Read Blood Wedding for Free Online Page A

shoulder
    “You’re not leaving without paying for that coffee,” he roars.
    She turns. He is staring at her furiously. Their eyes meet in a battle of wills. He is a man and Sophie senses it is important to him to win, his face is already red. So she takes out the envelope in which she has only large notes, her cigarettes fall on the floor, she picks them up, she is surrounded by people now, she takes a deep breath, snuffles, wipes away tears with the back of her hand, takes a note and presses it into the waiter’s palm. They are in the middle of the station concourse, encircled by onlookers and commuters who have stopped to watch. The waiter dips his hand into the pocket of his apron to get her change and Sophie can feel, from the slow deliberateness of his gestures, that this is his moment of triumph. He takes his sweet time, he does not look around but concentrates, as though there were no crowd watching and this were his natural state, one of calm authority. Sophie knows her nerves are about to snap. Her hands are itching. The whole train station seems to have gathered around them. The waiter painstakingly counts out the change, setting each coin, each banknote into her trembling, outstretched hand. Sophie can see only the top of his head, the pale scalp, the beads of sweat between his thinning hair. She wants to throw up.
    Shetakes the change, turns and pushes through the crowd, utterly distraught.
    She keeps walking. She feels as though she is stumbling, but no, she is walking in a straight line, she is simply exhausted. A voice.
    “Can I help?”
    Hoarse, barely audible.
    She turns around. God, this is depressing. The drunk standing in front of her seems to be carrying the whole weight of the world, he is homeless with a capital “H”.
    “No, I’ll be fine, thanks . . .” she says.
    And she moves away.
    “Because it’s no problem, yeah? We’re all in the same b—”
    “Fuck off and leave me alone!”
    The man scuttles away, grunting something she pretends not to hear. Maybe you are wrong, Sophie. Maybe he is right, maybe in spite of your sense of superiority, you are in the same boat. Homeless.
    What did you have in your suitcase? Clothes, rubbish. The most important thing is money.
    She reaches into her pockets and breathes a sigh of relief: her papers are there, and her money. She has everything she needs. So, time to think again. She steps out of the station into dazzling sunshine. In front of her, a row of cafés and brasseries, there are people everywhere, taxis, cars, buses. And over there, a low wall by the taxi rank. A few people are sitting on it, a man chatting on his mobile seems engrossed, a diary open in his lap. She walks over, sits next to him, takes a cigarette, closes her eyes and smokes. Concentrates. Suddenly she remembers her own mobile. They will use it to track her. They will see that she phoned the Gervais’apartment. She opens it up, takes out the SIM card and drops it into a drain. Then she throws the telephone into a rubbish bin.
    She came to Gare de Lyon instinctively. Why? Where was she heading? She has no idea . . . She racks her brain and then she remembers: Marseille, that’s right, she went there once with Vincent a long time ago. They laughed as they checked into an ugly hotel near the old port because they could find nothing else and they desperately wanted to snuggle under the sheets. When the man at the reception desk asked for a name, Vincent told him “Stefan Zweig”, because he was their favourite writer at the time. He had to spell the name. The man asked if they were Polish. Vincent said, “Austrian. Originally . . .” They had spent the night there, incognito, and that was why . . . She has a sudden realisation: her instinct is to go somewhere she has been before, whether it is Marseille or elsewhere does not matter, but somewhere she knows, even if only vaguely, because it is reassuring and that is what they will expect her to do. They will look for her in