Apocalypse Baby (31 page)

For a few months, she'd kept her two worlds apart: on the one hand she was this arrogant posh teenager, who hung out with girlfriends covered in lip gloss and good-looking boys who pretended to be cynical punks, while naively expecting things to work out for them; and on the other hand there were her weird evenings, listening to a guy who thought that the only truth issued from the mouth of Karl Marx. There was her ‘real' life and there was her vaguely shameful side interest, to which she was becoming addicted. Until one fine day, Carlito disappeared without warning. It was the summer of a financial crisis, and Valentine found herself to some surprise reading the newspapers, trying to imagine what Carlito would say about it. That summer wasn't much fun. She'd had a bad night with the boys from Panic Up Yours. She didn't care, but since then she'd felt a kind of vague shame inside, an angry cloud hovering over her head. It was true that she'd asked for it. Things had been bad at school too, she'd arsed around with a boy, and her father had been called in. He hadn't even wanted to talk about it, instead he'd enrolled her, without asking her opinion, into this crammer for retards. Things didn't go well with her girlfriends either, they were avoiding her more and more, saying she drank too much and got everyone into trouble.
She didn't want to make a big fuss, she wasn't the kind to start getting upset, but she felt she was living her life as if astride a wounded and furious bull in a corrida, clinging on to his horns and wishing he'd calm down. She had only to turn up somewhere for everything to go wrong. And yet she had sincerely thought she'd behaved well. But it was complicated. Her grandmother was always round at the house – and she could fly off the handle at the slightest thing. She'd always been that way; she couldn't explain anything without shouting. But it was tiring. Valentine couldn't relax in her bedroom for five minutes without the door bursting open, Western-fashion, and the old girl would come in to give her a lecture on Life. Five minutes later, she'd have calmed down and be baking cakes. But Valentine would still feel her bones shivering from the talking-to she'd received. Her stepmother tried to avoid her, but she was still there, she left bloodstained sanitary towels in the bathroom. A revolting smell, stale and pestilential. Her father was writing his novel, and wandered about the house with a vacant stare and wild look, to stop her talking to him, he was like this every time. And she missed Carlito, with all this chaos around her, more than she would have thought.

At the beginning of June, when she recognized Magali in the distance, at the Halles complex, she hadn't asked herself if it was taking a risk to be seen in public with such a conspicuously marginal punk, she rushed up to her.

‘Do you recognize me? Have you seen Carlito?'

‘He's gone on a trip. I thought he'd told you, he said he would.'

Magali hadn't pretended not to recognize her, or looked
sniffy about Valentine showing interest in someone who was
her
friend. It made a change for Valentine, who was being cold-shouldered from every direction. Carlito was on a trip, that meant he'd be back. And he had thought to tell her, so he had mentioned her to the people around him. She had taken such punishment, these last weeks, that she felt all at once that some dignity had been restored to her. Valentine had clung on to Magali in the most pathetic and wimpish way. But it worked. She'd followed her to a squat, a real one, full of punks and dogs, skinhead followers of RASH, with a smell of stale cigarettes and spicy food. And a grotty concert going on in the background. Even a month earlier, Valentine would have run a mile. Around her, people were drinking lukewarm wine out of cardboard cups, she was expecting someone to vomit over her at any moment. But she didn't have much choice. Everyone she knew had turned their backs on her. She stuck close to Magali, who had looked less than keen at first, but had finally let her tag along.

‘Got any cash? We could buy some Es.'

