Vernon Subutex Three

by Virginie Despentes

  When she said all this, Marie-Ange looked daggers at her. Like, motherhood is sacred, it is the core of a woman’s happiness. Easy for her to say, she’s got a guy at home. Xavier doesn’t work. And, on the subject of guys . . . good luck falling in love when you’ve got a kid in tow. You fuck during school hours, so if the guy’s got a job – you don’t get laid. Besides, Lucas doesn’t like the guys she sleeps with. And she can hardly claim it’s because he’s possessive. He’d really like her to find someone. It’s just that he’s more clear-sighted – she’s constantly dragging home losers. When there’s a conflict of interest between your son and the guy you’ve got the hots for – it’s not your son that gets kicked into touch. The girls were outraged to hear her talk like this. But she tells it like it is, that’s all. O.K., sure, you’re never on your own again. But that’s the problem: you’re never on your own again. Marie-Ange and Sylvie glower at her, saying, you’re not fit to be a mother, you should be ashamed. She doesn’t give a damn. She’s used to it. She drove the last nail home. She said to Pénélope, “Are you happy with your boyfriend? Yeah? Well, just remember that everything you love about your life with him ends the minute you have a kid. Having a family is the death of a relationship.” At this point, she stopped, because Marie-Ange looked as if she could strangle her. Most women have trouble being honest about these things. Motherhood is like F.G.M. – women feel obliged to make sure everyone else does it.

  She stopped there, having delivered the crucial points of her message. Having created a tense atmosphere, she backpedalled – she made her friends laugh. She started telling them about Lucas’ recent fixation with jerking off. The girls were shocked but howling with laughter. It’s true. For the past year, she’s had to change Lucas’ sheets every day. She buys boxes of Kleenex Man-Size and leaves them everywhere, otherwise he’ll wipe himself off on whatever comes to hand. Poor kid must be exhausted. She never goes into his room without knocking. Sometimes she teases him when he spends ten minutes in the toilet after some torrid scene in a movie. She goes through his phone to check that he’s not getting threatening text messages from the other kids at school – she’s afraid of him being bullied. It’s her worst nightmare. Lucas is a sweet boy, he’s incapable of defending himself, physically or verbally. She’s terrified that one day some moron at school will film him naked doing something dumb and he’ll end up being a laughing stock. This is how she knows he looks at porn, his search history is an encyclopaedia of XXX. His father says she shouldn’t go rooting around in his things, that she’s invading his privacy. That she doesn’t know what it’s like, being a teenage boy.

  Only when he’s singing can she be sure he’s not jackin’ the beanstalk – he can’t manage both at the same time. Lucas sings out of tune. And there must be – what? – four billion songs in the world . . . But Lucas, he sings the Marseillaise, he does little segues, a sort of Addams family “buh-buh-buh-BUM”, then he launches into Maître Gims.

  She managed to ease the tension with stories of her son’s wanking feats. Marie-Ange had tears in her eyes from laughing so hard. “But what’s with him singing the Marseillaise?” she asked. “It’s because of the January 7 attacks. He’s become patriotic. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he came home all proud of himself and told me he’d observed a minute’s silence without clowning around. I said, I should hope so, don’t think I’m going to congratulate you for that. Though it has to be said that the kids at his school . . . you should see them, they’re terrifying. Even back when he was in primary school, I’ll always remember this, he was playing in his room with a couple of classmates and suddenly I hear him yelling, ‘Better watch out, I’m dangerous as Mohamed Merah’ like he was saying he was the Pope, or Batman. I burst into his room and snapped, ‘What did you just say?’ and my kid smiles up at me, pleased with himself, and says, ‘I’m dangerous as Mohamed Merah.’ He’d learned it at school. He didn’t expect me to take it badly. I read him the riot act and, let me tell you, by the time I finished he knew there was a problem. And the other two, they were just like my son – one look at them and you knew they hadn’t heard something like this at home.” Since that day, every time she sees Latifa Ibn Ziaten on T.V. she fetches Lucas and sits him down in front of the screen. And then she asks him: “You think he’s powerful, the moron who murdered that woman’s son?” All that to end up here: her son singing the Marseillaise as he brushes his teeth. It almost makes her appreciate Maître Gims. But at least when he’s singing he’s not wanking.

