Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  When he gets home, as a rule, his face changes. He relaxes. Takes off the mask. But today, something’s not the same as usual. He rearranges his expression before going into the living room.

  This dark woman with short hair is sitting on the couch. Legs apart. Like a guy. Not like a tart, like she’s really a man, no kidding. Good-looking for her age. That’s because of her skin, the grain of her skin catches the light, looks luminous. And her nose is delicate. She’s got big eyes. Serious-looking. She doesn’t smile at him when he comes in, she looks him straight in the eye, just long enough to let him know she’s not going to be apologetic about anything. He sees that his mother’s offered her coffee, the empty cup’s on the low table. His mother explains.

  ‘She’s looking for your cousin Valentine. She’s run away. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  Nadja gets up, and puts her hand on his shoulder as she goes past. Everyone says they look like each other. She’s exactly his height. He’d have looked good too if he’d been a girl. His sister’s beautiful. Her beauty is grave and majestic. Not like those silly little girls who only wear headscarves because it’s today’s fashion, and then behave like sluts when they’re waiting for the bus. Modern Islam, a stupid idea invented by Muslims in France. Nadja started wearing the veil before he’d started growing a beard. For two years, she’d pinched his cheek when they were alone: ‘Think it’ll grow one day, or will you always be a baby?’ Now she asks him: ‘Want a coffee?’ and goes into the kitchen. From the way both women are acting, he knows that the stranger must have behaved correctly. They don’t need to wait for him if they want to kick someone out. Even if she looks slightly daunting, this woman. Not fat, but capable of a bit of strong-arming. Sturdy shoulders, straight back. A plain-clothes cop, perhaps. She hasn’t bothered to smile when she looks at him. Makes a nice change. The French are so hypocritical. Nation of shopkeepers. They always start by being smarmy, when what they really want is to shaft you.

  ‘I’m looking for Valentine. I work for a private detective agency. She went missing a week or so back. I saw on the internet that she’d got in touch with her mother’s family recently… so I took the liberty of calling to see you, to ask whether she had… mentioned anything that might give me some clues to follow up.’

  You can tell she’s making an effort, all the same. Trying to talk politely, so that they won’t be insulted. And that in itself is insulting. Well, anyway, do what she likes, there’s no way we can get on, her sort of people and our sort of people. Only the kind of French who live in cloud cuckoo land could imagine it’s still possible to understand each other. The ones who never see any rats. In the places they live, the way they live. No meeting possible. No forgiveness. No argument. The people who don’t like them are absolutely right. The day Yacine has something to say, he’ll have his knife on him. For now it’s a cold war. When things get bloody, he’ll be there. And war’s like football: they’ll be world champions. Yacine takes the coffee his sister holds out to him, pulls over a chair and sits down face to face with the newcomer. His mother speaks, neither friendly nor aggressive, just going over what she’s already said, spontaneously, so that Yacine can see the line to take.

  ‘We haven’t seen her since Christmas. You haven’t seen her either, have you? No, like I said. She wants to know where Louisa is. Well, we’d like to know that too.’