As the evening wore on and as the drugs took effect, she'd warmed up. Magali was quite funny, in fact. Her brain operated like a steamroller. You didn't expect that, because of her delicate features, her porcelain skin and her baby doll lips. But when she got going, every time she said anything, it came out pow! But she expressed herself well, like she was top of the class. Valentine's grandfather would have said she was very articulate. Magali was a no-holds-barred feminist, but she only hung out with boys. Mostly ones who worshipped her, whom she got together in a group, reigning over them while pretending not to notice the effect she was having. Valentine
found this quite a nice situation: a whole lot of disappointed rejected suitors who'd be there for her. She'd decided to go for this unkempt boy, a bit pretty-faced for her, but so drunk that he wouldn't remember. So the evening was turning out OK. She had kissed him in mid-sentence, to check whether he'd be up for it. Even better, it was like at a teenage party. He'd been surprised for a quarter of a second, then snogged her for real. Things were going well. Then a firm hand separated them. Magali, with a super-serious expression, made a sign to the boy to move off, clicking her fingers, like the gesture people make to their dogs when they're on heat, and turned on Valentine.

‘You came here with me, so please act properly, don't let me down with this “I'm the local nympho” stuff. Behave yourself.'

‘But it's none of your business!'

‘I said, behave yourself, I'm fed up now, you've spoilt my evening. We're splitting, come on.'

Magali had decided they'd go and smoke a couple of spliffs at her place. A tiny room, twelve square metres, on a fifth floor with no lift, somewhere behind the Place Gambetta. They walked there. At first Valentine was sulking a bit.

‘Don't treat me like I'm a whore!'

‘I've never called you a whore. Were you working? Did you need to make some money? If that was it, I'd have respected you.'

‘It's none of your business how I live my life.'

‘That's all I wanted this afternoon, when you grabbed hold of me! Let you live your life. But you looked so lost, I decided to take you in hand.'

In the end, she'd spent the summer in Magali's company. She'd boycotted the family holiday. Her stepmother, only too pleased not to have her with them in Corsica, had pleaded in her favour. Let her stay in Paris. Magali was interested in things that at first sight were really boring: the meat industry, the situation in Venezuela, the stock market, the discography of Crass – but which she made highly attractive by systematically treating them dismissively. She despised a lot of people. People who paid rent. People who had a job. People who'd been to university. People who were afraid of prison. People who gave interviews to the press. People living in couples. People who could only speak one language. People who were cynical. People who weren't politicized. People without any morals. The good thing about her was that once she had decided she was on Valentine's side, she defended her, whatever she chose to tell her, with a bad faith that winched up her morale. Those boys had pissed on her? So what, they were impotent wimps, useless deadbeats. Her girlfriends wouldn't talk to her any more because they were ashamed of her at parties? Pathetic, uncool, bourgeois mummy's girls. Her grandmother thought she was too fat? Reactionary old fossil, she's just jealous. Her teachers had chucked her out of school because of her poor grades? Fascist bastards, regimented band of stupid pricks. Her father sulked all the time because she gave him grief? Egotistical, going through the male menopause, insensitive hypocrite. Whatever the subject, it was sorted out in two minutes: filthy rich, pathetic drips, piss artists. Valentine realized that if she reduced her circle to a small group of individuals, external judgements couldn't reach her. Her new friends thought her a laugh. They didn't
have anything to blame her for. Magali didn't like going out, but she liked to have people back to her place. The entryphone buzzer started going at five o'clock and didn't stop. During these evenings, faces distinguished themselves. Valentine was being domesticated, she was becoming integrated into a close-knit group, where looking after each other wasn't undervalued. She was too exhausted to go on thinking this kind of thing was naff. She needed some TLC.

When classes started again in September, Valentine thought she would go back to her peaceful double life: evenings with Magali arguing hammer and tongs about post-colonialism, and daytime acting like a bimbo, exchanging lipsticks with girlfriends. She had always thought it best to say to people whatever she deemed judicious, in order to get what she wanted. She viewed herself as a manipulating little minx, without any sincere words or emotions. But it had hit her hard when she had to go back to school: duplicity didn't really suit her. She had found a place where she felt good. Not just a place to spend the summer holidays while waiting for her normal social activity to start again. She was honestly happy with Magali and her court of improbable subjects. She was changing. Part of her former self had detached itself in a block, without making a sound.

