by Kate Le Vann
Chapter 4
Chantal and I were getting on after our walk with Lucas, and she asked me along to her friends’ band rehearsal in the evening. She kind of had to take me with her, I suppose, but we found a lot more to talk about on the way. Apparently, they were all taking part in a medieval summer festival in the village, with ye olde market stalls and dancing and games in the square and that sort of malarkey. This didn’t seem like something a goth would be into, and I was a bit surprised by how enthusiastic she sounded, not least because she hadn’t been enthusiastic about anything since I’d met her. There was something undeniably cool about her, apart from her tiny goth-ness – the way I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing at me, and her slow, quiet way of talking. But as we chatted, she got quite into telling me the origins of the festival and to be honest, it was my turn to be secretly amused. She tried to explain by telling me how goths had their roots in medieval Europe, but . . . well, it was just funny having someone so dark and aloof giving me an enthusiastic history lesson.
My feet were killing me by then as I’d been walking all day, although I hadn’t noticed at the time how far we’d gone with Lucas because he was so distracting and lovely. Still, for someone like me, who can go practically the whole year without stepping off concrete, it felt kind of amazing to be outside here, in the countryside, with its weird noisy calm – crickets and loud chirping birds and the sound of the wind in the trees, instead of the trafficky buzz I was used to in the middle of my home town. There were little animals running around – rabbits and mice, butterflies that were floppy and slow in the hot, yellowy sunshine at the end of the day. I couldn’t believe how close we could get to the wildlife, which didn’t seem at all afraid of us, as if we were all part of the same world.
The band were called Alfie, because the lead singer thought the name was cool and ‘C’est punk, c’est London’, and they met in the garage of a big farmhouse where one of her friends lived. I turned up expecting a hard-core indie music gig, and found even more old-school goths halfway through painting ropey chipboard scenery and sewing raggedy medieval costumes. They were also rehearsing lines for the dramatic parts, and although I didn’t get the jokes because of the language, it seemed a lot like a school play. When the band started practising their numbers, they just argued with each other and the bass player would do something twangy on his own and then they’d discuss that for half an hour, then the drummer clattered through something on his own, all at eardrum-bursting volumes, and I didn’t understand half the conversations and couldn’t hear over the music the rest of the time. I was bored out of my skull. I tuned out and thought about Lucas instead, and how I finally had something good to talk to Rachel about.
‘So get this, I met a boy called Lucas . . .’ Rachel said.
Hang on, wasn’t that supposed to be my line? Rachel had phoned to talk to me about her second night on the town with Victoire – she’d just got back in – and when she mentioned Lucas I shivered.
‘Yeah?’ I said, unusually nervous.
‘Lucas Faye. And it turns out he’s Chantal’s brother?’
‘Yeah, that’s right, he just came back yesterday, we —’
‘He said that,’ Rachel said, excitedly, interrupting me. ‘He’s in college in Paris most of the time? I don’t get it – if he was out tonight, why weren’t you? Why didn’t you come with him? He could have taken you home.’
The reason, I told Rachel, was because I had to go to Chantal’s rehearsal.
OK, there was another reason: Lucas hadn’t mentioned that he was going into Vernon and hadn’t asked me if I wanted to go with him. Little did I know he’d be hanging out with my best friend in Vernon while I was watching people skip around a chipboard toadstool to lute music played on electric guitars.
‘He’s quite flirty, isn’t he?’ Rachel said on the phone.
‘Do you think so?’ I said, feeling a bit sulky. I’d been looking forward to telling her about the one fun thing that had happened to me, the new sexy brother development, and it turned out she already knew about him, and had probably had a better time with him already.
‘Maybe flirty isn’t the right word,’ Rachel said. ‘But all of Victoire’s friends seem to fancy him and he has that moody French thing going on.’
‘They all have that, don’t they?’ I said, surprised by how argumentative I was feeling. ‘It’s just being French.’
Rachel laughed. ‘Well that’s true. But he seems a bit better at it than his friends. Didn’t you fancy him then?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘OK, there was definitely a bit of flirting going on,’ I said.
‘Ha, I knew it!’ Rachel said. ‘As soon as I found out he’d met you I thought you must have made an impression. You could flirt for England.’
‘Hardly,’ I said quietly. The conversation was making me uneasy. The truth was, there hadn’t been much flirting going on at all. I let Rachel think there was because I was embarrassed at the way our usual personalities seemed to have been switched since we’d got here. Back home the only social event she never missed was orchestra practice. Now, here I was watching the nerds of darkness rehearse their medieval – I mean, could it be sadder? – village green morris dancing, and Rachel was in the centre of town with the in-crowd, flirting with my new crush. Except he wasn’t mine, and I didn’t have any claim to him. I’d let the conversation go there when I talked about Lucas because I wanted to put her off him and make sure she didn’t accidentally end up seducing him before I’d even had a proper conversation with him. Apart from the walk along the river, when his little sister was with us, and after his initial amazing, blazing stares at me, there hadn’t been any reason for me to think he found me remotely fanciable. I wasn’t used to feeling competitive with Rachel and I didn’t like myself for doing it – it just came out of nowhere, this new, half-annoyed, half-anxious feeling. Even Rachel seemed foreign over here.
