Apocalypse Baby

Author:Virginie Despentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Alone in the kitchen, Vanessa takes her time. She hadn’t planned to say anything. She keeps telling herself she’s got nothing to feel guilty about, nothing to hide. She doesn’t know where the kid’s gone, she hardly knows her. It hadn’t been her choice not to know her own child, she doesn’t have to justify herself. The big detective has heard the story from François’s family’s point of view, obviously. And the other one, the one who says nothing, the one who looks like a petrified deer. They’ve already made their minds up, like everyone else. Nobody needs to hear Vanessa’s version to condemn her.

When she comes back with the coffee, the detective is on the terrace, leaning on the stone balustrade, looking at the huge mobile-phone mast on top of the hill facing them.

‘That must be a powerful transmitter. You’re not afraid of the radio waves?’

‘No. When we first got here, I thought it spoiled the view, but in the end I quite like it. It’s practical, wherever I am in the city I know where my house is. And then you have the sea opposite.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s that about it…’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

Play for time. Again. Talk about something else, anything that lets her avoid deciding what she’s going to say, what she’s not going to say, what this woman may pick up about things that are better hidden.

‘People call me the Hyena.’

‘The Hyena! Because you’re a creature who’s cruel, fast and ruthless?’

The taller woman hesitates for a moment, then smiles for the first time since she got there. That’s another male strategy: because she’s playing cold and inaccessible, the slightest sign of relaxing, a smile for instance, takes on special value and makes you want to provoke others.

‘No. I was lucky. This idiot called me that when I was just starting out. He could have christened me Garfield… it would’ve been less serious, but it would have stuck just the same.’

She looks round her. In the gardens down below, there are trees with pink blossom, and clumps of white flowers, and a huge shiny aluminium pipe stuck on to the façade of an old stone-built house which had been beautiful before that addition. Roses in pots lined up under the balustrade to protect them from the powerful winds that sweep across the region all winter. One plant that looks dead straggles along the cracked walls; a few huge buds have appeared in the last few days along its bare branches.

‘You must be glad to have got away from Paris.’

‘The vegetation’s nicer here, yes. But I’m not a great one for botany.’

Vanessa has made a litre of coffee in a green Thermos, and fills the cups to the brim. The little one, Lucie, has huddled into a corner again. You tend to forget she’s there.

‘So Valentine came to Barcelona to see you?’

‘Yes, she came to see me.’

‘And you don’t know where she is now?’

‘No idea. She disappeared.’

‘And you hadn’t ever seen her again, before this time?’

‘No.

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