The Reader on the 6.27 Read Online Free Page B

stainless steel sides often flashed through his mind at this point. He knew that the Thing was powerless to do any harm – the control unit was switched off, the fuel supply disconnected. But Guylain couldn’t help remaining on his guard, alert for the tiniest hint of a tremor, ready to tear himself out of the Thing’s clutches if it suddenly felt the urge to make a little snack of him. He released the cylinder housing and slid between the two rows of hammers. He still had to contort himself and crawl almost two metres to reach the lower rollers. He yelled to Brunner to pass him the grease gun through the side hatch. The gangly Brunner was too tall to be able to get inside the machine. It infuriated him not to be able to board the ship, to be forced to remain on the dock and be content with handing Guylain the 32-mm spanner, the oilcan or the hose. Guylain turned on his head lamp. It was here, in the still-warm steel belly, that he gathered the day’s harvest. There were a dozen or so pages waiting for him, always in the same spot between the stainless steel wall and the bracket of the last roller spiked with knives – the only place that was out of reach of the water jets. Flyaway pages that had been blown against the partition streaming with water and had landed on this spur of metal which had halted their fatal slide. Giuseppe called them live skins. ‘They’re the sole survivors of the massacre, kiddo,’ he would say, his voice emotional. Guylain hastily half-opened the zip of his boiler suit and slipped the dozen or so sopping pages under his T-shirt. After greasing the bearings one by one and thoroughly washing out the Thing’s stomach, he extracted himself from his prison with the day’s lucky pages snug and warm against his breast. As he often did, old Kowalski had torn himself out of his armchair to drag his mass of lard to the edge of the pigeon loft. He was tormented by the thought that one of his workers had been out of range of his spyhole for a few minutes. Despite the winking, blinking red lights on his cameras, he would never know what Vignolles got up to in the belly of the Zerstor. And that angelic smile that Guylain bestowed on him every evening on his way to the shower did nothing to reassure him.
    Guylain stood under the scalding shower for nearly ten minutes. He was sick of the sludge he wallowed in all day long. He needed to cleanse himself of this muck, wash away his crime between these four yellow-stained walls. He stepped out into the street with the feeling that he had come back from hell. Once on the train taking him back to the fold, he brought out the rescued pages and laid them gently on the blotting paper that would free them of the moisture swelling their fibres. So that the next day, on this same train, the live skins would finally give up the ghost as he released them from their words.

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    Guylain did not read during the return commute. He had neither the energy nor the desire. Nor did he sit on the orange jump seat. After laying the live skins on their blotting paper and putting the folder in his bag, he closed his eyes and allowed himself gradually to come back to life as the carriage rocked his tired body. Twenty peaceful minutes during which life flowed back into him while the ballast streaming past under the train absorbed the day’s ill humour.
    On exiting the station, Guylain walked up the avenue for nearly a kilometre then disappeared into the maze of pedestrian streets in the city centre. He lived on the third floor of an ancient apartment building at number 48, Allée des Charmilles. His cramped attic studio flat was spartan with its kitchenette from another era, Lilliputian bathroom and worn lino. When it rained, like today, the skylight let in water if there was a wind. In summer, the terracotta tiles greedily drank in the sun’s rays and transformed the thirty-six square metres into a furnace. And yet, each evening, Guylain arrived home with the same sense of relief,