Apocalypse Baby (15 page)

He
doesn't listen at school. Education, he gets it his own way. He doesn't listen, but he hears all right, through the pathetic racket in the classroom, with everyone shouting at once. He hears the whore up at the blackboard, who's stammering something about violence coming from ‘fear of the other'. Bullshit. They're not afraid of anyone, that's the whole problem. He doesn't play up in class. He just contents himself with staring at her, sometimes her eyes meet his. She really likes him, she'd like to get him on her side. She'd like him to join in, she thinks she's got something to offer him. As if. What she really wants is for him to screw her, he can guess that from the way she looks at him, when he stares back at her without smiling, she'd like him to come up at the end of the class and ask for private coaching in literature. That'd really turn her on. But he doesn't go with just any slut. No way, he's not like that. He stands up straight. No one can take that away from him. His dignity.

When he gets home, he can tell immediately that the sounds are not the usual ones. His mother isn't in the kitchen, where she's always to be found at this time of day. His sister isn't yelling from her bedroom where she watches TV, ‘I can smell from here you've been smoking!' She's really pissed off with him about that. She says good Muslims don't smoke. Where did she get that idea? Nadja thinks you have
to keep making a constant effort, that's the only way to stay on the straight and narrow. If you let yourself go, you'll slip back. They've been as close as that since they were little. His other sister's left home, married. The flat seems bigger now she's gone. Raouda used to be a good cook, looked after the housekeeping too, and that helped their mother out. But she took up too much space. Talking all the time, listening to stupid radio shows.

When he gets home, as a rule, his face changes. He relaxes. Takes off the mask. But today, something's not the same as usual. He rearranges his expression before going into the living room.

This dark woman with short hair is sitting on the couch. Legs apart. Like a guy. Not like a tart, like she's
really
a man, no kidding. Good-looking for her age. That's because of her skin, the grain of her skin catches the light, looks luminous. And her nose is delicate. She's got big eyes. Serious-looking. She doesn't smile at him when he comes in, she looks him straight in the eye, just long enough to let him know she's not going to be apologetic about anything. He sees that his mother's offered her coffee, the empty cup's on the low table. His mother explains.

‘She's looking for your cousin Valentine. She's run away. Did you know that?'

‘No.'

Nadja gets up, and puts her hand on his shoulder as she goes past. Everyone says they look like each other. She's exactly his height. He'd have looked good too if he'd been a girl. His sister's beautiful. Her beauty is grave and majestic. Not like those silly little girls who only wear headscarves
because it's today's fashion, and then behave like sluts when they're waiting for the bus. Modern Islam, a stupid idea invented by Muslims in France. Nadja started wearing the veil before he'd started growing a beard. For two years, she'd pinched his cheek when they were alone: ‘Think it'll grow one day, or will you always be a baby?' Now she asks him: ‘Want a coffee?' and goes into the kitchen. From the way both women are acting, he knows that the stranger must have behaved correctly. They don't need to wait for him if they want to kick someone out. Even if she looks slightly daunting, this woman. Not fat, but capable of a bit of strong-arming. Sturdy shoulders, straight back. A plain-clothes cop, perhaps. She hasn't bothered to smile when she looks at him. Makes a nice change. The French are so hypocritical. Nation of shopkeepers. They always start by being smarmy, when what they really want is to shaft you.

‘I'm looking for Valentine. I work for a private detective agency. She went missing a week or so back. I saw on the internet that she'd got in touch with her mother's family recently… so I took the liberty of calling to see you, to ask whether she had… mentioned anything that might give me some clues to follow up.'

You can tell she's making an effort, all the same. Trying to talk politely, so that they won't be insulted. And that in itself is insulting. Well, anyway, do what she likes, there's no way we can get on, her sort of people and our sort of people. Only the kind of French who live in cloud cuckoo land could imagine it's still possible to understand each other. The ones who never see any rats. In the places they live, the way they live. No meeting possible. No forgiveness. No argument.
The people who don't like them are absolutely right. The day Yacine has something to say, he'll have his knife on him. For now it's a cold war. When things get bloody, he'll be there. And war's like football: they'll be world champions. Yacine takes the coffee his sister holds out to him, pulls over a chair and sits down face to face with the newcomer. His mother speaks, neither friendly nor aggressive, just going over what she's already said, spontaneously, so that Yacine can see the line to take.

