by Tony White
As he stepped back into the light, JJ saw that Victor was walking towards him holding something with both hands that looked a bit like a largish lemon with holes in it, and which JJ guessed must be the musical instrument he had heard.
‘Ciao, man,’ he said. ‘I go to the factory. I just want to say don’t go too close the edge, uh? And be careful of the falling rock. You see the yellow … places?’
JJ looked up at the yellow streaks that earlier he had thought were sunlight falling on to the rock. Up closer and now Victor had pointed it out, he realised that these were scars that showed where, in some cases, quite large sections of the rock had recently sheered off, and come to think of it, there were some hefty boulders scattered around in the scrub near where they were standing.
‘That yellow is typical of le calcaire dolomitique,’ said Victor, ‘because the rock contain lots of the magnesium, which react with the air.’ He shrugged. ‘We potters must know such things.’
‘I loved that music you were playing earlier,’ said JJ, changing the subject and moving more quickly now, away from the foot of the baou, ‘but what kind of instrument is that, exactly?’
It was an ocarina, a type of Central American flute. Victor demonstrated. He had tried making them once, but they didn’t sell. ‘I ’ave many, many,’ he said. ‘You can ’ave if you like.’
JJ took it, and thought he may as well walk back to the village with Victor, who told him that the spring was on the other side. ‘That one used to be a nightclub, for many years,’ said Victor, and he told JJ that when they’d first moved here the club had still opened up every now and then. It was called Labyrinth, there was a sign, and it would usually be busy too, he said. ‘But not everyone could get the ticket, if you know what I mean.’
It must have looked as if JJ didn’t.
‘It was the gay club,’ said Victor, ‘but from the day when that must be kept secret, non?’
As they walked up La Petite Rue, they approached an elderly man with a bucket who was mopping the cobbles. He had filled what looked like a dog bowl under a tap on the street, and at least a dozen cats were sitting nearby on windowsills and doorsteps, keeping their distance and pretending disinterest, but all within a radius of about twelve feet or so.
‘Regarde!’ whispered Victor. ‘This is Monsieur Houlette. I tell you about ’im in a minute.’
‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ said JJ politely as they went past, and Victor nodded a silent greeting, but the old man seemed content – or discontent – merely to watch them pass, eyes following them as they did so. If he had acknowledged them in any way, it had been imperceptible.
When they got around the corner, Victor said, ‘You know, ’e was the last person living ’ere when we came. ’Im an’ ’is cats. ’Is was the one ’ouse that still ’ave someone live in it.’
The thought of anyone living in isolation amid such dereliction gave JJ the creeps.
‘For ages,’ Victor continued, ‘I thought ’e was mute, you know, but ’e can speak. But if you ask ’im about those days after the war, or the nightclub, ’e pretend ’e don’t know what you are talking about.’ Victor paused for a second, then: ‘Anyway, ciao.’
And with that he turned left, out through the village gate and up towards the ridge and the menhir; JJ’s ‘royal road’. That idea – and JJ’s half-arsed talk of ley lines over dinner the previous evening – had greatly amused everyone. ‘Non!’ Milo had said, ‘Pas vrai! C’est une route de régicides!’
This morning, instead of travelling some ancient mystic song line to the next menhir, Victor would only be taking the track as far as the blasted cutting, where he would scramble down the bank and on to the Route de Grasse by the little fountain. From there, it was about a half-mile walk to the factory, where today, among other things, he would be supervising the loading and dispatch of a lorry-load of salt-glazed earthenware urinals, lavatories and handbasins that were headed for some lavish new international arts centre in one of the United Arab Emirates.
Behind them, watched as ever by his cats, Monsieur Houlette continued mopping the smooth cobbles of La Petite Rue, as he did every morning. He was a small, wiry man, and JJ thought he looked a bit like a much older version of Dustin Hoffman. Turning back into the village square, JJ found himself humming ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, and trying to remember how the words went: a zircon something, a freak show, trying to get away, but not getting far, not being able to do it on your own.
