CHAPTER 1
The punches came in hard, but it was always the kicks I feared. When they stopped the punching, it meant they would be standing up to use their feet, and that was the time I feared the real damage. I stayed tucked into a ball, but of course that just left my kidneys open to their kindness.

“Queer! Fucking arse bandit! Son of a whore!”

As I lay on the changing room floor, I caught a whisper, then a laugh.

“Daughter of a whore, yeah, better. Fuck it, JB, let’s leave this shit, I’m bored. But listen to me, Laplace…I catch you staring at my bits again, I stamp your face, got me?”

I lay there till I was sure they had gone, then started to try and put myself back together. Maman would kill me: my shirt was torn from where they had grabbed me by the collar from behind. With Dad away, there was no spare cash for this sort of thing. I would have to repair it, and that would show, and leave them with one more thing to use against me.

My lip was split again, but at least my teeth were still there. The left eye, that would be a sight in a few days, already closing as it was. I washed away as much of the blood and snot as I could and did my best with my hair. Should I cut it? It would be one less thing for them to use on me, or to use as a hold to drag me back and down, but in a way my hair was all I had of me, of myself.

And Pierre Forgeron was right. I HAD been staring at his ‘bits’, but not entirely in that way. No, not entirely…I had slipped, dropped my guard a little, and while he was rather well-hung for a fifteen-year-old, I had been dreaming of other things. Related, in a way, but so, so different. It was odd, that had been my thought, odd that I actually rather liked it on a boy, but found it absolutely disgusting between my own legs. I mean, between my own legs, it would be…if it wasn’t mine.

Stop that, Serge. That was how you slipped up earlier. Stay with the flow…two years of school, that’s all, and the little shits as well as all the not-so-little shits would be gone, and it would be university, and surely that couldn’t be like this horrible Caen shithole? That thought stunned me; if I managed to survive the next two years, managed to get the right grades in my exams, managed to get a place…if the same message was being given out by the students at university, I would probably finish what they had started, and happily so.

I made my way out of the school at the end of the last classes, and thankfully my ‘friends’ were too busy pissing about with a couple of crap mopeds to pay any attention to anything beyond the wasp in a jar sound of the engines or the Lolitas watching them at it while attempting to smoke in what they thought of as a sexy pose. All they had, all I wanted, was theirs from birth, and how they wasted it. Roll the hem of the skirt as short as you could get it. Smoke so as to look attractive (eh?) to teenaged boys. Hang around on a corner as they tried to race a piece of shit any fourteen-year-old could get to move faster. Every choice they had I dreamt of, and all of their choices seemed to be wrong ones. I saw them in my mind’s eye, in later years, fat and coughing, selling tat in the marketplace while their husbands played baby foot in the cafés. A flat in some shitty tower block in Hérouville. Pregnant again…

I blinked my tears away just in time to catch the tram, which carried me in my silence up to Maréchal Juin, where I sprinted across four lanes of traffic to the shopping centre. I had my eyes on a book, one that my French teacher had shown me, and it was there in the bookshop that catered for the University just across the road. Prévert was a poet who got right to my heart, right to my secret core, and what I was after was his “Things and Other Things”. There it was, with Others of his…no money; a shirt to fix, and things tight at home. Papa away…

Grow up, you stupid girl. Father was off screwing that drunk from the tabac; there was no way he was ever coming back, and Maman would never let him in the door if he did. Write him off, and read the book. He had caught me with one simple fragment, a graffito, as he called it: Ni Dieu, ni maá®tre, Mieux d’áªtre. Neither God nor master, Better just to Be. If only; I had no chance of Being, certainly not as I needed to, was dying to.

I walked the short distance home, and of course Maman was still at work, so I dug out her sewing kit and began the fiddly process of reattaching my shirt collar. I had lost track of time when there was a bang as my brother arrived home.

“Got a partridge, one of the Gendarmes ran it over out towards Bayeux…what the fuck are you doing, Serge? And your face? Who was it this time? Stand up…”

I stood, naked to the waist, and he walked round me, moustache bristling as he tallied the scars and bruises.

“This happens how often?”

I mumbled something meaningless.

“THIS HAPPENS HOW OFTEN?”

I caught my breath. “Most days”

His voice went very low, very soft. “I want names”

“No. They see me going to you, they make it worse. This I have to do myself”

“Then I see what I can do with the boys when school comes out. Swing past…”

I looked up at him, my bigger brother, my new flic, my policeman to worship. “It’s in school that’s the problem, Roland”

“And the teachers?”

“What they don’t see, mostly, and they are very good at not seeing”

“Whorehouse! Not even your friend, the old woman, what’s her name?”

“Madame Duchamp? No, if she saw it, it would break her heart”

He sat down, head shaking. “Sacha, make me some coffee, please, and while you are doing so tell me what is going on. Maybe, maybe if you are not looking at me, maybe you can speak more?”

I busied myself with the kettle and cafétiá¨re, a good dollop of Carte Noire to get his heart going. What could I tell him? Rather, could I tell him at all? I thought of the time a week before, when I had taken the bus to Honfleur and walked out onto the Pont de Normandie. So much simpler; a few steps, a short ride on the air, end of pain.

“Rollo…it is hard for me there”

“Because you are gay, Sacha? I know that, Maman knows that, the whole piece of shit of a school knows it, every fucker in my station knows it. This is supposed to be the twenty-first century, little one, a new millennium, not the Terror”

“But that’s it, Rollo, I am not gay. If I were, they would, there would be, you know, laws and things to cover me. I just need to survive a few years, just till they all clear off to their shitty little dead-end jobs and their ugly wives and their cirrhosis”

I turned as I said that, and handed him the coffee, reaching past him for a cup. “I’ll get the sugar”

I passed him the box of cubes, the ones I had always wanted to start collecting as a kid, the wrappers that made pictures when stacked just so, and he was staring at me, appraisingly.

“Not gay? News to the whole world, that is. They aren’t picking on you because bigger brother is a copper. That I know. That sort of shit gets very old very quickly, and usually with a lot of pain as a by-product. And if you aren’t gay, you certainly do a good act…no. Stand up, Sacha. Turn around for me...”

I did as he asked, then he handed me his jacket. “Please hang that by the door for me”

When I came back he was nodding. “No, not what I thought at all. You don’t walk gay”

“Sorry?”

“You are not camp, you don’t swish”

“Rollo, it’s not like some bloody package of merguez in the shop, no bar code on me saying ‘not gay, 50 kilos’, eh?”

He sighed, and looked at me with his head tilted. “My first boss, he said to me, Roland, he said, the trick is always to look at something, say what’s wrong with this picture. That’s proper policing, not all this shit with computers and crap like that. I am looking at you, and the more we talk, the more the picture is wrong. What is wrong with you, brother? Please…fuck, I shouldn’t tell you this, but Franck, yeah, you know the one? With the wall eye? He saw you last week”

Oh dear no. “Where was that, Rollo?”

He sighed again, head still tilted. “On that bridge, of course. If it is that bad, you have to talk to me”

“That’s Papa’s job”

“Fuck the drunken whoreson piece of cunt! It is me here, now, and he is gone and he is a father only by fucking sperm donation! What is up with you, boy?”

I could actually see the moment his mind told him the answer.

“Oh, fuck, Sacha. Am I right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do I have a bloody sister?”