Piglettes

by Clémentine Beauvais

  * Names have been changed.

  “Who’s Charlotte?” asks Astrid, scratching her chin.

  “Probably Chloé Ragondin,” I reply. “She has changed a lot since she got that silver medal. She stopped eating cake, then she stopped eating meat, then she stopped eating altogether. Saves her money, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t that journalist interview us?” whispers Hakima. “We’re the ones at the centre of it all.”

  “You’d have agreed to be interviewed?” asks Astrid, a bit surprised. “I wouldn’t. I’d never have known what to say.”

  “Me neither,” says Hakima, “but we’d have sent Mireille, because Mireille always knows what to say.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it!” I growl. “You both mysteriously lost the gift of speech when Malo and Princess appeared! I felt like I was surrounded by piggy versions of the Little Mermaid!”

  “You know we’re not like you, Mireille,” says Hakima limply. “We’re not extrinsic.”

  “Extroverts.”

  “Yes, that. We’ve got l’esprit de l’escalier—staircase wit.”

  “What’s that?” asks Astrid.

  “We learnt it at school. It’s, like, when you think of a witty reply to something someone’s said, but the person you want to say it to, well, they’re already gone.”

  “What’s it got to do with staircases?” Astrid wants to know.

  “Can’t remember. Maybe something like, you’re so gutted that you thought of the witty reply too late that you throw yourself down the stairs.”

  Astrid looks puzzled.

  “To kill yourself,” Hakima specifies.

  Astrid coughs. I throw my plump juicy arms around my plump juicy friends. “Right, let’s set things straight. No one’s throwing themselves down any stairs in the name of any wit. We’ve got bikes, we’ve got calves, we’ve got a garden party to crash. We’ve got a villainous Malo to fight, who’s in love with a Princess who cares more about her magic mirror than him. The stage is set for a true fairy-tale ending. And now, we’ve got something else too: media coverage. And we’re going to use it.”

  “We’ve got what?” Hakima asks.

  “Media coverage. Hakima, pay attention. You’re the one who suggested the idea, I’ll have you know.”

  “What idea?”

  “You said we should be front-page news! Trending topics. Red-hot hashtags.”

  “Did I?”

  I drag them out of the market, smiling at the Bourg-en-Bresse shoppers cramming their baskets full of vegetables, fruit, fish, cheeses and jars.

  “We’re going to get hold of that Hélène Lesnout, and she’s going to write an article about us. I mean really about us, this time.”

  8

  “Philidarling Daddy, Daddy Dumont extraordinaire, may I have a word?”

  Philippe Dumont shoots me a strangely suspicious stare over the bowl full of lasagne filling he is energetically mixing. Mum, acting as if she hasn’t heard, focuses on her pasta-making machine.

  “What are you after?”

  “I was just wondering if you happen to know a lady called Hélène Lesnout, seeing as you walk through life stuffing your pockets with new friends?”

  Waiting for a reply, I stick my spoon into a tin of chestnut spread. The brown paste curves sensuously around it, leaving Philippe Dumont and Mum plenty of time to swap worried glances. On the sofa, Hakima and Astrid pretend to be playing with Fluffles, who isn’t pretending to bite them.

  “You saw the article,” says Philippe Dumont.

  “Yup! And we’d love to meet the journalist.”

  “Erm… what for?”

  “To bash her head in with a snow shovel and dump her lifeless body in a ditch. No, just kidding. We’d like her to give us some free publicity for our trip to Paris.”

  “Your what?”

  Mum’s voice. She’s stopped twisting the handle of the pasta machine. The sheet of fresh pasta falls pathetically onto the countertop. Philippe Dumont’s hands, covered in mince and little bits of onion, are suspended mid-knead.

  I’m not impressed. “Seriously, Mummy, have you forgotten already? I told you the other night! You know, when you were wearing that nipple-tastic blue nightgown! Astrid, Hakima and I are going to Paris.”

  “Are you now?” Mum asks, her nostrils flaring elegantly. “And when will this be?”

  “Early July, once school’s over.”

  “Oh yes? And how are you going to get there?”

  “Mummy, Mummy, come on—you’re the one who gave us the idea. We’re going to cycle!”

