Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  I really want to have sex with her. The side effects of the scene of that evening when we arrived here, which horrified me at the time, are disturbing now. Flashes of images, of sensations, running in a loop, are obsessing me, but pleasantly. The expression she had on her face, the slight smile on her lips, when she pulled on the gloves. I really want to have sex with her. As fiercely as I’m afraid of it at the same time.

  Everything she does drives me crazy. She makes the things she’s interested in seem important, even if they’re super-boring at first. She’s only got to look at a car she likes, and I want to know more about engine size.

  I like the way she lets me know I’m attractive to her. It’s peaceful. I don’t bother my head wondering how we’re going to get round to kissing, and if it’ll be the way I want it. The pit of my stomach is the centre of my feelings, I can feel it reacting with fear, desire, impatience and excitement. I’m listening exclusively to it now. I’m in orbit round her gestures. Fascinated by her hands. Worried by the toughness of her gaze. I love the way her voice goes down a few semitones when she speaks in Spanish.

  We end up on a square, in front of the gallery of contemporary art. A huge white building, with about thirty skateboarders on the space in front of it. A deafening noise. Kids sitting round the edges are drinking from beer cans sold by Pakistani vendors. Zoska spots something I can’t see, asks me to wait a minute. She goes over to a group of teenagers, talks to them, takes them aside, and comes back a couple of minutes later. I put two and two together and gather she’s dealing. That explains why she has this fancy motorbike, although she’s only a part-time waitress getting six euros an hour. And why she moves from place to place so much, since her love of foreign languages isn’t enough to explain her perpetual need to travel on.

  In the Raval, the windows have posters up saying ‘Respect the dignity of this district’. I ask Zoska if it’s a protest about the horrible new buildings they’re putting up in the city centre. Zoska says it’s against prostitutes. My mistake makes her laugh. She glances into a bar, I imagine she doesn’t see the clients she was expecting to find, and she turns to me. ‘I’m worn out. I’ve parked a long way from here. I want to go back to my place before I have to go to work.’

  ‘Yes, I’d better be going too.’

  ‘Want me to give you a ride? It’s further to your hotel than to my bike.’

  Clinging to her as we speed along, I fling my head back. It’s night-time. The sky’s nothing like in Paris. Here, you can see the stars.

  I’m aware of her back, her body against mine. To be able to clasp my hands round her belly, pretending to be afraid of falling off, makes me deliriously happy. Everything becomes interesting when you want someone. When it happens, you get this special kind of intoxication. It’s been a long time. I tell myself it’s as good as when I was fourteen. But that’s wrong. Being fourteen was never as good as this. On the contrary, it was a tough, lonely sort of time, the worst moment of my life. I was never a little princess. My life was full of humiliations, brutal prohibitions, failures, and the inability to do things. I was scared of everything when I was fourteen, with nothing to protect me.

  I gaze at the silver chain she wears round her neck. My entire body focuses on this detail. And I feel that even my ankles are enjoying looking at the metal links on her skin. Her profile when she turns her head to change lanes. Her way of turning round at a red light to ask if I’m OK. She likes me.

  In front of the hotel, she takes back the helmet she lent me. I ask her if we’ll see each other tomorrow. She looks at me, moves slowly closer, and stands still, less than a pace away. We stay there like that, facing each other, for a long moment without touching. She comes nearer, I sway on my feet. Slide into her, between her lips. Under my skin, my libido is doing crazy somersaults. I’m high, on her. It lasts a long moment, just that kiss.

  Then she leaves me there, saying we’ll be in touch.

  A pure high, without coming down. Like helium. A quiet bomb with a warhead that I need to explode on her.

  At three in the morning, I’m not asleep when she finally texts me: ‘Can I come to C U?’

  The sun is flooding the grotty carpet with golden light. My tongue feels numb – after so much mucus contact with her I’ve picked up the remains of the coke. It’s 8 a.m. by the hotel alarm clock, and I’m smoking by the window. Zoska’s asleep, lying on her back. When she came to join me, in the middle of the night, she was a bit drunk, warmer and more expansive than in the day. I liked it that she was like that. Easy to make contact with. We made love until dawn made her roll on to her side, and close her eyes, leaving me unsleeping. It was all reflexes: I touch her and I feel inside my own body what I’m doing to her; she strokes me and it’s in my own skin that I feel hers when I touch her, the limits have melted, we’re wound round each other. I wake her up, sit astride her, clasp her to me, her whole body tells me to go ahead. She rakes me with her fingers, something is released, I’m soaking the sheets. It’s a tempo quite different from anything I’ve ever known, unending, happening to a different rhythm.

