Vernon Subutex One

by Virginie Despentes

  Virginie Despentes

  Vernon Subutex 1

  Translated from the French by

  Frank Wynne

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Vernon Subutex 1

  First published in the French language as Vernon Subutex 1 by

  Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, in 2015

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2015

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Frank Wynne

  This book is supported by the Institute Français (Royaume Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

  The moral right of Virginie Despentes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Frank Wynne asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 540 8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Non omnis moriar . . .

  for

  Martine Giordano,

  Joséphine Pépa Bolivar

  Yanna Pistruin

  THE WINDOWS OF THE BUILDING OPPOSITE ARE ALREADY LIT. The silhouettes of cleaning women bustle around the vast open plan office of what is probably an advertising agency. They start work at six. Vernon usually wakes up just before they arrive. He aches for a strong coffee, a yellow-filtered cigarette, he would like to make a slice of toast and eat breakfast while scanning the headlines of Le Parisien on his laptop.

  It has been weeks since he last bought coffee. The cigarettes he rolls every morning by gutting the cigarette butts from the night before are so skinny it is like puffing on paper. There is nothing to eat in the cupboards. But he has kept up the payments to his internet provider. The standing order goes out on the day his housing benefit hits his account. For several months now, this has been paid directly to his landlord, but the bill has still been paid out, so far. Let’s hope it lasts.

  His phone contract has lapsed and he no longer bothers to pay for top-ups. In the face of disaster, Vernon decided on a course of action: he played the guy who has not noticed anything unusual. He watched as, in slow motion, things began to collapse, then the collapse accelerated. But Vernon has lost none of his indifference, none of his elegance.

  The first thing to go was his unemployment benefit. By post he received a copy of the report written by his adviser. He got along well with her. They had been meeting regularly for almost three years in the cramped cubicle where she killed off houseplants. Thirtyish, bubbly, fake redhead, plump, well-stacked, Madame Bodard liked to talk about her two sons, she worried about them a lot, regularly took them to see a paediatrician in the hope that he would diagnose some form of hyperactivity disorder that might justify sedating them. But the doctor told her they were in fine form and sent her packing. Madame Bodard told Vernon how she had been to see AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses with her parents when she was young. Now she preferred to listen to Camille and Benjamin Biolay and Vernon abstained from making any offensive remarks. They had talked at great length about his case: between the ages of twenty and forty-five, he had been a record dealer. These days, his chances of finding work were slimmer than if he had been a coalminer. Madame Bodard had suggested retraining. Together they had perused the various courses open to him – A.F.P.A., G.R.E.T.A., C.F.A. – and they parted on good terms, agreeing to meet again to reassess the situation. Three years later, his application to study for a diploma in administration had not been accepted. From his point of view, he felt he had done everything he needed to do, he had become an expert in applications and prepared them with extraordinary efficiency. Over time, he had come to feel that his job was to bum around on the internet looking for vacancies that corresponded to his profile, then send off C.V.s so that they could send back proof of his rejection. Who would want to train someone who was knocking on for fifty? He had managed to dredge up a work placement in a concert venue out in the suburbs and another in an art house cinema – but aside from going out occasionally, keeping abreast of the network problems on the R.E.R. and meeting people, it mostly left him with a dreary sense of waste.

  In the copy of the report that Madame Bodard had written to justify his being struck off, she mentioned things he had talked about in a spirit of banter, like spending a little money to go and see the Stooges play Le Mans or losing a hundred euros in a poker game. As he flicked through his case file, rather than worrying about the unemployment benefit he would no longer receive, he felt embarrassed for her. His adviser was about thirty years old. What did she earn – how much does a woman like that make – two thousand a month before tax? Top whack. But kids of this generation had been raised to the rhythms of the Voice in the Big Brother house, a world in which the telephone can ring at any time to give the order to fire half of your colleagues. Eliminate thy neighbour is the golden rule of the games they have been spoon-fed since childhood. How can one now expect them to find it morbid?

  When he received the letter from the benefits office, Vernon thought that this might motivate him to find “something”. As though the worsening of his already parlous situation might have a beneficial influence on his ability to dig his way out of the quagmire he was bogged down in . . .

  He was not the only person for whom things had rapidly deteriorated. Until the early 2000s, a lot of people were doing pretty well. You still saw couriers becoming label managers, freelance hacks getting jobs as columnists in T.V. supplements, even shiftless wankers ended up running the record department of the local F.N.A.C. . . . At the tail end of the peloton, those least motivated by the prospect of success managed to get by doing contract work for music festivals, working as a roadie on a tour, sticking posters on hoardings . . . That said, Vernon was well placed to understand the threat posed by the tsunami that was Napster, it never occurred to him that the ship would go down with all hands lost.