  As if to mimic our future pedalling, Mum starts turning the pasta machine’s handle, slightly faster than a helicopter’s rotor blades in mid-flight. Philippe Dumont begins kneading his mince again, his fingers emitting perfectly obscene sucking noises.

  “How interesting,” Mum says. “And how long is that going to take?”

  “We haven’t figured out everything yet, but we’ll look it up online. There must be some website somewhere called How to Get from Bourg-en-Bresse to Paris by Bike.com.”

  “And where will you sleep?”

  “Under the starry skies, or, should we encounter charitable strangers, on beds of hay in creaky barns.”

  “Perfect. And what are you going to do once you get there?”

  The lasagne sheet splurging out of the pasta machine is now approximately the size of a shower curtain. “There in Paris, you mean, marvellous Mummy of mine?”

  “That’s what I mean, yes.”

  “Ah, Paris! The city of love. We’ll just walk around, you know. Hang out in bars, drink tiny expensive espressos, eat macarons, all that stuff.”

  “Wonderful. And with what money?”

  “With what money? Ha!”

  Failing to come up with a plausible answer, I turn to Hakima and Astrid, who are being gradually ripped to shreds by an overexcited Fluffles. “Astrid! Stop feeding that cat your blood and tendons, we might need them. Tell my mother whence the money shall come for our Paris adventure.”

  Intense panic. Astrid stammers, “Well, we’re going to… I mean, we’ll…”

  “We’ll earn it!” suggests Hakima, raising her hand in the air.

  Good start. “That’s right,” I confirm. “We’ll earn the money.”

  “Earn it by doing what, exactly?” Mum asks sarcastically.

  “Doing what? Well, that’s what so funny about it. Tell her, Hakima.”

  “By… by doing… by finding…”

  One correct answer a day being quite enough for our silver-medal piglette, she falls into confused silence.

  But genius strikes elsewhere. “By selling!” Astrid yells.

  “By selling,” repeats Mum, still unrolling a Bayeux Tapestry-sized sheet of lasagne. “Very interesting. By selling what?”

  “Come on, Mummy, isn’t it obvious? By selling…”

  “By selling…” says Astrid.

  “By selling… plump…”

  “…juicy…”

  “…delicious…”

  “…piggy…”

  “…”

  “…sausages!”

  Philippe Dumont and Mum seem to have forgotten Mission Lasagne. “Plump juicy delicious piggy sausages,” Mum echoes.

  “Yes!” Astrid shouts. “We’re going to sell sausages on the road!”

  “Plain sausages, thyme sausages.”

  “And also vegetarian sausages for those who don’t eat pork,” adds Hakima. “Or else it’s recrimination.”

  “Discrimination. Yes, exactly, Hakima, and we’re not having any of that in our shop.”

  “No sir! Everyone welcome in our shop.”

  “Three types of sausage, three types of sauce,” Astrid marvels. “Onion, mustard, apple! Fixed-price menu: one sausage, one sauce, three euros.”

  “Five euros,” I correct. “Plus one drink, 6 euros.”

  “No, Mireille, we can’t take drinks, it’ll be too heavy,” says Hakima. “Stick to the bare necessities.”
<
br />   “OK.”

  “She’s right, it’ll be too heavy for the trailer,” says Astrid, on a roll.

  “What trailer?” Mum groans.

  “My mum’s trailer,” explains Astrid. “She uses it to wheel her pots around. I told you, Mireille—the one you can tow with a motorbike.”

  “You’re going there by motorbike, now?”

  “No, no,” says Astrid, “we’ll, erm… tweak it so it fits three bikes.”

  “Easy!” quoth I.

  Philippe Dumont and Mum don’t look like they think it’s easy, or indeed sensible. Mum manages a remarkably calm, “Very well. We’ll talk about it again later.” Philippe Dumont turns back to his mixing bowl of mince and onions, but I can tell his shoulders are shaking with something like laughter. A few minutes later he slips a scrunched-up Post-it note into my hand, on which he’s scribbled Hélène Lesnout’s phone number.

