Apocalypse Baby (30 page)

‘Oh really? So you'd tell your parents?'

‘Of course.'

‘OK. So I'm making a big fuss about something, when everyone else is cool with it.'

But I've had time to imagine being at home, sitting across the table from my father and announcing to him, casually, that I'm going to live with my new girlfriend. And what the neighbours will say, if they see me living with a girl, when my flat isn't big enough for two beds. The Hyena hasn't finished.

‘But do you have room for you both, in Paris?'

‘Oh come on, lay off it. We just spent a night together, it's not…'

‘Aha! So you did. Now we're getting somewhere. You did spend the night together, then, I wasn't dreaming. Bitch, I almost didn't think so. But OK, now that you've chosen to confide in me, and let me say you couldn't have made a better choice – a word of warning right away. You don't know dykes. She'll turn up with her suitcases, asking for a spare key, before you've had time to remember the colour of her
eyes. Because she can do her job anywhere. But apart from that, believe me, you're living the best moment of your life. Heterosexuality is as natural as the electric fence they put round a field of cows. From now on, big girl, welcome to the wide open spaces.'

And for the first time since we've met, this kind of stupid statement makes me want to smile.

I'm plague, I'm cholera
Bird flu, the neutron bomb,
I'm a radioactive bitch
I'm a vicious little witch.
Aliens, humans all polluters
Universal contaminators

SITTING IN THE SHADE OF A TREE WITH
gigantic pink flowers that look like velvet, Valentine closes the black Moleskine notebook she stole from the stationer's where she photocopied the false declaration of the theft of her identity papers. She's only half-satisfied with the last rhyme. She's in a little park. She yawns. An old man with a beard and a huge belly ventures towards her corner. He's wearing flipflops, so you can see his revolting feet, with their long yellow toenails split at the ends. Surprised to see her there, he mutters something in a language she'd be hard put to identify, German, Catalan, Turkish, then he retreats. She's relieved that he's gone away. Then a man comes past, pushing a child in a pram so hi-tech it could enter for the Paris–Dakar rally. Three teenage girls, her own age, walk towards her taking no notice, their wrists are laden with bracelets, they
each hold a mobile and are chattering away. When she thinks she looked like that not so long ago. She's changed a lot. She is very attentive to her short biography. She looks back over it willingly, it's all she's got now. Her life. She remembers how the school terms followed one after another. Her old life. The Twilight phase, when you dream of this fantastic vampire, your hair's dyed red and your eyes are sore because you've rubbed them so hard to get the makeup off – she had to set her alarm an hour early, to have time to put on two sets of eyeliner and get them more or less symmetrical. Then there was the neo-metal phase, but people tell me that's for dummies, so I switch to the hardcore punk New York scene of the eighties, and my religion is Agnostic Front. Followed by the ‘I'm just a bimbo' phase – that's the only way guys are going to like you – but I'm not really a slag, I can afford designer handbags. And I can feel cynical when I do a few lines of coke. All this past seems far away now. In the last year everything speeded up.

It had all begun with Carlito, more or less. It wasn't exactly a
coup de foudre
. It was in front of this club, Le Divan du Monde. She was hanging about at the door, on her own, hoping that one of the boys from Panic Up Yours, who were playing there that night, would come past and give her a backstage pass. She bombarded them with texts they never replied to. Sometimes she slept with them: in town they showed off as tough guys who could have anyone, but didn't give a shit – except that in fact when they were on their own, without their mates, and naked in bed, they were as soft as little puppies and hardly any more threatening in the sack. At first sight, Carlito and his gang had bothered her. They were
coming out of an alternative bar and hanging about on the opposite pavement, vaguely harassing the crowd waiting for Panic Up Yours. They looked like anti-capitalist campaigners, just watching them you sensed a bad smell. They hadn't yet found the suckers they were looking for, but hadn't yet decided to split. Valentine was pretending to be reading texts on her mobile, and Carlito had crossed the street to ask her outright, ‘Hey you, can you give me ten euros, please?'

‘Ten euros? Inca bonnets too pricey, are they?'

She was sure that if he lifted a finger against her, the bouncers would leap on him. A little bourgeois girl like her and a big layabout like him, there'd always be someone to defend her.

