by Tony Hawks
Ten minutes later, after a drive that had seen Brad exude repeated gasps of approval prompted by the surrounding vistas, I was standing at my new front door and poised to turn the key in the lock. This was it! The moment that all the hours of paperwork, meetings, musing, worry, reverie and stress had been leading towards. The moment when for the first time the house well and truly became mine. Brad stood just behind me, poised with his camera, ready to capture the moment on film.
I turned the key but got no response from the lock. I turned it again. Still nothing. Three consecutive attempts produced little more than heavy sighs.
“Here, let me have a go,” said Brad, fully aware that he was better at this kind of thing than me.
I watched in despair as he turned the lock one way, then the other, only to find that the damn thing wouldn’t work.
“It’s no good,” said Brad. “The key just won’t open the door.”
“Don’t call it a key. It’s only a key if it has the good grace to open a lock. At the moment it’s just an annoying piece of metal.”
“Maybe it’s the wrong one. Let’s try it in the back door.”
And we did. And we had no luck there either, however many different key-turning techniques or swear words we used.
“Are you sure they’ve given you the right ones?” said Brad.
“I think so. They’re all labelled up as being for this house—and all the keys seem to fit the locks. They just don’t open them.”
“I think we might have to break in then,” said Brad.
“Oh I don’t like the sound of that,” I complained. “I haven’t gone through all the rigmarole of the French legal system just so that at the end of it all I can do what a squatter could have done in the first place.”
“All right, let’s try the garage door,” said Brad, who was clearly feeling far less despondent than I was.
The garage ran the length of the house beneath, like a giant cellar. However, I didn’t follow Brad as he set off down the drive because I was in a sulk. I knew what was going to happen. There was obviously a knack to these French locks, and soon we would have to summon the help of a Frenchman, shortly afterwards suffering the indignity of watching as he turned the key and opened the door with a nonchalant ease. I was extremely fed up that I was going to have to suffer this kind of humiliation in only the first few seconds of ownership. It would have been nicer to have let at least half an hour go by.
“Done it!” shouted Brad from below. “I’m in!” I ran down to join him. It was true. Genius that he was, he’d managed to get his head round a French lock, and we were in.
“Well done, mate,” I said, trying to pretend that I’d not spent the last few minutes in a childish sulk. “We can make our way up into the house using the internal staircase that leads up from here.”
Seconds later we emerged in the ground-floor hallway to be met by a dank smell of emptiness. Vacant houses always have this aroma, which lingers until the furniture of the new tenants arrives and magically exorcises it.
We opened the shutters and windows and a flood of light burst into the long open-plan living room where I’d had a drink with Jean-Claude and his family a few months before. It looked very bare now. Bare except for one very important piece of furniture that was already in situ. The piano. Upon moving out Jean-Claude had kindly got his brothers to help him move it up from the garage and into the living room. A gesture that had probably saved me and Brad from a premature acquaintance with the French health system.
“Go and play something,” said Brad. “A welcoming ditty.”
I lifted the lid and banged out the first tune that came into my head—which happened to be the Pink Panther theme. Quite why this melody emerged through my fingertips I do not know, perhaps it was some kind of subconscious homage to the Clouseau-like way we had entered the house. However, through the recently opened windows it also announced to the neighbourhood that someone new had arrived. Someone who knew the Pink Panther theme.
“I think a cup of tea is in order,” I declared as the final chord began to fade. “I’ll unpack the kettle.”
As new English settlers, it was important to mark our territory with a good old-fashioned cup of tea. Not to have done so would have been a betrayal of our heritage. It was certainly true that now I was here in France I wanted to absorb the local culture, but two things were non-negotiable. Tea and Marmite. I was not giving either of these up, and the fact that weeks before I’d made sure that the kettle was the most accessible object amongst the pile of stuff now waiting in the garage to be unpacked went some way to prove it.
In anticipation of a splendid brew, I turned on the tap in the kitchen, only to hear a whirr of escaping air, a sound that announced an hour of frustration. Faced with the prospect of days without water, Brad and I vigorously searched the house, garage and garden, meticulously turning on every tap or stopcock we found to see if it would afford us access to this life-giving commodity. But all we got was air. Life-giving, yes, but useless when you want to make tea or wash the muck out from between your toes.
From my mobile, I called Jean-Claude at his new house.
“Ah bonjour, Tonnee!” he said, before welcoming me to my new home.
He then proceeded to direct me to a distant corner of the front garden, talking me through each step as I remained on the phone. Soon I found myself being directed to climb under a prickly bush, beneath which was a small manhole cover. I got down onto my hands and knees and began crawling, all the time still conversing on the phone with an enthusiastic Jean-Claude. A car went by a few feet away in the road and I looked up to see Rene the Mayor. He smiled and offered me a cordial wave. The slightly puzzled expression that accompanied his gesture may have reflected a sense of mystery as to why I was choosing to engage in a phone call from beneath a shrub in my front garden. I winced. What if Jean-Claude and Rene had covered the subject of my interest in corks at the village lunch? If so, the mayor would now be able to add ‘crawling under shrubs to make phone calls’ to an ever-growing list of eccentric behaviour.
