by John Dummer
As I made my way along the dimly lit passageway past the open bedroom doors I suddenly had a strange vision. I felt there were confused old people leaning out from those doorways looking at me, wondering what I was doing. In my mind's eye they appeared deeply disturbed, as if they weren't sure what was going on. It was a strange feeling, strong and quite vivid. It reminded me of the time after my Uncle Tom had died and I went with Helen to see my Auntie Elsie. I had an overpowering feeling he was there in the room welcoming me and overjoyed to see me. I sat in his chair and could sense him standing beside me, beaming as my auntie chatted away. Was I dreaming up these lost souls? It didn't feel like it. They seemed very real and I found myself talking softly in French to them as I passed, assuring them that everything was fine and they shouldn't worry. I remembered how I had done the same thing, reassuring Gaston, the deceased previous owner of our house, that we meant no harm in our farmhouse when I had knocked down the interior wall. I must be losing my grip on reality.
I met Helen on the stairs on her way up to see me and told her about it.
'Do you think I'm going mad?'
'Yes,' she replied, matter-of-factly.
'Actually, I had a similar feeling earlier,' said Helen. 'I was on my own and went into a room to see what was in there. I had the feeling I wasn't alone, that someone had come in. I turned to say "bonjour" and there was no one there.'
I told her I didn't find it frightening, but that I felt sad that they were so lost and worried.
When I returned for the rest of the bed I thought the feeling might have evaporated but it was just as strong.
As I loaded the bed and chevets into the van I saw Serge coming towards me. He too looked bewildered. But as he got nearer I realised he was not so much confused as annoyed. He was cursing like an expert, spitting out expletives.
'Do you know what that son of mine has done now, Johnny?'
I said I didn't, as I had been upstairs dismantling a bed.
'Did you see that massive oak table in the dining room?'
'Helen told me about it, it's a big one, isn't it?'
'Big? It's giant-sized,' he moaned. 'It'll take about eight men to shift and it will never go in my van. Diddy paid well over the odds for it and he expects me to cough up and foot the bill. I tried to tell the auctioneer I don't want it but he says Diddy bought it fair and square and he won't re-auction it now.'
'What are you going to do?'
'And that's not all, Johnny,' he continued, ignoring my question, 'he's bought a load more stuff. Bedpans! Who wants bedpans these days?'
'Sick people?' I offered.
'Yes, but I've got two hundred of them. Do you need one yourself, maybe? I can let you have a couple dead cheap.' He made a noise halfway between a laugh and a groan.
'I don't know, he doesn't seem to have a clue that boy. He's going to ruin me. He's not got the sense he was born with.'
'Oh, come on,' I said. 'He's not that bad, surely; you told me last week it was nice having your son working alongside you.'
'I thought it would be, yes. But sometimes I can't believe a son of mine would be so clueless. He doesn't take after me, that's for sure.'
'No, perhaps not, but he's inherited your spirit of enterprise, Serge,' I said, trying to cheer him up.
'Do you think so?' He was flattered. 'Well, OK, maybe I can shift those bedpans as trendy flower pots, or perhaps wine coolers.' He was perking up visibly at the thought.
'Mmmm.' I nodded and smiled. 'You could be on to something there, Serge.'
... Not! Rustics who still kept potties under the bed for relieving themselves in the night tended to snigger uncontrollably at the sight of a potty being offered for sale as a desirable antique. How would they react to bedpans?
'I meant to ask you, Johnny, how was the Musée du Béret? I bet you enjoyed yourself while poor Helen was working away here on her own trying to grab a bargain.'
'It was quite interesting,' I conceded. 'But not as much as a Musée du Chapeau Melon would have been to us English.'
Serge found this remark incredibly funny. He exploded with hysterical laughter. When he eventually managed to regain control he took one look at me and he was off again, slapping his knees, pointing at my deadpan expression.
'You English are so funny! What a sense of humour, eh?' He wiped his eyes.
'I'd love to see you in a chapeau melon, Johnny. If I ever see one on the markets, I'm going to buy it for you.'
'Don't bother,' I said. 'The only way I'd ever don a chapeau melon is if I was wearing a codpiece with one eye made-up like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.'
He looked at me, baffled. I'd lost him on that one.
'Hang on a moment though, Johnny, I have got something to show you that I'm sure you'll appreciate.' He jumped into the back of his van and I heard him banging about before he emerged with what looked like an old brown fibre box. He undid the strap and pulled something out wrapped in tissue paper. It was round and made of a blue woollen material and looked suspiciously like a beret!
'This came up in the sale with some other hats today and I couldn't resist buying it.'
He removed the tissue paper and carefully positioned the beret on his head.
'Well, what do you think?' He struck what he intended to be a noble pose. 'It suits me, doesn't it?'
I looked at him in amazement. It suited him, all right. The beret was huge and floppy and stuck out prominently like the top of a giant drooping blue mushroom. He was proudly sporting a classic version of le béret extra large, the one that was ideal for people with big heads.
'I like it!' I said, trying to keep a straight face.
