Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  ‘Hi, it’s the Hyena, where are you, kid?’

  As if we’d been hanging out together every day for years. I’m already sorry I ever asked her for anything, I’m realizing that it would be wise not to succeed in our search, instead we should just wait calmly for the inevitable ghastly fallout. I continue to act evasively. ‘Oh, hi, yeah, um, I’m going here and there, places I saw Valentine… hoping something’ll come back to me.’

  ‘You think you’re Inspector Maigret? Want me to bring you beer and sandwiches?’

  I don’t really get her sense of humour and her cheerfulness sounds too loud. I wonder whether she slept with that girl yesterday. I reply more sharply: ‘I was just going to call her father and try to see him as soon as possible, I think he can help me locate her mother.’

  ‘I’d rather you put the father off till tomorrow. I’ve got someone round there today. I’ll explain. Can we meet?’

  This woman’s a loser. Just wants someone to spend the day with. Her reputation must be even more exaggerated than I thought, she’s so much at a loose end that she hasn’t had work for months, so she’s pounced on my case like a tiger on a monkey. Just my luck.

  ‘Well, I was going to…’

  ‘Because I called her school, and I’ve got an appointment with the headmistress at two o’clock. The kids eat outside the school, don’t they? I’m going to go round there when classes finish, to try and question a couple of them.’

  I feel like reminding her that I arranged with her to do the things I can’t do, not the ones I can carry out perfectly well. I pretend to be immensely busy, checking the diary to see when I’ve got a spare moment.

  ‘And you want me to come with you, is that it? I was going to…’

  ‘But you’re at home, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I already said.’

  ‘Because I’m not far away from Pyrénées metro. If you’re ready, I can be downstairs from you in ten minutes, I’m in my car.’

  ‘Look, I’m not at home. I just said. I can get to Belleville metro in, ooh, let’s say fifteen minutes?’

  I get there a little late. (It’s one stop from Pyrénées.) I look at all the drivers halting at the lights before I see her, watching me, sitting still, on the terrace of the Folies café. When she sees me coming over, she consents to get up and join me. She holds out her hand to greet me, I wonder whether she thinks I’m going to give her some infectious disease or whether at her age she doesn’t know that these days between girls we kiss. Or else just say hi. She’s double-parked her car, with a doctor’s permit slipped under the windscreen, but that isn’t the oddest thing: she’s driving an old red Mercedes, must date from before I was born. Perfect for a private eye, eh? Nobody would ever notice a car like that, would they?

  ‘I usually take the metro; the traffic’s so awful in Paris.’ That’s all I find to say, to sound a bit sulky, to show that I’m not the sort of girl who’s going to be mollified by the luxuriously shabby beige leather of the seats. Cigarette in mouth, she pulls away without a word, stops at the lights, and smiles at two little African girls with cornrows who are holding hands to cross the road. They have identical white socks pulled up tight over their calves. The Hyena looks happy. I wonder if she’s on Prozac. That’s what I tell myself about anyone I find a bit too dynamic. A GPS is clamped to the windscreen but it’s not switched on.

  I can’t manage to stay silent for long, we don’t know each other well enough to sit side by side without speaking.

  ‘You don’t bother looking for a parking place then.’

  ‘There are plenty of car parks, we can put it on expenses.’

  ‘As a freelance, do you get lots of expenses?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno. Just that I’m on a wage, and they check things carefully.’

  She charitably chooses not to point out that we’re not operating in the same league. ‘I’m hungry. We’ll stop and have a bite near the school, I know a good Italian place round there.’

  We’ve left the Chinese quarter, and drive past the tower blocks of Télégraphe. The district is poorer, less commercial.

  ‘You said you’d prefer me to wait before seeing her father?’

  ‘Yep. I’ve got a contact going in there today. She’s going to call me, she had an appointment with him for late morning. I saw that there was a WiFi code mentioned in the file but that you hadn’t copied Valentine’s hard disk. I thought it could interest us though. I asked for the hard disks of the whole family.’

