by Paul Harris
The way the Frenchman went on, without so much as a pause to catch his breath, made me feel uneasy, until my eyes adjusted to the light and I could see that he was smiling rather pleasantly at us as he strafed us with his words. Eventually, his batteries seemed to run down and, noting the blank expressions on our faces, he changed his approach. “Anglais?”
“Oui.”
“Ahh!” he said, as if a great mystery had been solved, and there was no requirement for further translation. “Beer, yes? Three?”
“Oui.”
“We are looking,” I began to explain by pointing to my eyes, “for our friend. Regardez our ami; nous ami.”
“Bouteille?” he asked, “or?” He pointed to the tap on the bar.
Amos indicated the tap. “Merci.”
“Nous ami?” I continued, doggedly.
“Sol?” interposed Amos. Bird was silent the whole time. The Frenchman shrugged.
“He stays here.” I pointed purposefully at the floor. The barkeeper craned his neck over the bar and looked at the floor around my feet, then, looking up, he smiled at me as if I were a lunatic.
“He stays here,” repeated Amos, which gave me the opportunity to take a much needed swig of beer. “Perhaps, upstairs?” Amos and I pointed to the ceiling. The man looked up as if raising his eyes to the heavens. “Non; nobody here.”
“Must be the wrong place, after all,” Bird casually remarked.
“But, this is the address you have?” I mildly remonstrated.
“Upstair?” persisted Amos, pointing to the ceiling again.
“Non.”
“You have lodger, maybe?”
“Non. Big lady, only,” he laughed. We would have laughed with him if we hadn’t been so bitterly disappointed.
Bird finished his beer in record time. “Well, I guess that’s it.”
“Hold on,” protested Amos. He and I were only half way through ours.
“Nah, let’s get out of this hole.”
“I quite like it here,” said Amos, “This is the real France, where the real people come.”
“Real people?” countered Bird, with a snort of derision, “There’re no people here. Let’s go back to Bar Lambretta.”
As usual, Bird got his own way. I was more in favour of Amos’s argument but, treacherously, remained diffident. We said Au Revoir and left the Frenchman to his big lady wife. He was cheerful as he bade us farewell, and invited us to return soon. That’s why I wanted to stay there: there was an old-fashioned hospitality once the lights came on. “Nice man,” I commented, “He even asked us to come back again. That doesn’t usually happen.”
“That’s probably because we’re the only customers he’s had for about twenty years,” retorted Bird, with his usual cynicism.
“Yeah?” urged Amos, “What about Sol, then? He’s been here in the last twenty years, according to you. According to you, that is.”
Bird glared at him, angrily, and took a deep breath. “Must have moved on then,” he said dismissively.
We didn’t go back to the Bar Gambetta. It was chock-a-block outside; teaming with happy people who weren’t even drunk. That didn’t suit us at all; we were looking for a more maudlin environment. Instead, we went for something to eat and, afterwards, paid a visit to the tourist information kiosk near the cathedral to try to sort some digs out. They asked us what our requirements were and we told them: the cheapest gaff in town. Curiously enough, they directed us back to Rue Lamartine. On the way, we took a diversion over the river to collect our scooters. We wheeled them up to the hotel. The bars along the river were packed now, and the Abba tunes were still hobbling, disjointedly, along the promenade, occasionally tripping over a gust of Neil Diamond. The breeze along the Somme had grown chilly. We were in t-shirts and shorts; Bird was trudging along in open-toed sandals, antipodean style.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Amos. “Is it cold enough?”
“It’s alright,” I smiled, “it’s fresh, but quite pleasant. I like it.”
“You like everything these days,” sneered Bird.
“Yeah, I’m a changed man.”
