Breaking Away. Anna Gavalda

B12, the one Sandrine brought back for you the other day?’

      ‘What about it?’

      ‘How much did you pay?’

      ‘Gosh, how do you expect me to remember? Around twenty euros, I think.’

      Carine repeats what Lola has said, choking on her words. ‘Twenty euros! Estée Lauder’s D-E-N-G with Vitamin B12! Are you sure about that?’

      ‘I think so.’

      ‘I’m sorry, but at that price it’s got to be fake! What a shame, girls, you’ve been taken for a ride. They often put Nivea in a counterfeit jar and no one’s the wiser. I hate to tell you,’ she insists, triumphant, ‘but your cream is just some old rubbish. Absolute rubbish!’

      Lola looks totally devastated. ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Ab-so-lutely sure. I know what the production costs are, after all! They only use essential oils at Estée—’

      This is where I turn to my sister and say, ‘You don’t happen to have it with you, do you?’

      ‘Have what?’

      ‘The cream.’

      ‘No, I don’t think so … Oh, yes! I just might … Wait, let me look in my bag.’

      She comes back with a jar and hands it to the expert.

      Said expert puts on her half-moon glasses and inspects the offending item from every angle. We watch her in silence, waiting with bated breath, vaguely uneasy.

      ‘Well, Doctor?’ ventures Lola.

      ‘Yes, yes, it’s Estée Lauder all right … I recognise the smell … and the texture. Lauder has a very special texture. It’s incredible. How much did you say you paid? Twenty euros? That’s incredible,’ sighs Carine, putting her glasses back in their case, and the case back in her Biotherm pouch, and the Biotherm pouch back in her Tod’s handbag. ‘That’s incredible! That must be cost price. How do they expect the rest of us to survive if they undercut prices like that? That’s unfair practices. No more, no less. It’s … there’s no more margin so they … It’s downright disgusting. It saddens me, you know …’

      Carine is utterly perplexed. She consoles herself by stirring sugarless sugar into a coffee without caffeine.

      After that, the hardest part is to keep our cool as far as the kitchen, but when we finally get there, we begin cackling like turkey hens on heat. If our mother happens to walk by, she says despairingly, ‘You two can be so nasty,’ and Lola replies, offended, ‘Hey, what do you mean? I actually paid seventy-two euros for that piece of shit!’ And we stand over the dishwasher splitting our sides with laughter.

      ‘Well, that’s good, with everything you won last night you’ll be able to contribute to the petrol, for once.’

      ‘Petrol AND péage,’ I said, rubbing my nose.

      I couldn’t see her, but I could sense her smug little smile and both hands placed nice and flat on her tightly squeezed knees.

      I raised my hips to pull a big note out of my jeans pocket.

      ‘Put that away,’ said my brother.

      Up she piped: ‘But, uh … really, Simon, I don’t see why—’

      ‘I said put it away,’ my brother said, without raising his voice.

      She opened her mouth, closed it, wriggled a little, opened her mouth again, dusted off her thigh, fiddled with her sapphire, inspected her nails, opened her mouth to say something … and then closed it again.

      Things were not going too smoothly. If she was keeping her mouth shut, it meant they’d had a fight. If she was keeping her mouth shut, it meant that my brother had raised his voice.

      Which is a rare thing.

      My brother never gets annoyed, never says anthing bad about anybody, hasn’t an unkind bone in his body, and does not judge his fellow man. My brother is from another planet. Venus, maybe.

      We adore him. We ask him: ‘How do you manage to stay so calm?’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I don’t know.’ We ask him again: ‘Don’t you ever feel like letting go sometimes? Saying really mean, nasty things?’

      ‘But that’s why I have you, gorgeous,’ he replies, with an angelic smile.

      Yes, we adore him. In fact, everybody adores him. Our nannies, his teachers, his professors, his colleagues at work, his neighbours … everybody.

      When we were younger, we’d sprawl on the carpet in his bedroom, listening to his records and smothering him with kisses while he did our homework, and we played at imagining our future. Our predictions for Simon: ‘You are too nice … some evil cow will get her claws into you.’

      Bingo.

      *

      I had a pretty good idea why they’d been arguing. It was probably because of me. I could reproduce their conversation down to the last sigh.

      Yesterday afternoon, I asked my brother if they could give me a lift. ‘What a question,’ he said, politely offended, on the phone. After that, the little love must have thrown her tantrum, because coming to pick me up meant a major detour. My brother must have shrugged his shoulders, and she’d have laid it on even thicker. ‘But, darling, from her place to the road for Limousin … Place Clichy is not exactly a short cut, as far as I know.’

      He had to force himself to be firm, they went to bed angry, and she slept at Hotel Cold Shoulder.

      She got up in a bad mood. While drinking her organic chicory, she started up again. ‘No, really, your lazy sister could have made the effort and come out here. Honestly, it’s hardly her work that’s wearing her out, is it?’

      He didn’t react. He was studying the map.

      She went to sulk in her Kaufman & Broad bathroom (I remember our first visit. With some sort of purple chiffon scarf around her neck, she was twirling about among her pot plants and giving a running commentary on her Petit Trianon, absolutely gushing. ‘Here we have the kitchen … so functional. And now the dining room … utterly convivial. And as for the living room … so versatile. Here’s Léo’s bedroom … isn’t it playful? Now this is the laundry room … just indispensable. And this is the bathroom … double, obviously. And as for our bedroom … so luminous. Here’s …’ It was as if she wanted to sell it to us. Simon drove us back to the station and just as we were leaving, we said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful house.’ ‘Yes, it’s functional,’ he echoed, nodding his head. Neither Lola nor Vincent nor I uttered a single word on the way back. We were all kind of sad, each in our own corner; we were probably thinking the same thing, that we had lost our older brother, and that life would be a lot tougher without him), and then, she must have looked at her watch at least ten times between their house and my street, she must have groaned at every traffic light, and when finally she hooted the horn – because I’m sure she’s the one who hooted – I didn’t hear them.

      Oh woe, oh woe is me.

      My dear Simon, I am so sorry to have put you through all that.

      Next time, I’ll make other arrangements, I promise you.

      I’ll do better. I’ll go to bed early. I won’t drink any more. I won’t play cards.

      By next time, I’ll have settled down, you know. Of course I will. I’ll find someone. A nice middle-class boy. An only son. A man who’s got a driving licence and a Toyota that runs on rapeseed oil.

      I’ll get myself one who works at the post office, because his dad works at the post office, who’ll put in his twenty-nine hours a week and is never off sick. A non-smoker. That’s just what I’ll put on my Match.com profile. You don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see. Why are you laughing, you idiot?

      That way I won’t pester you any more