Talking of princesses – zircon or not – Sylvie came out of her front door at exactly that moment, carrying a long-necked salt-glazed jug – one of Victor’s, presumably – which she began to fill from the fountain. With her long and tousled bleached-blonde hair, and wearing a stag-print kimono and dusty espadrilles, she may have been the most beautiful woman that JJ had ever seen in his life.
‘Bonjour,’ he said. ‘Vous êtes Sylvie? Je suis JJ, from last night. The blackbird, or—’
‘Ousel,’ she said. ‘Oui, je sais. Mon “Roméo”!’
They both laughed.
‘Mais, Roméo,’ she said. ‘Je déteste les Stranglers. Ce sont des phallocrates, n’ penses pas? What does it stand for, your JJ? Not “Jean-Jacques”, I presume.’
JJ laughed and shook his head. He was a fan of the band, and had even sent off postal orders for several issues of their Strangled fanzine, but he wasn’t about to admit that now. ‘No. It’s Joseph Jonathan,’ he said. ‘But I don’t like the name Joseph.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Alors,’ she said. ‘Je vais t’appeller “Joe”, OK?’
‘Oui, OK,’ he said, inwardly delighted and probably showing it too. Sylvie could call him anything she liked.
‘Bon. Salut, Joe.’
‘Salut, Sylvie.’
He was hungry. ‘Um,’ he said, remembering some rudimentary conversational French from school. ‘Y a-t-il une boulangerie ici?’ He hadn’t seen one, but you never knew.
‘Oui,’ said Sylvie, ‘bien sûr. But it is a great mystery. You cannot buy bread there. Do you want me to show you?’
JJ nodded, pleased of any chance to prolong the encounter. ‘Oui, s’il vous plaît.’
‘D’accord,’ she said. ‘But first I must ’ave coffee. Do you want coffee, Joe?’
17: FRÊNE (ASH)
Sitting at Sylvie’s dining table, drinking the coffee she had made and smoking a cigarette while he waited for her to get ready, tapping off a flake of ash in his saucer, JJ had a moment to revel both in the casual intimacy of the encounter – her immediate charm – and in the relative luxury of the room itself, if luxury was the right word. It was sparsely furnished, with its white-painted stone walls and flagstone floor, but compared to the other variously ramshackle and dilapidated houses that JJ had seen since he’d arrived in La Fontaine-en-Forêt – even with the larger communal space of Nos Resto – it felt spacious, light and airy. It also felt clean and dry, although it was unlike any room that JJ had ever been in. As if, rather than having been decorated, the room had been subjected to a brutal process of stripping away, so that only bare wood and stone remained. It felt more like a church than a house, but, whatever the reason for this austere aesthetic, it seemed to suit the place. So much so, in fact, that JJ couldn’t tell if this room was even particularly bare, or if it was just that all the other rooms in the world were unbearably cluttered. Here were no carpets or curtains, no wallpaper, and no knick-knacks or ornaments, no record player, no records and no books. The structure of the room itself provided its own kind of anti-decor, and yet it felt stylish and appropriately chic – beautiful, even. An iron range that filled the space beneath a stone chimney piece even more magnificent than the one in the communal kitchen opposite had been restored; certainly it was working. After disappearing into the kitchen next door to fill the pot, Sylvie had made coffee on one of its hobs, and JJ could feel the mellow warmth of its fire. Outside it had started spitting with a light rain just as they’d come in. A breeze now lightly shook the c
atkins on some budding alder branches that had been arranged in a large, old terracotta olive jar – clearly not one of Victor’s reproductions – that was set on the floor in front of one of the open windows, bringing with it the smell of rain on the stones outside. From the fresh putty and clean glass, JJ could see that both windows had recently been repaired and reglazed. The wood of the window frames had been stripped of paint and sanded down; it felt waxy to the touch.
