by Tommy Barnes
She seemed so exhausted with deciding where the furniture should be that there were moments where I thought she was going to cancel the whole thing and sell the tower there and then to a passer-by, but eventually she settled on where she wanted everything. I always liked working for Mishi because she was interesting. She would talk on all manner of subjects at the same time – fine art, parking regulations, she would tell me about when she worked with the Beatles in the ’60s, and she made incredible bacon sandwiches.
With this and the other odd jobs I’d done over the summer I’d gathered together a little bit of cash, but the EDF months had killed me financially. I’d given up some of my gardening jobs in April expecting instead to be brewing through the summer. My aunt’s money had disappeared into the brewery and then, with perfect timing, the 1999 Renault Mégane estate decided it had had enough. The garage couldn’t fix the problem of the battery charging, but they did manage to identify a separate, terminal problem with the gearbox. It wasn’t the ideal vehicle for me anyway. Now I needed something bigger to take to market. Something that could take tables, fridges and lots of stock.
Actually, I should tell you how we ended up buying the 1999 Renault Mégane estate in the first place. It was when we were staying in the village of Chantelle in the Auvergne region of France, back when we first came over and we were child-free, carefree and flush with a rapidly dwindling redundancy pile. This was before we came back to Braslou to buy the house.
We needed a new car for three reasons:
Driving a left-hand-drive car in France was safer than driving a right-hand-drive car.
Rose had a ceramics exhibition down in Provence and we needed more space to transport her pieces.
I had just crashed our other car into a ditch and written it off while trying to find my favourite radio station – Radio Nostalgie.
We had a week to find a new car before our contract at our house there was up and we had to drive five hours over to a campsite near Bordeaux. I remember walking past a car at the village garage that was the most awful-looking thing I had ever seen. It was a Renault Mégane made in the 1990s – the decade that brought us two-tone jeans and the Lightning Seeds. God, I hate everything about that decade. You can say what you like about the ’80s, but at least they had passion and ambition. The ’90s barely even went through the motions. It started off terribly with grunge music. Grunge music. That turd on a string. Listening to grunge music was like finding a shit in your butter dish. You spent the rest of the day wondering why anyone would do something so inexplicably horrid. But at least they didn’t wash. After that they sanitised everything and the rest of the decade beiged out into the horizon. It wasn’t that the music was dreadful, or the style was dreadful, it was that it wasn’t really anything. It was the Lightning Seeds. One day someone will steal the 1990s and nobody will fucking notice.
To say the Renault Mégane was badly designed gives it too much credit. It wasn’t designed. Nobody dared design anything in the 1990s. It was an off-white void on wheels. It had nothing to say for itself. It was the physical embodiment of the noise you make when you chew salad. Worst of all, it was an estate version. I remember thinking to myself at the time ‘at least we won’t end up with that shit-cube’.
I wanted to buy a classic French car – a 1970s Citroën shaped like a streamlined lemon – but it rapidly became obvious we didn’t have anywhere near enough money. Instead we turned our attention to modern, practical cars, but they were too expensive as well. Most used-car dealerships in France only sell cars that are one or two years old, so the prices were still quite high.
Now we were running out of time. I trawled through every single used-car dealership for thirty kilometres and found nothing. Our tenancy was up in two days.
I switched my search to the internet and soon found something we could afford a few miles away. It was called a Fiat Doblò. It was a sort of utility vehicle crossed with a people carrier and It was the first in Fiat’s new range of cars designed by a drunken toddler looking through a kaleidoscope. It was remarkable in that no elements of the car matched any other elements. No windows were the same size or the same shape, none of its parts were the same proportion. The bonnet looked further away than the rest of the car. If you stared at it too long it gave you an attack of vertigo. Needless to say, I quite liked it.
Sadly, before we could buy it, someone else saw the genius in it and bought it. And so it got to the day before we were due to get thrown out of our house and still we had no car. Luckily there was one car left in the village that nobody in their right mind would ever buy. The 1999 Renault Mégane estate.