  His mother loves her sister, Louisa. He knows that she misses Louisa, that they were close when they were young. Of all her sisters, even though they never see each other now, she’s still her favourite. That was why, when Valentine turned up, his mother was happy. Louisa’s daughter! She didn’t look much like her mother, but still, it was a bit of her coming back, a corner of her life reappearing. Since Louisa’s changed her name to Vanessa, she’s thought herself too grand for them. Apparently she lives in some palace now, in Barcelona. The high life. Vice often pays. She’s always used her brains to find herself a place in the sun, and she’d rather fall out with her entire family than see that bunch of losers turn up on her doorstep to dirty her carpets. One of these days, Sheitan in person will come and tell her he likes her style, but till then she’s right to act the way she does. The more you give your family, the more they hate you. But parents, that’s different. And Vanessa never speaks to hers any more. What astonishes Yacine is that his mother, who’s so proud, and upstanding and intransigent, can regret the loss of her sister, when Louisa isn’t even bothered to know whether her own parents are all right. No phone calls, nothing. Of course she abandoned her daughter too. Though the daughter’s got a cushy life, you have to say, but still. He’d asked Valentine if it was true she’d never heard from her, no, nothing, not a thing. In their house too, any photos of Louisa have been burnt or carefully cut out from the family snaps. Because of the evil eye. Because for ages, whenever a kid was ill or some slacker lost his job, it was ‘Louisa putting the evil eye on them’. With Nadja, on the quiet, they would laugh together. Yeah, right, Vanessa lives in a posh district, she’s treated like a princess, she goes to the hammam with Jews, and eats fancy food off porcelain dishes, but when she’s awake in her bed, she envies her family. That same bunch of losers. Of course she does, logical, that’s the way it’s got to be. But in fact he’s never seen Louisa. Even his mother no longer has any photos of her. He knows what it cost her, the day she had to bring them all out, so that they could be burnt in front of the whole family. But she did it, without cheating. That’s the way his mother is, straight, honest. Never does anything behind your back, everything’s always up front with her. Good deeds don’t often get rewarded, and his mother’s probably the one in their family who’s had to take the most godawful jobs, cleaning up other people’s shit, and she’s seen hard times, like when his father went off, and the kind of bad stuff you get from people when they see you’re trying to behave correctly. More correctly than them. Because when they see someone decent, they feel threatened. But anyway her children are all OK. Not one of them goes round moaning, ‘Oh, it’s society’s fault I have to deal shit, French society forced me to drink wine, society turned me into a piece of rubbish hanging about in the stinking stairwell.’ They stand up straight. Yacine’s responsible for his own actions. He knows where Louisa is. He doesn’t know her address, but he knows she’s in Barcelona. His cousin told him, that big slob, Radia’s son. How he found out was nobody’s business. He’d been mighty interested in Valentine, and pissed off because she only had eyes for Yacine.

  When this girl had turned up, one Sunday, his cousin’d been like one of those old-fashioned cartoons, the wolf with his tongue hanging out and dollar signs whizzing round in his eyes. Knocked sideways. Nobody said a thing while she was there, but you could see what all the younger members of the family were thinking: she’s loaded! Even her way of sitting on a chair looked like a million dollars. She immediately took to Yacine. She picked him out from all the others milling round her. He’d taken her back home. He felt sorry for her. Valentine was rolling in it, you could tell by her handbag, her cute haircut, her top-of-the-range Nike trainers… but Yacine had recognized from the start that the little princess was unhappy. He didn’t distrust her for long, because she was too vulnerable. Completely nuts, ready to do anything, and totally lacking in self-esteem. He’d have liked to do something to help her, but she was beyond help. Living in this flat in central Paris, 200 square metres, where her bedroom was bigger than their living room, and having pocket money like it grew on trees. He’d never seen her without a few banknotes on her. But Valentine had nowhere to put her feet on this earth. She was a lost soul, floating somewhere in the stratosphere. Her father couldn’t give a toss about his daughter, her stepmother wanted her out of the way, her grandmother couldn’t stomach her any more, and her bitch of a mother had even forgotten the date of her birthday. At first Yacine had been wary, because she was like no one else he’d ever known. But she tamed him. Valentine laughed non-stop. She contradicted herself all the time, with comical careless
ness. From a distance, you’d think she was totally frivolous. But close to, it was more complicated. Getting to know her, he’d discovered for the first time in his life that there’s such a thing as the misery of the rich. He wasn’t going to shed tears over her lot, but he finally worked out why she was sad. Valentine just didn’t have anything much. Socially, yeah, she’d probably do better than his family, the world was her oyster. Even if she didn’t do anything but mess about or get into trouble. Wealth is a thick mattress, it breaks any fall, and lets you bounce back. Where he is, it’s another matter. The walls close in on you, month after month, the registered letter, always the same, you won’t make it, you’ll never make it. You take up too much space. You want too much all the time. You’re always too hungry.

  Crisis, what crisis? This is all he’s ever known. So he’s hardly going to take fright at it now. How could they have any less than they have now? Cut off the hot water? OK, go ahead, we’ll manage, like we’ve always managed. All the same. Valentine was worse off than he was. Buy all you want, you’ll never fill that big hole eating up your heart. If he compared Nadja and Valentine, he saw a queen and a dropout. Valentine made an effort when she saw him, but however much she watched what she said, he could always second-guess her. All over the place and damaged. And that darkness inside her was waiting to burst out. He’d come very close.

