Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

  Finally Cordélia spoke.

  ‘I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to … but they forced me.’

  That’s a lie, thought Christine, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘They forced me. And they gave me money. They told me that if I didn’t do it, I’d be out on the street. They’re threatening to evict me. With my baby.’

  Cordélia crossed her legs and once again Christine had to force herself not to look lower down.

  ‘I got this flat thanks to a friend who’s subletting it to me. I moved out of my parents’ place. And Anton’s father went away without leaving an address.’

  ‘Why did you leave home?’ asked Christine.

  ‘My father was drinking, my mother was drinking, my brother was drinking … My father is unemployed, so is my brother … When I was fifteen, my dear brother tried to fuck me and since I didn’t want to, he broke my tooth. Four people in fifty square metres; a family of nutcases. I didn’t want my baby to grow up in a place like that.’

  Is that where you grew so hard? Is it because of them that you became so cold? So calculating? Or is this just another lie? Another one of your inventions? It seemed so much like a lie that it might actually be the truth. It reeked of social deprivation, intellectual poverty, filth and alcoholism. No books, or hardly any – but there was bound to be a game console and a satellite dish, just to be sure their brains were steeped in vulgarity as well as alcohol … was that too much of a stereotype? But just look outside: the streets were full of stereotypes.

  ‘The internship,’ said Cordélia suddenly. ‘Ilan and you, you have no idea what it means to me. To work at a radio station. To learn. To come from where I come from and wind up there … It was as if for the first time I could imagine a future.’

  ‘How did you get the internship?’

  She hesitated. But she had begun. So why not carry on to the end?

  ‘I faked my CV. But I deserved the position. While my parents were sprawled in front of the telly, and my bastard brother was playing Grand Theft Auto IV, I was borrowing books from the library and devouring everything I could get my hands on. I had the best marks in French all through school, even if I dropped out when I was sixteen. I lied, that’s true. But I do good work, don’t I? At least as good as anyone else…’

  That’s not altogether true, thought Christine. More than once she’d been surprised to see the gaps in Cordélia’s knowledge and wondered how the girl had wound up there.

  ‘All I ask is for a chance to improve,’ insisted Cordélia. (Had she seen the flash of doubt in Christine’s eyes?) ‘I know I can. I work hard and I want to get ahead, and you know it.’

  Christine nodded. It was true that the girl wanted to get ahead. There was a hint of sincerity in what she had just said, something that rang true. And it touched her. Christine told herself she mustn’t be taken in, that she had to keep a cool head. The girl was trying to win her over.

  ‘The person’s name,’ she said, setting down her beer.

  ‘If I tell you, they’ll make me pay. A lot.’

  ‘Think of your son. You have my word that I will help you. Provided you help me.’

  She could see the inner struggle in Cordélia’s frightened eyes. And she came up with another idea.

  ‘Listen, here’s what I suggest: tell Guillaumot everything. I’ll stick up for you, I’ll tell him you were the victim of blackmail. I’ll tell him to keep your position for you, that you do good work. Not only will I not file a complaint, but I’ll help you – financially, too. All you have to do is tell Guillaumot everything. The name you will only tell me. That’s my business, and I won’t tell anyone about it.’

  ‘They’ll hurt my child!’

  Seeing that her pupils were once again dilated, Christine understood that she was terrified. She wasn’t bluffing.

  ‘I – I’ll – listen, we’ll find a place, for you, for you and your son…’

  Good God, what was happening to her?

  All of a sudden her words were sticking to her gums like toffee, refusing to leave her lips. She reached out towards the coffee table and her gesture seemed terribly slow. As if her brain wouldn’t cooperate. Or it was just the opposite: her body was rebelling. Her fingers hit the beer bottle and it fell over, rolling across the table with a strange, smooth, distorted sound, before it fell silently onto the carpet.

  ‘What is … what is wrong with me?’

  Cordélia was staring at her. Her lips tight.

