Piglettes

by Clémentine Beauvais

  We get to Cluny around six, and set up shop next to a huge stone building called Cluny Abbey (according to a board). But no sooner have we opened the trailer than…

  “Hey! Look! It’s the piglettes!”

  …a tall Mediterranean girl rushes up to us. She’s got fire-black, smoke-frizzy hair, and she’s wearing the kind of dress you’d see at the Oscars—the blood-red, full-length glimmer of a million vermilion sequins. Behind her are a tall, brown-haired man and a tall blonde girl, both wearing a kind of military uniform, complete with gold braids and army caps.

  These three elongated types flash us some remarkably flawless smiles.

  “Great, they’re right on time!” the dark-haired woman comments, consulting the brown-haired man’s wristwatch.

  “You’d like a sausage?” the Sun asks, a little stunned.

  “Oh! I guess, if it makes you happy,” says the dark-haired woman. “Gab? Blondie? Sausage? I haven’t got any money, though.”

  Gab fishes a few coins from a pocket of his uniform. He buys a thyme sausage with onion sauce for Blondie, a plain sausage with apple sauce for himself, and a vegetarian sausage with mustard sauce for the tall dark-haired one, who “hates sweet-and-savoury stuff”.

  We watch the handsome trio eating our sausages. Even the Sun looks a little fascinated by the spectacle.

  After some time, I dare to ask, “Sorry, Mr and Mrs Soldier and Mrs Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, would you mind telling us why you’re dressed like that?”

  Blondie bursts out laughing. “We’re not soldiers, we’re students here. Well, my brother Gab and I are. This is our university’s official uniform. Bit military, I know, but I don’t generally go waddling through mud with a gun if I can avoid it. Still, we have to wear it: it’s the university’s summer ball, tonight. And this is Coline, my brother’s girlfriend.”

  We might have guessed, since Coline/Jasmine and Gab, their sausages barely swallowed, have been repeatedly clashing their lips together, as loudly and unsubtly as a pair of cymbals.

  “They’re super in love,” Blondie explains.

  “Looks like it,” I admit. “What was that about a ball?”

  “You’ll soon see,” Coline says slurpingly, having detached her mouth from Gab’s with a bizarre sucking noise. “You’re coming too.”

  “Who, us?” asks Hakima. “No, we can’t, because after this service we’ve still got some cycling to do. We have to get to Taizé, don’t we, Mireille? Taizé’s where we’re sleeping this eve—”

  “No way!” Blondie interrupts her. “Listen, it’d be so fun: we’re smuggling you into the summer ball!”

  “You’re what?!”

  The Sun, in his wheelchair, has grown noticeably tense. With a sweep of the hand, Gab points out the huge abbey, behind which the sun is about to dive.

  “That monastery, dear piglettes, isn’t just a typical example of… erm…”

  “Of Perpendicular Gothic architecture!” his sister fills in.

  “Nonsense,” snorts Coline, “it’s totally Romanesque.”

  “Anyway,” says Gab, “that monastery isn’t just a perpendicularly romantic example of some architecture from some time in history. No, dear friends: it is also a prestigious school of engineering, where my sister and I are currently studying. That noble and ancient institute—”

  “…gives a sumptuous ball every summer,” Blondie says, picking up the thread. “The Summer Ball.”

  “Boring name, great ball,” yawns Coline.

  “And this year, it’s tonight! You’re right on time to get in.”

  “It’s really nice of you to ask,” says Astrid, “but we’re not going to any balls, we’re just selling sausages and cycling. And we have to get up early tomorrow, because we’ve got a lot of cycling and selling sausages to do.”

  “Astrid’s right,” I say.

  “Oh, Astrid,” Coline groans, “enjoy life a bit. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! This isn’t a disco at the local youth club, my friends. It’s one of the most coveted parties in Europe!”

  Me: “If that’s so, I can’t see how we’d get in wearing shorts and sweaty T-shirts.”

  “No worries,” Gab replies. “We’ve got it sorted.”

