Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  She’d slipped into the bathroom alongside her bedroom, picked up the big bottle of bleach, and filled the washbasin with warm water. Her mother would be thinking she was washing her hands or wouldn’t even hear her, because of the TV quiz show she was watching with the sound turned up loud, so she could hear it while going to and fro to put away the ironed clothes. She dabbed some bleach on to the dark stain, then used the water in the basin to dilute it and plunged the bag in. Her hands under water rubbed at the fabric. Then she left it to soak. Basically, she didn’t imagine she would escape the consequences of what she’d done, she thought she would have to answer for it, it was just a matter of keeping the dizziness at bay by doing something. When they caught up with her, she could confess that she’d tried to make the stain disappear, but it wouldn’t greatly change the seriousness of what she’d done. She was waiting for the telephone to ring at any moment, or for someone to come to the door, for the outside world to enter her universe and shatter it.

  Their evening meal had taken place normally, and anyway she never spoke much. At table, the conversation was confined to the grown-ups’ concerns. Even when her sister was still living at home, they’d wait until after the meal to yell at each other in their rooms. Her parents would be talking about things that happened at work. So-and-so has been promoted unfairly, this woman in our office is an alcoholic, the union rep made a comment that was out of order. Her mother worked in a bank, her father was a head salesman at a furniture store. After supper, before watching a film on TV, her mother had gone to the bathroom. When she heard her mother say, ‘Why does this place stink of bleach?’ her heart had stopped; fear gripped her in the gut. Here we go: now the troubles will start. But her bag had simply turned white. Her mother was furious. ‘What on earth’s got into you? How do you think that’s going to be dry by tomorrow? It’ll have to be rinsed, or it’ll go into holes. And then dried on a radiator. Do you think that’s why we send you to school, to go with a bag looking like nothing on earth and smelling of bleach? You don’t know you’re alive, my girl, one of these days you’ll see, you’ll be surprised when you find out what real life’s like.’ There was no stain at all on the bag, just the shadows of the names of rock groups she’d written on the canvas with felt pens. Not a drop of blood. The bag had been rinsed, stretched out on the radiator, her mother was in a foul mood because she’d missed the beginning of the film. The bag ended up a sort of beige colour, with no visible trace of any stain.

  Next day, she spent the whole time with her eyes riveted on the classroom door, waiting for Loraine to appear. Or a policeman. Overnight, the whole thing had got bigger. The realization of what she’d done. The idea that he could be dead. She reran the scene in her head, wondering if someone might have seen her without her noticing in the heat of the moment. What was beyond doubt for her, in those days, was that a culprit would always be found out. The smell of bleach permeated the whole classroom, and the other pupils looked at her, laughing, pulling faces and holding their noses.

  That night, she found her parents both at home. She had put her nearly-white bag on the dark brown sofa in the sitting room, which was immediately filled with the smell of bleach. Her parents had hugged her tightly, an unaccustomed warmth coming from them, an intense and annoying contact. They had heard from one of the other parents who lived in their street. They didn’t know how to tell her. It was her father who finally stammered out, ‘Loraine’s dad is dead.’

  They hadn’t wanted to come straight out with it at first: ‘he was murdered’. They wondered if she wanted to call her friend, would that be the right thing to do, what did she think? As a rule, they knew exactly what to do and how you set about it. In normal social life, how many times you should let the phone ring, what time of day you should or shouldn’t telephone people, what sort of gift you take if you are a guest, what you should wear on special occasions. But that day they were at a complete loss: what do the rules say if the body of the father of your daughter’s best friend is found lying lifeless in the street? She knew she would have to own up. The sentences were there, all ready, in her head, but she was incapable of pronouncing them. Her bag was in her line of sight. How long would it be before they made the connection? She would have to tell them, but her lips remained sealed.

  She hadn’t called Loraine. She was convinced that Loraine knew. She thought Loraine would say something, end up by cracking, and give her away. It was for Loraine that she’d done it.

  Overnight, everything familiar seemed now to have taken on a new savour, and for several weeks, she had felt she was in a state of expectation and tension that illuminated everything around her. The wind on her cheek, how blissful. Walking through the streets after school, deciding to do most of the journey on foot. The way the people looked so smart first thing in the morning, smelling of perfume and aftershave, watches on their wrists, the women’s faces newly made up, the smell of their hairspray. Sitting in a coffee bar, opening a newspaper and ordering a cappuccino. The mosaic of the latest record sleeves, displayed in the window of the music store opposite the bus stop where she waited every evening. The grating sound of the garage door when her parents left for work, just as she was getting up in the morning. The step at the bottom of the cellar stairs that always creaked the same way when her father went down to fetch something for her mother. She knew where the town prison was, they often went past it in the car. That building was waiting for her.

