“Oh, I meant to say, I’ve got news. Guess who contacted me on Facebook?”
“When did you start reading your Facebook messages?”
“I don’t actually read them, but from time to time I open them – just imagine, Booba tried to get in touch and I didn’t know.”
“Booba got in touch?”
“I said I’ve got news, I didn’t say my world got turned upside down and I’m getting married.”
“Who, then?”
“It’s unbelievable. I’m looking through my messages and I see the photo of this girl in a veil who’s written to me, like, forty-five times . . . at first I thought it was some pathetic little Arab girl looking to make halal porn and wanting me to give her contacts . . . I was going to block her, but I was so fucking pissed off with her bombarding me with chat requests, I decided to troll her. Guess who she is?”
“Pam . . . how do you expect me to guess?”
“She’s Satana’s daughter. Aïcha.”
“Satana had a daughter? How old is she?”
“Just turned eighteen. Satana used to go on about her daughter all the time . . . the kid didn’t live with her, the father got custody.”
“You’re right, that does ring a bell.”
At the height of their careers, Vodka Satana and Pamela Kant were like Oasis and Blur, the Beatles and the Stones: twin superstars jostling for first place. One would turn up on Cauet’s show, flashing her tits and badmouthing the competition and the next day the other one would be on the set of “Le Grand Journal” wearing an ultra-low-cut dress bitching about her rival. They had never done a scene together. If Satana heard that Pamela was working on a film, she would hike up her fee and keep hiking until the deal fell through. They had cordially loathed each other until, one summer, they found themselves in Los Angeles, flat broke, and were forced to share an apartment . . . at which they – briefly – became inseparable. Satana had had a remarkably short career. She was famous for her legs which were 1.20 metres, slender, perfect. She claimed to be Lebanese, but actually her family were blédards back in Oran. She was the only actress Pamela had ever seen be more of a diva on set than herself. Guys didn’t like shooting with her, Satana was so rude to them that even the hardiest had trouble keeping it up. She could be emasculating or endearing as it suited her. She had her little favourites.
Satana had had a fling with the rock star Alex Bleach. She had appeared on the cover of Voici. Pamela thought she would never get over it. Their rivalry was over – Satana had made it into a different world. At the time, Bleach was breathtakingly beautiful. When he walked into a room, every girl felt the same thing – surrender. He had a high forehead, a firm jawline accentuated by meticulously trimmed designer stubble. On stage, he would quickly strip off his shirt to reveal banks of chiselled abs, bulging dorsals, a body for which anyone would sell their soul. Pamela rarely found herself flustered, when faced with her, men expected to be spurned. But Bleach had the beauty of a woman – too conscious of the effect he produced to be seduced.
Satana had stopped shooting porn, it was rumoured that these days she did private shows. Meaning she took advantage of her fame to turn tricks and charge a small fortune. Despite what amateurs might think, being a prostitute is very different from being a porn star. As an actress, you worry about the camera, the lighting, and your position, your partner is of no importance. As a prostitute, you are a lion-tamer. You have to get to know the beast, anticipate its reactions, know how to make it do what you want. Relinquish control, make the slightest mistake, and it will rip your arm off. Satana always liked wild animals, she was not afraid of them. Pamela, for her part, has never been particularly interested in men. They are too quick to humiliate themselves. She does not know a single one who is incorruptible. She hates them, not out of perversity, but because they’re sheeple. She never understood how a woman as beautiful as Satana could still be obsessed with them. But something must have gone wrong – she was very young when she killed herself.
*
Daniel is cleaning the cafetière as though trying to make it look new – Pam pulls a face but says nothing – the coffee will taste of washing-up liquid. He asks:
“So what did she want from you, the daughter?”
“She said some girl came to see her father. Aïcha overheard the conversation. She was in her room, doing her homework, she wasn’t supposed to be listening to what was going on in the living room . . . This girl was a journalist, she wanted to talk about Alex Bleach, and I don’t know why, but my name came up in conversation . . .”
“Maybe because you and Satana were friends back in the day?”
“Anyway, the daughter googled my name, found out who I was . . . and she wrote to me and said ‘I wanted to ask how you knew my mother’. Can you imagine how I felt?”
“So what did you tell her?”
“Do you get what I’m saying? The kid doesn’t even know who her mother was . . . Her father never talked about her.”
“Really? In his shoes, I’d be the same.”
“I was outraged. The kid’s a grown woman now, fuck’s sake, she has a right to know. It’s not like her mother was in the Waffen-SS!”
“You see, we’re back to your idea of a porn guide for toddlers . . . if you’d written one, the father could have casually left it lying on the kitchen table and when the kid said ‘Papa, what’s a gang-bang?’ he could have said, ‘It was one of your mother’s greatest talents’.”
“You’re cheerful this evening.”
“I’m serious. It must be difficult telling your daughter that her mother was a porn star. Having to tell a kid: your mother committed suicide, that’s bad enough . . . but having to go into detail . . . I can understand why he wasn’t in any hurry to tell her.”
“We must know, like, forty porn actresses who’ve got kids, and they’re all fine.”
