Ooh La La! Connie Pickles

by Sabine Durrant

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Ooh la la! Connie Pickles

  Welcome to the further private scribblings of Connie Pickles Constance de Bellechasse. Official connoisseur of all things French. Especially les crêpes. Et les goths. Et les garçons!

  Warning: reading may dispel any romantic notions of Paris, city of chic. As some singer once said, and the owner of this notebook recently discovered: Le chic, c’est freak. Wise words.

  À bientôt!

  Books by Sabine Durrant

  CROSS YOUR HEART, CONNIE PICKLES

  OOH LA LA, CONNIE PICKLES

  For adults

  THE GREAT INDOORS

  HAVING IT AND EATING IT

  SABINE DURRANT

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2007

  1

  Text copyright © Sabine Durrant, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978–0–141–31941–4

  To the Smiths

  Chapter One

  New vocab: un quai (platform); ne pas manquer (to be in time for); faire foirer quelque chose (to mess something up)

  Friday 28 March

  Eurostar, carriage sixteen, pulling out of Waterloo, 9.10 a.m.

  I think I can honestly say this is the most exciting moment of my life.

  Julie, who is reading over my shoulder, says that I’m a tragic human being and that the most exciting moment of her life was halfway through Wednesday night when she met Karl. This is what I say:

  1. Karl wears red trousers and she once told me never to trust a boy who wore red trousers.

  2. I bet he only lasts two minutes. None of her boyfriends lasts longer than that.

  3. She should keep her big nose out of my diary.

  [Squiggles on page due to undignified scuffle.]

  Now I have my pen back. (It’s a lovely thin-nibbed Pentel.) OK, they weren’t red, they were ‘wine-khaki’. And OK, she hasn’t got a big nose. Just medium.

  She’s listening to her iPod now, staring out of the window with a lovesick expression on her face, so I’ve got a few minutes’ peace.

  Oh! I can’t believe I’m finally on my way. I’m always telling everyone that Paris is my natural home, and now’s my chance to prove it. I know it’s only two and a bit weeks and that it’s only a French exchange, but I feel in my bones that something important is going to happen. I’m going to be as one with the French way of life. I may look embarrassingly English now – thick tights and floral frock from Oxfam are a mistake and I’ve made my skin blotchy picking those spots on my chin – but in two weeks I will be a changed person. I will be chic. I will be soignée. I will be pimple-free. I will probably wear black.

  Hang on, there goes Julie’s phone. It’s Monsieur Baker. We got separated from him and the rest of the group in Departures. It was so chaotic, what with Cyril and Marie, my half-brother and half-sister, charging around, and Mother all teary and William and Delilah… but I’m not going to think about that now… and what with Karl being there in his red – I mean wine-khaki – trousers, that by the time we got through Passports I was a limp rag. Julie yanked me into WHSmith to buy a copy of Elle and some cigarettes and I let the situation slip. (Honestly, I don’t know why someone as prim as me is best friends with Julie. Or vice versa.) The queue was ridiculous and by the time she’d paid and slotted her Marlboro Lights into the back pocket of her jeans – some feat of engineering considering how tight they are – the others had disappeared up the moving escalator.

  There was a drunken man taking his trousers off and trying to have a pee at the bottom so the ticket collector was a bit distracted and we fanned our passports and ran through. The train was already making noises and I had to yell at Julie to run – she’s wearing wedge espadrilles (honestly, in this weather!) and her boobs were bouncing up and down in her stripy halterneck.

  ‘Hurry up!’ I shouted. ‘We can’t miss the train. Paris awaits!’

  She couldn’t breathe when she finally sat down. Turns out you can’t smoke on the train anyway. Good thing too. I love Julie for all her faults, and I don’t want her to die of lung cancer before she’s even lost her virginity.

  Eurostar, Kent, 10 a.m.

  I am slightly concerned about the others. I was all for going to join them in carriage eighteen about five minutes ago, but Julie says Monsieur B will come and find us if he’s that bothered. Now she’s nodded off to sleep with her mouth against the window and I don’t have the heart to wake her.