  ‘You’ve got someone who can get into their building and hack their systems?’

  ‘Look, we have the code, we go in, we don’t hack anyone. I also asked for photos of the whole apartment. So I won’t need to go with you. I want to see what it looks like.’

  ‘What do we do about the interviews at the school?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. But I’d like you to be there, you never know…’

  ‘As your assistant? Great.’

  ‘Look, kid, chill out, can’t you? You haven’t got the slightest idea how to run an enquiry, so just be a good girl, follow my lead and do what I say. If you don’t like it, you can get out right now, and deal with your own problems. OK? This cheapskate enquiry of yours, all right, I’ll do it. But if you’ve got self-esteem issues, just sort them out yourself.’

  She says all this without getting cross. I think she’s even hiding a smile by the end, seeing the look on my face. We’re blocked by a delivery truck that’s created a small traffic jam. I sulk and look out of the window. Some morons are hooting their horns behind us. Three young girls cross the road. Parisian style on the cheap. Slim, long-legged, fashionable little furry boots, big busts and big tote bags with fringes. Cut-price copies of authentically rich sluts from the Marais, the kind that put on a tarty look but make you think of ads for perfume, not of little working-class girls from sink estates.

  The Hyena leans out of her window. She gives an admiring wolf whistle. The girls turn round, looking blasé, but they can’t conceal a movement of surprise – or shock – when they see it comes from our car. The Hyena gives them a thumbs up, to show she thinks they look good, and also sees fit to insist, yelling, ‘Hiya girls! Love the look!’

  They hurry on and don’t burst into nervous giggles until they’re about a hundred metres away. The Hyena adjusts her dark glasses in the mirror, shrugs and notes, with magnanimity, ‘They weren’t that marvellous, but hey, it cheers them up, doesn’t it?’

  ‘They were very young, was what struck me.’

  As if that was the problem.

  ‘I like girls. I like girls too much. Of course I prefer dykes, but I like all girls.’

  ‘Don’t you think they might feel insulted getting whistled at in the street?

  ‘Insulted? No, they’re hets, they’re used to being treated like dogs, they think it’s normal. But it’s a nice change to hear it from a superb specimen like me. Even if they don’t realize it, it lights up a tiny utopian candle in their poor little heads, after being smothered by heterocentrist macho awfulness.’

  ‘How do you know they’re straight? Is it written on their faces or what?’

  ‘Of course. I can spot a dyke from behind at five hundred metres. I’ve got radar. We all do. How do you think we’d ever find someone to have sex with if we didn’t have a sixth sense to spot each other?’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t know you needed a sixth sense for sexual orientation.’

  Finally we get past the delivery van, and she glances rapidly at me before pronouncing, still with a smile, ‘Jeez, it must be really tough being you.’

  The minute you get inside the door of Valentine’s posh school, you’re caught in the throat by that typical atmosphere of factories for turning out kids. A mixture of boredom and rebelliousness. I’ve got used to waiting outside school gates, but I’ve never before had occasion to go inside. The headmistress comes to fetch us, and we go along the main corridor, where the classroom doors are still open. Th
e sight of all the tables lined up, the blackboards, and the maps hanging on the walls suddenly makes me want to cry. The only memory I have of my school is looking at my watch. How long till the end of the lesson, how long till the end of the day. Even my work, which often bores me, has never made me feel so cooped up. And yet I’m pierced with nostalgia, with that sadistic and seductive pull that is so typical of it. I’d be hard put to find a rational explanation: there’s nothing about my high school years that I miss. I was an average pupil, I didn’t have any close friendships, I didn’t have a crush on any teacher. Blank years, of deep boredom. So who knows why tears come to my eyes when I see that they’re still writing in chalk on a big blackboard.

