Camille goes on talking about my rescue with a wealth of details. I can tell that he’s proud. In my opinion, he’s got good reason to be. And I can’t help thinking that if he hadn’t been on the game that night, I would be floating like a turd in the Seine.
His story has a happy ending: the rescuer rescues me, the paramedics paramedic me, and the hero (that’s me) is fished out in time. I smile, he smiles too.
Eventually, since we have nothing left to say to each other than “thank you/don’t mention it”, he gets up, rearranges his fringe and his cotton friendship bracelets.
He mutters:
“Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m really happy to see that you’re on the mend.”
We shake hands. He heads for the door.
And it is at this point, with the consummate timing I’m famous for, that I ask:
“Is it true you’re a rent boy?”
He turns around. I can see in his eyes that I have just ruined something. The elderly Moses, saved from the waters, is nothing more than a dirty old man, a sucker. A john.
Camille comes back over to the bed, his eyes now vacant. It occurs to me that in two seconds he’s going to reel off his price list. Given the state of me, the choices would inevitably be limited: a quick wank. I clutch the sheets like a virgin on her wedding night.
But no, he simply stares at me in silence.
I ask:
“How old are you, kid?”
“Twenty-two. Why?”
His tone is edgy, suspicious.
I suddenly realize that, to cap it all, and for no particular reason, I’ve just called him kid, which sounds paternalistic or Police nationale, depending on age and criminal record.
“Listen, I don’t give a shit who you sell your arse to. But why do you do it?”
He bites his lower lip.
“You don’t seem stupid, in fact quite the contrary.”
“So?”
“So being a hustler for every lowlife in the area doesn’t seem like a job with much in the way of prospects.”
I can tell he is getting more and more annoyed. Which is hardly surprising.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I stammer, “I’m not exactly subtle, as you might have noticed.”
“…”
“And I am very grateful, OK?”
I am talking louder and louder. The way things are going, in a couple of minutes I’ll be bawling him out. I take a deep breath.
“I owe you my life, and that’s a big deal. If you hadn’t been there, I’d be dead now. I wouldn’t be experiencing the joys of hospital food. You’ve got to admit, that would have been a terrible shame.”
I’m in a hole and I’m still digging, it’s pathetic.
“… It’s just… I don’t know… if I had a kid, it would kill me to know he was doing what you’re doing. You get me?”
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything.
And I am beginning to wonder exactly where I’m going with my lame speech, like a good father who’s just worked out that prostitution is not the ideal career path.
He must be intrigued, too; eventually he says in a feeble, disillusioned voice:
“Why are you saying these things? What have you got against me?”
“… Nothing, I don’t know, forget it, I’m being stupid. All I want to say is thank you. Sincerely.”
He gives me a contemptuous look, then leaves without another word.
The mince is cold. I’m not hungry any more.
Pass me a spade and I’ll bury myself.
Hey, mate, I hear you’re in hospital? I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from you lately. I’m in Brittany for another month or thereabouts, but I’ll come visit when I get back.
You can tell me all about it.
Hi! Not much to tell, it’s a complete blank—well, almost. I’m up for a visit, I’ve still got a few spaces in my diary. Meet in Room 28, second floor, I’ll be the one sprawled half naked on the little bed, you can’t miss me.
What the hell are you doing in Brittany?
On holidays, with Nathalie. It’s her niece’s wedding tomorrow. 300 guests, absolute madness. We’ve already been stuffing ourselves like pigs for the past two days. You ever eaten kouign-amann? It’s like butter and sugar but with more butter and more sugar, but what’s worse is it’s like a drug, you can’t imagine how addictive this stuff is.
I’ll bring you some. At least that way you’ll know what you’re dying of.
Arsehole
What are you reading at the moment? I’m rereading Duby’s A History of France from its Origins to the Present Day.
Well played, good choice. Given all the time I’ve got on my hands, I’ve started reading the telephone directory. I’ve just got to “Giraudin, Jean Claude, 13 rue Amiral Courbet”.
Oh, yeah, I remember that bit… You’ll see, when you get to “Lefebvre, Jocelyne”, it starts to get really heartbreaking.
No spoilers! I don’t want to know how it ends.
OK, I won’t say any more.
Behave yourself with the nurses. (Are they obliging?)
When you say “obliging”, I assume you’re referring to their selfless devotion?
Of course. What else?
I find them pretty obliging, as it goes.
Lucky bastard.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago, thanks to Mates of Yesteryear or Buddies from Back in the Day or one of those archaeological websites that shovel nostalgia like manure all over the Internet, I stumbled on my old friend Serge.
Full-time hedonist. Crazy bastard, great lover, insensitive git, forever juggling two women, two break-ups, two disasters. He got in touch with me in early August. Since then, we exchange emails, chat on MSN, talk about books, cooking, old war wounds which in our case means our childhood.
