by Mary Byrne
We wandered and talked throughout the day, but I couldn’t distract her from the problem of the missing Ponytail.
Finally we decided to brazen it out, go over to the Brits’ house and ask for him. As we left the hunting festival we stumbled on a mountain of backed-up traffic. We were forced to make a huge deviation. The gendarmes directing the heavy traffic were polite but unrelenting: you kept moving and you went where they told you. That was all.
‘I wouldn’t have the courage if you weren’t with me,’ Chantal said. ‘Anyway, the longer we stay away from home, the better chance the smell will be gone.’
So we rattled over there and up their avenue in the yellowing van.
Here was utter contrast to Chantal’s abode. Lawns and flowerbeds had been landscaped, then neatly manicured. Windows shone.
‘Not a hair out of place,’ said Chantal.
The doors and shutters were a Laura Ashley green.
‘Very British,’ I said.
The Brits, it turned out, weren’t interested in her problem.
‘Our son William has gone missing,’ they said, in their impeccable lounge. There seemed to be something else, but they didn’t want to talk to us. Ponytail seemed much less important than a son.
Chantal was silent as we drove back to her place.
‘What do you make of all this?’ she said finally.
I couldn’t help her, didn’t know how deep she was in, but it was clear that she thought Ponytail must be involved with the Brit’s disappearance somehow.
After a day of agonizing and doing everything in our power to reduce the smell, which seemed to have settled in the kitchen of all places, we went to the gendarmes.
They questioned Chantal for a while, then sent us into another office. A higher-up gendarme came in, removed his kepi from a sweating forehead, and said,
‘The news is bad, I’m afraid. Car accident.’ He watched us for reactions. ‘Mr Grigoriou was killed instantly. ‘About an hour from your place.’
Ponytail had had his last pastis and hot chocolate. They hadn’t contacted Chantal because she wasn’t family. In fact, it had taken them a while to track down his family. He seemed to be out of contact with them. They turned out to be in the middle of Paris. I asked him to repeat the family name.
‘Greek,’ said the gendarme. ‘Greek, from Barbès.’
I was briefly reminded of our wannabes.
By now the entire house was pervaded with the awful smell. It had seeped into all the rooms, attached itself to the upholstery. Even when we showered, it seemed to remain on our skin.
I dug out sleeping tablets for her and for me.
After a fitful night I got Chantal out of there as best I could. I arranged for the farmer neighbor to look after the animals and the mail, and took her back to Paris with me. The problem of smells and septic tanks I left for another day.
She actually made me go with her to Ponytail’s funeral. I don’t know what we expected, but there wasn’t a funeral as such. They’d had him incinerated. In a small whitewashed courtyard in Barbès—not unlike how I imagined Greece—his ashes sat on a windowsill in a grey plastic urn. A sad and motionless black-clad mother sat on a wooden chair, surrounded by a huge extended family. They were having a mechoui, more to feed the multitude than to celebrate anything, least of all Ponytail’s passing.
We were received and entertained by an older brother of Ponytail. He had organized everything. ‘For the mother, mostly,’ he said. Of the adults of our own age, he was the only one who spoke to us in French. No one talked of Ponytail. The brother talked of his own retirement, slated for six months’ time. He would go to Greece, where with a tomato and a piece of bread you could feed yourself. ‘Hope she lives long enough for me to take her back,’ he indicated the silent mother. A Greek was not like a Frenchman. ‘If you’re hungry,’ he said, ‘another Greek will feed you. There’s solidarity over there, there’s none in France.’ He was a member of one of the redder trade unions. He’d been working in Renault when the riots broke out in ’68. The riot police wouldn’t go in there: ‘The CRS didn’t dare.’ The first thing he’d do if he were Prime Minister of France, would be to close down all these charitable organizations and give everyone a room and access to sanitary facilities. ‘We don’t want charity,’ he said, ‘we want treating like human beings.’ Their own house—a collection of small houses surrounding the yard—had started life as a squat. Little by little, the family had grown and invested the abandoned shells. No one knew who owned them. The town hall had to do something about housing people. They were helping them with the paperwork to purchase it.
It all seemed to bring some peace to Chantal. She stayed in the city for ages, even met up with Ponytail’s older brother occasionally for chats in cafes about the way the world was going. She was amazed that she could like the city again, in love with city life as for the first time, astonished to see how swollen the immigrant population had become. When she said, with a wry smile, ‘You people not doing your job?’ I knew it was time to talk to her about going back.
I took a late-autumn week, with the anal-hoarding sadist’s approval.
We trained it out there. The van was still rusting in the station lot where we’d left it. We had to get a garage to jump-start it.
The house looked abandoned, but the animals were glad to see us.
Inside, the smell was still there, but fainter. We threw open the windows.
‘The bloody tank, I suppose,’ said Chantal. ‘I’ll put a dose in it.’
The house was chill too.
‘I’m going to light the fire,’ Chantal announced. ‘That’s what I missed most in Paris.’
The fire was difficult to get going. ‘Chimney’s good and cold,’ Chantal said, working away at it like a professional. ‘Always like this, the first fire of the winter.’
