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Chapter 26

There’s something annoying in life that you can’t do anything about: you can’t stop thinking. When I was little I practised every evening lying on my bed. I tried to create a perfect vacuum, I chased away ideas one after the other, even before they became words. I exterminated them at the root, wiped them out at source, but I always came up against the same problem: thinking about not thinking is still thinking.

One day I tried the question out on No. I reckoned that after all she’s been through she might have discovered a solution, a way around the problem. She looked at me in a mocking way. ‘Don’t you ever stop?’

‘Stop what?’

‘Wearing out your brain.’

‘Well, no, that’s exactly what I’m trying to explain to you. In fact, when you think about it, it’s not possible.’

‘Yes, it is – when you’re asleep.’

‘But when you’re asleep you dream . . .’

‘Just do what I do. I never dream. It’s bad for your health.’

She doesn’t think it’s stupid that I cut out the packaging from frozen food, that I collect labels from clothes and textiles, that I do comparative tests to see which brands of toilet roll are longest. She watches me measuring, sorting, classifying, with a smile at the corner of her lips, but it’s not an ironic smile. Sitting beside her I cut out words from the papers to stick in my notebook. She asks me if I don’t have enough already, what the point of it is, but she helps me look in the dictionary and I can tell that she likes it. You should hear her read out the definition in her broken voice. She separates out each syllable like a schoolteacher in such a serious tone. One day she helped me cut out some geometric shapes for school. She really concentrated. She pursed her lips and didn’t want me to speak to her. She was scared of getting it wrong. It seemed so important to her that it should all be perfect to the tiniest fraction of a millimetre. I told her she’d done really well when she’d finished. The thing she likes best is helping me with my English lessons. Once I had to revise a dialogue between Jane and Peter about ecology. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I could memorise it if I read it once or twice – she insisted on being Peter and me being Jane. With a hilarious French accent she tried ten times to say ‘worldwide’. She stumbled, made a face and tried again. We laughed so much we never did get to the end.

When I’m busy she spends a lot of time doing nothing. It’s perhaps the only thing that reminds me where she comes from, this ability she has to put herself anywhere at all like an object and wait for the minutes to pass, staring into space, as if something were going to come along and carry her off somewhere,

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