Mwah-Mwah

by Chloe Rayban

  Chapter Seventeen

  I hadn’t realised France was such a big country. Four hours later I was still watching an endless ribbon of hard shoulder as we steamed south down the autoroute. Beyond it, the countryside was hidden behind a relentless curtain of rain. The rain had started soon after we left Les Rochers and looked set to continue. Phillippe wanted to reach Cannes before nightfall. He drove fast and tirelessly, overtaking everything in our path. Each monstrous lorry we passed doused us with a blinding wall of spray.

  Matthilde and I were in the back. She’d settled into her corner with her iPod on and fallen asleep with her legs stretching uncomfortably on my side. I could hear the irritating jangle of the music from her earphones. It was icy cold in the car as Phillippe had put the air-conditioning on to keep the windscreen clear. I longed for my coat, which was in the boot with the rest of my stuff, but I didn’t dare ask him to stop.

  I had time to think in the car. As the windscreen wipers swept hypnotically back and forth, my mind was filled with alternative versions of what would happen when we found Michel. That was if we found Michel! What if we didn’t? Young people did disappear. You saw posters for them on railway stations and places. I shivered at the thought. But of course we’d find him, he hadn’t been gone that long. We’d find him safe and sound, playing his guitar in that restaurant. If only I could remember the name! I’d gone over it so many times in my brain, all I could remember were the names I’d rejected.

  My mind then started along another tack. How would he react when we did find him? He’d know I had given him away. He’d probably be really angry and hate me for it. I stared miserably out into the gloomy landscape. Oh why did it all have to end like this?

  It was about seven-thirty when we reached the turn-off for Cannes. Night was drawing in fast and it was still raining. As we approached the city, Matthilde woke up and moaned that she was hungry, so Phillippe stopped and bought us sandwiches and coffee at a service station. He ate his while driving.

  We were soon winding down a long road that led between apartment blocks. I strained my eyes for signs of glamorous nightlife but all I saw was a sad-looking restaurant with a doner-kebab machine going round and round inside. Eventually, the street got busier and Phillippe turned into a wide boulevard. The traffic was at a standstill – we were caught in a traffic jam that seemed to go on for ever. All I could see were the lights of the cars ahead reflected dazzlingly in the wet tarmac. So much for the bright lights.

  After an hour or so of tedious stop-start driving, we reached the seafront. Through the rain I could see the lights of yachts bobbing on the dark water. And there were palm trees, loads of them, with people huddled underneath with umbrellas, sheltering from the rain.

  Phillippe drew to a stop at the side of the road and we had a sort of argument about what to do. Matthilde said we should park and walk and find our way to the old town, which was where all the restaurants were. I think she had visions of us wandering through smart restaurants, checking out the celebs till we just happened to come across Michel. But Phillippe seemed to be insisting on continuing in the car. He said something about finding a hotel for the night as the search for Michel could be a long one. I realised he was right. Cannes was a pretty big place.

  There followed a nightmare two hours of searching. All the large hotels were fully booked because of the festival and we were advised to try the smaller ones. We drove through the narrow streets of the old town, often getting lost and doubling back. Each time we saw a hotel, Phillippe or Matthilde leaped out and made a dash through the rain to ask for rooms. But all gave the same response: ‘Complet.’ Rooms were like gold dust during the festival.

  At each restaurant we passed, Phillippe paused and turned to me to see if the name rang a bell. There are hundreds and hundreds of restaurants in Cannes and most of them have names to do with the sea, like ‘Le Joli Marin’, ‘Les Marinières’, ‘Le Navire’ or ‘Le Nautique’. They also have names of girls and flowers and songs but none of them seemed anything like the name Michel had mentioned.

  By midnight, we were all feeling frayed and Matthilde was complaining of a headache. Phillippe had drawn to a stop in a square at the highest point of the old town. The rain had eased off and he got out of the car and went and leaned on some railings. Matthilde didn’t want to get out; she said something about it being a stupid idea to have come to Cannes at all.

  I went and joined Phillippe. He checked his mobile for the thousandth time and listened to his messages. There was still no word from Michel. He turned up his coat collar and took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. He stood leaning there staring down moodily, and for one heart-lurching moment he looked just like his son.

  I leaned on the railings beside him.

  Phillippe suddenly turned to me, saying, ‘You know why Michel left?’

  I nodded. ‘He wants to work in films. He’s really serious about it.’

  Phillippe shook his head and said in a choking kind of voice, ‘And I ’ad started to make enquiries. ’Ee can go to film school if ’ee wants. As long as ’ee passes ’eez bac first.’

  What a mess. If only Michel had hung on in there. I stared miserably down at the harbour. After the rain, everything seemed to glisten. The lights from the yachts cast long trails of silvery ripples over the water. In any other situation it would have been a magical view.

  I left Phillippe to smoke his cigarette in peace and went for a bit of a walk to stretch my legs. In the open air, it felt welcomingly warm after the air-conditioned car. A faint steam rose off the puddles and the sound of water running down the gutters reminded me for a moment of standing on the bridge with Michel at Les Rochers.

  There was music coming from around a corner. I wandered towards it and found a door leading down into a cellar restaurant. Above the door was the sign of a leaping dolphin.

  Someone was playing a guitar. My skin prickled with anticipation. I checked the name of the place: ‘Le Dauphin’. That was it! For some weird and incomprehensible reason, that’s what the French called the heir to the throne. The Dolphin! I rushed back to Phillippe and grabbed him by the arm.

  ‘J’ai trouvé. I think I’ve found it. Le Dauphin!’

  Matthilde heard me and she scrambled out of the car. Together we raced down the steps of the restaurant with Phillippe hard on our heels. Our entry caused quite a stir, as smart-looking people glanced up from their meals to see two dishevelled girls in their midst. Matthilde was ahead of me and she stopped in her tracks. I followed her gaze. A guitarist was playing on a little stage at the far end of the restaurant. He had long black dreadlocks and a moustache. He was nothing like Michel.

  A waiter came up and asked pointedly if he could help us. Phillippe said something about seeing the manager and explained in a low voice why we were there. We were taken into a back room beside the kitchen that smelt of rancid cooking fat. A greasy-looking man sat at a computer; he seemed annoyed to be disturbed.

  From the conversation that followed, I gathered that Michel had been in there earlier in the day. But the manager had hired the other musician months ago. He’d told Michel to get lost.

  Phillippe pumped him for more information, but the man just shrugged and said it wasn’t his affair.

  We drove despondently back through the old town, pausing whenever we saw a figure in a doorway or a likely alleyway where a boy might shelter. At one point we came across a group of people bunched around a street musician, but when we stopped we saw it was an old man with a dog on a piece of string. He was miming to a CD with a paper beaker on the ground for coins.

  Now that the rain had stopped, people were coming out into the streets. I spotted a girl in a low-cut evening dress and two men in white tuxedos who might have been celebrities. We passed a cinema where people were queuing for an all-night showing and several nightclubs where we caught the low throb of music seeping out into the street. I realised sinkingly that there was little likelihood of coming across Michel by chance. It
was like searching for a single face in a football crowd. He could be anywhere.

  Phillippe turned back on to the seafront and we drove slowly along the promenade scanning the pavements. Cars hooted impatiently behind us. Faces loomed and faded in the beam of our headlights. Once, heart-stoppingly, we saw a boy with dark hair hanging into his eyes. Phillippe swerved to a halt. But his was nothing like the face we were searching for. At length, we reached the end of the city. We tried a last hotel on the edge of town, a dismal-looking place, but even that was full and Phillippe at last admitted defeat. It was two in the morning and we were all dead-beat. He said we’d have to sleep in the car.

  He parked in a lay-by beside a beach and we ransacked the boot for all the warm clothes we could find. My coat did come in handy in the end. Mum was right, I was glad I’d brought it. I curled up underneath with a bundled-up T-shirt for a pillow.

