The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

  After Unstad, the sea seemed to be full of surfers, although in reality there were only about half a dozen. I experienced a moment of acute anxiety and embarrassment. I wanted to get in quite badly, to feel the water on my face and go underneath the surface and get washed up like clothes in a washing machine. I needed that feeling of wrung-out saltiness. But I didn’t want to fall off in front of all these people. The wrung-out saltiness won and I began wading in. The magic still worked. For three hours I thought about nothing apart from the weirdly fascinating and endlessly frustrating process of trying to stand up on moving water.

  When I finally got out, most of the other surfers had got out, too. They were clustered around the Transit in the car park. The dogs came over first, tails wagging, licking my hands. I peeled off my wetsuit and hung it over the wing mirror to dry.

  The next to say hello was Xavier. He came to get the dogs and didn’t leave; pretty soon the other four had followed him and I had put the kettle on and someone went to get some extra mugs from the Transit and we were all sitting outside on the grass drinking tea. Everyone had wet hair and was salted and happy apart from the one called Jean, who had broken his leg falling off a footpath and wouldn’t be able to walk, let alone surf, for six months. Jean was from Paris and the others took the piss out of his accent, which was, apparently, straight out of the film La Haine. Xavier was the extrovert of the bunch, cracking jokes constantly. Nadine taught yoga in La Rochelle. Étienne was a Breton. He had dark curly hair and an old white Transporter that smelled like a fish and chip shop because he ran it on recycled vegetable oil. Benoit was a professional skateboarder who said everything three times, “Bien bien bien, voilá voilá voilá.”

  The dogs were called Cash, Magic, and Silence. They belonged to everybody.

  They all lived on a secret piece of land called simply “le Terrain.” By the time we had finished our cups of tea they had invited me to stay there with them since the gendarmes didn’t like vans at Vert Bois anymore, now that the right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen was so popular. Xavier practically spat his name on to the dusty ground. They piled into the white Transit with the dogs and I followed behind. It was hot enough that I was wearing only my bikini, despite it being almost November.

  Le Terrain was a few miles inland, at the end of a dirt track that burrowed through dense undergrowth that scraped the paintwork on both our vans, like fingernails on a blackboard. We reached a clearing. Étienne’s Transporter was parked next to an old Renault. Xavier tucked the Transit in next to the Renault and signaled for me to go alongside. I climbed through the bulkhead, pulled on my torn and faded jeans, which had completely gone at the knees, and hung my wetsuit on a tree to dry, like the others had. The air was heavy with the smell of pine and tamarisk trees. There was a fire pit in the middle of the clearing and surfboards were heaped up like debris around the edges. The late-afternoon October sun was filtering through the trees like a kaleidoscope. There was a shabby-looking wooden chalet with a small veranda and a couple of tents. A sign hanging off a massive evergreen oak read “No Hunting on Pain of Death.”

  The land belonged to Xavier’s uncle. They weren’t supposed to be living there in vans because it was a nature reserve, but the only house anywhere near it belonged to a Parisian politician who hardly ever came to the island. When he did he liked to walk around naked and have sex in the garden with his gay lover, so he didn’t want to call the gendarmes, either.

  Oléron is France’s biggest island after Corsica. According to Xavier, it gets more sunshine than anywhere else in France, even the Mediterranean. It was certainly true that it was as warm that October as it ever gets in Cornwall. I ripped the knees of my torn and faded jeans right through and made a pair of torn and faded shorts. It didn’t matter. This really was the end of my journey. I wore them to walk up and down the beach collecting pieces of driftwood for no reason. I wore them to drink coffee in the morning, sitting cross-legged on the roof of my van, which rested in the long grass at the edge of the clearing like a horse out to pasture. In the evenings we all sat around the fire and drank red wine and ate with forks out of one huge saucepan. We washed in a disused playing field, where you could break into the shower block by climbing onto the roof and dropping down through a skylight. I took advantage of the sunshine to empty the van and clean it thoroughly from top to bottom, laying everything out on the ground in the hope that it would finally dry and stop smelling of old sneakers. I even spent half a day wiping the mold off the ceiling. Everyone said it looked much better when I finished.