  Christine concentrated. Get a grip, come on.

  Christiiinnneeee … are you suuuure you feel aaalll riiiiight?

  What sort of voice was that? She must have taken something to speak like that … what a ridiculous intonation …

  Christine restrained a nervous laugh; they were both completely stoned.

  It was as if her veins were running cold, and the room and the sofa were pitching like the deck of a ship.

  She looked at Cordélia and got a shock: she was removing her dressing gown. Her long body, covered with tattoos, like a hieroglyph, once again unveiled.

  Cordéliaaaaa … what are you doing?

  I don’t feeel weeelll … not weeelll at aaaalll …

  She saw the girl get up and come around the coffee table. Her sex filled Christine’s field of vision. Stunned and fascinated, once again she gazed at the sparkling genital piercing – then Cordélia’s still-childish face replaced it, obstructing her visual field, and a warm, moist mouth pressed against her own.

  Doooon’t mooooove …

  Christine tried to struggle. She was blinking, shivering; her face was soaked. She tried to struggle, to get up and leave, but she couldn’t budge an inch.

  She concentrated on Cordélia’s gestures. The girl had her back to her, she had opened a laptop computer on the coffee table. She was typing something.

  Christine saw her round buttocks, her long athletic back and her prominent shoulder blades. Her tattoos were going blurry.

  Heere weee gooo …

  Cordélia turned around. Christine knew she was about to pass out.

  Blackout …

  16

  Recitative

  A noise sliced through her brain like a blade. She woke up instantly. The noise came again, scraping over her nerves, and she realised it was a car horn.

  The sound of conversation in the street below; the sound of a motor – and then silence. Christine sat up.

  It was almost completely dark, only grey filtering between the slats of the blinds, and her fear of the dark returned. She tossed this way and that in sheets as black as her surroundings, which seemed to be a strange unknown place until she realised it was her own room. The feeling of silk on her skin: like a shroud. She was naked. An image came back to her with the sudden intensity of an electric shock: Cordélia, naked too, kissing her, her tongue in her mouth.

  Trembling, she groped for the switch on the bedside lamp but when she found it and pressed it nothing happened.

  Something was shining in the darkness, all the way at the end of the bed. A rectangle of grey only slightly paler than the ambient darkness: a screen.

  Its faint luminosity indicated that it was on sleep mode. She wondered, with a cruel feeling of vulnerability, how she had ended up here, who had undressed her and switched on her computer? And what had they done to her while she was asleep? Instinctively, she crawled across the bed to the screen to turn on the computer: anything but this dense gloom. Terrified, leaning on one elbow, she clicked on the trackpad. The computer came to life. The sudden brightness of the screen dazzled her, bringing relief, casting shadows all through the room. A video session was about to begin. A big triangular arrow in the middle of the screen was waiting for her, but something held her back: the certainty that what she was about to discover would plunge her even deeper into her nightmare.

  Her fingers slid over the trackpad, hesitated, then finally started the video.

  She recognised it right away.

  The door to flat 19B.
>
  A view of the interior of the little flat. A webcam, set up facing the front door. The shrill sound of the doorbell. The one she had made pressing the button. Then Cordélia’s tall form entering the camera’s field of vision. From behind. Naked. Her round, pale buttocks, separated by a deep groove. She unlocks the door. Pulls it open and Christine appears, seen from the front. Strangely familiar and strangely different from the picture she had of herself.

  On her MacBook Christine saw Christine looking at Cordélia, then Christine’s gaze running along the young woman’s body, stopping to stare for a long while at her groin. Christine felt her face flush. On the video, Christine’s eyes were open wide, her gaze glowing. There could be no doubt about the object of her fascination. Then Cordélia’s voice saying calmly, ‘Come in,’ and Christine following the intern into the flat.

  As if she expected you, she thought. As if you had been there before.

  The next image.

  Christine sitting on the sofa with her back to the camera.

