by Tony Hawks
It had all been my fault, of course, but by the time I’d got back to the house, I was able to reallocate the blame.
“That ‘Curse of the White Van’,” I said dolefully, “it’s a…it’s a…”
It was no good, I just couldn’t find the word.
“A curse?” suggested Ron.
“Yes, that’s it. It’s a curse.”
And Brad nodded sympathetically.
§
By Saturday night, Brad and I were ready to party. We’d had a tough week ‘working on the pool and we were very much looking forward to the village fete up at la mairie.
The village fete wasn’t really a fete at all. Not in the British sense of the word, anyway. There would be no bunting, apple-dunking facilities or bearded men pulling pints of real ale whilst recounting tales of the unremarkable. Maybe hundreds of years ago our village had experimented with similar concepts until someone had had the wisdom to say, “Why don’t we cut all this crap and just have a bloody good slap-up meal?” Because that’s all our fete turned out to be—a similar affair to the village lunch and dinner I had attended, only bigger. This one was open to guests from outside the village, and it was to take place on the large terrace at the rear of la mairie, where we would all have the pleasure of dining under the stars.
Thinking it uncool to arrive at 8pm on the dot, Brad and I wandered in at 8.25pm, only to find that we were the first there. Well, almost. The solitary figure of Andre was standing expectantly alongside the makeshift bar, glass of Ricard in hand.
“Bonsoir ,” he said, cheerfully.
“Bonsoir ,” I replied.
“Bonsoir ,” said Brad, offering up one quarter of his entire French vocabulary.
Andre took Brad’s fluent delivery to mean that he spoke French as well as I did, and he proceeded to hold forth on the visit of the Pope to Lourdes, which was taking place in the morning. Didn’t le pape look old and frail? Wasn’t he brave to keep making these pilgrimages? Brad nodded furiously, which seemed to satisfy Andre, although I felt he must have had more than an inkling that Brad hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. I resisted the temptation to assert my belief that the Pope would die either in the morning or mid-afternoon, just in case Andre wasn’t a fully paid-up sophrologist.
The rest of the guests seemed to show up all at once, just before 9pm. It seemed that the ‘8pm’ on the invitation was the equivalent of ‘doors open’ for a rock gig. Only extreme nerds or the chief fire officer actually turned up at that time. (Oh yes—and me, Brad and Andre.)
All the familiar village faces were there, including my technical advisers.
“So, how are you getting on with that pool?” asked Paul, waving a large Ricard in front of him.
“Well, it’s coming on. Slowly. I’ve gone for polystyrene blocks.”
“Polystyrene?” said Berry, looking shocked. “Blimey.”
“I don’t know much about that,” said Paul. “You must tell me all about that method.”
I was spared the embarrassment of passing on my limited knowledge on the subject as Paul and Berry were tapped on the shoulders and immediately whisked away into the whirligig of village social life. I took a moment to look round the hall, and I noticed that there were a lot of teenagers. I guess it was Saturday night and this was the only village fete for miles around, so this function provided a welcome alternative to sitting around in a bar in the local town. There was something rather heartening about seeing representatives from such a broad spectrum of ages all out together in common cause. Regrettably, my life in Britain only afforded me such glimpses when I was a guest at weddings or queuing at the post office.
As ever there was no seating plan, so when Mayor Rene gave the nod, everyone quickly found a spot on one of the three long lines of tables. I ended up happily wedged between Andre and Odette, who entertained me with stories of the village half a century before when la mairie had been a school they had both attended. They were now well into their seventies, but for a moment I was able to picture them as young kids, running around a post-war village that had only recently been liberated from the shackles of German occupation. Andre launched into a tale about these times, but he was interrupted by loud singing from the young contingent on the next table. They sang their little hearts out. I asked Odette whether it was a tradition and she explained that it was because they were drinking too much alcohol, too quickly. She didn’t seem to wholly approve. She needed, I thought, to walk round the centre of a British town at 11.30pm on a Friday or Saturday night to realise just how angelic these teenagers were.