  In the afternoons I toured the island with Benoit in his ancient four-wheel drive Renault 4, looking for waves. I’d told him I couldn’t go home until I knew how to surf and he seemed to think this was perfectly normal and offered to help me. I won’t bore you with the details of my many and tiny surfing triumphs and disasters. It’s enough to say that I forgot everything else again, even the fact that I would be back at Broadsands in a couple of weeks. Or, if I didn’t exactly forget, I successfully pushed it to the back of my mind. I spent nearly all the money I had made in La Rochelle in the big market in Saint-Pierre-d’Oléron, the main town on the island, where I bought bread and cheese and wine to share with the others around the fire. I was still there when October turned into November. And I was still there on bonfire night, the day before my twenty-fifth birthday.

  It was the day that Étienne filled up his van with all the cans of vegetable oil he had been saving up for his winter trip to Morocco. And the day the mist rolled in and obscured the sun for the first time.

  “We’re living in ’umidity, man,” said Nadine.

  It felt like the end of something, and it was. Benoit was due back at college in La Rochelle, where he was training to be a PE teacher. Jean was going to the Alps. Xavier was going to Paris to become the next Gérard Depardieu. Only Nadine was going to spend the winter at le Terrain, teaching yoga in Saint-Pierre and looking after Cash, Magic, and Silence.

  There was a big party at le Terrain that night. Not because it was my birthday, although everyone agreed that it was a happy coincidence, but to mark the end of summer, in the same way that bonfire night marks the start of winter at home. Bonfire night had been Andrew’s speciality. He adored fireworks, and making effigies to burn at the stake. He always chose someone we knew to model his Guy Fawkes on.

  People came from all over the island to the party. Most of them were surfers that I already knew by sight. Étienne borrowed a generator from a campsite near Vert Bois. He played music on an old record player he bought in a car boot sale. Car boot sales were going to be illegal soon, he said, morosely. Or at least, you would have to declare all the money you made and pay a massive tax on it.

  “Taxer l’imagination,” said Jean.

  “They want us to sell our freedom,” said Xavier. “And get a death-grip.”

  “Mortgage,” explained Étienne, seeing that I hadn’t understood Xavier’s translation.

  Somebody came around with a massive plate of oysters. I told them I had never had oysters before and Xavier wept with laughter.

  “Bon anniversaire,” he said, handing me a lemon.

  We drank copious amounts of red wine and a local spirit called Pineau that tasted like sloe gin, and then, when we were all very drunk, the generator ran out of diesel. I offered to play tapes in my van with the doors open, as long as somebody had some jump leads so I could start it in the morning if the battery went flat. Étienne said he had jump leads, and he said I should drive the van nearer to the party so we’d hear the music better. I stumbled drunkenly through the long grass and climbed into the cab. I hadn’t driven it for two weeks. My lovely van. My rusty, trusty van that had once belonged to Ben’s motorcross mates and then got me all the way to Nordkapp and all the way from Nordkapp to Oléron without once breaking down. Which was incredible, now I came to think of it. I leaned forward and kissed the steering wheel.

  Only when I turned the key to start the engine nothing happened.

  I tried
again. Still nothing. Étienne went to fetch the jump leads. Still nothing.

  My rusty, trusty van had finally broken down.

  26

  When everyone had established that what was wrong with my van was not something any of them knew how to fix, Jean called an old school friend of his called Thierry. Thierry said he could get me towed off Oléron and taken to something called the Garage Moderne. It was modern for two reasons. Firstly, if you knew what you were doing you could rent tools and lifts and work on your own vehicle for cheap, and secondly, at the weekends you would be serenaded by musicians, poets, and comedians who would come and perform for Thierry’s artist friends as they sat around on the floor in amongst all the tools and bits of engine, drinking red wine and talking about philosophy and politics. Which, compared to all the garages I’d ever known, was pretty modern.

