She could tell that a lot of people on set used coke, but at first she did not touch the stuff. They were constantly disappearing to the toilets, passing each other little wraps of paper. When she finally fell, it was head first. She became thinner than she had ever thought possible. She would gaze at herself in the mirror. She could not believe her luck at inhabiting this body.
Once she got her nose into the stuff, she dumped Cyril within a fortnight, she was done with masochistic romance: she could not stand him helping himself to her emergency stash when she went to sleep. He infuriated her. He claimed to be her agent, but he never did a tap of work. He didn’t book the shoots, didn’t negotiate her fees, he spent his time on set swilling beer and joking. Sometimes, he would be helpful, go and fetch something for her, but it would never occur to him to leap to her defence when a director suddenly sprang something on her at the last minute – no way, I didn’t come here to do a gang-bang, you know that perfectly well, I was told this was a straight vanilla scene, so don’t fucking think I’m about to take four guys up the arse, no, I said no, do you take me for a rookie or what? Just pick one of these four fuckwits and I’ll give you one blow job, one anal scene, one money shot and you’ll have to make do with that. No, it’s not the fucking same thing. Yeah, right, you’ll fuck up my career good style – like I haven’t heard that before. Cyril had become surplus to requirement. With a gram of coke in her bag, she didn’t need anyone. Good riddance.
Then she had met Pam, at a “salon of erotica” down the country. It was just after Satana killed herself. They spent all night ripping rails and talking about her. As dawn was breaking, Pam announced:
“I’m done with coke.”
“Me too.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m in if you are.”
They caught the train home together and, two days later, Pam called her: “I’m still straight. You?” “Me too.” They kept the pressure on each other, at first it wasn’t a struggle, they both assumed it was just a temporary break. Then it became a curious sort of competition: you’re still straight? Me too. They would meet up to talk about it, at first to humblebrag about how amazing it was, and how easy. But all too quickly admit how tough it was. But neither wanted to be the first to give in. As much to show they were strong as out of solidarity. But there was no point shitting themselves: life was a lot more interesting with coke than without. This was their gift to each other – they had managed to quit. Though for both of them, it was a long shot.
Pamela held up well – she got into exercise, she bought fitness D.V.D.s and would park herself in front of the television counting off press-ups crunches squats cardio work . . . She was radiant. For Deb it was harder. She found dealing with quitting the business and quitting coke very difficult. She piled on weight, it was all she thought about. She was wary of the men she met. She no longer had money to take taxis everywhere and refused to take the Métro on her own. She often felt like crying.
Then there had been this concert. Lydia Lunch. The little transsexual. So cute. Deb instantly knew that this was her way out. She quickly realised that the trans community would take a dim view of her starting a testosterone course just to be rid of her old body. She lied to the endocrinologist, she regurgitated all the stories she had read online and managed to dodge the question when asked why, if she had always felt that she was a man, she had had a breast augmentation. This was not an interview, it was the Inquisition. Luckily, the guy doing the consultation was not into porn. She managed to dupe him. Gel, injections. She had not reckoned on the fact that she would change on the inside too. Her personality did not change, but the intensity of her emotions shifted. More diffuse than the effects of the drug, the readjustment was radical. What at first she had seen as a means of escape, a desperate attempt to get out of a situation she could no longer control, turned out to be the most inspired decision she had ever made. She had lied to other people in the trans community online – cutting and pasting their comments and passing them off as her own. Daniel was such a cool vehicle that she sometimes wondered: how could I be so lucky? Being Debbie the porn star had been fun, but being Daniel, the cute little guy everyone loved – that was the Rolls-Royce treatment. The pleasure of walking into a shop and being taken seriously, of chatting to other men and knowing they liked you. Before now, she had never realised how much men liked each other.
And Daniel is in love with Pam. Maybe Deb was before him. From that first night they spent together. But Daniel can admit it to himself. The next step is to admit it to her. Right now, they are binge-watching “Game of Thrones” and he is having trouble following the plot. “Is it me, or is it really complicated?” he says. Pam, not looking at the screen, still playing Tetris, snaps back, “It’s you being stupid. It’s completely obvious.” Daniel opens the text message that has just appeared on his phone. He says:
“What was the name of the journalist, the one who went round to Satana’s daughter’s house?”
