Everyone nodded happily. Maybe it meant something after all.
‘But I must return to the house now,’ I said. ‘Brigitte is a little bit ill.’ Thank God I poisoned her, I thought. What a brilliant excuse.
‘Oh no!’ So they hadn’t heard about the verveine incident yet.
‘Yes, a mystery illness. We don’t know what it is.’
I stood, grinning as if a dentist was trying to photograph my newly fitted dentures, and shook everyone’s hand farewell.
Outside in the warm but smokeless air, I poked at my phone, speed-dialling Alexa. At that moment she just seemed like the most sensible, and most neutral, person I knew. The only person who would understand what was going on.
‘You are stuck in Corrèze?’ she asked, and I could hear the amusement in her voice.
‘Oh yes.’ I headed out of sight of the Salle des Fêtes and told her everything. Not just the house-buying stuff but the wet marks in the bathroom, my inability to pick the correct size of courgettes or dig the right sort of hole, and the attempted poisoning.
I was halfway down the hill by the time I’d finished, and I stopped walking so as not to lose the signal.
‘It is simple,’ Alexa said. ‘Both my parents have been in therapy since before Sigmund Freud’ (she pronounced it ‘frod’) ‘invented therapy. So I know. Liquid is sexuality. The wet marks in the bathroom, even the herbal tea, it is a sexual exchange.’
‘Exchange? No way.’
‘Yes. She herself is the house, the bathroom floor. And the courgettes are phallic, of course.’ She wasn’t joking either. ‘The digging? It is sex, that’s for sure.’
‘No, it was just digging a hole, Alexa. With a spade, not my—’
‘A big, hard spade?’
I thought back to the shovel’s long, straight handle. My God, if it had been painted pink it couldn’t have been any clearer.
‘And she said I wasn’t digging in the right place. Oh no.’
‘Oh, yes, she wants you to dig with your spade somewhere else. Like between her legs.’
‘Alexa, stop, please.’
‘I’m sorry, it is very clear to me.’
‘OK, OK. But it’s all over now, she doesn’t want me to dig any more. She’s got me cleaning moss off the barn roof. So she’s calmed down, right?’
Alexa thought about this. ‘How do you clean this roof?’
‘With a knife.’
‘Hmm. She is probably fantasizing that you are shaving her pubic hairs.’
‘Oh God save me.’
‘What?’
‘Now she wants me to hose it down.’
‘Yes, you see, it is so clear. She wants you to shave her and then spray her with your hose. Or maybe, when your courgettes are big enough for her—’
‘No, please, Alexa, stop! This is all bullshit. They’re just random household tasks. Picking vegetables, digging in the garden, cleaning a roof. Totally normal country stuff.’ Though I had to admit that wandering around in a see-through nightdress and accidentally-on-purpose getting a faceful of my dongler were not quite so normal. ‘But now that I’ve tried to poison her, she’ll take it as a kind of subconscious message, won’t she? Leave me alone or I’ll kill you?’
‘Yes, don’t worry, I expect it will stop now.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘And apart from this, everything is going well?’ Alexa laughed. ‘Oh, poor Paul.’ She sounded almost nostalgic.
‘Yeah, yeah, what about you?’
‘I’m coming back to Paris in two or three weeks from now,’ she said. ‘I will work on a film.’
‘You’re making films now as well as taking photos?’
‘Trying. This is a – how do you say – work experience? On a real feature film.’
‘Wow.’
‘They’re filming some scenes in Paris and I will be an assistant. You could come along one day. But I don’t suppose you’ll be in Paris?’
‘I don’t know. What if they won’t let me leave this place?’
She laughed as if I was joking.
When I got back to the house, things were in uproar. All the lights were on, and the front and back doors were wide open. Florence and Michel were running about with cloths and mops.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s Maman,’ Florence said. She was wet and soapy from the knees down. ‘She got up to turn on the washing machine and forgot to put the hose in the shower basin. The machine has just pumped ninety litres of soapy water over the bathroom floor. It has gone down into the cellar, too, and soaked all the vegetables you picked.’
