When she catches sight of them, down below her house, at first she thinks they must be girls from the design studio, come out to have a smoke in the sun. They often do that. Then she remembers that it’s been closed down. The site hasn’t found a new taker, the To Let sign has been set crookedly on the terrace for months now. As she comes up level with them, she looks them over – at the dinner parties she goes to, people tell atrocious stories about women being tortured for hours in their own homes by vicious Albanians who’ve broken into their houses, so she’s wary. One of them’s a bit taller than the other, she’s wearing baggy jeans low-slung on her hips, which are remarkably slender. She has big boots, rather shabby and well worn, and her mirror-glasses date from two summers ago, but they suit her. The other one is stockier, ordinary-looking. Vanessa is used to people staring at her with that astonished insistence, people notice her and can’t take their eyes off her. She really is a striking beauty. But when the taller one gets up and comes towards her, Vanessa understands who she is.
Lying on his back on the couch, Bel-Ami is watching what’s going on round him, head thrown back. The detective unhesitatingly makes towards the cat, who doesn’t run off, although he’s normally very snappy. When she touches him, her gestures are incredibly gentle, she crouches down beside him, scratching him under the chin and making him purr.
‘What a beautiful cat. What’s his name?’
‘Bel-Ami. I found him in the gutter in the middle of August. He was a little alleycat, you’d never think he was going to turn into this, well, sublime creature.’
The detective stands upright and accepts the offer of coffee. Quite an impressive specimen, but she’s let herself go. No makeup, no decent haircut, she’s wearing practical clothes that don’t display her at her best. The smaller one, Lucie, isn’t good-looking at all. And she hasn’t tried hard either. She gets good marks for that. In Vanessa’s book, compiled over time, plain women who don’t try to disguise it are less pathetic than ugly ones who put on the slap and dress as if they were raving beauties. Women’s magazines and the cosmetics industry get blamed for a lot of things, but they’re not often accused of the real damage they do: they make a nation of puddings imagine that with a bit of effort anyone can look like what they are not. Nothing is more pitiful than a plain woman in an eye-catching dress, or a fat one trying to show off her good points. In this respect, true, men’s views do not coincide with Vanessa’s. They have their own criteria, nothing to do with good taste. They’d always prefer someone with greasy skin and a figure she’s let go, as long as she’s well-presented, rather than a perfectly passable girl without makeup. Luckily, fashion is dictated by the kind of men who don’t listen to what women think. The tall one is a real beauty, for all she has the stance of an all-in wrestler, she has a feline power: one wants to watch her move.
Vanessa puts the coffee on the table and opens the doors on to the terrace, then excuses herself to consult her voicemail: nobody has left her a message, but she needs some time to think. She didn’t want to turn her mind earlier to what she would do when this happened. In fact, she has scrupulously avoided thinking about it. She was expecting a man, just one of him. When the word ‘masculine’ passed through her mind, she looked at the taller detective, put two and two together, and came up with: lesbian. Short nails, the air of a plumber’s mate, very pleased with herself. Lesbian. She remembers a phrase from Arno, the Belgian singer, that she heard on the radio: ‘Lesbian, yeah, may not look too hot, but don’t we have fun!’ She herself had never considered that lesbians didn’t look good, she’s known too many of them. Perverted perhaps, but that’s not the same thing. Vanessa stands up the way she would if she were facing a man, making her body move gracefully through space in order to disturb the person in front of her, and mark her domination. She wants to impress the tall one. Women who are disturbed hide it better than men. And it’s more exciting.
The detective remarks, ‘You don’t seem surprised to see us.’
‘Claire Galtan warned me.’
‘You know each other?’
‘Not really.’
They’ve met only once, at Claire’s insistence. François has never forgotten Vanessa, and his new wife must have imagined that meeting her absent rival would make her lose her power. It had been a long time ago. Poor woman. Big bust and skinny legs, she looked a bit like a chick in a cartoon: a huge pair of boobs perched on top of tall boots. Very fine skin, but her oval face was already a bit puffy. She had a rather fetching short-sighted expression, which made her look cowlike and affectionate. Vanessa felt slightly sorry for François. Ending up marrying something like that. Hardly surprising if he was still having difficulty moving on. He had once thought himself so handsome… I bet he doesn’t take her out often, his lawful wedded.
It was Claire who, on that occasion, had warned her that Valentine wanted to find out where her ‘real’ mother was. She had explained that since she had two daughters herself, and they were what she cared about most in the world, she understood why the teenager wanted to see her ‘real’ mother again, inviting Vanessa to rethink her decision.
‘My decision?’
‘François explained to me what happened, but I thought, perhaps with time…’
It had been during the winter sales, they’d met at Angelina’s. For a hot chocolate. Vanessa made a sign to her to stop right there. ‘Does François know you’ve come to meet me?’
‘No, I thought I’d only tell him if you…’
‘Do you realize how furious he’ll be? If he finds out I’ve told you the way things really happened, you know that you’ll never think of him again the same way?’
She had no intention of telling, on the contrary, the other woman could be left to worry about that. Work out who you’ve married, what kind of a pathetic bastard your husband is.