“She didn’t give a name. She wanted to talk about Alex Bleach.”
“Because I’ve just had a message from someone who calls herself the Hyena who wants to meet up to talk about Satana.”
“Really? Show me. I don’t believe it – you’ve had a nose job, you’ve changed gender, and you’ve changed your mobile number a hundred times, how the fuck did she track you down? You think this is something to do with Alex Bleach?”
“They can hardly blame Satana – she’s been dead for years.”
“That would be so unfair. So, what are you going to say?”
“Some chick who calls herself the Hyena? Nothing. I’m not going to reply at all.”
A BLONDE IN A FLEECE JACKET WITH A FUCHSIA-PINK SHOPPING bag tucked under one arm is hanging from a strap and reading the latest Stephen King. A dark-haired girl in glasses chewing gum is wearing a black and white polka-dot blouse with the top buttons open and pearl earrings in her ears. She has the look of a saucy giscardienne. A black teenager with a red hoodie, a skinhead crop and thick black-framed glasses is jabbing a message into his phone, he seems pissed off about something. A guy of about forty with a rucksack and a pair of fluorescent yellow headphones is sitting with his legs manspread, he is obviously not familiar with the city. Vernon rides all the way to the end of Ligne 5. The deeper he penetrates into Paris, the more diverse the population. Past the gare de l’Est, the platforms are heaving. He surreptitiously observes the passengers, careful not to stare. A woman pushes her way through the crowd wearing a brown wool cardigan and dragging a luggage trolley to which a small amplifier is strapped with a red bungee cord, she is singing flamenco in a beautiful husky voice.
Things ended badly with Lydia Bazooka. He still feels shaken. He had expected to be able to stay at hers for two weeks, no trouble, since her soundman boyfriend was touring with -M- and had no days off planned. The field was clear and Vernon quickly settled in. Lydia Bazooka was much nicer than he had expected. He had popped round to her place, as arranged, to talk to her about Alex Bleach and found her listening to Kid Loco’s “Here Come the Munchies” on repeat at full blast in a tiny studio full of stuffed animals. Women are weird sometimes: what possessed this girl to get into collecting toys? As he stepped in, he noticed that the couch was not a sofa bed and besides was piled with mountains of clothes. If he was going to sleep here, he would have to share her bed. She had a tiny, charming body, her skin, unmarked by tattoos, was so white that it looked fake. She had put some beers in the fridge in his honour. If Lydia had flirted with him shamelessly online, now that they were face to face, she proved charmingly timid, she blushed at the slightest thing, something that made her even more attractive. For the first five minutes, Vernon was on his guard, then he relaxed. He could read her like a book, he had met her kind before. She was into Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, the Smiths and Oasis – an eclectic bunch of oldies, but nothing seriously off-putting. She was obsessed with rock, he knew the type – the misfit who takes refuge in music. Above her
desk she had pinned various photos of Alex. She was a real fan. Vernon could hardly complain, that was one of the reasons that rock music exists. People say fans are not best placed to talk about musicians but Vernon has always disagreed, after all, the fans are the only ones capable of staying awake for forty-eight hours straight tomake sure they don’t miss a single tour date out in the sticks.
He was hungry and fried himself some eggs; the kitchenette was teeming with cockroaches, Lydia gave them nicknames. She was curious by nature, she asked a lot of questions and had a talent for giving the impression she was listening. She found it completely normal for him to settle himself in a corner of the apartment.
He listened to her talk about her book project. She had the energy and verve of a writer who never manages to get their project off the ground. Vernon had spent a lot of time listening to people tell him about the book they planned to write propped up on the counter in the record shop – he was all too familiar with this feverish logorrhoea that was a substitute for getting anything done. She aspired to write something good. This is always a problem. Someone saying “I’m going to paint a thoroughbred at full gallop”, does not mean they can. More often than not, they end up scrawling something that just about looks like a squashed rat. This girl wanted to create a book that would be like a cathedral in the sky, she would probably end up delivering a plywood shed.