The copious amounts of food that we would be required to eat began with various starters, before Alain and Roger appeared to a huge cheer with three absolutely enormous basins of paella. Apparently, Alain had volunteered to prepare the main meal for all 150 diners. (And to think that I panic at the thought of cooking a meal for any more than four.) Alain’s efforts, albeit completed with a team of helpers, were nothing less than heroic, and he was formally thanked by Rene after we’d completed what seemed like the seventh course of our gargantuan meal.
“So, Tony, when will we see you here in the village with a nice girl?”
I looked up to see the smiling face of Roger. The cheeky nature of both his grin and his question suggested that I had been forgiven for buying the Peugeot 106.
“I don’t know, Roger,” I replied. “Soon, I hope. I’m working hard at rinding a nice French girl.”
“Non!” said Roger firmly. “You must bring une petite Anglaise”
“But I thought a French girl would be nice.”
“It would be nice, certainly. But you must bring une petite Anglaise”
Roger was adamant, and I couldn’t understand why. I’d always thought that the French were keen on promoting their home-grown produce.
“I will do my best,” I promised. “And when I find her, I promise to present her for your approval.”
Roger laughed. “I like this idea,” he said. “You need une petite Anglaise to go with the rest of your family.”
“The rest of my family?”
“Yes. The family at your house.”
“You mean Ron and Brad? They’re not family.”
“I think that they are. They are the family you have chosen,” said Roger, providing me with a slap on the back, the weight of which would have made Alain proud.
What an interesting concept. I’d always heard people say that you choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Perhaps the trick is to produce friends that become family. Short of marrying Brad, Ron, Nic and Kev, perhaps I’d got as close as I could to doing just that. The house had seen to it.
Just like the young people, I drank too much that night. I hadn’t intended to, nor did I want to, it was just that the wine kept flowing. The volunteer waiters and waitresses simply plonked another bottle in front of us just as soon as we’d polished off the previous one. Being British, my formative years had seen me nurtured in a drinking culture where you kept going until someone told you to stop. At the absurdly early time of 11 o’clock on a Friday or Saturday night, an unsightly man would usually appear and bellow at you:
“Come on! Finish off your drinks now PLEASE! We’ve all got homes to go to!”
It had taken me a long time to get used to places where you were welcome as long as you wanted to stay there, and despite lots of practice I still wasn’t one of the leading exponents of self-regulation. Some days it might be fair to call me a ‘mountaineer drinker’. I drink it because it’s there.
“Brad, Roger thinks that I should find an English girl,” I offered up at probably too much volume as we walked home beneath the stars.
“Interesting,” he replied. “Maybe he’s right. Shame, though. French girls are very sexy.”
“Yes, and there are more of them where we are now—in France.”
“Good point. You’ve got to play the numbers game, I suppose.”
“How about you?” I asked. “What are you looking f
or in a woman?”
“I don’t know, Tony,” he replied reflectively. “I guess I’m just not ready.”
“I am,” I said. “I just don’t think we’re going to bump into any women between here and my house.”
“No, I don’t think so either.”
And do you know? We were both right.
§
“Where are you going?” asked Ron.
He was tucking into a cooked breakfast on the terrace as the sun rose over the distant rolling hills, nudging its way ever closer to the mountains.
“Church,” I replied impassively.
“Church? Since when did you get religion?”
“I didn’t. It’s just that they’ve rigged up a screen in the village church and they’re broadcasting the Pope live from Lourdes.”
“What do you want to see the Pope for?”
“I’ve got my reasons.”