I turned the stopcock, which lay beneath the least visible manhole cover in all of France, and heard the reassuring whoosh of the water bursting forth into the pipes. Music to my ears. How on earth I had been expected to find this stopcock without instructions, I do not know. Perhaps Jean-Claude had simply forgotten to leave a note for me. Maybe it had been an initiative test. Perhaps Jean-Claude had injured his back whilst moving my piano and had wanted a gentle revenge. No matter, the kettle soon boiled and two splendid cups of tea were served on the balcony, to two grateful and thirsty Englishmen.
We had arrived.
§
For the next couple of days we were completely unable to do what seemed natural. Instead of basking in the summer sun, we got on with the copious chores that awaited our attention inside the house. The tasks we faced were taxing but fun—at least, that’s what I kept telling Brad, and to his credit he kept agreeing. It was most impressive that he could unpack boxes and lug furniture about with such joie de vivre, especially at a time when his emotional life was in a state of transient turmoil. From time to time we’d discuss the meaning of love and relationships—usually in the midst of a mind-blowingly menial task. Just as my life had undergone the scrutiny of Tim and Matt as we’d driven all my belongings down here, now it was Brad’s turn to be under the microscope. All sorts of questions were raised. What did he want exactly? What were the things that really made him happy? Why had married life become such a struggle?
Of course, there was a bigger question to be asked. Why had I been finding myself embroiled in so many conversations of this nature in recent months? Was it an age thing? Had I reached a point in my life where drifting through was no longer enough, and I wanted answers? Was I sifting through the emotional debris of Brad’s marriage so that I could find clues as to whether any kind of relationship could ever really work out for me?
“Do we need kitchen foil?” asked Brad.
It wa
s a question that convincingly punctured the analytical stuff.
Brad had begun a shopping list, but it was far from being your standard ‘milk, eggs and bread’ kind. This was the scarier sort that involved light bulbs, pillowcases, electric plugs, extension cables, shower curtains, sandpaper and crockery. Oh yes, and kitchen foil. We needed a big store.
§
“What does géant mean?” asked Brad, as we pulled into the vast car park at the conclusion of the half-hour drive.
“Gigantic,” I replied. “That’s why this is just the store we’re looking for.”
Well, it was and it wasn’t. By and large, I have a love—hate relationship with these places. By and large, I love hating them. You, the shopper, are seduced by the fact that you can get everything you need in the one place, but once you get inside you end up spending hours trying to find the right aisle for what you’re seeking, and when you finally get to the checkout, after what seems like hours of ill-tempered trudging, you realise you’ve forgotten the sugar. You are then faced with the mile and a half walk back to the aisle where the sugar is, by which time someone with a trolley piled as high as Mount Snowdon has usurped your place in the queue. When you reach the checkout girl, you discover that at least four of the items in your trolley haven’t been priced correctly, and the girl has to ring a bell and wave your item in the air until a spotty man appears, looks at your item and then buggers off whilst you wait patiently, and everyone behind you looks at you like you’ve killed more innocent people than Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein put together.
When you finally pay for your goods, you make the generous gesture of paying in cash so that the people behind are spared further delay, but the checkout girl slows everything up by having the gall to hold each banknote you give her up to the light to check that it’s not forged. When this happens to me I think that it’s only right and proper to do exactly the same with each item of shopping I’ve purchased. Extravagantly I reach down for the breakfast cereal and brandish it aloft saying, “Hey, these Weetabix are counterfeit.” The result is usually one of all round bad feeling.
Fraught, tired and immensely frustrated, you return to your vehicle hoping that it won’t be your turn to be the car that gets dented by that driver. That driver, of course, is the elderly one who can’t handle manoeuvring in the kind of car park that crams a thousand cars into a space suitable for 257. If lucky (or even if unlucky), you exit the car park as fast as you can, swearing that you’ll never visit one of these places again. A promise you keep until the next time that you actually need some shopping.
The experience in Geant was better than expected. Unlike the staff in their British counterparts, the workers here appeared to be motivated by more than a sense of shame. On the contrary, they genuinely seemed to enjoy their work and take pride in the fact that they knew the layout of the store. In fact, they were almost too helpful. I was approached by one of them after Brad and I had temporarily parted company, having given each other separate bits of the shopping list to track down. The kindly female assistant asked if she could help me. I hesitated. The problem was that I didn’t know the French word for kitchen foil, so it was actually a situation where I didn’t want help, unless she actually had a French⁄English, English⁄French dictionary to hand. My fear was that in the time it would take to try and communicate what I was after, I could have traipsed up and down every aisle in the store three times over.
My fear wasn’t unfounded. I began by trying to explain to the lady that I was looking for the stuff that you often use to wrap around a fish when you cook it.
“Ah!” she said, raising a finger and looking pleased, before leading me to the fish counter.
“Non ,” I said, and her face fell.
Unfortunately she wasn’t crestfallen for long, and soon she was looking at me expectantly again, much like a dog eyes you when it’s nosing you a ball in anticipation. So I had another go, this time by trying to mime ‘wrapping something over something else’. For some reason, this made the lady lead me to the section that sold string.
“Non ,” I said, and her face fell.