He talked to her about Alex. He was surprised to hear himself setting aside his cynicism, and say, by way of preamble: “The last couple of times I saw him, it was blindingly obvious he was begging for help, but I pretended I didn’t notice. Like most of his friends, I suspect. I liked the guy, but it would never have occurred to me to do something. He was in such a bad way. I never really understood why he was so depressed. In the end, he simply lost the plot. Physically, he was still there, but who he was deep inside had been hijacked – bodysnatched. He was done with himself. And I just listened and made as if what he was saying was perfectly normal.” Lydia said, “That’s still a way of being his friend, giving him space.” She wanted him to start off by talking about Alex back when he was gigging with unknown bands. Vernon tried to marshal his thoughts, “He was always handsome. Girls fancied him. That’s the one thing that made him different from the others. He was very self-effacing, he only came out of his shell when he was singing. The way we saw it, Bleach becoming famous was like Nirvana suddenly making it big when we were expecting it to be Tad or Mudhoney – he wasn’t the one we expected to make it to the finish line. The difference is that everyone was happy when it turned out to be Nirvana. It wasn’t the same with Bleach. We didn’t think he was the most talented, we thought it was unfair that he hit the jackpot. The fact that everyone liked him didn’t help, it was like bubblegum pop. You wanted to listen to something else. But success is like beauty, there’s no arguing with it, it is what it is. And it strikes where it strikes. Did the fact that he was black go against him, for those of us who knew him before? No. It went against him when he started banging on about it in interviews. A lot of people said he overdid it – here he was, hugely successful and still bitching about how tough it was being black . . . but in the beginning, it didn’t matter any more than his haircut. Not to him, and not to us I think.”
They talked about the videos Alex had recorded at his place. He hoped she would say that her publishers would pay to get their hands on them. He even told her the truth, that he had been evicted from his apartment and needed a thousand euros so he could get his stuff out of storage. Lydia had a hard job hiding the fact that she didn’t give a flying fuck about him being homeless, but she was wetting herself with excitement at the thought of unseen interviews by Bleach. She couldn’t believe he had not even listened to them. But on the subject of money, she was uncompromising: “They’re not worth shit. Unless he confesses he was Hortefeux’s lover in which case, yeah, maybe we could get something for them . . . But the publisher isn’t going to shell out another cent, take my word for it. On the other hand, it would be a serious scoop for the book if I had access to interviews no-one’s ever seen . . .”
He tried to calm her down by explaining that he couldn’t very well call Emilie and ask for the tapes without giving her back her laptop. Lydia was disappointed, but convinced they could come up with a solution. She had called a friend who came by to sell her a gram of coke. Then she and Vernon spent the night talking about Alex, about the past. He was thinking about sex, they both knew the other was thinking about it. But he was put off by the idea that he had to fuck her to crash here for the night. Sometime in the early hours, they collapsed, fully clothed, on the bed. Within minutes she snuggled closer to him, he pretended he was already asleep.
He had spent the following day holed up in the apartment, in the placid euphoria of a coke come-down. Lydia was a really funny girl. She didn’t sulk because he hadn’t fucked her. She told him how she had first discovered Alex’s records through a friend of her big sister and became so obsessed that she wouldn’t talk about them with anyone. Listening to her talk about her first interview with Alex you would have thought she had met the Virgin Mary.
Then Lydia stopped and threw herself at Vernon. Literally, she jumped on his back and wrapped her arms around him, a gesture so clumsy it was touching. At first, he didn’t like the way she kissed – she tended to get overexcited and bump her teeth against his. In less than ten minutes she was straddling him, tugging at his belt buckle with an enthusiasm that was more scary than sexy. She was one of the porn generation, she faked everything with a manic intensity and was happy to be fucked every which way. In the end, Vernon found it turned him on. Her little gymnast’s body bent to his every whim. She was an exceptional cocksucker – it was impossible to tell what she did with her lips and her tongue that others missed – perhaps it was an innate sense of rhythm. But when he came, he felt nothing very much.