  Coline squeezes the lacy collars of three shiny dresses out of a plastic bag. Blondie turns to the Sun and smiles. “Sorry, we didn’t think of bringing you clothes—you’ve got to admit, they’re mostly talking about those three in the papers. But don’t worry, we’ll find you a suit somewhere. Gab, be a dear and lend a suit to… to…”

  “Kader,” the Sun whispers, and stares at Blondie as if he finds her attractive or something, which kind of gets on my nerves, because, well, apart from the fact that she’s lithe, blonde, tall, with teeth as straight as piano keys and delicately turned ankles, she doesn’t look that extra ordinary.

  “Sure,” says Gab. “You must be about my height.”

  “Trousers might be a bit long,” the Sun retorts. “Come on, guys. Seriously, why do you want to get us in there? You want to make fun of the girls? I’m meant to be looking after them.”

  “Oh, Kader!” pipes Blondie. “Kader darling, it’s like you’ve never been a student.”

  “I haven’t,” says the Sun.

  That shuts them up for a few seconds, but then Blondie starts again. “All right, but you’ve been a soldier, right? You probably know more than us about jokes and pranks. You’ve never made an apple-pie bed?”

  “Sure, I have.”

  “You’ve never propped a bucketful of water on top of a door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve never smuggled girls into the barracks?”

  “Erm, no.”

  (Quite right!)

  “OK, but you get what I mean. In this university, pranks are our religion. Well, pranks and gambling.”

  “And alcohol!” Gab chimes in.

  “Alcohol?!” (A horrified echo from Hakima.)

  “Gab, stop freaking them out,” says Coline. “Anyway—this morning, a bunch of our friends read about you in the papers, and saw that you were stopping in Cluny this evening. They challenged us to smuggle you all into the ball tonight. If we do it, they’re buying us a case of champagne.”

  “Each,” Blondie specifies.

  “No, no, no!” Hakima shrieks. “Mum and Dad don’t want me to go to rave parties. Do they, Kader?”

  “Course they don’t,” the Sun mutters unconvincingly. “It’s out of the question.”

  “And what would we get out of it, anyway?” I ask. “We don’t like champagne.”

  “I don’t mind champagne,” Astrid whispers.

  “What would you get out of it?” Gab laughs. “She’s asking what they’d get out of it? Oh please, Mireille—that’s your name, isn’t it?—Mireille, darling, come on…”

  He slings an arm round my shoulders.

  “You’ll have the time of your life!”

  A few minutes later, Coline has transformed the trailer into a changing room. Our fiery fairy godmother twirls in a circle, brandishing dresses, brushes, combs, needles, shawls and jewellery.

  Hakima goes in first, looking like she’s about to have her wisdom teeth extracted without anaesthetic. Waiting for the metamorphosis to occur, Gab and Blondie take Astrid and me to the secret medieval passageway we’ll have to go down later.

  “It’s right by that plastic garden chair,” says Gab. “Here’s the key. The passage leads to the library. Everyone knows about it, so it’ll be guarded by some nerds who volunteered as security officers. We’ll distract them with firecrackers. As soon as you hear the bangs, get out of the passage, run to the red curtains and wait for us. We’ll pick you up asap.”

  Coline pops her head out of the trailer and calls Astrid, who scuttles off. Me: “But once we’re inside, they’ll spot us straightaway! We’re much younger than everyone else.”

  “No one’ll pay any attention. We’ll just avoid the wardens. Don’t do anything too noticeable, and it will be fine.�
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  Coline reappears. It’s my turn.

  The trailer’s completely different now: the mini fridge has been turned into a make-up console, myriad pins are scattered on the floor. My dress awaits, duck-egg blue, draped across pots of sauce.

  “Slip it on!”

  “It’s too long.”

  “No problem, we’ll take it up. With safety pins, of course—no time to sew. But it’ll do.”

  “How about my shoes?”

  “Keep your trainers on—they’ll be hidden by the dress. And just in case you’ve got to run…”

  She winks at me and starts doing my hair, which is notoriously uninteresting: grey-squirrel-coloured, flat, dry. She manages to pull it up into a ball, ripping off half my scalp in the process, and punches dozens of glittery hairpins through it.

  She then slathers my face in make-up and even spends some time painting my eyebrows, an art whose existence I had never suspected before.

  “All done! Go and find your friends.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the museum toilets. You won’t recognize them.”

