Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  Rafik is tapping furiously at his keyboard, you’d think he was launching a rocket. He mutters, ‘Don’t worry, just a few minutes’, which being interpreted means ‘you’re just going to have to twiddle your thumbs alongside me all day long if we have to’. I want to be outside, I want to be back home, surfing the internet, I want to go and see a good film in a real cinema. I couldn’t care less about what was on the computers of this family I don’t know, who seemed perfectly odious when I went to see them. Their apartment put me off for a start. Too big, too clean, too grand. I’d vaguely prepared some questions: who she saw, where she went, her mother. Everything about François Galtan put me off: his snapped replies, his way of avoiding looking at me as if it was purgatory to have me in his house for five minutes, his whole attitude shouted, ‘Get out, you’re incapable of finding my daughter.’ The stepmother was less unpleasant, but in her politeness I sensed a class disdain that was even more humiliating. When she ended up admitting that she didn’t get on too well with the kid, François Galtan rolled his eyes: ‘You’re her stepmother, God in heaven, when have the daughters of a first marriage ever got on with their stepmothers?’ I didn’t find out anything about the child’s biological mother, they claim not to have had any news of her for over ten years. They were lying, but I didn’t have the energy to insist. I just had one idea in my head. Get out of there as fast as possible.

  Rafik gets up, and starts connecting various cables to the machine alongside his, then switches it on so that I can see what he’s seeing. He speaks to me in an undertone, a hypnotic sound, typical of people who are doing two things at once. ‘To find the mother, I’ve got someone outside on the job, my team was all busy, it’ll be faster and I’d rather it stayed between us. We’ll have her details by tonight, I think.’

  I agree, trying to look like the Queen of Cool. This is what it’s like then, to be part of the privileged few: do sweet FA yourself, and let other people run round for you. I concentrate on the internet trawl which Rafik is now reading off aloud, as long lists scroll down on both screens. He starts with François Galtan’s computer. I keep to myself the thought that comes to mind: we really don’t care what the father’s hard disk tells us. He’s a pompous prick, but it’s hardly likely he’s got his daughter locked in the cellar, and even if he was that kind of man, I doubt he’d boast about it on the internet. Rafik explains that what’s coming up are the searches the father does online.

  A whole string of As with a yellow comma come up, I click on one of them and find I’m on the sales page for his last novel, The Great Pyramid of Paris. ‘What the hell’s he doing on Amazon, looking at his own book thirty times a day?’

  Behind us, a technician I hadn’t noticed enlightens me, not unhappy to reveal he’s overheard everything we’ve been whispering. ‘He’s looking up his ranking in sales figures, it changes every hour.’

  I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to find he could put together a whole sentence without the words ‘firewall’ or ‘router’.

  ‘I’ve got a pal who published an essay once. The sales rankings drove him crazy. He started placing orders for his own book. One a day. He tried not to, but if he saw his book slipping, he couldn’t bear it. He’d ordered fifty copies before his mother hauled him off on holiday to the Caribbean, to a bungalow without an internet connection.’

  ‘Well, Galtan can’t be ordering many of his, he’s about seventy-seven thousandth. Not so good, is it? Perhaps we should buy a few. Poor guy, he’s already lost his daughter.’

  Rafik and the other kid burst out laughing, as if I’d displayed the most hilarious sense of humour. The assistant is laughing because I’m sitting at Rafik’s right hand and Rafik is laughing because I’ve been sent by the Hyena. That must be it. A virtuous circle. Apart from this, the father looks up the book review pages of Le Figaro, Les Echos, Bibliobs, L’Express bestseller list, Livres-Hebdo and the kind of blog that rabbits on with great seriousness about Literature with a capital L. Galtan posts various shame-making contributions under different identities. It’s quite easy to track him: ‘She’s full of shit, she can go fuck herself in her big ass’ was his obliging comment on one colleague. Completely self-confident, eh, a man who’s not bitter, oh no, no personal hang-ups. The comments had all been posted after his daughter disappeared. Someone who doesn’t let himself be easily distracted then.

