by Sue Limb
She walked to the bottom of the stairs and listened. No sound. Was he dead? She almost hoped so. She just had to call him. She opened her mouth, filled her lungs and plucked up her courage.
‘Edouard!’ she called. Her voice sounded thin and weedy, but it was definitely loud enough to be heard. There was no reply. Jess was astonished. She had expected him to come straight to the door. A spear of fear went straight through her tummy. ‘Edouard!’ she called again, louder. Still no reply. Still absolutely no sound or movement upstairs.
Jess began to feel annoyed. Why couldn’t he just answer to his name? Even very stupid dogs could do that. She felt a fool, standing there and yelling. She decided she wouldn’t call him any more. She would pretend she had been singing. Edouard, the way they pronounced it in French – Ed-waaaagh – sounded just a tiny bit like ‘it was’. Jess remembered a song her father always sang. ‘It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy things …’
She walked away from the stairs singing, ‘Edouard just one of those things …’ She arrived in the kitchen, singing with deranged fury, and decided she was hungry. She’d just cook the freakin’ pizza, and if Edouard didn’t appear she’d eat it all herself. She switched the oven on with furious panache, and hurt herself quite badly on the switch.
The oven leapt into life. Its reassuring hum was like the voice of a long-lost friend. Jess ripped the wrapper off the pizza. Soon the most delicious smell was wafting through the house. And suddenly, there was a sound from upstairs. Lured by the whiff of cheese and tomato, Edouard was leaving his room! Jess’s heart started to beat fast. Any minute now she would be required to speak French.
She heard Edouard start coming downstairs. But there was an awful sickening stumble, a strange squeaking French kind of gasp, a thump, more thumps and thuds, and the unmistakable sound of a small French boy actually falling downstairs! Horrors! Maybe this time he really had died.
Chapter 15
Jess was tempted for a moment to turn tail and run out into the garden. She could hide behind some bushes down at the bottom, by the picnic table, until Edouard had gone away. Or been taken away by ambulance. Or possibly the funeral director.
She hovered, desperate, by the kitchen door. What should she do? On the one hand, she ought to run and see if he was all right. On the other hand, if she’d fallen downstairs in his house, she would prefer it if nobody saw.
There was a rustling sound out in the hall. He wasn’t dead or unconscious, then. Jess crept hesitantly out of the kitchen. Edouard was scrambling to his feet. His back was to her, and, oh no! His trousers were split right up the back! For a fleeting second, she got a flash of his underpants, which were adorned with small red teddy bears.
Edouard turned towards her. It was almost like a moment from a film, in slow motion. He placed his hands behind him. Jess knew he was holding his trousers shut. Their eyes met. There was no possibility of a smile. Smiles were just hundreds of miles away.
Jess just raised her eyebrows in what she hoped was a caring way – raised them so far that her scalp actually hurt.
‘Pizza?’ she said in a strange, demented croak.
Edouard shrugged, while still holding on to the back of his trousers. Jess knew it would be polite to stand back and usher him into the kitchen first, but then she would have to see the back of his trousers. So instead she led the way in. She had laid two places at the kitchen table, and she got the pizza out of the oven.
Edouard sat down, with a faint ripping sound. The damage had evidently gone further. He was pale, and looked like a soul in deep torment. Jess wondered for an instant how you could say in French, ‘I do hope you haven’t hurt yourself while falling downstairs, and let me assure you that I didn’t see your underpants, and sewing is my favourite hobby – just leave those trousers outside your bedroom door.’
Actually, she didn’t think she’d ever manage to say anything like that even in English. She cut the pizza carefully in half, picked up Edouard’s bit on a spatula and headed for his plate. But what was this? Edouard was shaking his head and waving it away. What? He didn’t want pizza?
‘No pizza?’ asked Jess incredulously.
‘No pizza,’ confirmed Edouard, blushing and shaking his head. ‘Sank you.’
Well, sank you, too, buddy, thought Jess. She placed the slice of pizza on her plate. Edouard just sat there, miserably looking at the salt and pepper mills. His plate was empty. Jess had to offer him something. She opened the fridge and got out some cheese, salami, ham, olives, the butter, the margarine, some French-type soft cream cheese with garlic and a carton of orange juice. And a carton of apple juice.
