‘Is he a friend of yours?’ asks Sandrine, her voice crackling in my headset.
‘Who? Marcel? Did he frighten you?’
‘No,’ she says firmly.
I smile at the sweetness of this young woman’s trust. And I do not make the mistake of assuming that Marcel’s mood today was because he is French and I am English. No, Marcel and his ilk exist everywhere: people who are only really happy when they are downright miserable. One day I should introduce him to Nigel.
Nor do I make the mistake of attempting to flirt with Sandrine. Well, maybe I flirt just a little, but only in what you’d call an avuncular way. Far safer to be a reliable old friend than an embarrassing suitor.
When we reach a thousand feet and turn downwind, I glance back at the aerodrome. On the apron, a tiny, stooped figure stands in front of the empty hangar. And it dawns on me that that could be me one day, if I do not learn to live my life bravely and generously: a tired, embittered old man, alone in France, muttering at the young as they spread their wings and fly.
A week later, on another furnace-hot day, I feel a different sort of dread as I drive down to Gilles’s house. For today we are killing chickens. Or rather, Gilles is killing chickens, and I am there to learn. As a meat-eater, I feel I should know what it is to take an animal’s life. The idea appals and frightens me, but only because I’m a hypocrite. I’ll eat meat that has been shinily shrink-wrapped at the supermarket, without giving a second thought to the animal from which it came. So why am I so repelled by the prospect of having to kill one myself?
Up at La Folie, I have four young cockerels besides Titus, and – sentiment aside – that’s at least three too many to keep. Even sooty Carrie has turned out to be a boy, and is therefore now called Harry, his black down exploding day by day into a burnished golden plumage.
Not only are the young chaps fighting amongst themselves, but they’re already beginning to display Oedipal longings for their mums. And Titus has no interest in playing Laius at the crossroads. On the contrary, he chases them down without remorse, immune to their screams of terror as he beetles after them, head lowered, beak cocked, savagely determined to show them what for. Catching one, he rips out a beakful of feathers from the back of its neck. Or, if he’s in a particularly beastly mood, he goes for the coxcomb. And from the squeals that follow, this hurts considerably more than being stung in the goolies by a hornet.
‘Tu es prêt?’ asks Gilles, as I climb out of the Espace and we shake hands. Last night he stopped by La Folie to let me know that today was the day, and I was amazed – and strangely relieved – to hear him say that he finds it difficult to kill a chicken.
‘Prêt à tuer,’ I reply grimly. Josette appears from the kitchen, and we kiss each other lightly on both cheeks. She is walking almost normally now. And then there’s an almighty flurry of flapping and shrieking and Gilles is dragging the first of three white cockerels out of its cage by the feet. So soon? I was hoping to have a bit more time to collect my thoughts.
I had expected the killing to be fast and brutal – just grab the head, twist and crkkkk – give or take the odd post-mortal tremor. But that is the English way.
Instead of wringing the bird’s neck, Gilles hangs it up by the feet with a length of blue baling-twine attached to a low beam. The cockerel seems improbably calm, its white wings hanging from its body like an opened fan, its head pointed vertically downward like a spear. I can feel myself gritting my teeth, and I have pulled my shirt up over my mouth.
Then Gilles is pulling the next bird out of its cage, and I wonder if it has any idea what is to come. It looks so big, so alive. I avoid catching its eye. Again, the blue twine is tightened around the long grey feet, and the heavy white body is left to hang beside the first like an unfurled umbrella. I don’t know how much they recognize, upside down.
And then the third bird is making its final struggle for freedom, and my heart leaps as it almost evades Gilles, forcing one leg free of his grasp, and drawing blood from the back of his hand with its spur. I’m praying for it to escape, and hope that it doesn’t. But Gilles has done this hundreds of times before, and the third cockerel is soon dangling from its blue twine beside its comrades.
Now there’s not much time left, and my mouth is dry as a bell jangles in the distance and I can hear a train rumbling towards the level-crossing.
Gilles picks up a small knife, the sort you’d use for chopping a carrot, its blade worn thin from years of sharpening.
‘Qu’est-ce que tu f—?’ I begin to ask.
