Apocalypse Baby (26 page)

Loraine had no intention of running away, she would have been too scared to leave her mother and sister behind to pay the price for her action, but right now she needed to imagine she was going to do it. She had never been so
openly anxious for company, for someone to talk to. And it had been nice. That and the sweet excitement of her skin, her tiny warm tongue, her active fingers always wanting to go further, letting herself go, more and more. Loraine was playing at being a girl seduced against her will, but losing all desire to resist. So with Loraine, in the quiet alleys of public gardens, or in the cinema, sweater pulled up to her shoulders, her sex being fingered, she was being pleasured to ecstatic levels. None of the others must know. And then one grey morning in February, after the half-term break, Loraine came in looking shattered. She was getting beaten less, but her little sister was getting it now.

‘I've thought about it. The only thing I can do to protect my sister is to set her an example. And the only example I can give her is to run away.'

Loraine was much unhappier than before. Her little sister's screams hurt her more than when she was receiving the blows herself.

She didn't say anything to Loraine but her mind was made up. She was going to seek him out and threaten to denounce him.

When he had realized he was being followed, he'd turned round and stared at her at length. Not afraid in the least, just looking scornful and annoyed. She was furious with herself, for wanting to give up at that point. To surrender, and realize she couldn't do anything, submit to the authority of things being the way they are, so that nothing will ever change. She had charged at him like a wild beast. When she came level with him, she had hit out. Not to avenge her girlfriend whom
he'd been torturing. A sudden desire had surged up inside her. To fell him. To force him to reckon with her. To get her out of this anguish, whatever the cost.

It must have been at that time that her way of thinking was transformed: through expecting always to be unmasked, she became capable of observing the slightest gesture, of analysing every sound. Something inside her must have been released. She paid such attention to what was happening around her that, little by little, she learnt to read between the lines when facing other people. She could spot those who were concealing something. She could recognize a lie. It even happened sometimes, with painful flashes of knowledge, that she simply guessed truths that had been covered up. It was like a kind of lucid madness, gradually extending its range. The sound of blood, other people's blood, started to reach her. The drives, hidden thoughts, secrets that had never been whispered. She found it easier and easier to judge people. Their ferocity. Their weaknesses. Which had nothing to do with what was on the surface. She didn't like it. The whole folklore thing about being ‘clairvoyant', muttering over candles, smelling of patchouli. As the years passed, her senses became spontaneously more sophisticated. When she heard on TV that some girl was missing, she knew instinctively whether the girl was alive or dead. When someone told her about some incident, she could see the place, visualize what had happened. More pragmatically, she was a good listener, to whom people could tell their troubles of the heart; she knew, and was rarely mistaken, who was deceiving whom, who was lying, who was two-timing, and who would come
back shamefaced after cutting a dash somewhere else.

She had got through her further studies effortlessly. She fascinated people. Nothing is less exciting than getting what you want too easily, especially if you think you don't deserve it. When she finished university, everything seemed flat. The depressive stage had kicked in. She didn't want to study any more, she wasn't interested in getting a good job. Success would have brought a bitter taste. She'd gone to Paris. For the first few years, she worked at the postal sorting office near the Louvre, and by filling in for other people, she ended up working full-time. She preferred the night shift: going to work at eight and walking back home as the city woke up. She had an attic room opposite the Gare d'Austerlitz. She didn't particularly enjoy her new life. She wasn't surprising herself or rebelling. She was as if in suspense, a state that suited her. It seemed to her entirely desirable for a whole life to go past in this peaceful solitude, without anything happening, exciting or sad. Nothing but a succession of nights standing up emptying sacks and sorting envelopes by size, reclassifying postcards from the wrong boxes, throwing packets with accuracy into the big metal bins. Her colleagues weren't very different from herself: pale, silent, rather absent-minded. A team of about twenty people, in a huge hangar with very high ceilings, impossible to heat in winter. A beehive in slow motion. In the post office hierarchy, the people on the night sorting shift thought they were looked down on, outsiders. She felt at home among them. A team of ghosts. A new rule had banned any alcohol in the building during the breaks. They didn't laugh a lot. They drank packet soups, and didn't have the guts to complain or to be vindictive. They didn't talk
much, or only about their kids, holidays, food, programmes on daytime TV, or how to look after houseplants. Things that didn't concern her. Nobody took much notice of her.