  When she leaves in the morning, I’m not sure if I’ll see her again. I ask her this while she’s doing up her trainers. ‘What are you going to do today?’ She turns to look at me over her shoulder and smiles. ‘I keep forgetting you work for the police.’ Then she gets up, picks up her jacket, kisses my shoulder, says I smell nice, and goes out. I tell myself that she’s doing it on purpose, it’s a ploy to make me come apart, a ridiculous manoeuvre. It works. I spend the morning with one eye on my mobile. I go down to rejoin the Hyena. Finding Valentine has frankly never been an obsession for me, but now it’s become the outer edge of the outer edge of my worries. I arrive in the bar where she’s waiting for me and she gives me a long hard stare.

  ‘You look very well, that’s odd. Have you been in the hotel beauty parlour or what?’

  I make like I have no idea what she’s talking about, ask her what she did yesterday, and pretend that we combed the whole city like lunatics. She’s not listening, she frowns as if she is trying to resolve a particularly thorny problem.

  ‘Very strange. You look much more, well, luminous, don’t you?’

  And as I say nothing, she starts to sing ‘Like a virgin, touched for the very first time like a v-i-i-irgin’.

  I ask again whether she’s found anything new in our search, and she sighs. ‘I’ll spare you the details of what my day was like yesterday. Cutting it short: Valentine got pally with this nun. Don’t look like that, I thought it was weird too. This said nun has advised me to go and have a look in some squat…’

  ‘We’ve already checked out Nazis, Muslims, toffs from the sixteenth arrondissement… so now it’s the Church and the loony left. You are joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, she’s certainly getting around, she’s touched all the bases.’

  ‘Do you have any serious leads?’

  ‘No. But I get the feeling someone’s going to help us find her. We’re not going to have to strain ourselves.’

  ‘And this feeling’s based on what?’

  ‘Call it my instinct. Don’t ask. Meanwhile our programme for today is, go and have a coffee in the central bookshop in Eixample.’

  ‘Has someone tipped you off about this?’

  ‘No, but I have met this bookseller. A redhead. She’s playing hard to get. Really kills me.’

  ‘And you met her where?’

  ‘In a bar, last night, I don’t know if you remember, but last night you seemed to want to stay in your hotel. Busy, apparently. So I went out on my own.’

  ‘We’re not being paid to pick up hard-to-get booksellers.’

  ‘Well, no. As I recall it though, I haven’t been paid. Are you coming, or do you have some other plan?’

  So we find ourselves on the first floor of the bookshop, La Centrale. Wooden floors, low voices, white benches. Their hot chocolate’s good, but I don’t know what the heck we’re doing here. The Hyena is hyped up. She’s put o
n the table all the books she could find about Montserrat. I’m afraid she’s decided to go and do some tourism. She flips through the pages, and sometimes stops reading to tell me it’s this fantastic site, that aliens are known to have visited it, that flashing lights have been seen in the sky overhead, or that Himmler in person went there in search of the Holy Grail. I glance absently at the photos and say yeah, it does look nice. Big rocky mountains. I don’t know what else to say.

  I’m thinking about Zoska’s sunglasses, I’m thinking about the space between her shoulders, I’m thinking about the little half-moon tattoo over her navel. And the bracelet of plaited leather on her wrist. The bookseller comes over to us. She doesn’t look that great to me.

  ‘I really would like to learn Catalan. But I’ve never found someone to give me lessons.’

  ‘There are free linguistic normalization classes, you know…’

  ‘I can’t possibly go to anything called normalization. But I saw this book downstairs about Montserrat, it looked very good. But it’s in Catalan! Do you think you might be able to translate a few paragraphs for me?’

  The bookseller, who has very short hair and such a strict expression that it’s depressing, to me at least, puts her down. No, she doesn’t know the book. Then she gets up and leaves us. The Hyena watches her walk away, then goes and leans on the counter, she looks more like she’s trying to pick up the barista by the end. Two whole hours doing bloody nothing. I’m getting fed up.

  ‘Are we going to hang around a long time like this, doing nothing?’

  ‘It’s quite simple. I’m not budging from here till you tell me everything you did yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shouldn’t we be finding out about these leftie squatters?’

  ‘What you don’t understand is that we’ve moved into a kind of Zen phase of the search. It works if you sit still. We don’t go looking, but we’ll find. Get it?’ The Hyena crosses her legs and puts her elbows on the table. ‘If we find our little Valentine, what will you do about Zoska? Are you going to have a serious relationship with her?’

