Chapter One Hundred and Four
Petunia Lapin-Défunt couldn’t sleep, so lay in bed, sheets scrunched between chafing thighs, fingers encircling her derelict, unmilked mammaries, the stirring words of Annette’s sermons blaring in her ears like a trumpet’s call to arms. Just as the orchestra, as it were, swelled, she knocked the baton from the conductor’s startled hand, leapt out of bed, her intoxicating vigour unspent, grabbed the knife she’d been wont to keep under her pillow, and raced off to Deirdre’s room, the vision of divorcing her husband’s adulterous dick from the rest of his body pleading to be realised.
Their door was unlocked—she hurtled in, to find the bed bare. She charged through the hotel, screeching for justice, found the open window, crawled out through the lately burrowed tunnel, reached the surface of the packed snow, and, her moon-drenched nightgown thrashing like a febrile ghost in the wind, followed the resolute footsteps to the cliff.
The moonlight had enchanted the snow in all directions, as Deirdre and Marcel strode, hand-in-hand, from the hotel. It snowed still, lightly, gracefully, flakes pirouetting like little glowing fairies called to Earth.
They spoke not a word. He could have begged her to reconsider, tried to persuade her of the beauty the world held in reserve for true lovers, etcetera; but he knew that the greatest act of love he could show her was to join her in this.
Standing at the edge, they took one last look at each other, their phosphorescent exhalations embracing and waltzing through the air. She smiled—it was the loveliest thing he’d ever seen—and they jumped.
Their hands froze together as they fell. The icicled wind penetrated her as she crashed down to meet it, and, finally, she knew true pleasure, which galloped up her torso, along her arm and into Marcel, who shared her vision: An undergrown, sickly child, she could never, despite the absolute love of her parents, be happy. Happiness was a foreign emotion others claimed to possess, but, like a bird’s wings, a fish’s fin or a tiger’s tail, she had not been born with it, and it would not have occurred to her to ask why not. She lay in her darkened room, assuming it was death, until, through no desire of her own, the door would eventually open, a light turn on, and she found herself still alive. Her adoring parents worked multiple menial jobs to afford the best doctors and psychiatrists, but nothing could ever be done for her. The experts shrugged their shoulders and put it down to an untreatable, congenital world-weariness to be expected in an old woman who’s lived past her allotted span. School was a bad dream, whose curriculum confirmed her innate conviction that this world was not for her, and she spent her adolescence in asylums. Her parents had died, heartbroken, and she floated through seamstress jobs and hospitals, ignoring romantic proposals from all manner of men, all of whom bored her profoundly. She had recently allowed herself to be confined in another asylum, where she was abused by a doctor, whom she calmly strangled almost to death before she was wrenched off him; she’d thought she was doing him a favour by killing him. She was held in isolation at the asylum until her trial, but summoned enough will to blackmail the head of the clinic with all she knew he’d done, and he allowed her to escape. Without expending much effort, she charmed strangers out of money with which she crisscrossed the continent on trains, to no conscious purpose. She ended up here, because of an advertisement in a scrap of newspaper which the wind had blown upon her lap while she lay on the grass in a park, having nothing other to do.
All that balderdash she liked to sprinkle around about looking for her father—it was not a corporeal father she’d been seeking.
And now, the eyelid of life closed, definitively and tenderly, over Deirdre and Marcel. They’d found the peace of which Gangakanta knew nothing.