A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  By the time the market came around, I would have around 300 bottles of beer, as long as the other batches that were still fermenting turned out OK.

  ‘Animals can sense if you’re uptight. I once got within a metre of a wild peahen,’ said Claude, Damien’s dad, in a way that meant I was supposed to be impressed. And, consequently, I was impressed, although I didn’t know why. Claude occupies a higher state of being. I was very impressed. He looks like Damien, but he’s more ethereal and he’s less hell-bent on getting things done all the time. He arrives in waves and he disappears in a moment. When Claude speaks, you can’t help but take notice.

  People often ask me if I have a plan for the brewery. I normally fob them off with something about third-quarter growth and the guy who invented the plastic bits on the end of laces and now he makes the wings of space shuttles or the water jets in bidets or something. I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan, of course. Not past knowing that I had to make beer and then I had to sell it to make sure my family didn’t starve. I hadn’t written a single number on a piece of paper. I was talking to Claude about the brewery. Claude didn’t ask me if I had a plan. He knew I didn’t. He said this: ‘Don’t try and get rich. That’s the most important thing. Build your business slowly. Start by selling beer in a fifty-kilometre radius. Markets, bars, shops. Then after two years, if it’s going well, expand by another fifty kilometres and so on. But, most importantly, remember to live. Don’t try and get rich and forget to live.’

  This was a plan I could follow. I loved Claude for this advice and I recited it to myself whenever I was in danger of working too hard and not drinking enough wine. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that situation ever occurred, but I remained vigilant. In all the time I lived in the UK, nobody ever said that to me. It was always Work as hard as you can and earn as much as you can. I didn’t do that, of course. I was much more naturally suited to Claude’s advice.

  I thought if I took what I learnt from Monsieur Richard and combined It with Claude’s advice I would probably be somewhere close to living a good life. Do what you do to the best standard you can, but don’t kill yourself working.

  For the asparagus market I only had my red IPA-style beer, but I had been developing a porter as well. Nobody agrees on what makes a porter different from a stout. Some people say a stout is different from a porter because it uses roasted barley, but others say that this is not it at all and a stout is just a type of porter with something extra to it – more alcohol, or more hops. I couldn’t give a shit either way. My porter was coming out better and better. I didn’t bother brewing any for the asparagus market because I thought it probably wouldn’t be the sort of beer people would want, but actually, when I gave it to the people round here it generally got a good reception. I dry hopped it with a little bit of Mandarina Bavaria to get a chocolate-orange flavour.

  Burt had started digging holes in the garden. I thought perhaps there was some root vegetable that he had discovered, or there was a burrowing animal that he was trying to catch, but after a week or so I came to the depressing realisation, based on the placing and size of the holes, that he was trying to booby-trap the garden so that I might trip and fall on my face. No amount of punishment dissuaded him from digging holes. He was like this with everything. He would just carry on doing whatever it was he wanted to do. People who meet Burt often come to the erroneous conclusion that he’s an idiot. That he’s too stupid to realise the consequences of his actions. Too dense to be trained. I wondered the same thing for quite a while, before concluding that that is exactly what he wants you to think. We are, in fact, the idiots and Burt knows only too well what he’s doing. He’s trying to destroy humanity, one despicable act after the other. That’s what he’s doing.

  He lives in a different universe. Not a universe with different values, but a universe where values as we understand them don’t exist. There’s no logic to his actions. Instead, some other system completely unfathomable to people of our universe presides. I’m not talking about a universe of dog values – Louis, his brother, is equally as perplexed by Burt as I am. No, Burt is the other.

  I talk a lot about Burt because he’s this kind of great evil that follows me wherever I go, but by now you’re probably wondering what had happened to Louis. Louis’ story was a terrible one. Even now, when I think of what happened that fateful day, 3 April 2017, I shudder.

  Louis was a kind, thoughtful and well-behaved dog. Consequently, he didn’t get anywhere near as much attention as Burt. Louis’ story, more than anything, highlights the plain unfairness of life.

