An extract from "Poids de rien" publication date April 2010, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in mid-August.
"It was the first day of September in Alsace, but to Jacques it might as well have been the first day of any month.
His days weren't defined so much by the passage of time, but by the piles of stinking clothing he had to work through - other people's dirt his peculiar badge of sorrow.
Disgusting, filthy animals, up to their necks in shit. Like cattle - and the women were worse than the men, he had found.
Jacques - bespectacled and unsympathetic in this, his 52nd year - mused on the strange discrepancy he had uncovered during the course of his job in Ninot's oppressive dry-cleaner's. Why is it that women should happily sink in their own ablutions when the mythical creature which lives in his mind is its exact opposite? As clean and pure and ungraspable as steam: this is a woman.
Oh, the oppression! If Jacques' life had been a pack of cards, every one he drew would have led him down this path of muck and heat and misogyny. 52 cards in the stack, each the bearer of some unlucky symbol or distant misfortune. Now they were all exhausted.
The first day of September, like the first of July, the first of February, promised nothing. The weight of nothing multiplied by nothing, months gathering months, a gaping, living zero, was an immense burden to Jacques. Zeroes pushing against each other, heads in a crowd.
Stinking clothes discarded by abnormal citizens. The only cipher he could push down between the days to differentiate one from the other."
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