“Yes, when you’re fixing punctures on tyres, not when you’re changing a wheel. OK, well—good thing I was a scout, and I can do it.”
I sway with shock. “You were a scout, Astrid?”
“Of course. In the Swiss mountains, with the sisters. We’d go cycling all the time. And hiking in the hills. There were precipices everywhere. Once, we saw a sheep tumble down one of them. When it landed at the bottom it sounded like a pencil case falling off a desk.”
Hakima goes “Ah!” with terror. I nod appreciatively. “And there was me thinking you only knew how to play Chicken Run and listen to Indochine.”
“It’s Kitchen Rush, not Chicken Run. Get me your dad’s toolbox.”
“It’s not my dad’s, it’s Philippe Dumont’s.”
Philippe Dumont’s toolbox is exactly like Philippe Dumont’s DIY ambitions: big, but never put into action. He’s only opened it once, to weigh up the different tools. Thus all of them are still tidily slotted into their respective holes, like a biscuit selection: an electric drill that looks like a small hairdryer; a smart screwdriver with detachable ends; a macho hammer, with a big handle; a cute hammer, with a small handle; a neon-orange crowbar; and lots of little magic drawers stuffed with nails, screws and hooks.
That reminds Hakima of something: “The other day, in Biology, we learnt that if you extracted all the iron from someone’s body and put it all together, you could make a little nail out of it.”
“Wow,” I whistle. “I can’t decide if that’s too much or not enough.”
“It’s just right,” Hakima states. “Just one little nail, no more.”
Astrid intervenes. “Popeye must have more. At least one big nail, if not two.”
“No, because we learnt that Popeye, actually, you know, that thing about the spinach, it’s not true. There’s not very much iron in spinach, but there’s lots in broccoli and lentils.”
“Oh, really? So what’s Popeye’s iron content like, then? A pin? A needle?”
Me: “Piglettes, focus, please. We need to change that wheel. Astrid, show us.”
She shows us, and we watch her. She unscrews the wheel, slides it aside, straightens it up by hammering it something serious and puts it back into place. It looks like it’s worked. She fetches a bucket of water…
(Me: “Ha! I knew there was a thing about a bucket of water!”)
…dips the punctured tyre into it; bubbles appear…
(Me: “Bubbles! It’s ready!”)
…then she pulls the tyre out again, expertly patches up the punctures and pumps it up with surprising strength. Hakima and I watch her, bemused but happy, since Astrid’s doing all the work, huffing and sweating in the heat of the garage.
Then she oils the bike chains. Her white hands get coated in black grease, the gears click, the links jump into place. Watching those machines come to life is a beautiful thing; like creatures from a fairy tale, stretching and yawning after sixteen years of snoring, trapped by the terrible curse of Mireille’s Legendary Laziness…
After a while, Astrid finally realizes that we’re shamelessly freeloading, watching her do all the work without lifting a finger ourselves, so she gives us some chores to do. You screw this, you unscrew that, you oil this, you inflate that. Her orders are clear, precise and segmented into perfectly manageable slices. You can tell she’s got a flair for management, thanks to all those extremely weird video games.
It’s almost 3.47 p.m., and the bikes are fixed. We wheel them out into the garden.
“We’re going to have to try them, now,” says Astrid.
A wave of surprise washes over us, all of a sudden. We were sort of joking, the other day: the bike idea, the garden-party plan, the insanely long journey! We were acting as if we really meant it, but…
But now… the bikes are here, shining in the golden sunlight; they’re whispering, Why not? They’re waiting for us to ride them, to take them to Paris. They’re already shuddering with impatience and excitement. The red-and-gold Giant wants to fly along open roads all the way to the capital, and up the Champs-Élysées like its mates in the Tour de France. The beige bike simpers, with its perfect curves and its drrring drrring; it wants us to take it on a tour of the Latin Quarter. And the little blue one is hoping for a quiet trip alongside rivers, on sandy paths, with evenings spent cooling down, after a warm day, locked to a tree near the three little piglettes’ tent.
“Well… I guess we could try,” says Hakima.
“If we don’t like it, we can always give up,” I add.
“We can just go on a tiny little ride,” confirms Astrid.
