She’d already seen Loraine’s mother. Loraine’s mother looked classy. She wasn’t the only one who’d like to think: I’m a cut above this run-down area. But she was more elegant than the others. She had a way of getting out of a car, of closing the door behind her daughter; with her gentleness and tact, she impressed. And this woman, who wore her hair in such a neat bob, who went round in smart suits and trimly knotted silk scarves, this woman was a battered wife? Like poor old Madame Tunard down the road? Like the fat alcoholic woman opposite? Battered? Like some ordinary woman round here? And she couldn’t get away because it was ‘too complicated’? Everything looked different now. That was why Loraine never invited her home. Why she didn’t hang about after class. Why it was so important to get good grades. Why she had odd, touchy reactions. Everything that had made her seem so mysteriously uninterested in everything around her, her air of seeming to float above the mediocre world below – for all this, there was a simple, banal explanation. She was an abused child, living too far from the kind of district where the social workers called and lifted up kids’ T-shirts to check for bruises. That was why she never came to the swimming pool, never wore shorts for games. Why she never cheeked the teachers, or horsed around in the playground, no physical contact. Obviously with her body like that, she wouldn’t want to tangle with the boys.
And that evening, going home, she’d sworn to herself that that was the end of it, her obsession with Loraine was finished. Over, all that time of riding her bike to school instead of taking the bus, so that she could catch her up at the corner, of knowing where she was in the school buildings without even needing to look, of reading a book she’d mentioned so that they could talk about it, even when the books were totally boring, about people who lived five hundred years ago in some other country. It was over, listening to the slightest things she said, as if she had to learn all the nuances of a language foreign to her, so that in conversation she too would be able to sound condescending, use words like ‘naff’ and know what it meant, even while realizing in some shamed corner of her mind that it invariably referred to the habits of her own family. Over, having to be willing to listen to records by male singers who couldn’t have a drink without crying, or take drugs without moaning about it, and who were always being abandoned. That evening, she’d vowed that it was all over with Loraine. She was going to get back to her normal self.
But that’s not how it worked out. An invisible hand had swooped down to pluck her up as she was about to run away, and had set her back on the rails of her destiny, making sure she’d see it through to the end. Insidiously, admiration had gained the upper hand. It must take enormous willpower to go through what Loraine was going through without anyone else suspecting. Most of the time, they acted as if it wasn’t happening. Loraine would choose moments when they were alone to show her her bruised body, or just to talk about it.
‘But doesn’t your mother have any relations? Her parents aren’t living? Couldn’t you run away to some uncle?’
Because Loraine’s mother didn’t go out to work, she had no friends. No exit that way. They often moved house. The mother was isolated. But still she was an adult, wasn’t she, couldn’t she just pick up her car keys, take her two daughters, and go back to her family?
‘My mother won’t let me say anything. She says nobody would understand. My grandmother, for instance, she adores my father, it would kill her if she found out. Everyone adores my father. When he’s OK, he’s always got a kind word for people, he’s interesting. Nobody would understand. He just can’t help it, you see. He cries afterwards, all night. He’s in pain too. He does it because he’s too sensitive. He can go mad over the slightest thing.’
‘Yeah, but when he gets going, it’s against you, he doesn’t hit himself, and I don’t hear you telling me he has a go at the people at work.’
Loraine wouldn’t listen. She didn’t like others to interfere in her life, where there was much pain but no way out. She just wanted someone to lend an ear and confirm her diagnosis: ‘Nothing to be done.’
‘Most of the time, you know, he’s in a good mood, he’s funny, he jokes. But if we don’t laugh, that can trigger it – or if we laugh too much. Or if the dinner’s too cold. Or if he spills orange juice on a shirt he meant to wear next day. And he’s off. You can see it coming. But you can’t predict why it’ll start. For instance, one day I can come home with only twelve out of twenty in French, and he’ll just shrug his shoulders and say I must try harder next time. But next day I can have fourteen, and he says how come I didn’t do better, and if he doesn’t like my answer, off he goes again. Or say my mother cooks the pasta too long, she panics, she has tears in her eyes, and he’ll make fun of her, “Oh it doesn’t matter, the pasta’s fine like that.” Then the next day, he might see her wiping down the table with the sponge we use to do the dishes, and he’ll haul her into his study and beat her up, because he’s decided we have to have two sponges, one for the dishes, one for the table. But you can’t predict the rules we’re supposed to follow, see, they change, and we don’t know when we’re going to get something wrong. The problem with my father is he wants us all to be perfect, we’re supposed to know instinctively how we should be, without him having to tell us all the time.’