She placed them all on the table in front of Edouard, who looked at them miserably and with revulsion, as if Jess had placed a decomposing dog in front of him. Jess was tempted, for a moment, to grab the rolling pin and – but no! He was a stranger in a foreign land! And he had teddy bears on his underpants. Remembering this detail, Jess felt a brief shiver of something like tenderness.
She got out the bread. Luckily it was already sliced. She found some crackers, some Ryvita, some hummus, some guacamole. She even put a pack of corn chips on the table and opened a jar of salsa dip. Still Edouard gazed at the feast with what looked like dismay.
Jess foraged in the most remote and secret cupboards and found a packet of chocolate biscuits. She placed it before him. Edouard’s expression modulated just a touch. His face made a faint transition from torment to mere anguish. He reached for a chocolate biscuit. Phew! Nourishment was being attempted.
Jess poured him a glass of juice, sat down and started to eat her pizza. The silence was deafening. She began to notice the awful chewing noises she was making, and when she sipped her juice it went slurp – glug glug glug in a most unattractive way. Mind you, Edouard wasn’t any better. He was eating with his mouth open. It was like watching a cement mixer preparing to build a chocolate house.
Once she’d eaten half of the pizza, Jess wondered if she ought to eat the other half. If she didn’t, it would just be lying there and Edouard might feel guilty that he’d rejected it. She jolly well hoped he’d feel guilty, anyway. No! Think of the teddy bears frolicking on his bottom. He was a stranger in a foreign land.
After four chocolate biscuits and a sip of juice, Edouard cleared his throat. Jess ploughed on with the second half of her pizza. It was hard work. She’d burnt it a bit, to be honest.
‘Hmmm!’ said Edouard, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Oh no! He was going to speak.
‘Wheretamare?’ he said. It was so obviously a question. But what on earth did it mean?
‘Sorry?’ said Jess politely, raising her eyebrows and trying to look as if she just hadn’t quite heard, rather than failing to understand.
‘Wheretamare?’ said Edouard again, the fool. It was so unfair of him to speak in French. He was supposed to be here to learn English.
‘To be honest,’ said Jess, smiling pleasantly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re rabbiting on about, but never mind.’ If only Flora and Fred were here to enjoy this kind of sarcastic game. Or even Mum.
However, Jess did remember vaguely that the French for ‘where’ did sound quite like ‘where’, though it was spelt?.?.?. uhhh?.?.?. où est. Bingo! Bravo! Perhaps even bongo! So he was asking where something was.
But what? The mare? The female horse? Hmmm, unlikely. But wait … mer! Jess remembered now! La mer was ‘the sea’. They’d done a bit of French geography recently, and Mrs Bailey had pointed out that France was surrounded by three seas: the English Channel to the north, the Atlantic to the west and the Med down south. But good old Britain still beat them hands down, with sea all round.
So … Edouard had apparently asked where the sea was. Was this a sign of suicidal thoughts? Had he plans to run to the shore and hurl himself in? And where on earth was the nearest sea? To Jess’s intense disappointment, trips to the beach did not loom very large in her day-to-day life.
Her dad did live i
n St Ives, which was by the sea, but that was hundreds of miles away and she hadn’t actually been down there yet. She had a feeling that even the nearest sea to home was miles and miles away, or, as Edouard would probably prefer to think of it, kilometres. She smiled, nodded and raised her finger as if to indicate he should speak no more.
‘Où est la mer?’ she said, with a triumphant smile.
Edouard nodded and almost smiled, too. Communication had been achieved!
‘Hang on a tick,’ said Jess. ‘I’ll just go and find an atlas!’ She leapt to her feet. Edouard watched her, looking puzzled. She went off into the sitting room. It seemed unbearably delightful in there, empty and welcoming, with no French exchange person waiting to be fed and talked to. Jess ransacked the bookshelves.
As her mum was a librarian, all the books were in perfect order. There was a whole section of atlases. Jess found them right away, but she pretended to look for a bit longer, so she could have a few more precious minutes on her own. Then she carried one back to the kitchen.