  I look through his inboxes. He has three addresses: one for activity as an author, almost entirely devoted to his press agent, whom he bombards with slightly flirtatious and falsely jocular messages: ‘I wonder why I haven’t been invited to the radio programme From the Bookshop, since I understand it’s about literature, and I happen to write books… I’m also asking myself if you’re wearing that red dress that makes you look so fetching.’ One wonders whether perhaps he’d like to be able to control himself and slow it down, but he sends her ten emails a day. If the girl has gaps in her press listings, he immediately jumps on them: he tells her what’s out there, in any form of media, relating to novels. His second address is personal, for close friends and family. I can’t find any mention here of his young daughter’s disappearance. He simply tells people regularly that he’s ‘feeling terrible’ and cries off various parties, anniversaries or dinners. The third is a secret one, devoted to his mistresses, and he keeps every message. You can reconstitute for the last two years the clumsy and rather brief sequence of his consecutive mistresses, in order of breaking it off. He’s a coward. When he dumps one of them – and he only does so when he’s sure of a new one, no gaps between adulteries – he just stops answering, and there are plenty of messages from the rejected women, not even opened but saved to their files. Rafik is tackling the Word documents, versions of his CV, sketches for blurbs on the back of his books, the first few lines of a text about ‘Women’, an official letter to the telephone company that hasn’t cancelled his contract, and a few notes about Paris brothels of the last century. The fast succession of pages on the screen makes me feel sick, I want to take a break.

  ‘The only interesting thing is he doesn’t mention his daughter at all.’

  ‘That’s normal, he’s a man, men don’t like to moan.’ He explains this to me as if I have never had the good fortune to observe at close quarters how life is lived by men, that little-known species of human being of whom we all know that they go through life standing tall and dignified, strong and silent. Rafik is opening the hard disk of the stepmother, and I get the impression now that I’m being punished. She is passionately interested in new recipes for roast duck, or beef, or lemon tart. She posts on mumsnets: pathetic little blogs about the books her daughters are reading. I’m already on automatic pilot when I move on to the emails. She sends a terrifying number of them. And she is soon talking about Valentine. ‘It’s terrible to see her empty room.’ Yes, we didn’t expect her to announce right away that she’s contemplating turning it into a dressing room for herself. ‘I hug my own daughters, praying never to be in this ghastly situation of not knowing where they are.’ After thirty seconds’ attention, I can already feel the sirens of total boredom calling me, but then if we go back a bit, just before the disappearance, it gets more interesting. ‘It’s begun again. And in the kitchen again. She pushed me against the sink, shouting the most awful things, I’d just advised her to be a bit more careful what she eats, she called me all the names under the sun. Now I’m afraid when I hear her come into the house. She goes to her room without a word to me, but I know she’s there, and I’m afraid any minute she’s going to come out and hit me. I’m afraid at night before I go to sleep, I think, What if she got hold of a knife and came and cut my throat. François keeps telling me not to worry, she’ll get over it, but he’s never seen her when she gets in a rage. She’s unrecognizable, she’s a monster.’

  Rafik is silent, tense, opens all the emails one by one, and I’m sitting upright, my eyes riveted to the screen. Several sensations go through me, happiness at finding something, but also a certain pleasure in imag
ining that bitch in her beige body-warmer who looked down on me in her sitting room this morning, squirming against the kitchen sink, terrorized by her stepdaughter. ‘This morning Valentine slapped my face before she went to school. I know you’ll say I should tell François and that I shouldn’t stay here in the house with her. I spent all day crying.’

  Rafik asks me at the same time as he reads: ‘What was she like, the stepmother?’

  ‘Well slappable.’

  His fingers leave the keyboard for a moment and he turns to me. ‘If it was her bloke who was hitting her, you’d think that appalling, but when her stepdaughter does it, it’s funny, is that it?’