As if it’s the most natural choice for her, Hakima opts for the Giant. She perches up on the seat like a pigeon, her legs too short to touch the ground. The precarious balance doesn’t seem to bother her. Astrid Blomvall, not a little proud of her work, bagsies the pretentious beige bike. That’s perfect—the one that’s left for me is Mum’s, the small blue one, exactly the right size—Goldilocks’s bike, if Goldilocks was a fat little piglette with straight chestnut hair.
And they’re off! We’re going for a spin.
Mum’s in the garden, reading a big book in a deckchair, thighs caramelizing, bug-eye sunglasses on the end of her nose. Philippe Dumont has just finished mowing the lawn, which is so green and so clean that it looks like he’s hoovered it. Both watch us pass by, marvelling at the miraculous sight.
“Mireille’s fixed the bikes?”
“Mireille’s cycling?”
Why, it seems pigs might actually fly after all. Mum stands up to watch us go—her tulip skirt, straw-yellow, billows in the breeze. Philippe comes to hold her by the waist. I spy on them discreetly as we ride down the alley; they’re American-beautiful, with their sugar-coloured house, in their garden planted with bushes like Brussels sprouts.
Kittycat the dog, excited by the noise, runs over to us wagging his tail—but fails miserably at licking our calves. He quickly understands that we’re champion cyclists and he won’t be able to catch us (plus he’s asthmatic). We’re already far away, whooshing towards Bourg-en-Bresse town centre, we the piglettes, we the gatecrashers, on our pretty bikes that shriek with light and laughter.
I don’t know if you’ve ridden a bike recently?
Maybe you do it all the time. In which case you might be too used to it to notice.
To notice the magic.
What’s magical about a bike is that it’s a broomstick—a flying broomstick that punches holes through the air, obeying your merest thoughts; it responds to your fingers, your feet, your groin; you don’t need to tell a bike where to go, it knows—it’s a flying broomstick.
What’s magical about a bike is that it’s also a horse. A proud, athletic horse—that hurts its hooves sometimes, that whinnies and grinds its teeth when it stumbles into a pothole; you have to stroke a bike and talk to it. You really must—it’s a horse.
What’s magical about a bike is that it’s a clickety, metallic machine, a mechanical wonder; look at its gears and marvel.
And when you realize how magical a bike is, all those things begin to mingle within you, and all at once you can feel the air bursting as you tear through it, feel every crack and crease in the road, the most intimate hiccups of the bike’s workings; and the blood inside you pumps harder with each pedal stroke.
And suddenly it all fuses together, and it’s a miracle: everything is fast and fuzzy, and you are completely at one with the universe, as if you’d created it yourself.
7
Market day in Bourg-en-Bresse. Sweaty (Astrid and me pepper-coloured, Hakima the deep red-brown shade of a beef tomato), we leave our proud bikes locked together and to a lamp post.
I tell the piglettes, “Last time I went anywhere this fast was probably fifteen years ago, during a certain morning cuddle, when I left Klaus von Strudel to invade my mum’s belly.”
“But actually, that’s not how it works,” said Hakima, “because we learnt in Biology that, in fact, the sperm isn’t,
like, a tiny human or anything, it’s just half, and it’s only when it gets to the egg that it becomes cells, so actually it’s not true when we think that the baby won the race against the other sperm.”
“Glad you clarified that for us. Shall we have a wander round the market?”
The problem with that idea is that after a few steps, we start aching all over, and a few yards later, we’re holding on to each other like a gang of winos outside a bar. At the same time, it’s pretty funny—we sway through the crowd moaning ouch ouch ouch every time we lean on a muscle butchered by our twenty minutes of cycling, which causes quite a stir among the people weighing melons and tasting bits of goats’ cheese.
“Crikey, Mireille, what’s up with you?” asks Raymond, the cheese and charcuterie seller, from whom I buy garlands of sweaty saucissons and deliciously chalky Crottin de Chavignol every weekend.
N.B. There’s only one thing you really need to know about me, which is that Crottin de Chavignol is my favourite cheese.
“We’re aching all over, Raymond. We went cycling for at least eighteen and a half minutes!”
“Why would you do that to yourselves? Come on, let me help you get your strength back.”
