Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  ‘Do you think we’ll get an invite Loup?’

  I still can’t get my head around not being invited to Odette’s for Christmas. I keep sifting over everything that has transpired between us, wondering where I went wrong. In the past, when I put a foot wrong with my belle-seour, it led to two years of being shutout. I take today's rebuff as personal.

  ‘Laisse tomber Freya, drop it! You know my sister … she’s probably pissed off with me!’

  Happily, the clear weather means that Skype works. I ring my parents and shed a tear with Dad, who is in pain with his cancer, but remains stoic and determined. My ricocheting life will in a month take me back to Melbourne, for Dad’s birthday, so at least we have that.

  Later that day Loup receives a text from his sister, saying that they are preparing for departure to Strasbourg tomorrow, Boxing Day, and will we also be ready to leave with all of Loup’s tools?

  ‘Man, that woman’s got balls.’

  But there is something to be thankful for: Loup and I will be part of the family again, even if it is a non-stop working bee, and for the sixth year, will be participating in Pascal’s dream.

  When we all roll in to Robertseau ragged after the ten-hour drive, Pauline and Claude are good-natured hosts, squeezing us in to their modest apartment, which overlooks directly the old family home. (Which I find perplexing, that Pauline never moved farther than across the street from where she grew up.) Odette and Yves sleep on the lounge room floor, giving Loup and I the other blow-up mattress in the spare room. Without doubt, Odette is gracious and spares no effort now that we are here, to make this a memorable time. We all work like crazy. On New Year’s Eve, Loup and my wedding anniversary, I help the sisters prepare a feast, and the six of us drink more than usual, playing games and fooling around. Telling jokes in Alsace and French. At midnight we rush to the upstairs window and lean out as far as we can to catch the fireworks exploding above the city. Loup is pressed right up against me with his hand on mine and I can tell that he is happy. Loup and I have only spent two out of seven wedding anniversaries together. So this one is rare.

  There are many reasons for me to admire Loup’s family, but working alongside them in difficult circumstances, and in particular alongside the task-driven Odette, tops them all. When two weeks later we all return south, winter is well underway. Yves and Loup spend a day at the hut installing the little potbelly we have brought back from Strasbourg, and Odette and I saw old planks and palettes and little Lâhn collects pinecones. Seeing the first plumes of smoke and sparks fly out of the flue above our hut we leap for joy. Another happy time; for which I am grateful to Loup’s family.

  My next job is to dig the dunny hole. It is a particularly proud memory, to have instigated our ‘throne’ as the French call it. I remember insisting on staying in the hole until it was finished, with Loup helping me tackle the hardest limestone. But that was the night I was flying from Paris to Melbourne; it was a comic sight seeing me transform myself without a shower into a respectable commuter waiting for the TGV at Aix en Provençe. I did not want to desert Loup. To abandon him to three months of severe winter. But that is what my ricocheting life entailed: to return every few months to Australia; to visit family, to work and save for the next trip back. It meant long months apart. And it didn’t always serve us well.

  Clutching at straws and Bali Balo: Two years later.

  Loup did not believe in failure; we did not believe in giving in. This is why we choose to live in a vomit-yellow grimy hut. But neither would we want a palace. The threatening letter we received from the bank has been put on hold. Loup has advice from a lawyer, which is buying us time. Loup’s business is dying, but we are its life-support. Loup is by its side seven days a week. Giving it all he’s got. I overcome my fear of the roads, and drive into his work during the week: over the boulder-strewn dry prairie which makes me think I’m Thelma or Louise, dropping down past monstrous petro-chemical tanks and pylons, around the algae-scum water of the Étang de Berre, braving the several freeway interchanges until I arrive in a sweat at Loup’s work.

  Félicité his secretary shows me how to type letters to people with significant three-name titles, and prepare ambitious tenders. It is a challenge I thrive on, diving into the complexity of French language; a lexicon of construction and legal terms way beyond my experience.