‘Et voilà,’ he says quietly, as he draws the knife out of the neck of the first chicken, and a ribbon of scarlet hangs down to the ground.
There is no struggle. Unflinching, the second chicken appears unaware of the life blood seeping away beside it. I watch Gilles take the bird’s head gently in his left hand, and hear the rasp of blade on bone as he presses the knife through its neck with the other. It looks like he’s opening an oyster. Another ribbon of blood. Another life ending. I’m never going to be able to do this.
And then the first chicken begins to flap violently, trying to raise itself, fighting against the suffocating blood in its throat. Other chickens in the farmyard approach, heads cocked, unmoved. Gilles steps backwards. I bite the inside of my cheek, watch blood on white feathers through narrowed eyes. Already, I’ve seen too much.
A third red ribbon connects the last bird to the earth.
Now the second victim is flapping violently. With a burst of frenetic flapping it manages to fly upwards for a second, but collapses again, exhausted at the end of its rope. The first is almost still. A series of spasms, each one weaker than the last. The third, too, begins to struggle upwards for breath, and for a moment – in a frantic froth of blood and feathers – all three birds make a last great effort for survival. And then they simply hang there, twisting lifeless on their blue strings. The other chickens peck at the fallen red ribbons before they melt into the earth.
It is finished.
Except that it isn’t finished because now we have to pluck the dead birds. Josette emerges in rubber gloves. Gilles cuts each bird down, and dunks it unceremoniously in a blue bucket of steaming water. There is a bad smell, like a wet dog with a festering sore.
‘This makes the plucking easy,’ says Gilles. Then he hangs them up again, and each of us begins to rip the feathers off a bird.
Gilles is right. It is easy. The feathers come away from the skin just like pulling fluff off Velcro. There’s a faint ripping sound, but this new smell is not as bad as I feared.
‘These as well?’ I ask nervously, indicating the big wing plumes, the flying feathers.
‘Oui, bien sûr,’ says Gilles.
The thick quills don’t come out as easily as the down, and they leave behind ugly black puncture marks. How could something so alive suddenly be so dead?
Next comes the blow-torch – ‘il faut les flamber’ – to scorch any hairs, roots and pimples that remain after the plucking. Gilles gently wields the flame as though he were spraying paint on to a model aeroplane, and – as frazzle replaces gloop - I’m happy to see the chickens looking a little bit less like murdered living creatures, and a little more like something inanimate you might barbecue.
As a child, I remember seeing my father gutting a salmon he’d caught when we were on holiday in Scotland. The sight of all those gleaming, squishy, fetid nasties squelching and bursting between his fingers was as much as I could bear. I would have imagined that gutting a chicken would be even worse. But my senses are so numb, after what I’ve just witnessed, that I could probably remove the adenoids of the Prince of Wales without so much as a blink.
‘Why can’t men bring themselves to gut chickens?’ Josette asks Gilles teasingly.
‘Killing them, that’s our job,’ says Gilles with a cough. ‘N’est-ce pas, Michael?’
46
OCTOBER: THE CHIMAERA
Serge’s wife, Jacquie, was right to warn me about snakes. Hot and grimy fro
m an afternoon spent splitting logs with the axe, I’ve only come into the dark bathroom to splash some water on my face. And there is this grey-green thing, furled around the taps on the basin like a mooring rope. A foot and a half long, thick as a bicycle pump. Right between the Savon de Marseille and my shaving cream. A viper.
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
Slowly, I back away. Then freeze, as a forked tongue flickers from the dragon head, and the coiled rope begins to unwind. Please let him not disappear into that hole under the bath, or I swear I shall never wash again.
I don’t know what to do, short of going to fetch Martha and Mary, and leaving them to tear the creature apart.
You’d think I could just coax him back out through the window. But each time I approach, he slides a little further towards the hole under the bath. In an ideal world, I would phone International Rescue and wait for Scott and Virgil to arrive in Thunderbirds 1 and 2. But this is rural France, so I phone my old school friend, Survival-Kit Toby. Now Toby is an animal-lover, but he also happens to have trained with the Gurkhas in Borneo, and has eaten all sorts of snakes in his time.