  ‘No. Believe me, if her husband did it, I’d still think it was a good idea.’

  Rafik hesitates, then smiles knowingly. I see I’ve scored some brownie points.

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me to hear you’re working with her then.’

  I resist telling him that I grew up with a stepmother too, and it puts me pretty much on the side of any little wankerette who punches hers on the nose. Rafik discovers several exchanges between Claire and Madame Galtan senior, with links to private psychiatric clinics: Switzerland, England, Canada, the States. They searched far and wide. Claire assures the grandmother that she’ll press the case with the father, who seems resistant to the idea of having his little girl locked away. He’s in denial, understandably, and luckily the two women are taking care of everything. Rafik holds out his hand towards me, as if I should congratulate myself about something. Still in an undertone, he tells me as he opens the last hard disk, ‘I’ll leave you to work out the detail on your own, but it opens up a few avenues.’

  ‘If Valentine suspected something of all this, you can see why she’d run away.’

  ‘And we can see why you were hired. For that kind of place, you need to build up a dossier, it’s like getting into a top-level university.’

  ‘We’ve already got a dossier on her, believe me.’

  ‘Apparently it’s quite a read.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t do animals, but frankly that seems to be the only limit.’

  It’s already dark by the time we meet in a little bar in the Goutte d’Or district, not far from the office. It’s Ramadan and the place is crowded. An entirely male clientele. Smells of coffee, mint tea and spicy food come from the back room. We’ve picked a little corner to the left of the counter. The Chibani manager seems to know the Hyena well – someone else who’s a friend of hers. Rafik explains that he can’t get over it.

  ‘You have to go back more than two months to find anything like normal mobile phone activity, calls or texts. Nearly three months. I’ve never seen anything like it… Fifteen years old, she stops any internet access and doesn’t use her mobile – how do you explain that? Even if you were depressed, really, really depressed, it wouldn’t stop you checking your emails now and then, would it? Is she on drugs? Hardly – we’d find her trail all over the web, twenty-four seven, if she was. A love affair? Without a mobile? Can you imagine teenagers in love without texting?’

  The Hyena is less bothered.

  ‘Could be she’s joined some sect we haven’t heard of. A sect that doesn’t text during Ramadan perhaps.’

  ‘Three months with no mobile, no email, no tweets, nothing. Not the slightest post to a blog. You seem too calm. You must have some idea you’re keeping to yourself, yes?’

  I’m sitting opposite them, and nobody expects me to say anything. My ego has been trampled on more times than an old fag end in the gutter. I’m getting used to it. I can appreciate the restful aspect of the situation. For instance, it means I avoid saying something stupid. No one asks anything of me. Not even to pay for my drink. I’ve got a slight headache after spending the whole day in front of a computer screen.

  Rafik is still worrying away at the puzzle. ‘… That’s unless she’s watching such hardcore porn on the internet that her father preferred to cough up to have it all wiped off, and after that they strictly forbade her to go online…’

  ‘That doesn’t explain why she hasn’t sent any emails.’

  ‘And you’re absolutely sure? Never seen her in an internet café, or using a friend’s mobile? Never?’

  This question was in fact addressed to me, but by the time I wake up they’ve moved on. The Hyena just has one idea.

  ‘And when will you get some info on the mother, Rafik?’

  ‘Tomorrow sometime. Nothing’s come up under her name yet: social security, tax return, bank account. But it’ll come up, I’m not worried. We can do like we did today. I’ll take Lucie through it and then in the evening…’

  ‘No, tomorrow, we’re working together: a concert by that band, Panic Up Yours, in Bourges. We’re going to the setting-up session. I don’t suppose you listen to them, Rafik, you prefer Rihanna and Lady Gaga?’