Brad decided to come with me, mainly, he said, because he fancied the walk. It was a measure of how well I’d settled in to this village that I knew exactly who lived in every house we passed along the way. We began by ambling past Bruno, my immediate neighbour, then Irish Mary, before we pressed onwards up the hill past the lovely home of Edouard and Sylvaine, a couple who’d moved down from Paris. Next it was Roger—advocate of la petite Anglaise, Serges the hole-digger, and then, at the top of the hill, their mother Marie. We made a left and started to drop down into the valley, a route that took us past Michel, Malcolm and Anne, Odette, and Alain, before we finally arrived at the little church. The very little church.
“Right, let’s go in,” I said.
“Are you sure, Tony? It’ll probably go on a bit.”
“I’m sure. I want to see the Pope.”
“Since when were you so keen on the Pope?”
“Since the wager with Fabrice. I have a one-euro bet with him that the Pope will die today. In Lourdes.”
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not. That’s why I’m here.”
Brad began to laugh. “You are unbelievable sometimes. But he’s very old, so I suppose it could happen.”
Of course it could happen, I reasoned. If there is a God—and the Pope certainly seemed to be of that opinion from what I’d gleaned from a lot of his statements—then I’d noted that every now and again He seemed to demonstrate something of a penchant for cruel irony. One example of this was the Lisbon earthquake of 1775 that killed 90,000 people, one third of the city’s population. God managed to arrange for this to happen on All Saints’ Day, exactly when the churches were full of people who were busy worshipping Him. I reckoned that He was due another such act of grievous mischief, and allowing the Pontiff to snuff it in the very place where pilgrims flocked for miracle cures fitted the bill perfectly.
“Let’s go in and see what happens,” I said, leading Brad up to the wooden church door.
Every village in this area, regardless of how small it was, had une petite eglise to service the devout. If the attendance at our church was anything to go by, then the ‘devout’ were mainly the elderly. The turnout to see le pape on the large screen was not huge, and hardly warranted the efforts the village committee had made to set it up.
Brad and I sat down on the same pew as Odette and two back from Andre, who acknowledged us with a nod. We began to watch proceedings ‘live’ from Lourdes on the screen that had been erected in front of the altar. The French commentator waxed lyrical, seemingly undeterred by the fact that there was nothing to see yet other than a vast crowd waiting in anticipation. We were waiting in anticipation too. Were we going to see history being made? Or were we going to sit through a doddery old man making an uninspiring speech, delivered in French with a heavy Polish accent?
There was a ripple of excitement amongst the dozen or so of the congregation when the Pope finally appeared on our screen.
“God, he looks ill,” said Brad.
“Yes. But is he ill enough?” I replied.
“I don’t think so.”
Brad was good. He could spot a man who wasn’t about to die when he saw one. Despite his frailty and his need to be operated by aides who at times resembled puppeteers, John Paul soldiered on courageously and completed his discourse without collapsing.
“He put in a good effort, I felt,” said Brad, as we filed out of the church.
“I think he could have done better,” I replied. “That whole failing-to-keel-over thing was a disappointment.”
“Where are we going now?” asked Brad.
“La mairie”
“Why?”
“Free aperitifs followed by the annual village photo.”
This was another tradition of which these people had every reason to be proud. Each year, primarily by using the bribe of free aperitifs to ensure a big attendance, a photograph was taken of the village populace on the steps of la mairie. As we were cajoled into position by the photographer (who turned out to be Christine, the deputy mayor’s daughter), I wondered how many villages in England could manage to pull such a stunt.
I was wedged between Roger and Andre, smiling rather too enthusiastically as Christine clicked away with relish. It seemed to me to be a great shame that she herself wouldn’t be in the picture and I called out something to this effect. She dismissed me with a giggle and a wave. Presumably she was one of the many women who don’t like being in photos. Before long, though, the rest of us would be in a framed photo behind the bar in the village hall—a splendid record of a tiny moment in history.
“So, you owe Fabrice one euro,” said Brad.
We were getting out of breath as we climbed the steep hill that took us back to our side of the village.
“Yes, well, I guess I can live with that. I didn’t really need to win a euro that much.”