  Some said it was karma, the industry had experienced an extraordinary upturn in the era of C.D.s – selling their clients their whole discography on a medium that cost half the price to make and was sold for twice the price in shops . . . with no real benefit to music fans, since no-one had ever complained about vinyl records. The drawback of karma theory was that if there was even a grain of truth in the notion that “what goes around comes around” people would have long since stopped being arseholes.

  His record shop was called Revolver, Vernon had started working there as a shop assistant at the age of twenty, and taken over when the owner decided to move to Australia, where he became a restaurateur. If anyone had told him that first year that he would spend most of his life in this shop, he would probably have said, don’t talk shit, I’ve got too many things I want to do. Only when you get old do you realise that the expression “fucking hell but time flies” most appositely describes the workings of the process.

 
He had had to shut up shop in 2006. The most difficult thing was finding someone to take over the lease, to kiss goodbye to the prospect of turning a profit on the deal, but even so his first year being unemployed – with no benefits, since he was self-employed – went well: a commission to write a dozen entries for an encyclopedia of rock, a few days cash-in-hand manning the ticket desk for some festival in the suburbs, record reviews for the music press . . . meanwhile he went online and began selling off everything he had salvaged from the shop. Most of the stock had been sold at a knock-down price, but there was still some vinyl, a few boxed sets, and an extensive collection of posters and T-shirts he had refused to sell off cheap. On eBay, he made three times what he had anticipated, without any of the fuss of having to keep accurate accounts. You simply had to be reliable, to go to the post office once a week, to be careful how you packaged the merchandise. The first year had been a blast. Life is often a game of two halves: in the first half it lulls you, makes you think you’re in control; in the second, when it sees you’re relaxed and helpless, it comes around again and grinds you to a pulp.

  Vernon had just had enough time to rediscover his love of a long lie-in – for more than twenty years, come hell or hideous hangover, he had rolled up the metal shutters on the shop six days a week no matter what. Only three times in twenty-five years, had he entrusted the keys to one of his colleagues: a bout of gastric flu, a dental implant fitting and an attack of sciatica. It took him a year to relearn the knack of lazing in bed and reading in the mornings if he felt like it. His preferred leisure activity was cranking up the radio and scanning porn on the web. He was familiar with the entire oeuvre of Sasha Grey, Bobbi Starr or Nina Roberts. He also enjoyed an afternoon nap, he would read for half an hour and then nod off.

  In the second year, he had handled the picture research for a biography of Johnny Hallyday, signed up for welfare with the R.S.A. – which had just changed from being the R.S.I. – and he had started selling off his personal collection. He did well out of eBay, he would never have guessed what fetishistic folly stirred World 2.0, everything was up for sale: merchandising, comics, plastic figurines, posters, fanzines, coffee-table books, T-shirts . . . At first, when you start selling, you hold back, but a little incentive and suddenly it becomes a pleasure to get rid of everything. Gradually, he had cleared his home of every last trace of his former life.

  He came to appreciate the true glories of a peaceful morning with no punters to constantly bust his balls. He had all the time in the world to listen to music now. The Kills, the White Stripes and sundry Strokes could release all the albums they liked, he no longer needed to give a shit. He could not bear the constant torrent of new stuff, it was endless, to keep up you’d have to plug into the Web and be drip-fed new sounds on a constant loop.

  The downside was that he hadn’t anticipated that it would be a gruelling slog to get girls after he closed down the shop. People say the rock industry is a man’s game, but people talk a lot of shit: he had always had a string of female customers that was continually replenished. He had an understanding when it came to girls. He didn’t do monogamy, and the more he tried to sack them off, the more they stalked him. When some babe came in with her boyfriend looking for a C.D., he could guarantee that within the week she would be back, on her own this time. Then there were all the girls who worked in the neighbourhood. The beauticians at the salon on the corner, the girls in the shop across the street, the girls at the post office, the girls in the restaurant, the girls in the bar, the girls down at the swimming pool. A vast collection of potential conquests that was lost to him the day he handed back the keys.

  He had never had regular girlfriends. Like a lot of guys he knew, Vernon was haunted by the memory of the girl who got away. His was called Séverine. He had been twenty-eight. He was so attached to his reputation as a player that he refused to recognise that she was the one until it was too late. He was a big cat prowling the streets, wild, untameable, all his mates were blown away by the elegant nonchalance with which he moved from girl to girl. Or this was how he saw himself, at least. The one-night stand, the lone wolf, the guy who never gets tied down, the guy who won’t be twisted round some woman’s little finger. He had no illusions: like a lot of insecure young men, he found it reassuring to know that he could make women cry.

