by Kate Le Vann
‘Sam?’ Rachel said.
‘I’m still here,’ I said, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.
‘Oh. OK.’ She went quiet too. ‘Well, I’ll just be hanging up properly now . . .’
‘Don’t go yet!’ I said. ‘Listen, that stupid drawing – I didn’t do that . . . other stuff on it.’
She sighed. ‘You know, it doesn’t really make any difference who did it.’
‘It does to me,’ I said. ‘Because if you believe me, there’s a chance you’ll speak to me again. And I don’t want to lose a friend over this.’
The line stayed silent.
‘It’s OK,’ Rachel said finally. ‘It was always going to happen. You wear a tracksuit like that, a lot of people’ll get jealous . . .’
We both laughed, although I could hear that her laugh was still wobbling on the edge of crying, and we were both a bit snuffly-nosed now. She said she had to go, and I changed the subject because I really wanted to keep her on the phone and didn’t want her to go until I knew we were OK. Rachel was different on the phone from the way she was in school – she was relaxed, funnier, she talked more. We ended up on the phone for hours, opening up about all our stupidest anxieties, feeling the importance of us both being only children, and by the end of the conversation, everything felt fixed. More than that, it sort of felt like we were both in on a secret – a good secret – and I knew already that I wouldn’t talk about this to our other friends. (My mum told me off for keeping the line engaged all evening.)
It probably all seems a bit overdramatic and girly now, but friendships can be quite intense and . . . almost romantic, especially in the beginning, when you don’t really know each other and are just like God, I love her! and telling everyone you know about them. Soon after that, as best friends, we’d take the mickey out of ourselves mercilessly, and that day in particular, me accusing her of being hysterical, her accusing me of being evil. But I was secretly sentimental about the whole awful, embarrassing thing, because it was the first time I felt I’d had a true connection with another person.
Sometimes it’s the difficult things you go through with someone that pull you together.
What I really admired about Rachel was that she never conformed, even when she could have. She could have bought the same Japanese satchel as the rest of us, or imitated the way we all talked. I knew – because I was her best friend – that she didn’t like to bother her mum for new things. According to Rachel, her mum got pretty seriously depressed and just shut down after her dad died. Even though she was really young at the time, Rachel had to take over and get things done, and it was really hard for her. There were just the two of them in the house and Rachel said sometimes their relationship got close to imploding – I’ve felt tension between them every time I've been round there. They feel more like equals than me and my mum, by which I mean that Rachel always seems to spend as much time looking after her mum as the other way round. But anyway, I know that’s not the reason she never bought into being the same as everyone else. Despite her shyness and reputation for extreme sensibleness, Rachel has never been afraid to be true to herself. When I was on a giddy/funky rollercoaster of emotions over some boy, she’d tell me what she thought, not what I wanted to hear. When I was trying to get over a life-threatening case of embarrassment because of something that had happened at school, I looked at the way she handled being teased – she met things head on and didn’t pretend to feel whatever the people who were making fun wanted her to feel, just to get off lightly. I know that when I’d been bullied, however mildly, I pretended to be a good sport when I wasn’t at all, or blushed and covered my face with my hair. Rachel talked back, she explained herself, sometimes she even bored people into withdrawing what had been quite offhand intimidation – that was quite cool. It’s weird, because you don't really associate being brave with shyness, but they go together pretty well.
Rachel was my best friend because she was the best person I’d ever met. I’m not so sure I know why she liked me.
Chapter 3
My first morning in France. No matter how bad yesterday had been, today I was going to turn everything around and begin as I meant to go on, with a positive attitude. I woke to bright sunshine filtered through pink-rose-printed curtains and the sweet overlapping chatter of bird song. Good start. I got my spongebag and shampoo together and padded lightly to the bathroom, determined to make myself look great today. There was just one tiny problem. I flung open the door and . . .
‘Oh my God, Sam, no way,’ Rachel said, for about the tenth time. ‘No way!’
As I was explaining to Rachel a few hours later, Monsieur Faye hadn’t yet worked out that having a stranger in the house made it a good idea to lock the bathroom door. ‘Oh no, what did you see?’ Rachel braced her face for the worst. ‘Was he on the toilet?’