Carlito had carried on in his loud voice, ‘Oho, little miss smelly puss, we've got a sense of humour, have we?'

‘Oh, leave me alone, get a life! Go find an anti-racist demo at Bastille or somewhere.'

He didn't impress her. Too fat. She didn't like guys with bellies. If, at that moment, an angel had come down and told her,
this man will change your life
, she'd have burst out laughing. He went a few steps away, but not far, she could feel him looking at her, while he went on doing his panhandling. There were fewer people around now. At the front of house, she humiliated herself pleading with one of the big dumb bouncers to let her in. The concert had started. She kept sending texts, still to no avail. She'd decided to beat it, feeling disgusted, she'd have to go past those three zombies to get to the metro, so she changed pavements, but it wasn't enough. Carlito had started following her.

‘Go on, give me ten euros, I know you've got them, I so
want you to give me them. I love it when girls like you give me money, it really turns me on.'

They were both standing on the boulevard. And then this total wanker, wearing a grotty tracksuit tucked into cheap white socks, a wanker, yeah, but six foot tall, decided to get involved. ‘Leave her alone, she's my girl,' – and he took her by the arm to pull her away. Bad scene. Obviously, Carlito was going to split, and leave her to sort it out with this half-witted giant. But no, he didn't push off, or even bother to argue, his arm had shot up, his fist clenched. One fierce punch. An uppercut to the jaw, like in wrestling matches where the opponents are mismatched; and the loser staggered backwards, obeying all the rules, almost in slow motion. Carlito had turned round to face the other guy's allies, with a twisted smile on his lips, and his own two sidekicks were already behind him, arms folded. You had to give them that, they relished a fight. Someone in the group growled, ‘Look out! cops, cops coming,' the two protagonists threw looks of hate at each other, indicating, ‘going 'cos we got to, but we'd really like to smash your face in'. And everyone dispersed, quickly but casually, hands in pockets. Without running or turning round, but taking oblique routes through the street, hugging the wall so as to turn the corner faster. And Valentine had fallen into step with Carlito. He seemed to think it natural that she should attach herself to him, and talked to her as if he knew her. ‘See, if we hadn't been there, you'd really have been in the shit.' The two sidekicks laughed at everything he said, it didn't take long to see he was the boss. They stopped in front of a grungy bar near Pigalle, and Carlito had asked, as if it was a done deal, ‘Right, those ten euros, going to shell
them out now, buy us a beer?' They knew the manageress, it stank of grease inside, and Valentine disliked this kind of place, smelling of old people, poor people, and unhealthy fast food. She didn't say much, just took it all in. More pals of theirs had come to join them and a little gang had gathered round Carlito. It was sort of fun to be sitting at table with the kind of people she normally despised. Without actually calculating, Carlito arranged things so that she was sitting next to him, showing off that she was his little fun item of the day, and nobody else was about to contradict him. She watched everything around her, thinking this would make a good story afterwards to tell her real friends. It takes some time to learn other people's way of talking, and Valentine was too inexperienced to pick up everything that was going on. Carlito was cocksure and she liked that. At one point he'd turned to her, sniffed her neck and whispered in her ear, ‘You smell of soap from a hundred metres. What's so dirty at home that you keep washing so often?' He looked her straight in the eyes, as if he were fucking her, standing up right there in the bar. He might not be a turn-on, but he knew how to talk to girls like her. He was still the leader of the gang, even when more people showed up. The one who talks more than anyone else, the one people listen to more, the one who makes everyone laugh. Whose judgement they all depend on. Their major source of entertainment tonight was a notorious left-wing activist who'd spent a few months in jail, suspected of having tampered with some railway containers. They all found his statements to the press hilarious. Carlito seemed to know them off by heart, and made constant fun of this individual he regarded as a political jester. In their conversation,
there was no reference to her own world. She'd thought that these G20 protester types spent their time mocking the bosses, the rich, the powerful, and posh kids. She'd even tried to join in by making a clumsy joke about the president's wife. They looked at her without reacting, as if she'd made a reference to Montaigne. The Elysée Palace wasn't on their radar. Nothing to do with them. Valentine had always been told how lucky she was to be born into her family, that everyone wanted above all to have the kind of life she had. But in this scruffy crowd, nobody seemed worried that they couldn't afford an expensive lunch at Costes.