  The decidedly multifunctional Cluny Abbey, which is also a university, is indeed also a museum, though that part’s closed tonight, for ball-related reasons. The museum shop, however, is open, and so are the toilets near it. I slip into the building. A couple of tourists in shorts stare at me with interest. A father tells his kid, “You see, that’s one of the young ladies who are going to the ball this evening.”

  “Come on, Gaëtan, it can’t be,” whispers his wife. “She’s much too young to be studying here.”

  “Maybe she’s the girlfriend of one of the students here,” Gaëtan hypothesizes.

  The girlfriend of a student. That good man considers it plausible that I might be the girlfriend of a student! With a thumping heart and reddened cheeks, I seek shelter in the toilets, where Hakima and Astrid, planted in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, are gazing at themselves with no small degree of surprise.

  “Oh, it’s…” I begin—but somehow, I cannot speak.

  Who are they?

  In the huge glistening mirror, three strangers—three young ladies—are looking at us. Who are they?

  A voluptuous, curvaceous blonde, her egg-yolk-coloured, strapless dress ideally matched to her rosy complexion. Astrid? Astrid, is that really you?

  And this perky little dark-haired girl, whose purple, off-the-shoulder velvet number sways like an anemone every time she moves around—Hakima? Hakima, is that you?

  And that proud-looking young woman, her hair pulled back by diamond pins, her azure dress, pleated like a toga, falling over her endless legs and describing her pretty waist… is that… could that be… me?

  …

  JUST KIDDING!

  We look exactly like what we are: three little piglettes, dressed up in synthetic ball dresses and painted like stolen cars. Astrid and I look like plumper versions of Cinderella’s sisters Anastasia and Drizella in the Disney cartoon. Hakima has all the allure of a dried prune wrapped in bacon.

  We’re silent for a while, and then…

  …and then we can’t hold it any more—we burst out laughing; we double over with laughter—a laughter that rises from the depths of our podgy bellies, that shakes our jewellery, our hair and our dresses—that forces us to lean against the taps—a laughter that makes us want to pee, a gigantic laughter of freedom and ecstasy, brand new, magnificent—as big and as spectacular as the ball that opens its doors to us, and soon swallows us up.

  Blondie, Coline and Gab weren’t lying: the ball is bewilderingly brilliant.

  Huddled together like three lost ducklings, we hop from room to room, hypnotized. Each room, Gab explains, has been decorated by one of the year groups.

  “That one’s by those who matriculated last year.”

  “Who did what?” whispers Hakima, turning bright red.

  “Nothing rude, my love, it just means enrolled.”

  “So it’s the second years’ room,” explains Astrid. “It’s as if your year entirely redecorated a room in our school, Hakima.”

  “Oh, right. Well, we’d start with taking down all the posters about abortion, drugs and bullying, because they’re depressing,” Hakima thinks out loud.

  “Hey, look! This is Gab’s year’s room!” Coline says proudly, dragging us to a kind of frozen, apocalyptic wasteland.

  “The theme was Titanic,” Gab explains.

  Stalactites—some real, some plastic—hang from the ceiling, dripping cold water onto our heads. In lieu of a bar, an ice wall, with carved-out nests for bottles. Loudspeakers are playing a mixture of sea noises and shrieks of terror, provoking laughter from the revellers. Some of them are trying on life jackets. A bunch of violinists are playing very sad music, and sometimes a foghorn may be heard.

  “It’s in very good taste!” I observe.

  “Always!” Gab laughs.

  We sit down in a lifeboat with a small round table in the middle.

  “I had to hammer that bloody thing in,” Gab says. “It was tricky as hell. I even swallowed a nail.”

  “You swallowed a nail?!” Hakima cries. “But you’re going to die!”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” says Gab. “I ate a whole pack of cotton wool afterwards, it should be fine.”

  Hakima whispers to us, “Now he’s got twice the amount of iron you’re supposed to have in your body!”

  Coline comes back with two Bellinis, one for her and one for Gab, and three alcohol-free cocktails for the other piglettes and me. Hakima sips hers, looking very much like she’s suspecting it might secretly contain alcohol. She grumbles, “Where’s Kader, anyway?”

  Apparently, no need to worry: the Sun makes his entrance in a dashing suit, pushed merrily by Blondie, who got him into the ball by saying loudly, “He’s my new boyfriend, I know he hasn’t got a ticket, but come on, he’s disabled! You just have to let him in!”