The smoke began to fill the room. She still didn’t panic. ‘That’s funny,’ she said, ‘it’s never done that before.’
She opened the door. ‘Create a draft,’ she said. ‘I forgot to have the chimney cleaned this summer.’
Even when there was a rustling noise in the chimney she still didn’t panic.
‘I’ve even had birds and their nests falling into it.’
Then it happened.
A foot fell into the fireplace.
We shot to our feet and recoiled. We recognized it as a foot because there was a shoe, and even a sock, but the bones and the rest of it only became clear after a lot of ‘Oh, là-là!’ and dragging it out of the embers with the mercifully long tongs.
Then of course a foot begged the question of a body.
And sure enough, when we got the courage to look, the rest of the body was still up there. Stuck, so to speak, between heaven and hell. Chantal blessed herself and went to the phone.
It took some persuading. No one would believe her.
She pressed the loudspeaker button. ‘You pulling my wire?’ a policeman asked. ‘The other one has bells on it.’
Chantal was somewhere between laughing and crying. I took the phone and explained. As I hung up, it struck me that maybe her ambiguous falsetto didn’t help.
When coroner, gendarmes, firemen and all the others who eventually turned up had done with us and ‘it,’ and had taken ‘it’ away, Chantal poured us both a stiff glass of goutte.
‘It was the Brit,’ she said, huddling up to an electric radiator.
‘What?’
I thought she might be losing it again, like the day the computers crashed.
‘It was William, Mimi’s friend.’
We both studied the now-empty fireplace.
‘They’re expecting me in town tomorrow. To fill out a report.’
She was still amazingly calm.
‘They reckon he came to burgle the house,’ she said quietly.
I burst out laugh
ing. ‘With all the dosh they have, and the Laura Ashley paint?’
‘Not the parents, the son. The gendarmes said burglary was quite common in unoccupied country houses.’
‘There you are!’ I said, overenthusiastically. ‘Yours is occupied!’
Next day, we went to the gendarmerie.
One unoccupied night is enough, they told her. The British boy, as they called him, would have needed the money for drugs. The antiques were always saleable, no questions asked. Paris dealers were always interested.
They’d examined his mobile phone messages. He’d got stuck in the chimney. He’d phoned Ponytail for help. They surmised that Ponytail had hightailed it off to get help from someone like himself, but unused to the car, and preoccupied, he’d gone straight through a dangerous crossroads. Nobody suggested he was running.
What shocked me most was what Chantal said next:
‘I keep imagining William there in the chimney, waiting for Mimi to come back. I think of his dawning realization that Mimi has betrayed him. Just imagine his thirst, the fatigue, the hunger, the thirst, the terrible need for the drug…’
I took her out of there. Again.
I helped her sell the place—the price was rock-bottom after all that had happened and the greedy farmer got it for a song, horses and all. I arranged for her to sign it all in a Paris notary’s office. Before that I went out there and got a dealer she knew to take the antiques. He was keeping them in a warehouse until Chantal decided what she wanted to do.
‘Let it go,’ said Chantal when it was done, as if I were the one selling. ‘Like I let go the anal-hoarding sadist, and Mimi and a whole host of stuff.’
She never talked about young William in the chimney anymore, but she started going into churches more often, lighting candles. Things like that.
Back in the office that winter, old Herringskin, as our boss was now known, became unbearable. He was pushing more of our buttons than ever before, pushing everyone equally. You’d be forgiven for thinking he missed Chantal.
At my instigation, we struck. We got out and demonstrated on the street with the wannabes. He tried to fire more of us for incompetence, but it was too late. We sued for harassment. Chantal came in with us. We all got a small stipend.
But it wasn’t about the money. We were happier at last and free at last and Chantal’s voice came down an octave and we could look at ourselves in the mirror again.
I Say ‘Good Morning’ to My Truck
The evening I met him I had just run out of the house because of a strange and disturbing impression.
It was Sunday night, post-dinner you could say. I eat sporadically and when really hungry I go up to Les Platanes, a bar-restaurant with a comfy ageing blonde manager and food you’d die for. The Changement de Propriétaire sign has been draped across the front for years. The interior décor was obviously once designed for a Chinese place, all red flocking and whorls. This is confused with some North African objects, by way of a statement, I suppose, or else in search of a clear sign that isn’t Chinese.
But to get back to me for a minute. Although it was a winter’s evening, I still had all the curtains open. I like to do that because, paradoxically, it deters the nosy-parker across the yard, who spends her time hanging out the window chain-smoking. I like to catch the last of the sun reflected in the windows opposite (I face east, it’s cheaper), and spot individual lights as they come on, and finally to appreciate the fully-lit ensemble of the other buildings around. I fantasize about occupants of those rooms that peek around the corner of our yard, rooms whose shutters stay closed for days on end, then open to expose the cheap ceiling chandelier in all its glory, while three sets of men’s laundry are clumsily and hastily festooned around the window to dry. Since we’re on the edge of the city, some of these hotels serve as coach-stages for happy families on their way to Euro Disney, but others tell a different tale, are called “meublés” and house people down on their luck whose rent is paid by social services because they can’t pay the now exorbitant Paris rents.