She was pleasant enough to live with. She had a little-girl laugh that was constantly erupting. He felt at home in her place. He spent time on his Facebook page, adding more bullshit posts – making sure he had a fall-back option, Lydia’s boyfriend was bound to come back sooner or later. Sylvie had flown into a rage. This depressed him. In a fury verging on lunacy, she trolled him on his own page and those of his friends: liar, thief, fraud, psychopath, terrorist, child rapist, chicken fucker. It was not so much the things he had stolen but his sudden disappearance that angered her. Luckily, he could rely on the deep-rooted misogyny of most of his acquaintances to chalk up her diatribes to common-or-garden hysteria. But he was shocked to see the extent of her rage and worried that it did not seem to be diminishing. He blocked her access to his page and those of his friends and struggled to think of a casual message that might neutralise her fury. Gaëlle got in touch. “Hey, sounds to me like you got yourself a girlfriend, huh?” Vernon tried to explain “It was just a casual thing, but I think she’s hung up on me.” “Don’t sweat it,” Gaëlle wrote back, “I can’t stand the bitch, she’s always pissing people off. So, how you been, old man?” And when she heard that Vernon was looking for somewhere to crash in Paris, she gave him her number – there was a spare room where she was staying. Lydia, to whom he read these messages, was astonished that girls were forever offering to put him up. He slipped an arm around her, she allowed him to kiss her.
“Don’t be jealous. I’m not likely to go sleeping with Gaëlle – she always claims she’s bi, but I’ve never seen her with a guy.”
“I don’t do jealous. You can’t have them all. But why is it always girls offering to put you up?”
“Guys with families aren’t allowed to bring friends home. And the ones who have no wife, no kids, no job . . . well, they remind me too much of my own life. I’d rather stay with a girl.”
*
One day, Lydia posted a photo of Vernon on Instagram. Nothing compromising. He was bent over his laptop, looking for a video of Iggy Pop doing a cover version of Yves Montand, the naked light making his face look gaunt, it was a beautiful shot, he had rare
ly seen himself look so handsome. In the background, a mirror dusted with coke and a neatly cut straw from McDo gave the scene a festive touch.
Who knows how Sylvie came to stumble across it. And how she tracked down Lydia’s address. She must have spent all night searching online. She did a good job.
The following morning, Vernon and Lydia were lying slumped together, too tired to fuck, but too wired to sleep when the front door juddered under the force of a pounding fist. Clean and sober, it would have shocked them, but given the state they were into, it was like being plunged into a Scorsese movie, helicopters police raid bloodbath. And things did not get any better when Lydia opened the door.
It’s amazing how much damage a skinny little thing can do, both sonically and in terms of sheer physical damage. For the first time since he got here, Vernon found a use for the hideous collection of stuffed animals: thrown against the wall they neither break nor make any noise. But that just seemed to fuel Sylvie’s rage.
She destroyed both laptops, upended the bed, ripped the sofa, smashed the crockery and stomped on the C.D.s, it seemed clear she was about to attack the windows before starting in on the foundations of the building, she was howling like a thing possessed, a stream of abuse that was directed at Vernon but went far beyond the nature of their recent relationship. He had two decades of frustration and disappointment thrown in his face. He was the embodiment of every man who had ever humiliated her.
Vernon was forced to overcome his fear so he could creep towards her, whispering gently as though trying to pacify a wild animal, but as soon as he came close, Sylvie calmed down. “Come on,” Vernon said, “let’s talk about this over a cup of coffee. She’s just some girl who gave me a place to crash, I don’t see why she should have anything to do with the conversation. Come with me.” Sylvie was still railing, “So what did you steal from her, huh? I’m betting you fucked her too, yeah? Do you have any idea who you’ve had living with you, mademoiselle? No, you don’t. You’ve got no idea who Vernon Subutex really is.” But she agreed to go with him.
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