  I’ve just reread the details of my French exchange student.

  Name: Pascale Blanc

  Family: Father (hotel suppier); Mother (housewife); two bothers (older)

  Hobbies: Fashion, rock music,literature

  She sounds intriguing and I like her handwriting on the form. Her family sounds tidy and grown-up too. Just the sort of thing I like. Mine’s so higgledy-piggledy, what with my own father being dead and Jack, my stepfather, being divorced from my mother, and Marie and Cyril being so irritatingly little. Sometimes I think I’m the only person who keeps everything together. A conventional family with older siblings will be restful. I’m not so sure about Pascale’s hobbies. Julie says it’s about time I took some interest in fashion and rock music. My personal style is what I like to call ‘charity-shop chic’, i.e. anything I can find that’s wacky and cheap. Julie thinks I need to be a bit more Miss Selfridge and a bit less Dr Barnado’s. I’m so glad Pascale likes literature. I’ve started reading Madame Bovary, which is quite hard work. Pascale’s probably read it several times and I expect we’ll discuss it late into the night.

  Eurostar, train track in the French countryside, 11.50 a.m.

  I went to sleep. It must have been the rhythm of the train. It seems to be running faster and smoother this side of the Channel. Of course it does; everything is better here. Julie’s still snoring next to me. I can’t believe I missed the tunnel. I’m actually in France! The landscape is beautiful. Flatter than I’d imagined – dark furrowed fields stretching out like giant rumpled handkerchiefs under the lowering dark sky. (Sorry: I must stop trying to be too poetic. It’s just showing off.) A church with a steeple in the distance. And walking along that road a man with a dog in a beret. The man’s in the beret, I mean, not the dog.

  The countryside is turning into town – tall buildings, pavements, cars. There’s something beautiful about the shape of French houses – the steep pitch of the roofs, the golden colour of the brickwork, the shutters, the wrought-iron balconies. Those houses there are just so French. You couldn’t find them anywhere
else.

  We’ve made good time. We must be getting into Paris. It’s strange that Monsieur Baker hasn’t come to look for us. I expect we’ll meet him on the platform. I can’t see anything I recognize from pictures yet, like Sacré Cœur, or the Eiffel Tower. It looks more industrial than I’d thought. And – stupid, I know – I hadn’t imagined it to be drizzling.

  We’re slowing down. Julie’s stirring. In a few minutes my feet will be on real French soil. I’m going to remember this moment for the rest of my life. France, oh France.

  Belgium, 12.25 p.m.

  Oh God.

  Chapter Two

  New vocab: un embouteillage (a traffic jam); une zone industrielle (an industrial estate); une goth (a goth)

  Station office, Gare du Midi, Brussels, 12.30 p.m.

  Julie is talking to Monsieur Baker on her phone. I think he is angry – very, very angry. I can tell this by the fact that she has let her hair fall forward to cover her face and that she hasn’t looked up to stick her tongue out at me once. A thin man in uniform, also very angry, is talking at us fast and furiously, with lots of hand gestures, but I don’t understand because I seem to have forgotten any French I ever knew. Actually, maybe he is speaking that other language they have in Belgium. What is it? Flemish.

  It is only just sinking in. We are not in Paris. We are not even in France. We are miles from France. I wish I’d paid more attention in Geog because then I’d know how many miles.

  To be honest, I’m not even sure where Belgium is.

  A taxi in the back streets of Brussels, 2 p.m.

  The station master, or monsieur de gare or whatever he’s called, became much nicer when he’d calmed down. He said we must have been led on to the wrong platform. It was bad luck that the Brussels train had been delayed. He let us sit in his office while he spoke for a long time on the phone to Monsieur Baker. When he hung up, he wrung his hands and raised his eyes to the ceiling as if to say, ‘Whoa, that’s one cross French teacher,’ which I thought was very human of him.