  The headmistress is obese, affable and competent. She’s wearing a black and orange outfit and makes the fabric ripple every time she moves. The Hyena has put on a denim jacket to cover up the tattoos on her arms, but doesn’t take off her dark glasses during the interview. She has introduced herself as my assistant, which doesn’t stop the headmistress addressing all her remarks to her. She’s taller, thinner, more beautiful and more confident: so she’s the one people want to talk to. I generally inspire a slight revulsion in people, I think it’s because I’m so ill at ease that they prefer not to look me in the face if they can avoid it. I’m fascinated by the vast size of the headmistress. She really takes up a lot of room. The Hyena has sat down as usual, legs apart, chin up, and is asking a series of precise questions, taking down notes on a little pad, in her tiny close-packed writing. I wonder what this lady thinks about the huge death’s head rings.

  ‘… yes, often absent, which is a real problem for us. Apart from the last fortnight, when she’s attended all her lessons, we’ve had trouble getting her to come regularly. She doesn’t turn up for detentions either… I discussed her a lot with her teachers before the police came round. She didn’t confide in any of them in particular. She had good grade averages on the whole. This is a private school, and we specialize in helping pupils who haven’t performed well elsewhere. That’s not exactly her problem. Valentine wasn’t outstanding, but she didn’t have any trouble with her school work.’

  ‘Was she good at any subjects in particular?’

  I ask myself what criteria the Hyena has in the questions she asks. As if the head is going to tell us that she was good at maths and, Eureka, we’d go and look for her in a chess tournament. The thing is, she puts her questions with such aplomb, and this ingratiating air of being serious and concerned, that the person facing her offers answers without realizing the absurdity of the conversation.

  ‘No, there are some assignments she hands in, and gets reasonable grades for’ – the head is turning over the records so that the Hyena can see them, she’s completely eliminated me from her field of vision – ‘and there are some tests or assignments she doesn’t deign to do at all. That’s why her average has gone down, you see: she has zeroes in every subject somewhere, but the grades she does get are around ten out of twenty. Which is quite good, for these pupils.’

  The Hyena has more shock questions up her sleeve. If she carries on like this we’ll be here all afternoon. I try not to fall asleep.

  ‘And how did she get on with her classmates?’

  ‘Well, again I asked her teachers, before talking to the police… but I didn’t gather much, I’m afraid. She’s never been told off for cheek or fighting, she wasn’t a chatterbox. I saw her apparently getting on with the other pupils when she was here, but I’ve never noticed her making particular friends with any group or individual. Let’s say that she mostly turned up because she’d been told to, and we do insist on that, and because her grandmother kept tabs on her, but we never sensed any enthusiasm. The possibility of expelling her had come up several times, because we can’t accept a child who makes the others think school is optional, but we never took that step, because it’s equally hard to expel a child who has never caused any discipline problems.’

  Blah blah blah, I’ve already noted the fees: at three thousand five hundred euros a term, I imagine that pupils who are expelled from this school must at the very least have tried to massacre the others with a chainsaw.

  The head accompanies us to the main door, repeating to the Hyena that no, the police don’t seem to know at all what’s happened. I wait for her to go back in.

  ‘Lucky we came, eh? Fantastically interesting. She told us piles of things she didn’t think of telling the police, so we’re way ahead of them.’

  ‘Do you ever get fed up of being so negative?’

  ‘I’m not being negative. I could have told you about her grades without us having to sit and sweat in this bell jar: if you’ve read the file, everything’s in there. The grandmother had told me about them. And that she bunked off school, same thing, mega scoop. That’s why I was hired in the first place.’

  ‘And it doesn’t strike you as interesting that precisely for the fortnight you’ve been following her, she’s been coming to school every day?’

  ‘Yes of course it has. And it pisses me off, believe me.’

  I said that for no special reason, just to say something back, but you would think I’d made the gag of the year, the Hyena bursts out laughing and looks at me almost with affection. I think perhaps she’s flirting with me, but at the same time what do I know?

  ‘Show me where the kids eat lunch.’