‘Are you sure it’s a viper,’ he asks, ‘and not some poor little grass snake?’
‘I’m sure he’s a viper. He’s got a knowing glint in his eye. Should I try and coax him outside?’
‘Not if you don’t know what you’re doing. No, you’ve got to kill him.’
‘Right. What?’
‘Bash him over the head with a big stick. A cricket bat would be ideal.’
‘I’ve got to kill a snake?’
‘Bludgeon the bastard. Don’t hold back.’
‘Toby, I’m not sure that …’
‘Look, even vipers have their place in God’s Great Scheme and all that, but not in your bathroom.’
‘Right.’
‘And Michael, don’t be fooled if he acts stunned. Be ready to hit him again.’
‘Right.’
I’ve done some beastly things to my fellow creatures in my time – I used to work as a theatre critic, after all – but I’ve never had to kill a snake in cold blood. There wasn’t much of a call for this kind of thing in East Dulwich. And watching Gilles kill his chickens the other day doesn’t seem to have helped – any more than does the knowledge that I must, before long, do the same with four of my own. Nevertheless, I can feel my upper lip stiffening as I don my wellies and my chainsaw gloves.
Distant snare drums rattle. Far trumpets swell. Clutching a great big stick that I have found in the barn, I tiptoe back to the bathroom.
The snake hasn’t moved. But my Wilkinson Sword Activ Gel is in the way, so I have to run and fetch the barbecue tongs to shift the canister. I don’t think Sigourney Weaver ever had to do this in Alien.
I watch the snake: placid, handsome and doing nothing to aggress me, save for the unfortunate fact that he or she is here, now, and constitutes a threat. If not to me, then to the next guest – a child, perhaps – who enters the bathroom.
After taking careful aim, I shut my eyes as I drive the snake’s skull against the wall with the stick; hold it pinioned there. I can feel the wood tremble as the body begins to flail and spasm like a hooked salmon.
Teeth clenched, I strike again. I want it to be over soon. Only this time I miss, and the snake slithers into the basin. Again, again. I don’t mind if I shatter the porcelain, just so long as it’s dead.
At last the snake hangs limp from the basin, its stretched, gleaming skin now as matt and wrinkled as a baby that has aged eighty years in a day. I feel roughly the same myself.
Three minutes later, the beast starts putting itself back together. Oh God, Oh Montreal: I’ve taken on the Terminator. The taut glossiness returns. So does the flailing and the coiling, stronger and faster than ever.
Panicking, I strike it some more.
This time the poor creature really is dead. When I lift it by the tail, it flops like a lank entrail, or a chicken on a length of blue twine. I feel fear and pity, but no catharsis. I leave it in a bucket on the step.
Ten minutes later, I pick up the snake once more. Necessary as it may have been, I feel ashamed at what I have done. And birch me with hawthorn if it doesn’t suddenly begin to coil and twist itself upwards yet again, drawing back its head as if about to strike me with those mangled jaws. Spooked, I drop it and run.
Next day, the pretty pharmacienne refuses to come out from behind the homeopathy display until I promise her that the snake in my tupperware box is dead.
‘I want to confirm it’s a viper,’ I explain, ‘and buy an antidote.’
‘Oui, c’est une vipère.’ She grimaces, peering into the box. ‘There are a lot this year. And the antidote is chickens.’
‘Excusez-moi?’
‘Chickens kill snakes.’ Well, yes, I know. But I have thirteen chickens (some of whom may be about to receive a last-minute stay of execution). And this blighter still managed to find his way into my thunderbox.
‘Can’t I have a serum, too?’ I ask. ‘I live alone, out of town, and may need to inject myself.’
‘There used to be a serum,’ says Madame. ‘But more people were dying from the injection than from the snake.’
‘Ah, bon.’
‘Better to stay as still as possible, and call the fire brigade,’ she says. She also sells me a red vacuum pump that looks like a water-pistol, for extracting venom, and tells me I can buy snake repellent from the droguerie in the Rue du Coq.
‘Ah, bon.’
Later that night, I spend a few minutes with Titus and the girls in the poulailler. It feels the safest place to be right now.
