Juliette.
My daughter with the big, bright, serious eyes.
One night when some old mates from uni were having a party in their apartment to celebrate several birthdays at once, I got so wasted I would have – and I use the conditional quite deliberately seeing as it’s a hypothetical situation we’re talking about – I would have completely blanked the fact I banged a guy standing up against the bathroom cabinet. In those days, I was scared of finding myself all alone in my little maid’s quarters room, so I often went out and left parties much the worse for wear; I was almost always the last to leave, when there really was no more hope of anything happening. A month and a half later, I felt so ill I went to see a doctor, who told me just by looking at me: ‘Come now, young lady, you’re pregnant!’ He sent me off for blood tests and when the lab technician told me he was right, I was stunned. That’s when I did some cross-referencing and ended up with the day of that joint birthday party.
Somebody thinks they saw me disappearing into said bathroom, hence my inferred memory, but nothing could be less certain. It must be said that I’d had several other partners in the meantime; scars on my back, orthoses, ankle boots, mini-skirt, who knows why men have always found me sexy with my legs and their apparatus.
I sat down in the nearest café to the pathologist’s rooms and called Hildegarde to tell her to come and meet me.
That’s when, as I was waiting for her, some guy who must’ve been fifty to fifty-five years old, poorly shaven, wearing crotch-hugging jeans that showed off his bulging bits, a bomber jacket and red Converse sneakers came into the bar with his whingeing kid stuffed into some sort of hiking backpack and sat down at the counter. The child was wearing a mini puffer jacket and an enormous beanie that was falling down over her eyes and she was whining because she was too hot. Her father was trying unsuccessfully to bring his cup to his lips as the kid wriggled around on his back, her face flushed . . . waaaaa . . . waaaaa . . . It was unbearable! He knew perfectly well, the idiot, that he was irritating us with his kid . . . waaaaa . . . waaaaa . . . He was even more aware of the fact that before her birth he wouldn’t have tolerated the situation for a second either.
With that kid carrying on just a few metres from my ears, I thought of my fatherless pregnancy and the fact I would be facing the ordeal entirely on my own. I knew nothing about children. I was an only child, raised by an abrasive and impatient old aunt. I didn’t know where I’d find the resources to give a child the attention and love it deserved.
‘Is that going to go on for much longer?’ his neighbour at the bar asked.
‘She wants to get down —’
‘Well, get her down!’
The guy undid his back contraption and put it on the floor with the kid still in it, squeezing her between his legs and the counter, amid all the sugar packets, the old metro tickets and the losing scratchies.
Waaaa . . . waaaa . . . And she was off again, even louder now.
I stared at the little girl, who was busy pleading for her father’s attention. She was tugging on his jeans, and without even lowering his eyes he responded with little patting gestures like those you’d give your pooch. At one point he even picked up a copy of Parisien and started to read an article as he reached down with a piece of croissant, feeling around, trying to stuff it into her ear, thinking it was her mouth.
And suddenly I had a vision of my father and a sort of bitter bile rose up within, filling my mouth.
‘You can do whatever you want to get his attention. He’ll never look at you. All he wanted was to screw your mother, some pretty little piece of ass, no more than twenty-five years old, just so he could forget for a moment that he was mortal. You gotta understand, some young ass, it’s good, it’s sweet . . . But now here you are and you’re giving him the shits! It was still vaguely pleasant when you were a baby, it was cute, all that flim flam around your vintage cradle, but the fact you’re growing up makes him even more aware of his own decrepitude and that’s not so much fun anymore for the old man! The point is, you ruined everything, you’re a burden! A weight he has put down on the ground in an attempt to try to remember what life used to be like without you for as long as it takes to drink a coffee. Life without a kid. And you put up with it without doing a thing. Do something, goddamn it; anything. Come on, you fill me with contempt. You’re just a loser. But look at him, now he’s actually having a laugh with the manager while you’re there, your snout glued to his shins . . . Waaaa . . . Waaaa . . . Down there in the dust.’
I know she read all of that in my look because she made a move. Finding an unexpected handhold at the bottom of the counter, she suddenly toppled over, doing a face-plant onto the floor. There was a harrowing scream, a bloodied nose – the works! She had managed to spoil her father’s coffee and with a bit of luck his entire day once he brought her back home with a swollen face to be called an irresponsible bloody idiot by his younger other half.
‘Congratulations, that’s my girl! Just keep on irritating the hell out of him. Anything other than fucking up your own life by falling off a cliff!’
A daddy, a mummy, what the hell did I need with all that bullshit; what I needed was a loving, watchful helper. So, when Hildegarde finally arrived and found me limp and listless, I simply asked if she was ready to help me. She promised me that she, and especially her parents, who had already lost two children to Marfan syndrome, would always be there for us – and they always have been. What’s more, they knew what to do.
Aunt Hildi will never be able to have a child, but she has Juliette.
It was Hildegarde who got me into legal reprographics, ten years ago now. Ten, that’s how old my daughter is too, and it was precisely then that I drew a veil over my Icarian ambitions and the precariousness that went with them. In other words, when Juliette was born I stopped living any old how and got a real job. For her part, Hildegarde had been in reprographics forever and a day. Unlike me, she hadn’t completed any studies and thought repro would be the ideal day job because the only thing in life that had ever interested her was her battle against animal cruelty and her dedication to the animal rights organisation L214. To hell with everything else. You could say she’s built of unusually stern stuff to be able to cope with the unbearable cruelty of abattoirs and intensive farming, but when you know her well you’re just struck by the extreme consistency of her temperament with her choices.
The work was on the list of so-called reserved jobs – that is, jobs reserved for the disabled, so donkey work – but it still needed to be performed with a high degree of conscientiousness given what was involved. Practically speaking, it consisted of scanning all documentation, page by page, relating to every major and minor indictable offence committed in the capital, apart from political or military crimes. I loved the work. I had the protected status of a civil servant, the salary wasn’t terrible, and you could work at your own pace. And there was such a jolly atmosphere of freaks with a great sense of community, along the lines of Appoint some disabled people, it’s such a laugh seeing them work!
The bulk of the work would arrive straight from police stations and the rest of it from the chambers of examining magistrates. All the questioning, the records of police searches and seizures, transcripts of phone intercepts, pinging and triangulation, DNA expert reports, autopsies, Facebook page captures, records from listening devices in cars, letters rogatory of every kind: these piles of police paperwork appeared in our office to be digitised and stored on CD-ROM for the lawyers so they could prepare their clients’ defence.