‘Ninety litres of warm soapy liquid? Out of a hose? All over my courgettes?’ Brigitte had gone into Freudian meltdown.
That was it, I decided – as soon as the water was mopped up, we were getting out of the house. Out of the village. Out of Corrèze. Somewhere where there were no spades, no mossy roofs and no courgettes. Definitely no courgettes.
2
Can You Be Arsed?
1
THE FRENCH ARE pretty shameless about telling politically incorrect jokes. There are lots of gags about the people from Auvergne being stingy, the Swiss talking slowly, and the Belgians being of less than French intelligence.
Take, for example, the one about a Belgian who falls down a lift shaft. As he falls, he thinks (in his guttural Belgian accent), Hey, this isn’t too bad. It doesn’t hurt at all. No, still doesn’t hurt. Still doesn’t hurt. Still doesn’t hurt. Ouch.
OK, not exactly hilarious, but I was laughing inside because I’d turned into that Belgian.
I was heading for a collision with the Earth at a hundred miles an hour, and I was feeling great. This was going to be the tenth, twentieth time, and I just kept coming back for more.
I was speeding up now, two hundred mph at the very least, with my feet in the air and my head full of noise. I was thinking, Falling out of a plane without a parachute would be a fantastic experience if you could enjoy the freedom of flying without worrying about what was going to happen when you hit the ground.
Things got bumpy, then dark, and the world flipped over on to its back. I felt my neck about to snap, and then whoosh, everything was normal again and I was lying on my stomach, grinning breathlessly towards my topless girlfriend.
That last wave had been bigger than the others, and it had wrenched the bodyboard out of my hands and somersaulted me over. Time for a rest, perhaps.
I picked up my board, tipped my head to the right and left to empty my ears, and walked up the sand towards Florence. She was lying stretched out on an immense orange bath towel, her eyes closed, meditating (I hoped) on how good it was to have put a few hundred kilometres between us and her mother.
We were on the île de Ré, a thirty-kilometre ribbon of an island off France’s west coast. On the map it looks a bit like a scrawny chicken leg with a long, curved foot at its western end. Actually it’s not really an island at all, because now – after much environmental wrangling – an immense suspension bridge has hooked it to the mainland.
We’d only been here a couple of days but I had already come to the conclusion that Ré contained everything you could possibly want from life. Unless you were an Arctic explorer, trainspotter or rhino hunter, I suppose.
For a start, the small town where we were staying had a daily market selling local seafood and enough melons, nectarines and apricots to help me forget that courgettes and strawberries even existed. There was a great stall selling bright and breezy island wines that lifted your spirits without hammering them back down again too violently. It also stocked a yeasty beer from the micro-brewery in the centre of the island, and if I didn’t fancy drinking it at home, there were plenty of bars and cafés where the other customers were just as anonymous as I was.
The breakers on the Atlantic side of the island were big enough for a belly-first amateur like me to get some white-knuckle thrills, but not so huge that they attracted the clever bastards who try to disembowel you with their st
and-up surfboards if you dare to go for ‘their’ wave.
In early July, it was also a sock-free zone. I find that when my toes are on the loose, the rest of me feels that much freer to wiggle and enjoy itself too.
And then there was Florence, liberated at last from maternal inhibitions.
Florence was the perfect girl to go on holiday with (I thought back then) – not only was she shaped as if the bikini had been invented especially for her, she also had an almost inexhaustible capacity for enjoying sex, or at least for faking it very convincingly. There are girls who do that ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, you enjoy yourself thing that makes me feel totally inadequate. Not Florence. She was definitely not the woman Madonna had in mind when she wrote ‘Like A Virgin’. She was more like the girl in ‘Do It To Me One More Time’.
We were staying in her dad’s seaside holiday home, which had three bedrooms and even more beds, plus a couple of sofas and a jumbo bathtub, all of which had seen action in the short time we’d been there.