  The school is on the banks of the Seine, in one of those districts full of office blocks and fancy apartments where it doesn’t seem possible that anyone needs to go out for a loaf of bread or a litre of milk. Car sales, hi-fi equipment, computer shops. But nothing much that’s convivial, bars, restaurants or little boutiques. I’ve never understood why there are never any practical shops or nice coffee bars in the areas where the very rich live. Is it such poor taste to eat out? So the kids have the choice between a brasserie which is very expensive and a long way off, and a tiny bar that sells little plates of sushi and three kinds of sandwich on white bread. That was a problem for me: passing unnoticed in such a small place was difficult. Luckily, the young don’t usually bother looking at people my age. I point out to the Hyena a table where I recognize some pupils from Valentine’s class. She’s taken off her jacket now, and slung it over her shoulder, revealing the Japanese-sailor-type tattoos that crawl all over her arms. She goes up to the biggest of them, by instinct, he has the face of a mischievous child on the body of a lumberjack.

  ‘I work for a firm of private investigators. Valentine’s parents have called us in to back up the police effort.’

  A small curly-headed youth with freckled cheeks, wearing a hoodie and wide trousers, sees fit to reply. ‘Yeah, they’re right, the police do fuck all, look at the traffic chaos everywhere.’

  Chorus:

  ‘The police didn’t even come to talk to us.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything on the TV news, was there? So what did they care?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, there was this girl last summer and she’d been gone a week, and people recognized her from the photo, so how are people going to know she’s missing?’

  The Hyena hasn’t sat down yet, she’s listening to them seriously and casting an amused look over them. I’m two paces behind, and not too surprised that not one of them says, ‘Hey, you’re always round here.’ My talent is being invisible.

  ‘Did you know her well? Did she have many friends in school?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t all that friendly with people in school.’

  ‘Yeah, she could be, she sometimes ate her lunch with us. But mostly she went off on her own with her iPod.’

  ‘Mostly she didn’t come back either.’

  ‘She was a bit snobbish with us, if you want to know. If you said something, she’d put on this superior air and say the opposite. She was more friendly at the beginning of the year, I thought…’

  ‘She’s not friends with any of us on Facebook, is she?’

  ‘We don’t even know if she has a Facepuke page, actually…’

 
‘But did she have problems with anyone at school?’

  ‘Nah, not even. Perhaps she thought she shouldn’t be here at all. Dunno.’

  ‘And none of you saw her outside school?’

  ‘Yeah, I did, but it was a long time ago, oh, about three months ago. But we had words.’ This is a dark-haired girl with very pale skin speaking: she looks intelligent, but so languid that you feel like shaking her to see if she’ll switch on.

  ‘What happened?’

  The girl who’d said this purses her lips and looks at the ceiling, not sure how to reply. The other kids burst out laughing.

  The curly-haired one, who didn’t think the police were doing their job, intervenes. ‘Valentine’s a bit weird. Kind of OK, but weird. Very hot. Especially when she’s had a few.’

  ‘She ought to be in the ads against binge drinking for teenagers. You really wouldn’t want to be her when she’s drunk.’

  The brunette takes up her story again. She talks like a little girl, in an unpleasant whiny voice. ‘She can be funny if it’s just the two of you, she’s fine. She’s nice. But if you go out somewhere, she can be a real drag. She binge-drinks. She knocks it back till she can’t stand up straight, and if you’re at a party, no prizes for guessing you’ll have no fun, you’ll end up carrying her out to the taxi, and then she’ll be sick all over it, and then you’ll have to help her get up the stairs at home. See what I mean? A drag.’

  The Hyena is nodding her head all this time, looking round at them in turn, then suddenly asks, ‘And what about boys, what’s she like with them?’

  A tall gangling youth with a long, horsey face replies.

  ‘She can come on to you just like that, saying “Wanna blowjob? If you want one, just tell me.” Well, that’s what she used to do, when she first got here. Boys she liked, she’d go up to them and, pow! just like that, she’d come out with it. But she calmed down. In fact lately, she didn’t seem to bother with us.’