‘We haven't seen her since Christmas. You haven't seen her either, have you? No, like I said. She wants to know where Louisa is. Well, we'd like to know that too.'

His mother loves her sister, Louisa. He knows that she misses Louisa, that they were close when they were young. Of all her sisters, even though they never see each other now, she's still her favourite. That was why, when Valentine turned up, his mother was happy. Louisa's daughter! She didn't look much like her mother, but still, it was a bit of her coming back, a corner of her life reappearing. Since Louisa's changed her name to Vanessa, she's thought herself too grand for them. Apparently she lives in some palace now, in Barcelona. The high life. Vice often pays. She's always used her brains to find herself a place in the sun, and she'd rather fall out with her entire family than see that bunch of losers turn up on her doorstep to dirty her carpets. One of these days, Sheitan in person will come and tell her he likes her style, but till then she's right to act the way she does. The more you give your family, the more they hate you. But parents, that's different. And Vanessa
never
speaks to hers any more. What astonishes Yacine is that his mother, who's so proud,
and upstanding and intransigent, can regret the loss of her sister, when Louisa isn't even bothered to know whether her own parents are all right. No phone calls, nothing. Of course she abandoned her daughter too. Though the daughter's got a cushy life, you have to say, but still. He'd asked Valentine if it was true she'd never heard from her, no, nothing, not a thing. In their house too, any photos of Louisa have been burnt or carefully cut out from the family snaps. Because of the evil eye. Because for ages, whenever a kid was ill or some slacker lost his job, it was ‘Louisa putting the evil eye on them'. With Nadja, on the quiet, they would laugh together. Yeah, right, Vanessa lives in a posh district, she's treated like a princess, she goes to the hammam with Jews, and eats fancy food off porcelain dishes, but when she's awake in her bed, she envies her family. That same bunch of losers. Of course she does, logical, that's the way it's got to be. But in fact he's never seen Louisa. Even his mother no longer has any photos of her. He knows what it cost her, the day she had to bring them all out, so that they could be burnt in front of the whole family. But she did it, without cheating. That's the way his mother is, straight, honest. Never does anything behind your back, everything's always up front with her. Good deeds don't often get rewarded, and his mother's probably the one in their family who's had to take the most godawful jobs, cleaning up other people's shit, and she's seen hard times, like when his father went off, and the kind of bad stuff you get from people when they see you're trying to behave correctly. More correctly than them. Because when they see someone decent, they feel threatened. But anyway her children are all OK. Not one of them goes round moaning, ‘Oh, it's society's
fault I have to deal shit, French society forced me to drink wine, society turned me into a piece of rubbish hanging about in the stinking stairwell.' They stand up straight. Yacine's responsible for his own actions. He knows where Louisa is. He doesn't know her address, but he knows she's in Barcelona. His cousin told him, that big slob, Radia's son. How he found out was nobody's business. He'd been mighty interested in Valentine, and pissed off because she only had eyes for Yacine.

When this girl had turned up, one Sunday, his cousin'd been like one of those old-fashioned cartoons, the wolf with his tongue hanging out and dollar signs whizzing round in his eyes. Knocked sideways. Nobody said a thing while she was there, but you could see what all the younger members of the family were thinking: she's loaded! Even her way of sitting on a chair looked like a million dollars. She immediately took to Yacine. She picked him out from all the others milling round her. He'd taken her back home. He felt sorry for her. Valentine was rolling in it, you could tell by her handbag, her cute haircut, her top-of-the-range Nike trainers… but Yacine had recognized from the start that the little princess was unhappy. He didn't distrust her for long, because she was too vulnerable. Completely nuts, ready to do anything, and totally lacking in self-esteem. He'd have liked to do something to help her, but she was beyond help. Living in this flat in central Paris, 200 square metres, where her bedroom was bigger than their living room, and having pocket money like it grew on trees. He'd never seen her without a few banknotes on her. But Valentine had nowhere to put her feet on this earth. She was a lost soul, floating
somewhere in the stratosphere. Her father couldn't give a toss about his daughter, her stepmother wanted her out of the way, her grandmother couldn't stomach her any more, and her bitch of a mother had even forgotten the date of her birthday. At first Yacine had been wary, because she was like no one else he'd ever known. But she tamed him. Valentine laughed non-stop. She contradicted herself all the time, with comical carelessness. From a distance, you'd think she was totally frivolous. But close to, it was more complicated. Getting to know her, he'd discovered for the first time in his life that there's such a thing as the misery of the rich. He wasn't going to shed tears over her lot, but he finally worked out why she was sad. Valentine just didn't have anything much. Socially, yeah, she'd probably do better than his family, the world was her oyster. Even if she didn't do anything but mess about or get into trouble. Wealth is a thick mattress, it breaks any fall, and lets you bounce back. Where he is, it's another matter. The walls close in on you, month after month, the registered letter, always the same, you won't make it, you'll never make it. You take up too much space. You want too much all the time. You're always too hungry.