Today he’s got a Papillon Roquefort like you’d never believe, a mortadella sausage so green and pink it looks Photoshopped, and tiny goats’ cheeses like whitewashed buttons. He hands us out three of them with his big brown fingers; we gobble them up and thank him. Hakima politely says no to the next gift—small slices of roasted figatelli sausage—but she accepts the third: a cup of Normandy apple juice, painfully cold.
As we feverishly rub our throats to thaw them out, a customer comes in, and Raymond produces an enormous dish of…
“Pork sausages! Made from the juiciest, plumpest piggies in the region. Plain or thyme? Need apple sauce to put on the side? Ask Flavie over there, she’s got the sweetest cooking apples you’ll ever taste—you’ll get diabetes just looking at them!”
Another voice, behind us: “Juicy plump pigs? I’d watch out if I were you…”
We turn around, throats still cryogenically frozen.
“The three juiciest, plumpest piggies in the region, together! How cute! Selfie!”
It’s Malo. He leans towards us and takes a picture—his radiant face in the foreground, ours right behind him, in full chewing glory: cheeks full of cheese, foreheads drenched in sweat, red-dappled necks. No doubt the selfie will soon end up on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. #pigpageant.
Astrid and Hakima are frozen like a couple of rabbits in the headlights, clearly waiting for me to say something.
I say something. “Dear piglettes, let me introduce you to this blond paparazzo. His name is Malo. It is thanks to him that, every year, Marie Darrieussecq votes for its three juiciest, plumpest little piggies. The genius idea for this very original contest came to him three years ago, in the middle of a boring music lesson, while he was puffing into a recorder. He started by setting up a Facebook group, and then it all went very fast. Please note that this was no money-making venture—it’s a labour of love of the purest kind.”
Our contest organizer spits out a skinny thread of saliva, which lands on the floor next to a small Yorkshire terrier.
“Great to bump into you here. Birds of a feather, hey? Smelt the lard, felt at home?”
Please, I think very hard, please, girls, please, don’t start moaning that it’s really not nice to say things like that; I beg you, please, don’t start whining that you don’t understand how anyone can say that sort of thing.
“It’s really not nice to say things like that,” moans Astrid.
“I don’t understand how anyone can say that sort of thing,” whines Hakima.
Perfect. Malo revels in those magnificent moans and repeats them right back at us, in a mock-idiotic voice. The piglettes’ eyes well with tears instantly. Mine don’t—I have better windscreen wipers.
I try another tack. “When I think, Malo darling, that we got married for real in Reception, and we told each other we’d pretend we were really in love for ever and ever. Whatever happened to our vows?”
He laughs. “Never made any vow to any sow.”
And he swings to the side to grab the waist (as waspish as they get) of a charming young lady who seems to be wearing a thick belt in lieu of a skirt and a bra in lieu of a top. But then she’s got the body to make that kind of thing work, with a top like this: V, and legs like this: | |
“Look, Princess,” says Malo. “It’s the three pigs that won the pageant.”
“No way!” yells Princess, eyes glued to her phone. “No way! Wait for it—wait for it—wait for it—so Pablo’s just, like, calling me now, like, out of nowhere? Like, I’m like, what? What a dickhead! I mean, seriously?”
And tick tick tick, she power-texts Pablo on her iPhone, the case encrusted with splendid sticky crystals that burn the retinas of everyone in her immediate vicinity with their glitter. Her long, curvy nails click against the screen.
Hakima and Astrid are petrified. Astrid has probably never seen someone like Princess at the sisters’, and Hakima’s surprise seems to indicate that such a creature has never been invited home by the Sun either (phew!).
Malo, a little saddened to see Princess writing a novel to that dickhead Pablo, tries to take back control of the situation. “If Raymond manages to sell plump juicy pig sausages, maybe he can give you some tips on how to present yourselves better. Then maybe someone would take one of you off the shelf.”
“What a bitch!” howls Princess behind him, still staring at her screen.
“Well, I suppose we could always try dipping ourselves in apple sauce,” I reply. “With a bit of parsley on the side, and mashed potatoes…”
“Yeah, right, fill a bath with mashed potatoes and stick a sprig of parsley up your arse, it should get you some likes on YouPorn—after all, it’s full of videos of naked dwarves and hairy women, it must turn on some peo—”
“NO WAY!” Princess explodes. And then starts crying with laughter. “Babes! Babes! Watch this!”
Malo “Babes” Delattre watches this, looking like someone who finds something not very funny but tries to pretend it’s very funny with a classic this-is-not-very-funny-but-I’m-trying-super-hard-to-pretend-I-think-it’s-hilarious expression.
“Did you see that? What a bitch!” howls Princess.
“What a bitch,” Babes confirms.
Ping! Princess checks her email, and suddenly switches tab, and changes mood. “Forget it, let’s go, Pablo’s being a total loser.”
I take advantage of the sombre atmosphere to chip in, “Lovely to meet you, Princess.”
Princess lifts her nose for the first time, and fixes me with her dark-blue eyes, staring out of Cleopatra make-up.
Then: “Wow! What? Wow! I mean, just, like, wow!”
Upon which she sets off, pocketing her phone, and Malo follows her, yapping “Did you see how fugly they are, did you see?” but Princess is only moderately interested, probably because it’s not as lame as whatever thing that bitch just posted.
“Before I forget—catch!” Malo shouts, and throws something to us. Hakima catches it like a rising star of the NBA.
As the duo disappear into the distance, I give the girls a telling-off.
“Right, darling piglettes, we’re going to have to give your repartee muscles a serious workout. We’re going to gatecrash the Élysée garden party, remember? The point is to do it scandalously and sensationally. It’s not going to work if you have tongue paralysis.”
I go back to Raymond to buy some ham and Rocamadour cheese. Astrid taps my shoulder. Tap, tap. Yes, just a second, Astrid. Tap, tap. I said just wait a sec, I’m paying. Well, hurry up. Yeah, calm down, I’m getting there! Here you go—what’s the rush?
The thing Malo threw Hakima turns out to be a regional newspaper: the Bresse Courier. I know the editor-in-chief, who’s a Rotary friend of Philippe Dumont’s, but I’ve never met Hélène Lesnout, the author of today’
s headline article.
PARENTS PERPLEXED BY PIG PAGEANT
Ingrid, Fatima, Marielle.* Three ordinary teenagers, in Years 8 and 11 at Marie Darrieussecq High School in Bourg-en-Bresse. Three teenagers whose names are now on everyone’s lips, ever since they were listed, last Wednesday, on a Facebook page—which awarded them gold, silver and bronze medals in the annual Pig Pageant, or in other words the school ugliness contest.
[full article on p. 3]
Flip, flop, flip, we turn to page 3.
At Marie Darrieussecq, the “pageant” is already in its third year—and none of the teenagers we meet outside the school seems particularly keen to stop it. “Sure, it’s not very nice for the girls,” says Nathan,* 13 years old, “but it won’t kill them. It’s just a joke.” Alessia* and Oriane* disagree. “It’s really stressful. We try really hard to make sure we don’t get shortlisted. It would be horrible.”
Ms Cerdon, the school’s head teacher, disapproves of the contest, but also stresses her powerlessness. “We can’t do anything. It’s on the Internet, it’s not the school’s responsibility. We’ve already tried talking to the student who started it all, but the most we can do is reiterate basic citizenship rules.”
Who is the student who launched the Pig Pageant at Marie Darrieussecq three years ago? Marco,* a handsome, confident young man of 15, assures us that the contest is “a privilege” for the shortlisted girls. “It lets them know they should take more care of themselves.” He also claims that the “finalists” of the past two years have “considerably improved” since their nominations. “Apart from one of them, who got yet another medal this year, the past laureates have lost a lot of weight and really looked after themselves. I think the contest showed them that they’d let themselves go.”
Marco introduces us to Charlotte,* who was “awarded” a silver medal two years ago. Now in Year 11, the bubbly brunette confirms that the contest “was a real wake-up call. I finally saw what I’d refused to see until then: I was disgusting. Immediately afterwards I started exercising, I lost weight, I started following fashion blogs, I changed my hairstyle. I’m not saying the contest’s a good thing, but without it, maybe I’d still be a pig.”
Piglettes Page 4