But after a year, she'd been assigned the task of training a new recruit, a dark-haired boy who never stopped talking, who complained because he was missing rock concerts that interested him, or going out with his pals. His name was Arnaud. She didn't really want to start chatting to him, but the nights were long, with nobody else near, they were thrown together. He'd succeeded in hauling her out of her torpor, insidiously, he'd get her to listen to a tape, buy a record. He took pains over his appearance, he was good-looking with full lips and big brown eyes. He deserved to be gay, poor boy, instead of which he had a string of affairs with straight girls his own age, each more pathetic than the last. She hadn't managed to stop herself taking an interest in him. Because of her conversations with him, one afternoon she'd left her flat and walked over to the Place Jussieu to look at some second-hand records, and spotted the dark-haired salesgirl: an upfront dyke, condescending and raffish-looking. Impossible not to keep going back. Life had started to reassert itself, without her realizing it. The girl's name was Elise. She listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees all the time, and liked Chinese films. The depression blew clean away. Elise was like a blazing coal, a tiny body that allowed itself to be lifted and turned as much as one liked. Her behind was like a baby's. Her back was tattooed all over. Elise liked Philip K. Dick and went round clutching Valerio Evangelisti's first novel, which she was reading for the third time. She would describe how her mother had died after endless suffering, with that coolness of youth, when one
is still running too fast for emotion to catch up. Her wrists were scarred by razor blades. Elise's charm was all the more overwhelming because she wasn't free, she was the kind of girl who loves duplicity, the kind of girl you can never trust, one who was excited by the idea of betrayal. She lived in a bedsit, on the sixth floor without a lift, near the Place de l'Horloge. Elise had other girlfriends and introduced them to her. She'd have liked to get off with them all. And it was mutual. One evening she'd called in to work saying she was sick, a second night she said she had a problem, the third night she didn't call at all, and assumed they'd realize she was quitting her job.

She'd started in the debt-collecting racket by chance. This guy she hardly knew had agreed to go and pressure a porn film producer to pay an actress right away. He'd asked her to go along with him. The job had immediately pleased her. Some people fall for heroin first shot, some people fall for coke at the first sniff, what she'd fallen for was the adrenaline. Her number was passed round, she took on missions the way other girls might have offered a quickie: regularly but not the whole time. She'd become the Hyena. An outfit had offered her a full-time job, she'd accepted. Not a great job, but quite well paid. In a detective agency, getting creditors to pay up is pretty much the equivalent of cleaning lavatories. She wasn't unhappy to play the dyke the way heteros expected: brutal, marginal, ready to cut the balls off anyone who crossed her. The first years, she quite enjoyed it.

She wasn't in the business to make friends. She didn't want peer-group recognition, she had no intention of being understood or sympathized with. But the first man she worked with
as a regular partner, Cro-Mag, was OK. When he gave up, she didn't enjoy working with other people. Her colleagues were heavy-handed, too highly motivated, cut-price sadists who thought they were tough. Something had kept her hanging on for a while: the chase itself. She'd developed a taste for it early on: one day when she was doing her act, a gipsy hiding in the corner of a room had pinned her to the ground, he'd put a knife against her throat and hadn't needed to say a word to indicate that it wasn't a good moment to threaten anyone. For a tenth of a second, his breath had invaded her space, they had exchanged looks, nothing in his eyes gave any hint of his humanity. She had come very close to death – he would have slit her throat like that of a chicken, without a pang. She had not felt afraid. Not at the time. Instead, she had replied to him on the same wavelength, as if she were digging her hands into his guts, a geyser of cold, still, intense hatred. It had been a moment suspended in time. A shard of life. And for the next few days, she had had the sensation of being aware of every cell in her body, every particle in the air. Reinvigorated. She didn't care which side she was playing for. She didn't even care whether she got the best of it. What had hooked her was the precise moment: two wills fighting full tilt. She would have liked it to happen with a girl, to see if it was even better. Everything was always better with girls.

