Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  Chrissake! I have been back in France six weeks, after a five-month stint in Australia working two jobs, scrounging to get back here. French car registration had been the last thing on my mind. Although I have been harping on to Loup about having our own legitimate address. But he is hell-bent on leaving no trace. The gendarme is busily tapping something into a mobile screen,

  ‘Madame, your address is Chemin de l’Homme Rouge La Ciotat, n’est ce pas?’

  ‘Ur, en fait Monsieur, non…we live here now…en fait, we have just recently moved,’ Bloody hell, I’m no good at lying… the Gendarme will guess the truth… that we actually moved two and a half years ago!

  ‘I’m afraid the fine has been automatically generated to your old address. I assume you are collecting the mail?’

  ‘Ah oui, bien sûr, Officer.’

  ‘Make sure you go to the Préfecture and register your vehicle to your new address Madame. Toute de suite!

  And I hope you enjoy your holiday’, farewells the Gendarme.

  Unable to get his breath around the English ‘h’. So sexy, if he wasn’t a policeman who’d just sent me a walloping fine to our fraudulent address. And worse, ordered me back grovelling to the Prefects.

  ‘Certainement pas!’ yells Loup, defying me from going. And I certainly don’t insist.

  ‘We’re not paying any fucking fines’.

  So I begin to flex my new outlaw’s muscles.

  ‘But what if they stop me at the airport, and take away my passport?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous Freya, you know most French people throw their fines in the bloody bin!’

  In a country where the signage is foreign, playing dumb and breaking the law is easy. On the other hand, it isn’t difficult to work out that ‘Passage or Accès Interdit,’ means one simply is not supposed to go there. Especially when followed up with ‘Entrez à vos risques et perils’! The sign that I love most says ‘Sauf Riverains’. Except river-people? I recall my early running explorations around Auriol, seeing this sign everywhere. Why, when there was no river in sight? I then remembered rive droite and rive gauche, the banks either side of the Seine in Paris, and Loup confirms that a ‘riverain’ is someone who lives along the shore, a resident of that bank. Even with absolutely no river in sight, a shore-dweller had come to mean a local. How exquisite.

  During my quest for these invisible shores, I pass by homes and gardens to envy; the centuries-old farmhouses and massive barns are best. The ‘Mas’, that tumble and ramble forever. Old France fringed and frayed with stone along her minor chemins. Today I seek out this old France. Away from Pascal and his disease. Striding out, down the bleached length of the canal, in the opposite direction from industry, across the bridge between the have and the have-not’s, emerging into a landscape transformed by water. I wind my way up past olive and wine groves, the barns in ancient stone that spill out toward me; the Lavoir Romain, a water-feature from Roman times, where the women would gather to do their laundry. The ankle-deep pool now floats with plastic wrappers and squirms with cigarette butts. For a long time, I mistook the cigarette-butt French term ‘mégot’ for ‘maggot’ and the ugly visceral association remains.

  If I work the ancient pump-arm vigorously, I hear the gurgle of water surging up from the viaduct rushing through the pipes, shooting out the sculptured spout. I rip off my runners, and want to keep going, shorts and singlet and sink my whole skin in. But shyness and the maggots hold me back. Instead I admire the genius of the Romans and the aesthetic of the French. The day I introduce the Lavoir to Loup, it’s as if it were my very own discovery. For a while, he lets me coax him there after work, under the shade of two enormous plane trees, and we work the pump, excited as children. One pumps furiously, while the other peels off sweaty shoes, or the pumper races to beat the water along the pipe before it gushes out the other end.

  For a while, it is our sacred spot. Calmed and soothed by the shade and water, we return to our white trash trailer better people. Loup surprises me one day by inscribing a heart with our initials into the papery skin of the majestic Plaintain tree. And later, after a quarrel, we christened it ‘ours’. Later, as stringent water restrictions impinge on the ‘right-siders’, the locals start bringing their cars there to wash them. More and more rubbish floats. More and more mégots squirm. I have since searched and searched, but in the three years passed, the skin of the plane tree has peeled and flaked, and there is no sign left of our teenage love. But the majestic twin trees and the flush of water still reign.