Claire had finally admitted that she’d found Vanessa’s whereabouts after coming across the report of her latest marriage, carefully clipped from a newspaper and filed away by François. She had said, ‘If I could find out, Valentine could do the same any time. It wasn’t difficult, I telephoned your husband’s office and left him a message… which obviously he passed on to you.’
She had felt no joy at the thought that François was still interested in her. Disgust simply. And Claire paid for it. Because she was there, because she wouldn’t tell, because she was the kind of woman one felt like giving a good shaking to.
Since then, Vanessa hadn’t heard a word from her. Until a fortnight ago, when Claire had called in tears, to warn her that Valentine had disappeared. ‘What business is it of yours? You’ve got a nerve, crying about my daughter as if she was your own.’ And she’d hung up. Which hadn’t stopped Claire, masochistic Claire, from calling a second time, to say they’d hired a detective, ‘from the best agency in Paris’ – people with money always need to console themselves with the idea that they’ve shelled out more than common mortals – and that Vanessa would surely be getting a visit from them, although no one in the Galtan household had taken the liberty of giving them her address.
‘Look, sweetie, I’ve already had the cops round, I told them all I know, I’ll do the same with your fucking detective. So just tell your dickhead of a husband and his bitch of a mother that if they’d looked after my daughter properly, she’d still be tucked up in her bed, and not out on the fucking streets like some little waif and stray.’ Straight out of the high-rise slums of Seine-Saint-Denis. A way of talking she’d spent a long time suppressing, but it could rise to the surface when she needed it. People who live in the smart districts of Paris aren’t used to being spoken to like that. And they don’t like it. That’s why they spend so much money taking holidays in Russia, Romania or Thailand, unlike what people think, it’s not just to have sex with under-age teenagers on the quiet. The French need to see poor people who don’t insult them. They know that if they got into an armoured bus to gawp at the living conditions of the poor in their own outer suburbs, the bus would be torched. I
t distresses them, all that poverty: they can feel sorry, give away a few coins and old clothes. The trouble with homegrown poor people is that they can be nasty. It makes Christian charity complicated.
The little investigator is concentrating on her coffee cup. The big one – the best in Paris then, Vanessa supposes with amusement – looks round before saying suddenly, ‘Valentine came to see you, didn’t she?’
‘The police have already been round.’
‘Can you tell me what you told them?’
‘Yes. But I can also tell you the truth. Valentine did come to Barcelona. But I don’t think she’s here any longer. Would you like some more coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Black, no sugar?’
‘Yes, could you give me a double shot?… I thought I’d have a few while we were waiting for you, but there aren’t any bars round here.’
‘Shall we go on to the terrace, the workmen don’t seem to be making much noise today.’
‘No, they’ve had a balcony collapse on the front of the house. We spent a long time watching them. We were there two hours. A big balcony, I think it’ll take them all day, moving the rubble: it came down on top of all the building materials, their planks and machines.’
Alone in the kitchen, Vanessa takes her time. She hadn’t planned to say anything. She keeps telling herself she’s got nothing to feel guilty about, nothing to hide. She doesn’t know where the kid’s gone, she hardly knows her. It hadn’t been her choice not to know her own child, she doesn’t have to justify herself. The big detective has heard the story from François’s family’s point of view, obviously. And the other one, the one who says nothing, the one who looks like a petrified deer. They’ve already made their minds up, like everyone else. Nobody needs to hear Vanessa’s version to condemn her.
When she comes back with the coffee, the detective is on the terrace, leaning on the stone balustrade, looking at the huge mobile-phone mast on top of the hill facing them.
‘That must be a powerful transmitter. You’re not afraid of the radio waves?’
‘No. When we first got here, I thought it spoiled the view, but in the end I quite like it. It’s practical, wherever I am in the city I know where my house is. And then you have the sea opposite.’
‘Well, I suppose there’s that about it…’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
Play for time. Again. Talk about something else, anything that lets her avoid deciding what she’s going to say, what she’s not going to say, what this woman may pick up about things that are better hidden.
‘People call me the Hyena.’
‘The Hyena! Because you’re a creature who’s cruel, fast and ruthless?’
The taller woman hesitates for a moment, then smiles for the first time since she got there. That’s another male strategy: because she’s playing cold and inaccessible, the slightest sign of relaxing, a smile for instance, takes on special value and makes you want to provoke others.
‘No. I was lucky. This idiot called me that when I was just starting out. He could have christened me Garfield… it would’ve been less serious, but it would have stuck just the same.’
She looks round her. In the gardens down below, there are trees with pink blossom, and clumps of white flowers, and a huge shiny aluminium pipe stuck on to the façade of an old stone-built house which had been beautiful before that addition. Roses in pots lined up under the balustrade to protect them from the powerful winds that sweep across the region all winter. One plant that looks dead straggles along the cracked walls; a few huge buds have appeared in the last few days along its bare branches.
‘You must be glad to have got away from Paris.’
‘The vegetation’s nicer here, yes. But I’m not a great one for botany.’