I got up early the next morning so I could beat Monsieur Faye to the bathroom. I said the usual bonjour to the daddy-long-legs in the cistern when I was stopping the loo from overflowing – I was good at that now – and tried very hard to get out of the bath without getting any water on the floor, as this was something Madame Faye had told me off for doing the morning before. I dressed and went quietly downstairs and was freaked out to discover Lucas already in the kitchen, making himself a breakfast of coffee and cold cured sausage slices on thick pieces of bread. I wasn’t sure why I was so nervous around him: maybe it had something to do with lying about flirting with him to Rachel the night before, as if he’d found out what I’d said. I just wanted to turn around and go straight back to my bedroom. But Lucas had already seen me and offered me some fresh coffee.
‘So I met your friend last night,’ he said softly, handing me a cup.
‘Rachel,’ I said, also very quietly. ‘Yes, she told me on the phone. Do you know Victoire?’
‘Yes, lots of people in the villages went to the same school; I’ve known her since a long time,’ he said. He was doing the steady, slow-burning stare again, and I couldn’t meet his eyes – it was too early in the morning. I looked into my coffee cup instead, and blew the spiral of steam away from the top. ‘Next time maybe you’ll come too?’
‘Well, yeah, I’d really like to!’ I said. ‘But I’m sort of, you know, supposed to stick with Chantal, to learn French, not just go around with my English friend having fun. And it was good to see Chantal’s band, they’re very—’
‘You’re not in school now, you know?’ Lucas said, shrugging. ‘You’re not having your lessons all day. The evening is your own, you choose what you want to do.’ He popped a large piece of the bright red sausage into his mouth – croissants aside, the French eat mad stuff for breakfast – and chewed, not taking his eyes off me.
‘I don’t know how happy your parents would be about that,’ I said. He shrugged again. I drank more coffee and, looking deep into the cup, said, ‘Are you going out tonight?
’, trying not to sound as if I was asking him out. I peeped at him over the rim.
‘No,’ Lucas said, without looking at me at all, ‘I’m going back to Paris today.’
What would I have given to spend the day with Lucas in Paris? Monsieur and Madame Faye had planned a trip for the rest of us to Monet’s gardens, and while they were unquestionably beautiful, picturesque, blah de blah de très blah, there is maybe nothing on earth more boring than talking about flowers in French with middle-aged French people, while walking so slowly I thought I might actually fall over. Oh, regardez, there’s the bridge he painted about a zillion times, there’s his favourite pond. And over there, more flowers. Chantal was forced to come along too, and I could tell she blamed me for her Saturday being a complete bust – she’d gone back to being dark and moody, and talked in very fast French so I found it hard to keep up. I hid my yawns, she didn’t. I got a text from Rachel saying she’d gone to the beach in Deauville with Victoire and co – Deauville is a really posh beach that movie stars sometimes go to, apparently – and she wished I could have gone too. I was hearing that a lot from Rachel. I’d seen her once since we’d got to France. I couldn’t help feeling she’d abandoned me, even though I knew it wasn’t her fault at all.
We had another long, Lucas-free Faye family meal that evening, as heavy as ever, the same tough brown meat smothered in rich sauce, despite how hot it was outside. If I went on eating like this, I was going to grow out of all the clothes I’d brought. Chantal was happy to let me use her computer again, probably because it meant she didn’t have to spend all night talking to me. She sat on the other side of her bedroom watching ancient episodes of Friends that had been dubbed into French on a little portable telly and talking to her friends on the phone. My first Saturday night on our French adventure, and this was how I was spending it. If I’d been at home, there would have been a party, or a walk with my male and female friends watching the sunset chill to moonlight from the North Bridge, maybe a friendly snog with one of my exes. I would have done anything to teleport myself home that minute and be somewhere I belonged again.
Chapter 5
The next morning, Sunday, the Faye family went to church. There was an awkward moment when Madame Faye asked me if I wanted to come. Of course, I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know what to say. There was a silence, then she just let me off, saying there was no reason I should go if I didn’t usually go. But you could tell she was thinking, Well, if you want to go to hell, that’s fine with me . . . Chantal said I could take her push-bike if I wanted to get around a bit more easily, and I could have hugged her. I cycled into Vernon and ordered a scrummy breakfast in a little patisserie – the softest, flakiest golden pain au chocolat and a still-warm buttery croissant, with the jam that Rachel couldn’t stop eating the day I’d met her in town. I hadn’t called Rachel to tell her I was going to be so close to her French family’s house this morning. I missed her, and I’d been missing her every day I’d been there, checking my phone for messages that didn’t come. But today I felt like being alone: to comfort eat, to mope, and just to sit outside in the gentle morning sun and think, away from the Faye house. And I was embarrassed because I was always the one waiting to hear what Rachel was doing, waiting for her to say she had time to see me, then being told she hadn’t. I wanted her to ask me for a change. I’d bought postcards at Monet’s garden to send to my parents, although I’d been keeping them up to date by email, and some of our friends. I filled these in with more cheerful stories about the great time I was having – trying not to think too hard about how jealous they’d been of our big French plan, and how not-jealous they’d be if they knew how I was spending my days. I watched the sleepy town starting to wake up as I sipped my cup of thé and stuffed my face with pastry.