I felt relieved that my rather morbid hopes had not been fulfilled. The Pope may not have been my hero but certainly a lot of other people seemed quite keen on him. A vast crowd had turned up to see him, and they’d given him a tremendous ovation even though he’d done no singing or dancing, and probably hadn’t even turned up for the sound check.
“And if he had pegged it,” said Brad, “just think of all those puppeteers who would have been made unemployed.”
“You’re right. And it wouldn’t have been fair on the Pope either. You wouldn’t want to die with that many people watching.”
“No. How many people watching you die would be about right, then?”
“Ooh, five or six would be about right, I reckon.”
Our absurd conversation about death continued all the way home. Quite why we lingered on the subject for so long, I do not know. Perhaps it was because at some subconscious level we sensed that we needed to cover this subject in order to prepare ourselves for a bereavement that was about to take place further away than Lourdes. Further away from Lourdes, and yet much closer to home.
§
I didn’t get up until 11 o’clock the following morning. The excesses of the ‘Concrete Day’ and the village fete had obviously caught up with me. I pulled on my shorts and wandered downstairs, ready to apologise to Ron and Brad for whom I’d promised to provide some extremely unskilled labour.
The two men were seated at the dining table. I knew instantly that something was wrong. The mood was sombre. No one said a word. No jibes about my tardy arrival, no banter about the day ahead. Instead, silence.
I looked at Ron. As ever, his face revealed little. He did grimace a little and nod in the direction of Brad. I looked over to see my friend pale, drained and with bloodshot eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Brad tried to say something, but he just couldn’t seem to make a sound. It was as if his wringing hands were willing him to speak and yet the words were caught in his throat. I looked to Ron for elucidation, but he just waited, allowing Brad the time he needed to squeeze the words out.
“My mum died last night,” said Brad, eventually.
I’m not sure if my jaw physically dropped, but it certa
inly felt like it did. It was my turn now to be lost for words. What do you say in a situation like this? How do you comfort someone at a time when they are patently uncomfortable? Every sentence that formed in my head seemed wrong. What had Ron said, I wondered? How had he handled this when he’d been told the news?
“That’s terrible,” I said, rather pathetically. “What happened? She hadn’t been ill or anything, had she?”
“No. She died peacefully in her sleep.”
There was another long silence which Ron and I seemed to know instinctively not to fill.
“It’s just such a shock,” continued Brad. “Seventy-six seems so young. Her mother lived to ninety-two and her grandmother to ninety-three. I never saw it coming this early.”
I looked at my friend. He had an emptiness about him. But then what did I expect? If this news felt like a body blow to me, then how did it feel to Brad? I got to my feet, trying to muster some positive energy.
“I’ll organise some flights home,” I said.
With those words I left the room. Perhaps I should have stayed longer, but I felt that Brad needed to be silent, and yet not completely alone. Somehow I knew that Ron was going to be a better man for the job than I was. And for once, he looked up for it.
§
One of the frustrations of life is that however much time we spend planning our futures, we are always potentially just a moment away from a piece of news that can shatter everything. We have but a brittle hold on our own lives, let alone those of others.
“Jeez, I might be dead tomorrow.”
It had been a phrase I’d often heard uttered during my travels in Ireland some years before. It was true that very often the provider of these words was about to order a twelfth successive alcoholic beverage, and that the consumption of this next drink might indeed make ‘being dead tomorrow’ a distinct probability. However, there was a profound wisdom behind it. Is it not the case that we live our lives largely in denial of our own mortality? We may indeed ‘be dead tomorrow’ or perhaps halfway through next week, but we don’t like to consider the prospect. We just don’t know when we are going to pass away. Even the greatest minds on the planet are ignorant of when their moment of extinction might come. It’s a mystery. However, when the moment of truth does arrive and we are able to look back over our lives, there’s one thing we can be sure that we won’t be saying: