The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

by Catrina Davies

  It was a beautiful day. We followed an old path that often thinned to nothing and disappeared, forcing us to dismount and carry the heavy old bikes until we could ride again. It was hard at first with only one arm, especially to stop, but the exercise felt good, and by the end of the day Pierre had me laughing.

  “You just have to be patient, ma chérie.”

  After that I went out on the bike most days, exploring every inch of the lake, finding the remains of drowned villages and feeling inordinately happy to see the first buds pop out on trees I didn’t recognize. In the evenings I took to sitting on the terrace and drinking wine with Francis Philippe. He told me about his life and read me odd things from the ancient books that sat in piles all over the house. Once he showed me photographs of his wife, collected in an old album with yellow lace trimming. Francis Philippe told me she had died of cancer nearly ten years ago. It still upset him to talk about it. Pierre was in some of the photos, a younger, fresh-faced Pierre, on holiday from medical school, with a pretty brunette hanging off his arm. Pierre’s wife, Francis Philippe said. His childhood sweetheart. I was amazed.

  “Pierre has a wife?”

  “He had a wife. She left him for another doctor. One of his friends.”

  “Oh God, poor Pierre!”

  “He was very sad, but he is happier now.”

  “Pierre deserves to be happy,” I said.

  Francis Philippe looked at me with this old-fashioned expression he’d use from time to time, but he didn’t say anything.

  Sometimes Pierre would take me out for the day in his ancient Polo Coupé, which went by the name of Paulette. We went to Montpellier and sat on the Place de la Comédie and drank hot chocolate. We drove high up into the Cévennes, where it was cold, and ate steak and potatoes by a roaring fire. The first of March came and went. One unseasonably hot day we took Paulette all the way to the Camargue to see the flocks of pink flamingos and drink cocktails on the beach. It was here that Pierre told me his plan.

  “I have a holiday in two weeks.”

  “My cast comes off in two weeks.”

  “I know,” said Pierre. “That is why I think you should have a holiday, also.”

  I shook my head. “As soon as the cast comes off I’ve got to start busking. I’ve got almost no money left, and I’ve got to get all the way back to England. It’s going to take forever.”

  It was a daunting prospect, especially when Pierre said, gently, “You know your arm will need some time, some physiotherapy. You will not be able to busk immediately.”

  It honestly hadn’t occurred to me.

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  “I do not know. Until we remove the cast we cannot know if it has healed.”

  “You mean, it might not have healed?”

  “I am sure it will be okay, but you must give it time.”

  “I can’t give it time.”

  “That is what I am telling you. I have an idea. I have always wanted to be a hippie.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It is true. I would like to be hippie in your camion. I would like to take my holiday with you in your camion. I will pay for the diesel and you can do exercises to make your arm strong enough to busk. I will help. In return you will allow me the opportunity to be hippie. I have always wanted to do this.”

  I was speechless. Partly because of how incredibly kind and thoughtful Pierre was, and partly because of the dawning realization of how tough things were going to be. Pierre was right. At the very least, my arm would be wasted and weak. It would be ages before it was capable of the long hours of busking I used to do. And I would be horribly out of practice. And that was if it had even healed properly. You heard all sorts of stories about bones not healing, or healing funny and having to be rebroken and set all over again. In all the weeks at La Soleiade, I’d tried not to think about my cello, but now the thought of it hit me in the ribs where it hurt. I longed to play it. I longed for those old tunes and the sense of peace they brought me. It was like a hunger.

  “Where shall we go?”

  “I have always wanted to see the Alhambra,” said Pierre.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Granada.”

  “Spain?”

  “Southern Spain.”

  “Southern Spain?”

  “I thought you were busking from Norway to Portugal.”

  “No, no, that’s what Andrew was going to do. But he’s dead. I want to go home.”

  Home seemed so far away. Broadsands was part of another lifetime. I was veering so far from my old life I was afraid I would never find it again. It was months since I had spoken to Ben.

  “We can go to the beach. We can walk in the Sierra Nevada,” said Pierre.

  That night I asked Francis Philippe if I could use his telephone to call England. I offered him the tiny bit of money I still had left over from Bordeaux, but he brushed it away, offended. The telephone was an old-fashioned one with a round dial you had to turn with your finger for each number. Ben sounded unhappy.

  “I should have called.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You missed Christmas.”

  “I know. I broke my arm.”

  “Fuck,” said Ben. “How?”

  “I fell over on some ice.”

  “In Bordeaux?”

  “In the Alps.”

  “The Alps? You’re in the Alps?”

  “Not anymore. I’m by a lake in the south of France.”

  “I give up. You know you’re totally illegal now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No tax, no inspection, therefore no insurance. If something happens you’re completely screwed.”

  This stuff hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  “I opened your tax letter and did the SORN thing for you, so at least you won’t get a massive fine.”

  “Shit. Thanks.”

  “I suggest you throw away your MOT certificate. If you get stopped just show the insurance and the registration document. You’ll probably be okay.”

  I bit my lip.