Crisis, what crisis? This is all he's ever known. So he's hardly going to take fright at it now. How could they have any less than they have now? Cut off the hot water? OK, go ahead, we'll manage, like we've always managed. All the same. Valentine was worse off than he was. Buy all you want, you'll never fill that big hole eating up your heart. If he compared Nadja and Valentine, he saw a queen and a dropout. Valentine made an effort when she saw him, but however much she watched what she said, he could always
second-guess her. All over the place and damaged. And that darkness inside her was waiting to burst out. He'd come very close.

He'd slept with her. Almost at once. He'd never told Nadja. He'd hardly pulled out before he was already regretting it. But he'd started again. Often. The animal in him was straining at the leash. She drew him to her. Every millimetre of her skin was screaming for him to come into her. Yacine knew she would sleep with anyone. He ought to have been disgusted. But he doubted it was the same for her with anyone else like it was with him. The first time, she'd started putting on an act, the easy lay who knows all the little tricks. Playing the good-time girl, I'm so emancipated, suggesting porn-star positions, and making too much noise. But it had all changed very fast. She hadn't been expecting that either. They had frozen, arms round each other, drenched in sweat, astonished, on the edge of an abyss, and looked at each other, wondering what was happening to them. Surprised by the violence of what they'd started. Not the usual kind of teenage brutality, with a bit of violent fighting and clumsy sodomy. Not that kind of thing at all. Unspeaking, beyond words. A magnetic path from which they couldn't escape. At that moment he saw her transfigured: a black virgin. Deep inside her, a blood-red heart opening up to swallow him. It was like a hammer blow, invisible and of phenomenal force, sending him into a darkness filled with whispers. They were in a clammy intensity, a dark and overgrown jungle. When their skins touched they reached a different level of sensuality. Valentine was transformed: a goddess of destruction, holy and terrifying. He was altered too. And that frightened him.

But not her. Straight away afterwards, all she did was keep quiet for a moment, while her prosaic partner regained possession of his body. Her wings came off. It didn't mean more than that to her. She was without any sense of the sacred that might allow her to fear the forces they were unleashing. She was too trivial to be distressed. She was just a teenage girl again. With her dopey way of talking. Giggling about nothing, with something fragile and flaky at the back of her eyes. Just a girl. Attractive, annoying. Normal. He didn't like the power he had glimpsed. It freaked him out. And what attracted him most was precisely what made him want to run away. A huge force, that he was the only one to be summoning up. He never let himself go to sleep alongside her: he thought she was quite capable of putting a knife in his guts.

No good could ever come of it for them. She was full of all the fancy ways of a French girl who thinks she's liberated. As if liberation meant letting yourself be screwed like a whore by some guy who wants nothing to do with you when you're dressed again. Yacine is used to girls, he often talks to them, they don't scare him. Valentine wasn't the first to run past him her little number about sexual freedom, the right of girls to like it and not to feel defiled if someone touches them up, and so on and so forth. It would have pleased him if it had been true, he'd have liked to meet a woman who really didn't care and came out of it OK. Not one of those who makes believe, who takes it up the ass, and then when she can't sit down makes up some story about how she's happier standing up. It would be nice if the world was like that. But walls are walls. The mouse can always pretend she gets on
fine with the cat, but the day he bites her in the neck, she'll be on the ground and he'll have a good meal. It's like the tarmac all round them, it's concrete, you can't escape it and nobody cares whether you like it or not. There's an order in this world.