I resented that car for a long time, but despite its age and its general nothingness, it dragged us around France and gradually I developed a grudging respect for it. But now it was on its last legs it was time to move on. It was time to do the decent thing and leave it in the garden to get overgrown with weeds until Rose bullied me into one day getting it scrapped. It was time to look for a van. The problem was, I didn’t have the money to buy one. We were in a bind. Rose’s father happened to be staying with us.
‘Well, perhaps I could invest a little in the brewery, if you really need it,’ he said when he heard my predicament.
It’s embarrassing borrowing money from people. You should be proud and strong and dignified. You should insist that you don’t need it. No, it was a kind offer, but it was time for me to stand on my own two feet.
‘You’re a great man. How does five grand sound? I’ll dedicate a beer to you,’ I said immediately.
‘Fantastic. Perhaps we could name a beer after my grandfather?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Was he a fascist dictator?’
‘What? My grandfather?’
‘Actually, never mind,’ I said. It wasn’t a deal-breaker either way.
The new beer was named Clifton Porter. And with that, the search for a van began. Something modern, safe and reliable. Something I could depend on.
‘Does it have air con?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said the seller.
‘Sat nav?’
He laughed. ‘No, it does not.’
‘Is it economical with fuel?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Reliable?’
‘It’s thirty-five years old, so no.’
‘Heated seats?’
‘No.’
‘But it’s pretty safe though, right?’
‘It doesn’t have seat belts.’
‘Oh. Hey, does the siren still work?’
‘Yep.’
‘I’ll take it.’
‘OK.’
‘Actually wait, let me ask my uncle. Tony, you think I should buy it?’
‘God no,’ said my uncle Tony.
‘OK … I’ll take it.’
Tony sighed and started walking back to the car.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the seller, ‘I forgot to mention, you can’t lock the doors.’
Tony stopped for a moment. Surely no idiot would buy a van that you couldn’t lock?
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Because it doesn’t have any locks on the doors,’ said the seller.
‘Oh, right,’ I said.
Tony shook his head urgently and made a swiping gesture across his throat.
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
Tony sighed and started walking again.
I was never one of those children who was really into fire engines, so it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to everyone else that I decided to buy one. Fire engine is perhaps an overstatement. It was a little red pompier (fireman’s) Peugeot J9 van made in 1982, a hilarious design with both the front and back wheels situated so close to the middle of the vehicle that it rocked back and forth on them like a toy boat. It was round and irresistibly cute, but when you drove it you soon found that within a monster lurked. A monster that cared little for adequate brakes and a halfway-sensible turning circle. Tony was right to try to persuade me not to buy it. The damned thing w
as a wreck. Not only that, there are certain alarm bells that should ring when the person you are buying it from:
Refuses to tell you his address.
Insists on meeting you on a roundabout on the outskirts of town and transporting you to a secret location where the fire engine is stored.
Opens up on the defensive, telling you in a fairly aggressive manner that there is nothing to worry about, over and over again, then proceeds to argue away several problems the van may or may not have that you hadn’t even been aware of, so that he sounds very much like he’s having an argument with the voice of conscience in his head.
Ruins any attempts you had made to view him as an honest man by advising you that the best way to replace the faulty windscreen would be to smash it yourself and claim it back on the insurance, just like he did with that car over there and that other car over there.
In fact, all of these alarm bells did ring, but none of them rang as loudly as the genuine, working siren. There comes a time when you have to stop fucking around and make things happen. This probably wasn’t that time, but nevertheless I went ahead and bought it. And besides, despite his air of shiftiness, I liked the guy selling it. He looked like Robert De Niro would if he’d made some bad life choices.
He clearly knew he was ripping me off. When I studied the CT report – essentially its MOT – he broke into a cold sweat and started pacing the room. He was human, you see. He wasn’t some kind of cold-blooded psychopath; he knew he was probably doing something shifty and he clearly wasn’t at ease with himself. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t sell me something that was dangerous: he wasn’t that sort of guy. Maybe he had doubts about its reliability. Maybe he had stumbled across the van for free and couldn’t believe how much I was willing to pay, so he felt guilty about that, but any van from the early 1980s is going to be unreliable. I was prepared for that. I had searched for a while for a van like this and this one was much cheaper than anything else on the market. It was none of my business what his profit margin was; the only thing that mattered to me was whether I thought the van was worth what he was asking, and I thought it was. It had a siren, for God’s sake.
Tony wasn’t the only one to try and dissuade me from buying it. When I had shown Damien the advert, he had told me not to buy it. Celia had told me not to buy it. Rose had definitely told me not to buy it. They all thought I should buy a modern, practical van with power steering, but they couldn’t see what I could see. Underneath all that rust was a beautiful, 35-year-old Peugeot J9 fireman’s van in some semblance of working order. A giant ladybird on wheels. A design classic. And let me ask you this: if you are in a busy market surrounded by all manner of delicious food and drink, what is going to grab your attention more: a white Ford Transit with side airbags and a decent service history, or a 35-year-old fire engine with flashing lights and a fucking siren? Maybe the brakes worked, maybe they didn’t, but it had flashing lights on the roof and a siren. I forgot to mention it had flashing lights. It had flashing lights.
The problem I had now, having bought the fire engine, was that I had to get it from Burgundy back to the Indre-et-Loire. I’d found the van on the website leboncoin, and the bloody thing was in Burgundy, you see. Burgundy is hundreds of miles from Braslou. The whole thing was ridiculous. It was idiocy, I tell you, and yet, unsurprisingly, this is what I did. My uncle Tony happens to live in Beaune in Burgundy, quite close to where the van was, so that’s why he’d come to see it with me.
Having bought the van, we drove it back to Tony’s house, a terrifying twenty-minute drive full of near misses and failures to stop. There I stayed the night, debating whether to try and drive it all the way back to the Indre-et-Loire the next day or to spend a few hundred pounds getting it towed home. Tony told me not to try and drive it home. Damien and Celia told me not to try and drive it home. Rose definitely told me not to drive it home. Even Bad-Life-Choices De Niro, a man who had gone to great lengths to fib about how reliable it was, had told me not to drive it home. Except for the odd test drive to the end of the road and back, the van hadn’t moved for twenty years or more. Braslou was four-and-a-half hours away by motorway, and I couldn’t take the van on the motorway anyway because according to Bad-Life-Choices De Niro it wouldn’t really do more than 70 kph. A quick check of Google Maps revealed I could cut across country and avoid the motorways and it would take six hours.
I decided to drive it home. I knew in my heart it would make it.
The next morning, I set off at 7 a.m. and picked my way through the villages and vineyards that surround the Burgundian town of Beaune. I soon regretted my decision to try and drive it home. I was convinced I could hear noises from the engine that weren’t there the night before when we drove it back to Tony’s. A noise like a bass guitar from somewhere above my head grew louder and louder while at the same time a sound like a sea lion being whipped by an angry dinner lady gradually began to develop from the engine, and yet it continued to trundle along.