“Yeah, but they’re alive . . . Don’t say you told this kid on Facebook her mother’s porn name?”
“No. I looked at the photos of the daughter and I realised why I was upset . . . She looks like the sort of kid who stays up at night doing homework, she wears the veil, she’s always sulking . . . it’s not down to me to tell her.”
“She wears a hijab? Satana wouldn’t have been too impressed . . . That said, she always did have a sense of humour.”
“Things have changed. In our day, if you wanted to shock people, you did porn, these days all you have to do is wear a veil.”
“It’s not the same thing . . . so you dodged the question?”
“Yeah, I told her I knew her mother because we both loved dancing and we’d often see each other at parties . . . The girl sounded disappointed that her mother went out dancing. So, she’s definitely not ready. Fucking pain in the arse, this whole generation. Hope they all die from global warming, and soon.”
*
She is often depressed by young girls who look like Mormons or wear stupid veils. When it’s not religion, it’s family, or managing to remain a virgin until you get married . . . fundamentalist storybook romanticism. It’s like they’re determined to spend their lives making râgouts and tartes aux pommes.
DANIEL WILL NEVER GET USED TO THE PIGSTY OF PAM’S APARTMENT. Every time he spends the night there, he tidies up but by the time he comes back, chaos has reasserted itself.
Pam chats to him while she watches T.V., cradling her games console, playing Tetris with a bunch of Koreans. She has been playing the game since he first met her, at dazzling speed.
They both behave as though the relationship has not changed recently. But for the important difference that, these days, they could be a couple. Now that he is sleeping with women, he sees her differently. He is careful to avoid mentioning that he does not quite see her as he used to. She would consider it a betrayal. He cannot tell her the effect it has, taking testosterone, he constantly feels the urge to fuck. And they spend half of their evenings together. They are bound to end up together. It wouldn’t matter whether he was a guy,
a girl or a two-headed kangaroo – he is the only person she can bear to be with for three days straight. All it will take is allowing Pam the time to realise that she has been single for years, and that Daniel will never let anyone take his place. It is taking Pam some time to come to terms with the choice he has made.
*
It came as a blinding flash. One night they were at a Lydia Lunch gig at 104. The sound was shit, it was freezing cold and Deb went outside for a cigarette. Whirlpool baths in the courtyard were steaming in the darkness. Films were being projected onto the walls. She spotted a group passing a spliff around and ambled over, as though to join the conversation, and stood next to the person holding the joint. She chattered to the person on her right, a cute, little guy sporting a lot of ink. She had heard the expression ‘trans’ used for a girl who became a guy but she didn’t make a distinction between transvestite and trans, she didn’t give a shit, she assumed it meant a girl who dressed as a guy. It didn’t bother her one way or the other. Later that night – at least five blunts and three beers later – she was still chatting to him, seduced but circumspect since the guy’s girlfriend never took her eyes off him. And one of the other girls said, as the guy was heading inside to see the end of the gig – I thought you knew her from before? When I first knew her, she wore her hair in pigtails and everyone called her Corrine.
She instantly knew: she would do this. She began searching on the internet that same night. Deb was almost twenty-seven. She had already had several bodies. She had been an ordinary little girl with no particularly vivid memories before the age of ten. Then she had filled out. At first, she was just a little chubby, but she could still go to the swimming pool without people teasing her. She felt fat in the way certain girls are: horrified by a hideousness that she alone could see. Then, with puberty, she ballooned to become obese. It went on for four years, and every day was hell. People can behave how they like with fat kids. They can lecture them in the canteen, swear at them for eating in the street, give them horrid nicknames, taunt them if they ride a bicycle, ostracise them, give them advice on diets, tell them to shut up when they try to speak, laugh if they confess they wish that someone fancied them, glare and pull faces every time they appear. They can jostle them, pinch their belly, kick them – no-one will intervene. It was perhaps at this point that she learned to give up on gender: male or female, fat people suffer the same exclusion. Others are entitled to look down on them. And if they complain about the way they are treated, deep down everyone is thinking the same thing: eat less, you fat slob, at least try to make an effort to fit in. Deb’s relationship to sugar was the same as it was to coke years later: she was hooked. She thought of nothing else. Sugary foods called to her in the night. She used to say this as a joke, but it was true: from the kitchen cupboards she would hear a bewitching air, she had to get out of bed, had to gorge herself. It was not a decision, it was an overpowering urge. After school, she would get home as quickly as she could, her parents were working and she pictured herself as a cute, chubby panda, slumped on the sofa. She spent the whole time watching television, she would get presents of boxed sets and retreat into another world. “Ally McBeal”, “Sex and the City”, and “Buffy” were closer to her reality than school. Sitting in front of the T.V. screen, she was a slim, elegant American girl.