  Even better, the camaraderie is a welcome change from my solitude with Pascal. Félicité and Loup’s assistant Mathieu are wonderful loyal people, and once again, prove what a waste it is not to have formed friendships here in France.

  ‘Non chérie, we must keep work separate’, Loup insists whenever Félicité invited us over to her and her husband’s place.

  The heat is on whenever a big tender had to be submitted, and I am given the job of taking the registered packages to the Bureau de Poste to meet the deadlines. Most of these registered letters we type are of repeated requests for late payment, or arguments over contracts and clients trying to exhort extra work for the initial low price. Loup’s adrenalin was contagious, and we were with him all the way, doing whatever was needed.

  One Friday Félicité takes a phone call, which I could tell was abusive. She is so cool it’s like cinema.

  ‘Lock the front door’, she whispers, ‘vite! Pull down the blind!’

  My desk is the closest to the door, so I race over and do as she says.

  ‘Get down, here under my desk, vite!’

  No sooner had I crouched down next to her, than a man comes, yelling and bashing on the glass door. It isn’t the first time men had come abusing Loup through the door. Better though that Loup was out of the office, as the baseball bat his old boss kept for such encounters was something we did not want to see used. Once the irate sub-contractor gives up and retreats, Félicité and I crawl out, shaken. The heat is definitely on. Loup was in fact scrupulous about paying his sub-contractors, even before the client had paid him. He would pay them out of his own pocket. But he was ruthless if the subbies tried to screw him. Back home at the hut I feared being alone, hiding behind our broken shutters, scanning the cyclone as the suspicious white van with two men would occasionally circle slowly our perimeter. Each night I feared one of these vans would follow Loup home.

  Our summer Sundays at the office become a routine, which I come to enjoy. At least we are together, and I like doing my bit to rescue Loup’s enterprise. These are hot airless afternoons where we save money by not turning on the air conditioning. After finishing the cleaning, (Cagé Cajot had long been given the flick), and Loup had exhausted himself with scanning his files, we would sometimes drive another 45 minutes back to La Ciotat in search of the sea and a swim. Relieved and softened by our night swim, we would drive the hour and a half home floppy with fatigue. All the way back from our old haunt le Mugel on the east, to the garrigue on the west side of Marseille. As we skirted the high-rise apartments above the bay still buzzing after another manic Mediterranean weekend, Loup would keep himself alert at the wheel by singing ridiculous songs. German or Alsacian folk songs. Or his favourite, the bawdy Bali Balo, an old French street song, with each verse getting progressively more filthy.

  ‘Bali Balo dans son berceau

  Bandait déjà comme un taureau

  Fils de putain lui dit sa mère

  Tu bandes déjà plus que ton père

  Ah-ah Bali Balo

  Bali Balo est un salaud’

  In English, the rhyme is lost, but the gist is this:

  ‘Bali Balo in his cradle, already hard as a bull,

  Son of a bitch says his mother,

  You got a hard-on bigger than your father,

  Ah Bali Balo,

  Bali Balo is a little bastard…’.

  Loup would end up in fits unable to drive, and I would feign offence. It was like a cyst of tension had burst in his brain, derailing him from commerce-county into lurid-land. By the time he’d sung the fifth verse, which is offensive, Loup was a different person. Who really cares, was what I thought, after
all that we’d been through and was said to be still coming. Who cares if we’re being downright dirty? It’s a rare thing to make Loup laugh these days.

  One October Saturday, it seemed the interminable heat was bowing out. As the morning drizzle cleared and the soleil returned, I came home from the Laundromat to see plumes of black smoke rising from behind our hut. We lived in the perfect venue for a pyromaniac, but it would seem unlikely that we had escaped the hottest windiest summer just to be burned under the first rains of autumn. As my car rumbled over the last ditch in the track, I could see Loup bent over our 40-gallon drum incinerator. Beside him was a towering pile of files from his work. The very same ones that it had become our routine to scan all weekend, since the letters from the bank had become more frequent. In Loup’s hand was our petrol can for the generator. His demeanour was carefree and reckless.

