Free Monsieur by Emma Becker

get drunk with happiness.’
    I can’t help laughing, but I sense that Babette’s last words will come back to haunt me. I get out of the taxi, almost stumble, and there I am, at the clinic. Remember, Ellie, when you were only ten you hated to be brought here, and now a few years later you’ve actually spent thirty euros to get to the place faster.
    Those were the days, when I tried to hide around the corners in corridors to escape the visits: twenty minutes of being stroked by patients who gushed at the sight of the cluster of little blonde girls hanging on to Dr Cantrel’s coat, in rooms stinking of ether and pain, and as a bonus, the occasional sight of enormous, bleeding lines of stitches across the knees of sobbing old women. I can remember how my sister Louise was unable to eat the piece of chocolate she had been offered by the nurses, arguing it must taste like the scabs she had seen on the shin of an Algerian workman. We spent hours – or so it felt to us – in the waiting room, Alice hiding from the doctors behind Philippe’s legs. Disgusted as I was by the spectacle of wounds and the heavy smell of medicine, I was endlessly fascinated by the way others looked up at him with respect and gratitude. You could be a famous surgeon and still run around the Luxembourg Gardens with a swarm of brats in your wake, or take hold of our small hands, sticky with popcorn, to guide us across the rue de Rennes. It was only, many years later, when I visited the clinic that I realized we had a doctor in the family. That was also the first time I came across Monsieur, or at any rate the anonymous pair of grey eyes he then was.
    Another real-life-encounter memory. It’s all coming back to me, like a dream, or maybe even a sequence from a good erotic movie. An evening party on the occasion of my uncle’s birthday: I was barely eighteen, and we must have ignored each other.
    (How curious it is that the men we love already exist in their own right before our perception changes them and they enter the familiarity of our world.)
    How nice it would have been if he had already known then that the plump, blonde schoolgirl sitting at the table across from him would one day encircle his body with her legs. I can almost feel the tension in the air: halfway through a formal conversation I could have whispered in his ear, ‘I will become your mistress,’ then moved away from the table, still wearing my school uniform, leaving him to guess at the shape of my breasts under the T-shirt, and what the whole body he would caress two years later actually looked like. Sliding like a snake between tables and chairs, spreading my smell across him, like a spell, as my hands waved in the air. It would have been nice to be able to watch him silently, and then, under the cover of innocence, speak to him, make him laugh, imagine myself naked against him. I can picture an evening spent moving together from room to room, not daring to do anything. Then, in a neglected corner of the house, Monsieur and I would begin to debate literature, he sitting in a deep armchair, me cross-legged on the bed at the other end of the room. The door wide open, he would not have tolerated any suggestion of impropriety, even though those few stolen minutes away from the other guests would have been full of unspoken cravings deep inside our guts. Monsieur understands perfectly what lies behind a young girl’s eyes, when she is at an age that makes men reluctant to respond to her smiles. He is one of those men who recognize the way blushes spread across cheeks, the initial listlessness clouding the eyes, and responds accordingly, already so cleverly aware of what lies in wait beneath the mask.
    Go and tell your uncle that that’s why you’re standing in front of the clinic today .
    I call Monsieur. I can hear his smile when he says, ‘I’m on my way, darling.’
    A blonde secretary stares at me, as if she has overheard