I’d heard it on the train, guessing it must mean ‘awesome’.
‘Each day I walk the ten kilometres to the chateau and back…vous pouvez venir and walk with me….’ offers JPC Laconte the 3rd. ‘Je serais très content.’
The flattery is working; I step higher in my heels. I adore that the French employ the word ‘content’ for the English glad or happy. Somehow it conveys a more permanent state: envelopment of enduring goodness. Again I’m tempted to wallow. Rescued by the Baptist rebuttal:
‘Merci, c’est gentil, but we live far from Marseille; I come here only on occasion.’
Of course I could not entertain this friendship, though innocent. Loup would definitely not be content. So JP3 and I accompany each other just until the naked statue of David (a convincing copy of the original), and I am thankful we do not pass any more naked barbies. Instead we exchange small life facts, in French. I learn that he was once in love and married, but has since had a string of lady friends. And that as I suspected, he does not feel the need for fidelité.
‘At my age’, he says, ‘I just want amitié’.
Ah yes, friendship with benefits works at any age. But I’ve waited nine years to marry the man I love, so for once my fidelity will stay fierce. My past benefits having amounted to an ample insurance scheme. Random sex without follow-up or a polite coffee, or even friendly sex with a polite text message après, no longer fills me with fear of missing out.
La Canicule, Heat Wave at the Hut, 2015.
“The thing with heat is, not matter how cold you are, no matter how much you need warmth, it always, eventually, becomes too much.”
Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword.
Today Juillet 2, midday. The temperature creeps up over 39 degrees inside and the whole of France is on alert. (Pissed off: Loup’s theory again that everything that is bad is feminine). La canicule, which will climb to 44, is declared on France Inter ‘to pose a serious public health problem’, and I worry again about the omnipresent odour of our baking shit.
Do we, in fact, pose a serious public health problem?
I switch the radio instead to France Culture, and hear a piece about slowing down, as if I need any encouragement for ralentissment, about people preferring to take an overnight commuter train, rather than arrive at their destination too hastily by plane. At the close, one woman retells a Native American Indian parable about the old chief who, after the arrival of the first trains to his village, takes the inaugural ride into town. And then instead of leaving the platform, he proceeds to sit and wait. Upon being asked why he is waiting, he replies that ‘my body has arrived, but I must wait for my soul to catch up.’
Just like my preference for the back roads. Anything but straightforward. Somewhat like listening with an Australian ear to an Indian parable re-told in French. Loup rings at lunchtime, comme d’habitude. His habitual call to see if I am ok. His colloquial, confident work voice, efficient and hurried, asks,
‘Ca va?’ Like our lazy Australian ‘howzitgoin?’ A throwaway line. A dispensable street inquiry. Seldom sounds sincere, seldom waits for a reply.
‘Please don’t ring me to ask me how I am. You already know the answer,’ I mooch, with sulking and shame. But when Loup doesn’t ring, of course it is worse. Some days I fear that to speak out loud, (for at the hut, I rarely do speak,) might shatter the fragile bubble in which I hide. Ashamed that I have nothing new to recount. Some days, the tyranny of distance I have put between my daughters and myself is an ominous silence that I fear must not be sullied by small talk with my husband.
Some days, alone with France Inter, I feel nothing but the serrated edge of my reward: for choosing my husband over my children, over my ageing parents, my baby grandson. In fact the voices on the radio cannot obliterate the guilt I feel at never making the right choice. There is no right choice. No right choice between my husband and my family, between Australia and France. So I bounce between both, never settled. Some day, the carefree ricochet of my elastic life is about to catch me in its knot. Today as usual, when Loup rings, he is driving, and it is a strain to hear each word. The panic in his voice is alarming.
‘Freya, you’d better go somewhere where you can get internet…you need to bring your ticket forward…also, look for cheap flights for me. And you’d better stay put rather than be out running when I get home…we need to discuss things urgently.’
