Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes

her head under the warm water, she can hear sounds from the flat below. As so often, the neighbours are having a row. Amplified by the water, the sounds become strange, muffled, low. Often, the husband is violent. Claire hears the woman yelp two or three words, then she hears him retorting from another room, before he finally goes striding through the flat, and that’s when he hits her. She screams and protests, sometimes trying to run away from him. Then the scene is punctuated by some louder sounds than the others, hard to identify, not necessarily blows. Followed by silence. The first few times, Claire was afraid he’d killed her, but in time she realized that it was the calm after the row. You wouldn’t think, to look at them, that they were that kind of couple. Him, she often sees in the lift, he’s an examining magistrate. Reddish face, rather puffy, a nose swollen by alcohol, but always well-dressed, polite, and smelling of aftershave. He was probably good-looking in his youth. He still acts the gentleman towards women. He has two children, a boy and a girl, two years apart. When Claire moved in with François, she used to see them often, playing with the concierge’s little girl on the pavement out in front.They’re big now, no more scooters and marbles until they have children of their own. She never hears them intervene when their father raises his hand against their mother. Like all people this kind of thing doesn’t happen to, Claire is sure, or so she thinks every time she meets someone from that family in the lift, that she would never have put up with what the woman downstairs endures. If only for her two daughters’ sake, she’d have found the courage to leave, to pack her bags, whatever it cost, she’d have protected them from a violent father. Christophe had never laid a finger on Claire, nor on his daughters, come to that.
    He left her just before the older girl’s sixth birthday. Claire had loved him unreservedly and obstinately for ten years. He’d come into her life when she was twenty-two, one New Year’s Eve at a friend’s house. She’d felt his eyes on her, trying to locate her wherever she was in the room, and then his large figure had kept appearing within a few feet from her, following her round from group to group. A mild form of stalking, which he hadn’t tried to conceal. He wanted her. It attracted Claire. She waited. That evening he was wearing a black sweater and three-day stubble, which suited him. She was young, still unsurprised that life revolved round her, pursuing her and offering her the choicest gifts. After spending a few nights with him, she’d begged him to shave. Claire’s face was burning, her fine skin irritated and painful. He was her first serious boyfriend. She had met Christophe the same year her mother had marched her off to a dietician – and it had worked, she had lost weight, had to buy new clothes, and had become attractive again. She managed to stay slim for two years, but after the birth of the older girl,Mathilde, she’d put on five kilos and never succeeeded in losing them. It was distressing, but it hadn’t dragged her down into the depths of depression, as it would have done before she had given birth. Something had happened to her with motherhood, it had given her calm and confidence. The presence of this baby in her life had transformed the way she looked at things.
    Before Mathilde, there had been holidays abroad: Egypt, New York, Ireland, Sweden, friends, dinner parties, evenings at the cinema, their first flat, family parties, and plenty of long mornings in bed. Then there’d been the enchantment of declaring her pregnancy, decisions to take together, the nursery to be furnished, the first scan, thinking of a name. Her parents had completely changed their attitude when she’d told them the news. Claire had a sister three years younger, who had always been her