She didn't have a bad conscience about being a rich kid. Some of Magali's friends had tried to make her feel guilty along the lines of ‘you can't understand, you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you don't know what it's like to be hard up and hungry', but Valentine had never tried to justify herself. They thought they were tough, lucid and angry. They were innocents. They couldn't even imagine the
degree to which people from her background were indifferent to people like them, unless they wanted to write bad novels. If they had had to come face to face with the actual reality, they would have been gobsmacked. How much money there is swilling around in the circles she comes from, how many things are just taken for granted, including the self-esteem you get at birth as your inheritance. Not so much personal self-esteem – that's hard to acquire if you come from a family where the older generation has been too succcessful. But social esteem. If they knew, really knew, how people live up there, they'd explode with rage, they wouldn't even have the strength to discuss it.

Carlito had returned in October. Suntanned and spaced out, he didn't say where he'd been. The others seemed to know, she felt excluded. They talked a lot about the internet and the surveillance of everyone's words and actions that it made possible. Magali didn't have a computer in the house. She said you had to learn to live without one. That you would never be able to start a revolution if you left all your activities wide open to state snooping. The clandestine existence had to be worked for, by learning to live without the micro-technology of surveillance, without a landline or broadband connection, without being vulnerable to eavesdropping. The others didn't agree with her. They talked about Copyleft, resistance platforms, secret codes to access parallel networks. But nobody was going to share the codes. And one day Valentine brought her laptop along and asked Thibaut, the nerd of the group, to wipe out her entire virtual identity: her Facebook account, Twitter, her old MySpace, her old blog, her email inbox. Then she had thrown her mobile phone into the Seine,
a grand gesture, full of panache. Thibaut had said it was a bit radical, especially for a girl with nothing particular to hide, no clandestine activity of any kind. She had replied that she needed this kind of experience in order to feel really alive. Valentine didn't really know what she meant by this, but it sounded good. Thibaut had done as he was asked. The amputation was unexpectedly painful. The panic of the first weeks had taken her by surprise, filling her with anguish. To learn to go without seemed at first like having lost the power of speech, her crutch and her best friend all at the same time. An attack of vertigo. Even if she didn't log on to the internet all that much in fact, it was always the first thing she did in the morning: she'd switch on her laptop, check her email and her bookmarked sites, glance at a few clips, with her MSN open permanently in one corner, then she'd google a few sites at random for a mosaic of news, images, novelties. It was worse than amputating a part of herself: she'd slammed the door shut on the best things the world had to offer. Valentine had stuck to her resolution out of pride, because her gesture had attracted welcome attention in Magali's circle, and she didn't want to look ridiculous. Then the withdrawal symptoms had stopped, as suddenly as they had begun. The odd hour snatched in an internet café helped her not to regress completely into the Stone Age and she could manage perfectly well without a mobile. It wouldn't hurt her grandmother not to be able to know every minute where she was. And the first time Valentine had said ‘Don't bother, I don't do email' to a girl in class who asked for her address in order to send her a homework assignment, she had felt more mysterious and interesting than if she'd grown a pair of horns on her forehead.
She liked it, in the end. It was like giving up smoking pot: you got more energy and space in your brain. Magali had congratulated her. You can't at the same time want to start the revolution and be visible to the forces of order.

Other people in the group didn't agree: ‘… these are the last fun years on the internet! It's still possible to subvert it, and get into these, kind of, utopian spaces. We'd be daft to abandon this whole area completely, on the contrary, we should be trying to defend it and take it over.'

‘Valentine's not abandoning anything, she just doesn't want people to know every minute where she is. That's quite different.'

‘Utopian spaces – what on earth do you mean?'

‘Well, it's completely free for a start. And you get instant communication.'

‘Oh yeah? And Apple, and your ISP, they're your best pals, are they?'

Valentine couldn't care less about these conversations. All she knew was that what she did could trigger such heated discussions. Valentine was getting to be someone important. She liked that. A lot.