  Thierry said my van needed a new starter motor. He could get a secondhand one, but it would take a while. Even with a secondhand one, the whole thing was going to cost five hundred euros. Luckily, because the garage was modern, I could work off some of it by playing my cello on Sunday nights. The rest I would have to busk for. The good news, said Thierry, was that I could stay for free in an apartment on the Quai des Chartrons that belonged to a friend of his. The only problem was that both the Quai des Chartrons and the Garage Moderne were in Bordeaux, several hundred more miles in the wrong direction. Xavier tried to cheer me up by saying that traveling theaters always kicked off a new show in Bordeaux because it was the hardest place in France to busk. He and Thierry both agreed that if I could make money on the street in Bordeaux, I could make money anywhere in the world. I was reminded of Oslo and felt sick.

  The apartment on the Quai des Chartrons was right opposite the Garonne River, in a terrace of huge and dilapidated stone warehouses built in the eighteenth century by rich merchants to store their hoards of silks and spices bought or stolen from Africa. In some later century the warehouses had been carelessly split up and turned into flats. Many of the original warehouse features remained, like the unplastered stone walls, so thick that the bedroom was actually scooped out of one of them. To get into bed I had to climb a rickety wooden ladder. I brought Hanna’s ribbons in from the van and hung them off the ladder. It was scarcely more luxurious than the van. There was no bathroom. There was no hot water. The cold shower was in the corner of the kitchen, separated from it by a curtain. The toilet was in another corner. The floor was tiled and the windows rattled in their frames. Instead of a fire there was an ancient leaky heater that burned petrol you had to pour into it from a jug, like a giant version of Jack’s Trangia. The apartment smelled like a filling station. It was also very noisy. I had grown so used to silence that I couldn’t sleep until I had unplugged the fridge and unscrewed the fizzing lightbulb in the bedroom. But I couldn’t unplug the taxi drivers in the street below who spent all night leaning on their horns, or unscrew the ancient pipes that gurgled like a swimming pool.

  Bordeaux is one of France’s larger cities, and it was a long walk from the Quai des Chartrons to the center. Xavier wasn’t joking, either. It was the worst place I had ever tried to busk. Worse than Bergen in the rain. Worse even than Oslo, because at least in Oslo there wasn’t this freezing fog that came in off the sea and stayed all winter. I had never been anywhere so cold, let alone sat still for hours in it and tried to play a cello. I was worried about my cello. The cold seemed to be making the wood contract. The front and back panels were coming unstuck. There were gaps along the seams. If only I could have wrapped it up in Jack’s Patagonia duck down coat. Or the red one Børge had taunted me with at Unstad.

  I looked forward to Sundays, when I played in the garage, because they gave me an old gas heater all to myself. It was a strange environment for music, but I was used to that by then. I hadn’t learned anything new in a while, but the big, echoing warehouse made all the old stuff sound much better. I closed my eyes and played my whole repertoire, chronologically, blending the pieces into one another. I’d start with Bach and Haydn, which would always remind me of those first awful weeks. Then I’d play “Summertime” and “Autumn Leaves” and “There Is No Greater Love,” which were the long road north and the silence and the strange dusty towns like Mo i Rana, where the old people gathered on the bench to listen. Then I’d play “Vocalise” and I’d be back in Tromsø, and Jack would loom large and my heart would ache a little. I’d finish with “Bruca Maniguá,” my version of it, which wasn’t much like the original anymore, and I’d be back in the van with Hanna, and we’d be singing those lines from the chorus about how the answers were in the mountains. I wished I was in the mountains, too.

  The whole thing took about half an hour. I wanted to learn something new, but without the van and the tapes to listen to I couldn’t remember anything well enough.

  Because my eyes were closed I couldn’t see my poor van in the corner of the warehouse with bits of engine all over the floor. Or the audience, which was composed of the kind of designer-clad artist-hippies I’ve only ever seen in France, all of whom were apparently as unmoved by music as the rest of the city.