  By this point of the story, Marie-Ange did not have the heart to laugh, she asked, “So are there a lot of rough kids at his school? Have you never thought of putting him into a private school?” And Stéphanie shook her head. “Where I come from, we go to secular schools. It’s not like I’ve got the money to pay for a school, but even if I was stinking rich, I wouldn’t send my son to a private school. And if you think that sending your daughter to Notre-Dame-dewhat-the-fuck means she’ll turn out less of a fucktard than my son, you’re kidding yourself . . . She’ll come home reciting passages from Mein Kampf, and you won’t be very happy either. The only solution is not to have kids, the times we’re living in are completely screwed-up. We keep coming back to the same situation.”

  Marie-Ange was not prepared to let her have the last word. “I don’t agree, I think that’s precisely why it’s important that people like us have kids – because we educate them differently, and the world we live in needs well brought-up kids.” Stéphanie did not respond. Marie-Ange’s boyfriend is a bit fascist around the edges and, the way Stéphanie sees it, there’s no shortage of guys like that these days, rather the reverse. She had said what she needed to say to Pénélope – you never know, she might even listen. You’re looking at twenty years without parole. And that’s it, that’s the real difference between men and women.

  It was Max who wanted a child. It was his idea. She had the child. But him, he’s a father when he can spare the time. A little less than every other weekend, as it turns out. The same goes for child support: he pays it when he can. And all his friends slap him on the back, “Respect, bro, you’re really looking out for your kid.” He takes Lucas to a boxing match once a month, to a concert, or to Disneyland because he’s got a friend who works there on and off and lets them in for free . . . and if you ask Max how he’s dealing with fatherhood, he’ll tell you: “I’m nailing it.” But if a woman treated her children the way Max treats his son, she’d have the perfect parenting police on her tail, non-stop. And they’ve got spies everywhere.

  Pénélope changed the subject. “I’m fed up, it’s supposed to rain again tomorrow, I’m sick and tired of this weather,” and Marie-Ange said, “I really fancy a weekend in Barcelona.” Sylvie said, “You know if you book in advance, the flights cost less than thirty euros?” and Stéphanie piped up, “I’ve wanted to go there for years. Max’s sister lives there and she has a daughter Lucas’ age, she’s forever suggesting that he come, so she can take him on a tour of the Barça stadium, but I’m worried about putting him on a plane on his own, Lucas isn’t the brightest crayon in the box, he’d probably end up in Bamako, the moron . . .”

  And that was how she had ended up in this nightmare situation. The girls looked up the price of tickets, opened their diaries to find a weekend that suited everyone. And Stéphanie went along with it . . . in spite of the little voice of reason.