  ‘It’s not at all what you think.’

  ‘Oh really? Would you be freaked out if you had to tell people you’re with another girl?’

  ‘I can’t see what’s freaky about it. Excuse me, I don’t live in the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Oh really? So you’d tell your parents?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘OK. So I’m making a big fuss about something, when everyone else is cool with it.’

  But I’ve had time to imagine being at home, sitting across the table from my father and announcing to him, casually, that I’m going to live with my new girlfriend. And what the neighbours will say, if they see me living with a girl, when my flat isn’t big enough for two beds. The Hyena hasn’t finished.

  ‘But do you have room for you both, in Paris?’

  ‘Oh come on, lay off it. We just spent a night together, it’s not…’

  ‘Aha! So you did. Now we’re getting somewhere. You did spend the night together, then, I wasn’t dreaming. Bitch, I almost didn’t think so. But OK, now that you’ve chosen to confide in me, and let me say you couldn’t have made a better choice – a word of warning right away. You don’t know dykes. She’ll turn up with her suitcases, asking for a spare key, before you’ve had time to remember the colour of her eyes. Because she can do her job anywhere. But apart from that, believe me, you’re living the best moment of your life. Heterosexuality is as natural as the electric fence they put round a field of cows. From now on, big girl, welcome to the wide open spaces.’

  And for the first time since we’ve met, this kind of stupid statement makes me want to smile.

  VALENTINE

  I’m plague, I’m cholera

  Bird flu, the neutron bomb,

  I’m a radioactive bitch

  I’m a vicious little witch.

  Aliens, humans all polluters

  Universal contaminators

  SITTING IN THE SHADE OF A TREE WITH gigantic pink flowers that look like velvet, Valentine closes the black Moleskine notebook she stole from the stationer’s where she photocopied the false declaration of the theft of her identity papers. She’s only half-satisfied with the last rhyme. She’s in a little park. She yawns. An old man with a beard and a huge belly ventures towards her corner. He’s wearing flipflops, so you can see his revolting feet, with their long yellow toenails split at the ends. Surprised to see her there, he mutters something in a language she’d be hard put to identify, German, Catalan, Turkish, then he retreats. She’s relieved that he’s gone away. Then a man comes past, pushing a child in a pram so hi-tech it could enter for the Paris–Dakar rally. Three teenage girls, her own age, walk towards her taking no notice, their wrists are laden with bracelets, they each hold a mobile and are chattering away. When she thinks she looked like that not so long ago. She’s changed a lot. She is very attentive to her short biography. She looks back over it willingly, it’s all she’s got now. Her life. She remembers how the school terms followed one after another. Her old life. The Twilight phase, when you dream of this fantastic vampire, your hair’s dyed red and your eyes are sore because you’ve rubbed them so hard to get the makeup off – she had to set her alarm an hour early, to have time to put on two sets of eyeliner and get them more or less symmetrical. Then there was the neo-metal phase, but people tell me that’s for dummies, so I switch to the hardcore punk New York scene of the eighties, and my religion is Agnostic Front. Followed by the ‘I’m just a bimbo’ phase – that’s the only way guys are going to like you – but I’m not really a slag, I can afford designer handbags. And I can feel cynical when I do a few lines of coke. All this past seems far away now. In the last year everything speeded up.

  It had all begun with Carlito, more or less. It wasn’t exactly a coup de foudre. It was in front of this club, Le Divan du Monde. She was hanging about at the door, on her own, hoping that one of the boys from Panic Up Yours, who were playing there that night, would come past and give her a backstage pass. She bombarded them with texts they never replied to. Sometimes she slept with them: in town they showed off as tough guys who could have anyone, but didn’t give a shit – except that in fact when they were on their own, without their mates, and naked in bed, they were as soft as little puppies and hardly any more threatening in the sack. At first sight, Carlito and his gang had bothered her. They were coming out of an alternative bar and hanging about on the opposite pavement, vaguely harassing the crowd waiting for Panic Up Yours. They looked like anti-capitalist campaigners, just watching them you sensed a bad smell. They hadn’t yet found the suckers they were looking for, but hadn’t yet decided to split. Valentine was pretending to be reading texts on her mobile, and Carlito had crossed the street to ask her outright, ‘Hey you, can you give me ten euros, please?’

  ‘Ten euros? Inca bonnets too pricey, are they?’

