Billie Read online

  Oh my God. It was a big deal.

  It was something . . .

  Excuse me? What, you fools? You still want to get on our case? Oh, well, no. No, thank you. It seems that Billie really doesn’t want to and that someone respects her wishes.

  Oh . . .

  I was born at that moment . . .

  Besides, as soon as Madame Guillet turned on her heels, I who never opened my mouth in class, I screamed. I screamed like a wild beast. Ostensibly to blow off steam, but really, I realize only now, it wasn’t at all about stress that was subsiding or pressure that had to be released, it was the cry of a newborn . . .

  I screamed, I laughed, I lived.

  So, you know, little star, I’m really going to do everything to try to convince you to help us one more time, but if you don’t want to, don’t worry, I’ll save Francky myself.

  If necessary, I’ll carry him on my back; I’ll grit my teeth and go to the end of the world. Yes, if necessary, I’ll drag him to the moon and we’ll end up in the emergency room on planet Mars, but meanwhile, no worries, you and all the others, you can count on the fact that my will shall be done.

  I admit, I’ve been drawing out the pleasure but don’t worry, the rest will go faster. Note that I don’t have much choice, since the nights are short at the moment and I’d better get a move on if I want to finish telling you the whole story before you disappear.

  But then, you understand, it’s important because it’s the show’s first season. Like, the one that sets up everything to follow. Afterward there will just be more or less well-constructed episodes that come one after the other until we get to you.

  Plus, you know them already . . .

  You were there . . .

  Yes . . .

  You were there . . .

  Okay, sometimes, it’s true, you were distracted, but I know you were with us. I know.

  In the first episode, I made a real effort because I just can’t hold back when telling the story of how we met. Those scenes contain the heart of our friendship. Besides everything is there, everything . . . Our way of being, of not being, of chatting, of gossiping, of helping ourselves or loving ourselves. As I said to Francky one day, we’re communicating vessels but with mud on the inside, so yes, it was important for me to do a good job recounting how we started out in life.

  And that’s okay, right? There are plenty of people who produce six-volume works about their childhood and then four more on the first time they used a condom, whereas I’ve given it to you in one scene. That’s the right way to do it, admit it.

  * * *

  I won’t say that everything was easy after that, but there were two of us, so actually yes, I’ll say it: everything was easier after that. By recess on that same day, everyone was already calling us Camille and Perdican. Hey, that really put us on a pedestal, don’t you think?

  Precisely because we didn’t want to repeat it, our performance became a sort of mythic thing, and anyone who was absent that day because they were sick or something, according to the others, it was as though they had missed an Olympic competition in which France took the gold.

  The miles of ridiculously ornamental sentences that bratty girl from the trailer park just barely managed to perform, Franck Mumu’s anger when he explained in a killer voice how a woman tears you apart with love, and our super beautiful made-to-order costumes: it became a big deal. I didn’t get better grades for all that, nor did Franck make more friends, but okay, instead of insulting us, now everyone ignored us. So, thank you, Alfred de Musset, thank you.

  (Though I insist, you didn’t need to do in little Rosette to help your cause.) (If all men who were cheated on did the same thing, there wouldn’t be many people left on this planet . . . )

  * * *

  Franck and I didn’t become inseparable—too much still separated us: his really screwed-up father who had transformed his long-term unemployment into a crisis of extreme paranoia and spent all his time on the Internet exchanging top-secret information with his legionnaire friends from Christendom; his mother who swallowed kilos of Médoc to forget that she was living with such a nutcase; my own father who didn’t need a computer to have the impression that he was a type of legionnaire on an official assignment; and my drunk of a stepmother with her pack of male rats, female rats, and baby rats who did nothing but howl all day long. No matter how hard we tried to rise above it, all that shit weighed us down.

  Please excuse my vulgarity. In other words, all that misfortune clipped our wings. We were like little birds, dumped in bad nests . . .

  Plus, because I was weaker than he, I always tried to join groups and get others to like me, while he was a loner. He was the hero of Jean-Jacques Goldman’s song: the one about the guy who walked alone without a witness, without anyone, with his steps that ring out and the night that forgives him and all that.

  His solitude was his crutch; mine was my gang of lousy girls.

  Once or twice, at the beginning, I had tried to go talk to him during recess or to sit next to him in the cafeteria but even if he was nice to me, I sensed that I was upsetting him a little bit so I stopped trying.

  We spoke only on Wednesday afternoons because he went to have lunch at Claudine’s house and because, as a result, I didn’t take the bus in order to walk a little way with him.

  At first, she invited me to stay, but since I always said no, she finally stopped asking.

  I don’t know why I refused. Always this story about a gift that was too precious to mess with, I think . . . I was afraid that if I went back to that house I would ruin things. Easter break was my only beautiful memory and I wasn’t yet ready to remove it from the display case.