The bad news we have been awaiting has arrived. The banks will have our blood. As Loup had warned, the final denouement would come with surprising speed, after dragging us along with excruciating deliberation during the past three years. Monsieur Jean-Loup Zorn has now just eighteen days to settle his debt with the bank.
‘Merci pour votre comprehension… Veuiller agréer nos salutations distingués….’
The letter Loup receives rolls out phrases of grandiose and vicious eloquence. Odd, how a language can rise to great heights in honour of damnation. It is obvious that I must leave if I don’t wish to inherit my husband’s considerable debt. However, what is patently unclear is that despite the three-year process: Loup declaring through the correct and legal channels his firm’s collapse; the damage done by huge jobs gone unpaid, then going into voluntary administration, that the bank still has a right to exact its revenge. And to charge a retrospective three years of interest! Apart from my father, I have not seen a man work with such dedication. Our marriage has been a ménage á trois; Loup’s work living with us twenty-four seven.
Ironically however, now that we are officially losers and living a clandestine existence in no-man’s land, we can experience more freedom. Loup is paradoxically happy to desert his desk, and set up camp at the dotted end of the thinnest lines on my maps. His slow surrender has allowed us to swim naked in hidden cascades and play in the lap of France’s remote country.
His ambition finally thwarted, Loup urges me to live to the full the next three weeks of our freedom in France, but warns to prepare myself for worse.
‘But I just don’t get it, surely if you are bankrupt, you cannot pay three years of interest…isn’t that the whole point? Can’t they negotiate a compromise…isn’t that what your lawyer has been doing for you? Isn’t that what’s taken so bloody long? Three years of living in different countries, me coming and going, living a farce for a marriage!’
‘Putain Freya, don’t you ever listen?’ snaps Loup, unable to hide his frustration and anger with me for being so thick, for not understanding the French law of commerce.
Again.
He curtly explains that the Bank can do this, because he was pressed to use a personal ‘asset’ as guarantee for the business loan, which was in fact another loan with another bank on another ‘investment’ property, on which he is paying off a considerable credit. Mute and heavy, I feel as though the odour of our excrement is the perfect metaphor.
Except that it is not figurative.
It is baking right next to me. Fucking not metaphorical. I can’t imagine even Victor Hugo finding a poetic angle. Although Loup informs me that his celebrated countryman wrote standing up, naked, and boasted of seducing multiple jeune et jolie sexual partners well into his eighties. A pernicious letter from a bank and a pile of shit on a 44-degree day might have been right up Hugo’s alley. Maybe I should get naked and see what Aurélien is up to.
Trespassing.
"A woman can walk miles without making one single step forward..…To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing."
Fatema Mernissi
But no, that is the madness talking. Better to stretch my new outlaw’s skin in a different way.
Pascal, do you remember when we broke the law, you, Loup and I? And how good it felt? It was merely trespassing, nothing too brave, but I started thinking about it today, when I transgressed for the fifth time here in France. It all starts like that, doesn’t it, a minor misdemeanour here, a petty theft there, an accidental abuse of public services, a slight case of domestic violence and before you know it, you’r
e gambling your life away with scar-faced men, spending your winnings on their tattooed prostitutes who fuck you, and then those putes get fucked in turn by their scarred pimps. And it’s too late to pull out, in the back of a dingy delivery van in the putrid tic-drunk swamps oozing out from the black forest.
Not the kind you want to eat.
Well, apparently that’s what the clairvoyant has told your sister, about the way your father ended up. I’ve tried to block out those ‘revelations.’ But an image insinuates itself into the bedrock of our marriage, your brother’s and mine, like rusty water.
Drip drip drip.
Perhaps you alone discovered what became of your father? Is that why you stopped sleeping washing eating? Stopped engaging with the world outside your fortress? Perhaps that’s why your Psychiatrist, the Doctor whom your sister Odette would spear if she got close and none of us would blame her, sent you a letter ordering,
‘Monsieur Pascal Zorn, you must on the following day present yourself at our clinic to be confined in the Psychiatric Ward until we determine it is safe for you to leave. Failing to do so will eventuate in your immediate incarceration.’