  *

  They were still in a warm bubble, an extension of the atmosphere at the convergence. Stéphanie had shown up there by accident. She had had dinner with Olivier, a guy she had met twenty years earlier in Angers, when she was still a student and never missed a gig by Les Thugs, Casbah Club, or Cut the Navel String . . . Olivier used to hang out with the guys from the indie label Black & Noir, and he had been a little in love with her. It had been a late-night friendship, a flirtation that had never come to anything, one that should have faded and died with time. But when she moved to Paris, they bumped into each other at La Cantada. At the time, Oliv
ier was working for Radical Production, he got along well with Max, whom Stéphanie had just met. Olivier had become a happy, contented father, but unlike most of her former suitors who cut her dead the day they stopped dreaming of a future with her, Olivier had remained friendly. Ever since, they’ve regularly met for dinner, without any blurred lines – something Stéphanie finds faintly disappointing. One night, Olivier spent the whole evening talking about Subutex’s convergences and Stéphanie listened, though she found it a little boring. She thought maybe he was having a mid-life crisis, a bizarre kind of time travel that involved going to raves in muddy fields and necking handfuls of Molly. It’s such a waste, she thought, if you’re going to lose the plot, you’d be better off cheating on your wife with me . . . Olivier was invited to the next convergence. He was happy as a sandboy. He explained that the selection process was very rigorous, because the organisers didn’t want to end up with four hundred arseholes. “It would ruin the magic.” This was the era of V.I.P.s and velvet ropes, of people who knew people and appreciated things precisely because others are excluded. Then, suddenly, he said, “I’m driving down tonight, why don’t you come with me? I’m allowed to bring one guest. You’ve got a licence – aren’t you from some godforsaken village in the country? We can share the driving. What do you say?” And it was so unexpected that Stéphanie did not have time to panic. From the ambience of a grown-up dinner, they slipped straight into youthful pandemonium, Stéphanie just had time to swing by her place and grab a couple of T-shirts and some clean underwear while Olivier skinned up a mild spliff “for the road”, between them they felt a wanton bubbling excitement, the sort of rash complicity that prompts such adventures.

  She felt intoxicated by this freedom, this recklessness that for years had characterised her life and which she had completely forgotten. If he had let her sleep on the idea, she would have changed her mind – the notion of driving through the night to go dancing in a field would have seemed grotesque. But he swept her along. She had left her mobile phone at home, as he had requested. For the first hour, this panicked her – if something happened to Lucas, no-one would be able to contact her, etc. But Olivier calmed her, he reminded her that people had lived for most of their lives without smartphones, besides, this was how things were at the convergences – no-one takes selfies, no-one goes online. It’s important. She almost snapped, “Well, excuse me for thinking my son is important,” but Olivier simply shrugged. “I’ve got kids too. We’re talking twenty-four hours when they can’t get in touch. We grew up without our parents calling us every hour, remember? And we didn’t exactly suffer.” She said nothing. He had annoyed her. But when he put on the Bee Gees she relented and started singing in the car. It’s difficult to sulk convincingly when you’re listening to “Stayin’ Alive”.

  They had driven all night. They listened to Curtis Mayfield. Olivier had stopped at a petrol station and bought dark chocolate. Dozens of bars of dark chocolate. He had explained that all participants left something behind “for the commune”, it could be whatever you liked. He said, chocolate is good, it’s full of magnesium and it’s easy to store. Then they pulled over and slept for a while in the car and she was a little disappointed that he didn’t slip his arm around her shoulder, that they didn’t abandon the idea of the convergence to go and discuss geopolitics in a hotel room, but she was too exhausted to truly focus on her frustration.

  *

  They had arrived in the city in the late morning with the sun beating down. Olivier’s face was drawn from exhaustion, it made him look older, Stéphanie decided it suited him. He had left the car in a car park and they had walked to the square outside the train station.

  They had to wait for the “shuttles”, in this case, three beat-up little cars ferrying people back and forth. Needless to say, it was a long wait, since there were a lot of people. They had sat on the ground and gorged themselves on croissants. Stéphanie wondered how long it had been since she had last sat on the ground doing nothing. It was strange. There was already something in the air. A childlike joy. The convergents acknowledged each other, smiled at each other. Stéphanie had been to a few raves back in the ’90s. She had good memories. She loved M.D.M.A. She doesn’t take it anymore. The comedown leaves her with a vicious headache. As with most new drugs, it had taken a while before people realised the dangerous side effects. Molly can make you depressed. The reverse of how you feel coming up on it. A nasty boomerang.

