The Folly of French Kissing

by Carla McKay

  ‘I don’t have to justify giving presents to people I like’, he told Fern. ‘I’m bored of all my clutter, that’s all.’

  He went upstairs and she could hear the door slam. I suppose he’s on his bloody computer, she thought. I wish I’d never saved up to buy him that – it seems to have taken him over. Just lately, Ben had spent every evening on it, only coming down, reluctantly to eat supper. Once, a couple of nights back she had got up in the night and seen his light still on at 2am and heard him still tapping away. When she remonstrated with him, he told her he had an essay to finish that he’d forgotten about.

  Early the morning after she and Judith had talked about Ben in the shop, Judith rang her. ‘Is Ben still there?’ she asked.

  ‘No, you’ve just missed him. He’s gone to school.’

  ‘Fern, can I come round?’ Judith sounded anxious.

  Fern told her she could come round straight away before she had to go and open the shop. Suddenly she felt rather afraid. This was an odd request from Judith. ‘Why? What’s up? Is it about Ben?’

  But Judith didn’t say. ‘I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes,’ she said and put the phone down.

  20

  Today was the day. Ben stood at his window looking down in the street below. He tried to focus on the plane tree opposite but the more he tried, the more it became blurred, its leaves fusing into a great green blob. It was just before dawn and he hadn’t slept all night because his head was buzzing – not with excitement exactly but with something indefinable, a feeling of great lightness and emptiness. It was a high of sorts though not like any high he had ever achieved through smoking weed. He felt unanchored, unrooted like a spec of dust dancing in the air. A title of a book he’d noticed in a bookshop came to him: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That was it, that was exactly how he was feeling now. The odd thing was that with this strange buzzy lightness, came no feeling whatsoever. He knew he should feel something on this day of days but he just couldn’t. He tried now to summon a feeling purely as an experiment, but it wouldn’t come, not even when he thought of his mother. Normally, thinking of Fern with her pretty, anxious face and evident concern for him simultaneously gave his heart a tug and made him feel guilty, but not now. It was as if his neural connections had all been pulled out of their sockets – how weird was that? And how good was that too? Feelings were bad, and feelings had to be stopped. And somehow, in the last few weeks, he had achieved that by thinking only of his plan, his solution – and it had worked. If he had any feelings, he would probably take the time to tell all the unhappy people in the universe how he had achieved this, because surely everyone would like to know how to stop their own feelings. The only people who completely understood him were the people he had found in the suicide chatroom, Chatting to Death.

  These people who came from all over the world had become his closest friends because they all had the same interest in common – ending their lives. It was all they talked about but it was never boring because in discussing their deaths and all the detailed planning that was going into it, they also discussed their lives. There were some who had been at it for years apparently, which when Ben started corresponding, he had found ironic. Often though, he learned, they had tried and been ‘rescued’ by well-meaning friends and relatives. What was strange was how it was sometimes the other chatroom correspondents who had called the police or whatever; on the other hand, some of them positively encouraged action. ‘Go on then, do it. Keep going’ read one message when one of their number whose sign-on was Eyeball told them all how many prescription drugs he had just taken. Ben never did learn whether Eyeball lived or not but he had stopped corresponding so perhaps he had managed it.

  He himself had particularly struck up a relationship with a girl in California whose sign-on was Penfox. Penfox was cool. She was a little older than him but she looked out for him. Every day she wrote: ‘How are you today?’ like she really cared. And when he replied that he couldn’t take it anymore, she urged him to reconsider. She told him that she had been suicidal for as long as she could remember and yet there was no reason for it that she could think of. Her family was cool and her school had been OK; she just never felt comfortable inside her life. She said she kept hanging on though hoping it would change one day whilst knowing it wouldn’t. The chatroom was her only way of getting any relief from her ongoing depression.