  It was a hideous night. Matthilde and I kept waking each other up each time we turned over. Some sort of party seemed to be going on in a nearby beach pavilion and there was the sound of the bass line throbbing endlessly like a dull heartbeat just loud enough to hear. Cars passed endlessly, each one throwing a blinding beam of light over us.

  In the end, I must have fallen asleep, because I woke cramped and cold to the milky light of dawn. I could hear by their steady breathing that both Phillippe and Matthilde were asleep. I peered at the clock on the dashboard. It was five-thirty. Outside the sun was rising in a peachy glow over the sea. The clouds had cleared overnight and the sky was a clear unbroken pearly white. Already I could feel the faint warmth of the sun through the window.

  I remembered the search of the night before and my heart turned over with a thump as I wondered where Michel was. I prayed he’d found somewhere safe and dry to sleep. I tried to get comfortable enough to go back to sleep but worry about Michel nagged at my mind. I was hungry too. It seemed ages since we’d had that sandwich from the service station. It occurred to me that if I walked back along the beach, towards the city, I’d eventually find a café or a bakery open and I could buy some croissants and maybe coffee and bring them back for the others.

  Carefully, I extricated my legs from Matthilde’s. She stirred but didn’t wake up. I let myself out of the car, holding the handle up till the ultimate moment so the door closed silently.

  Outside, the air was fresh and smelt of seaweed and some sort of spicy herb. Seagulls hovered on the wind, their harsh cries reminding me of happier seaside walks on holidays with Mum and Dad.

  I made my way down the beach and doused my face in seawater. It left my skin sticky with salt but it was better than nothing. Then I set off along the shoreline. As the sun rose higher, the air grew steadily warmer. The sun glinted on the sea and I saw a yacht making out from the harbour shake out its sails and catch the wind as it headed out towards the horizon. The sunshine seemed to melt away the fears of the night before. Michel couldn’t have totally dematerialised. He was here somewhere and given time we’d find him. I started to feel mindlessly optimistic. Nothing bad could happen on such a beautiful day.

  I walked for about a kilometre before I came to that last hotel we’d tried. No one was awake, it was still closed up, so I continued on my way. The bay curved inwards shortly after the hotel and I came to a promontory built out into the sea forming a kind of harbour. I clambered over the rocks and found that the promenade started the other side. The first hundred metres or so had been built out from the land. It arched over the beach, making a rough kind of shelter beneath. And as is the way with such shelters, this one had attracted its usual population of the homeless and other random rough sleepers.

  I shivered, wondering if Michel had spent the night in company as grim as this. I made my way past, keeping down by the water’s edge, scanning the sleepers but not wanting to look too closely at the lumpy array of sleeping bags and pathetic makeshift shelters. By the look of it, most of the people were permanent residents. The overhang got narrower at the end, barely providing a shelter at all. And that’s where I caught sight of a skimpy sleeping bag some way off from the others from which an arm protruded clutching – surely that was Michel’s guitar?

  I made my way up the beach with horrible foreboding. Empty beer and wine bottles were scattered around. Was it him? Or would some horrible bleary-eyed drunk leap out and make a grab for me? I crept closer. A tuft of tousled hair emerged from the bag – Michel’s colour. And closer still – my heart was beating hard in my chest now.

  It was him.

  Close up, I could see he was fast asleep; his face looked crumpled and childish and none too clean. And I suddenly saw him as he really was – a boy – not so much older than me. No older, no wiser, just a kid really.

  I leaned towards him and my shadow fell across his face. He woke with a start and clutched his guitar tighter. Then he saw me and a slow smile passed across his face.

  ‘Rosbif !’

  ‘Bonjour, Grenouille.’

  He sat bolt upright and looked around him, coming out with a stream of French I didn’t understand.

  Then he stared at me and asked, ‘ ’Annah. What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re all here. Me and Matthilde and your dad. We came to find you.’

  He seemed to be trying to get his mind round this one.

  ‘My father?’

  I nodded. ‘He was really worried about you.’