It took place in his study, the room nobody else in the family could enter without being asked. Loraine was being beaten up so that she would get better grades at school. She went into morbid detail when she talked about it.
‘If you could see his face, going round the chair and shouting at my mother to stay outside, and as long as I don’t cry, he goes on hitting me, he seems to be proud of me if I can stand it for a long time without crying, or screaming, but it makes him mad and he can’t stop. He gags my mother, I’ve seen him through the keyhole, one day he’s going to throttle her.’
Loraine liked her to fall into the trap and plead with her for hours to do something to make it stop. She liked to reply no, to point after point, it was a game she took pleasure in. Stubbornness.
She had a life outside her passion for Loraine, because of all the evenings and weekends when she could go round with other people. She was friends with the boys and she had girlfriends outside school. She was streetwise, nowadays she knew she could always get what she wanted from girls. When the two of them met up again after the holidays, in the first year of the upper school, the lycée, everything seemed to be likely to drive them apart. The lycée was in the town centre, and it was full of much more exotic and surprising creatures than Loraine. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t the only girl who was into girls. There were four of them in the top class, always going round together. The first time she saw them in the yard, it had been a shock, like when she’d first heard the word ‘dyke’, pronounced by an uncle talking about a woman he’d met in Paris. She’d been ten years old. She knew she was one, even before she knew there was a word to describe her state, and it was odd to find that it really did exist, that it wasn’t just something she’d invented for herself, to be in love with this girl or that in silence. She had never seen the woman, who was a friend of her mother’s, but the howls of laughter that had greeted the uncle’s remark had taught her that it was about as highly valued as having been born with a big red nose. It was before the word became associated with the word ‘pervert’: that came a year later when a primary school teacher had found her french-kissing a schoolfriend in the toilets. ‘Little perverts!’ It was getting complicated. And it was wicked as well as grotesque. Luckily it was exciting too, because you had to be highly motivated not to be persuaded to forget the whole thing. Her old lady hadn’t said a word, after the headmistress had telephoned her. They didn’t talk about things like that. Her mother thought it would pass, all girls go through a phase. So when she saw these tall girls from the top form, with their short hair, unsmiling faces, always with a cigarette in the corner of their mouths, wearing leather jackets like boys, a separate gang in the schoolyard, she’d had several epiphanies. She wasn’t
the only girl in the entire region to be ‘that way’. There was a ‘look’ for what she was, a way of being recognized immediately. The chatter in the school playground didn’t come to a halt when these four girls appeared, nobody threw stones at them in the street. At a stroke, a whole lot of interesting perspectives opened up.
She and Loraine met in front of the hot chocolate machine at school. The four other girls were smoking a few feet away from them. Loraine rolled her eyes, looking disgusted. ‘How ugly they are. At least you don’t look like that.’ Loraine had lost her superior airs. She’d become old-fashioned, with her Clarks shoes and her plaits, her paperback books, and her scornful look at other people. She was trying to reduce things to her measure. Sensing that she was losing her grip, Loraine had counter-attacked. ‘Can I talk to you for a few minutes?’ and then with a worried but determined expression, and clasping a copy of Boris Vian’s Heartsnatcher tightly to her, she said, ‘I’ve had enough, he’s gone too far, you’re right, I’m going to run away. Will you come with me?’ The Hyena had been waiting for this to happen all the previous year, but now she just felt like saying, no, you sort yourself out, I’m fine here, can’t you see I’ve got plenty of new friends and there are girls everywhere that I need to get to know? But Loraine, realizing that this wasn’t enough to restore her domination, had moved her lips close, slipped her hand under the Hyena’s sweater and up her back, whispering, ‘I love you,’ and it had worked. Their skin had touched and it was worth all the troubles in the world. After that, she had learned her lesson: always take the first exit when it appears in an affair. As soon as you get bored or tired, get out fast.