  It was like that with most of them – they knew these guys, their virtual friends really, really understood what they were going through, unlike all the doctors and psychiatrists they were sent to see. Ben had been careful not to correspond with Penfox in the last 24 hours in case she realised how near he was getting to his time and tried to trace him or something. He didn’t want anything getting in his way now.

  When Judith arrived at Fern’s, she wasted no time. ‘There may be nothing to worry about, Fern, but on the other hand there just may be,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t ask questions now but just telephone Ben’s school and check whether he got there. Could I go up to his room and look at his computer?’

  Fern felt icy cold and faint. She didn’t want to face up to what Judith’s concern suggested. Deliberately, she pushed down her feeling of rising panic. ‘He won’t have got there yet anyway,’ she said angrily. ‘Judith, what is this? Why don’t you think Ben will be there? Has he said something to you?’ But Judith was half way up the stairs. ‘Phone as soon as he should be there’, she called. ‘I won’t be long. I just need to check something’.

  Heart hammering now, hoping against hope that she was wrong, she booted up Ben’s computer and looked around her at his transformed room, almost empty of possessions, de-personalised. No note. Bed made, unslept in probably. Everything uncannily neat. A life put on hold, or tidied away. Quickly she scanned the computer screen and accessed the internet with no difficulty, Ben’s password being automatic. In the space you typed the website address you wanted, she clicked on the arrow to the side to scroll down the recent sites he had accessed.

  There was only one, dozens and dozens of time over. Sweating now, she double-clicked on it. Please let me be wrong, she intoned to herself, please, please… She didn’t need to read much. It was what she feared and now she needed to act fast. ‘Fern’, she shouted, but Fern was already half way up the stairs. ‘He’s not at school, she whispered, her voice breaking, the panic rising again like the gorge in her throat. ‘He hasn’t shown up this morning. Where is he? What are you doing? What’s this all about?’ She started to cry. ‘What do you know about this, Judith? Where is Ben?’

  Judith tried to get a grip on herself. Fern mustn’t become hysterical because they had to think hard and act fast, but she had to let her know her fears for Ben. ‘I’m worried that Ben might be thinking of harming himself,’ she told Fern. ‘He’s been looking up a suicide site on the internet where people talk about suicide and ways of doing it. And he’s cleared out his room and given things away – it can be a sign, you see Fern, that he’s thinking of giving up. But I might be wrong. Please don’t cry yet.’

  Fern was now hugging herself, swaying slightly, shoulders heaving silently, tears streaming down her cheeks – ‘Please Fern, the most important thing we can do now for Ben is to find him before anything happens. He may just have gone somewhere to think, to get away from school.’ She held Fern in her arms. ‘Think now, Fern, think where he might have gone. Does he have a favourite place to go? He can’t have gone far. We can go and look for him now.’

  ‘He has a bike’, Fern gulped. ‘He goes off into the country sometimes on it at weekends. He says he likes to walk in the garrigue and if it’s hot he goes swimming. He doesn’t take it to school cos he walks there. She ran down the stairs. ‘It’s gone!’ she wailed. ‘Oh god, where is he. Where can he be?’

  ‘Think, Fern, think,’ urged Judith. ‘Where might he go to be alone? Be strong now and think. We need to find him. Who else might know? Get in my car now and we’ll drive to all the places within cycling distance that he might go. H
e’s been gone less than an hour; he can’t have gone too far. Where would he swim round here? In the river? The only river beach I know is too far away. Is there anywhere else?

  21

  Lance of the Languedoc, as Tim had privately dubbed him, was feeling pretty chipper. He and Alan Knight had thrashed Frank Partridge and Rex Stanhope on the golf course once again, even though it was really a damned sight too hot to play. Now, he thought, there was just time to shower and change and then he could bowl along to Roland’s for a drink and chat before he closed up for the afternoon. Roland had mentioned that he had some pretty special white burgundy put away behind the bar and also they needed to finalise their plans for a trip to a particular club in Montpellier.

