by Tim Roux
“So they don’t mind things getting smashed?”
“They just blame us.”
“Don’t things get lost?”
“All the time. Papa and Maman blame that on us too.”
I snorted. “I think that it would be easier simply to believe in ghosts, not least because that is what you’ve got.”
“I am not sure that it is a ghost. It might be just a poltergeist or something.”
(Um). “Poltergeists are ghosts.”
“Oh, oh well. I’ll tell Maman and Papa that you think there is a ghost in the house too, and see how they react.”
Either Geneviève didn’t tell them, or they didn’t react at all, because nobody has ever said anything to me except to update me on all the stuff they’ve lost. I once tried to exorcise it myself when nobody was looking, but it just ignored me.
* * *
The house at Valflaunès is a complete tip. We haven’t tidied up for days – not since Mum and Dad left in fact. I make less mess than my brother Mike in the ordinary course of things, but he cleans the place up more vigorously when he is ready to do so. I hate housework; it’s a total waste of time. Mike gets motivated once the debris builds to a point where it is seriously obstructive of our everyday activities, but it is a few days off reaching that point yet.
The other trigger for tidying up is when we expect to invite people back, specifically women. I was briefly at school here in Valflaunes when I was eight years old, and I have managed to keep in touch with a few friends from that time when we have visited here during summer holidays. Mike didn’t really make any friends at his school in Claret as he was only five years old then, but he has developed his own relationships now off the back of mine. My best friend here is Thierry with whom I used to trade and compare Pokémon cards – those were the days! The other is Luc. Anyway, through them and all the other people around here who accept us as quasi-locals, we have managed to infiltrate the university crowd in Montpellier which is a rich source of romantic encounters, even over summer, as many students stay on rather than go back to sing on the hilltops of the Auvergne, or whatever they are supposed to do.
Most of our focus is on women, of course, however much we pretend to be self-sufficiently enjoying each other’s company. And they play the same game. We are forever concentrating our efforts on the one we are least looking at until we move in to close the deal. I like the pretty stroppy ones – that is both ‘pretty, stroppy’ and ‘pretty stroppy’ – a bit like me, I suppose. We hook up at a party, or even sometimes in the street having been introduced to each other by friends, there is an explosion, we do our thing – go swimming, drink a lot, hang around in bars, restaurants and clubs, go for walks, get passionate about each other – followed by a series of minor explosions as we gradually decouple, finalised by a massive bang as one of us slams the metaphorical door on the other and vows never to see the other again – a promise we usually manage to keep for at least a year or so (the fact that Mike and I live in Brussels for ten and a half months of the year more or less ensures that).
Mike is very different from me. I sometimes wonder whether he is that bothered about the athletic side of relationships, as against the homely cuddly bit. He loves a cuddle, he always has, but he seems much less interested in ripping off their panties which I have to admit is the primary appeal of relationships to me – the chase. It is hackneyed, I know, but it happens to be true. If you see a piece of mouth-watering candy, why wouldn’t you want to unwrap it, peel it, suck it, savour it, and spit it out when the flavour has turned flat and sour.
I don’t know what Mike is really up to in his love life. I wondered at one time whether he mightn’t be gay. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he had been but it wouldn’t have been quite right either. Anyway, we both lost our virginity in the same room with two girls from school, Nele and Laura, and he was appropriately enthusiastic about it all then, so that probably settles that.
The problem with the house looking a mess when people come back is less that they care and more that it gets in the way of the smooth progress of conquest. They start asking if a wild boar has hit it (we actually get sanglier in our garden), and then they begin to twitch about, sliding a few things back into place, and cleaning caked food off surfaces (like the floor) when I want them to be applying 110% of their attention to me instead.
So the place has to get sorted, and I therefore have to work on Mike for a few hours, persuading him to accomplish his pre-party trick of making the place devoid of messy distractions. I normally have to bribe him in some way and then forget to pay him, a fact that he only recalls about a week later in the middle of a heated argument.
We still have fantastic arguments, usually at a time and a place that suits my bio-rhythms, if I am being honest. I get “bedornered”, I poke Mike, he reacts, we scream at each other ever louder, we swear at each other, we slam real doors in each other’s faces, we do our own thing for a few hours, then we settle down with a glass of wine and have a good laugh, go out, whatever.
It is a pattern we have repeated for twenty years, and I suspect that it will only change after we reach forty and lose all interest in life, or something, if we should ever get that far. I privately reckon that I will go in a car crash and that Mike will mourn himself into terminal illness a couple of years later, although maybe we will end up as brothers in our nineties sharing a bachelor pad on some coastline somewhere, the loves of our lives having slipped away, time passing slowly but peaceably as the sun bakes the day and a gentle wind ruffles our hair.
I hope that neither of us becomes bald. That really ages you, makes you look like you have been stripped of all further romantic use. I’ll settle for losing my hearing or teeth or something. You don’t really need those at ninety. You no longer feel hungry and you cannot bear loud noises. Mike will have problems with his legs, and I’ll sit there grunting like a farty old bulldog whose sleep has been disturbed.