And as I stood over her on the beach and let two droplets of seawater drip from my hair into her golden navel, I couldn’t wait to get back to the house and start again.
It’s a stupid guy’s trick, I know, waking your girlfriend up by splashing her with cold water. But it’s irresistible. She squeals and writhes, her stomach muscles tighten, making the flesh rise up around her belly button and her breasts swell and jiggle. Then, if you’re lucky, she smiles welcomingly up at you and you just want to kneel down and kiss that smile hello.
‘Isn’t it about time for me to rub some more sun cream all over you?’ I asked.
‘But I haven’t been in the water.’
‘Well why don’t I rub it all off then rub some more in? You can’t be too careful about protecting yourself against sunburn.’
‘No, but I must protect myself against your sandy hands.’
Oh well, no rush, I thought, and crashed out on the bath towel beside her. We weren’t one of those couples who do separate beach towels.
‘You’re all wet, Paul, go on your own towel!’
Spoke too soon.
We were lying on a long, white beach on the northwest coast of the island, up on the chicken’s foot. It wasn’t a developed beach at all – the only way you could buy something to eat or drink was from the student shoving a trailerload of refreshments back and forth along the sand. About a mile away, near the old lighthouse, there were a couple of massive Nazi blockhouses that had tumbled off the dunes and on to the beach, but on the stretch where we were lying there was nothing but sea, sand and sunbathers. It was as if all of human history had been devoted to beach holidays. What a great place the world would be if that was true, I thought.
Even though my mind was taken up with such noble sentiments, it was impossible to ignore the fact that a lot of guys were committing Florence’s naked breasts to memory. But as long as they stopped short of photography (I did lean over and block the view of one guy who was pretending that he had to point his phone towards Florence to get a signal) I honestly didn’t mind. Mainly because I was free to get my fill of all the other fine specimens of sun-roasted femininity around. This bit of the beach was like a photo shoot for a swimwear catalogue for which the bikini tops hadn’t been delivered. And we were on the fringe of a fifty-yard section where none of the swimwear had turned up at all. There, the beach towels were populated by middle-aged all-over tans, shaving rash, and tattoos in places I would have preferred not to know about.
I couldn’t look at the women without being reminded of Brigitte. And why, I wondered, when the guys got up to swim, did they all feel obliged to spend several seconds gazing down at the fleshy little bundles hanging between their legs? Their looks of self-satisfaction suggested that the tourist office really ought to mention their genitalia in its list of the island’s architectural highlights.
Not being a regular at nudist beaches, there was something about the male body I hadn’t noticed before. Something they don’t show you in naughty films, either.
‘Look at him,’ I said to Florence. ‘Over there on the right, the guy with the paunch and the hairy nipples.’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s got big puffy balls and a small dongler.’
‘Dong-leurre?’
‘Yes, his todger, you know, his queue.’
‘Ah yes.’ She lay back down again, totally unmoved by my breakthrough in human physiology.
‘It’s not so much a pair of walnuts and a chipolata as two kiwis and a button mushroom. Don’t you think that’s weird?’
‘Honestly, Paul, it is not because a man’s zizi is small when it is in repose that it is not big when it gets excited.’ She sounded protective, almost as if she wanted the guy to hear. ‘You know, quite often a man has what looks like a small queue, but when he is dans le feu de I’action you get a very pleasant surprise.’
‘OK, OK, I get the message, thanks.’ There are some things about a woman you don’t want to know, like how extensive a study she’s done of the excited zizi.
‘You have a complex?’ she asked, opening one mocking eye.
‘No, should I?’
‘Ah, les hommes.’ She closed her eyes again, the better to philosophize. ‘You all have something to offer, you know. And the best men are the ones that know what they have to offer, and who offer it generously. Without wanting to make you feel arrogant, mon chéri, you are a spontaneously generous boy.’
My mood gave a little jump at this, as did my surfer shorts.