She had assumed Carlito would try to sleep with her that night. She would have agreed, if he had put a little pressure on. Valentine slept with as many men as she could. She thought you could improve in bed, like you could playing the piano: by practice. Carlito didn't really attract her, but she found it logical that the leader of the gang would get plenty of blowjobs from as many girls as possible. Otherwise how would he stay on top? She thought he would want to sleep with her, and like the others would be surprised how much he'd like it. Guys always ended up going nuts, either because they were hardwired to be grateful, or because she was good at it. She opted for the second solution. She had her own theory about sex. The key thing wasn't position, or little moans, any slag could do that. The key thing was to be able to talk, and there porn was no use at all, porn films were practically silent. You had to be not ashamed of talking dirty, but you also had to find just the right tone, so as not to sound ridiculous, which wasn't something granted to everyone. You had to work at your voice, so that it was sexy enough to be
exciting, but upper-class enough to be arousing. ‘Oh it's so big, please be gentle, your prick's so huge it's going to break my little cunt open, oh you're so big, you're going to blow me apart.' The ultimate hit was to persuade him that he was so good at fucking that he made her lose her mind. That never before had she been in such a state. You had to make a quick judgement. Would he prefer: ‘Hit me, tear me open, baby, I'll be your whore, I'll do anything you want, you're so fantastic, you can do what you like with me.' Or was he more into little-girly talk: ‘Oh, no, not so hard, you're hurting me, it's so big, gently please, oh no, no no, you're an animal, you're hurting me so much.'

Carlito hadn't tried anything that night, when he left her on the pavement. He'd merely stung her for another twenty euros for a taxi which he had suddenly remembered he had to take for some urgent reason. He'd promised to pay her back next day: ‘What are you doing tomorrow night? Are you free? Want to meet up? Then I'll pay you back. Porte de Montreuil, outside the metro station? Wait for me, eight o'clock, OK? Sure? I don't like owing people money.' When she left him, she wasn't sure whether she'd go. But by not screwing her right away, he had created suspense. So she turned up next day. And so did he, half an hour late. He didn't pay back the twenty euros, instead tying himself in knots with a confused and convincing explanation, the upshot of which was that the simplest thing would be if she lent him another thirty, so that he owed her a round fifty, and he'd give it back next day without fail. ‘Without fail.' That, she was to learn over time, was an expression covering everything he had no intention of doing. With the money she'd just lent him, he invited her
to dinner in a downmarket pizzeria, in which he ordered bottle after bottle of wine. Carlito talked a lot and listened very little. At first, Valentine had found him amusing, by the end of the evening he fascinated her. He could do long riffs, whether on R & B, the African Football Cup, the Red Brigades, Japanese pornography, or surveillance technology. In the course of the conversation, she'd let drop that she was François Galtan's daughter – normally nobody recognized her father's name, but Carlito seemed to go mad, literally. He brought out his big guns, as if he had a chance to speak to the father through the daughter. He had his own particular way of arguing, she felt his brain was equipped with a pair of pincers that enabled him to pick up any subject and lift it, so that you saw it from an unaccustomed angle, then drop it with a crash to the ground when he'd decided to finish with it. Nobody else she knew was like him. He talked to her a lot about sex, but didn't try to seduce her. When the restaurant closed for the night, he'd negotiated a reduction of the bill with the owner, with an insistent bravado that paid off.

She got in the habit of going to meet him when he called. He didn't have a mobile of his own. He would borrow other people's, often without asking permission, and make a series of calls. He would give Valentine a rendezvous, never for a precise place, always by a metro station, and would turn up to fetch her up to an hour late, without apologizing. And then she would stay to listen to him. She didn't tell anyone about these meetings. None of her friends from her ordinary life would have understood what she was up to with this left-wing loudmouth. And Carlito wasn't in any hurry to introduce her to the people he hung out with. Sometimes, though, a girl
called Magali, a redhead, with tribal tattooings right across her forehead, would come to fetch him. She would say as she arrived, ‘Carlos, everyone's been waiting two hours for you, come on.' And then she would wait for him another couple of hours. Valentine liked knowing that he was making other people wait while he chatted with her. Or more accurately for the pleasure of having her as an audience.