  He gave us a really horrible cup of coffee and then he put us in the taxi that is at this very minute taking us to a coach station. We don’t have to pay. Monsieur Baker has sorted that out, though we will have to pay him back. (I feel very bad about Mother.)

  We’re stuck in traffic. Julie is texting Karl. There’s nothing outside the window to fill the heart with glee. The buildings are modern and aloof. Rain streaks the concrete black. The station master says there’s a square near by where there’s a statue of a little boy peeing. I think it would remind me of my little brother, Cyril, who always leaves the seat wet but whom I’m beginning to miss more than I can say. I feel homesick. Actually maybe I just feel carsick.

  A coach somewhere in Belgium, seat twenty-three, 4.45 p.m.

  Thank goodness we got on this bus. The last one was full. Julie and I sat in a cafe and drank a gallon of Coke, two sandwiches filled with stringy ham, and about eight packaged cakes. Our landlord, John Spence, who is also Mother’s boyfriend (but that’s another story), gave me fifty euros as a present and I spent eighteen of them on snacks.

  Julie has been talking a lot about Karl. He goes to the same school as her last boyfriend, Ade. ‘But,’ she said, ‘he’s not the sort of person to get off with someone else when you’re in the same room.’

  ‘No.’

  We both sat thoughtfully, remembering a fateful party in which Ade had done just that.

  ‘Karl’s perfect,’ she breathed.

  ‘But he does wear red trousers,’ I added.

  Same coach somewhere in France, seat twenty-two, 6.30 p.m.

  I’ve swapped seats with Julie so as to be by the window. We’ve crossed the border: lines of poplars, more huge fields, motorways, factories. We might not be seeing France’s best side.

  Julie has just suggested we make lists of all the boys we’ve ever fancied. I’ve humoured her for a bit, but only on the condition we play I spy in French to practise our vocab.

  She’s just texting Karl – AGAIN – and then she will.

  Bother. I can’t stop thinking about William now. It was odd of him and Delilah to come and say goodbye. Delilah is my next-door neighbour and a good friend – though I don’t always like her, if you know what I mean. She was wearing an acid-green mac cinched in at the waist and quite a lot of make-up for so early on a Friday morning. I think she’d really come because she was peed she wasn’t going on a French exchange (they don’t do them at her school – too posh) but she wanted to show me she wasn’t.

  She said airily, ‘We’re going on a day trip; William’s taking me to Brighton. Thought we’d wave you off as we were passing.’

  I tried to catch William’s eye but he was scuffing his feet back and forth across the floor as if there was a stain he was trying to clear up. Truth be told, his jeans are so wide and flapping he was in fact mopping clean a small area without realizing.

  Things have been a little strange between us since the incident. I keep telling myself it was just a kiss and he wasn’t even going out with Delilah when it happened, and it is DEFINITELY for the best that we are just friends.

  He looked up, finally, and saw me watching. ‘We’ll miss ya,’ he said casually.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  We gazed at each other. And, for a moment, I forgot all the noise and bustle of Waterloo around me. I just saw my dear friend William – that sweet, sheepish smile he has when he bites the corner of his lip as if trying to stop himself. For a moment I thought there was something still between us, but… But then Delilah came up and gave him a side-on hug.

  Right, I’m going to read Madame Bovary now. So far it seems to be about an unhappily married woman who is obsessed with love. Not a good life path. One thing I’m going to do on this trip is flush William from my system. That sounds a bit lavatorial. I should say purge him from my being. Oh dear, that does too. What I mean is: FORGET HIM.

  (I’ve had a horrible thought. Do you think they’ve done it?)

  Coach in outskirts of Paris, back in seat twenty-three, 7.40 p.m.

  Had to swap seats back as Julie is feeling sick. We are entering Paris through the back door. The coach is going to drop us somewhere near Disneyland (the indignity), where Monsieur Baker will ‘hand us over’ to our families. I’m beginning to feel nervous. Julie says she’ll run away if she doesn’t like hers.