The whole place seemed as impossibly glamorous as Sylvie herself, and JJ couldn’t help wondering why she was living here alone. Partly in the sense of ‘How had she managed to bagsy it?’ and partly wondering if she had a boyfriend; hoping that she didn’t.
If Sylvie had been Norma Jean herself, or if she had emerged from the sea and been borne, Venus-like – naked, and barely protecting her modesty – by fragrant winds on a great vulval shell to some Arcadian shore, she could scarcely have appeared more beautiful to JJ than she already did. Nor could the connection between her beauty and his desire have been more profound. What was a nineteen-year-old English boy with a hyperactive imagination who had been mistaken for a punk to do in this world of adults and – he wished – sexual possibility?
In JJ’s brain, as with many nineteen-year-olds, a constant battle was being fought between sexual desire and a kind of priggishly self-righteous need to be politically sound – or was it to not be thought unsound? This sometimes manifested itself as a feeling that he was required to have an answer – possibly even the correct one – to any given challenge or situation. Not that he had been in many situations at all, whether ethically challenging or otherwise. This was also part of an unspoken and usually self-defeating compulsion on JJ’s part to give an impression of effortless maturity, as if he had been born fully formed, and – to borrow a phrase from his Marxism Today-reading college friend Heather back at home – ‘always-already’ cool. More often than not, the tension between these two states, between desire and being politically sound, would result in a kind of all-pervading psychic paralysis, particularly at times of romantic tension. Luckily for him, or not, what went around came around, and the casual observer might easily mistake the resulting state of self-induced catatonia for a kind of cool after all.
The night before, once conversation had again turned to politics after they had seen that JJ was reading Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Élise and Pea-tag had spoken at length about the Miners’ Strike in the UK, and JJ had found – to his slight shame – that they knew far more about it than he did. He hadn’t realised that so much had been at stake.
‘So Maggie,’ Pea-tag had said, ‘succeed to portray this as a wild-cat strike because the miners make the tactical error over the ballot at the beginning, non? But even if they ’ad ’ad the ballot, the state could never let them win, you understand?’
Élise had changed the subject with a mischievous grin: ‘So if you like the Killing Joke but you don’t like the Angelic Upstart, then maybe you are not a punk but a Lollard.’
So-called ‘Oi!’ music was a branch on the evolutionary tree of punk that was also sometimes associated with the skinhead movement, and JJ had confessed that he found the boisterousness of bands like Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects, or their audiences, a bit scary. That they were able to have a conversation like this at all was because punk, like the atom bomb, was a kind of shared concern of the young around Europe and beyond. Music was more of a lingua franca than the ‘franglais’ that JJ’s poor French was forcing everyone to adopt. Punk or new wave was both a proxy and a crucible in and of itself: both a means to an end, and the end itself, if that end was the discussion of ideas. Back at home, even relatively recently, JJ and his friends had still liked to toddle off to Left Bank Records on a Saturday, and then to sit on one of the benches in the Cathedral Precinct, or on the low stone walls if it was sunny, where they might pore over the covers and inner sleeves of the records they had just bought, searching for information and ideas, for clues.
When it came to Oi!, JJ found the whole scene problematical, as his Marxist friend Heather might have said. He still associated the skinhead movement with its racist, National Front-supporting nadir, rather than its reggae-loving multicultural origins. Consequently, of the newer bands, he preferred the more positive critical and political messages of bands like Crass, Flux of Pink Indians or Killing Joke, of whom he was a badge-wearing fan, after all, or The Mob, with their anti-nuclear lament, ‘No Doves Fly Here.’
He’d been to Crass’s second Exeter gig back in the autumn, and his favourite of their records was The Feeding of the 5000. As far as JJ was concerned, the habit of the organised Church to gain wealth and influence, to lavish riches, decoration and power upon itself, was the height of hypocrisy, a contradiction in terms, and he had said so.