  When we called the dogs in, Louis was always first there. Burt only came if he got a treat. You didn’t have to bribe Louis to not be an arsehole. You did have to bribe Burt. This meant that Burt was constantly being rewarded for doing what he should have been doing anyway. Burt got all the treats.

  We should have seen it coming, really. No one can endure that injustice forever. No one can watch such a despicable creature as Burt winning in life, when he does everything wrong. No one can watch their perfect behaviour go unrewarded time after time while their brother deliberately fucks everything up over and over again and is rewarded handsomely. No, even for a creature as good-natured as Louis, the injustice became too much to bear. So we come to 3 April.

  We’d been for our daily family outing to the hypermarché in Chinon. Even after living in France for over a year, the exotic allure of a French supermarket had not waned. They still sell horsemeat in French supermarkets – what a riot! We’d even stayed for lunch. Treated ourselves to an excellent three-course meal of endive salads and confit duck legs in the supermarket restaurant. You don’t get that in Tesco. Then we returned home, not imagining in the slightest what an utterly dreadful scene awaited us. You see, that morning, before we left, we’d called the dogs into the kitchen. We normally leave them in the kitchen if we are going to be away for a few hours – we’d stopped electrocuting them due to the rising cost of electricity bills, and we couldn’t leave them outside for too long, as they might eat the chickens or escape to Paris or be radicalised by fundamentalist terrorists. The problem was, while Louis returned to the kitchen immediately, as is the norm, Burt refused to come, deciding instead to continue his search for some kind of major power cord to chew in the undergrowth. We should have persisted in trying to get him in. We should have bribed him, but in the end we thought, ‘Ah sod it. We’ll keep Louis in the kitchen and we’ll leave Burt in the garden because he’s an arsehole.’ We weren’t too worried about Burt being out in the garden on his own because Burt, for all his bravado, is a follower, not a leader. He generally won’t go anywhere if Louis hasn’t gone there first, so we thought he probably wouldn’t try and escape. This was grossly unfair to Louis of course, who, as usual, had done exactly what we had asked and because of that had been imprisoned in a tiny kitchen while Burt roamed free in the sun. And that, simply, was once too much for Louis.

  Something was wrong when we returned to the house. Burt was standing outside the kitchen door, whimpering. Through the window I could see the bin had been knocked over. Used nappies were torn and shredded on the floor. Even more alarmingly, hundreds of chewed Nespresso capsules were strewn across the kitchen. I had been saving them to recycle, but that morning Burt had chewed my car door and Gadget had bitten me on the knee and at that point I had decided that the universe would be better off if we stopped recycling things and left the earth to turn into a fireball, so I’d chucked a big bag of the Nespresso capsules into the bin. And now it appeared Louis had eaten them all.

  I feared the worst. We entered the kitchen and picked our way through the debris. Burt stayed outside, still whimpering. Louis was nowhere to be seen. The door from the kitchen to the living room had been forced open.

  We tiptoed through the house, not knowing what we would find. After a quick search it became clear that Louis wasn’t on the ground floor. Rose pointed to the ceiling and mouthed ‘upstairs’ like a commando would. The thing is, Louis wasn’
t allowed upstairs. He’d never been upstairs, he’d never before showed the slightest interest in going upstairs, and yet he wasn’t downstairs, so now he must be upstairs. This was unnerving. Tiptoeing upstairs to the landing, we were both hit by a dreadful smell. A quick check of the nursery and the study proved fruitless. That left one room – our bedroom. As any hero would, I told Rose to step back while I entered. I thought I was prepared for anything, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

  ‘Oh, dear God, Rose.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Rose said.

  I couldn’t answer. There, lying prostrate across the floor of the bedroom, was an enormous shit. A monstrous turd on the rug. Meanwhile Louis, jacked up on Nespresso capsules, his eyes bulging – I’m not shitting you, I could see them pulsing – lapped the room at the most extraordinary speed like a mechanical hare, ploughing through his own poo over and over again, leaving a trail of it around the edge of the bedroom.

