Vernon Subutex Three

by Virginie Despentes

  “Fuck, I’d never even thought about it before now, and I love these shoes, they give me a booty just like J-Lo’s.”

  Sylvie manages to stop herself saying, “Sounds like wishful thinking.” Emilie has a big booty, that’s a given, but even in six-inch heels no-one would mistake her for Jennifer Lopez.

  Someone who smelled of sweat and greasy hair obviously took the lift just before them. They wrinkle their faces in disgust as they close the gate and squeeze into the tiny compartment. Emilie holds her nose; Sylvie carries on talking.

  “Obviously, it’s unlikely that less than three weeks after the attack at the Bataclan anyone’s going to target Bercy . . .”

  “It’s not called Bercy anymore, did you know that?”

  “Who goes round changing the name of a place everyone knows? A fucktard.”

  “We’re going to be searched, like, ten times before we get into the arena. Can you imagine – terrorists killing Madonna?”

  *

  Outside, it is bitterly cold, typical pre-Christmas Paris weather, so they stuff their hands in their pockets and head for the métro. This is all they talk about. For the past three weeks, it is all anyone talks about. In a way, this suits Sylvie: if it weren’t for the terrorist attacks, Emilie would ramble on endlessly about her love life. Three months ago, she met someone. The guy’s a total suit, the sort of boring arsehole no-one would hook up with unless they’d gone for years without a decent shafting, but Emilie is in love. And it’s starting to get ridiculous. She’s capable of telling the same story ten times over. There are people like that, when you hang out with them, you feel like you’re training to be a Samaritan . . .

  Sylvie catches her reflection in a shop window. This is the first time in her life she has gone to a gig wearing trainers. When she was really young, she liked wearing Converse Low Tops without socks, showing a bit of ankle – like Jane Birkin. But it’s been donkey’s years since she gave up the Lolita look. In profile, she finds herself depressing. It looks as though her legs have got shorter. She can do anything in heels – run down a grassy hill, brave an icy pavement, skip through gravel or prance down the stairs – she is possessed by the spirit of Tina Turner. It’s just a question of habit. Her legs are accustomed to high heels, her ankle never quivers, her eyes can spot the slightest obstacle at ten metres: metal gratings, cobblestones, slippery floors. She’s not afraid of anything or anyone. Except those fundamentalist fuckers. They’ve won. She needs to feel that she can run in order to have the courage to venture out. Because, in the end, this is no joke: like everyone in Paris, she is still terrified three weeks later. That said, her white Fila Disruptors are sublime.

  Emilie has launched into her stories again. She met some guy at the camp who was looking for a bassist. Emilie was up for it. She almost cried during the first rehearsal, she says, because she felt so happy to be back in that whole atmosphere. But the night before a gig as a support act at Petit Bain, her boyfriend said, I can’t come, I’ve got a dinner that night, and when she insisted, he sweetly said, “At your age, it’s ludicrous. I don’t want to see you and think you look ridiculous.” The first few times Emilie talked about her new boyfriend, Sylvie tried to tell her – tactfully – precisely what she thought: the guy’s an arsehole. It’s a no-brainer. You’ve landed yourself a bona fide scumbag. It’s not surprising, there are a lot of them out there. But Emilie has waited fifteen years to land a decent guy – decent, well, everything is relative, let’s just say a guy who’s into her – so she refuses to listen. Give it a couple of weeks and she’ll invent some reason to drop out of the band, that way there won’t be any more unpleasant conversations.

  *

  When they reach the platform of the métro, Sylvie takes out her mobile phone and interrupts Emilie. “Let’s take a selfie!” She cranks the Facetune Filter up to ten and holds the phone up so she can get them both into the shot. She knows her best angle, cheeks sucked in, pouty lips. She notices a girl giving them a withering look that says, makes you sick, two wrinkly old cougars posing for a photo . . . Just wait till you’re my age, kid, you’ll see what filters are for.