  Today I am on a mission to get to the train station, as I have two trains and another long walk, to reach La Ciotat where Loup will meet me after work. And late, after the crowds swarm past on their way to a barbeque of sardines or moulles et frites, Loup and I will head to a deep cove, and dive into tourmaline bliss. The journey will take nearly four hours, but the sea at the end of the day is worth it.

  This first walk is seven kilometres, and I revel in every step... tracing the narrow D70, veering off on the Chemin de la Rabassière… the Gare at Saint Chamas is at the hilly end. Once, it would have been a beautiful feature, but now it is neglected, and unmanned. At first this confuses me: where am I supposed to buy my ticket? But then when approached on the train by an officious SNCF guard, I learn I can pay on the train itself; for an extra euro or two. Today however, as on my previous two trips, I ride as a guest of the SNCF. Whenever a guard approaches, I smile, ready to reach for money, but these last few assistants have been the opposite of officious. Polite and preoccupied, they ask for nothing. So I push aside my guilt for not blurting out as I used to, ‘Excusez-moi Monsieur, but I need to pay!’

  In frustration, Loup will harangue me ‘we take nothing from the system…all these taxes I pay, all these years we’ve put into this economy, paying your fucking health insurance, and still you have to pay, they haven’t figured out you are my wife yet…do I need to remind you about the Préfecture? Wanna hear more stories about my building guys who abuse the system? Freya, they know how to bend the rules. You have no idea!’

  But I am unconvinced. I fear that one act of dishonesty will lead to another. So today, I travel free but uneasy on a sparkling new train, my neighbour a friendly woman about my age, from Guadeloupe. I confess to having not pre-bought my ticket, and feel less alarmed, when she admits brightly, ‘Moi non plus! Ce n’est pas grave, Madame.’

  I am in the company of a well-dressed freeloader. The woman’s tight greyish curls are shaved close to her head, accentuating her cheekbones and limpid eyes. Her smile is of course, white against her macchiato-skin. I find her most elegant. My islander neighbour fans herself constantly. ‘Mon Dieu!’ she cries. ‘This heat, ce chaleur. It is unbearable, ce galère!’

  She goes on and on, as if offended by the inadequacies of her motherland.

  ‘Chez moi, I have air conditioning partout…my work, my home, my car…I don’t even notice the heat if I don’t wish to!’

  I agree that yes, this heat wave is awful, but don’t bother tell my neighbour that chez-moi, we don’t even have a fridge, let alone air-con, water or electricity. Although I know little about Guadeloupe, except that it is a French-speaking Department, my assumptions about entitlement are happily overturned.

  ‘Tell me about your country,’ I ask in French.

  ‘Alors, elle est magnifique, there are many beautiful beaches…’

  ‘Il y a les montagnes?’ I interrupt, not crazy about tropical beaches.

  ‘Bien sûr, well of course, we have volcanoes, forests, rivers, cascades…tout!’

  She tells me that her sister lives in Paris, and her daughter and grandson here in St Chamas. We talk effusively about our grandsons, and I wonder if she would move to France to be near them?

  ‘Non, never, even though I miss them. I adore my Island home. Anyway, they come to visit once a year, and I come here twice a year.’

  I pursue the question of autonomy for Guadeloupe. My exotic black neighbour scoffs,

  ‘Why would we wa
nt Independence? We have everything we need. Our life is merveilleuse.’

  A twinge of envy pricks: that these two far-flung countries, geographically and culturally distinct, share a common language and are enriched by a long, if challenging, exchange between their ‘old’ and ‘new worlds’: content to be related. Another reason to cringe; my homeland is conspicuously un-related: white culture too easily superficial, and black culture too easily ignored.

  Years earlier, on my rides through Aboriginal land, I had discovered that white-man’s ‘empty’ means overflowing out there. Abundant emptiness. An old Aboriginal Aunty spoke of the land as her skin. There, I hunted respectfully for a place to hide my tent amongst its folds. The skin absorbed my tent into itself, so that when I returned late from a hike its yellow dome was lost to me, completely. A row of sentinel ghost gums glimmered, their pearlescent limbs, dancers in the dark. After tracing and re-tracing my steps, they finally lead me home.

  ‘Did you feel it too, that skin, Pascal?’ Or did you not give it time… were you already impatient for the ‘Au délà’?’

