All the Way

by Marie Darrieussecq

  She gives up. We might as well go to Milord’s. She makes up her mind for both of them. It’s as if she’s done this all her life, like smoking.

  Girls get in for free, but not boys. She lets him sort that out and orders a Pineapple-Malibu cocktail. Hardly anyone there. A dance floor, empty, and a disco ball turning.

  He orders. One beer, she translates. It’s exhilarating to be in a nightclub. And to be with someone, to be able to let the three guys there think she’s going out with this stud. The music is super-loud. She has a bit of a dance, glass in hand, sipping on the straw. The dance-floor tiles light up like in the ‘Billie Jean’ video.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Charlotte.

  Her favourite first name for the last few weeks.

  ‘Whaa…?’

  Charlotte!

  From a song she loves. In the school toilets she teases her hair like Michael Jackson. And Nathalie draws under her eyes with black kohl, just like he does.

  ‘Tricky name! Where are you from?’

  From Clèves!

  ‘And you’re not at the carnival?’

  It sucks!

  ‘The carnival sucks?’

  Yeah, it sucks!

  That makes him laugh, she doesn’t know why.

  He must be about twenty-five. Pretty ordinary (her mother would say). But muscly under his wolf-print T-shirt (Monsieur Bihotz has the same one). He’s a fireman, he yells, he and a couple of workmates are having a bucks’ night.

  ‘I’m getting married tomorrow!’

  Congratulations!

  Having Terry over there, at the bar, gives her a feel for repartee. Or at least for an appropriate response.

  ‘Is that your guy?’

  No!

  The fireman shoots a final glance at the English boy and yells again, at the top of his voice, ‘Gimme a kiss, to celebrate?’

  That’s it. It’s going to happen. As long as the nightclub doesn’t burn down, as long as Monsieur Bihotz doesn’t turn up wielding an axe, as long as her father doesn’t land in the middle of the dance floor, finally, she is going to go out with a guy.

  And maybe more than that, maybe she’ll go further, because two hands grab her buttocks, pull her against the wolf on the T-shirt, two hands hoist her up firmly, not bothering about the rhythm of the music anymore, a bigger and bigger face is pushing down at her, the wily wolf and the mouth on mouth, dry and hot, a bit bristly, she opens her mouth and the hands squeeze her and an amazing pressure radiates through her cunt, coursing through her buttocks and her groin, her mouth melting too, and her tongue penetrating the mouth of the huge body, which responds with a hard, pointed tongue, he’s not kissing the way she would like but who cares, the pressure fills her whole body and a hand lets go of her buttocks and slides under her T-shirt, the nipple on one breast is pinched and pulled, the enormous pressure stars to whirl, needs to become some other vibrant and shining thing and her own hands start to explore and grab and hunt and investigate—‘Oh Charlotte,’ says the huge body.

  Not really in ecstasy; more like reining in a horse. ‘Oh Charlotte,’ like she is a filly.

  She pulls herself together. A bit of decorum called for. Boogie with the fireman. He smells of sweat and cigarette smoke, she has a syrupy taste in her mouth. Blaring music and the dance floor flashing in time. He says, ‘Are you slack?’ or perhaps it was ‘I’ll give you a smack’. She can’t hear properly so they sidestep over to a pillar (‘lean back’?) where it’s pretty dark (‘new track’?) and one of the fireman’s hands is inside her underpants (‘what’re you like in the sack?’) and then one of the fireman’s fingers, it’s amazing, slides into her vagina (‘ah, it’s wider than a crack’?). She’ll be able to use tampons.

  But it’s kind of uncomfortable. She twists around to extricate herself, muffled words, he kisses her and pushes his finger in further, his hand stuck to her sucking wet cunt, uncomfortable but too bad, if that’s what he wants, let him keep going—right now, like this—she doesn’t dare take the initiative again, so she holds him by the shoulders, he rubs the lump in his jeans against her, he opens his fly and just then the boum boum boum of ‘Billie Jean’ starts up.