At seventeen, a tyrannical dietician railroaded her onto a draconian diet. Like someone who had been waiting in vain for a train for five years, this time – for some reason – it worked: she managed to catch the train and within six months she was a different person. At that age, you can melt away even as you exploded in a season. Another new body. She had become overweight while still a little girl, from that lump of fat a rather pretty young woman emerged and when she looked at photographs in magazines and compared herself to them Deb realised that she was a fine specimen. She had elegant shoulders, pert, finely shaped breasts, a shapely waist, long legs and slender ankles. Having spent four years shunning mirrors, she could now stand in front of them for hours, discovering herself. But still she did not recognise herself: the girl in the mirror never became one with Deb. In fact, in her whole life, the mirror had never given her a true reflection. She would gaze at the body in the mirror and, whether obese, moustached or big-breasted, it was a stranger.
She had lost eighteen kilos in the space of six months. It made her furious that people’s attitude to her could so quickly change according to how much weight she was carrying. Fat, she was happy to take on the role of the poor bitch, the scapegoat, the girl who gets slapped or humiliated to make others laugh, the one people turn to stare at if there is an unpleasant smell on the Métro. Okay, that was her – the fat girl. She had adapted to the role of the girl who needs to have a sense of humour and focus on other people’s stories. She was used to it. But the fact that it could change so completely in such a short space of time left her furious. Now, suddenly, she was treated like a pretty girl. Fucking arseholes. Choosing clothes had been a nightmare, she practically had to apologise to sales assistants when asking whether they had something in her size, now all she had to do was reach out and slip something on – and everything fitted her perfectly. It was the same with people. She was so used to being nicer than other people to avoid being slapped or shunned, she was friendlier than a girl at a perfume counter. Now everything had changed. She only had to appear and everyone was kissing her arse. Because she was wearing a pretty dress. Because she had come back into line.
She was invited to parties, people squeezed up to make room for her in cafés, boys asked for her number so they could send timid text messages. Meanwhile her rage was a tumour gnawing at her bones, the size of a walnut at first it bloated and swelled to the size of a clenched fist, septic, suppurating, threatening to explode. And then she met Cyril. He was a taciturn boy who rarely smiled but he lit up when she was with him. In hindsight, Daniel can see that the guy was such a self-centred hick he was almost retarded, but when she first met him it was like stepping into a fairy tale. He was handsome, admired, respected. He liked her to wear simple black dresses and dizzyingly high heels that cost a fortune. He would straddle her and massage her back while telling her about crime novels he particularly liked. He was a smooth talker, he talked to her in a slightly condescending tone, little compliments that turned her head. Her anger transmuted into passion. There was sunshine, rides in his car, weekends in the country, nights when he D.J.’d and girls swarmed round him but he was no player, he was with her. These slivers of time glittered like shards of gold, it was the polar opposite of what she had experienced before she met him. She repressed the image that came to her, of the bird in the fairy tale impaling itself, pressing its throat onto a thorn. She knew that this sunny weightlessness could not be real. He treated her like a princess. He was spending ten times what he earned. The hotels the first-class trains the seafood restaurants the taxi rides the champagne for breakfast. She knew that he lied from time to time, that he owed a lot of money to a lot of people. She could tell something was not right. He could not afford this extravagant romanticism. She tried not to think about it.
And so, when he mentioned filming, she quickly gave in. As a favour to him. The poor guy was in deep shit. He was sincere, when he asked her to help him out, he believed what he was saying: just this once, babe, I’m really sorry, after that, I’ve got a plan, I’ll make up my losses. Just this once. She had never felt particularly attached to the stunning body that was now hers, she saw no problem making use of it. Just this once. For him. Besides, they would be doing the scenes together, and it did not seem particularly complicated. He swore that no-one else would touch her. He knew a guy who rented out his town house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye for filming. They played poker together. This was how he had come up with the idea. But at nine a.m., when they were supposed to film the scene, Cyril did not have an erection. The verdict of the professionals was final: “can’t get it up”, a complaint the crew were familiar with, and one for which there was no cure. Deb did not yet kn
ow that in the porn industry there are guys who can get it up and guys who can keep it up, and those men who can do both are never likely to be out of work. She had to do the scene with someone else. The director was happy with the results. He said she reflected the light well. Cyril was no longer gutted, his girl had done the business, he was proud.
She did a second scene, feeling more relaxed, the crew complimented her, at the time she did not realise that she was slipping on the skin of a new character, one that she would play for years. To change invariably means to lose a piece of yourself. After a period of adaptation, you feel it falling away. It is both a sadness and a relief. This was her continuing journey.
*
In the car on the way back, Cyril was considerate. He turned the music up full blast – a mind-blowing techno mix. He let his hand rest on her thigh. He loved her. He said nothing that needed to be said. She stared out of the window and watched the world flash past. A week later, there was another shoot, and he really was up shit creek, there were guys who would smash his face if he didn’t pay them back, he adored her, could she please do it, just for him. She had been expecting this. And it was true, he did adore her. In this moment, their roles were reversed – from now on she was the star.
In the porn industry, she could measure her success by how hostile the other girls were to her. Everyone wanted to work with her. Cyril negotiated a great deal on her first boob job. Another transformation. She could not walk into a room anymore without people thinking about sex. All they could see were her breasts. And yet she could not manage to shed the two kilos that, in her mind, still separated her from absolute perfection.
Vernon Subutex One Page 15