‘But with other men,’ she went on, ‘sometimes you have to reassure them that they can be generous and show them how. I remember one man, his zizi was much smaller than yours, but he . . .’
It’s a basic rule of life, I guess. As basic as the one about not stepping into a lift shaft without checking whether there’s a lift there first. Don’t comment on other guys’ zizis or you may be heading for a fall.
2
LIKE ANY GUY, as soon as I get on a bike I start suffering from sex problems. Chromosome problems, to be precise. I personally don’t want to pedal as fast as I can – it’s my male chromosomes that are craving for speed.
Now they were urging me to leave Florence behind as she cycled slowly back to the house. They wanted me to charge off and explore side trails, go on ahead then double back to meet her, or at the very least zig-zag along no-handed.
As it turned out, though, I was pedalling as fast as I could, and I would still have lost a race against a one-legged lobster. This was because a stone shed round the back of Florence’s dad’s house was home to four of the oldest, rustiest bikes known to man. The frames, wheels, chains and handlebars were flaky brown; even the tyres were rusty, and I’d always thought that was a scientific impossibility.
The bikes had been there when he bought the house, apparently, and Florence insisted that we should use them, even though they transformed what would have been a six-kilometre jaunt along the flat, well-tended cycle lanes into a clanking, squeaking battle between two lumps of old iron and our vulnerable legs.
Admittedly, there’s something sexy about a beautiful girl on an old bike – it’s the contrast, like serving a hot dessert with ice cream. But there’s nothing at all sexy about having your coccyx fractured by a bone-hard saddle and non-existent suspension. Every crack in the cycle path vibrated up through my pelvis and threatened to dislodge teeth.
Getting back to the house on that rusty bike was only a bit more painful than our meandering trek across France to get to the île de Ré.
The morning after Brigitte flooded her bathroom, I’d got Michel to drive us into Brive, where we’d caught a local train across the Dordogne. The train régional, a tiny TGV, was so new that people would get on and say ‘Oh, pardon’ because they thought they were in first class. None of the other passengers crossing the Dordogne in comfort were English-speakers, by the way, which goes to show how much we’ve lost the habit of taking the train because of the scare stories about our own railways.
The smooth, air-conditioned part of the journey ended when we got to Bordeaux. A main-line train was waiting for us (the French railways are very polite like that – they wait for connecting trains to arrive), but we hadn’t reserved a seat on it. And this twenty-carriage monster was crammed with people who’d booked well ahead for their migration up the west coast from Biarritz to Nantes. If it hadn’t been for the holiday smiles and the beachwear, you’d have thought the whole of southwest France was on the run from a Spanish invasion. Eight-seat compartments were full of picnicking, chattering, card-playing families whose suitcases were blocking corridors or balanced precariously on luggage racks threatening to give snoozing grandad a violent wakeup call.
Florence and I battled our way through two carriages, crawling over people and bags like spiders on a coal heap, before giving up and plonking ourselves outside a first-class toilet. Here, we were disturbed every one or two minutes by disapproving passengers who suspected that we weren’t of the required class to be in their carriage, and finally by a ticket collector who said we had to pay a supplement for standing outside such a privileged toilet.
I paid up, but only on condition that he found us a seat, which he did. One seat, which I gallantly gave to Florence while I returned to play concierge outside the executive washroom.
We got off the train at La Rochelle, and went to stuff our bags into the baggage compartment of a stiflingly hot coach. But after half an hour in a traffic jam to get across the bridge to the island, suddenly we were in a holiday zone and it felt right to be sweating in a sun-baked bus. We were driving through villages of low, white houses with sunburn-coloured roof tiles. The people wandering about were half-undressed and totally unhurried, clearly on their way to or from the beach. Florence took off her T-shirt to reveal her bikini top, and I was now sitting next to a beach babe.
Signs by the roadside promised cheap bike hire and fresh seafood, or pointed the way to campsites, hotels and holiday villages. Even the posters for the itinerant circus, with its garish clown and lost-looking elephant, managed to give off a holiday buzz.
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