  Séverine was tall and hyper – so hyper she could be exhausting – she had legs that went on forever, she looked like a Parisian rich bitch, the sort of girl who can wear a sheepskin jacket and make it look cool. She grabbed life by the balls, there was nothing she could not do around the house, even changing a tyre on the hard shoulder did not faze her, she was the sort of rich brat who was used to sorting things out herself and never complaining. Which did not mean that, in private, she did not know how to loosen up. When he thinks about her, he sees her naked, sprawled in bed; she loved to spend whole weekends there. She kept her turntable on the floor next to the mattress so she did not have to get up to change the record. Piled up around the bed she had her cigarettes, her bottle of water and the telephone, whose spiral cable was constantly tangled. This was her kingdom. For a few short months, he was granted access.

  She was the kind of girl whose mother had taught her not to burst into tears when you find out your boyfriend is cheating on you. Séverine gritted her teeth. Vernon had been stupidly caught in the act – and had been surprised that she did not leave him there and then. She had said “I’ll leave you to it”, and forgiven him. He concluded that she did not have the strength to lose him and began to feel a slight contempt for her weakness of character. And so he did it again. They had had three or four screaming matches, each time she said if you keep pushing your luck, I’m out of here, you’ll leave me no choice, and each time Vernon was convinced it was just an empty threat. He never saw it coming. When he found out she was seeing someone else, Vernon stuffed her things into a cardboard box and left them downstairs on the pavement. The image of her clothes, her books, her perfume bottles being ransacked by passers-by and strewn outside his door would haunt him for years. He never heard from her again. It had taken a long time for Vernon to realise he would never get over her. He had a talent for ignoring his feelings. He often thinks about what his life would be like if he had stayed with Séverine. If he had had the courage to turn his back on what he had been, if he had known that one way or another we are stripped of the things we care about, that the best thing you can do is plan ahead. She had kids, obviously. She was that kind of girl. The kind who settles down. Without losing any of their charm. Not a bitch. A bewitching woman who probably eats organic and gets all het up about global warming, but he is convinced that she still listens to Tricky and Janis Joplin. If he had stayed with her, he would have found another job after he closed the shop, because they would have had kids and he would have had no choice. And right now he would be worrying what to do about his son smoking weed or his daughter’s anorexia. Oh well. He likes to think he minimised the damage.

  These days, Vernon fucks less often than a married man. He would never have believed it possible to go so long without sex. Though Facebook and Meetic are wonderful tools for picking up girls from home, unless he’s prepared to content himself with a virtual fuck on Second Life, sooner or later he has to drag himself outside to meet the girl. Find clothes he can wear that look hipster rather than homeless, find some way to avoid going to a café, to the cinema, and certainly not for dinner somewhere . . . and avoid bringing her back to his place so she doesn’t see the empty cupboards, the sorry state of the fridge and the disgusting mess – nothing like the charming chaos of the confirmed bachelor. His flat reeks of socks worn for too long, the quintessential scent of the single man. He can open the windows, spray himself with cologne. This smell marks out his territory. On the whole, he picks girls up on the internet and stands them up when they arrange a meeting.

  Vernon understands women, he has made an extensive study of them. The city is full of lost souls ready to do his cleaning and get down on
all fours to lavish him with lingering blowjobs designed to cheer him up. But he is too old to believe that all this comes without a series of reciprocal demands. Just because a woman is old and ugly doesn’t mean she is less of a possessive pain in the arse than some twenty-year-old babe. The characteristic thing about women is that they can keep a low profile for months before laying their cards on the table. He is wary of the sort of girl who might find him attractive.

  Friends are different. Spending years together listening to records, going to gigs, arguing about bands, these are sacred bonds. You don’t stop seeing each other simply because of a change of venue. But what had changed was that now he had to call and arrange to meet, whereas before they could just come into the shop if they were in the neighbourhood. He was not in the habit of organising dinner parties, trips to the cinema or signature cocktails and spliffs . . . Gradually, without his really noticing, a lot of his mates had moved out into the sticks, either because they had a wife and kids and couldn’t go on living in a thirty-square-metre apartment, or because Paris had become too expensive and they had sensibly moved back to their home town. Once they hit forty, Paris only suffered the children of homeowners to reside within its boundaries, the rest of the population went on their merry way. Vernon had stayed. This had probably been a mistake.

  He only became aware of this fragmentation much later, when loneliness had walled him up alive. Then came the chain of catastrophes.

  It had started with Bertrand. The big C had come back. This time the crab was in the throat. He had had a hell of a fucking time the first time round. He thought he had beaten it. At least his friends had celebrated his remission as a definitive triumph. But this time it was all over so quickly it hit them like an uppercut, they only truly took it in after the funeral. In the three months between diagnosis and death, the illness had consumed him. Bertrand always wore black shirts with the collar turned up. He had been wearing them like that since 1988. Over time, he had a little trouble buttoning them as his beer-gut blossomed. At forty-something, he had long white hair, a pair of tinted Ray-Bans perched on his nose, a beautiful pair of snakeskin boots and a face like a thug. Blotchy from booze but well-preserved, the big lug.