‘I honestly don’t know if that would have been better,’ I said.
‘On the bidet?’
‘He was taking a bath.’ I had a violently clear flashback to Monsieur Faye’s grey-furred bosoms and look of open-mouthed surprise. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands to try and erase the image.
Rachel covered her mouth and giggled silently until her shoulders shook. ‘No way! Couldn’t you hear splashy noises from outside the door?’
‘No! Argggh. Why didn’t I listen for them?’
‘So, you’ve been there less than one day, and you’ve almost flooded the loo, you’ve seen the father of the house naked, and your new best friend is a goth.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said and dropped my forehead on to the table. I was back with my best friend in a café, outside in the sunshine, and it all seemed funny, now. Now I was safe. We were in Vernon, the nearest town to my village; Rachel’s French family were based here in town.
‘Are you finishing that brioche?’ Rachel asked me.
I opened one eye and looked up at her. ‘No, I’m too traumatised to eat.’
‘Can I . . .?’
‘Course. I’d have thought your perfect family would have already given you a six-course breakfast with caviar and champagne cocktails,’ I said, peering at Rachel through my hair.
‘Well . . . actually . . . that isn’t so far off what they had,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s just that everything is so delicious here. This jam! I shouldn’t eat it, should I? You’re right, I’m fat. I’m a hog.’
‘Of course you’re not fat,’ I said, starting off angry, but going soft, because this was a conversation we had too often and it made me sad. ‘I’m just obsessing over how you’ve landed on your feet and I’ve landed in . . . well.’ I had to change the subject back before Rachel got caught up in food-guilt. Rachel had been . . . well, fat when she was very little – I’ve seen pictures and apparently she got called names a lot – then she was a bit, sort of, heavy in her early teens, but now she looked good. What had once been puppy fat had turned into proper sexy Marilyn Monroe curves, but the thing about curves is that you have to believe in yourself with them, and Rachel hated hers. I was always telling her – and I really meant it – how gorgeous she was and how many people would kill to have a body like hers. But she just couldn’t believe me, and she moved and held herself as if she was standing in the way of the telly during a programme that everyone in the world wanted to watch.
‘But I’m a bit scared of my French people too,’ Rachel said. ‘Victoire and her mum are so posh and chic, and I’m so lumpy and English and clumsy, I do feel like they must be staring at me thinking, What is she wearing? What if she breaks our dainty French chairs? So, you know, just because it looks like I have it easy . . .’
She stared at me solemnly, and then I burst out laughing.
‘My heart bleeds, you jammy git!’ I said, snatching my plate of brioche back. ‘Give me that. You’ve got your own bathroom!’
‘Well, yes.’
‘No naked old men in it!’
‘Mm, that is definitely an advantage . . .’ We started laughing again. ‘What are you goin
g to do? Can’t you
come and stay with me? It’s like a mansion! There’s definitely enough space!’
‘I wish! Is Victoire really nice?’
‘She’s lovely. Her mum’s lovely. Sorry!’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Really. It’s good that one of us is happy. And Chantal isn’t not nice, I just think she’s had
me foisted on her and didn’t really want to look after an
English girl all summer.’
‘So what did you do with her all last night?’ Rachel asked.
The answer was that we had eaten a very long dinner with about three more courses than I was expecting, each one more inedible than the last. Not just because of the way they tasted, but the fact that I was more than full, less than halfway through, having eaten everything put in front of me out of politeness, but not having guessed how much was still to come. We started with slabs of this greasy pâté coated with thick yellow jelly, on slices of stale baguette. That was followed by watery brown soup, with bloated peas and bits of undissolved stock cube floating in it. Then, maybe the worst of the lot, the fish course. Guuuhh, stinky, chewy chunks of grey fish in a gluey parsley sauce, I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to swallow it. I must have been pulling a face when I was eating it. Then brown meat. I honestly couldn’t tell you what kind of meat it was. Just brown. Chewier than the fish – and yes, that’s what you’d expect from meat – but the fish had set the bar for chewiness quite high. Finally, a wet, runny crème brûlée, which wasn’t brûléed, just wobbly and white all the way to the top with a bit of brown sugar sprinkled on it. ‘C’est très bon,’ I said, ‘mais je suis . . .’ before I realised I didn’t know the word for ‘full’.