  It’s something I hope I never have to witness again and it’s a lesson for us all. Don’t take the good guys for granted, because if you do, eventually they’ll shit in your bedroom.

  It took several days for Louis to return to normal. He had made his point. Now he gets more treats.

  Two chickens arrived. I assumed it was to do with Rose’s pregnancy cravings, which was really too confusing because it was now almost a year since she’d given birth.

  The night before the marché de l’asperge, a clear night, a night of a billion stars and other space matter, we packed up Damien’s van full of beer and branded aprons. It was going to be an early start. I was nervous.

  Market day. Picture this: an ochre sun climbs through streaks of purple cloud that stretch to the horizon and beyond. The fresh morning air is cool and clear. All around, bare-chested men go about their business. Men’s men. Men’s men’s men. Also some women. Possibly women’s women. I don’t know what that means, but they sound alluring and likely to work in the trades. Everywhere people are preparing for an event that is of incredible significance. The atmosphere is primed, coiled with anticipation. Then from the depths of hell great engines roar and in the background an inspiring guitar-led soft-rock soundtrack plays. What I have just described is the opening credits to Tom Cruise’s art-house film Days of Thunder, but the scene that surrounded us as we set up our stall at the Braslou marché de l’asperge reminded me of it a great deal. Other stallholders seemed underwhelmed by the occasion.

  The day started badly. Some of Rose’s family were staying for the weekend and the night before, driven by a mixture of childlike curiosity and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge as all the best scientists are, my brother-in-law Arthur and I decided to try and drink a magnum of cheap red wine each, as fast as we possibly could. The results were spectacular: I have never been so animated about an episode of whatever that show is called where Michael Portillo makes endless fucking train journeys, but at 6 a.m. the next day, as I fumbled around in a faraway state, trying to put pants on my head while brushing my teeth with a candlestick, I almost regretted it.

  It got worse. When we arrived at the market, Damien parked up the van and went to find out where our stand was. He called me on the mobile a few minutes later, telling me to drive the van to the other end of the road. Excited at the chance of driving a van, and hence moving one step closer to my dream of producing some small amount of testosterone, I began the task of trying to get it out of the parking space. There were stalls set up all around us and vans unloading front and back. It would require a tricky manoeuvre. A tricky manoeuvre for your average driver, but I comforted myself that I had superior spatial awareness.

  Seven minutes of frantically turning the steering wheel and driving backwards and forwards and finding myself in exactly the same position ensued. It was a problem completely impossible for my red wine-gunked brain to solve. It must have been the most pathetic attempt at getting out of a car-parking space ever witnessed. And it was witnessed. Most of the other market-stall owners had by now gathered to watch with incredulity as I over-revved the engine and rolled two inches forward and then two inches back for the thirtieth time, until finally the man with the vegetable stall opposite tapped on the window, shook his head and gruffly signalled me to get out, like a trainer throwing in the towel for his punch-drunk fighter. He got in and, after performing a couple of fairly routine manoeuvres, reversed it out of the space and down the road in under three seconds. Then he got out and walked off without even looking at me.

  I was already flustered, then Damien asked me to tie our banner to the stand. A tricky task for your average punter, but not for someone who had mastered the overhand knot to the degree I had. Seven minutes of huffing later, a small crowd had gathered. The same crowd, I rather suspect. By now I was feeling the force of a most extraordinary red-wine hangover. Finally, Damien took over.

  ‘Enough of these English knots. I will do a French knot.’

  The marché de l’asperge was set along the main road that runs through Braslou, from Richelieu to Marigny-Marmande. It’s a straight road flanked by modest old houses in tuffeau, some rendered in sandy white, which huddle together as you get towards the middle of the village. At the start of the village there was a marquee set up for the special lunch (at most of these fêtes they have a large sit-down lunch to celebrate whatever it is they are celebrating) and a couple of booze stands along the way. Most of the people there were selling asparagus, but there were other stalls as well. Fruit and veg stalls, pasta stalls, plants, wine.