  He’d slept with her. Almost at once. He’d never told Nadja. He’d hardly pulled out before he was already regretting it. But he’d started again. Often. The animal in him was straining at the leash. She drew him to her. Every millimetre of her skin was screaming for him to come into her. Yacine knew she would sleep with anyone. He ought to have been disgusted. But he doubted it was the same for her with anyone else like it was with him. The first time, she’d started putting on an act, the easy lay who knows all the little tricks. Playing the good-time girl, I’m so emancipated, suggesting porn-star positions, and making too much noise. But it had all changed very fast. She hadn’t been expecting that either. They had frozen, arms round each other, drenched in sweat, astonished, on the edge of an abyss, and looked at each other, wondering what was happening to them. Surprised by the violence of what they’d started. Not the usual kind of teenage brutality, with a bit of violent fighting and clumsy sodomy. Not that kind of thing at all. Unspeaking, beyond words. A magnetic path from which they couldn’t escape. At that moment he saw her transfigured: a black virgin. Deep inside her, a blood-red heart opening up to swallow him. It was like a hammer blow, invisible and of phenomenal force, sending him into a darkness filled with whispers. They were in a clammy intensity, a dark and overgrown jungle. When their skins touched they reached a different level of sensuality. Valentine was transformed: a goddess of destruction, holy and terrifying. He was altered too. And that frightened him.

  But not her. Straight away afterwards, all she did was keep quiet for a moment, while her prosaic partner regained possession of his body. Her wings came off. It didn’t mean more than that to her. She was without any sense of the sacred that might allow her to fear the forces they were unleashing. She was too trivial to be distressed. She was just a teenage girl again. With her dopey way of talking. Giggling about nothing, with something fragile and flaky at the back of her eyes. Just a girl. Attractive, annoying. Normal. He didn’t like the power he had glimpsed. It freaked him out. And what attracted him most was precisely what made him want to run away. A huge force, that he was the only one to be summoning up. He never let himself go to sleep alongside her: he thought she was quite capable of putting a knife in his guts.

  No good could ever come of it for them. She was full of all the fancy ways of a French girl who thinks she’s liberated. As if liberation meant letting yourself be screwed like a whore by some guy who wants nothing to do with you when you’re dressed again. Yacine is used to girls, he often talks to them, they don’t scare him. Valentine wasn’t the first to run past him her little number about sexual freedom, the right of girls to like it and not to feel defiled if someone touches them up, and so on and so forth. It would have pleased him if it had been true, he’d have liked to meet a woman who really didn’t care and came out of it OK. Not one of those who makes believe, who takes it up the ass, and then when she can’t sit down makes up some story about how she’s happier standing up. It would be nice if the world was like that. But walls are walls. The mouse can always pretend she gets on fine with the cat, but the day he bites her in the neck, she’ll be on the ground and he’ll have a good meal. It’s like the tarmac all round them, it’s concrete, you can’t escape it and nobody cares whether you like it or not. There’s an order in this world.

  He’d stopped seeing her. He’d fucked her one more time, in an alley, anyone could have seen them, from behind, like a whore. It hadn’t succeeded in making things sordid enough for him to be free of that image of her. It had been fantastic, yet again. When she turned round to look him in the eye, there was no more to be done. They both knew they’d crossed the frontiers. She was a divinity. Too attractive. Pleasure in abjection. To touch her made him too feverish. He had no desire to learn any more about this stranger inside him, the one who emerged every time he touched her.

  Just after he had come, making her take it up the back, she had stayed with her forehead against the wall. He’d walked away without saying anything. When she called to him, he’d said it was over, she must forget him, give him up. He didn’t want her to come near him again. Ever. She hadn’t insisted. She’d disappeared from his life.

  He had missed her, missed not seeing her any more. He even missed her silliness. When she got angry, she was like a furious kitten. But he breathes more easily now he doesn’t see her. It’s a danger avoided.

  His mother and Nadja are still talking away with the detective. He’s surprised how friendly they’re being. This private eye’s good at her job. They don’t usually chat like that. Especially since they hardly know Valentine, in fact. They’re going on about how happy she was to discover she had a family, how she liked meeting her grandparents, her false shyness. Yacine says nothing. He gets up to make some coffee, and offers one to the woman, who accepts at once; he wonders if she’s going to camp there. She’s carrying out her plan, saying ‘Oh really?’ and ‘Are you sure about that?’ to get the conversation going again, you can see that mentally she’s registering every word.