  When Max left the voicemail offering her two tickets to Madonna, various thoughts crossed Sylvie’s mind: surprise that he should think about her, joy at the opportunity to go out and to be able to give Emilie something cool for her birthday, given that she’s flat broke and any gift would pose a problem, excitement at the prospect of seeing Madonna and at remembering the last time she saw her, wistfulness at realising how much everything about her life has changed since then and how bitterly she misses everything about her former life . . . And it seems that what little she has left is doomed to disappear. The camp was the last thing she could cling to. Now that, too, has collapsed. But in the surge of joy she felt on the day Max left the message, never for a second did she imagine that going into the city would be an act of resistance . . .

  *

  On the night of November 13, she had turned on the T.V. She was absentmindedly zapping while waiting for “Ce soir (ou jamais!)” to come on so she could see who the guests were. Olga, who by force of circumstance had become her flatmate, had gone out that night. Sylvie did not immediately realise what was happening. At first, people assumed it was a gangland shooting. And although she knew the place, the name of the restaurant didn’t ring a bell. At first. She had idly turned on France Info. From that moment, she would remember every second of how she spent the night. Because of the loneliness. Though actually, she had received numerous text messages. People were asking each other – where are you, are you O.K.? Xavier messaged first, then Patrice, then Olga, who had had to borrow a phone and was stuck in a bar on the other side of place de la République, then Daniel, who knew a guy who was trapped on the roof of the Bataclan, then Sélim, one of whose pupils was actually working as a waitress at Le Petit Cambodge. And Sylvie, who was sitting with her phone in her lap, sending text messages, the laptop open on her Facebook timeline, the T.V. turned on and the radio to hand, had started sobbing. She suddenly realised that tomorrow morning there would be no coach trip back to the camp to debrief with the others. Fat tears had rolled down her cheeks, and with them came a feeling of tenderness.

  She had waited for her son, Lancelot, to reply to her messages with a sense of mounting panic that the mantra “there’s no reason he would be among the victims” did nothing to allay.

  She did not know it, but he was spending the weekend in Normandy. He was at the cinema and it took a while before he texted back to reassure her. Now it was his turn to worry. He texted, don’t go outside, no-one knows what’s going on, and ended with, I love you. The words warmed her heart, and she began to sob harder. She wept tenaciously – about everything at once. About Lancelot sending her an affectionate message given that, lately, he has been angry with her all the time. She knows what’s wrong – ever since she moved out, he can’t bear to see her in this shabby two-room apartment. Alone, penniless, growing old. It’s too difficult. He finds it easier to be angry. They upset each other. She can tell that he is sad. Nothing is going the way he had hoped. Not with his studies, or his girlfriend, or his friends. Every time she sees him – so, not very often – she tells him everything is going to be fine, that it’s just a phase. But she is not convinced. She can perceive the man he is growing into. And she is not sure that this man is destined for a happy life. She finds it devastating, this realisation that her child is not very good at being happy. And so she cries harder as she rereads the affectionate messages from her son.

  In a tearful frenzy, she had sent messages of love to everyone she had met at the camp whose phone numbers she had. Every one of them. And the more she sobbed, the more she loved them. Every fucking one of them. She learned how many victims there were when she woke up. She had no tears left. The WhatsApp group chat carried on until daybreak. Olga was still stuck in the bar. The police had cordoned off the whole area. She said there were boys crying, young men, and that she was trying to cheer them up. And fo
r the first time that night, Sylvie had smiled. She could easily imagine the young men Olga was attempting to console and the thought distracted her. For the unwary, the giant’s train of thought can be genuinely unsettling – a sort of semantic earthquake.

  Sylvie had been one of the few people to go out the following morning. It felt like mid-August without the sunshine. A city forsaken. Crushed. The grief was palpable, it clung to every wall. But at everyone you met, you could smile. It was so poignant that she hadn’t stayed outdoors for long – she had to go home to cry. Usually, when she’s out in the street and so depressed that she feels tears begin to well, she finds a church. It is the one place in the city where you can go in, sit down and weep. It’s also the one place where a single woman can linger without some creepy guy deciding to strike up a conversation. But that Saturday morning, Sylvie did not have the courage to go and weep in a church.