‘Now look, everybody,’ I begin. The girls squawk to attention on their perches. ‘You have a job to do out there, and I’m worried you’re not doing it.’
Silence. Thirteen pairs of eyes glint at me, wondering what I’m on about this time.
‘All right, boys and girls,’ I sigh. ‘At ease.’
Shutting the chicken-house door behind me, I can hear my protectors clucking indignantly at one another within. I presume they’re totting up all the vipers they saved me from today. The ones I never saw.
So I go to the droguerie, where an old lady – tiny, birdlike and pretty – in the queue behind me asks me why on earth I want to repel snakes.
‘You should be stroking them, or hanging them around your neck, Monsieur,’ she says.
‘Well, yes. But only if they’re dead.’
The droguiste confirms that many people have been asking for snake repellent this year.
‘Last week there was a lady who found a viper in her kitchen-utensil drawer. It slithered out and hid behind the kitchen units. And she made her husband dismantle the entire kitchen to find it.’
‘Ah, well. At least it’s rare to hear of anyone being bitten,’ I say, waiting for them to nod sagely and agree with me.
‘I know of two, personally,’ says the old lady. ‘A four-year-old boy, who died. And an older child, paralysed.’ She sounds quite cheerful about this.
Oh, good. ‘I think I’ll take two pots of that stuff, please,’ I tell the man behind the counter.
Still no rain. Every morning this week, the cat and I have been woken by a deep fog-horn just outside the bedroom window. It’s the bleating of a sheep, but pitched more like a bass-baritone than one of my tenor Rastafarians. And sure enough, whenever I go to the window to investigate, there are two or three fat white ewes munching in the parched flower beds: more escapees from over the hill.
Today, when I chase them down the drive, I come face to face with a muscular lad with big shoulders and a face lined with concern, who is on his way up. I recognize him as Young Boulesteix. I’ve heard that he took over his father’s farm a few months ago. I’m not sure if he has also inherited his father’s Anglophobia.
‘Sorry,’ he says, shaking my hand. ‘No matter what I do, they keep escaping.’
/> ‘Ce n’est pas grave,’ I reply.
‘I’ve lost ten,’ he continues, correcting me. ‘Are the others up there, too?’ He points up the drive to La Folie, searching my face for signs of hidden sheep. Boulesteix is that rare thing: a young man starting out as a sheep-rearer in rural France, when others are stopping in their droves. Last summer, he was a cheery, strapping lad, tucking up the sleeves of his T-shirt to show off his muscles. Right now, he looks like an old man.
‘I’ll have a good look,’ I tell him. ‘Give you a call if I do.’
Later, I drop round to Gilles’s house for un apéro. In silence, we watch the weather forecast on his big black television, which looks as incongruous in his ancient kitchen as a Dalek in a cowshed. Further unbroken sunshine is forecast for the next few days.
‘C’est grave,’ he mutters. ‘Usually there’d be grass for the sheep until November, and they’ve had none since July. If this carries on, even the trees are going to start dying.’
It’s true. For weeks, the leaves of the tall acacias in front of La Folie have been fox-marked with brown and gold. Some of the fruit trees have gone further still, and look as if they’re getting ready for winter, not autumn. The splashing river at the bottom of the hill fell silent months ago. The Rastafarians stand bemused in their field, their black shapes standing out against the frazzled grass like distant wildebeest on the plains of Africa. They gaze at the desert that surrounds them, and then they peer at me. What have we done to offend you?
I give them a granulated feed morning and night, so they will not starve. But they seem as bored and irritable as teenagers. It’s bad enough having to eat hay in winter –Ouessants despise hay – but when the summer lushness turns to dust, a sheep’s life is bleak indeed.
Though I am not a proper farmer myself, I am close enough to the parched landscape to feel the farmers’ anguish, and the misery of their beasts.
In the afternoon, I receive another visitation from Young Boulesteix’s ewes. I’m almost tempted to let them stay for a snack, but instead I shoo them off down the drive. Boulesteix is down there once again, this time with his mother beside him, though she looks far less smiley than usual.
C'est La Folie Page 31