Apocalypse Baby (25 page)

‘You stupid prick! You know fine well she hasn't done anything, but you don't dare punish the ones who were really shouting.'

She didn't know why she had felt like defending Loraine. She rarely spoke up in class. All the other pupils knew she was
into girls, for them it was as if she was somehow grubby, the whole time. The group excluded her, but without bullying her. She didn't fit the good victim profile. She liked a fight. And she put sufficient passion into it that any attackers enjoyed it less than she did. Since primary school, she'd worked out her strategy: start every new school year by attacking in public a boy who was enough of a show-off to attract notice, but not dangerous enough to be a really serious enemy. After that they were more likely to call her ‘the nutter' than ‘the dyke', and leave her in peace. In return for which she tried not to be conspicuous for the rest of the year. But that day, she'd abandoned her low-profile approach, and other pupils had taken up the cry.

‘She's right, sir! You've given her three hours and she was the only girl who didn't laugh!'

After that, they'd been told they'd all be kept in, but they weren't too angry, as they left the room, because of the fun they had had hearing their teacher called ‘stupid prick' several times, in a class that had finally fallen silent.

On the way out, she'd caught up with Loraine in the corridor. ‘Don't look so sad, that's life, we all get kept in now and then.'

The other girl nodded without replying, then instead of going to her next class, she had run frantically out of the building. And had thrown up on the grass.

‘Did you eat something in the canteen to make you sick? Oh, no, you don't go to canteen, do you. Want to go to the sick room? I'll come with you. Was it the detention? Will you get into trouble? We're all being kept in, your folks can't blame you for it.'

That was how it had begun, trying to defend her, and that was how it would end. Until then, she had always fallen for the same kind of girl: the prettiest in the school, as long as she was up for it. She liked beauty with a bit of edge. She had a weakness for vulgar, precocious girls who didn't mind going behind the bike sheds for a snog with another girl. It was their brothers who were a problem, as a rule. Loraine wasn't at all that type. But it had happened all the same, after the detention business. She'd fallen in love. She had sought out the new girl's company. And Loraine had reluctantly accepted, like a wary animal.

One very hot day, Loraine came to school wearing a black woollen sweater: its sleeves were too long, hanging down over her wrists. They were on their own near the bike sheds.

‘Wow, your face is really red! Good thing you can't see it. Why don't you wear a T-shirt like everyone else? Think it's cool to be sweaty, or what?'

But instead of smiling vaguely, and putting on a superior and absent-minded expression as she usually did, Loraine had pulled up her sleeves, challenging her to look. Her forearms were black and yellow, covered with bruises and scars, her elbows were raw. It made no sense. Those bare, mutilated arms and the rest of her body. This proud, rather stuck-up girl, always fussing that this or that was clean and up to scratch. It didn't fit. With her quiet behaviour, her straight back, her delicate lips and finely shaped nose, the care she took of her things. Her arms were from a social worker's casebook, grafted on to a fragile body. Some children at the school showed off the marks from being belted, or turned up with a black eye, or burns from an iron, others pretended they'd
hurt themselves falling off a swing, and some took pride in telling you the gory details of the abuse they'd suffered. Yes, of course it happened to other kids. But they were expecting it, it was well known, or not surprising. Loraine had pulled down her sleeves in silence. She'd thought that was the end of the revelations, but the teenager now pulled up her sweater. Her torso was like her arms: marked, bruised, scarred, all over. Loraine said in a neutral voice, ‘He takes care to keep off my face or hands. Once I put my hands up to protect myself, and the next day the teacher asked me what had happened. After that, he's taken to tying my wrists above my head before he starts.'

‘Your
dad
?'

‘He's sick. He can't stop himself. But the rest of time, he's normal.'

‘Normal has to be full-time, or it doesn't count.'

What a let-down. She'd fallen madly in love with a princess, who'd turned out to be a poor kid being abused in secret by a crazy father. She'd asked a few more questions to be polite, but was wondering all the time how to put an end to this outburst of confidences.

‘Is he like that often?'

‘If it isn't me, it's my mother who gets it, and that's worse. And when it's not my mother, it's my little sister. We try hard to make it us, so that it's not her. She's only five.'

‘Why don't you run away?'

‘He's not like it all the time. Mostly, we're fine, all of us. It's, well, it's complicated.'

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.