  You might not realize it because I’m the only one speaking now since Francky is comatose and since, in the meantime, I’ve learned to express myself but back then, I was very nervous.

  Very, very nervous . . .

  It wasn’t as though I had been really physically abused during my childhood, to the point of, like, my ending up on page one of Détective magazine or something, but I was always slapped around just a little bit.

  All the time, all the time, all the time . . .

  A little slap here, a little slap there, a blow from below, a little kick in the legs when I was in the way, or when I wasn’t, hands always raised to make like, wait, I’m going to give you a smack and all that, and that made me . . . how can I put it?

  One day, I remember, I was secretly reading in an employment contract a thing about alcohol that said, of course, you shouldn’t drink, but if you got, like, sloshed one night, it was like throwing a bucket of water on the floor: it’s not great, but okay, afterward you mop up quickly, the floor dries, and we forget about it, while alcoholism, even if concealed and under control, it happens drop by drop, and little by little, drop of water after drop of water, in the end you inevitably have a hole in the floorboard. Even the most solid kind . . .

  And, well, that’s what it was like, little slaps and little bruises that I received nonstop since I was a kid . . . It didn’t get me a mention in the news or a file with social services, but it messed with my head. And that was the reason I was so nervous: any little draft of air blew right through me and knocked me immediately back. And Franck, at that moment, he wasn’t all that sturdy either and couldn’t support me the way I needed him to. So we were very cautious with each other. We liked each other, but we didn’t stick together too closely to avoid jinxing it.

  But it was okay because once again, we knew.

  We knew that between us, it wasn’t disdain or indifference but precaution and even though we couldn’t show it, we would always be friends.

  He knew because when I sensed that he was more sad than lonely or a little more depressed than dreamy, I stood in front of him, and said: “Raise your head, Perdican!” and I knew because even if sometimes he wanted to know or was curious abo
ut my life, he never suggested accompanying me to my house. Plus he never asked me questions that were too specific. He was polite, respectful, discreet. As his father would say, he must have suspected that at the Morels’ place, it wasn’t exactly the cradle of Christianity.

  The half-hour trip we shared on Wednesdays allowed us to get through the rest of the week. We didn’t really speak to each other, but we were together, and we revisited the good old days.

  And that was fine.

  It kept us going.

  * * *

  It was around the middle of June that I started to freak out: I wasn’t promoted to the next grade, not even on the vocational track, and Franck, he was going to boarding school in order to get a better education.

  It was a period when my head spun from all the anxiety in an alarming way and I tried not to think about it, but there was no avoiding it, it was written right there on my report card: “Not promoted,” and on the letter he had just showed me, all happy: “Accepted to boarding school.”

  And bam! Another punch in the stomach.

  That day, I remember, I asked Claudine if I could stay to eat with them and it was dumb because I didn’t swallow a thing.

  I told the truth, that I had a stomachache, and Claudine forgave me since it was normal for a girl my age to have stomachaches but she was wrong of course . . . It wasn’t that type of stomachache . . .

  * * *

  Fortunately, there was still a nice memory in store for us at the end of the school year: a class trip to Paris.

  It was the week before exams, and we dragged ourselves around the Louvre with the idiots from our class. All those morons who did nothing but take photos of themselves and look at the stupid photos they had just taken while there were so many more beautiful things to absorb.

  Franck and I sat next to each other on the bus because we were the only two all alone.

  During the trip, he lent me one of his earbuds. He’d made a mix for the occasion so I was finally able to hear her—his famous Billie Holiday. Her voice was so clear that it was the first time I understood a few words in an English song . . . Don’t Explain . . . That one was really beautiful, right? Really sad but really beautiful. We listened to a few others afterward and then it was time for a bathroom break on the highway so he took back his thingamajig and we each kept to our own side of the seat to give each other some space.

  When the bus got going again, he told me some things about the person behind the voice we had just listened to. He told them to me in a gossipy way, like in the magazine Oops, and of course, I answered that way, too: like, Oh? Yeah? Really? But of course, once again, he and I knew very well what was happening between us.

  It was like my dumb explanation as to why he should play the role of Camille: The words I used weren’t good but they got the job done anyway . . .

  What did he tell me about the very beautiful voice we had just heard, which was one of the most famous in the world, which has stirred the emotions of millions of people since the invention of jazz and which two little junior high country bumpkins were still listening to in the back of a bus snuggling up next to each other fifty years after her death?

  Oh . . .

  Not much . . .

  That her mother was kicked out by her parents when she was thirteen because she was pregnant; that she herself had a very difficult childhood; that she didn’t speak for a long time because her grandmother whom she adored had died in her arms; that she was raped when she was ten years old, one night, by a lovely neighbor; that she was sent to a type of girls’ home where she was tortured and beaten; that she wound up in a brothel with her alcoholic mother; and that she too had been forced to have sex more often than anticipated, . . . but okay . . . go figure . . . it eventually worked out fantastically for her anyway . . .