The hotel was just like the bar across the road that we’d visited earlier; dull and eerie. In fact, it wasn’t so much a hotel as a doss house. It suited us though. We couldn’t afford to hang around too long anyway. Luckily they had a vacant room. There were only two beds but we told them that it was okay and that we’d manage. We took our holdalls up three flights of stairs and dumped them in the room. It was small, really small. I wondered how they’d managed to shoehorn two beds into such a tight space. The pebbledash wallpaper was thickly coated with white paint that had turned a murky yellow over the beds and across the ceiling. Above the mildewed sink, hung a framed portrait of Charles de Gaulle. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look happy at all. If I was hung in that room in perpetuity, I don’t think that I’d be able to raise a smile either. Having said that, I never smile much anyway.
Bird slung his bag onto the bed nearest the door. The springs groaned and the legs shook. Half a dozen tiny moths leapt from the sanctuary of the candlewick bedspread. “What a state.”
“Who’s sleeping on the floor?” I asked, suspecting that I already knew the answer. They both looked at me suggestively.
“You’re the youngest,” said Amos.
“By two months? What’s that got to do with anything anyway?”
“Let’s have a vote,” suggested Bird.
“Forget it.” I slumped on Amos’s bed, secure in the knowledge that I’d already lost the proposed vote. “This room stinks!”
“Check the cupboards for corpses,” quipped Bird. But there were no cupboards. Apart from the beds, the sink, and the picture above it, there was nothing.
“No coffee maker?” I laughed, “No trouser press?”
“Never mind, boys, there’s a really groovy bar over the way there,” smiled Bird.
“Nice to see that you’ve cheered up,” I retorted, sarcastically.
“Let’s get out of here,” Amos suggested, “No motoring tonight; let’s get bang on it!”
“That’ll do for me,” said Bird.
“Aren’t we going to wash or something; change our clothes?”
“We’re on holiday, Rod.” With that, Amos was out of the door. As I chased him down the stairs, I couldn’t help noticing that the boils on the back of his neck were at bursting point. “Where shall we go?” he asked, over his shoulder. The stair treads groaned as we marched, in single file, down the narrow staircase. There were no stair rails and no carpet. I never saw any carpet in that hotel. The lighting was so poor that you had to feel your way from stair to stair with both hands pressed against the fingertip-smudged walls.
“The Bar Lambretta?” suggested Bird, with affected ebullience.
Amos instantly pooh-poohed the idea. I remained non-committal, playing the role of the inconsequential youngster rather well.
“What do you think, Rod?” as we reached the street, “Left or right?”
“Or straight ahead,” I shrugged.
Bird sighed and Amos smiled. “Make a decision, Rod!”
“But, I’m only the boy here,” I declared with mock humility. Amos took a playful swing at me. “Okay, okay, we’ll try Bird’s suggestion first: the Bar Lambretta or whatever you want to call it. If that’s no good, we’ll try somewhere else. It’s only about seven o’clock now, so we’ve got plenty of time to get back here before last orders. Besides, they don’t have archaic licensing laws like we do, so they’ll probably stop serving when we tell them to.”
“Settled, then!” Bird struck out for the square. Amos snorted but, somewhat begrudgingly, followed him. We turned right and followed the Rue des Trois Cailloux, past weary people, still returning home from their days toil; their heads bobbing, lost to the tune of commerce; faces ploughed and furrowed deeply, ripe for a thrombotic harvest. Even here, despite the happy ambience, the beauty, and the calm; even here, the rats are racing to an early grave.
; The square was bursting with revellers. People of all ages were diving in and out of the fountains. It was as though there was some kind of pagan festival taking place; something that we should have been informed about by the tourist information people. People with empty glasses mushroomed out of the Bar Gambetta towards us, waiting patiently in a haphazard queue.
“Ah,” said Bird, “perhaps not, then.”
Amos looked smug. “What did I tell you?”
“You didn’t know it was going to be like this!” Bird snapped, “None of us knew. Damn it!” He wouldn’t be beaten. “It might be a laugh anyway.” He plunged into the crowd.
I looked at Amos and he shook his head. We sat down together on the edge of one of the fountains and got splashed from all directions. We splashed them back and joined them in their laughter. Half an hour elapsed, before Bird returned, straining to smile. “Pretty good in there,” he yelled.
“So, where’s the beer?” I asked him.