7
WOODWORM AND WALNUT BUFFETS
We sat and stared balefully at the beautiful walnut buffet that Diddy had originally sold to a rich customer, who had returned it, complaining it was 'making strange noises in the night'. Serge said he thought it was some sort of wood-boring beetle at work and we had to annihilate it. We had taken the doors off and lain the top half with its little carved wooden figures and ornate finials against the wall in Serge's garage. It was around midnight and we strained our ears to hear, hardly daring to breathe.
And there it was – a kind of crunch, crunch, crunching sound. It was hard to tell where the noise was coming from exactly. But it appeared to be from somewhere deep inside the wood.
Serge got down on his hands and knees and put his ear up close. He cupped one hand and listened, moving his head up and down, trying to pinpoint it. After several minutes of this he shook his head and stood up.
'That young idiot! I've told him so many times. If there are holes, treat it. Kill the little beggars, because if you don't,' he waved at the buffet, 'you're going to be left with sawdust.' He sat down on a chaise longue with horsehair sprouting through holes in its velour cover and put his head in his hands.
Since he had told us about his break-up with Angelique, his separation from his baby boy Adrien and his dog Robespierre, I had begun to see Serge as vulnerable. I felt sorry for him and tried to help him whenever I could.
'Can't you just give the man his money back?' I asked.
He lifted his head and gave me a look that suggested I was born yesterday.
'Give it back? Give the money back? No, of course he can't give it back! The little idiot's spent it. You think Diddy has any money to give back to people? He's up the casino gambling it away or on the Internet buying clothes. He can never give any money back. It burns a hole in his pocket. He's got no idea of the value of it. Besides, the guy who bought this is a real heavy with contacts all over Eastern Europe. You see all these other pieces?' He pointed to several chevets, chandeliers and wrought-iron lamps. 'He's filling a container of French antiques and exporting it to his warehouse out there. I've got to pack a load of my better stuff in boxes for transportation. He wants the stuff cheap but he can shift a lot of antiques so it's worth it to me.'
We had picked up the buffet earlier that evening in Biarritz from the man who
had complained about the noises it was making.
'This guy is rich,' Serge confided, 'and when I say rich I mean rupin, filthy rich.' He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. 'And he's powerful, too. I can't afford to offend him. He'd have me done – just like that.' He smacked his hands together as if he were killing a bug.
'It was Bruno who put me onto him. He's a really good contact. I've got to keep him sweet.'
This information about the link with Bruno made me feel uneasy. I had come up against Serge's dubious friend Bruno the Basque in the past and I had an intense dislike of the man.
Serge's rich client owned a smart penthouse apartment in Biarritz. We had gone up in the lift and rung his doorbell on the eighth floor. We stood outside the door waiting in the plush hallway.
'This is impressive,' I said to Serge.
'Yeah, well he's a Romanian, he likes things just so.'
'A Romanian? You didn't tell me he was Romanian. Does he speak French?'
The door swung open to reveal a man dressed in a turquoise towelling dressing gown and blue silk pyjamas. It was four in the afternoon. He was tanned with silver-grey hair combed back like a fifties thug. He looked like the sort of grumpy, tough person you wouldn't want to annoy. He signalled impatiently for us to enter and we followed him through into a sumptuously decorated living room with a panoramic view over the sea. We both stood, spellbound, watching the boats go by.
'Right, you two clowns,' said the grumpy old man, breaking our reverie. He spoke with a strong Eastern European accent 'That whoring thing, it keeps on going tap-tap-tap night and day. It is driving me crazy. Get it fixed. I don't care how you do it, just do it!'
'Don't worry, sir,' said Serge obsequiously, 'my colleague here and I will sort it out. We'll take it back to my workshop and find out what the trouble is.'
The man was unimpressed. 'You better.' He glowered.
Serge grovelled pathetically and promised it would all be fine, and we hefted the buffet through the dining room, trying not to bump into any of the incredibly valuable pieces of antique furniture that adorned the flat. On the way to the front door we hit the wall and ripped a piece out of the expensive designer wallpaper. Serge hurriedly licked his finger and stuck back the telltale tear. We tried to manoeuvre the buffet through the front door and in doing so scratched the paintwork and scuffed the polished wood of the buffet.
The front door was slammed after us and when the lift arrived I realised we had no chance of getting the buffet in it, but Serge insisted we turn it this way and that, trying to squeeze it through the sliding doors. It didn't help that every time we pulled it out, ready to try again, the lift door slid shut and descended to pick up someone below who had pushed the button. Serge began cursing and shouting to whoever was down there to stop it.
It was hard to convince him we were going to have to hump the buffet down eight flights of stairs, but in the end he conceded we had no choice. Around the fourth floor the strain began to get to me and I found myself singing Bernard Cribbins' 'Right Said Fred'.
'What's that damn thing you keep singing?' asked Serge, puffing as we negotiated the winding stairway.
'Oh, nothing much,' I said. 'It's an English song about moving a piano, that's all.'