‘The atlas!’ she cried, as if atlases were the most fab fashion accessory. She plonked it down on the table. Edouard looked mystified. Jess flipped through the pages until she came to a map of their region. In the bottom right-hand corner was a bit of sea.
‘There!’ she said, grinning in triumph. Edouard stared at her as if she had gone insane. What on earth was wrong with the guy? He was the one who’d raised the subject of geography in the first place. Jess measured the distance from their home to the sea, using a convenient knife.
‘What’s the scale of this map?’ she said, in a thoughtful kind of way, talking to herself. It was the only sensible thing, really. She was the only person in the room who could understand. Using the scale, she worked out that they lived about seventy-two miles from the sea.
‘Seventy-two miles!’ she announced. Edouard looked blank, even panicky. Jess knew it was the miles that were the problem.
‘Come!’ she said, and ran upstairs. Edouard followed slowly, holding his trousers shut at the back. Jess raced into her mum’s study and went online. She dragged an extra chair alongside her for Edouard. He sat down with a faint ripping sound.
Jess tapped ‘miles-kilometres’ into Google and found a conversion chart.
‘There!’ said Jess. ‘The sea is 115 kilometres away!’
She expected Edouard to look pleased, but instead he looked lost and slightly tearful. Then Jess had her first good idea of the evening. She leapt up and offered Edouard the seat at the computer. He accepted it instantly, and jumped eagerly into the chair. His little fingers flew across the keyboard and Jess was amazed to see whole web pages in French appearing. How amazing!
There seemed to be a lot of people being fabulous in French: kissing each other on both cheeks, watering chic pot plants in French, skiing, windsurfing, the lot. At the sight of his countrymen frolicking about Frenchly, Edouard started to look a bit happier. So Jess said, ‘Just going down to do the washing-up!’ and escaped downstairs.
It was annoying having to do the washing-up, especially as she’d made the supper, but wasn’t that just like a boy? After she’d cleared the table and burped several times (there had been too much pizza and she had violent indigestion), Jess decided to phone Flora again.
‘Please God,’ she whispered as she dialled, ‘make it Flora who answers, not her dad.’ Although to be honest, sometimes Jess thought that perhaps Flora’s dad was God. His voice was certainly loud enough.
Chapter 16
‘Hello?’
Bliss! It was Flora’s mum. She was a wonderful, cuddly, glamorous, lazy person who spent most of her time on the sofa. She always treated Jess like a long-lost extra daughter, whereas her husband always treated Jess like a broken bidet, fit only to be kicked.
Eventually, after sharing with Mrs Barclay the trials and tribulations of being home alone with her French boy, Jess was reunited with Flora.
‘How’s it going, babe?’ asked Flora. ‘We’re having a great time. I’m redesigning Marie-Louise’s eyebrows.’
Suppressing a wave of jealousy (it should be Jess who was receiving this kind of cosmetic attention), she cut straight to the crisis.
‘It’s a nightmare!’ she said. ‘My mum’s gone off to Granny’s! He wouldn’t eat the pizza! He’s only had four chocolate biscuits! He fell downstairs and split his trousers and I saw his underpants! And he can’t flush our loo and I’m too embarrassed to mention it – and even if I did, he wouldn’t understand a word.’
‘Put a DVD on,’ advised Flora.
‘It’s all right – he’s on the internet at the moment,’ said Jess. ‘Did you know they have an internet, too, all in French? It’s weird.’
‘Well, let him surf away all night, then,’ said Flora. ‘At least it gets him out of your hair.’
‘What’s the time?’ asked Jess.
‘Er – ten past seven.’
‘Only ten past seven?’ screamed Jess in anguish. ‘How am I ever going to get through this evening?’
‘Homework?’ suggested Flora, who always did hers the moment she got home. (If she didn’t, there was no supper, by order of God.)
‘Homework!’ said Jess. ‘Brilliant! Brilliant! I’ll do my homework! And when I’ve done it all, I’ll invent some more!’
‘Edouard will have homework, too, don’t forget,’ said Flora.