Last time we saw each other was July 1970, in a roadside café somewhere between Bordeaux and Lille. He was handsome as Steve McQueen back when he was playing Josh Randall, I was massacring Dick Rivers’ songs on the guitar. I was twenty-five, he was twenty-six. He had a red VW Microbus, I had a beat-up blue Renault Dauphine. We dressed like ‘Les Chats Sauvages’ or ‘Les Chaussettes Noires’: black leather jackets, drainpipe trousers, winkle-picker boots. The student riots of May ’68 had come and gone without shaking our convictions, we’d rather have died than join the “Peace & Love” brigade, smoking spliffs or growing our hair long. Bell-bottoms and paisley shirts were for chicks. We wore our shirts black and tight across the chest. The fuckwits of the Woodstock generation greeted us with middle and index fingers raised in the V-for-victory, hippy-dippy Peace salute. We returned their salute. Leaving out the index finger, for simplicity’s sake.
We thought we were rebels. Everyone else thought we were losers.
Serge had just got a job as a wine rep. I had just started working for an import-export company in the food-processing industry. We had our whole lives ahead of us.
By the time we first met up again, at La Comète brasserie, our whole lives were pretty much behind us, and it had happened without our noticing.
He had brought photos from back in the day. Those little Polaroid snaps—the yellowish-brown image, the grey back, the white borders—of such truly shitty quality that they’re impossible to digitally scan.
As soon as I stepped into the brasserie, I recognized him, despite the fact that forty-two years had flowed under the bridge. People change, but they don’t really change. We still have much the same mug we had as kids. No matter what we do, we preserve a certain family resemblance as we grow old.
He wasn’t as bald as me, I wasn’t as potbellied as him. I wasn’t wearing a guitar slung over my shoulder any more. The music world hadn’t missed much.
My friend Serge looked like the Belgian singer Arno, hair tousled, bags big as suitcases under those hangdog eyes, but well upholstered. It was obvious that he’d taken his job in the wine trade to heart. But I know the guy, he’s scrupulous. Now there’s a rare quality!
What is there to say
about yourself when you meet up with someone after so long? Marriage? Kids? In my case, we’d be done and dusted pretty quickly. No children. Widower for the past ten years. No official partner, no casual girlfriend.
And, yeah, maybe you feel a bit lonely, but no one’s nagging you…
Serge, that old goat, has been married for thirty-five years to the same woman. Nathalie her name is, small, skinny, blonde, with eyes like a wary cat and utterly faithful.
In a recent photo, they were flanked by two tall, smiling thirty-somethings who were the spitting image of the parents.
“That’s the family…”
He seemed happy.
We embroidered a bit on the subject of work, both being happily retired.
Serge was a rep for the same wine merchant for thirty-five years. He had started out unloading barrels and ended up a supervisor; I had moved between companies a couple of times, but always in the merchant navy.
He had spent most of his life with his nose in a wine bottle, I spent mine on the loading docks.
He had travelled from vineyard to vineyard, from crus classés to crus bourgeois, while I had worked in various commercial ports from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, from the Aegean to the Black Sea.
He had rumpled the sheets of a thousand Campanile, Ibis and sundry Kyriad hotels.
I had spent my nights sweltering under rotating fans in port hotels that smelt of fried food, diesel oil, stale sweat and tobacco smoke, protected from mosquitoes and cockroaches by threadbare mosquito nets.
Our ears had been christened at very different altars. For him, the festive sound of popping corks, the sensual glug-glug. For me, hysterics, shrieking gulls and an engine’s roar. He talked to me about vinification, malolactic fermentation, settling. I talked about gantry cranes, stabilizers and side loaders.
We were like kids: we were comparing marbles.
At the end of the jousting match, he nodded in amazement and delight, as though he were proud of me.
You’re a real globetrotter, man!
And adventurer, I think you mean.
We laughed all night like teenage boys, our minds keen and our hearts light. We no longer felt our wrinkles, we had a full head of hair with not a single grey, and our paunches were washboard abs.
We had just turned twenty.
AN EVOLUTIONARY miracle: the little lardball can talk.
This morning she stopped in the doorway and said:
“Hey, m’sieur?!”
I gave her a hostile glare.
“Can I borrow the laptop?”
Not so much as a bloody “hello”.
I love this kind of human interaction, it immediately makes me conciliatory. In passing, I noted that she had said the laptop, not your laptop. Maybe she thought it was provided by the hospital, first come first served. I hesitated between a number of different responses: In your dreams, tubby—Get stuffed—or even “What else?”—if only to practise my English conversation.
I said:
“Sorry, I’m using it.”
She gave a little shrug that clearly meant my opinion didn’t matter. She said offhandedly:
“Yeah, but I need to get on Facebook, like, now.”
“No.”
She gave a sigh, as though I were a difficult child refusing to see reason, then she stood there, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, probably expecting me to change my mind.
I was toying with the formulation I might use to tell her to fuck off—euphemistically, of course, given her age—when the nurse appeared with a broad smile pushing a trolley and said in a sing-song voice:
“Time for your bed-baaaath!”
She pushed the door closed on the girl, telling her in the same perky tone.
“Why don’t you come back later, OK?”