  When they arrived at the place where the convergence was being held, she hadn’t been surprised at the sea of tents being pitched, the calm good humour of people glad to be there. It was a familiar atmosphere. It takes a little while to read a crowd, at first all you notice is the multitude. Gradually, her eyes took in the details. The crowd was largely white – though not as disproportionately so as at a techno night or an indie gig. In terms of age, it was pretty mixed. There were a lot of people her age, but there were young people too, there were even older folk who couldn’t strut about and needed someone to support their elbow and help them sit down. There were slightly more women than men, which immediately made Stéphanie stress out – if this was a girlie thing, she couldn’t imagine it being anything extraordinary. If something’s truly brilliant, guys show up – Q.E.D.

  Thankfully, there were a number of fine specimens of manhood to make up for it. They ranged from the sensational – there was one young black guy in particular, with piercing eyes and abs that looked like they had been precision-moulded, who made such an impression she figured she was in the right place at the right time.

  Stéphanie recognised an ageing rock critic she hadn’t seen in years and they said hello. He was walking through the grass in his oilskin boots and his tailored three-quarter-length coat, bald but elegant. He talked to her about chemtrails, pointing to the white streak in the sky, and she was surprised that a guy like this would buy into that kind of conspiracy theory. She said: “Do you really think the government would poison us just for the hell of it, and do it in broad daylight, without even trying to conceal it, when it would be a whole lot easier to put something in the water supply?” and the journalist said, “Yeah, that’s what’s so intense, they don’t even feel they need to hide it anymore. After all, what could we do?”

  She carried on walking while Olivier napped under an oak. In the distance, she saw a couple of forty-something punks, one guy had orange liberty spikes, the other had a red mohawk that was black at the roots, both pretty craggy. Khaki jackets, beat-up sneakers, old tattoos with fading ink. Seeing them, she thought, there they are, typical gutter punks. As she drew alongside, they shared a long, languorous kiss. Maybe not so typical, then.

  There was no stand selling drinks. There was nothing for sale, no booze, no kebabs, no T-shirts. That, and the absence of her mobile, which she instinctively rummaged for in her pocket at regular intervals, seemed a little worrying. How were you supposed to kill time if you couldn’t drink, couldn’t buy food, and couldn’t check your timeline? People were taking the rules so seriously she began to wonder whether she hadn’t stumbled into a sect. Not a single selfie, not a single surreptitious text message . . . It took some time for her to put her finger on what she found most troubling in the pre-rave atmosphere: the gentleness. And with gentleness comes an innocence: to be gentle is to assume that everything is going to be fine. Strangers were smiling at each other. People who didn’t know each other were chatting, as though they had been transported back to childhood and were at a holiday camp. There was something old-fashioned about the collective atmosphere that was reminiscent of ’70s music festivals.

  She had recognised Patrice, whom she had known back when she was with Max but had not seen since. He’d always been fuckable. Highly fuckable, in fact. And he hadn’t changed much. He introduced her to his girlfriend, Pénélope, and Stéphanie sized her up: too pretty, too young, too comfortable in her own skin. No way would she be able to steal the guy from under her nose. Since Plan A was a non-starter, she befriended Pénélope, w
ho was also fairly new to all this. Together they headed off in search of the little girls’ room – a row of compost toilets at the far end of the camp, unsurprising, given the location. Pretty well kitted out, as it happened, you didn’t retch the minute you stepped inside. Everyone was so responsible that no-one splashed their piss all over the sand. All this consideration was starting to get on her tits.

  *

  Pénélope said that this was her first convergence, although she had visited the camp a month earlier. “When there’s just seven or eight people the atmosphere isn’t the same, obviously . . .” “I don’t get it – what the hell do they do? Play cards? Breed sheep? What’s their thing?”

  Pénélope could not say with any certainty.

  “They’re just unemployed, I suppose . . . They talk, they cook meals, they fix up some old banger . . . It’s Patrice’s trip, really. He’s known them for ages. He says the convergences are magical. He persuaded me to come, he said that it’s like levitation. That you have to experience it in person.” Stéphanie was beginning to think that this was going to be like one of those movies everyone tells you is genius and when you see it you’re disappointed because of all the hype you’ve been fed . . .