  In school, everyone talked of nothing else, the papers were full of it too. It lasted three days, then there was less, then nothing, very quickly. Every morning, arriving at the school gates, she checked from people’s faces that no one knew, and every morning, she felt a certain relief without really being at ease. Life went on, as normal, but nothing was the same as before. Nobody was thinking about her. Loraine was absent for a fortnight, without getting in touch. And when she did come back, it was clear that she suspected nothing. Like everyone else. She looked thinner, paler, her eyes had circles under them. So she had shed tears. A group formed round her, sympathetic and curious teenagers, attracted by the smell of drama. Normally, nobody paid much attention to Loraine. She was taking advantage of the situation to have her fifteen minutes of fame, appealing to the older pupils, feeling for once part of the school. But between the two of them there were no knowing looks, no reproaches or guilty complicity.

  Life had resumed its course. It was as stupid as that. A few months later, one night, lying in bed with the light still on, reading a novel without taking it in properly, she was struck for the first time in days by the obvious fact that nobody would ever know. Justice wasn’t always done. Impunity. Before, it had been a word that didn’t mean anything to her, now it filled all her mental space. It was something to be envisaged: impunity. The man falling backwards, herself running away. Justice was something exceptional, an unusual break in the banality of bloody events.

  She’d finished her school year, and done well in all her subjects. Between herself and the world, an impassable gulf had become fixed. She did all that was required of her with remarkable efficiency. She’d always been a rather borderline pupil before, the kind over whom the staff meeting at the end of year hesitates: ‘Should we make her repeat a year, or let her go up?’ By applying herself just a little more, she’d improved her grades. She did her homework carefully, reassured to be sitting in her bedroom, crouched over her exercise books. This tranquillity, which had always seemed so bland before, had transmuted into comfort. She didn’t try to go round with gangs of boys at school, or make passes at the girls. She no longer spent all her free time with Loraine. She didn’t feel like going out at weekends, she didn’t want to be tempted by the idea of drinking, with the risk of breaking down. Her parents rewarded her. They told each other with a knowing air that her teenage rebellion was over. They sent her on a language course abroad. She wasn’t afraid any more to look like a swot. The immoral aspect of all this did not escape her, on the contrary it fascinated her. That’s what happens when
you do something bad: you get a reward. Anything else is just romantic rubbish and hypocritical naivety. She was subject to bursts of maniacal joy, during which she thought of herself as part of an elite: those who have done it. She got crazes for history books: China in the twentieth century fascinated her for a whole year. Then pell-mell Chile, Spain, Germany, Korea, France, the USSR, Turkey. Sometimes she went further back in time: the history of the United States, the Spanish Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, colonialism. Who gets rewarded, who gets punished, which dog eats dog. Who wins and gets to write the history books. Who decides what counts as evil. Serial killers, bandits, terrorists, were of less interest. They were people rather like herself: amateurs. She preferred more serious historical cases: when the crime was massive, openly committed, not denied. Truly rewarded.

  Outside novels, she’d never heard of any criminals shedding tears, asking sincerely for forgiveness. Their stories were always the same: the guilty person only remembers the humiliation, the wound or the terror that governed his decision to kill. What was done to him. Then comes a gap in the story. And he goes straight on, to talk about the unjust treatment inflicted on him, when the law seeks to make him pay. What, me? But I’ve done nothing wrong! The space in the real world in which he killed, tortured or massacred only exists for the victim – if the victim survives, that is. The ones who express remorse are always just hoping for some mercy from the court. Anyone who claims to regret their crime is lying. The killer doesn’t even remember it. There is no link left between the act perpetrated and the individual responsible for it. All he thinks of is the aggression of others towards him, when he’s charged with the offence. It’s as simple as that. Victims, of course, have good memories. They cling to the injustice someone committed towards them, to justify any act of barbarity that they will commit in turn. But the murderer has no need to make an effort. It has become detached from him. It was never really him anyway.

  She had understood how it worked. Not forgetting demanded a constant effort. Not to focus on the offences committed by her victim. Or the stupidity of the people who hadn’t caught her. Or the icy loneliness that had overcome her afterwards. Not to focus on her own pain, banish it somewhere to the very edge of consciousness. It was a matter of pride. She would not let human nature do its work, but put up a barrier between herself and the forgetting of what she had been. She refused to be like others of her kind, an amnesiac predator whining about her lot.

  Loraine had arrived in the fourth form at high school – the Collège Albert Camus – halfway through the year. Fair-haired and well-built, she wore an off-white sleeveless pullover, a sheepskin jacket and heavy shoes. She carried her schoolbooks in a rectangular bag, made of maroon leather, different from the other children’s satchels. She wore her hair in two plaits. She didn’t try to make friends with people, she looked scornful of her schoolmates. But her arrogance had no real basis. She was neither particularly pretty nor rich, she was only so-so at sports, and her grades were nothing to write home about. But her parents had bourgeois aspirations. They lived in the same kind of house as everyone else, they had the same boring middle-class jobs, drove the same kind of car, and wore the same chainstore clothes. But they thought themselves a cut above the others, with a couple of dozen books on their shelves and a smattering of English. They considered themselves educated because they listened to classical music and sometimes watched films with subtitles. They were snobs.