“OK,” said the girl.
No one asked whether it was OK by me.
I made the most of the rub-down to do a little investigating:
“That girl, was she in an accident?”
“The one who was at the door? I’m afraid I’ve no idea. She’s not on this ward, that I can tell you. She’s probably up on the third floor, I saw her using the lift earlier.”
Hardly what you would call progress.
The nurse’s name is Myriam. She’s a buxom forty-something woman, a live wire, she laughs a lot, talks too loudly in her beautiful southern accent, articulating every syllable and embellishing the endings of words with letters that have no place there. It reminds me of my inbred relatives down south. Since she noticed that I still have a faint hint of an Occitan accent, she took me under her wing, and tells me endless stories about every detail her life—probably to keep me distracted. I express my gratitude for this attentiveness by lavishing her with flattering, improbable names: bronzed beauty, young goddess, light of my eyes, spice of my life.
She chuckles, on account of my age. If I were fifteen years younger she would be purring with pleasure. I’ve arrived at that baleful age where I make women laugh without even trying.
“And how are you today, my Mediterranean Venus?”
This is enough to get her going:
“People these days, they’re unbelievable! Half an hour ago, this guy just roars past as I’m driving out of the emergency department, straight past the stop sign. I leant on my horn, obviously. I mean what would you do?”
It all depends.
At twenty, I would have jumped out of my car and punched him in the face.
At thirty, I would have given him the finger and hoped he was spoiling for a fight.
These days, my courage is inversely proportional to the size of the other guy.
It’s amazing the way that age can make a man more forbearing.
That said, Myriam’s question was clearly rhetorical, because she rambles on:
“… and he screams at me ‘Silly Bitch!’ Those were his very words. Scuse my language, but honestly! I was just itching to take a swing at him, I can tell you…”
She is still angry, I can tell by the way she is scrubbing my bits with the rough flannel. So as not to fuel her anger and risk a fatal accident, I express my sympathy with little anxious nods, holding my breath, staring straight ahead, pupils dilated. Eventually she calms down and I can breathe again.
While she’s about her business she informs me, in her thick Bordeaux drawl, that they’ll soon remove the drip-uh and the drain-uh and raise me to a semi-sitting position.
“That way, you’ll soon be able to wash your own bits.”
I stifle a sigh of relief. I know there are people who fantasize about getting a bed-bath, but the reality is deeply disappointing. Myriam has all the delicacy of a stretcher-bearer on the front lines in the middle of a bombing raid, she has a younger colleague who is painfully ham-fisted and an older one whose hand hovers over the area for so long that the water has time to evaporate before it hits the spot. I prefer to look after my tackle myself. I take no pleasure in it, but I’m efficient.
As Myriam packs away her kidney tray and her bottles of Betadine, she says:
“Oh, yeah, I forgot! The physio will be visiting you from tomorrow morning to mobilize you.”
“To what?”
“Oh, don’t worry, you’re too old to be going off to war! Mobilize means getting you to be a little more mobile.”
“Already?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, you’ve a long way to go before you can take me out dancing!”
She gives me a wink. I laugh long enough to make her happy. She is still giggling as she leaves the room. I call after her to close the door.
But of course she is long gone-uh.
MAYBE IT’s the prospect of my looming expiry date that makes me want to rake over the past. I’m just saying, I mean, what would I know, I’ve no experience.
This is my first time being old.
Whatever it is, I’m hardly four pages into my autobiography and already I’m struggling like a nun in a brothel. It’s not easy, let me tell you. Not e
asy at all.
There are whole swathes of my life I’ve forgotten. There are other bits where I can’t be sure to within four or five years when they happened. And then there are memories that are crystal-clear. I’ve discovered—it was high time—that the preciseness of a memory has nothing to do with the importance we attach to that memory.
For example: I can remember the taste of the worming powder my mother used to give me, the smell of the wax polish she used on the furniture, and of the purple ink and the white paste we used at primary school. But I don’t remember the smell or the taste of my first love. Any more than I remember the others, and there aren’t a whole heap.
And yet, in the hierarchy of vivid memories, my first conquest should surely come a little higher than the tubes of Etuifont powdered ink we had to dilute in a huge water barrel or the little pots of Cléopâtre paper paste made from starch and bitter almonds.
I can tell you the precise colour of my first bicycle, a red Peugeot with back-pedal brake, a bit too big for me, with mudguards, rack, headlamp and chain guard in the same colour and beige panniers.
My father’s eyes, on the other hand, I’m not sure: blue-green, grey-green, grey-blue?
I can remember every last flagstone of the barracks where I spent sixteen months doing National Service, but I would be incapable of sketching from memory the buildings of the secondary school where I spent eight years, from sixième to the baccalauréat—including having to repeat troisième.
I cannot remember a single voice.
Not one.
I might as well admit it right now: I don’t have much to show for my sixty-seven years here.
Everything is slipping away, everything is flashing past.
I should probably be happy: if you want to get somewhere far away, it’s best to travel light.
Get Well Soon Page 4