‘Oh Lord. Poor you,’ Rachel said, mirroring my expressions as I described it. ‘Our dinner last night was really nice. There was an amazing chocolate and cherry gateau, and I had three pieces – they made me! Not that I was complaining . . . Oh, sorry, um, and what about Chantal? Did you get to know her a bit? She’s at school with Victoire and her friends: they said she was quite intense?’
‘Well – she definitely has a sense of humour . . .’
* * *
I gave Chantal the watch, and she was obviously horrified by it, but also clearly amused. She snapped it on above her little leather knotty bracelets and nodded, assuring me it was ‘charmant’, and even I wanted to laugh, because it was so insanely wrong for her. But I didn’t laugh, because I was also just mortified. Then she asked if I wanted to use the internet, and I jumped at the chance. She left me alone for about an hour in her room, which was covered with posters of bands I’d never heard of – Anomie, Abductee, loads of A-names – and photographs of her with her friends, who were also all goths or emos or whatever. I wrote some emails saying ‘I want to come home, let me come home’, then deleted them without sending because I didn’t want my parents to worry, or any of our friends – who had been satisfyingly jealous of me and Rachel when we told them our holiday plans – to be able to gloat.
I went to my favourite internet talkboard – one based in America which I first found so I could talk about American telly programmes, but it was sort of bigger and friendlier than that now, more of a community – and told all of the people I knew there about it. They were really nice and said they’d still swap places with me, and that felt good. It’s weird how close and supportive an internet community can feel, people you’ve never met giving you (((((hugs))))) they honestly mean. Then it was basically time for bed, or late enough that I could pretend it was. Chantal’s parents were downstairs, Monsieur Faye laughing till he coughed at a French comedy, and I went down and told them I’d had a long day and was going to get an early night – in French – and then I went to my bedroom and tried to work out if the spiders had moved, and fell asleep at about eleven.
‘Oh,’ Rachel said.
‘Yeah. But I was tired, anyway. I don’t think I’d have been fit for much more than that. How about you?’ I said. ‘And why do I already know I don’t really want to hear this?’
‘Well, we just walked into town – Victoire’s house is only about ten minutes from here – to this little bar, I can show it to you, actually it’s pretty cool, and I met her friends: Marthe, Océane, and – oh, what was the other one called? They were all totally gorgeous, like her. I was just like . . . you know what I look like.’
I sighed. ‘Anyway. I can’t believe you were in a bar with people our age! I was eating slop and going to bed with spiders!’
‘It was intimidating though! They’re all lovely, but they’re so good-looking and they talk really fast – you know I can’t speak French as well as you can. Well, they did speak English a lot to me. I was just wishing you were there all night. Not because I was worried about you, although I was, but because I just needed you there, you know, but I couldn’t really say, “Let’s go and get my friend”, and your place is quite far out, isn’t it? – and I didn’t know what you were doing.’
For some reason, Rachel’s phone network didn’t automatically switch to the French mobile provider the way mine had and she hadn’t got my text. So before we split up again, we went and found a phone shop and got new French sim cards. Rachel showed me the bar she’d been to the night before.
‘Did they drink alcohol?’ I said.
‘Yes, they shared a little jug of wine, you know – how French! – but I didn’t. Victoire didn’t, either.’
‘Were there boys there?’
Rachel’s face suddenly broke into this huge, wide, involuntary smile.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Rachel said, seeming to snap out of it. ‘They know loads of people, that’s all. We were walking in the street on the way home, and it was warm, it was all new, and like, here we are in France, in the middle of summer, I just had this . . . tingle last night like we were really living, really out in the world!’ Her eyes started shining again. Then she caught my gaze. ‘Things are going to get better for you; we’ve hardly been here any time at all,’ Rachel said, squeezing my hand. ‘I really believe we’re going to have the best summer of our lives, like you promised.’
