Like everything, even being able to successfully report a crime entails “having money.” Because, obviously, you need a phone to do it. A phone, of course, is expensive. And so is the monthly payment plan that goes with it. Naturally, some will say that phones are perfectly affordable “nowadays” and that “it really doesn’t cost that much” for a basic plan. These are the people who have never been made to understand what it is for every single centime to count. That even the most rudimentary form of survival is a struggle, let alone taking into account the “addendum” survival tool society currently requires: owning a smartphone.

Noémie, who had been born in France to Algerian immigrant parents, knew something about that…the struggle of survival, that is. For despite having citizenship in this country, it still fundamentally despised or outright ignored her presence. More than just her “dark” skin tone (though no darker than, say, a Kardashian), it was her “Muslimness” that affronted them. They could see it on her, even though it wasn’t like she sported a hijab to corroborate their “intuition.”

It was simply “something about her” that rubbed the French Establishment the wrong way, leading her to very little in the way of financial success. Sure, she cadged work here and there, but it was never “legitimate.” In other words, she was often paid in cash, and very little of it at that. Her skill set ranged from cleaning apartments to cleaning large office buildings. In short, the name of her game was cleaning. That was how she made her living.

That cruel phrase: “make a living.” As though you couldn’t just live, full-stop. You had to make a life. Do something apart from breathing to live. No, you had to “get this bread” to live. And The Powers That Be decided a long time ago that breathing shouldn’t be for free. Maybe as long ago as 1632, when the phrase “make a living” was first recorded in written form. About a century after that, the Industrial Revolution came along and “make a living” grew to have an even more odious connotation. Inferring that you could make “just enough” to stay alive. But staying alive anymore certainly wasn’t living. Noémie knew something about that as well. About how each morning, waking up felt like another add-on to her prison sentence. In this way, life was a curse, not a blessing. Especially as a woman prone to traveling alone at night. 

This was just par for the course considering she worked well into the evening hours whenever an office building was involved. And, more and more, it was involved. She couldn’t turn down the chance to fumigate one, so to speak, whenever it arose, and apparently word of her cleaning prowess had spread throughout La Défense, because the gigs kept coming, steadily replacing the private residence ones she had formerly relied on. Although Noémie thought she was “bowing out” of them gracefully by ensuring that she was replaced with an equally as competent Algerian, the deadbeat housewives who employed her wasted no time in taking the opportunity to berate her, telling Noémie that they had been doing her a favor by letting her continue to work for them at all despite her second-rate capabilities. The gall! (Or Gaul, if you prefer a play on words). Ordinarily, she would have just taken it, swallowed the shit…but since she knew she had some steady work to fall back on for the foreseeable future, she decided that, just this once, she would finally stand up for herself. She proceeded to tell all five of the women who denigrated her that they weren’t capable of cleaning their own assholes, let alone their sorry, middle-class excuses for homes. 

Months later, as the well started to dry up because the bloc of La Défense office buildings opted to go with a “cheaper alternative” (though she couldn’t imagine what could actually be cheaper than herself) that also happened to be a major conglomerate of a cleaning business, Noémie was really starting to regret having snapped at those five women who had once been her way to “make a living.” She should have known better than to think she could get “too big for her britches” (a phrase that smacked of colonial overtones). Now here she was, centime-less and phoneless. Sure, she still technically “had a phone,” but she couldn’t afford any plan at this juncture, not even the “lowest monthly rate” one that wankers were always going on about in terms of how “any broke ass” could afford it. Well, no. Not if you were legitimately broke.  

And she was. Presently traveling alone at even smaller hours of the night so she could more successfully dodge notice from the police (who would fine her for not paying for a ticket), Noémie realized she was putting herself in harm’s way just because society had deemed her unworthy of being paid. Of being “employable.” But what was employability if not an actual willingness to work, which she genuinely had. It was instilled within her from a young age. After all, someone had to pick up the financial slack when her father lost his job at the factory. She’d been so fucked up and brainwashed like everyone else that she whole-heartedly believed her only true value was monetary. That if she couldn’t “secure the funds,” she didn’t even register on the scale of “human relevancy.” Worse still, she couldn’t even call a simple four-digit phone number because her phone had been completely deactivated after weeks of threatening emails and letters that finally prompted her to just sell the damn thing for cash. Never mind that it was her only potential resource for getting new work—it was too agonizing to be reminded of her financial failures by holding on to a non-functional phone.

With the cash she got out of it—a whopping forty euros from Le Bon Coin—she decided to be profligate. To have a night on the town before skulking back to the suburbs where she belonged. Except she didn’t even belong there. Not just because she couldn’t afford it, but because it was so blatant that she was meant for more. Where everyone else had seemed to resign themselves to the life they were “given,” the “hand they were dealt,” all Noémie could think and plot and dream about was an escape. And it had been ripped from her for the sake of “cutting costs”—the root of all evil.

Which brings us to how she figured, fuck it. Might as well use these forty euros for a good time. Or an attempt at one. Alcohol is always helpful with that (until it’s not). So yeah, she was a little tipsy that late night on the train, stumbling toward a seat, any seat, and then noticeably slouching. At least, it was noticeable to the middle-aged man who was eyeing her up and down like a lion sizing up a gazelle from afar, that was for sure. And you might say it was a bit too on the nose for the sign that read, “Pour arrêter un agresseur il faut du courage, mais surtout un téléphone” to be placed right in between Noémie and her own agresseur, but life is nothing if not on the nose.

So on the nose that when she looked up at the sign amid his lecherous approach, she still reflexively reached for her phone to try calling the number. But it wasn’t there. Nor would she be for much longer. And what was the purpose of her “enduring” anyway? What really is a person without money, without a phone? Are they even a person at that rate? Worth taking the trouble to rescue through the hard-earned taxpayer euros that help fund the police? The answer needn’t be spoken, for the actions toward people like Noémie scream loudly every day. Even as the sign insisted, “Chaque alerte fait reculer le harcèlement.” But only if you had the middle-class ability to sound that alert in the first place.