Vanessa has made a litre of coffee in a green Thermos, and fills the cups to the brim. The little one, Lucie, has huddled into a corner again. You tend to forget she’s there.
‘So Valentine came to Barcelona to see you?’
‘Yes, she came to see me.’
‘And you don’t know where she is now?’
‘No idea. She disappeared.’
‘And you hadn’t ever seen her again, before this time?’
‘No. I presume the Galtans told you their version of what happened.’
‘No. They don’t say anything about you. Just that you left when the baby was a year old. If you want to talk about it, that’s more or less what we’re here for.’
She does want to talk about it, yes. When she opens her mouth she’s even surprised to find out how much she wants to talk about it.
‘I met François when I was eighteen. He was thirteen years older than me, he was already a well-known writer, he was in love with me, and I liked that… But his mother didn’t. His friends were more welcoming. They all used to talk to me about couscous, the East and belly dancing. It was the early nineties, for girls like me the hangover was beginning. We’d grown up thinking things would be fine, that France was a mature place, that we just had to go to the city for people not to hassle us about our origins. I’d already changed my first name, after the model Vanessa Demouy, and I’d say I was Lebanese. But they could spot it. If you knew the number of references to tagines and gazelle horns I had to put up with at dinner parties. The left-wing ones were the worst, they were afraid we’d forget our roots. But like any girl my age, that’s exactly what I did want to do, forget where my parents were from. I got pregnant early on, I was glad, I could already see myself as the little wife, staying at home while he wrote his stuff. I liked François fine. But even his more open-minded friends, who understood he was sleeping with me, told him to watch out. That I might go back to the desert with the baby. What the hell did they think I’d do there? Is there a Carita salon over there? Anyway… I didn’t like being pregnant, I didn’t like being so fat, I wanted it to be over as soon as possible. It was François’s mother who wanted to call the baby Valentine. She tried to move heaven and earth hoping to persuade her son to ‘get rid of it’, but she turned up the first day in the maternity ward. François was relieved, he’d been worried his mother would quarrel with him for good. But she fell in love with the little girl. I wasn’t too bad at looking after the baby, as good as anyone else, I guess. But the old bat was always round at our place. I wasn’t doing this right, I didn’t know that, and so on. François just chickened out of the arguments, he took care not to be home, leaving me with Jacqueline, she had her own keys. I spent whole days at the park or the swimming pool or with my sisters. Anything, to stop her catching up with us.’
Vanessa pauses. She’s spinning a bit of a yarn, of course. She has a right to, the Galtans have been spreading their own lies for long enough. She forgets to make it clear that she got pregnant immediately, and on purpose. François hadn’t wanted to marry her. Because of his mother. So she presented him with a child. She was very young, she didn’t know the ways of the world, she thought Galtan was a good catch. She’s making it up about the park and the swimming pool. In fact she had the blues after Valentine was born. The child got in the way of her life. She’d left her with the grandmother. More and more often. She hadn’t suspected anything. Jacqueline was only too happy to take the child. She’s just massaging the facts slightly, it’s always pleasant to be a little economical with the truth if you can make yourself look a bit better.
‘And then I met someone. Just when I was least expecting it, that’s life, I guess. This guy was good for nothing, he was a rich kid, but way off the rails, same age as me, face like an angel, and all he ever did was tinker with his Harley-Davidson and listen to Led Zeppelin. Face of an angel, character of a bastard. Classic.’
It had been the first time she’d really fallen for a man. She’d always had the advantage before. She had always slept for profit before, her mother had warned her that sex was only for pigs, and women got nothing out of it at all. On that point she had been wrong. Guillaume was a strictly cash payer. They
were like in Goodfellas, when he went off somewhere he asked her how much she wanted and she showed him with her thumb and finger how thick the pile of notes should be. When he touched her it was like an electric shock. She’d walked out on François just like that. Without the least hesitation. She hadn’t hurt him, she’d killed him. The morning she came back to pick up her things, she’d been missing for five days. She’d come home at dawn, high on coke. He was up, white-faced. If she’d snapped her fingers, he’d have opened his arms wide and taken her back at once. She was the love of his life, as she realized at that moment. She felt as if she was stabbing a sword into his heart. But it was inescapable. Love or be loved. And at that moment, she was in love. She thought it was the greatest thing in the world. And when François, still in shock, had asked her when she would come back to see Valentine, she’d said she’d telephone. She could see from his eyes that he couldn’t believe she wouldn’t even give him some explanation. She’d packed her bag, she wanted to get out of the house before he collapsed. A bitch, yes, she’s been a real bitch. But she paid for it later all right. Paid for what she’d done.
‘I’d have liked to take Valentine with me, but the way we lived, I couldn’t. I wasn’t thinking baby clothes. I wasn’t yet twenty. I thought I had the right to my grand passion. But then when I tried to see Valentine again, I couldn’t, they’d changed the locks and the concierge where the grandmother lived had been told not to let me in. People told me I should lodge a complaint. But I was living in one room, knee-deep in coke and stolen goods. How could I go to the cops?’
Apocalypse Baby Page 15