Loraine had no intention of running away, she would have been too scared to leave her mother and sister behind to pay the price for her action, but right now she needed to imagine she was going to do it. She had never been so openly anxious for company, for someone to talk to. And it had been nice. That and the sweet excitement of her skin, her tiny warm tongue, her active fingers always wanting to go further, letting herself go, more and more. Loraine was playing at being a girl seduced against her will, but losing all desire to resist. So with Loraine, in the quiet alleys of public gardens, or in the cinema, sweater pulled up to her shoulders, her sex being fingered, she was being pleasured to ecstatic levels. None of the others must know. And then one grey morning in February, after the half-term break, Loraine came in looking shattered. She was getting beaten less, but her little sister was getting it now.
‘I’ve thought about it. The only thing I can do to protect my sister is to set her an example. And the only example I can give her is to run away.’
Loraine was much unhappier than before. Her little sister’s screams hurt her more than when she was receiving the blows herself.
She didn’t say anything to Loraine but her mind was made up. She was going to seek him out and threaten to denounce him.
When he had realized he was being followed, he’d turned round and stared at her at length. Not afraid in the least, just looking scornful and annoyed. She was furious with herself, for wanting to give up at that point. To surrender, and realize she couldn’t do anything, submit to the authority of things being the way they are, so that nothing will ever change. She had charged at him like a wild beast. When she came level with him, she had hit out. Not to avenge her girlfriend whom he’d been torturing. A sudden desire had surged up inside her. To fell him. To force him to reckon with her. To get her out of this anguish, whatever the cost.
It must have been at that time that her way of thinking was transformed: through expecting always to be unmasked, she became capable of observing the slightest gesture, of analysing every sound. Something inside her must have been released. She paid such attention to what was happening around her that, little by little, she learnt to read between the lines when facing other people. She could spot those who were concealing something. She could recognize a lie. It even happened sometimes, with painful flashes of knowledge, that she simply guessed truths that had been covered up. It was like a kind of lucid madness, gradually extending its range. The sound of blood, other people’s blood, started to reach her. The drives, hidden thoughts, secrets that had never been whispered. She found it easier and easier to judge people. Their ferocity. Their weaknesses. Which had nothing to do with what was on the surface. She didn’t like it. The whole folklore thing about being ‘clairvoyant’, muttering over candles, smelling of patchouli. As the years passed, her senses became spontaneously more sophisticated. When she heard on TV that some girl was missing, she knew instinctively whether the girl was alive or dead. When someone told her about some incident, she could see the place, visualize what had happened. More pragmatically, she was a good listener, to whom people could tell their troubles of the heart; she knew, and was rarely mistaken, who was deceiving whom, who was lying, who was two-timing, and who would come back shamefaced after cutting a dash somewhere else.
She had got through her further studies effortlessly. She fascinated people. Nothing is less exciting than getting what you want too easily, especially if you think you don’t deserve it. When she finished university, everything seemed flat. The depressive stage had kicked in. She didn’t want to study any more, she wasn’t interested in getting a good job. Success would have brought a bitter taste. She’d gone to Paris. For the first few years, she worked at the postal sorting office near the Louvre, and by filling in for other people, she ended up working full-time. She preferred the night shift: going to work at eight and walking back home as the city woke up. She had an attic room opposite the Gare d’Austerlitz. She didn’t particularly enjoy her new life. She wasn’t surprising herself or rebelling. She was as if in suspense, a state that suited her. It seemed to her entirely desirable for a whole life to go past in this peaceful solitude, without anything happening, exciting or sad. Nothing but a succession of nights standing up emptying sacks and sorting envelopes by size, reclassifying postcards from the wrong boxes, throwing packets with accuracy into the big metal bins. Her colleagues weren’t very different from herself: pale, silent, rather absent-minded. A team of about twenty people, in a huge hangar with very high ceilings, impossible to heat in winter. A beehive in slow motion. In the post office hierarchy, the people on the night sorting shift thought they were looked down on, outsiders. She felt at home among them. A team of ghosts. A new rule had banned any alcohol in the building during the breaks. They didn’t laugh a lot. They drank packet soups, and didn’t have the guts to complain or to be vindictive. They didn’t talk much, or only about their kids, holidays, food, programmes on daytime TV, or how to look after houseplants. Things that didn’t concern her. Nobody took much notice of her.