‘Yeah! Of course! Brilliant! I always wondered what was the point of homework, but now it seems quite a wonderful invention,’ said Jess. ‘Oh, by the way, he asked me this really weird question – where’s the sea?’
‘The sea?’ said Flora, puzzled.
‘Yeah, like: Où est la mer? I looked it all up and everything. I even translated it into kilometres, but he just looked puzzled. Honestly! He’s so ungrateful. As well as being anorexic.’
‘It might not have been, “Where is the sea?”’ said Flora, rather irritatingly. ‘It might have been, “Where is your mother?” You know: Où est ta mère?’
‘But it sounds so similar,’ complained Jess, though light was beginning to dawn.
‘One’s got an extra e,’ said Flora. Jess, despite being grateful for the explanation, still wanted to hit Flora, slightly. ‘That would make sense, wouldn’t it, as your mum’s out?’
‘That’s it! That is so obviously it,’ said Jess. ‘Thanks. All I have to do now is translate into French, ‘‘Mum’s gone to see Granny for some unknown reason and she’ll be back at midnight and sends her apologies.’’ It’ll only take seven weeks for me to do that, but hey! The evening’s going to be that long anyway.’
‘Wait a min,’ said Flora. ‘I’ll just ask Marie-Louise what it is.’
Eventually Flora and Marie-Louise translated the message into French and dictated it to Jess, who wrote it down. She replaced the phone and heaved a massive sigh. Never mind homework. Her brain was totally exhausted already.
She went upstairs. Edouard was still checking his e-mails. Jess placed the slip of paper in front of him. Edouard read it, then turned towards her with something that was almost a smile, and nodded. Jess felt a tidal wave of relief wash over her. She went downstairs and got out her homework.
Never had homework seemed less boring. Even though she was already tired out, the prospect of having to make small talk with Edouard was even worse than having to write an essay about the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Jess was herself a Cavalier, obviously, because she loved all the velvet and lace and curls and stuff. She also loved drama, and had hated the Roundheads ever since she discovered they’d closed all the theatres. She threw herself into the essay with panache.
Some time during the reign of King James I, Edouard could be heard leaving the computer and going into the bathroom. There was a long silence, and then he started the loo-flushing routine. However, this time, after about seventeen attempts, when Jess was on the point of covering her ears and screaming aloud, he actually somehow made a huge effort and managed it.
It was music to Jess’s ears.
She sighed again, with relief this time. Then she heard Edouard coming out of the bathroom. She cringed in anticipation of him coming, or possibly falling, downstairs, but instead he did the decent thing: he went into his bedroom and closed the door.
What a relief?! Jess returned to her essay. It was so odd to be sitting at home, willingly doing an essay, without Mum standing behind her with her arms folded and wearing a ferocious scowl. Having a visitor changed everything.
Eventually she finished the essay (a Grade A, surely, this time – it was three and a half pages instead of her usual one and a half?). Then Jess placed some corn chips, a tiny pot of dip, a banana, an apple, a piece of cheese and three more chocolate biscuits on a plate and left them outside Edouard’s door with a can of coke. She knocked and ran away downstairs. It was a bit like looking after a pet hedgehog.
After this act of charity, she switched on the TV. She sprawled out full-length on the sofa, and the next thing she knew, Mum and Granny were staring down at her and something random to do with deep-sea fishing was on the telly. Jess realised she must have been asleep for hours. She hoped Edouard hadn’t come downstairs and seen her. She sat up, yawned and stretched.
‘It’s midnight,’ said Mum. ‘Come on, Jess. You can share my bed tonight. Granny’s staying with us, just for a day or two. She can sleep in your room.’
‘Are you OK, Granny?’ asked Jess, leaping up and giving her adored grandparent a hug.
‘I’m fine, thank you, dear,’ said Granny. ‘But I’ve apparently got to be punished for my recent bad behaviour.’
‘Don’t be silly, Granny,’ said Jess’s mum.
‘What bad behaviour?’ asked Jess. Granny shrugged.
‘Just talking to somebody,’ she said in a sarcastic tone of voice. ‘I won’t intrude by taking your bed, dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll just sleep right here on the sofa.’