  ‘Geez Loup, you nearly blew your face of last time you did that!’

  ‘Ne t’inquiéte pas, anyway all your putain toilet paper made it too wet to start.’

  It’s true that to avoid over-filling our hole-in-the-ground loo, I put all our used paper in the incinerator and burnt it off whenever the mistral allowed. Which in fact had not been the case all summer.

  I too joined in Loup’s gusto at ripping hundreds of old files apart and chucking them on the fire. Most of them went back years, and Loup and I had spent long hours trying to make sense of their abysmal inconsistency. The previous owner was according to Loup a brothel, and that was the kindest thing that could be said about him.

  ‘Why do you have to keep all this shit Loup? Do you really have to spend all Sunday scanning everything?’

  ‘Freya you idiot, I have to keep everything for the last ten years!’

  Which seemed excessive to me only two years in, and now the bank was foreclosing on us.

  ‘My little finger tells me I’ll find some dirt in here, when the time comes.’

  Loup seems to thrive on revenge. Especially eaten cold. A cultural or family trait? Or a result of all his struggles? Revenge seems like a waste of energy to me; nevertheless, if the ‘brothel-man’, dressed in his fancy white pants and pointy shoes and lemon shirt and gold chains and flash car eventually gets his karma, I will not feel sorry. Loup’s little finger was right: there is dirt to be found. For a start, he’s screwing Loup’s accountant. And not just monetarily.

  Hiding from the huissier, the bailiff.

  Two years and then a few desperate months of life support: Loup decides I must leave, return to Australia, before the bank takes everything. For the second time this year, Odette warns us to pack everything away, hide what is valuable, which for each of us is only our bikes and our I-gadgets, but what about the sewing machine and your two pieces of furniture, your bed, she insists.

  ‘Ils prendront tous!’ They will take everything she says, ‘it happened to a work colleague, même tes livres, tes vêtements, tes boites, tout!’

  I cannot imagine them hauling off our books, clothes, and shoes, but am most concerned about my recently purchased car, which cost me a small fortune in Australian dollars converted to Euro. Odette says we must hide everything. So, we pack up our life again into boxes, my sewing machine and easel and treasure collections: stash them in a garden shed at Agostina’s place, secrete my car, and in our new daring modus operandi take to the hills.

  Le Deffends, Wonderland, summer of 2015.

  “Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?”

  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

  The images I hold of Wonderland are infused with meaning. Or are they? More likely, their majesty defies meaning, standing instead aloof and apart. An attempt to describe them insulting; indecent to drag majesty down to my own mawkish terms. But our shame had already done that: Loup and I had already shown ourselves unworthy of this last adventure. Oh Pascal, we behaved badly. Did you witness our vulgar rupture of the silence…. our failure to reach the top… our egoism? Burgeoning the list of our failures.

  Four months have passed since the suicidal plane crash in the Alps of Haute Provence. And since I cancelled our early spring hike. The word I heard on France Inter that terrible day, pulvérisé, to describe the plane and its human cargo, that terrible irreversible English and French word, pulverise, still haunts. As do the days and days following France Inter interviewing the pilot's work associates, the disbelieving families; desperate for clues as to how such a harrowing thing could be possible. How suicide could turn so effortlessly into homicide.

  Avoiding the precise location, but with a lingering wish to pay my respects, I consult my maps, and plan a trip which will take us deeper into an adjacent river valley. The valley of the Haute Bléone. And up to the higher reaches. Not high peaks by alpine standards, but for a flat-lander 3,000 metres is pretty high. At this point, I am unaware that among those scattered in the ravines below the Massif des Trois-Évêchés are a mother and son from Melbourne. Two extraordinary people whom I learn later devoted their time and spirit to their community, wherever they were. I am ashamed of my ignorance, that my knowledge gleaned from the French radio is so scant. As if the seal of my bubble actually does prevent me from engaging.