  Once camped by a remote waterhole in the Kimberley, my cycling friend and I experienced a sensation that had no explanation: a visitation to each of us in our separate tents. A startling tangible vision. A grandfatherly warning that we were on someone else’s ground. We had ignored the sign asking us whitefellas not to camp there. But we were on bikes. It was dark. We thought we were different. What would my pilgrim friend Ilona have thought? This was lucid, insistent, more stirring than any encounters from my former beliefs. Or was it all from the same source?

  ‘Les galères font le galérien’

  “The galleys form the convict”

  Victor Hugo.

  During my second train trip, from Marseille to La Ciotat, I sit near a bunch of boys bopping and rapping loudly. No one on the train seems to mind; a sign that all is right with the world, when thirteen year-old boys of various ethnicities aren’t ashamed to sing together at the top of their voices. And when singing loudly in public is nothing to take offence at. I wonder whether this might happen in Melbourne.

  Thinking back on my conversation with the woman from Guadeloupe, I find a paradox. The French expression I have lately learned to describe something hellish, like the current heat wave my friend called ‘la galère’, defines in fact the way my own homeland was ‘civilized’. With galères and galleys rowed this time by white slaves. By convicts rowing with no free will, no idea of what might lie ahead. But knowing they could never return to what lay behind. It was a slow death, whichever way they turned. Advancing their heavy galleys across a shark-infested sea to a snake-infested land. Clunkswoosh, clunkswoosh, clunkswoosh. Heaving oars against timber and water. Dead weight around their ankles.

  But I am the first to defend my larrikin ancestors against the powder-nosed-princes who begat Loup. My feisty pioneers: they battled and broke the Englishmen’s law. And the law of nature; of drought followed by flood that nearly broke them, but didn’t. Loup calls me bad mannered and uncivilised, and I call him prissy and pretentious. We have fun with our pseudo-patriot wars. Knowing that in fact, Loup has no manners, and I am over-polite.

  But I am not so polite these days, as the heat spirals without relief. ‘I know I’m losing it’ I confess to Loup, my loss of control accelerating.

  ‘I know I must leave.’

  But before I could leave, Loup and I retrieve some dignity, putting some grace and fun back into this misère we have created together. An opportunity to break the law, another minor misdemeanour, redeems us. My daily escape of running into the hills is becoming impossible. Tearing my calves on thorns and withered plants spikey from dehydration, I start to resemble their thorn and spike. On rare days, if the mistral isn’t a searing fan, running the length of the canal could be a reprieve, the wind teasing the water, a rush of ripples. I recall the previous two summers, slogging my way back to the hut, peering into that sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes Yarra-brown water, wishing like hell that I had more gumption.

  For fuck’s sake Freya, just go IN… Don’t worry about those signs or getting caught, play dumb!

  But upon seeing on separate occasions, bloated bodies, a car chassis and a baby seat bobbing, I gagged. One corpse, I figured was a wild boar. The other, larger, I still don’t know. It appeared during a lonely two-week period when Loup was away in Strasbourg working on the family house, and I was not invited. We were accustomed to seeing burnt out car skeletons along the bank, and ‘règlement de comptes’ killings were not uncommon. In fact, a car with three bodies inside was found incinerated outside Loup’s work, last Christmas.

  I told myself this ballooning whitish blob with macerated bits of floating tripe must be a cow. But there were no cows to be seen for miles around here. Not live ones, anyway. Stop imagining the worst, just because Loup was away and the hut could not be locked, and any of those nasty men who were after Loup could come calling at any time and I was freaking out. So out of defiance, I left the broken glass doors wide open to the cooling dark; illuminated my solitary interior with our mini-solar lamps, and listened to France Inter or France Culture on the radio, playing music all night long from the ‘Festival d’Avignon’. Which ironically was live. Just up the auto-route.

  Sometimes I would kill my loneliness by going for long drives. One night I found myself circling the monstrous girth of the petro-chemical plant, hunkered on the other side of our hunting reserve, in search of an all-night store which might sell me snacks and wine. I found my oasis; a tiny épicerie stacked roof-high with all kinds of alcohol and enough goat’s cheese, potato chips and Lindt to stave off my hurt from the abandonment.The young Arabian shopkeeper emerged from behind a curtain and chatted amiably. The first exchange I had had in a week.