After two tense hours, I was in the Morvan – a vast and remote national park to the south-east of Burgundy. Most importantly, it was a hilly park. The van was still forging ahead, but it disliked going up hills immensely, often slowing almost to a halt as traffic built up behind me. I realised that on the downward hills I would have to pick up as much speed as I could in order to carry that speed up the next hill. And so, as I mounted the crest of each hill I would slam the van into fourth gear (it only had four gears) and push the accelerator flat to the floor. Gradually the van would pick up speed and the engine, which had been unusually and imaginatively placed in the actual driver’s cab just to my right, where one might normally have a middle passenger seat, would begin vibrating and groaning, so that I could hear every piece of it rattling and spinning, and as I approached the bottom of the hill and stared at the rising road in front of me, the speedometer creeping up to an ill-advised eighty kilometres an hour, we would begin to climb. For the first few yards the van would hold its speed and I would scream with delight. But then the engine would start to strain and, sure enough, the speed would drop, slowly at first, but as momentum disappeared it would crawl slower and slower and cars would pile up behind me, the drivers gesturing and pulling out menacingly, even though it would be suicide to try and overtake on these roads. I would rock backwards and forwards, trying to will the thing over the top, all the time waiting for one of the ancient, decrepit engine parts to crumble into dust, which would at first stop the van in its tracks and then see me roll backwards down the hill into anything behind me, as the handbrake, Bad-Life-Choices De Niro had told me in a rare moment of honesty, was working at just under 25 per cent capacity. And yet the engine parts didn’t crumble and still the van trundled forward, scraping its way to the top of hill after hill, until finally we rolled out of the Morvan and onto more sympathetic roads.
I was perplexed as to why the designer of the Peugeot J9 had decided to put the engine in the passenger seat, but I soon realised the big advantage of this was you needed only to reach over and touch the plastic engine cover to discover whether and to what degree the engine was overheating. At first it seemed to get to a near-terminal heat every two hours or so, at which point I would pull over for a few minutes to let it cool down, but as the sun rose and began to sear the tarmac in front of us, stops became more frequent until I was stopping every half an hour.
As I passed through towns and villages, locals sitting outside cafés pointed, children smiled and waved. I met them all with the steely grimace of a fireman who had saved a thousand lives and was on his way to save a thousand more but didn’t consider himself a hero, although he clearly was.
I stopped for lunch at 1 p.m., six hours after I had set off. By my original calculations based on Google Maps, I should have been almost home, but I was actually only just over halfway. Seventy kilometres an hour is really fucking slow. The town was called Dun-sur-something-or-other, or Something-or-other-sur-Dun, as I recall. A nice enough place. Glassy-eyed locals chatted to me about the van a
s they drank Pernod on the terrace of the local bar, which faced onto a square surrounded by lime trees. I was directed to a restaurant near the church and ordered their menu du jour, which was appalling. I’m still haunted by that leg of duck confit that slithered round the plate in figures of eight in its own slime.
As I walked back to the car, I was followed by an angry teenager blasting aggressive rap music very loudly on his phone. At first, I wondered what he had to rebel against in this perfectly nice town. Then I realised it was probably the food.
‘Duck confit.’ I nodded and rolled my eyes in solidarity as I got in the van. Then I attempted what I hoped might be a gang sign for Something-or-other-sur-Dun – I made my thumb and forefinger into a loop and poked my other finger through it. He was confused. There was no time to explain. I had fires to put out.
On I chugged through the increasingly benign countryside and endless fields of sunflowers, through the department of Nièvre and on into the department of Cher. This must be where they built the never-ending pop-singer robot, Cher, I thought to myself. Despite its uninspiring landscape, I was impressed, and serenaded several farmers with Cher’s ‘Believe’ as I passed them by. There’s a chance I was suffering from mild heatstroke. Now it was early afternoon and the temperature in the shade was up to the mid-thirties. The engine beside me was red hot and it was almost impossible to cool it down even when I pulled over because it was so hot outside, so on I went, plundering the bars and cafés of central France of any booze they had to offer while I waited for the engine to explode. But it didn’t explode, and finally the houses in the villages I rattled through began to turn to tuffeau stone and I knew I was getting close to home. Twelve hours after I had set off, I pulled into Braslou.
‘What the hell is that?’ said Rose.
I shouted out of the window, over the noise of the spluttering engine, ‘THIS, MY DEAR, IS THE BEAST OF BURGUNDY. OR THE MONSTER OF THE MORVAN. I HAVEN’T DECIDED ON THE NAME. THE POINT IS, THIS IS GOING TO MAKE US A FORTUNE.’ Rose didn’t seem convinced. ‘IT HAS A SIREN ,’ I added.