  When she got home, she found Olga wearing a bright pink dressing gown that made her look like Barbapapa. She had just taken a shower. She had not slept a wink all night. But she was full of energy. She was waving her arms and screaming down the phone at Xavier: “Are you fucking dumb or what? People weren’t even out of the Bataclan and there you were, already on Facebook writing #stopIslam? I couldn’t ring you at the time because I didn’t want to freak out the people in the bar I was stuck in, but I was gobsmacked that you’re this far gone. Have you no heart, or just no fucking brain cells? #stopIslam? What the fuck do you mean by that, dipshit? Stop Islam from what, you ignorant twat? What the hell is going on inside your head when you write shit like that? We should kill all refugees? Haven’t we had enough death as it is? Or maybe you haven’t had enough, dickwad? Hasn’t there been enough grief, enough anguish without you adding a sprinkle of your fuckwit frustrations? For God’s sake, Xavier, go buy yourself a brain, they’re pretty useful, ask anyone . . .” And then, against all expectations, having bombarded him with insults and without giving him a second to reply, she had ended the conversation with: “O.K., right, see you tonight, yeah, later,” and as she hung up, she had asked, “What do you say all of us meet up here at your place tonight? Just this once . . . We need to meet up, don’t you think?” Sylvie had opened her eyes wide. “What do you mean, all of us? The apartment is too small, Olga. Who else did you tell to drop round?” She had invited everyone. The whole camp. And now she was staring at Sylvie in genuine surprise – she saw no relationship between the size of the space and the impossibility of seating twenty-odd people. “They’re not coming for a comfortable sit-down. They’re coming so we can all be together . . . because there’s too much misery. Don’t add to it. Are you annoyed that I invited them to come round without clearing it with you first? I’m completely screwed up, I’ve had the night from hell, I might as well be a first responder with all the people I helped and supported. France isn’t ready for war, believe me . . .”

  At the time, Sylvie had been annoyed. But, in the end, it was a good idea. Olga was right – they needed to stick together.

  Sylvie had never thrown a party at her place. Out of embarrassment. Because it was a dreary, low-ceilinged little apartment with no features. Because it contained the only three pieces of furniture that fitted. Because it was an ugly, charmless street and the lobby of the building smelled of boiled cabbage – of poor people’s food. Because the dealer on the sixth floor blocked the doorway and junkies pissed in the lift shaft. She had allowed Olga in, so she could squat on the sofa. She knew Olga wouldn’t notice any of these things. She’s used to it. In her eyes, this squalid filth was normal.

  Sylvie had made crêpes and the circumstances were so serious that she even had some of the Nutella Xavier had brought. God, it had been ages since anything containing so much fat had passed her lips. Besides, ever since her menopause started, it’s been straightforward, she stopped eating properly. Strangely, she doesn’t feel weak. Her girlfriends tell her that, after she hits fifty, a woman only needs five or six hundred calories a day to feel good. She doesn’t know whether it’s true. Even on an anorexic diet, she doesn’t lose an ounce. She can’t afford to put on weight. She doesn’t have the money to buy herself a new wardrobe.

  At around eight o’clock, Pamela had said, shall we switch off the lights? And they had found themselves, not exactly as they used to be, but with something of their old complicity. The moon in the window was a waxing crescent, a slender scar against the darkness. Patrice had asked, “Has anyone heard from Vernon?” when everyone was thinking about him but not daring to mention his name. But he had disappeared. It was the best evening she had spent since the camp had been dissolved.

  *

  She still hangs out with the same people she used to – but she no longer invites them back to hers. She lies. She says she’s moved because, without Lancelot, she finds the house depressing. That it’s too big, that it’s pointless, that she needed a change of scene, that she loves her new neighbourhood. She says she’s found a beautiful little two-room apartment just outside the Marais. She lives in Parmentier. She tells her girlfriends, I’ll have you round soon, but I’m not finished decorating. In her friends’ eyes, there is no cachet to social disgrace. Any more than it had in hers, before. But she does not have as much fun as she used to when she meets up with old friends.