  “We were worried about you. We almost called the police.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We talked about it.”

  “Who talked about it?”

  “Me and Jack.”

  They were worried about me?

  “Is he still there?”

  “Nope.”

  I caught my breath. “Where is he?”

  “In Portugal.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? Surfing his brains out, as usual. When are you coming back?”

  “I’ve got to go to Spain. It’s a long story.”

  “You’re not coming back.”

  “I am coming back. Just not quite yet.”

  After I said good-bye to Ben, I went outside and sat in the dark on the terrace in the old wooden rocking chair. I sat and stared at the darkness for ages, until Francis Philippe came and turned on the outside light. Huge moths hurled themselves at it. Somewhere far away a dog barked. He put a moth-eaten blanket on my lap.

  “What is the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You have bad news?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  What was the matter? Was it that Jack had left again? He’d come back. He was only in Portugal. In fact, he was closer to me in Portugal than he was at Broadsands. Anyway, what did I care about Jack any more? Now that there was Børge, and Pierre. Pierre? I was overwhelmed by feelings I couldn’t put into words. That was what music was for. That was what my cello was for. I needed to play my cello. My good hand was clenching into a fist. I had never gone this long without playing my cello. If only I could just sit there in the dark and play “Bruca Maniguá.” If I could just play that, I would feel okay again.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Francis Philippe was kind. I think he was worried.

  “My cello,
” I muttered. “I miss it, I suppose.”

  Francis Philippe shuffled off. He came back with an old guitar, which he placed in my lap, on top of the blanket.

  “I can’t play the guitar.”

  “Pierre said it would help you to try to use your fingers.”

  I picked it up. With my left hand I tried to find the melody from “Bruca Maniguá,” but the guitar was tuned differently from the cello and it didn’t work. I tried to pick the strings with the fingers of my right hand, but they were all seized up. It was like trying to open a gate whose hinges had rusted solid. God only knew what would happen when I actually did try to play my cello. I didn’t want to think about it. I put the guitar on the floor. I stared at the darkness.

  “There’s no point.”

  “You must have courage, ma chérie.”

  I folded my arms. I heard Hanna’s voice in my head and I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears. Instead I found myself almost shouting.

  “I’m bloody sick of people telling me to have courage. I’m sick of it. Fucking courage and fearlessness. Look where it got me. I can’t do anything. I’m completely fucking useless. Fear is there for a reason. To stop you trailing off through the fucking mountains and breaking your arm and fucking up your cello …”

  Francis Philippe shook his head. “Do you know what courage is?”

  “Doing all those things you don’t want to do because you’re too bloody scared. Probably because they’re so fucking dangerous.”

  “Non non non.” Francis Philippe straightened up and walked over to the edge of the terrace. He looked down at the lake for a while, then he turned to face me.

  “Courage is not about what you do. Courage is about keeping your heart.”

  I shook my head.

  “Si. Courage is from coeur. Coeur means heart.”

  I had never seen Francis Philippe look so serious. He marched out of the room again and came back with a yellowing old book. It was a huge Latin dictionary.

  “Courage,” he read aloud, “means to be who you are with your whole heart. To tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.”

  There was a pause, while the words sunk in.

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  “With music, for example. Playing the cello, for example. Or being a good doctor, like Pierre. Or a good wife, like my wife, for example.”

  “I can’t play my cello.”

  Francis Philippe picked up the guitar and put it back in my lap.

  “Then you will have to sing.”

  36

  I sat there for hours that night, picking away at the guitar, trying not to turn around when Francis Philippe shuffled in to check on me. It was for his sake, really, that I tried. I tried to write a song about Jack, a love song about loss and pain, but it was crap, and what I actually ended up writing was a song about Hanna. And it was good to be reminded of her, to remind myself of the things she had taught me, remind myself that I was free.

  Even when I had most of the words I couldn’t think of a melody, so I went to bed with it going round and round in my head like a puzzle. In the morning I knew what I had to do. It took most of my last two weeks at La Soleiade to learn to play the chords to “Bruca Maniguá” on the guitar, and then fit the words of my song about Hanna to them. It seemed appropriate, but it wasn’t easy. Mainly because I couldn’t play the guitar and I had to learn each and every chord from scratch, and also because my right arm was in a cast and the fingers that poked out of the end of it were so wasted that even trying to pluck open strings was a massive effort of will. I’d hum the song and try to match the chords and hope that Francis Philippe wasn’t listening, which I knew he was, and smiling to himself, because I seemed so much happier and the whole thing had been his idea. And then the two weeks were up and it was all over.

  Pierre cut the cast off himself with a penknife. My arm was yellow and covered in thick black hair. I was nearly sick when I saw it. Pierre seemed to think it had healed well, even though I could barely lift it up. I tried not to show how shocked I was. At least the fingers sort of worked, thanks to the guitar. Pierre opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. After the champagne we drank two bottles of red wine from Francis Philippe’s cellar. It was the end of March. The vines had sprung back to life. The birds had hatched their chicks on their little islands in the lake.