  Only her neck and shoulders are visible; Cordélia is standing in front of her. In an eminently suggestive pose. She spreads her thighs, her fingers with their nails painted a neon yellow spread the lips of her vagina, in a gesture that is shockingly immodest and disturbingly intimate. Christine doesn’t move. She is as motionless as a statue.

  With her back to the camera, her attitude suggests that she is staring at the young woman’s genitals, the way she did in the doorway.

  The next image. Christine started: Christine and Cordélia naked on the sofa, facing the camera this time. They are kissing. Christine has her eyes closed, her hand is buried between the intern’s thighs, and they are kissing. The young woman is moaning. Christine is not moving – for good reason.

  The final image: Christine sees Christine on the sofa, once again with her back to the camera; Cordélia is facing her and counting a wad of bank notes:

  ‘Eighteen hundred … Nineteen hundred … Two thousand. Okay, I’ll withdraw my complaint. But it’s not just because of the money, it’s because you were so good at making me come.’

  Snow on the screen. The little private porn film was over.

  She gulped. Her temples pounded. She now had a partial answer to what had happened while she was unconscious.

  Trapped. If Guillaumot or anyone at the radio station happened to see this video, it would confirm everything Cordélia had said. And her career would be well and truly over. Was this blackmail? Was this the next stage? Is this how things were going to end? But she had already lost her fiancé and her job … What did she have left to lose?

  The drug she’d been given must still be in her blood, because her brain felt all foggy and her arms and legs were heavy.

  Suddenly she remembered her satchel and she looked anxiously all around her, then felt intense relief when she saw it on a corner of the bed. Next to it on the black sheet there was a white rectangle. She grabbed the piece of paper and held it up to the glow of the screen.

  A receipt for a bank withdrawal. She was overcome with panic.

  She recognised the first few and last few digits: it was her bank account. On it was written: ‘Withdrawal, date: 28/12/12, time: 10.03, cashpoint 392081’; a sum of €2,000 had been debited from her account that very morning. Then she made the connection with the images on the video where she’d seen the girl counting a wad of bank notes.

  A double trigger trap …

  There was something else on the sheet next to the MacBook. A plastic CD case. She grabbed it.

  Madame Butterfly. Opera, naturally.

  She recalled with a shiver that Madame Butterfly commits suicide at the end. Fear was working its way into every corner of her brain. Was that what they were trying to drive her to? A dreadful memory came to her: her father holding her so tight that it hurt, his strangely shrill, erratic voice saying over and over: Oh, my darling, there has been a terrible, terrible, terrible accident.

  She only learned the truth much later: Madeleine had hanged herself.

  At the age of sixteen.

  She closed the video player and saw that her email had stayed open on the screen. Or rather that someone had opened it while she was sleeping. Shit, she had downloaded an entire security package, erased all the cookies, changed her password – how was this possible? Her gaze scrolled mechanically through the emails that had come in since the last time she had checked. There was one from the vet entitled ‘Iggy’, there were several messages from online shops, then she froze: malebolge@hell.com. The subject of the message was ‘OPERA’. She held her breath and clicked the trackpad.

  I hope you like opera, Christine.

  Nothing else.

  Bloody fucking bastard!

  She grabbed the MacBook with both hands and with a gesture that was both liberating and vengeful hurled it with all her strength against the wall of the room, and watched as it smashed then fell to the floor, no longer functioning but almost intact: MacBooks are virtually indestructible …

  * * *

  In the little speakers, the first movement of the Ninth Symphony – light violins, hazy horns and sparkling harp – was like the mournful stillness of an autumn morning in the forest, when suddenly a storm of brass and strings burst forth after a thunder of pounding kettledrums. At this new surge of music in the little room beneath the eaves, Servaz looked up from his reading for a moment – not at something specific but in order to listen more attentively, his eyes lost in contemplation of the wall, that passage where the percussionist strikes the rhythm with dull thuds, as if signalling approaching tragedy. He’d heard it hundreds of times, yet he always felt it in his blood, those hammered blows of destiny.

