At The Tip Of Your Fingers

- Chapter 1 -

INSUFFICIENT BALANCE

That is what I was reading on the ATM screen. It had been three days since I had made a real complete meal and I dreamed of biting into a tomato and letting the juice flow into my mouth. It was over 30°C and I could not take it anymore with the diet of dehydrated noodles and sandwiches from the vending machine that I had been imposing on myself for several weeks, but my bank account was definitely empty.

I had not always been poor, far from it, one can even say that I used to belong to the good society, my father was the head of an investment company and we lived in a huge house of which I used to have an entire floor all for myself. I had never really cared about what my father's job was all about, he made enough money to keep his beloved daughter and beautiful wife safe from everything, that was enough for me. Before meeting my father, my mother had had a vague career as a model and when this rich man married her she decided to become an "artist". In other words, she spent most of her time discussing new trends with pseudo-intellectuals who were hanging around the house day and night. I loved my life. My parents loved me above all else, my father spoiled me and my mother had always encouraged me to develop my marginal side. I had taken many courses of everything and especially nothing: piano, ballet, silk painting, gardening and others. But what I loved most of all was writing, I had set my mind to become a writer and, like my mother, to spend my evenings with literary critics whistling champagne glasses and talking about a world we did not know, perched atop our ivory tower.

From then on I had lost everything. My father turned out to be in debt and when he had his heart attack at 50 my mother and I were out of business in no time. She could not stand it and one night she emptied a bottle of sleeping pills. In the letter she left she said that imagining life without my father was unbearable, but the bad tongues, which had previously been our neighbours and friends, had rumoured that it was mostly the money she could not survive without. That was when I discovered that all the people I thought were our loved ones actually saw us only through the prism of money and that without it we would no longer have much interest. With both my parents only children and my grandparents deceased, I was left alone in the world at the age of 22. My friends had turned their backs on me, too. And what about Jules, my boyfriend? The coward had told me verbatim that he was too young and too sensitive to tolerate the scandal and trouble inherent to my new situation. So we broke up the week after my mother died. I buried my parents, sold everything I had left and moved to a place where no one knew me to start my life over.

So it was in front of this terminal of the cash machine that I was now standing. I was renting a room from an old lady for the summer before the start of the new academic year. I now had less than a week to move before the student who usually occupied the room during the school year returned. Faced with the interstellar emptiness of my bank account, I decided to turn around and go home. The hot and charged summer air made me sweat big drops and hunger gave me a headache. I could have taken a bus with air conditioning pushed to the limit, but even buying a bus ticket turned out to be a luxury I could not afford. It was therefore the feet bruised by sandals whose straps threatened to let go soon that I took the way to my room. The thought of being able to remove the tight jeans that cut into my skin was the only thing making me not faint on the tarmac. I struggled to climb the five floors leading to the small old-fashioned apartment I shared with my 80-year-old roommate. She visited her family several hundred kilometres away, which allowed me to enjoy the space as I pleased.

As soon as I crossed the threshold of the shaded apartment, I undressed completely before lying entirely naked on the fresh tiles of the kitchen. I had only planned to lie down for a few moments, but the comforting cocoon that the cold ground provided against my clammy and burning flesh got the better of my exhaustion and I finally fell asleep.