Free Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan Page A

In fact, looking more closely, the furniture in room 500-9 is made up of disparate items that correspond to the firm’s different periods: light wood, metal, white Formica. Room 500-9 has no window. The only source of light comes from the glazed panel which separates it from the supply store, which does have external light.
    On the other side, room 500-9 shares a wall with the men’s toilets for the floor, from which it is separated by a plywood wall.
    In the company, room 500-9 is known as ‘the storeroom’ or else ‘the shit-hole’. Because you can very clearly detect the smell of Glacier Freshness air freshener as well as the sound of the toilet-paper dispenser.
    Legend has it that a restless trainee over the course of several weeks recorded precise statistics about the number of trips to the toilet and average consumption of toilet paper of all the managers on the floor. An Excel spreadsheet appeared on the desk of the managing director at the end of the study.
    That’s why room 500-9 stands empty most of the time.
     
    Mathilde has placed the Argent Defender in front of her. She’s more than half-tempted to talk to him, or rather murmur in a beseeching tone: ‘So what are you going to do?’
    The Argent Defender must have nodded off somewhere, taken a wrong turning in the corridor and ended up on the wrong floor. Like all princes and white knights, the Argent Defender displays a dubious sense of direction.
     
    From where she sits with the door open, Mathilde can see all the comings and goings. Count, note, establish possible links. It’s a distraction at least.
    Éric has just gone by. He was looking straight ahead. He didn’t stop.
    Mathilde hears the sounds, identifying them one by one – the lock, the extractor fan, the jet of urine, paper, flush, washbasin.
    She doesn’t even want to cry.
    She must have slipped by mistake into another reality. A reality she cannot understand or take in, a reality the truth of which she cannot grasp.
    It’s not possible. Not like this.
    Without anything ever being said. Nothing that would allow her to go beyond, to make amends.
     
    She could phone Patricia Lethu, ask her to come down right away and show her that she doesn’t even have a computer any more.
    She could throw her files around the room, fling them as hard as she can against the walls.
    She could leave her new office, start shouting in the corridor, or sing Bowie at the top of her voice, play some chords on the air guitar, dance in the middle of the open-plan area, sway on her heels, roll on the ground so that people look at her, to prove that she exists.
    She could call the managing director without going through his secretary, tell him she doesn’t give a fuck any more about proactiveness, the optimisation of interpersonal skills, win-win strategies, the transfer of competence, and all these fuzzy concepts he’s been feeding them for years, that he’d do better to get out of his office, to come and see what’s going on, to smell the sickening stench that’s invaded the corridors.
    She could show up in Jacques’s office armed with a baseball bat and methodically destroy everything: his collection of Chinese vases, the talismans he brought back from Japan, his ‘director’s’ armchair in leather, his flat-screen and his CPU, his framed lithographs, the glass on his storage cabinet. She could tear down his Venetian blinds with her bare hands, with one gesture sweep all his marketing literature on to the floor and trample it in a fury.
     
    Because there is this violence in her which surges up all at once: a continuous cry held back for too long.
    This is not the first time.
    The violence first appeared a few weeks ago when she realised what Jacques was capable of. When she understood that this had only just begun.
     
    One Friday evening, when she had just got home, Mathilde received a call from Jacques’s secretary. Jacques was held up in the Czech Republic. He had agreed to write an article for