  He whistles when he sees us. “Gorgeous! You look like Hollywood actresses. Mireille, that hairstyle really suits you.”

  “Oh! Pff! Hmmph!” I reply, and go on emitting another dozen equally weird noises. Said hairstyle has a major flaw, that of revealing my ears, which must be visibly Merlot-coloured right about now.

  The Sun declines the Bellini offered by Blondie, and calmly drinks a Coke while she downs a cocktail in a few minutes.

  “Where did you change clothes, Kader?” Hakima asks.

  “Oh, just over there, in a room.”

  “In Blondie’s room?” He drinks his glass instead of replying, masking a small smile I wish I could X-ray.

  “Unbelievable, this ball,” he murmurs, half-amused, half-reproachful. “Does it happen every year?”

  “Every year! We need to celebrate, you see, after all the work we’ve done!”

  The Sun nods, but I know what he’s thinking; he’s thinking that in the army, you don’t celebrate the end of the year with pretty balls when you’ve lost yet another, I don’t know, fifty, sixty soldiers in Problemistan, not to mention the Sun’s bottom half. He’s also thinking about Barack Obamette, who promised, crossed her heart and hoped to die, that the troops would be pulled out this year, but eventually she just couldn’t, you see, because the Americans wouldn’t be pleased, and it’s all very complicated.

  I wonder if Klaus Von Strudel is annoyed that his wife’s sending all those men to die in Problemistan so as not to displease the Americans?

  Hey, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about Klaus.

  We walk around, changing rooms and atmospheres. A jungle here, a beach there, and in corridor after corridor, room after room, we help ourselves generously to paella, oysters, cheeses, cakes—and alcohol, too. I try sangria, just to see what it’s like, in the flamenco room; and caipirinha, just to see what it’s like, in the salsa room… We keep walking, brushing past crinoline dresses (who still wears crinoline dresses?), tail coats (who still wears tails?) and school uniforms.

  Suddenly, Blondie
spots a richly decorated, Versailles-style room, where an elegant waltz is playing, and…

  “Kader, you’re dancing with me!”

  “Course not.”

  “It wasn’t a question…”

  Well, apparently he can dance. With Blondie, he can dance. That wheelchair isn’t just good for playing Paralympic basketball, it seems—you can also kind of waltz around. As long as there’s a tall blonde to swirl around, like a satellite around one’s solar chariot…

  “Astrid, Mireille… he’s dancing. He’s dancing!” Hakima murmurs. “I must tell Jamal. And Mum. And Dad. And cousin Sofia and Auntie Nour…”

  Me: “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I really want to see that room over there. It looks awesome!”

  That room over there that looks awesome, and which I’ve picked entirely at random, turns out to be the karaoke room, where a chubby man is currently attempting to sing some Avril Lavigne. We sit down and clap loudly—me especially, because the two cocktails are starting to make their way into my bloodstream…

  “Let’s all give Jean-François a big round of applause!” the karaoke’s emcee shouts.

  Me (I think): “Woohoo! Jean-François, you’re the best!” [whistle]

  “Mireille, are you drunk?”

  “Me? Drunk? Lies! Jean-François, another one! Encore! Encore!”

  Jean-François looks a teensy bit taken aback to be begged for more songs by Cinderella’s stepsister, but he flashes me a goofy smile. Uh-oh, looks like we’ve been spotted.

  “Hey, we’ve got a lovely trio over there!” the emcee yells. “Aren’t you going to sing us a little something? How about the Spice Girls?”

  “NO WAY, MATE!” I shout back (at least I think it’s me). “I SING ALMOST AS BADLY AS JEAN-FRANÇOIS!”

  “And I don’t know any songs,” Hakima worries.

  “How about you, in the middle? Want to sing us something?”

  It takes Astrid two and a half centuries to realize he’s talking to her. “Who, me?”

  “YES, YOU!” everyone else shouts (including me, I believe).

  “Well, I dunno,” says Astrid. “Have you got any Indo-chine songs?”

  “She’s asking if we’ve got any Indochine songs!” the emcee laughs. “Of course we’ve got Indochine songs, my love! Which one do you want?”