Oui, the Lollards thought this too, Élise had said. They were medieval English heretics, she’d explained, comme un socialisme prototypique. They wanted to redistribuer la richesse, to redistribute the wealth. These were dangerous ideas for which men – ‘bien sûr, because they think women do not ’ave political ideas, oui?’ – might be burned alive.
‘But look around,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t you notice something strange about this place?’
JJ had still been so overwhelmed by La Fontaine-en-Forêt and its inhabitants, on so many levels, that he didn’t know where to start.
‘Il n’y a pas d’église!’ Élise had said. ‘No church!’
Not quite getting her point, JJ had wondered if there was some kind of equivalence here to the rule – as he understood it – that it was only towns with cathedrals that qualified as cities. ‘Does that mean this is a hamlet and not a village?’ he’d asked. But then, perhaps it was neither, he thought to himself. Perhaps it was just a glorified waterworks.
Élise had laughed at this display of naivety, and said she thought that the fact that there was no church meant La Fontaine-en-Forêt had always been a place for outsiders, even more so since the one road and sole means of access to the hamlet, village, whatever it was, had effectively been cut off. You couldn’t get any kind of vehicle up here. Without a road, and with the spring at La Fontaine-en-Forêt being replaced as the main water source for the area with the laying of the Aqueduc du Foulon and the Canal du Loup – initially a stone-and-concrete channel, later a huge iron pipe – from a source higher up the mountain in Gréolières, the village had ceased to be useful. Already depopulated by the First World War, and safely out of sight, it had been allowed to wither.
When Sylvie reappeared, she was wearing jeans and a white cotton man’s shirt, which she had tied in a knot at the waist. JJ couldn’t help noticing the silver medallion that she wore on a chain around her neck. ‘C’est mon ducat,’ she said, smiling. ‘Tu l’aimes? Regarde.’
Leaning forward with an elbow on the table, she held the necklace up as far as the chain would let her, so that he might see. The medallion itself was ornately cast but looked exceptionally old. Framed within a vertically aligned beadwork ellipse was a crude image of what he guessed from the halo was Jesus, surrounded by stars. It was impossible to read the embossed lettering around this central device. Gazing as he was at both the coin and the smooth, golden skin of Sylvie’s breast, breathing in the smell of her perfume, JJ could do little more than nod.
‘It look like nothing,’ she said, ‘but is real. I find it when we first move ’ere. Inside the—’ She gestured at the flagstoned floor. ‘— stones, oui? In the crack. It look like nothing, but the joaillier tell me is a ducat vénitien from the Napoleonic era, when France invade Venice. ’Ow it got ’ere, I don’t know.’ She stood and allowed the coin to gently fall back against the skin between her breasts, where it was framed by the open neck of the white shirt. ‘I think the gold ducat is worth a lot of money. This one not so much because he is only silver, but he is beautiful, no?’
‘Oui,’ said JJ, relieved and distraught in equal measure. And whether actions spoke louder than words or not, he was momentarily lost for both. ‘Sha
ll we go and see this bakery, then?’ he said eventually.
As they stepped outside, and with no warning, Sylvie slipped on the wet cobbles, grabbing JJ’s shoulder and arm with both hands as she did so. That he had managed to stand fast and prevent her from falling would be the source of considerable moral satisfaction for the nineteen-year-old for the rest of the day, while the memory of the touch and the weight of her body against his, combined with this sense of having been chivalrous, would become highly erotically charged. In his fantasies, this moment would be returned to again and again, and in that imaginary realm it became the prelude to their rushing back into the house in a fantasy of sensual abandon that presented itself as a series of transitionless vignettes; a Kama Sutra of sexual positions and endless erotic possibilities. Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that, but even in spite of the events that followed, this accidental touch – Sylvie grabbing his arm as she momentarily lost her footing on the wet cobbles – remained the fulcrum of an erotic fantasy that would sustain JJ for many years.
