Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes Page A

mother’s favourite. Claire had been the child who was a bit too fat, a bit too placid, never managing to engage her parents’ attention. When they divorced, she had been twelve years old, and once more, her mother had devoted herself to her little sister, everything revolved round her. Claire didn’t get up to any pranks, she didn’t worry her mother. And she wasn’t as pretty. She couldn’t do anything without attracting blame. Nobody around her had taken the trouble to notice that she had been deeply upset by the divorce. It’s true that she hadn’t done anything outrageous to alert anyone. She had just started putting on a few kilos, slowly, and become more withdrawn. In her childhood bedroom, for years she had secretly pinned the holiday postcards sent by her mother next to the ones from her father, so that the blue hills of the Vosges were up against the mountains of Peru,the Mediterranean jostled the Pacific. With a little Sellotape to stick them together. That was back when the children of divorced parents used to have to explain to their school-friends what it was like to have two homes, in the days when that was still unusual. Her sister Aline hadn’t needed a year’s mourning in order to start boasting in the playground of two lots of Christmas and birthday presents and all the special permissions to be absent or to extract more pocket money through parental guilt or bargaining: ‘Mummy said yes,’ or ‘Daddy promised me.’ Claire often wished she could strangle her sister. But once she was pregnant with Mathilde, everything changed. Both parents got into the habit of calling her up all the time, and she had to schedule their visits so that they didn’t coincide too often. The day of the birth, they had both been with her in her hospital room, without their new partners, and she had seen the joy on their faces: shared emotion, the first grandchild. And it had lasted until the birth of the second daughter, Elisabeth. Then, wouldn’t you know, Aline had become pregnant just afterwards, from some one-night stand, not that that made the coming child less welcome. On the contrary, as usual, she had managed to spoil everything, demanding the maximum of attention. One day, Aline had turned up at her mother’s house, declaring firmly that she couldn’t go through with it, she wanted an abortion at six months. Next day she turned up at her father’s, saying she would have the baby but give it up for adoption, she couldn’t take care of a child on her own. A week later, heavily pregnant, she was snivelling in her mother’s kitchen, drinking her fifth beer and chain-smoking, claiming that she was sure the baby would be stillborn, and of course that shewould never get over it. Poor little dead baby, she spent the whole evening torturing her mother. And it worked. She got all their attention. The parents started telephoning each other every day, telling each other what they’d had to endure from her, and making frantic efforts to rescue their daughter from the brink of madness. Aline had always done whatever she liked, and her tactics were spectacularly successful. She had given birth to her son. It
would
be a son, of course. For three months, she’d gone into ecstasies over the bliss of motherhood, then her figure had come back, she’d put on a dress, left the baby with her mother, and continued her life as before: plenty of affairs, too much alcohol, and hefty overdrafts.
    Mathilde was just five then, the age when children stop being little angels and become little people, they’re not quite so cute, adults find them less entrancing. Her grandmother went on looking after her with pleasure, but her real pride and joy was Thibaut, the first male child. The adorable, extraordinary, reckless, wilful, insufferable Thibaut. Claire was already in therapy at that stage: she was getting the feeling that at last she could take control of