  It’s a sign! Her second favourite song. They’re having a special moment here, her first kiss, dedicated to Michael Jackson boum boum boum! This song makes her feet and hips move irresistibly. I can’t help it! she yells, laughing, writhing away, dancing, but he holds onto her, grabs onto her, he shouts something, it sounds like ‘what the fuck’ (‘come out to my truck’ ‘get down ’n’ suck’) and his dick sticking out of his jeans, blinking beneath the lights and shadows.

  Billie Jean is not my lover boum boum boum.

  ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere,’ says Terry, with almost no accent. ‘What did you do with that guy, what the fuck did you do with that guy,’ he’s just about shaking her.

  He’s a pompier, she pleads, there’s no harm in being with a pompier, how do you say pompier in English? Are people looking at them? Is someone going to make fun of her? There’s no one on the dance floor, four or five figures at the bar, and the fireman has disappeared.

  Trees and fields. The boum boum boum is getting weaker, whoo ooh in the branches, a stifling night. Her head is still resounding with the bass line. Perhaps it’s the Pineapple-Malibu. Her underpants go stiff as she scampers behind Terry, it feels weird.

  It must be three o’clock in the morning by the time they get back to the village and what’s left of the carnival. Christian is sitting slumped against his moped; apparently he vomited. Rose went home furious, ‘the worst night of her life, she’s going to give you hell’ (warns Nathalie, whose kohl is smudged and whose parents are there, with Georges, Papa’s mate, at the drinks stand, which is still open). The band is playing ‘Que je t’aime’, the singer has hair like Boy George. She doesn’t want Georges to see her (her parents’ Georges).

  Terry has disappeared. Nathalie is talking to some guys. Couples are dancing slowly. Clusters of people wander around. The trees are swaying. Wires are hanging from the branches. The sky is stencilled sheet metal. It becomes impossible to go home. Impossible to go to bed.

  She can still feel in her groin the sensation of the fireman’s hands, and his bristly face and the smoky taste, and right then and there, in front of the unmoving merry-go-round, it hits her—it’s all tight, burning, wet—at the mere thought of his hands and mouth, there’s a gripping sensation between her legs. Standing up, gaping, stunned, remembering what happened an hour ago, feverishly remembering—the sky becomes grey in the east and she’s back there, at Milord’s, glued to this unknown body. She has to be back there, not at Milord’s, not with that man, but inside that thing at the centre, right now, that moment when everything’s ablaze.

  The band has stopped playing. The musicians are carrying heavy black cases. A man and a woman are dancing through the silence, hanging off each other. The shutters have come down on the drinks stand and her father is there on a chair. Not in the plane or in Paris but there. A female figure is sitting on his knees. It’s not her mother or the pharmacy woman. It’s the singer who looks like Boy George.

  He tries to stand up but can’t. He yells that he’s dreaming. He yells at her to go to bed and asks in a really loud voice what the fuck she’s still doing there. He yells where’ve you been, what the fuck is she doing out this late, where has she been?

  By midday the next day the world is back to the way it was. Hours have sixty minutes and are marked by the ringing of the church bell, ladle-banging on the Clèves mess tin. A cow moos, the yellow air sticks like jelly. The thermometer reads 32 degrees, the horizontal lines are trembling on the hillsides.

  Monsieur Bihotz came to check on her at eight in the morning; he thought they’d go fishing. ‘He hasn’t noticed that you’re growing up,’ says her mother (on the phone, she’s at the shop). ‘Keep the shutters closed, so the house stays cool.’

  Scratchy lips, those hands, and the touch of a stranger. My first k
iss, she repeats it to herself, my first kiss. A little bit of this incredible event settles in these three words, my first kiss, my first kiss. ‘Daydreaming about him, an exquisite shuddering overwhelms her.’ Is that what it is? ‘She got wet like a bitch’, another phrase, heard from the mouth of a man at a carnival or a party or a bar or perhaps Georges.

  She tries again. Yes, the face leans down, the T-shirt with the wolf, and already it’s tight like a fist between her thighs and there’s that whooshing, she leans this man down towards her as far as she can, and all of her, body and head and brain and marrow and skull and bones, everything is alive.

  She drops her bike in the grass, steps over the nettles. It’s that time in summer, the slack time, deep in summer, when the days to come are as long as those that have gone.

  Billie Jean is not my love.