That’s seventy years off, but I sometimes like to think about it. It puts things into rosy perspective. Better than the premonition of the end of the world that keeps assaulting me, anyway.
So forget seventy. It’s hamburgerisation for all of us, apparently.
* * *
Mike has prepared lunch – saucisson, cheese, bread, salad (which I used to hate and now love), tomatoes, wine and peaches. He has set up the table on the terrace because the one in the house is laden to bursting with other stuff. We’ll knock back a couple of bottles of wine and have a lazy afternoon - what generations of us Lamberts (men at least) have called 'paradise', and we will not be the first to argue.
Chapter 2
Natalie is lying here beside me. She is a typical French girl - stick legs, pinhead butt, minimal waist, tea-cup breasts, slinky face, doll-like. I picked her up last night in the boîte. I was doing my cocky, cock-you dance which mostly has the desired effect, and she slithered into my terrain until we were officially dancing together. She is a friend of a friend – Bernard. I watched her checking me out. It was because she sort of knew me that she agreed to come home with us.
We have had a couple of girls go hysterical on us when we have driven them out to lonely Valflaunès, fearing rape, murder, the lot no doubt, and we have had to take them home promptish to calm them down. There was no problem with Natalie.
Mike was showing no interest in the boîte last night, in fact I think he spent half the time walking the streets of Montpellier, breathing the air. I thought at first that perhaps there wasn’t anybody his type on the floor but, on reflection, I think he is probably pining for Sarah. She is exactly the woman for him – tragic, miserable, soulful, four to five years older than him. I actually find her quite interesting myself, but if Mike wants her, he can have her.
That’s brotherly love for you.
I think that is where he has gone now, up to the château in Freyrargues. I heard the car scrunching on the gravel earlier. Too bad that there is only one car, but we cannot afford to rent two. If Natalie wants
to go home, I will have to stall her or she will have to ask someone else to collect her.
We got in at four or five this morning. Mike was driving and was more-or-less sober. Natalie and I were wrecked. We tumbled into bed. When I woke up just now, I wasn’t sure whether I had even penetrated her, but I am more or less still inside her, so I must have done. I wonder if she will remember. I wouldn’t mind getting up and having a pee, some cereal and a cup of coffee. That will mean waking her. I have no choice. She is pressing on my bladder, and my bladder is urging me towards the toilet.
I turn under her and she slips onto her side without the slightest resistance or noise. I worry for a second whether she might be dead or in a coma but, on careful examination, I can detect her breathing softly.
Mike has left the breakfast things out on the table on the patio which is masked from the line of sight of neighbours by a thick covering of trees bordering the farm track which is used by vine-harvesters. I like to sit here naked having my breakfast, even when I do not have a guest, but it is more exciting when I do. Occasionally I misjudge the occupancy of the house, and a girlfriend of Mike’s discovers me there, so I always lay a towel on the tiles beside me, just in case. Once Mum barred me at the last minute from making naked acquaintance with the wife of the Mayor who was visiting. If Mike is bringing anyone back by car, he phones to warn me. I have always preferred to be without clothes, and isolated, discrete, Valflaunès is the perfect place for it.
Natalie arrives downstairs just as I finish my third cup of coffee. She is wearing my dressing gown. She skirts round behind me and drapes her arms over my shoulder, allowing her right hand to squirm down my stomach while she kisses the back of my head.
She moves round to my front to ease herself on top of me. “Good morning,” she says.
We speak in French. I can chat up girls in three languages - English, French and Nederlands. Mike can do English and Nederlands, but remains embarrassed about the hesitation in his French, although this disappears with repeated applications of alcohol.
“Where is your brother?” Natalie asks me.
“He has driven off somewhere, probably to see a girl in Freyrargues.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure that the car isn’t here. It is usually parked at the bottom of these steps here, or in that parking bay over there, and I heard it being driven away earlier.”
“Just checking. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.” She gets up, eases off my robe, settles herself in the chair to my left and helps herself to a coffee. “It is very peaceful out here,” she comments. “I love having breakfast with the sun shining directly onto my skin. Nobody can see us?”
“Nobody. The grounds are completely fenced in and the trees are too thick to see through.”
“Do you ever make love out here?”
“Sometimes.”
“You are a love-them-and-let-them-go type, are you?” she suggests, starting to conduct sufficient personal research to indicate that she wishes to extend our relationship beyond a one-night stand.
“Not necessarily. I don’t like to hold onto people against their will and I don’t like to kick them out either. It is normally a question of mutual consent when we break up.”
“What is the longest you have ever had a girlfriend?”
“I was with someone for nine months. She was probably my most serious relationship.”
“Not very serious if it was only nine months.”
“It was, but her parents moved on to Hong Kong. People don’t stay in Brussels for more than three or four years.”
“That must be frustrating for you.”
“It hasn’t mattered too much yet.”
“And have you had many girlfriends around here?”
“Yes, I have had a few. We have been coming here most summers for the last fifteen years.”
