Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan

of an hour. At the end of the platform the predominant smell is urine, but it’s the only place you can sit down. She’s tired. Some days when she’s listening for the sound of the train, her buttocks stuck to the orange plastic, she wonders deep down whether it wouldn’t be better to spend the whole day in the bowels of the earth, let the useless hours flow by, and around lunchtime go up a level to buy a sandwich, then go back down and resume her place. Remove herself from the flow, the movement.
    Give in.
     
    The ROPO arrived. She hesitated for a second and then went into the carriage. Once seated she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again till the train came back up to ground level. The weather was bright.
    Eight minutes later, at Vert-de-Maisons, she got out of the carriage and went towards the main exit, a bottleneck where a line of travellers soon built up, like at the supermarket checkout. She waited her turn, then filled her lungs with the outside air.
     
    Mathilde takes the stairs, goes into the tunnel under the tracks and comes out again at street level.
    She’s been making the same journey for eight years, the same steps every day, the same turnstiles, the same underground passages, the same glances at clocks; each day her hand reaches out in the same place to hold or push the same doors, touches the same rails.
    Exactly the same.
     
    Just as she’s leaving the station, it seems that she’s reached her own limit, her saturation point beyond which it’s impossible to go. It feels as though each of her actions, each of her movements, because they have been repeated three thousand times, threatens her balance.
    Though she has lived for years without thinking about it, today this repetition seems to her like a sort of violence being done to her body, a silent sort of violence capable of destroying her.

Mathilde is over an hour late. She doesn’t hurry, doesn’t quicken her step. She doesn’t phone ahead to say she’s almost there. No one could care less anyway. Little by little, Jacques has managed to take away from her all the important projects she was working on, to distance her from any issues, to reduce her involvement with the team to a minimum. Through a lot of reorganisation and redefinition of assignments and responsibilities, he has managed in the space of a few months to strip her of everything that constituted her job. Under increasingly obscure pretexts, he has succeeded in excluding her from meetings that would have kept her in the loop or enabled her to get involved in other projects. In early December, Jacques sent her an email to tell her that she absolutely had to take the two days’ holiday that she hadn’t used that year. The day before she went, he arranged an impromptu drinks party for the whole floor the next day. He postponed the date of her annual appraisal ten times and eventually announced that it would not be happening, without offering any explanation.
     
    In the street parallel to the railway line, Mathilde has stopped. She turns to the light long enough to feel the sun on her face, to let its warmth bathe her eyes and hair.
    It’s gone ten when she goes through the door of the Brasserie de la Gare.
    It’s gone ten and she couldn’t give a damn.
     
    Bernard, with a dishcloth over his shoulder, gives her a broad smile: ‘So, young lady, we didn’t see you on Friday for the Loto . . .’
    Now she’s playing the lottery twice a week, reading her horoscope in Le Parisien and going to see clairvoyants.
    ‘I took a day off to go on my son’s school trip to the chateau of Versailles. The teacher needed volunteers.’
    ‘Was it good?’
    ‘The rain never stopped.’
    Bernard groans in sympathy and turns to the coffee machine.
     
    Mathilde takes a table. Today’s the twentieth of May, so she’s not going to drink it standing up. Today, on the twentieth of May, she is going to sit down, because it has taken her over an hour and a half to get here and she’s