  Then there had been the incident in the history-geography lesson. The class was taken by a supply teacher, who couldn’t hold the pupils’ attention for more than few minutes: he found public speaking difficult. He would hardly have started the lesson before the class broke down in chaos. It was the ferocity of children in a group, raging because authority wasn’t being exercised with full force. He would lose control, throw temper tantrums and punish four pupils at random, like throwing a few glasses of water to put out a fire. That day, he had picked on Loraine: three hours’ detention, on the pretext that she had been laughing loudly. She wasn’t at all the kind of girl who would join in the laughter. He’d picked on her because she wouldn’t dare to protest. She looked completely devastated and changed colour. So much so that the whole class turned and looked at her, the noise was suspended for a few seconds. The teacher was looking pleased with himself.

  ‘You stupid prick! You know fine well she hasn’t done anything, but you don’t dare punish the ones who were really shouting.’

  She didn’t know why she had felt like defending Loraine. She rarely spoke up in class. All the other pupils knew she was into girls, for them it was as if she was somehow grubby, the whole time. The group excluded her, but without bullying her. She didn’t fit the good victim profile. She liked a fight. And she put sufficient passion into it that any attackers enjoyed it less than she did. Since primary school, she’d worked out her strategy: start every new school year by attacking in public a boy who was enough of a show-off to attract notice, but not dangerous enough to be a really serious enemy. After that they were more likely to call her ‘the nutter’ than ‘the dyke’, and leave her in peace. In return for which she tried not to be conspicuous for the rest of the year. But that day, she’d abandoned her low-profile approach, and other pupils had taken up the cry.

  ‘She’s right, sir! You’ve given her three hours and she was the only girl who didn’t laugh!’

  After that, they’d been told they’d all be kept in, but they weren’t too angry, as they left the room, because of the fun they had had hearing their teacher called ‘stupid prick’ several times, in a class that had finally fallen silent.

  On the way out, she’d caught up with Loraine in the corridor. ‘Don’t look so sad, that’s life, we all get kept in now and then.’

  The other girl nodded without replying, then instead of going to her next class, she had run frantically out of the building. And had thrown up on the grass.

  ‘Did you eat something in the canteen to make you sick? Oh, no, you don’t go to canteen, do you. Want to go to the sick room? I’ll come with you. Was it the detention? Will you get into trouble? We’re all being kept in, your folks can’t blame you for it.’

  That was how it had begun, trying to defend her, and that was how it would end. Until then, she had always fallen for the same kind of girl: the prettiest in the school, as long as she was up for it. She liked beauty with a bit of edge. She had a weakness for vulgar, precocious girls who didn’t mind going behind the bike sheds for a snog with another girl. It was their brothers who were a problem, as a rule. Loraine wasn’t at all that type. But it had happened all the same, after the detention business. She’d fallen in love. She had sought out the new girl’s company. And Loraine had reluctantly accepted, like a wary animal.

  One very hot day, Loraine came to school wearing a black woollen sweater: its sleeves were too long, hanging down over her wrists. They were on their own near the bike sheds.

  ‘Wow, your face is really red! Good thing you can’t see it. Why don’t you wear a T-shirt like everyone else? Think it’s cool to be sweaty, or what?’

  But instead of smiling vaguely, and putting on a superior and absent-minded expression as she usually did, Loraine had pulled up her sleeves, challenging her to look. Her forearms were black and yellow, covered with bruises and scars, her elbows were raw. It made no sense. Those bare, mutilated arms and the rest of her body. This proud, rather stuck-up girl, always fussing that this or that was clean and up to scratch. It didn’t fit. With her quiet behaviour, her straight back, her delicate lips and finely shaped nose, the care she took of her things. Her arms were from a social worker’s casebook, grafted on to a fragile body. Some children at the school showed off the marks from being belted, or turned up with a black eye, or burns from an iron, others pretended they’d hurt themselves falling off a swing, and some took pride in telling you the gory details of the abuse they’d suffered. Yes, of course it happened to other kids. But they were expecting it, it was well known, or not surpris
ing. Loraine had pulled down her sleeves in silence. She’d thought that was the end of the revelations, but the teenager now pulled up her sweater. Her torso was like her arms: marked, bruised, scarred, all over. Loraine said in a neutral voice, ‘He takes care to keep off my face or hands. Once I put my hands up to protect myself, and the next day the teacher asked me what had happened. After that, he’s taken to tying my wrists above my head before he starts.’

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘He’s sick. He can’t stop himself. But the rest of time, he’s normal.’

  ‘Normal has to be full-time, or it doesn’t count.’

  What a let-down. She’d fallen madly in love with a princess, who’d turned out to be a poor kid being abused in secret by a crazy father. She’d asked a few more questions to be polite, but was wondering all the time how to put an end to this outburst of confidences.

  ‘Is he like that often?’

  ‘If it isn’t me, it’s my mother who gets it, and that’s worse. And when it’s not my mother, it’s my little sister. We try hard to make it us, so that it’s not her. She’s only five.’

  ‘Why don’t you run away?’

  ‘He’s not like it all the time. Mostly, we’re fine, all of us. It’s, well, it’s complicated.’