“So you have summer flings, then.”
“I have whatever happens. I don’t plan anything much.”
“What happens in Freyrargues?”
“We met a family there are few weeks ago. They are there en masse – the parents, their daughter Fiona, her husband John, John’s parents the Hardings who were involved in a kidnapping a few years ago, their daughter Sarah, who was also kidnapped and who is the one that Mike is interested in, a friend called Peter, another older friend they picked up called John who is a retired policeman, and us, which includes my parents when they are around. It is an endless party over there – quite fun, actually.”
“Where are your parents now?”
“They have gone across to Agay, the other side of Saint-Raphael, to visit friends. We used to live there once. They’ll be back on Tuesday.”
“So you can do what you like until then.”
“We can do what we like at any time. They never stop us doing anything, although Mum can blow up sometimes, usually at my Dad.”
“They argue?”
“Constantly.”
She wrinkles her nose. “That can’t be nice.”
“We are used to it. It is no big deal. It worries Mike sometimes. It doesn’t bother me. They aren’t going to split up or anything. It is quite reassuring to be surrounded by people who behave worse than we do.”
“I hate it. My parents argue all the time too. I cannot bear being there.”
My chances of seeing Natalie again may be fading – still it is better to know now.
She gets up. “Do you mind if I have a shower?”
“Help yourself.”
“Do you want to join me?”
The prospects are looking up again.
* * *
Mike returns mid-afternoon to say that we are invited to Freyrargues this evening, if we wish – Natalie too.
Natalie agrees to come, but we have to swing by her parents’ house for her to change, which entails making polite conversation with them for half an hour over a suze-cassis. The father is a ball of fire who keeps flinging me 'Have you just been fucking my daughter?' looks. Just to goad him I make it extremely obvious that I have, several times, and maybe with another bout to follow later.
Natalie’s parents even argue in front of us over something to do with an aunt, and then over what happened to his screwdriver he left in the kitchen, and then he started questioning whether Natalie shouldn’t be staying home tonight, a speculation crushed emphatically by Natalie who has not the slightest intention of being grounded.
“Bye, Dad. Bye, Mum. Enjoy yourselves.”
“These two tell us that you are going over to the château at Freyrargues.”
“Yes.”
“And you are invited?”
“Naturally.”
“And where will you be sleeping?”
“Don’t wait up. That isn’t decided yet.”
“We would like you to come back here within a reasonable time.”
“Night, Dad. Don’t stay up,” at which point she saunters out towards the car. Mike and I shake hands with her parents and follow sharpish.
* * *
We find a huge party of people spread around the garden and into the swimming pool, with the Earl and Countess of Affligem (Fiona’s parents) presiding magisterially, if self-effacingly, over the throng. We should probably go and pay our respects but they are surrounded by people. The Earl does wave at us though.
“We need a swimming costume for Natalie,” Mike decides. “I’ll ask Sarah.”
“I don’t think Sarah’s would stay on Natalie,” I caution.
“Oh, they have millions of spare costumes lying around. She can have any size she likes. Do you want to swim, Natalie?” Mike asks her belatedly.
“Yes,” she replies.
“Come this way then,” Mike encourages her – smooth talker. He wants to check her out and to demonstrate to Sarah what a kind-hearted chappie he is, which he undoubtedly is. I keep telling him that girls prefer the bastards to the toadies, especially English girls, but he ignores me. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” I mutter to myself. I
f he really wants Sarah, he is going to have to listen to me sooner of later.
He is facing stiff competition. There are all sorts of new faces at the party, most of them seemingly intent on picking Sarah up, and some of them really knowing what they are doing. Well, only one looks to be a real threat – a really foxy guy who gives the impression of being half-artist and half-banker – ‘soulful financier seeks impressionable English woman for conquest’. I watch them talking for a second or two, trying to figure out whether there is a real threat to Mike’s chances here and, if so, how I can help him, while Natalie stands there smiling enchantedly. She has resisted Mike’s invitation, so he has gone off on his own. I nod towards Sarah. “That is the one that Mike is after,” although that has become obvious as Mike approaches her to inquire about a costume for Natalie.
John, Fiona’s husband, comes over and I introduce Natalie. “What’s going on?” I ask as there is suddenly a shrapnel of shock that emerges from a group of people near the Affligems.
“God alone knows,” John replies. “When you are as bored as this lot are anything can shock you.”
“Why are they bored?” Natalie asks, breaking into a perfectly acceptable English.
“Too much money, not enough brain power to spend it on,” John comments dismissively. “Party all day, party all night.”
John’s friend Peter approaches, winks at Natalie, and drapes himself over John in much the same way as Natalie did with me on the patio this morning. “You will never believe it,” he begins to confide exclusively to John.
“What?”
“Inspector John claims to have found an arm rotting in his garden – a woman’s right forearm. He thinks it has been there some time except that it should not still have so much flesh on it. He is baffled.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What was that?” Natalie asks me, her shock confounding her understanding. I explain. “Oh how horrible,” she adds appropriately.