So there I was, seated at my table—a big table for someone who never eats at home—drinking something, and flicking through a magazine. In the big mirror—big to give the illusion of space, create an Alice-in-Wonderland other room I can never reach –I suddenly caught sight of a high-rise block through the window, and across the gardens, behind me.
It caught my eye because it seemed to have moved nearer. In fact it seemed to me, for a moment, that it was approaching our building at a fair speed.
Get a grip, I muttered to myself. Without verification or reflection, I grabbed my coat and headed out to the street, skipping down the stairs without even waiting for the lift.
Outside it was colder than I expected, with a searing wind. Few people were abroad. I remembered hearing a weather forecast about snow on low ground, expected avalanches, traffic bottlenecked, ski resorts full to bursting.
The usual pre-spring scene.
I headed for Les Platanes. The usual fug of warmth, good food and drink greeted me. The habitual hangers-on were around the bar, with a few new faces from the hotels round about. The talk batted around this and that, politics and habits, with the occasional guffaw or sneer from us or the man behind the bar, who seemed to have no end of glasses to dry. Maybe it’s an obsessive-compulsive thing with him. The ageing blonde came and went from the restaurant tables, mothering late customers—mostly single men from the hotels roundabout—and smiling a homely smile. Some of the men at the bar had plastic bags of shopping at their feet, baguettes peeking. That meant they’d perhaps been there since the Sunday morning market on the canal. Nobody seemed drunk or disorderly. I always reckoned this was due to the presence of the motherly blonde.
There comes a moment, in Les Platanes, when you know it’s time to go. The glass-drier behind the bar and the blonde never actually say anything, you just begin to feel uncomfortable. It’s related to some unseen control that keeps everyone from getting drunk and shouting and becoming aggressive. You know it really is time to call it a day when the Algerian—yes, the sublime French food is cooked by a North African—finally slinks out of the kitchen and slides towards the door, as if trying for invisibility.
This is the moment when I pay up and go, for I can’t be bothered having my last drink ruined by some unseen, unbidden haste.
I scrunched my shoulders and collar up, headed out into the now sub-zero temperature for what I call home. Ahead of me, equally hunched, was a small dark man carrying a plastic bag of shopping. As I levelled with him he looked up, and I recognized him as one of the men from the bar, men I normally consider to be just numbers, ships that pass in the night.
I said, ‘Good Evening,’ recalling, as I did so, a phrase of my father’s: Whiskey talks.
The little man smiled and moved into step with me, and I wondered if greeting him hadn’t been a bad idea.
‘Back to work tomorrow, hein?’ he grinned. ‘Actually, I never do anything else only work. When one job is finished, the boss calls me on the mobile and away I go again. Never see home. I have a meublé here and another in Cherbourg.’ His attachment to his rented rooms—he made them sound like Riviera properties—reminded me of student bedsits in northern cities, of men who came to collect rent late on Friday nights, counting the cash slowly and entering it in a notebook, each room with a rat in a trap sitting on his bed, waiting for the man to knock.
‘Not that home is any great shakes either,’ he said. ‘I come from St Georges de Bagnoles, a miserable place—two houses and a church.’
He paused. I hoped he wasn’t going to cry or something.
‘Trucking is a strange existence. You have no friends, no family.’ This didn’t seem to upset him unduly. ‘Ended up in all kinds of trouble.’
I thought of the influence of the homely blonde. I wondered how much drink he’d taken. He didn’t appear drunk.
As if he
had read my thoughts, he said, ‘We can’t drink from Monday to Friday, you know, not a solitary drop.’ He scraped his thumb under his front teeth, to indicate zilch.
His baguette was taking a beating—squashed under his arm and beginning to fold in two. I couldn’t help wondering what it would taste like in the morning.
His story was complex. There was a lot of it, and I didn’t follow it all due to his diction.
However, somewhere in there I got hooked.
‘Tu m’énerves,’ he had said to a gendarme, way back. The common mortal didn’t normally tell gendarmes they were annoying, but I imagined truckers have a longer leash than the rest of us. The gendarme hadn’t got the message, had insisted on more papers and a full inspection of the truck. I’d seen these cops in their bike gear on motorways, their knee boots affirming that they wouldn’t suffer fools lightly. The trucker had finally lost his patience and roughed up the gendarme, catching him by his jacket and shaking him.
He was silent for a moment.
I waited, studying his diminutive appearance, searching for the toughness I hadn’t noticed before. I marveled at the hidden treasures and even major dangers to be found bottled up, standing beside one at a bar or in the street.
‘Married five times,’ he said.
There had been one daughter.
‘Grew up without me around.’
He hadn’t seen her from babyhood to womanhood. Most of the rare times he was home, she was in bed asleep.
‘You’re not going to waken a kid at two a.m.,’ he said, ‘for your own purposes.’
There also seemed to have been some major piece of bad luck, a bigger background he hadn’t got to yet. He was getting stuck into his story now, and I hoped that his discourse was heading for some dénouement or other, before we froze to death in the windswept street.
We paused at a corner and faced each other. I felt like one of the wedding guests who’d run into the Ancient Mariner.