It did the trick. I started to relax, the tension in my head seemed to smooth out, and I felt good. Really calm and happy, as if the lies I was telling in the postcards had started to convince me. Then, some kid, maybe eleven or twelve years old, who’d been making his way around the tables (I’d glanced at him thinking he might start begging from the customers, and deliberately didn’t look at him any more so he wouldn’t approach me) grabbed my bag from the back of my chair and started running off with it. I was so shocked I just made a kind of pathetic ‘uh!’ sound, and before I really knew what was going on, a tall boy at another table had stood up so fast he knocked over his chair with a huge clang, and run off after the kid, so that I wondered if they were together – until he tripped the kid up, grabbed the bag off him, and tried to hold him there by clutching various pieces of the kid’s clothes until they stretched out to three times their original sizes, then the kid hit the tall boy in the face, wriggled out of his grip and ran like mad, without my bag. By now I’d managed to get to my feet and make my way through the tables – excusing myself past a bunch of curious French people who were watching the show and muttering about me and my bag – and over to the boy who’d stopped the thief. He was a few years older than me. Blond. Very cute. And bleeding a little from a cut in his lip.
‘Oh my God, thank you,’ I said, then remembered where I was and switched to French to add, ‘That’s my bag.’ (Duh!) ‘Thank you! Are you badly hurt?’
The blond boy picked himself up and smiled shyly.
‘No, of course not. I’m glad I could help,’ he said, in English, although he was French. He touched his lip with the back of his hand and looked at the blood. I grabbed an unused napkin from an empty table and gave it to him.
‘I’m so sorry he hit you,’ I said. ‘I should have been paying more attention to my stuff. Thank you so much, you really saved me.’
‘He was just a child,’ the boy said, shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t very heroic.’
We stood and looked at each other for a moment. I didn’t really know what else to say.
‘Oh, I’m Samantha,’ I said self-consciously, and put my hand out to be shaken.
He smiled just as shyly. ‘Hi, Samantha. I’m Bruno.’
That was as much conversation as we managed, and we went back to our breakfasts on separate tables, and I sort of waved, like an idiot, as I picked up my croissant again, and went back to writing my postcard. Then I had a thought.
‘Oh, sorry, excuse me, Bruno?’ I called over. ‘I’d really like to – could I buy your breakfast, to say thanks?’
‘No, really, that’s fine,’ he said, tilting his head to smile again. ‘But thank you.’ He turned back to his paper, and I saw that he had a small cup of coffee and nothing else. Wow, how flash was I, offering a reward equal to a whole euro and a half! Then I had another thought.
‘I wouldn’t even be able to buy my own breakfast if it weren’t for you,’ I said. ‘So . . .’ OK, enough, leave him alone, now, Sam, you total freak. ‘Listen, thanks so much, this bag has got everything in it! My purse, my passport, my, er, sunglasses . . .’
I’m not sure how we got from this brilliant start to him joining me at my table and the pair of us ending up noisily and comically arguing about which celebrity marriages were going to last the longest – he came up with a formula which involved the couples looking the most alike ending the soonest, and I was coming up with all the exceptions – while the other French people who’d been happy to watch the bag-snatch drama unfold now occasionally looked up and glared at us for chattering constantly in loud English through their previously peaceful Sunday breakfasts. I knew I ought to be practising my French, but I was lapping up the company after having ticked off another evening listening to myself squeaking the plate with my knife and chewing gristle chez Faye. Also, Bruno’s English was brilliant, unlike my French, making this the easiest conversation I’d had for days. He told me he was an art student, in his first year, but he was originally from round here, and came back home for all of his summer vacation because he found it the best place to sketch and paint, and it was cheaper moving back with his parents for a couple of months.
We weren’t flirting or anything, by the way, just tal
king . . . but really easily. He was very different from Lucas – when I first locked eyes with Lucas it felt like electricity passing between us. Bruno was just really nice. In his own way, definitely as good-looking, but softer, quite like a cute golden Labrador, compared with Lucas’s sexy Orlando Bloomy bone structure. Bruno was the kind of boy you and your friends call sweet, and you constantly ask yourselves how come he hasn’t got a girlfriend, and you all sort of fancy him but the ‘thing’ just isn’t there. ’Cause who knows why we fall for one person and not another? Sometimes I wonder if we make it hard for ourselves because if we always took the easy option, our lives would just start going too fast and we’d have to live up to them. I’ve always chased after boys that I couldn’t get, and if I did ever somehow get them, I suddenly found all sorts of reasons to change my mind.
Anyway, I could compare and contrast different French boys all day long, but it wasn’t like any of them were asking me out. All that happened was Bruno thanked me for his second cup of coffee, apologised for my having to see an ugly side to what he promised was the most beautiful part of France, and said he hoped the experience wouldn’t make me worried for the rest of my stay. Then he got up and shook my hand. The French shake hands a lot.