  By December I was destitute. I busked and busked. I busked all day and sometimes long into the evening, too. I had chilblains all over my hands. And yet I made so little that after giving Thierry the minimum fifty euros a week I had virtually nothing left for food, let alone for the journey back to Brittany that I would have to make when the van was fixed, not to mention the ferry. But just as I was beginning to worry that I would spend the rest of my life sitting on some street corner in that big, uncompromising city, my cello in frozen pieces beside me and my van quietly rotting in the Garage Moderne, I met Romanian Georges.

  27

  It was the coldest day of all. So cold that nobody wanted to hang around outside for a second longer than they had to. So cold that a lady who worked in one of the posh jewelry shops on the rue Bijouterie brought me a cup of hot chocolate, evidently concerned that my fingers would actually freeze on to the strings. The hat remained resolutely empty. A tramp walked past. He spat on the pavement and told me to go and shag my mother. I packed up and wandered around the city, searching for a better pitch, but there was something wrong with all of them. Workmen were digging up the roads, doorways were full of people with clipboards collecting for charity, small choirs of children filled all the squares.

  The place Allées de Tourny was unrecognizable. Rows of wooden stalls had arrived overnight as if by magic. Whole streets of them had appeared out of thin air. The stalls had roofs and heaters and big bubbling cauldrons of mulled wine and hot cider. People crowded around to buy chocolate and pretzels, and a red-faced, potbellied man in a beret was playing gypsy jazz on a dented silver saxophone while his skinny, toothless sidekick played a double bass held together with tape. People were literally throwing money into their hat, which wasn’t a hat at all, but a hard saxophone case. A man wearing a blue striped apron brought them each a plastic cup of mulled wine.

  The red-faced, potbellied saxophonist put down his saxophone, took a big swig of mulled wine, and stood up, the beret balanced precariously on the top of his shiny round head. He scooped out the contents of the saxophone case and tipped the coins into a leather bag, which he stuffed inside his jacket. He caught me staring at the coins.

  “You are the one with the violoncello.”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his red face, took his beret off and put it back on again.

  “Come,” he said. “I will introduce you to my friends.”

  Romanian Georges led me in and out of the stalls until we came to an opening with a raised area like a tiny bandstand. He had a noisy discussion with the stallholder closest to the bandstand. The stallholder eventually laughed and handed Georges two more plastic cups of mulled wine, one of which he gave to me. Then he led me to the bandstand.

  “You must not play sad music. You must play Christmas carols.”

  I stared at him, openmouthed. I had forgotten all about Christmas.


  The place Allées de Tourny is the busiest Christmas market in France. There was a time when I would have been terrified of playing to crowds of people from a bandstand in the busiest Christmas market in France, but that time had passed. I would probably have taken all my clothes off and done it naked if it meant getting out of Bordeaux quicker.

  I set up on the bandstand and launched into “Silent Night.” The first phrase of “Silent Night,” anyway. I made the rest up. I didn’t even know if French carols were the same as English ones.

  After “Silent Night” I played “Once in Royal David’s City.” Then I played “Away in a Manger.” Finally I played ‘In the Bleak Midwinter.” I wasn’t cold anymore. The man at the stall kept giving people cups of mulled wine to give to me. By the time I finished it was dark, I had made nearly a hundred euros, and I was so drunk I could barely find my way home.

  “Silent Night” was my favorite. Over the course of the three weeks I spent on that bandstand I must have played “Silent Night” a thousand times. Nobody seemed to care. Probably because they were all drunk. I was drunk, too, every day by lunchtime. And the money just kept rolling in. By Christmas Eve I had enough piles of coins lined up on the mantelpiece in the apartment on the Quai des Chartrons to pay Thierry what I owed him and buy a ferry ticket back to England.

  I drained a final cup of mulled wine with Georges and the toothless bass player. Their bus left for Bucharest in a few hours. The journey would take three days. They’d miss Christmas, but Georges didn’t care. His wife had left him anyway. Divorced him because he got a passport when the Berlin Wall came down.