'Pianos! Don't talk to me about pianos! I got a hernia moving bloody pianos. Thank God no one wants those sods any more.'
We managed to get the buffet to the ground floor, load it into Serge's van and drive it to his apartment, where he had spent most of the evening in his garage squirting a smelly woodworm treatment into all the little woodworm holes.
'These holes are mostly old,' he said now. 'I can't see why there would be live worm in here.'
The treatment consisted of an aerosol can with a clear plastic tube with a needle on one end. The needle was inserted into a hole and the button on the can pressed, whooshing a thin spray of deadly killing liquid deep down along the tiny passageway to where the worm was supposedly hiding. Serge had lost the small protective funnel which fitted round the needle. When he pressed the button the deadly fluid went deep down the entrance hole and out an adjacent exit hole, spraying him unexpectedly in the face. He leapt back like he'd been stung, frantically rubbing his eyes. He ran to the bathroom and reappeared a few minutes later. His eyes were red and he kept blinking. He continued his work with the aerosol but this time leant back so when the liquid sprayed out it missed his face. I kept dodging the spurts as I held the buffet steady.
We stopped for a coffee and Serge had a Ricard with his. We examined the buffet again.
'See this one here?' Serge pointed out an impressive hole a few centimetres across. 'That's where a Capricorn came out. The grubs have got massive jaws. I think that's what could be making the noise.'
I'd seen these Capricorn beetles. They were beautiful. About the same size or slightly bigger than an English stag beetle, only more streamlined, with great long antennae that curved out and round either side. They were a species of longhorn beetle, so-called as the antennae resembled the curving horns of a mountain sheep.
I decided to go and ring Helen again. Earlier I'd phoned to tell her we'd picked up a buffet from Serge's Romanian client. She'd sounded surprised.
'Romanian? That's interesting, does he speak French then?'
'Yes, he's a nice bloke,' I lied.
'Nice? What sort of nice?' She smelt a rat.
We had noticed Eastern Europeans gradually arriving in France over the past few years and others travelling down into Spain. They had increased in number and some seemed to be lost, ill at ease and out of step with the modern world. Many had integrated quickly, learnt French and set up and ran very successful businesses, but others were outside society. Over time it was these begging Eastern Europeans that were the only ones everyone noticed, talked about and objected to, and the hardworking majority was overlooked. Helen and I had been travelling back from a sale in the van one time, our clothes all dusty from collecting items we had bought in a barn, when we were flagged down. French laws oblige you to stop and help if someone is in difficulty and this was a family in trouble on a country road. We pulled over only to be harassed for our bank card, purportedly to buy petrol, by a tough character and his thuggish son. They wanted me to take them to a cash machine. Luckily we had neither cards nor money on us and we looked so poor they lost interest when one of the family managed to stop another car. Most of the French are wise to these scams and drive past unconcerned. I had to admit I did have a nagging feeling of unease about Serge's client.
I promised Helen I wouldn't be much longer. She was keen to tell me about a house she had looked at. I went back to help Serge in his garage.
He was bent over the buffet intent on the job in hand, examining the large Capricorn hole. 'I reckon if we cut out this piece of wood here and follow the tunnel down we'll find the little swine making all the noise,' he said. 'The woodworm killer doesn't seem to affect him. He's probably so tough he's immune to it.' He fetched a vicious-looking pointed saw.
'Is that such a good idea?' I said. 'Maybe we should just wait for the treatment to work.'
'No, Johnny, trust me. He's in there, all right. It's just a question of cutting him out like a cancer. He'll never crunch again once I get to him.'
He began sawing vigorously on either side of the large hole. Eventually he gave up and fetched a mini electric drill with a box of small bits and saw wheels. He affixed a nasty-looking cutting implement, plugged in the machine, set it running and attacked the buffet anew. It made a scary searing noise, which reminded me of a dentist's drill. The expression on Serge's face was disconcerting, too. When I was a kid my mum took me and my brother to a dentist called Mr Walmsley in Kingston who had a similar expression when he was drilling your teeth. His drill wasn't much more sophisticated than the one Serge was using, and it vibrated and sent screaming shafts of agonising pain through your raw nerves. My brother, who was three years younger than me, had been unable to stand it and bit into Mr Walmsley's hand, drawing bloo
d. We changed our dentist soon after that.
The tunnel was longer than Serge expected. Soon there was a big chunk out of the wood and a little pile of sawdust on the floor. He began poking about in the hole with a screwdriver and after a moment let out a cry of triumph. A huge bloated white grub plopped out and fell amongst the splintered pieces of wood. He dropped down on his hands and knees and scrabbled about in the sawdust until he held the thing aloft grasped between his thumb and forefinger. It twisted and turned in its nudity like a peeled prawn.
'There you are, my little beauty.' He placed it on the concrete floor and before I could stop him, brought his heel down on it hard. It exploded with a loud pop, sending a squirt of disgusting glop all over his jeans. He pulled a face and tried to wipe off the mess with an old hankie, but only succeeded in spreading it into a large unsightly stain.