  He was less than pleased to encounter the buffoon Bill Bailey half an hour later on his way out of Café Le Square. Bill’s angry, red sweating face could not just be put down to the heat. ‘Those bloody buggers don’t deserve your custom if that’s where you’re heading,’ he shouted across the street to Lance gesticulating in the direction of Roland’s. Lance sighed and stopped reluctantly by Bill’s jammy open-top silver Mercedes.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he asked, fanning himself with his panama.

  ‘Not seems to be the problem – is the bloody problem’, said Bill furiously. ‘Not content with refusing to sell me the damn place at a far higher price than those monkeys deserve, they are now refusing to serve me a beer. I wouldn’t have gone there except it’s the only goddamned bar for miles around and I needed a cigar.

  ‘A cigar?’ queried Lance, interested. ‘They haven’t started selling Havanas have they?’ He too would be up for one of those.

  ‘No, of course not, that would be way beyond their limited Gallic imaginations. They sell some kind of French variety, naturally, filled with something like crushed-up deckchairs, but it’s better than nothing and I haven’t got time to go into Montpellier to get any Cohibas. Anyway, I mentioned that they could do with getting in some decent cigars and they virtually threw me out. That appalling little peasant you hang out with, Roland, started ranting on about Jose Bove, whoever he might be, and telling me to go back where I belong.’

  Lance felt his temper rising. He too would like Bill Bailey to go back where he came from. It was difficult enough getting on with the natives without blundering idiots like Bill alienating them altogether. He, like Judith, had noticed a few anti-English and American slogans daubed on walls in the area lately and was a little alarmed. As for Roland invoking José Bove – that was seriously bad news. Bove was the French peasant leader who in 1999 trashed a McDonald’s under construction near Montpellier, instantly becoming a national resistance hero, his influence being particular strong in La France Profonde where it was hard to find a motorway bridge without it calling for Bove’s release from jail, where in fact he had only languished for six weeks after Lionel Jospin called his action ‘just’. Which in a way it was, since the Americans had unilaterally imposed trade restrictions on the superb local Roquefort cheese. If there was going to be no Roquefort in the US, Bove’s argument went, then why should the French tolerate the ‘McMerde’ burger in France which in any case was bad for French farmers who produced the proper stuff.

  Briefly, he explained to Bill who Bove was, adding, ‘So look here, Bill, we definitely do not want another peasants’ revolt down here. Unfortunately, the locals tend to confuse us with the Americans and we can’t afford to fall out with them. You have to try to be more diplomatic.’

  Bill’s face turned a darker shade of magenta were that possible. ‘Diplomatic?’ he spluttered. ‘What they need is an automatic – aimed at their temples. There’s no reasoning with them. Buggers all caved into the Germans at the start of the war and have been blaming us for it ever since. Can’t take the guilt. We’ll never get on with them, and you’re kidding yourself if you think you can with your fancy manners and panama hat. I tell you, if it weren’t for my business interests here, I’d leave tomorrow.’ So saying, he slammed his car door and fired the engine.

  ‘Well, maybe that would be best’, countered Lance but his words were lost in the roar of the Mercedes’ turbo engine and his panama flew off in the slipstream of fuel and dust that Bill left in his wake. ‘Fucking fool,’ he said angrily out loud, stooping to retrieve his hat from the gutter. He strode towards the bar in time to see to Roland pulling down the shutters and locking up. Frantically he gesticulated to him to open up but Roland ignored him. What was he playing at? Don’t say that all the Brits were barred now on account of that jumped-up cretin. He sighed deeply, wiping the sweat from his brow and noting the beginnings of a tension headache. There was nothing for it but to head off home to Jean’s unwelcoming face – what had got into her lately? – and a limp salad if he was lucky. Not exactly a bower of bliss there either.