  The river is swollen with green water. Bulging, as if swifter water was surging beneath the surface. The soil is on delayed time, it remains there, dusty, shot through with this other matter, this other possible arrangement of matter. Without the slightest ripple, the whole expanse of water spreads over the muddy beaches. The softness of the silence is horrifying.

  She lies down under the trees, it’s the green from primary school, the green you imagine when you think of green. She could stay there forever, tumbling among the trees with her too-big body sore from bike-riding, sweating, hot—lying down to soothe this stabbing sensation that makes her rush outside, onto the roads, across the countryside, it’s impossible to stay inside—remembering the incredible sequence of gestures and words that led her behind the pillar at Milord’s—with this sun shining for no reason, when Rose and whoever are at the beach or lying around a pool, when towns are pulsating with their nightclubs, which are no doubt different from Milord’s—when, on the disco ball, Paris and New York are pulsating and this village is the only dark spot—she dips her fingers in the water, slowly sinking her hands in up to the wrists.

  The stupidity of this life, that she even needs this stupid body, the bother of it all. She dips her face in her cupped hands, it smells like cold rock and iron, the water runs between her breasts, their ridiculous shape. Her skirt drags and sticks to her thighs, and her pubis is outlined in an upside-down Y—this insistent presence, both empty and full, hungry and glutted—is she the only one to be so obsessed by it?

  The adult world seems to worry about it a lot, and the whole school always has, but what connection is there between this raging loneliness that makes her stretch her legs restlessly in the cold water, and the piss ’n’ shit of buttocks and unzipping pants and whore-faggot-fuck-prick, as if guys’ underpants were opened by their mouth.

  It’s a ritual; her father brings back samples for her, a jar of Air Inter jam and a red, white and blue paper napkin, and this time a present in a little packet: a key ring. An Eiffel Tower that twinkles.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  Everything will be explained. The past, the present and the future. Their gestures, their words, everything that’s incomprehensible. Just thinking about it makes her want to cry. (Solange is very sensitive.)

  ‘There’s this disease,’ her father says to her. And he stops as if to tell himself what he’s going to say. He’s in his uniform, he smells like he always does, the smell of the air. And it’s as if suddenly he’s making it up, that he’s making up the disease. ‘It’s a disease that kills people who begin with H. Homosexuals, Haïtians, Haemophiliacs and Heroin addicts.’

  She doesn’t know half of the words. Homosexual she knows, that means faggot. For girls you say dyke, but there aren’t any here (except the hairdresser with cropped hair and the little chain around her ankle).

  ‘The truth is that this disease is transmitted by fucking. And everyone fucks. Do you understand? So: fucking is forbidden.’

  She’s frightened he’s going to start yelling. And forbid her, yelling at her.

  ‘Do you hear me?’

  Yes.

  He lights a cigarette. He is very handsome. Very tall, his uniform trimmed with a badge in the shape of wings. Very short hair, grey at the temples, and a determined chin (says her mother).

  ‘You believe me?’

  Well, yeah.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. Sharpen your critical faculties a bit. You really think I can forbid you from fucking? Only your mother believes stuff like that. Everyone fucks. I fuck, you fuck, we fuck.’

  From his pocket he takes out a square, sealed packet, through which a round shape is visible. ‘You know what this is, right?’ He hands it to her. ‘The first bastard who tells you this is useless, you send him over to me and I’ll smash his head in. You make him put this on. You make him, do you hear me? If you catch this disease, it’s death in two years. I’ve seen open graves. It’s a bloodbath. You can only see them from the plane. And we have orders to close the blinds on the window seats. Do you know what that means? You go to the pharmacy, and she’ll give you some. On my behalf. As many as you want.’

  He takes the square packet out of her hand and tears the wrapping. He changes his mind and returns it to her. It smells powerfully of rubber.

  ‘You practise on a banana. And you make him, do you understand? It’s forbidden to die. Understood?’

  I went out with a fireman, she announces to Rose and Concepción.

  She’s not sure about saying that she slept with him. That would be too much of a lie. Okay, it’s not written on your forehead. But she thinks it’s obvious—with Rose it is. Deflowered. Like a bush that has been stripped of its flowers. There’s a sort of reserve about Rose now. Perhaps she always had it. It’s almost a matter of principle, with certain girls. If she had to draw up a list of them, it would include: Rose, Concepción, and perhaps Delphine, the girl from the chateau. Not Nathalie because she’s a bit slutty.