  Relegating the music to the background, he re-focused his attention on the printed words. He still had trouble reading on screen, so he’d gone to the library before coming home. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, to be honest. But he had eventually unearthed a few books. And now he was immersed in titles such as The Manipulators Are Amongst Us or Moral Harassment: Perverse Violence in Everyday Life.

  What he gathered from these books was that certain encounters can change your life for the better and others can drive you to the brink, or even constitute mortal danger. Within society there were perverse, manipulative minds, people who every day caught in their nets weak and vulnerable individuals, men and women whom they went to great lengths to control, debase and destroy. Was this what had happened to Célia Jablonka? Had she fallen in with a bad lot? When he got home he typed Moki into an Internet search engine and discovered that the Blue Moki was a perciform fish native to New Zealand, the Moki Bar was a concert café in the 20th arrondissement in Paris, and the word was also used to refer to a type of haiku in Japanese. But there was no one by the name of Moki in either the White or the Yellow Pages – no Moki at all other than in Célia Jablonka’s diary.

  In his reading, Servaz discovered there was a first stage, called breaking and entering, when the manipulator did everything in his power to penetrate the other person’s psychic territory, causing them to lose their bearings, and invading their thoughts and replacing them with his own. Then came control and isolation: from family, friends, loved ones. Like in a cult, thought Servaz. At the same time, denigration, humiliation and acts of intimidation were destined to bring on a collapse of identity in the victim’s mind, and to destroy their self-esteem.

  If the victim resisted, showed opposition and didn’t react as predicted, then out came threats, physical violence and, when the victim was a woman, sexual violence – including rape, or murder. Once again, Servaz wondered if this was what had happened to Célia. Should he dig deeper or was he wasting his time? She hadn’t been married, but maybe she’d had a boyfriend, a companion at the time of the event. Had he been interrogated? There was virtually no information in the file that Desgranges had given him. The case had been closed very quickly.

  He went on reading.

  According to these texts, psychological violence was deeply egal
itarian, transcending social class. Domestic and professional tyrants were everywhere, hidden behind an innocuous social masquerade.

  Finally, when it came to couples, the bully knew his victim very well – her weaknesses, her flaws: this gave him a considerable advantage. In this case, psychological violence consisted in humiliating, debasing, provoking a feeling of shame, and making the victim lose all self-confidence: ‘What would become of you without me?’ The partner was terrorised by indirect aggression perpetrated against animals or children; she was cut off from former friends and family; her defences were methodically undermined by a continuous barrage of minor attacks until she ended up losing any ability to discriminate, until she was immersed in a state of mental confusion, having lost all bearings, incapable of distinguishing what was normal from what was abnormal. Until she reached a point where she tolerated what was intolerable. She would be held captive in a climate of permanent tension and anxiety: the victim never knew where the next attack might come from, or when. Whereas the partner remained two-faced: smiling, affable and likable on the outside; unstable, intimidating and scornful within the four walls of home – so much so that it was the victim who eventually ended up seeming difficult and antisocial in the eyes of others, when sometimes she could no longer help but overreact at odd times.

  With the spread of the Internet, stalkers could now choose their targets outside the family or the workplace. The Web had made this activity, too, more democratic: it was no longer only celebrities who fell victim to stalkers; anyone could be a target now.

  Servaz stood up and went to the window.

  Night was falling on the expanse of snow and woods as it melted into the greyness, slowly turning to midnight blue.

  He went back to Célia.

  If someone had driven her to suicide, Servaz didn’t believe that they were acting without motivation. Unmotivated crime didn’t exist. Serial killers struck because of their sexual drive, crimes of passion were driven by jealousy, fraud by the lure of money; even a stalker only became a stalker because at a given moment something about his victim had drawn his gaze: there was always a motive. And that motive, if it existed, if Célia Jablonka wasn’t simply depressive and paranoid, must be hidden somewhere in the details of her life.