Excuse me if I haven’t got the translation word-perfect, but this is the gist of the letter, and I agree with your sisters and Loup, that to find this in your letterbox one fine morning in June must have signalled the death-knoll for you. To be threatened, no told, that you were about to lose your personal liberty.
Why wait? You thought, ‘why give them the satisfaction?’
I admire you for taking the option away from them, Pascal. For taking your life into your own hands: funny expression that, because a person can do a lot wrong with their own life, in their own hands. Chèr beau-frère, I admire you for not giving in to incarceration, but I wish you could know how much that hurts those of us left behind. I wish you had asked Loup to stop you.
Do you remember? Ours was a banal introduction to law breaking. It was Christmas Eve 2 a.m. and you and Loup arrived bleary from France. At the airport, you were playing the clown, blending in, in your Akubra hat, into the country you’d never seen. Whilst here, you upgraded that hat with an RM Williams top of the range, but how often did you get to show yourself to the world in it? I hope at least Nicole took pleasure from the shadow it cast over your eyes. Brim and eyes both turned up slightly at the outer edges, in tune with the swaggering sweep of your moustache… revealing a glint of something that only you two knew.
Anyway, there we were, driving all the way at 3 am up to the Dandenongs, to a little hideaway where we would recuperate, spend a quiet Christmas, and then drive the long way, to arrive at Cape Bridgewater for the wedding. I have to confess Pascal; I’d been wishing it were only Loup and I.
After all, your brother and I hadn’t seen each other for five months, and we were on the cusp of our wedding. Ungracious thoughts as it turned out. Having you there brought us an unexpected joy. Warmth, depth, and a word I use without really knowing it, soul… Maya knew though, my husky…yes, you and she were instant soul mates. She sensed it, as only a dog can.
Are there dogs where you are? I believe so. Perhaps you’ve met the hero husky that the Russian family told us about? Remember, on Christmas Day, when we went for a long walk through the forest under towering trees and ferns taller than a building, shadowing deep gullies absent of people. We gripped Maya’s lead, to not upset the native animals. We met other orphans of Christmas, as they waited for their dream to unfold in this foreign land. In their excitement at meeting a fellow-husky, they gave us the gift of a story.
Loup retold it to me the other day. A story the Russian family knew intimately. They were at pains to tell us it was not a myth….
A group of their friends had set off by canoe to explore a remote gorge.
They had with them their trusted husky Sitka. Upon reaching rapids, they were forced to portage their canoes up and over cliffs. It took them longer than they expected, the weather turned foul, mists obscuring their way. All of a sudden Sitka started a low growl, then a high yelping …
The group thought perhaps a bear. Sitka planted herself in their path, her yelp becoming a long howl.
They froze, but there was no bear, or any other threat that they could see. They were in a hurry to get their canoes down to the river again before night set in.
So they advanced, but Sitka repeated her performance. They tried to console her, still approaching slowly through the fog, their canoes starting to weigh heavily above their heads.
But Sitka would not shut up! Each time they took a few steps, she blocked their progress. Then in a blink, she was gone.
Right before their eyes, she threw herself over the edge, to show them once and for all, that they were in immediate danger of crashing to their death.
Sitka alone had sensed the precipice.
Our impromptu clan poised on a narrow track under sizzling eucalypt-air, seemed a long way from an ice-shrouded cascade in Europe. But we bonded instantly, sharing through Maya some kind of magic. And Pascal, you held onto her more tightly, and I hugged her more closely and Loup never forgot her.
But first there was Christmas Eve.
One Tree Hill Road, Mt Dandenong, December 2008.