  In the kitchen, he heats up some water. A spoonful of instant coffee in both glasses. The detective appears, stops at the kitchen door and asks: ‘Can I have five minutes with you on your own?’ He gestures towards a chair with his head. She acts like a cop, Clint Eastwood style. She must have seen his films when she was young and considered him a good role model. Yacine wonders what kind of man shacks up with a woman like this. Must have brass-lined balls, her guy. Yeah, she’s good-looking. But too masculine. Could be a turn-on, but you can’t imagine yourself coming home at night and asking her what’s for supper. You’re be scared she’d punch you on the jaw. Yacine looks at the floor, hands clasped between his knees, unmoving. She says nothing. He breaks the silence.

  ‘I didn’t say anything in there, because I’ve got nothing to say.’

  ‘But I know that Valentine was in love with you, I think you saw each other without anyone else knowing, and what I’d like is if you’d tell me, just quickly, what happened.’

  How does she know this? She was careful to keep her voice low so that they can’t hear from the next room. He doesn’t like what she said one bit. He keeps calm.

  ‘You’re wondering if I’ve locked her up in some cellar and how much I want for her? Sorry, madame, wrong address. Try the Africans across the landing, maybe they’ve eaten her?’

  She stares at him, glacially, then changes tactics and bursts out laughing. She can look after herself. Women as a rule find it hard not to convey that they find him attractive. Even when they try to play ice-queen, there’s some giveaway glance or smile. They can’t hide it. But not her. She’s got the situation under control. She’s unr
eachable. It makes her attractive. In spite of everything, he’s glad he made her laugh.

  ‘I don’t know where you’ve dug up a story like that, I don’t know any more than what they told you next door, and that’s the truth.’

  ‘Ah yes, but on the internet there are some pictures of the two of you… Photos, I wouldn’t exactly call them compromising, but the way she’s looking at you, I’d say that you know each other a lot better than you’re telling me.’

  He is silent. Nadja and her damned computer. Nadja and her craze for photos. He doesn’t bother himself with what she gets up to on the internet. He’d forgotten the photos. The private eye isn’t charming now, she’s just a standard model cop. An unarmed cop. Out come the violins.

  ‘And you don’t think she might be in danger, and it would be better if I can find her?’

  What he really ought to do is slash her ugly mug and have done with it. He clenches his teeth. He hates her. He has no desire to tell her what happened. She insists, still speaking in a low voice.

  ‘If you like, we can go down for a walk, nobody else needs to know what we’re talking about. I’ve got a deal to suggest.’

  ‘You’re threatening me? You’ll make trouble for me if I don’t cooperate, right?’

  She leans across and speaks in such a quiet voice that her lips hardly move, she doesn’t stop looking him in the eye, her face is expressionless.

  ‘Your cousin Karim, for me it’s not a problem to get them to reopen the file, discover it was a case of mistaken identity and he shouldn’t have been charged. I can get him out in 48 hours. Interested?’

  That waste of space. His cousin Karim. Shooting around on his scooter, when some other kids were chucking stones at the police. This one cop got hit on the head, bust a blood vessel, and was paralysed after that. OK, tough luck, but come on, it’s his job, he should have been wearing riot gear and a helmet. What kind of cop goes round in the middle of a riot without head protection? Practically professional misconduct. They arrested everyone in sight, of course. Karim hung about, because he’s stupid, and he thought just because he hadn’t done anything, no reason to rush off. And they got hold of him, among others. They formally identified him – as if you have time to photograph one out of about fifty guys milling round the place. He didn’t get done for the stone that hit the cop, by chance they pinned that on another couple of cretins. Apparently those two weren’t even down there when it happened. They were fetched out of their homes. But between what people say and what really happened, they don’t bother to distinguish. Karim’s been charged with attacks on public property, supposedly setting fire to a dustbin during the riot. As if he had nothing better to do. He could cop it hard though. Be made an example. Actually, Yacine has never liked his cousin. He’s stingy, cowardly and fat, he likes football, porn movies and fancy cars. Not much to be done with him. But he’s family. The bitch. She’s really worked hard on her little file, before turning up at the door with her foundation-covered face. Yacine resists. But he knows she’s got him.