  After dinner, once Astrid and Hakima have left, Mum sits me down at the kitchen table. I expect a full-on lecture on why there’s absolutely no way she’s letting us cycle through France on our own, with little Hakima who’s much too young for us to be responsible for, and actually Astrid and I are much too young to be responsible for ourselves anyway, and bikes are dangerous because they go on roads, and the world is full of perverts who target young girls (even Pig Pageant winners), and you can’t sell food without a hygiene certificate and a full eight-year training course validated by the Ministry of Food Trailers…

  …and I’ve prepared answers to all these entirely unreasonable points; I’m ready to fight back with bullet-proof arguments, because in my blood runs that of Klaus Von Strudel, philosopher and logician.

  But it turns out that’s not what she wants to tell me.

  What she wants to tell me, her cheeks gammon-pink, is much, much more unexpected.

  “I have news, Mireille. Philippe and I are having a baby. Isn’t that great?”

  Something like a decade, or maybe even a full minute, ticks by. Time enough for Fluffles to pat a bit of mince off the table with his paw, poke it around the floor for a while, play ping-pong with it, eat it, spit it out, eat it again and suddenly run off up the stairs, terrified by what must be an aggressive-looking bit of fluff.

  I haul my voice up from the depths of my throat. “A baby? What? Did you get IVF or something?”

  Mum laughs, gets up and walks towards the stairs. “Why? Do you think we always sleep on opposite sides of the bed after a chaste kiss goodnight?”

  “To my despair, I know for a fact you don’t, but—I mean, you’re not exactly young!”

  “Thank you, you’re such a darling. We’re forty, it’s not that old. Many people have children naturally at our age.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “Well, I already have three half-brothers, so I’d rather it was a girl.”

  “Tough luck, it’s a boy.”

  “I hope he’s less of a moron than his quarter-brothers. Oh, good Lord! I’m sure you’re going to call him something idiotically posh, like Julius-Aurelian.”

  “We haven’t yet picked a name, but thank you for offering to help.”

  “When’s he scheduled for?”

  “In five months.”

  “Five months! Why the rush? And what’s going to happen to me? I’d happily be proven wrong, but I doubt he’ll look like Jean-Paul Sartre, if you see what I mean. With a cocktail of your genes and Philippe Dumont’s, he’ll turn up looking already like a mini-Johnny Depp, and everyone will go, ‘The Dumont-Laplanches, what a lovely family, with their new baby boy, Julius-Aurelian—such a cute little cherub, unlike that ugly duckling of a big sister, you know, that pigfaced—’”

  “Mireille, you’re giving me a headache.”

  “Will you go to school and teach with the baby hanging from your boob? Some mothers do that sometimes. It’s atrocious. I refuse to condone such behaviour.”

  “I won’t be teaching, since I’ll be on maternity leave. And I don’t know if I’ll breastfeed. Is that all? Any other questions?”

  “Yes. Why are you producing a baby instead of producing a major work of contemporary philosophy?”

  She rolls her eyes, and oh! that sigh!

  “No, but, Mum, listen—you’ve already got a daughter—I mean, I know it hasn’t been an incredibly successful experiment, but you can cross that off the to-do list. Why have another baby now, when the real you is so crammed full of top-quality philosophy, just waiting to be unleashed on the world, Mummy, why, why…”

  “I’m not a philosopher, Mireille,” she snaps. “I’m just a philosophy teacher. Philosophers write philosophy books. Philosophy teachers read them and talk about them to their students. And occasionally, members of both categories are allowed to have children.”

  She walks up to her bedroom. And I finally get what it means to have l’esprit de l’escalier, when I scream to her, from the bottom of the staircase, “You know what? The ugliest thing Klaus gave you isn’t even me. It’s that idea that you’re just a philosophy teacher.”

  Slam. The pregnant woman is going to bed.

  Give her a break, I tell myself. Cells are dividing up inside her at this very minute. It must be tiring.

  9

  Astrid has asked her mum to lend us her trailer, and against all odds, the delightful lady has agreed, “in principle”. She just wants to meet us first, to ensure that we are responsible and mature young women.

  I think she must be a little crazy—what kind of mother of a sixteen-year-old girl assumes it might be OK for her daughter to cycle off across France selling sausages, with a twelve-year-old and a trailer in tow?

  I ask Astrid, as she leads us through a charmingly overgrown garden towards her little country cottage, “Is your mum a little crazy? She doesn’t mind us going off on our own?”