Before reaching the ridge-top hideaway, I wanted to show my guests the view, from One Tree Hill. A view of nostalgia; my flat city of Melbourne hugging tight the Bay and then stretching out toward the foothills. With my child’s eye, I would spot the lighthouse and its yellow arc that backlit the way down the dirt track behind the big bend in the Bay, where the ships made their sharp turn in the channel, the light sweeping down to the bowered end where my grandparents once lived. As a young girl, these galaxies of human-light were a marvel. As a young woman, my first boyfriend and I would tear up to the Mount to catch a summer storm marauding across the bay as the lightning struck out suburb after suburb. And our galaxy city would disappear down black holes. A shameful memory was when I got my first car, a Kingswood Holden with the gears on the steering column, and I shot defiantly up the serpentine road to the ‘Dandies’ after a horrible fight with my Mum. Not long after, my conservative parents acknowledged that their 21 year-old-daughter needed to bolt.
But when we arrived this Christmas Eve, the viewpoint was closed, wasn’t it Pascal. Barricaded and locked. A lot can change in 30 years. ‘One Tree Hill’ was now a thousand trees, obscuring the galaxies below. You and your brother were patient as I persisted. We crept through dense ferns, dampness up to our thighs, staking out the high cyclone fence until we found a way to climb through. It was 4 am. The City I wanted to share with my guests was still asleep under a billion lights: the shipping channel a lone indigo ribbon; Santa’s reindeers pulling sleighs, the ‘Skipping Girl’ still smiling down upon the Yarra and remnant bush beyond the trams of Victoria Street. To all of us who grew up here, an icon of wonder.
‘Oh shit, we’ve been sprung!’
‘I told you Freya! Putain, we’ve only been in the country an hour… you’re going to get us kicked out!’
‘It’s ok,’ I bluffed as the Security Guard bore down upon us.
‘Aahh…I’m very sorry sir, but my guests have come a long way to see the lights of Melbourne…they’re just off the plane from France…it’s my fault…I insisted on bringing them here…didn’t realise it would be all locked up, it’s all changed!’
You were brilliant Pascal…. You and Loup just smiled and said désolée and looked sheepish. You won the Guard over.
‘Strasbourg?’ repeats our new friend, ‘Well I’ll be buggered… my niece is over there on…whadyacall it…gap year? The bro and his missus are flying over for New Year’s…what’s that big market you have? Seen a bloody amazing video of that Cathedral…jeez the lights! Wouldn’t mind going meself…but not winter…nah, do they have the light show in summer?’
And so the four of us stood there on the slope, under the mountain ash silent in the night, exchanging warm nods handshakes and ‘Joyeux Noël’. Until the scent of freshly cut gra
ss and eucalypt could no longer keep us alert, and the idea of sleep suddenly took hold. And the helpful guard shone his torch so that we could find our way back out through the hole in the cyclone.
Boulevard Victor Hugo, our third summer at the Hut, 2015
Now is a very long way from that Australian Christmas: my first and last with Pascal. Today as I was driving home form the Laundromat and doing the shopping, I saw a traffic jam up ahead. So I turned off on a side road, intending to buy water, perishables and ice from another supermarket. I had already spent the maximum 16 euro-voucher at the first shop. This is how I did the shopping: doing the rounds with Loup’s lunch vouchers. (And making him sandwiches each day instead.) It was a time consuming and stressful task, when I ran out and had to use my credit card. My weekly challenge: to buy water and groceries for two people with the weekday-allowance of eight-euros lunch money was simply impossible. No sooner had I turned off, but I see two police motorbikes, and straightaway am waved to the side of the road.
‘Bonjour Madame’, the Gendarme peers through my window. ‘May I see your Permit de conduire?’
I rustle around in my sac. Sweating profusely. Hoping like hell the policeman doesn’t detect my un-bathed body odour of three days.
‘Ah, je m’excuse Monsieur, but it’s de l’Australie,’ red in the face guilty without knowing why. He regards my Australian licence with amiable curiosity, but then taps on my windscreen with a frown. Not like the obsequious prefect, but still with an air of admonishment.
‘C’est bon votre permit, Madame Gordon, but you realize you are driving an unregistered and uninsured car?’
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