But she hadn't stayed much longer in debt collecting. Too many rules, too much timekeeping, paperwork, trivial internal quarrels, egos squabbling in a teacup. She'd taken on fewer missions, plugged the gaps in her income by selling grass, then moved on to dealing in coke. Because of her former contacts in debt recovery, she was naturally contacted
by the French intelligence services. A good-looker and fast talker, she had very long legs, a powerful motorbike, and the best suppliers in town… Within a year, her network was set up: politicians, sportsmen, doctors, actors, journalists, officials, hairdressers, prostitutes, traders, drivers. Apart from sex, nothing unites people like drugs. It wasn't hard in the circumstances to get hold of various pieces of private information about the wife of a minister, the son of a left-wing singer, the neighbour of a captain of industry. Cocaine was the ideal vehicle to get her into every kind of milieu, and even those who weren't users were willing to see her, there was always someone close to them who might be interested in the service she provided. Her appearance and her business fended off curious questions. No one asked what she was up to, why she was so interested in everyone's affairs. Her androgynous looks were an advantage: the man of the house was always a little turned on by the thought that she might make a pass at the lady of the house before leaving the family sitting room. People didn't enquire too closely into her life. But she did enquire closely into theirs, and knew who to pass her findings on to. The more information she delivered, the more protected her own racket became; the better able she was to carry it on with impunity, the better she could inform, and the more she was appreciated and introduced to new circles. She ran all over Paris, with wads of cash the size of Big Macs in one pocket and sachets of coke in the other. When she ran out of supplies, the narcotics squad helped her out. It was hard work – people siphoned the stuff up like crazy, she'd hardly got to a new address before she was being called back for more. It was well paid too. Those were the
days: wherever she arrived, people were pleased to see her, even if she turned up five hours late.

Waugheirt had moved her on to a higher level. Still passing intelligence. He had a dark comb-over on his bald head, and his long fingers, bristling with hairs, made his hands look like impatient spiders. He wore a wedding ring. She found it hard to believe that a woman could be in such deep shit that she'd want to share her life with him. He spoke slowly, like in films from the Far East, you had time to think of a hundred other things while he was explaining something. Waugheirt was ugly, yes, but he gave an impression of intelligence, deep concentration, an impression reinforced by his voice, which was amazingly deep and throaty. He said he'd spotted her and observed her at work. It was time for her to give up dealing, he said, give up the amateurism and the info picked up in exchange for trivial favours, small-time protection rackets or perks, flats belonging to the Paris city council, freebies. He thought she should work – without official cover – on more ambitious projects. Full-time, at the going rate. Which was quite a lot. Thinking to refuse the offer, she'd replied that Paris wasn't short of double agents ready to do anything to get on the right side of French intelligence. ‘People aren't that complicated. You just have to hint that someone in power's behind you, and all they want is to go and brown-nose. So why me?'

‘You're just a small-time dealer. How long can you go on doing this? You're getting on for thirty, right? Someone younger will come along one day soon, and take your place in your “in” circles. You're happy with what you can make from it for now. But everything could change if you're willing to make the break.'

Waugheirt had taken his wallet from his inside pocket, glanced at the bill, paid for the two coffees, leaving a small tip, but a tip all the same. Before standing up, he had added, soberly, ‘Why you persist in playing below your real level is your own business. I've got contacts. Everywhere else, to get a quarter the information you bring in calls for three times the work. And that's not taking into account this disconcerting gift you have for knowing
where
to look.'