  She was sure that if he lifted a finger against her, the bouncers would leap on him. A little bourgeois girl like her and a big layabout like him, there’d always be someone to defend her.

  Carlito had carried on in his loud voice, ‘Oho, little miss smelly puss, we’ve got a sense of humour, have we?’

  ‘Oh, leave me alone, get a life! Go find an anti-racist demo at Bastille or somewhere.’

  He didn’t impress her. Too fat. She didn’t like guys with bellies. If, at that moment, an angel had come down and told her, this man will change your life, she’d have burst out laughing. He went a few steps away, but not far, she could feel him looking at her, while he went on doing his panhandling. There were fewer people around now. At the front of house, she humiliated herself pleading with one of the big dumb bouncers to let her in. The concert had started. She kept sending texts, still to no avail. She’d decided to beat it, feeling disgusted, she’d have to go past those three zombies to get to the metro, so she changed pavements, but it wasn’t enough. Carlito had started following her.

  �
��Go on, give me ten euros, I know you’ve got them, I so want you to give me them. I love it when girls like you give me money, it really turns me on.’

  They were both standing on the boulevard. And then this total wanker, wearing a grotty tracksuit tucked into cheap white socks, a wanker, yeah, but six foot tall, decided to get involved. ‘Leave her alone, she’s my girl,’ – and he took her by the arm to pull her away. Bad scene. Obviously, Carlito was going to split, and leave her to sort it out with this half-witted giant. But no, he didn’t push off, or even bother to argue, his arm had shot up, his fist clenched. One fierce punch. An uppercut to the jaw, like in wrestling matches where the opponents are mismatched; and the loser staggered backwards, obeying all the rules, almost in slow motion. Carlito had turned round to face the other guy’s allies, with a twisted smile on his lips, and his own two sidekicks were already behind him, arms folded. You had to give them that, they relished a fight. Someone in the group growled, ‘Look out! cops, cops coming,’ the two protagonists threw looks of hate at each other, indicating, ‘going ’cos we got to, but we’d really like to smash your face in’. And everyone dispersed, quickly but casually, hands in pockets. Without running or turning round, but taking oblique routes through the street, hugging the wall so as to turn the corner faster. And Valentine had fallen into step with Carlito. He seemed to think it natural that she should attach herself to him, and talked to her as if he knew her. ‘See, if we hadn’t been there, you’d really have been in the shit.’ The two sidekicks laughed at everything he said, it didn’t take long to see he was the boss. They stopped in front of a grungy bar near Pigalle, and Carlito had asked, as if it was a done deal, ‘Right, those ten euros, going to shell them out now, buy us a beer?’ They knew the manageress, it stank of grease inside, and Valentine disliked this kind of place, smelling of old people, poor people, and unhealthy fast food. She didn’t say much, just took it all in. More pals of theirs had come to join them and a little gang had gathered round Carlito. It was sort of fun to be sitting at table with the kind of people she normally despised. Without actually calculating, Carlito arranged things so that she was sitting next to him, showing off that she was his little fun item of the day, and nobody else was about to contradict him. She watched everything around her, thinking this would make a good story afterwards to tell her real friends. It takes some time to learn other people’s way of talking, and Valentine was too inexperienced to pick up everything that was going on. Carlito was cocksure and she liked that. At one point he’d turned to her, sniffed her neck and whispered in her ear, ‘You smell of soap from a hundred metres. What’s so dirty at home that you keep washing so often?’ He looked her straight in the eyes, as if he were fucking her, standing up right there in the bar. He might not be a turn-on, but he knew how to talk to girls like her. He was still the leader of the gang, even when more people showed up. The one who talks more than anyone else, the one people listen to more, the one who makes everyone laugh. Whose judgement they all depend on. Their major source of entertainment tonight was a notorious left-wing activist who’d spent a few months in jail, suspected of having tampered with some railway containers. They all found his statements to the press hilarious. Carlito seemed to know them off by heart, and made constant fun of this individual he regarded as a political jester. In their conversation, there was no reference to her own world. She’d thought that these G20 protester types spent their time mocking the bosses, the rich, the powerful, and posh kids. She’d even tried to join in by making a clumsy joke about the president’s wife. They looked at her without reacting, as if she’d made a reference to Montaigne. The Elysée Palace wasn’t on their radar. Nothing to do with them. Valentine had always been told how lucky she was to be born into her family, that everyone wanted above all to have the kind of life she had. But in this scruffy crowd, nobody seemed worried that they couldn’t afford an expensive lunch at Costes.