BooksBarbecue
Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Acknowledgements

Vidor suppressed a groan. Clouds, leaves? How poetic. But the hippocampus had a mind of its own and was not easily fooled. He wondered how much Jean-Claude was being paid to come up with this nonsense. During the long minutes of fidgeting and sighs, Vidor was less conscious of drifting clouds than a rumbling of gastric juices. When the heavyset woman to his left peeked at him through a fringe of dark hair, he looked away. He wasn’t here to socialise, and the very thought of some unhappy soul laying claim to his attention made him want to flee.

The warm air was putting him to sleep. Vidor stood and opened a window, but as soon as he sat down again, the heavyset woman leapt up and shut it with a bang. ‘I have a horror of draughts,’ she said to no one in particular. The look on her sour face presented less an impression of illness than abandonment. Perhaps her husband had run off with his Scandinavian mistress and she’d come here to lick her wounds.

They moved on to the sharing part of the session. When Jean-Claude asked who would like to start, the woman shot her hand in the air.

‘Wonderful. Please go ahead, Babette, we’re all ears.’

In accented English, she related the story of a summer holiday in Bavaria when she was eleven years old, and how she had become separated from her parents during an outing at some ancient castle.

Vidor tuned out at that point, as she had told a similar tale at the previous session. Separation and abandonment. Childhood fears and confusion. Didn’t they all have some version of the same story? At least she hadn’t yanked up her blouse, like the last time, to show everyone the surgical scars that criss-crossed her abdomen.

Jean-Claude turned next to Vidor, his doleful eyes telegraphing encouragement. Vidor squirmed, but as long as he was stuck here, he might as well have a bit of fun. So he delivered a tale about a trip to the Hungarian countryside when he was a child, just before his family escaped the Soviet aggression and fled to France. A true story, actually, though he’d been tempted to invent some nonsense to please his audience. It was a memory he was particularly fond of, so why not let Jean-Claude and the others imagine him as an excitable boy of five, rather than the gentleman with the greying hair who sat awkwardly amongst them on these ridiculous cushions.