  This time I butt in. ‘Great to hear I’m supposed to be on the road tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Derrick, you got other plans?’ She appeals to Rafik with a big laugh. ‘I’ve rarely met anyone so reluctant to do anything.’

  ‘Would it be too much to keep me in the loop? It’s my time you’re asking for, after all.’

  ‘No problem, Derrick, next time I’ll send you a fax.’

  I roll my eyes with a big sigh, meaning I’m fed up with being called Derrick and being treated like mud. She appeals to Rafik again.

  ‘See that? She’s crazy about me. They all are. It’s a bit of a problem actually. It’s like I’m always telling you, Rafik. The thing about testosterone, it isn’t the quantity, it’s the quality. See with me, they’re all like bitches on heat, they don’t realize what’s happening. They just fall in love with me.’

  Next day the Hyena is waiting downstairs for me. Today she’s driving a metallic grey four-by-four, no idea where she got this monster. We drive through Paris slowly, and in this vehicle it feels like being in a carriage, you sit really high up, makes you feel like waving to the pedestrians like the Pope or the Queen of England. France Gall is singing ‘Si maman, si, si, maman si’, a song I haven’t heard for ages. It makes these amazingly clear images flit across my eyes, ones I’d completely forgotten, of Sunday mornings sitting in the back of my parents’ car, when we went to see our grandparents for the weekend, and we listened to this programme called Stop or Play It Again. Then Michel Berger starts singing ‘Si tu crois un jour que tu m’aimes’ and I realize it’s not the radio. The Hyena drives in silence, absorbed in her thoughts; she drives sitting far back, arms out straight.

  ‘Won’t we be there a bit early for the concert?’

  ‘I know one of the organizers, so I called to know when they’d be setting up the sound system. I thought that in a provincial town, where they don’t know anyone, just before they go on stage would be the best time to catch them.’

  ‘You know what you want to ask them?’

  ‘What do you think I’m going to talk to them about? The situation in Israel? Carbon taxes?’

  ‘I wish you’d stop treating me as if I’m retarded.’

  ‘Well, change the kind of question you ask, that would help.’

  ‘Is it true that Cro-Mag started calling you the Hyena?’

  ‘No. I was already called that when I started working. It’s because I’ve got a big clit.’

  I roll my eyes. I really don’t like this kind of talk. I get the impression that she’s insisting on drawing my attention the whole time to her genitals. We take some time to filter on to the motorway and I try to show some interest in what we’re doing.

  ‘Have you found out a lot about the group?’

  ‘Saw their Facebook page. Rich kids, rebels, they look like a milder version of White Power.’

  ‘Mild? White Power?’

  ‘I dug around a bit, they’re making up their stupid spiel. Bunch of wankers really, I think. They’re from posh families, but they’d like to have been born working-class. They’ll get over it when they join daddy’s firm.’

  ‘
So racism doesn’t shock you?’

  ‘I’m old, you know. When I see white kids who need to say, I’m white and proud of it, I just think in my day it would never have come to mind to say we were proud to be white. If we did think it, we felt sorry for everyone else, full stop.’

  ‘They may not be card-carrying members of a party, but it doesn’t stop them being political, does it?’

  ‘If you don’t have any links to politics, your group won’t get noticed by anyone, just you and your pals rehearsing in a cellar… it’s sort of like being a poet in a way. You can’t blame people for wanting to write poetry, can you?’

  ‘You don’t take them too seriously, I gather.’

  ‘Look, they’re about seventeen. On their website, they call themselves far right, and where do they play? In a venue run by dykes. That’s how I know one of the organizers. So what with one thing and another, no, I don’t think I can be bothered to give them a lecture on morals.’

  That’s all she ever says, honestly. Dyke, dyke, dyke, I’ve never heard this word so often as in the last few days. As if I could care. As far as I’m concerned, she can be lesbian, or nympho, or celibate, the end result’s the same. I have to put up with her, and I couldn’t care less what kind of sex she has when she leaves me. She carries on.