He bit his lip.
“You mean you went in there and got yourself one and didn’t think to bring us one?” Amos stood up.
“It wasn’t quite like that,” pleaded Bird.
“What?” I winked at Amos. “You mean you did get us a beer but drank them before you got back out here?”
“I couldn’t get near the bloody bar, could I!” The three of us laughed. I threw an arm around Bird’s shoulders and we marched off towards the river. The air had dropped positively cold now and we were still in t-shirts and shorts. “In fact,” bleated Bird, “I didn’t even get through the door.”
We stood, quietly, on the bridge over the River Somme; a place synonymous with tragedy and slaughter. “Think of the men who died on this river,” I whispered, respectfully, “The corpses that must have floated down here, and under these bridges.”
“The fighting was mostly further upstream,” said Bird, pointing along the river, and into the rural distance.
“You know something about it?” asked Amos, “I thought your lot were all stuck out in Turkey?”
Bird seemed to take umbrage with that. “My lot,” he explained, indignantly, “my lot were terribly mistreated and misled at Gallipoli, but also fought valiantly on the Western front. In fact, they dragged my lot; the survivors, at least; back from Turkey to help your lot out here when they realised what a pig’s ear they were making of it all.”
“Oh,” said Amos, electing not to pursue the matter any further.
“So, did it happen far from here?” I, naively, asked Bird, “Do you know? The Battle of the Somme and all that?”
“Not far; at least, I don’t think so. We could drive out that way tomorrow, before we go home.”
Amos shrugged. “Why not?”
“Ah, yes!” I was enthusiastic; it sounded as if it would be really interesting. “It’ll be good.”
“It’ll be different,” affirmed Bird.
“We going home already?” asked Amos.
“We’ve done what we came to do. Slow drive back to mother England?”
“We didn’t do anything.”
The music along the Quai Belu was still atrociously out of tune, the bars horribly packed, and the people frighteningly happy. We pushed our way through them, attracting timid looks of disdain and contempt. We walked past the last bar on the quayside. It was exactly the same as all the others; full of shiny, happy people who smelled of Imperial Leather and Palmolive. Subconsciously, we knew that we were out of place; with our finely honed aromas of stale body odour, beer, and Marlboro. We made a unanimous, simultaneous, silent, and psychic decision, there and then, to make our way back to Rue Lamartine in search of the ghoulish toothless grins that reminded us so much of home.
There were two lads, maybe a little younger than me, floating a small rowing boat downstream. They were ducking underneath the hanging branches of the trees and keeping absolutely silent, as if they were on a mission for the SBS. As one gently rowed, the other was staring at us, expressionlessly. They were level with us, about ten metres from the bank, when they both turned their heads to give us the once over. They were too innocent looking to be policemen or drug smugglers or anything like that. We stopped walking and Amos held out his arms. “What?” he called out to them.
One of them leant forward and spoke to the other, quietly, using his words with great deliberation.
“What are you looking at?” I yelled at them.
The rower nodded at his accomplice, and began to turn the boat towards us, pulling on the oars more and more frantically. The other one seemed to be looking for something in the bottom of the boat. Bird found an empty beer bottle in the doorway of a house. He raced to the balustrade that ran along the bank, and hurled it at them. They both ducked, but it missed anyway, splashing into the water between us and them.
“Come on, then!” I shouted, trying to disengage a boulder from the flattened earth of the towpath. “Come on!”
They were making good ground and soon came up alongside us. Amos spat into the boat from his vantage point above them. I gave up attempting to free the boulder and jumped over the balustrade to meet them instead. They pulled in the oars and started to scramble amongst their gear in the bottom of the boat, presumably looking for weapons. The guy who’d been rowing, looked up at me, straight into my eyes.
“Never get out of the boat!” I growled at him.
“Absolutely, goddamned, right!” continued Amos, picking up on the movie reference.
“Unless you’re going all the way,” I smiled, menacingly. The boys in the boat were beginning to look a little nervous. One of them snatched up an oar with both hands. I thought he was going to take a swing at me with it, but he poked it at the bank, and the boat floated off down the river, with the crew jabbing at the bank in order to keep their distance.