  He slumped forward. ‘ ’Annah, I ’ave been such an idiot. What ’appen last night. You don’t want know.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  He shook his head. ‘The man in the restaurant ’ee don’t remember me. Some guy, ’ee say ’ee know some place I can play. ’Ee took me down a dark street, took a knife out. Took all my money. Took my portable. ’Ee would ’ave took my guitar too but someone come and ’ee run off.’

  ‘Oh, Michel.’

  He looked around him. At the row of bundled-up sleeping people. At the rim of rubbish on the beach. At the empty bottles strewn around on the pebbles. A slow grin spread across his face and he said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she ’ad to walk into mine.’ It was a quote from the film we’d watched together – Casablanca.

  We walked back together to the car after that. I was dreading what would happen when we woke his father. I thought Phillippe would be really angry, but it was worse. He cried. He just stood and hugged Michel close to him and cried. In fact I think we were all in tears. When we’d recovered, we each made loads of phone calls.

  I heard Phillippe call up the de Lafittes and Marie-Christine and then Michel asked if he could have the phone. He walked off at some distance and I heard him leave a message for his mother.

  When he’d finished, we all piled into the car and Phillippe drove us back into Cannes. I thought he’d head straight for Paris but he turned off the boulevard and swept into the driveway of the poshest hotel on the seafront.

  The doorman seemed rather surprised by the sight of us but he made no comment. Phillippe walked in and asked where breakfast was served as if he owned the place. We were shown to a vast dining room which was all flounces and frills and tables laid with pink tablecloths and orchids. We were the only people there because it was so early and the staff were just finishing laying the tables. But there was a breakfast buffet at the far end positively heaving with food.

  Matthilde and I went and tidied up in the ladies’ room. They had lovely-smelling soap and soft towels and dispensers with expensive perfume in them. As I was combing my hair, I caught her eye in the mirror. She was staring at me.

  ‘Quoi?’ I asked.

  ‘Tu sais, ’Annah. Michel, il t’aime,’ she said.

  I felt myself blushing to the roots and nodded. ‘I know he likes me. I like him too.’

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes, saying, ‘ ’Annah, I sink you are ve-ry fu-nny.’

  It was an odd kind of compliment, but by the way she said it I could tell that, somewhere in the not-too-dist
ant future, we might actually become friends. I followed her back to the breakfast room with my mind in a turmoil, wondering what she’d really meant by ‘il t’aime’. Oh, how can a language be SO unspecific!

  The four of us ate the most disgustingly enormous breakfast. There was everything on the buffet, from fruit and cereals, eggs done every way, sausages, bacon, muffins and pancakes – you name it. I don’t think the waiters had ever seen anyone eat as much as Michel.

  We all climbed back into the car feeling positively stuffed. We’d given up the idea of taking the train. Phillippe was going to drive us all back to Paris. Matthilde got in the back with me, letting Michel sit beside his father.

  As we left I stared out of the window in a kind of haze. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours it was hard to get my mind around it. And I had a few more points to add to my score of French positives and negatives.

  Positives:

  1) There is breakfast beyond French breakfast.

  Negatives:

  1) Words that are as horribly vague as ‘aimer’, meaning both ‘to like’ and ‘to love’. You’d have thought the French would’ve sorted that one out, wouldn’t you?

  Chapter Eighteen

  The journey back to Paris seemed to take for ever. Matthilde and I shared the earphones of her iPod for most of the time and actually the music she had wasn’t that bad. From time to time I took out my earphone and was hazily aware of Michel and his father talking. I couldn’t understand much of what was said but I could tell by the tone of their voices that they were coming to some sort of agreement.

  At midday we stopped at a service station for coffee and sandwiches. Matthilde went to tidy up in the loo and Phillippe stood outside smoking a cigarette.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered to Michel.

  Michel leaned over into the back and said, ‘Eez OK. I can go to film school. As long as I pass my bac.’

  ‘So you are going back to the lycée?’

  ‘I do not mind. As long as I know the future.’