  We are turning off the motorway so we must be getting near. We’re pulling into an industrial estate. I can see Monsieur Baker waiting with a group of people. On one side of him is a smiley girl in jeans, younger than us, a chubby woman in a tracksuit and several young children in grubby anoraks. On the other is a small woman in a beige raincoat and an angry-looking goth in head-to-toe black. We’ve come to a halt. I wonder which is mine. Julie has just squeezed my hand. I think I can bear anything except perhaps the goth.

  The cleanest bathroom in the world, 9 p.m.

  I got the goth.

  I’m so tired I can hardly lift my pen. I’m in the bathroom. They think I’m cleaning my teeth.

  I almost cried saying goodbye to Julie. She whispered, ‘Mine looks about ten and yours looks about twenty-five; do you think they’ve got us muddled?’ as we hugged. I gave her an affectionate whack in the ribs with my elbow so the last I saw of her face was it contorted in fake agony. Oh, I’m going to miss her.

  This is stupid, and I’m going to get over it, but I feel lonely. The house is modern and clean, in a cul-de-sac next to other identical houses. There’s a tiny old-fashioned kitchen and a big room divided into a sitting area and a dining area, with a massive flat-screen television blaring from the wall. The floors are all cold and tiled. Upstairs, where the bedrooms are, the carpet is dark green and scratchy. It’s nowhere near the centre of Paris. We’re way out in the suburbs.

  Madame de Blanc is like a little brown mouse (complete with whiskers: oh that’s so mean, sorry). She’s slightly bent and her hair is tied back in a frail bun. No make-up, beige clothes. I keep worrying I’m g
oing to tread on her. I think she wants to be called ‘Madame Blanc’ because she didn’t correct me when I did. One of the side effects of an unconventional upbringing is that you can be a bit free and easy with first names. No sign of Monsieur Blanc or either of Pascale’s brothers. You know how other people’s houses always smell different, though there’s normally food and washing powder involved? Well, this one smells sterile, like my doctor’s waiting room.

  Pascale does look about twenty-five. Huge black boots, buckles all over her trousers, dyed purple hair, loads of eyeliner. She’s pretending she’s not interested in me to be cool. At least, I hope she’s pretending. She didn’t talk to me at all in the car. I tried to chat, but my dictionary was in my rucksack and my French, despite the I spy, has deserted me.

  I’m sleeping on a spare bed in her bedroom. The room’s covered in posters of snarling pop stars and she’s written things in angry felt-tip all over the mirror. The windows are covered in black paper. I’ve got a drawer for my clothes. At the back, I found a key ring in the shape of a skull.

  I rang Mother to tell her I was here safely. She’s received a running commentary on our day from Monsieur Baker and has been ver’ ver’ ver’ worried (she often says things in threes). I had to pretend to be ver’ ver’ ver’ jolly to cheer her up. Marie came on and told me all about the Easter Bonnet parade she’d had at school and then I spoke to Cyril – he’d lost his Superhero Top Trumps and I remembered they were on top of the toaster. Now I feel so homesick I can’t write any more.

  Chapter Three

  New vocab: la banlieue (the suburbs); voler à l’étalage (to shoplift)

  Saturday 29 March

  Pascale’s bedroom, 1 p.m.

  Some observations:

  1. In France you drink hot chocolate from a bowl not a cup.

  2. Madame Blanc enjoys cleaning.

  3. Pascale snores.

  I woke up this morning feeling much more positive. Pascale was still asleep (see observation three, above) but I could hear noises out in the street – voices and birdsong. I lay on the bed, thinking about my long-lost grandparents, the deliciously named Bellechasses. Mother hasn’t spoken to her parents for years – they disowned her when she ran off with my poor dead father – but she wrote to let them know I was coming. It is strange they didn’t ring when they got her letter. It was only a week ago – I joined the French exchange programme at the last minute. Maybe it hasn’t reached them yet.