As she talked about her first night, I could picture everything – the gorgeous girls and dark, beautiful boys, people laughing and spilling on to warm streets – leaning against each other, rowdy and laid back, teasing each other the way we used to with the boys back home. I thought about the five course heavy Faye feast, the creepy crawlies everywhere and the naked man in the bath, and felt a sharp stab of loneliness, mixed with envy and homesickness – already! Sam, you wimp! –but I made my own smile bigger so Rachel wouldn’t see how I felt.
It was a long walk back to the Faye house, through Giverny and along the corn fields. (Monsieur Faye had given me a lift to Vernon to meet Rachel; he hadn’t looked happy about it, maybe because I’d already seen too much of him that morning. Ahem.) As I walked, my mood began to change. I kept thinking about what Rachel had said, the stuff about the ‘tingle’ she was getting from being here. I was angry with myself because I didn’t feel the same – but the more I thought about it, being angry just seemed stupid. I was in charge of my own life in a way I hadn’t been before, and that was . . . tingleworthy.
Things were about to get tinglier.
Closer to the little cluster of cottages where the Faye family lived, I ran into Chantal talking to a gorgeous older boy, and thought, blimey, top score, Chantal. But he looked absolutely nothing like the boys in the photographs in her room – all those pale, black-haired, pierced male versions of her. This one had sandy-brown hair and tanned, even skin, and he was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting petrol-blue T-shirt with a small v-neck. When Chantal greeted me with an unexpected smile, he turned round to face me and swept his eyes up and down my body in a way that made me want to blush. As if he didn’t care whether it bothered me.
‘This is my brother,’ Chantal said. ‘Lucas.’
‘L’anglaise?’ Lucas asked her.
> ‘L’anglaise,’ I confirmed.
‘How do you like Giverny?’ Lucas asked me.
‘This is just my first day, really’ I said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Her friend is staying with Victoire Lacasse,’ Chantal told him, and raised one eyebrow.
‘And the friend is also English?’ Lucas asked.
‘Yes,’ Chantal nodded.
Lucas said something very quickly to his sister that I didn’t understand, to which she shrugged, then he said to me, ‘How long are you staying?’
‘A month. Four weeks.’
I’m going to pause here, because I realise that, written down, this doesn’t look like an exciting conversation. I have to explain what’s happening while this is going on: Lucas just does not take his eyes off mine! Oh my God, his eyes! Brown, with a kind of golden star around the pupil, and steady, maybe laughing at me, or with me, I have no idea, it hardly matters – and he doesn’t even seem to blink! It’s like I’m caught in a hypnotic beam, my heart rate has suddenly tripled and I’m honestly thinking, Is this what love at first sight is like? while trying to remember the second-person-present-participle of être. Of course Chantal is also standing there, and I’m suddenly aware that she must really now think I’m an idiot.
‘What have you shown her of Giverny?’ Lucas asked his sister.
‘Nothing, she just got here yesterday afternoon,’ Chantal reminded him. ‘We ate dinner, she went to bed.’
‘Exciting,’ Lucas said, flashing his eyes at me again. ‘Do you want to see the river? L’Epte?’
‘Uh, now?’ I said.
‘Yes. Let’s go,’ Lucas said, tilting his head in the right direction.
The whole heart-pumpy thing eased off when I realised he meant me and his sister. But I liked watching them together: Lucas teased Chantal, but he was obviously really fond of her, and she softened up a lot with him around; she got giggly and chatty. She told me afterwards that when term was over he came back to Giverny to visit his family quite a lot, even though he had a flatshare in Paris – her eyes lit up when she said it, as if she was proud of being the reason he came home. I was thinking that, yes, maybe their parents were a bit strict, but the thing was, Rachel was making the most of our time out here straight away, getting into the freedom and new culture, while I was really being weedy and scared about being away from home for the first time. Had I even been looking for things to worry and complain about? So why not . . . not do that? We bought ice creams just before we turned back, and all the way home I had this silly big internal smile threatening to break out all over my face and make me look goofy.