  Once last year, before the young pilot inflicted his self-loathing onto babies and parents, exchange-school children and opera-singers, Loup and I explored the lively Bléone’s flanks and her smaller tributaries. We got spectacularly lost as we climbed a disused track, traversing tumbles of rocky scree at dizzying degrees; not my favourite aspect of hiking. Susceptible to vertigo, I have to crawl on hands and knees to avoid throwing up. Regretting that no matter how much I channelled Heidi as a little girl, I was never going to be a natural in the Alps. Never a Brigitte Muir.

  We pass memorial stones in honour of soldiers and resistance fighters lost in World War Two. Hours later, having crawled and scraped our way up the goat track, we clamber back down a washed out cliff, past a medieval church and cluster of houses. The only thing setting Chanolles apart from Utopia is a battered plane propeller and a memorial to three Officer’s wives and their five infants, who crashed there in 1948. Never suspecting that these same mountains would take more children from the sky, we planned to return to Wonderland as soon as we could.

  The morning sun is behind the trees as we set along the trail, the air smells of wild berries and cedar. Loup, normally a fastidious packer, has left the preparation to me. It’s an easy overnighter, after all. Perhaps this is where our trouble started. I am used to my heavy pack, and tend to not count the extra grams, whereas Loup insists on micro wherever possible. We have splurged on a super lightweight tent, and a compact gas burner. But I will carry cans of sardines, and a two-nip bottle of whisky, so I give Loup the 600ml bottle of wine. The chocolate, fruit, bread, and water are my other heavy items. He carries the salami, cheese and tent.

  ‘Why not lump a bit of luxury, and enjoy ourselves?’ I counter, unaware that the extra 187mls will become an issue.

  ‘Well this is good, a gentle easing into the climb’, says Loup cheerily, as we skirt the litter of boulders beside the creek…. ‘We should be nicely primed.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s perfect!’ I leap with joy. To be away from the mistral, the arid hut. Set free.

  ‘Look, Loup, look!’ I cry in amazement at every bend, but am soon reminded that Loup likes to be left in silence. For him, these moments in the mountains or forests are about escaping from people, about disengagement. For me however, this is my opportunity to share, to re-engage. One of us is desperate to switch off, the other ecstatic at finding common ground with others. Loup cannot possibly know how good it feels as I greet each fellow hiker with a ready smile,

  ‘Bonjour Madame, Monsieur…Bonne promenade…Je vous en prie…Bon courage’

  Later, when I reflect upon this, je comprends. I get it, that I could not possibly know either, how urgently my husband needed silence. His weeks were a cacophony of sound: of him yelling on the building site, yelling on the phone, being yelled a
t. Loup would often admit,

  ‘It’s sad to say Frey, but if I’m nice, the work doesn’t get done. If I yell, it does.’

  Another example of our disconnect: Loup brings the yelling home without realizing, and for a while I would remain mute against his barrage, but then launch into my own attack. It was not a pretty cycle. I was fed up with being a wallflower. Or an escargot, sloping off into the mistral-scoured scrappy garrigue. Back on our trail, instead of extolling aloud the beauty of the silver birches, their dappled bark and chartreuse leaves a delicacy I didn’t realize I had been missing, I keep quiet. And think to myself about my father; how he loved these trees and insisted on planting them in his Australian garden. Must have been his Danish roots. I reflect on how he would have stopped in awe as with each step, around every curve, appeared another revelation. And I miss him and realize too late our sacred common ground. I would have like to introduce him to my mentor, in her birch-shaded garden back home.

  Heading toward the cooler air under firs, the trail becomes an enchantment of moss-dens and come-hither birdcalls. A local fire fighter tells me later that these same birds stopped singing for a week after the plane crash. And as we climb I am conscious that each foot forward is inherently flawed: us being alive and human. Happily, our footprints are concealed by the moss, forgiven by leaf rot and indulged by the industry of insects. But I am still uneasy about my liberty, about the gift of life we take so blithely. Then without warning, we are thrust out again into bleached scree. I scurry over the glaring heaps to reach the shade. And wait for Loup.