  “No, she’s not crazy, she’s just… a bit of a hippy.”

  And so it seems she is. Laure Rosbourg, Astrid’s mother, is exactly like her small, chalk-white, tumbledown house. Like her, the garden grows in every possible direction, healthily and chaotically, stuffed with snails and ladybirds. The house, like her, is stocky and short, capped with a roof of sun-bleached blonde slates. She’s got potter’s hands, with close-cropped nails. Every doorway is curtained with garlands of wooden beads. There are kitsch crucifixes everywhere on the walls, worm-eaten Bibles on the mismatched furniture, jostling for space with little plastic saints from Lourdes, and stone and resin statuettes brought back from trips abroad. On the fridge, under ugly magnets (Swiss dog with a barrel of brandy round its neck, Swiss flag, Swedish flag), Astrid smiles out at us from faded pictures: dressed as a scout; ready for communion; hiking in the Alps, her Germanic calves flashing under wide tan shorts. Most of the crockery is home-made, and the clay plates and cups are chunky and cracked, varnished, sometimes painted. Laure pours us some tea from the biggest, reddest teapot in the world.

  “How lovely to meet Astrid’s new friends,” she says respectfully, as if we were adults like her. “I’ve heard so much about you. I’m glad Astrid’s met some good, genuine people.”

  Are we good, genuine people? Hakima and I nod vigorously to make it look like we entirely agree with that definition.

  “I think that the journey is an excellent idea. People today are much too afraid of letting children roam freely, sleep in the countryside and explore the world. But how about you, Hakima? Will your parents agree to let you go?”

  “I haven’t asked them yet,” answers Hakima shyly. “I doubt they’ll say yes.”

  I doubt it too, and that’s very much the elephant in the room. How will we convince Hakima’s parents? She’s twelve and a half. At that age, you don’t just cycle off to Paris from Bourg-en-Bresse, selling sausages, in the vague hope of gatecrashing a garden party at the presidential palace.

  “You just need to tell them,” says Laure, “that children used to wander around alone in forests and mountains all the time only a fe
w generations ago. Some still do. Scouts, for instance.”

  “Exactly! But not scouts, we’re expert sausage-sellers. We’re punks! We’re going to do our own thing. I’m sure your parents will say yes.”

  Not everyone’s sure, though, and frankly, if I were Hakima’s parents, I wouldn’t let her go away with Mireille Laplanche and Astrid Blomvall: two single, childless only daughters, and also, incidentally, teenagers, ill-adapted to real life and wrapped in ill-fitting clothes, who only a few weeks back had absolutely no friends in the whole wide world.

  And yet… you do end up being pretty good at taking care of people once you find a good reason for it. A good reason, such as, for instance, Hakima’s little scrunched-up nose when she talks about the trip—and her black eyes, which suddenly seem to shine from the inside, as if lit up by two little LEDs.

  Laure nods, and dishes out some hippy home-made biscuits—composed, as far as I can tell, of sugar, chocolate, butter, gravel and sand.

  “I’ll lend you the trailer,” says Laure, opening the squeaky garage door. “Tweak it, repaint it, adapt it—I don’t mind. May it bring you luck and joy. It’s been with me a long time, and I spent the best months of my life with it, riding around selling pottery, before…”

  Her voice breaks, as does a small clay pot that falls from a pile of boots and gardening supplies near the door.

  “…before she had me and my father left her,” concludes Astrid.

  I picture Laure Rosbourg and her handsome Swedish boyfriend, towing the trailer through Europe, selling pots from town to town. A wandering life, not suited to the arrival of a podgy blonde baby with rheumy eyes. Is that why the Swedish man left? Is that why Astrid ended up in Switzerland, destined for a slightly dull but painless childhood with a soundtrack of Catholic hymns and Indochine songs?

  The trailer is the size of a small car, with two large wheels. Two metal arms stretch out in front, meant to be hooked onto a motorbike. The right side of the trailer opens outwards and turns into a long shelf, which we’ll use to sell the sausages. There’s barely space for more than one of us inside, especially if we cram it with dishes and boxes full of sausages and sauces. The cracked paint on the outside still spells out the letters