  The conversations haven’t changed. It is her ear that has shifted. Comments she would previously not have noticed, she finds unsettling. There is always someone around the table to tell stories about the local yokel in the village where he has his country house, the one who lives on handouts rather than looking for work. The scrounger, the layabout, the benefit cheat – all of her rich friends seem to know at least one. He is an archetype. He twiddles his thumbs and rakes in fifteen hundred euros a month. He is a spendthrift. Two years ago, Sylvie had her own tame pauper, her cleaner’s husband who had spent years lying around at home and knew every trick for getting money from the state. But now that she no longer has a cleaner, now that she has been personally forced to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops to get the allowances and the benefits to which she is entitled, she has never managed to rake in the mythical monthly fortune so talked about at the dinner parties of the rich. She is not a spendthrift, since every bill that lands on the mat is a blow to the solar plexus. She doesn’t dare bang her fist on the table and scream, will you for God’s sake stop spouting such rubbish, you go try and wheedle money from the state, go and fist the poor, shiftless people you’re always talking about . . . Why don’t you see how easy it is to make ends meet on less than a thousand euros a month? But she says nothing. She who was always so quick to open her big mouth has discovered shame. It is also because she knows these people: reality does not affect them. All that matters are the stories they tell each other over a bottle of fine wine. She was once one of them. A member of that left-wing faction. The left that is suspicious of the poor. That cares about them, granted, but knows them too well to be duped. Too nice for their own good. And can see no other way than to whip them into shape. Because that is what they’re like, the poor, they’re ungrateful dogs. They bite the hand that so lovingly strokes them. They are badly trained. And the rich are to blame. They’ve been too generous.

  For a long time, Sylvie, too, had cherished the belief that someone like her could never fall so far as to be dependent on state welfare. It was not malicious, she did not even think of it as patronising. She simply believed that she was too smart, too resourceful. Genuinely not realising that this implied that others could make a bit more effort. As though, ultimately, the elegant apartment, the weekly groceries from Le Bon Marché, the taxi rides and her son’s private school were attributable to some innate personal quality.

  When she lost everything, a great weight had descended over her former life – little was spared. She pounded the streets, she knocked on doors, sent letters, made proposals – she was happy to work as an usher, a translator, an assistant, a salesgirl, a temp, a freelance journalist, a toilet attendant . . . but she might just as w
ell have saved her energy and stayed in bed scratching her arse and staring at the ceiling, because she could get no job of any kind. Not part-time, not off-the-books, not even minding children. Nothing. She began to see her friends at the camp in a different light. They had not changed. She began to notice the way she had passed judgement on them. A judgement so deeply rooted that she was unaware of it. Until her social disgrace, she had thought that Vernon, Lydia, Xavier, Patrice and the others were adorable but . . . well . . . fundamentally, a little feckless. They lacked drive. They didn’t go about things the right way. Oh, she didn’t hold it against them, but a part of her genuinely assumed that if her life was easier, it was because she deserved it. She would sometimes say, “I know I’m privileged . . .” but, deep down, she did not think this was quite accurate. To complete the thought, she would have had to add “. . . and if worst came to worst and I had to, I’m the sort of person who would know exactly how to hang on to those privileges.” She identified with luxury. With ease. Life took it upon itself to show up her flawed thinking.

  Her personal journey had mirrored that of the country: within a year, her world had completely collapsed. It had begun when Lancelot left. Her ex-husband had bluntly informed her that, from that day forward, he would not give her another cent. Legally, it made sense. But she had not been expecting it. She had always assumed that he would take care of her for as long as she needed. As though some tacit arrangement, some overarching covenant meant that he would not be so graceless as to ever leave her in the lurch. She had raised his son. She had made a good job of it. She had been his first wife. She would always be. He didn’t see things the same way. He talked about the financial crisis, income taxes, hard times. Not another cent, and this from one day to the next. Sylvie had gone to explain the situation to her mother. She thought perhaps she could get an advance on her inheritance. Just a little, enough to get by, while also avoiding death duties. Until she found a more permanent solution. She had expected to walk away with twenty or thirty thousand euros, which she would have used sparingly. But, against all expectations, her mother had waffled, said she would see what she could do and more or less showed her the door. A few days later, she was hospitalised. In hindsight, Sylvie was horrified to realise that the stroke that had felled her mother was related to her request. There was nothing she could do. She could hate herself, but there was nothing she could do. Within a few short days, she lost her mother.