  A few miles away Tim was contentedly lying on his back on the grass at the edge of a dam which the locals used to swim in at the weekends. Dressed only in his shorts and with yesterday’s Tribune covering his eyes from the glare of the sun, he was thinking how fortunate it was that events had propelled him down here, starting, he supposed with that ridiculous school feature. He wondered what had happened to that Carinthia who had spun him the story? She had been a piece of work! Life in the south of France was suiting him down to the ground. He adored the heat and the countryside, was very comfortable in his bachelor gîte, had fixed up a surprising amount of freelance journalistic work already – but not so much that he couldn’t afford not to be at desk – and was looking forward to getting to know some of the local talent. The girls were ten times better looking than their London counterparts. Thin and sexy and stylish in a way that had nothing to do with the clothes they wore – rather the way they wore them.

  Luckily, his French wasn’t bad. Being musical, he had a good ear for it and he was sure he could pick it up in no time… here, his reverie was interrupted by his dog pushing his newspaper off his nose and licking his face with meaty breath. ‘Get off, Piggy’. He sat up and threw a stick for her into the water which she bounded after, swimming as though her life depended on it. That was another good thing. Tim loved dogs (one of his former girlfriends had told him he was very like a dog – affectionate but messy and annoying) and had missed having one in London. So it was fortuitous that Piggy had come into his life as soon as he moved into Lance’s gîte. She was a black mongrel of some sort, a cross of what looked like Labrador and Collie. A proper dog that did proper fun doggy things like retrieve sticks, play football with her nose and swim. She also, he soon discovered, had a prodigious appetite, hence her new name.

  She was just one of what appeared to be a shifting, ownerless population of dogs that roamed round the villages foraging for food. He supposed many of them did in fact have owners since they didn’t look underfed but they were certainly not owned in the British sense of having a collar and a lead, a dog bowl and a home, if not a bed, they could call their own. Tim had yet to see a French dog being actually walked. They just walked themselves and slept outside wherever they happened to find themselves. There was one dog, a great shaggy thing like an Old English sheepdog, which made a habit of sleeping right in the middle of the main village street, seemingly unmoved by the cars that squealed round it, treating it like a traffic island.

  Piggy had hung around his house from the day he moved in and once he had fed her, that was it – she was hooked and so was he. He had asked one or two neighbours if she belonged to anybody but they didn’t know, and probably cared less. Now, two weeks on, she appeared to be a fixture who had readily adapted to a hearth and home, and that was fine by both of them.

  Even at this time in the morning, the heat was intense and Tim drifted off. He had sat up late the night before working from home and felt he was owed some time off. Besides, he was looking forward to a swim and then he wanted to explore the garrigue. Tim had wondered at the name and had discovered it was Occitan, the medieval language of this part of France, for the small evergreen holm oaks whic
h, together with other hardy bushes and aromatic plants, formed the wilderness that stretched as far as the eye could see. The scents of the garrigue were overpowering especially in the early morning and at night. It was like plunging into a huge bouquet garni and the sense of space was irresistible especially for anyone used to fighting for every inch in London.

  Over the centuries in this part of France, many different people had made good use of the garrigue as a hiding place, from the persecuted Protestants who held their services in secret there, to the resistance fighters in the second world war who used the many caves to hide in. Of course the other creatures who made good use of the garrigue were the sangliers – the plentiful wild boar which apparently had a great time terrorising the odd walker or motorist throughout most of the year until October when hordes of French huntsmen came out of the woodwork and mass slaughter began.

  A fly perched on Tim’s nose and awoke him. Sitting up, he looked around for Piggy but couldn’t see her. That was strange as she never went far away from him. She probably feared losing him more than he feared losing her. He stood up scanning the horizon, shouting for her and strolled round the part of the dam where one could swim. There was nobody around at this time on a weekday and the water was utterly still, the whole scene resembling nothing so much as a Scottish loch. After five minutes, Tim felt a pang of anxiety. Piggy wasn’t the kind dog who would disappear after a scent like a terrier, especially now that she was fed regularly. Then his eyes focussed on the high concrete barrier which separated the part of the dam where you could swim from the huge expanse of water where it was forbidden, and below which millions of tons of water would fall down the walls when the dam was operative.