  That she didn’t simply achieve immortality; her life really soared like a bird—a bird she flipped at the sky.

  Don’t explain, right?

  What was nice was that just afterward, on his mix, was I Will Survive, Brothers in Arms, and Billie Jean, specially dedicated to Lady Day, so that allowed us to more easily move on from her.

  Do you understand, little star? Do you understand who he is, my friend? Can you see my little prince from where you are or do you need a pair of binoculars?

  If you see him the way I’m describing him to you, in other words, from very close up and without any imperfections and you let him suffer needlessly, you really need to take a little time to explain your reasons to me because I swear to you, I’ve endured many things in life, many, many things, but this calamity, God knows, I’m already sure I’ll find it difficult to go on living . . .

  * * *

  At the time, I was too dim-witted, but for Franck, Paris was a shock that day.

  Why do I say a shock? I should say the shock. The shock of his life.

  He had already been there several times for shows paid for by his mother’s trade association but it was always at Christmastime, so at night and in a hurry, and also with his father who spent his time pointing out the buildings and explaining to them how they were spoiled thanks to such and such schemes and this or that Jew (that guy was off his rocker) and so he had bad memories of the place . . .

  But on that beautiful day in June, alongside little Billie who believed, unlike Franck’s bigoted father, that a freemason was an honest Portuguese man and who pointed out tons of pretty details for him to remember it all by, it completely changed him.

  The Franck on the bus ride to Paris and the Franck on the bus ride home had absolutely no relation to each other. When the bus headed back to the site of our gloomy adolescence, he no longer spoke, he gave me both of his ear buds and the scraps of his food, and he spent the rest of the trip daydreaming while looking out the window . . .

  He had fallen in love.

  The Palais du Louvre, the Pyramide, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, I watched him admiring them and I had the impression I was seeing Wendy with her little brothers when they flew over London with Peter Pan. He didn’t know where to look given that everything was so wonderful.

  More than the monuments, I think it was especially the people that had really had an effect on him, their way of dressing, of crossing the street any which way, of dancing between cars, of speaking loudly, of laughing among themselves, of walking quickly . . .

  The people sitting in front of the cafés who looked at us, smiling, as we passed by, the incredibly chic people or people in business suits who were picnicking on the benches of the Tuileries or who were sunning themselves on the side of the Seine with their briefcases as pillows, the people who were reading newspapers while standing on the bus without holding on to anything, those who were passing in front of the cages on the Quai de la Whaddyacallit without even noticing that there were parakeets inside because their life seemed more interesting than those of the parakeets, those who were speaking, who were laughing or who were getting annoyed on the phone all while pedaling in the sun, and all those who were going into or coming out of super classy boutiques without buying a thing as though this was normal. As if the saleswomen were paid just for that, for smiling at them while gritting their teeth.

  Oh dear, yes . . . It all made my Francky really emotional: the Parisians in springtime; they were his Mona Lisa . . .

  At one point, when we were on a bridge, or more like a sort of walkway above the Seine, and when, all around, every which way we turned our heads, the view was amazing—Notre-Dame, my famous Académie française of our rehearsals, the Eiffel Tower, the beautiful carved sculpted buildings along the quays, the I-no-longer-remember-what museum, and so on—yes, when we were craning our necks and the other country bumpkins who were with us were using their cameras in zoom mode while leaning on the padlocks that lovers attached to the railings. I wanted to promise him something . . . I wanted to take his hand or his arm while he was looking a
t all that beauty, salivating like a poor skinny dog before an enormous super juicy bone that was permanently out of reach and whisper to him:

  “We’ll come back . . . I promise you we’ll come back . . . Raise your head, Perdican! I promise you we’ll come back someday . . . and to stay . . . that we’ll live here, we’ll live here too . . . I promise you that one morning you will cross this bridge like you were going to Faugeret (the name of our local bakery) and that you will be so busy with your super completely thin cell phone that you will no longer even notice all this around you . . . At any rate, you may notice it but you’ll drool less than today because you’ll be so well-heeled . . . Let’s go, Franck! What man believes in nothing? Since it’s me who’s promising you . . . me . . . your Billie who owes you so much . . . You can trust me, right?

  My dear brother, your family and Jacques-Prévert Junior High taught you what they know, but believe me, it’s not all; you’ll know more, and you won’t die without living here.”

  Yes, I felt this terrible need to promise a picture-perfect future, but of course, I stayed silent.

  For me, the bone wasn’t out of reach, it was completely absent from my life. There was very little chance I would come back here someday . . . Really no chance at all.

  So I did what he did: I looked at the view and hung a sort of imaginary padlock with our two initials engraved on it.