  For example, the same reserve or dignity found its full expression in Sixtine, on the beach three or four years ago, when she said she was ‘indisposed’.

  Rose. Now that she’s done it, got rid of it (popped her cherry, the boys say), this thing that keeps her dignified and composed has spread out in her, like a great tree of honesty and pain, of honest pain, which has filled her up from top to bottom and made her a woman.

  And she, Solange, is still just a floppy sack, immature, the head teacher wrote on her report. So it’s obvious, it’s obvious in the clear light of day. That she hasn’t done it. That’s what’s so obvious.

  Apparently in the vagina there’s some thick skin that blocks the way through. That explains the butchering Rose suffered, and other stories she’s heard, or read in Girls Magazine. Boys who were banging on it like it was a closed door, who ripped it to shreds. And then there are the roosters whose chopped-off heads are left to bleed on the bridal sheets of girls who are not virgins and who don’t bleed. It’s all too crazy. Like vampire stories.

  ‘A bit of red ink would work just as well,’ says Nathalie.

  ‘Or get married when you’ve got your period,’ Solange says.

  Everyone laughs. She’s surprised at her success—it was just elementary critical thinking.

  ‘Other way round,’ interrupts Nathalie. ‘You have to calculate the dates so you’re not on the rag. Because hanging round all day at the church while you’re “indisposed” and all that, hello stress, as well as a red stain on the white dress. I’m telling you, it’d be so embarrassing.’ Nathalie came back from a weekend in Bordeaux with ‘hello stress’ and ‘I’m telling you’.

  ‘It’s so gross to be “indisposed” in church,’ adds Rose, who is also trying out expressions, which suit her in the same way as her new haircut: bizarrely. (She has the same blond highlights as Sixtine. But on Rose, who is a brunette, they make her look like a zebra.)

  ‘It ith forbidden to go into a church if you are indithpothed,’ announces Concepción, whose embarrassment exaggerates her Spanish lisp—no one makes fun of her because now everyone starts to have their say. Even Christian.

  Because he
hangs out with the girls, Christian gets called a faggot: but that’s just it, he likes girls—he says it with that earnest look people get when they’re saying something important. It’s so cool when Christian is there and they dare to talk about these things. And, except for Concepción, who gives up trying, the others all stare straight ahead and talk in voices like on the TV.

  ‘I will never let my husband touch me when I’m “indisposed”,’ assures Rose, with that solemnity, that ice-queen halo she’s acquired since she became a woman. Someone should take a Polaroid of her to capture what’s taken hold of her—like seeing ghosts around haunted people.

  If only they could get back to her fireman story. I went out with a fireman. Or I went out with a fireman and everything happened so fast between us. Or He’s experienced. And an exquisite shuddering…If Christian could only know. The lips, the hands, the flashing lights. The big face leaning in. The fingers pushing in…Her legs folding and melting away, to carry her off limp and liquid… Another girl, Slurp, interrupts them to ask for a light.

  Another big discussion follows (obviously there’s not going to be any fireman). Until then she’d thought Slurp was called Slurp because she sucks. Sucks, sucks what—stay cool and think, it’s not that difficult to imagine. It is certainly incredible but no more than coupling; ‘it happens in the best families’, even Christian agrees.

  But the truth is more subtle, just like the truth is never exactly what you believe, the truth is complex and full of unexpected things, and the truth about Slurp is that when she was deflowered—by a member of the basketball team, the international team, one of those guys from Orthez, a hunk, really tall (so his dick was probably really big?)—he nearly got stuck.

  Apparently the skin in Slurp’s vagina was really thick, like leather. The international basketballer went at it with all his athletic powers, but nothing happened. He decided to put on a condom. It worked (thanks to the lewdbrication of the condoms). But when he pulled out, the condom stayed jammed in there, the vagina skin was like a plumber’s seal. With a gynaecologist’s flourish of his thumb and index finger, the international basketballer pulled and the condom spurted out with a slurp.