  There isn’t much in Braslou. The smallest mairie or town hall in the region, Bruno’s restaurant and bar, and that’s pretty much it. There used to be much more. Damien can remember when there were four or five bars, a boulangerie, a butcher and a general store. Damien is in his late twenties, so if he can remember it, the decline must have happened quite quickly. Sadly, this is typical of rural France. A combination of the rise of supermarkets on the edge of towns, the fall in the profitability of agriculture and the increasing lure of big towns and cities for young people means that the economic climate for a small shop in a small village is perilous.

  And yet something seems to be happening in Braslou. There are young families moving in. Houses are being built. Somebody constructed a par-three golf course on the outskirts. That is bloody madness in an area like this, but he/she could sense it. There is a seed. An industrial zone on the outskirts that has several flourishing businesses. Sylvain, a young man from the village who had a stall next to mine at the market, had just started an enterprise making artisanal pasta. Artisanal pasta is not the sign of a village in decline.

  The market began without me realising it. Before we’d even got a chance to put our branded aprons on. I don’t know quite what I was expecting, some kind of klaxon to signify that it had started, or perhaps Dale Winton hang-gliding in to cut a ribbon, but instead, as we were finishing our set-up, people started wandering up and down the street.

  No one stopped at our stall. People glanced and laughed, but no one stopped. I hadn’t appreciated quite how personal selling something that you had made is. It was me out there behind the table and if no one bought anything, it would be a humiliation. I’d be the laughing stock of the village. And worse, it would be the same for Damien too. He’d stood up alongside the funny little Englishman, but whereas I didn’t really have a reputation to lose because I wasn’t very well known round here, he was, and he did. Then Monsieur Richard arrived.

  ‘Bonjour Tommy, how’s it going?’

  ‘Yeah, good. A bit slow, but I’m sure it will pick up.’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry. I will buy twelve bottles of beer.’

  Our first sale! He handed over €24 and I gave him the beer and it was as simple as that. Now, I know for a fact that Monsieur Richard didn’t really like my beer. And that’s all right. It’s not to everyone’s tastes. He liked blonde beers. Beers that quench the thirst. Not my dark, mysterious hoppy, heavy beers. I had long ago stopped giving him bottles of my beer to try because I knew h
e was running out of polite ways to say he didn’t like it. But that was the person he was. He saw a man dying on his arse in a foreign land, and he stepped in and bought twelve bloody beers that he didn’t even want, and I will be forever in debt to him for that. Because all of a sudden other people came to the stall. They had seen Monsieur Richard buying beer and, whether they knew him or not – and most people probably did – they had taken one look at him and thought, That is a man who has mastered life. If he is buying beer, then I will buy beer. Because that is the power that Monsieur Richard has. And suddenly we were inundated.

  Damien’s claim to know everyone in the village turned out to be true, as he called passer-by after passer-by over to try the beer. The stock began flying out of the boxes.

  Customers came to chat. They wanted to know how the beer was made, what was in it. I told them all the processes you go through to make beer; I bored on about malts and hops and how they affected the flavour. Alongside me, Damien didn’t know what was in the beer, so he was making up all that stuff – I mean, he was saying literally any old shit, but it didn’t matter, it was working. As more and more people came to our stall, we couldn’t keep up. We weren’t at all prepared for this level of interest; we were swamped and things were starting to go awry. People were receiving the wrong change, customers were waiting and getting irate, when from nowhere Claude, Damien’s dad, appeared behind the bar next to us and started serving customers, and his presence alone calmed everyone. By 10.30 a.m. things had died down, largely because we had sold out. Three hundred bottles in an hour and a half. People from the village were asking for the empty bottles to take as a souvenir. It was overwhelming. I turned to Claude to thank him, but he had gone. Disappeared like a guardian angel. Vanished into thin air. Or possibly the wine tent.