But after a year, she’d been assigned the task of training a new recruit, a dark-haired boy who never stopped talking, who complained because he was missing rock concerts that interested him, or going out with his pals. His name was Arnaud. She didn’t really want to start chatting to him, but the nights were long, with nobody else near, they were thrown together. He’d succeeded in hauling her out of her torpor, insidiously, he’d get her to listen to a tape, buy a record. He took pains over his appearance, he was good-looking with full lips and big brown eyes. He deserved to be gay, poor boy, instead of which he had a string of affairs with straight girls his own age, each more pathetic than the last. She hadn’t managed to stop herself taking an interest in him. Because of her conversations with him, one afternoon she’d left her flat and walked over to the Place Jussieu to look at some second-hand records, and spotted the dark-haired salesgirl: an upfront dyke, condescending and raffish-looking. Impossible not to keep going back. Life had started to reassert itself, without her realizing it. The girl’s name was Elise. She listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees all the time, and liked Chinese films. The depression blew clean away. Elise was like a blazing coal, a tiny body that allowed itself to be lifted and turned as much as one liked. Her behind was like a baby’s. Her back was tattooed all over. Elise liked Philip K. Dick and went r
ound clutching Valerio Evangelisti’s first novel, which she was reading for the third time. She would describe how her mother had died after endless suffering, with that coolness of youth, when one is still running too fast for emotion to catch up. Her wrists were scarred by razor blades. Elise’s charm was all the more overwhelming because she wasn’t free, she was the kind of girl who loves duplicity, the kind of girl you can never trust, one who was excited by the idea of betrayal. She lived in a bedsit, on the sixth floor without a lift, near the Place de l’Horloge. Elise had other girlfriends and introduced them to her. She’d have liked to get off with them all. And it was mutual. One evening she’d called in to work saying she was sick, a second night she said she had a problem, the third night she didn’t call at all, and assumed they’d realize she was quitting her job.
She’d started in the debt-collecting racket by chance. This guy she hardly knew had agreed to go and pressure a porn film producer to pay an actress right away. He’d asked her to go along with him. The job had immediately pleased her. Some people fall for heroin first shot, some people fall for coke at the first sniff, what she’d fallen for was the adrenaline. Her number was passed round, she took on missions the way other girls might have offered a quickie: regularly but not the whole time. She’d become the Hyena. An outfit had offered her a full-time job, she’d accepted. Not a great job, but quite well paid. In a detective agency, getting creditors to pay up is pretty much the equivalent of cleaning lavatories. She wasn’t unhappy to play the dyke the way heteros expected: brutal, marginal, ready to cut the balls off anyone who crossed her. The first years, she quite enjoyed it.
She wasn’t in the business to make friends. She didn’t want peer-group recognition, she had no intention of being understood or sympathized with. But the first man she worked with as a regular partner, Cro-Mag, was OK. When he gave up, she didn’t enjoy working with other people. Her colleagues were heavy-handed, too highly motivated, cut-price sadists who thought they were tough. Something had kept her hanging on for a while: the chase itself. She’d developed a taste for it early on: one day when she was doing her act, a gipsy hiding in the corner of a room had pinned her to the ground, he’d put a knife against her throat and hadn’t needed to say a word to indicate that it wasn’t a good moment to threaten anyone. For a tenth of a second, his breath had invaded her space, they had exchanged looks, nothing in his eyes gave any hint of his humanity. She had come very close to death – he would have slit her throat like that of a chicken, without a pang. She had not felt afraid. Not at the time. Instead, she had replied to him on the same wavelength, as if she were digging her hands into his guts, a geyser of cold, still, intense hatred. It had been a moment suspended in time. A shard of life. And for the next few days, she had had the sensation of being aware of every cell in her body, every particle in the air. Reinvigorated. She didn’t care which side she was playing for. She didn’t even care whether she got the best of it. What had hooked her was the precise moment: two wills fighting full tilt. She would have liked it to happen with a girl, to see if it was even better. Everything was always better with girls.
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