Free The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Thériault

Robert didn’t push the matter, but warned his friend he wouldn’t be let off the hook without at least going for a drink with him after work, to celebrate. Bilodo hesitated, knowing how easily an invitation of this sort could lead to things getting out of control, but after what Robert had just done for him, how could he refuse?

15
    Bilodo dreamt he heard someone laughing. As he woke up, it took him a minute to realise he was lying fully dressed on the futon with the blinds open and the morning sun stamped right onto his face. He tried to get up, then abandoned the idea, floored by a throbbing ache boring into his skull. The memory of last night’s excesses came back to him in snatches. There was that pub on rue Ontario where the night out began, those glasses of Scotch appearing one after the other at the bar. What came next was already a bit blurred: there was that club with female dancers on the rue Stanley, also a cubicle where sensual beauties swayed their hips in close-up, then the massage parlour Robert had dragged him off to against his will, then that Hawaiian pizza ingested on a banquette in a glaringly bright restaurant, then yet another place – a bar? a club? – but he had absolutely no recollection of what came after.
    And there were those questions. Those indiscreet questions from Robert who quizzed him again and again about the letter, about Ségolène, and relentlessly returned to the charge as the night wore on, as things got more and more out of hand. The clerk had obviously meant to take advantage of his alcoholic stupor to get the full lowdown. What had Bilodo let slip? He had to admit he had no idea. What did he tell Robert? What had happened during those black bits that hatched the mental film of the night?
    The laugh he’d heard in his dream rang out again, except that Bilodo was wide awake this time. It came from the next room. Someone was laughing in the living room. With a shock Bilodo recognised Robert’s distinctive braying and realised the clerk was right there, in the adjoining room. A squirt of fresh memory data splashed onto his mind: he suddenly remembered that after the wild spree, in the small hours of the morning, he had stupidly let his friend drive him home. His new home! His secret refuge!
    He recalled Robert’s drunken amazement when he found out the little sneak had moved without telling anyone, and then his surprise when he discovered the Japanese décor of Bilodo’s new lair. He recalled how his friend had explored the premises, looking for a geisha, drained a bottle of sake, pissed in the bathtub, knocked over the little tea table, then collapsed on the tatami and snored like a B-52 in search of a city to drop an atom bomb on. Bilodo’s migraine flared up. What an unforgivable blunder! Now the secret of his private fortress was out. Robert knew. He was right there, in the living room, and he was laughing. What could he be finding so funny?
    Bilodo managed to get up in spite of his seasickness and navigated his way into the corridor. Another burst of laughter from Robert. Bilodo held on to the wall and reached the doorway to the living room, where he found Robert in his boxer shorts and undershirt slouched in the armchair at the desk. He was reading something he obviously thought highly comical. And that thing was a haiku by Ségolène.
    The drawer was open. The young woman’s poems were scattered about on the desk and Robert had a few of them in his hand, defiling them with his sacrilegious gaze while he scratched his scrotum and even had the gall to recite them in his croaking Pithecanthropus voice.
    ‘“They act tough, flaunting / their avalanche clothes / but they are tender-hearted,”’
Robert said, guffawing. ‘In
those
clothes I guess they’d call a blow job a
snow
job.’
    At the sight of the clerk in his underwear holding Ségolène’s refined poems between his fat, disgusting fingers, sullying them with his glowering stare and coarse laugh, Bilodo felt