Another expectant look ensued, though, as she nosed the ball towards me again. This time I became inspired and threw in the world ‘metallique’, following it with another poor attempt at the ‘wrapping’ mime.
This time I was led to cheese graters.
“Now,” I said, and her face fell.
At this point I could see Brad clearly visible not that far behind her, successfully having located the light bulb section by a much less painful means. It seemed that speaking no French whatsoever can be a distinct advantage at times. Especially when in France.
Frustrated, I decided to enunciate what I wanted, loud and in English.
“ALUMINIUM FOIL,” I said.
“Ah!” she said, before leading me to…yes! The aluminium foil! Success at last.
“Voila!” I said with glee.
“Alu” she said.
“Ah, alu!” I repeated.
And with that, the tiniest of words, she was gone from my life. Or so I thought. Minutes later I was aware that she was coming back, no doubt trying to ‘help’ me with my next item. I wasn’t having any more of her unhelpful helpfulness. No thanks. I made damn sure of it, and darted behind the tinned vegetables counter when she approached me. I would find the sandpaper on my own. Crouched out of sight and waiting for her to pass, I found myself dreaming wistfully of the elusive, distracted and downright ignorant staff employed by superstores back home in the UK. For the first time I felt I really appreciated how little they had to offer.
Conforama was next on our shopping expedition, a kind of French IKEA but without the crowds. Back in the UK I’d noticed that IKEAN crowds are able to swarm like bees with such vigour that they can sweep you round the warehouse against your will, dragging you past items that may have interested you before dumping you in a more spacious area where you’d buy pillows or candles you didn’t really want in order to justify having made the trip in the first place.
Conforama was more peaceful and sedate, and instead of crowds I was greeted by a pretty young sales assistant. Her badge said that her name was Emmanuelle. I suppressed some unwholesome thoughts loosely based around some films from the 1970s, and asked her to direct me to mirrors, wardrobes and chests of drawers. This she duly did, and I made numerous purchases based on the fact that I was knackered, and that her name was Emmanuelle. Brad looked on, eyeing our sales assistant in a manner that might best be described as ‘distinctly heterosexual’. As we made our way to the checkout desk he asked me a question which suggested that for the last ten minutes the quality of the goods I was selecting hadn’t been at the forefront of his mind.
“What’s the French for ‘arse’?” he enquired.
“I think it’s ‘cul’,” I replied.
Brad smiled, and so did I. Perhaps it was because we were two forty-something men buying furniture together that we felt the need suddenly to become ‘ladsy’. Perhaps it was because we felt that to Emmanuelle we must have seemed like two men setting up home together. Our automatic and unwitting response to this was to demonstrate our heterosexuality by pointing at women in the store and making references to particular aspects of their anatomy. New men we weren’t. More in the mould of shameful, seedy adolescents.
In the queue for the checkout I allowed my eyes to fall on a particular feature of the woman who was two ahead of us.
“Nice cul” I said to Brad, at an indiscreet volume.
Like a complete idiot I had assumed that ‘cul’ was a great little code word that Brad and I could safely use. I had instinctively avoided saying ‘nice arse’ for fear of offending anyone. However, I’d made the profoundly unintelligent choice of picking a French word to use as my cipher. Clearly not the best of ideas when one is actually in France at the time. Had I been Homer Simpson, this would have been the right time to emit a loud ‘Doh!’
The husband of the lady in question turned round and
scowled at me, whilst I smiled meekly and slowly reached down to my trolley, ready, if necessary, to use one of the flat-pack mirrors in self-defence. Brad, my temporarily fifteen-year-old colleague, sniggered like a juvenile.
It was time to go home.
Four words sum up the problem of the flat-pack mirror. No erection, no reflection. I’d bought three ‘Matisse’ free-standing mirrors, one for each of the bedrooms, and now they needed to be assembled. The instructions were clear, the makers having dispensed with any need for language by plumping for illustrations. The central drawing at the top of the sheet was a sketch of a man in dungarees holding up a spanner, and next to him was an egg timer with the number ‘15’ beneath it. The omens weren’t good. I wasn’t wearing dungarees, I didn’t have a spanner or an egg timer, and to date the only thing I’d managed to build in fifteen minutes of DIY was a raging fury.
However, today was an exception and this time everything fell into place, quite literally. For the first time ever, I was good, I was very good, managing to assemble my mirror in the time it took Brad to do the same in the adjacent bedroom. I then completed the third mirror, before emerging triumphantly onto the landing.
“Brad, I think I’ve cracked this DIY business at last,” I boasted. “It’s all about going slowly and being methodical.”
“Exactly,” said Brad, who’d built lots of things in his time and who I believed had a master craftsman inside him, struggling to get out.
“I’m going to have a go at one of the clothes rails now,” I said, eagerly.
“Good for you.”
I had fallen into George Foreman⁄Nigel Mansell⁄Bjorn Borg⁄Mike Tyson syndrome. Instead of retiring after winning the world title, my ego had driven me onwards in search of even dizzier heights. It was ridiculous—I didn’t even need the money, so what was I thinking of? A free-standing mirror is one thing—but a clothes rail is quite another.