“Come back here! Get out of that boat!”
I jumped back over the balustrade and started, frenziedly, kicking at my boulder until, eventually, it came away. I picked it up, swung around, and launched it at the retreating sailors. It hit the oarsman on the back of the head. He slumped forward over the oars. His mate began shouting and waving his fists at us. They were at a safe distance by now.
“Damn!” I said, “I really fancied that! Haven’t had a good row for ages. I was really up for that.”
“You’re always up for it,” said Bird.
“You told them not to get out of the boat,” said Amos, wagging an accusing finger.
“I didn’t mean it, did I? How would they have understood that anyway? I was only doing my Martin Sheen. Typical French coward bastards!”
Amos laughed and I tried to restrain myself from slipping into a sulk. “Damn!”
We passed the hotel in Rue Lamartine as the rain, in fine tepid drops, started falling gently from the gathering clouds.
“Just in time,” said Bird.
“A light shower,” I assured him, “A pleasant summer shower, I’d say.”
We hesitated outside the bar. The lights were on now and they shone, spectacularly, through soot-stained windows onto the street. Ghost-like figures moved, twitchingly, behind the opaque glass and through the smoke-filled cavern. I pushed the door open and we strode in as a clap of thunder ripped the sky apart above our heads and the heavens opened, unmercifully.
“Very pleasant,” muttered Amos, sarcastically.
But, it was quite pleasant, once we’d shut the door behind us and banished the inclemency to the outside world. The inside world was full of people in shirt sleeves. Our toothless heroes were sitting around an open fire, arguing vociferously about politics, and putting Jacques Chirac to the sword. The place was still dirty and run down, but the people made it cosy, ever more so as the rain outside became heavier and the wind rattled the fragile panes of glass in their frames.
The owner spotted us and grabbed three bottles from a glass-fronted refrigerator. “Asseyez-vous! Asseyez-vous!” he demanded, shepherding us to a table in the corner. “You come back! My best table!” He made a wide and p
roud gesture, as if he were presenting us with a birthday cake or the designs for a new cathedral. We made ourselves comfortable at his best table, and he uncapped the bottles and, carefully, set them out in front of each of us in turn. “Glasses?”
We all shook our heads. “This’ll do, thanks.”
He went back to his station behind the bar. We could tell that he was talking to his regulars about us and that he knew our French was hopeless, so he didn’t have to keep his voice down. He continually looked over to us, smiling, nodding, and prompting us to take more beer. He was obviously unaware of the effect it could have on us. No one else looked at us or paid us any attention; they didn’t stare, didn’t care, and weren’t interested. It made for a pleasant change.
Amos was nodding, complacently, as he toyed with his lager bottle.
“Okay, okay,” conceded Bird, “this is comfortable. You were right.”
I thought it was nice, and I said so.
Two girls walked in, shaking umbrellas. They marched up to the bar and stood there, drinking glasses of white wine mixed with water. They looked as though they were going out clubbing, in their high heels, very short skirts, and gorgeous legs. They were wearing coats and I wanted them to take them off, but they didn’t. Bird was sitting with his back to them, but his head kept on swivelling around to look at them, like something from The Exorcist. He kept, distractedly, missing his mouth and pouring lager down his t-shirt. Fortunately, it was already stained so nobody could tell which were new stains and which were the old ones. He sighed, wiping the damp patches on his belly. “Could I do with a bit of that?”
We were all in agreement. They knew that we were ogling them, but they never looked around, just gave us one great big blank. I finished my bottle and slammed it down on the table. Bernard, the proprietor, had ceased giving us his full attention, and was more taken with the girls at the bar. “I’ll give him a shout,” I said, “and get some more beers over. Same again?”
Bird leapt to his feet. “No problem, I’ll get them.”
“You’re not normally so keen to get the drinks,” I jibed.
“No need for your sauce. Give me some francs, I never said I’d pay for them.”