  “Do you want to try to play your cello?” said Pierre. “I will get it.”

  “No!”

  I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to.

  We left the following day. Francis Philippe folded me into a bear hug and gave me the ancient guitar as a leaving present. I tried once again to give him what remained of the money I had made in Bordeaux, but once again he wouldn’t hear of it. I was all choked up and couldn’t say good-bye properly.

  “There is always a place for you here,” he said. “You have le feu.”

  Pierre drove and I sat safely strapped in on the passenger seat with nothing to do but stare out of the window at the landscape drenched in sunshine and the meadows full of flowers and the foothills of the Pyrenees in springtime.

  I would have stopped and hung around in some meadow, but Pierre refused. Spain was a big country and Andalucía was away down in the south of it and he had a plan written down in the “notes” section of his guidebook. He insisted we kept going. In the early evening, after the Pyrenees finally folded into the Mediterranean, we stopped for the night at a small seaside town near the Spanish border called Collioure, a place of narrow cobbled streets, old wobbly houses and sandy beaches. It could have been St. Ives except for the fact that the sea wasn’t cold, and instead of surfers the beaches were full of tables spread with tablecloths and wineglasses and great heaving piles of shellfish waiting to be boiled alive.

  We left the beach where we had swum, drunk wine, and eaten freshly boiled shellfish, and walked up a flight of steps to the van, which was parked so that we could see the sea from the back step. I had missed the sea. The sky was inky blue, and a perfect slice of moon dithered on the horizon. Pierre picked up Francis Philippe’s guitar and began to gently strum some soft music that made me think of warm southern nights and starlit streets. He could play quite well. I closed my eyes. After a while the music stopped, and I realized that Pierre had begun to very gently stroke my face.

  I kept my eyes closed. It felt good. It didn’t feel important, or dramatic. It just felt good. Which was so confusing I pulled away.

  “It’s too complicated,” I said.

  “What is complicated about sex?”

  “I don’t want to spoil everything.”

  “We are friends. Why can we not also make love?”

  Pierre was still stroking my face. It still felt good.

  “Unless you do not want to.”

  I did want to.

  “But then what?”

  “I think love is like a good cheese,” Pierre said. “You enjoy it when it is ripe and then you forget about it.”

  My mind fought with itself. I had slept with Henrik. But I knew I never had to see Henrik again. And I had been very drunk. I had been in love with Jack. Maybe I still was. And Børge, well, there was that meeting on the Pont de Pierre, and the way I felt when I looked at his eyes. I didn’t have that same feeling about Pierre, the feeling that there was some purpose to it. He was just nice. The nicest man I had ever met. Did that mean I should sleep with him or I shouldn’t? Maybe there was no should and shouldn’t. Maybe it was all just up to me.

  “Sometimes I feel like life is this big game, only just when I think I’m getting the hang of it the rules change and I have to start all over again.”

  “I had a wife.”

  “I know. Francis Philippe told me.”

  “She had a lot of rules. Now I do not have rules. Because rules are always wrong. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

  Nothing happened that night, but we fell asleep together in my bed, side by side, and in the morning I woke with my head on Pierre’s shoulder, as
if it were a pillow.

  We left Collioure and followed the coast to Barcelona, stopping at roadside bars for espressos and freshly squeezed orange juice, drinking them standing up while flies pecked at our heads and swarthy truckers wiped the sweat from their foreheads with paper napkins. Just before we hit the city we turned inland and began to head toward Albacete and the Sierra de Segura, a range of mountains a little lower and further north than the Sierra Nevada. Night fell. The road emptied. Pierre decided to take advantage of the empty road and drive all night. I drifted in and out of sleep. In the early hours of the morning I was woken by the sound of sirens and Pierre shaking me and asking me for my documents.

  Pierre was calm, but then, he would be. I was having a mild heart attack, remembering what Ben had told me when I called him from La Soleiade. I hastily flicked through the papers, trying to surreptitiously remove the ones that were out of date. Fortunately Pierre, who could speak Spanish as well as everything else, distracted the policemen by chatting to them through the open window. I handed over the registration document, the insurance document, and my passport. Pierre seemed blissfully unaware that, even if my insurance certificate had been valid, he wasn’t on it. The policemen glanced at the papers. They breathalyzed Pierre and asked to see his passport. It was in the back, so he gave them his identity card instead.

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  It was nearly as good as having a cello. They handed back all the documents without reading them and sent us on our way.

  There was a national run on drink driving that Easter in Spain. Pierre got breathalyzed four times that night, and each time the police asked to see my documents. It was so ironic. Apart from the English policeman who kicked my tires at the Tyneside tunnel, nobody had once asked to see my papers in all the months I had been away. Until now, when half of them were out of date.

  I could see why the police were doing it. I counted thirty wooden crosses by the side of the road, each one piled up with bunches of flowers. Each one another Andrew, with dozens of shell-shocked friends and a grieving family. I remembered what Hanna had said about all the moments being precious. She was right. Life was so short, and so fragile.