  Still with so much water under the bridge, real and figurative, the bodies and the signs along the canal crowd my imagination. The scariest warning features an image of a man falling backwards; arms and legs splayed out like a spider that knows it’s done for. And Strictement interdit au public is unequivocal. After all, this is the canal that cradles much of Provence’s water supply. Understandably, the EDF (Électricité de France) has purpose built the sides of the canal to carry water, not to encourage human bathing. The steep concrete is suitably unwelcoming, but there are regular security points of survey: rusted steel ladders, sloping down into oblivion. I remember being taunted by those ladders. Begging Loup to come too. No way he had said, that water is filthy! Haven’t you seen what goes down there? As if he doesn’t realise that is what I do all day. Observe floating carcasses and imagine.

  But I don’t give a damn anymore. I’ve had enough of wait and watch. Three times, I have turned at the bottom bridge to run back home and three times, spied a dozen youths having a ball in the water. Jumping off the bridge, balancing on the steep sides. It can’t be that dangerous. I regret not being young and carefree, being boring and obedient. And then, halfway back to misery hut, I pass a steel ladder descending. There is no one around. No other walkers or joggers stupid enough to venture out in this galère.

  Done with being a goody-goody.

  I find a little shade near the ladder. I spy a long piece of bubble-wrap spiked on a prickle bush. Laying the plastic neatly under a log, I survey with pleasure my riverain seat. Slowly I sit and peel off my runners, leaving my socks on, thinking they might give me grip on the way down, I whisk off my t-shirt, thankful for once I’ve worn a running bra; I give one last furtive glance up the canal and back. No-one. I can see the tops of trucks hurtling past on the road on the other side of the canal and I can see the shutters of the big house in the pines opposite. Like all shutters this time of the year in Provence, they are shut. Finally, I feel ready. Avoiding a drop like spider man, I waddle down on my bum, knees bent up into my chest like a duck. The rusted rails are right there if I need them. But it is surprisingly easy to get in and I can even stand without toppling. Although the edge is slimy and it wouldn’t take much to slip
and break a coccyx, or several teeth. Clinging on to the lower rail, I lunge into the water where to my delight I discover that the current is weak. I let go. Arcing back I float… kicking gently, barely rupturing the warm surface, up and down… following the bank. I cannot believe the relief…. the pleasure of wetness licking up and down my body.

  I cannot believe that Loup and I have endured three infernal summers here without once gliding in. Gliding in to this serenity… with almost religious ecstasy, I relive my baptism as a fervent young believer… dunked in white gowns into deep waters, ‘bearing witness’ to my congregation. At such burning intensity, my faith could only last a short time. Now, I have more in common with the Common Carp that nibble at the sludge. Nevertheless, this body of water which Loup and I traverse without pause; to go to work, go to the tip, do the laundry, do the shopping, to catch the train, to paradoxically buy water; takes on new, transformative power.

  But we are on the wrong side. The non-law-breakers, who lay claim to viaducts, swimming pools, hoses, taps, baths, showers, sprinklers, washing machines, dishwashers and flushing toilets are on the right side. I think about what they would think: would they be sympathetic? Would they call us, and our way of life originale? As Éloise did and then never extend an invitation, afraid that our lack would cause embarrassment at their poolside champagne and hors d’oeuvres? Would I be any less discriminatory if the roles were reversed?

  I open my eyes wide to the dazzling sky, unafraid now of that old sun. Or of being on the wrong side. I am in the water and nothing can hurt me. As I swim, reborn in this fluid dominion, one of my socks falls off… I duck-dive down to retrieve it. The commotion stirs up all the dirt settled on the bottom. The water is instantly opaque. I shudder momentarily remembering late spring when after so much rain, the canal stayed brown for three weeks. But then convince myself that this will wash away, along with all my toxic thoughts. Getting out of the canal is ungainly and comical. Slipping and sliding, I resort to all fours, clinging to the ladder, stooping against the steep incline of the concrete. Quack quack. Drying myself with my t-shirt on my bubble-rapped log, I cannot believe the transformation. Returning to our hut beside our pungent ditch, the useless hot fridge and the thermometer that reads 36 inside, now seems less depressing. For a while, I feel in control again. I cannot wait to entice Loup down to my new discovery.