by Kate Dunn
He nodded.
“What about you? How do you manage?”
“The Dragonfly is so small she practically fits in my pocket. And I’ve got Delphine to help me.”
They looked away from one another, in opposite directions. The night air was so warm Colin felt as if he could lean against it and it would take his weight. He hardly realised he had sighed.
“I suppose I ought to…”
“Yes, well…”
“…take my granddaughter…”
“Perhaps another time…”
“…and get that kebab.”
“She’s a great kid.”
“Another time – yes, maybe.”
“Yes. Yes, maybe.”
“Well, then…”
They took their leave. Ahead of him, Delphine went dancing down the gang plank on her tip toes with her arms outstretched. She jumped hard, near the bottom, trying to overbalance him. After he had recovered himself, the two of them set off along the quay and the flapping of her flip-flops sounding like birds’ wings taking flight.
The sun distilled to darkness in the sky.
“I really like Tyler,” the child said, with an arch note in her voice. “She’s so kind. She has such… good taste. And maybe I am wrong about her pictures. It is possible. Maybe they are not so affreuses, not all of them. Maybe she needs to practice a little bit, that’s all.”
Colin switched his saucepan and the small electric ring that Tyler had lent them into his other hand. “What will you do with your ten euros?”
“Buy a video camera, to make movies,” she answered without hesitation. She flashed a smile his way, and he was struck by the scope of her dreams, their randomness, and the fact that they remained unbroken.
“That’s my girl.” He peered at her through the gathering dark. “You’re right, Tyler is kind.” He craned his neck to look back. On the deck of Sabrina Fair a figure was just discernible in the dusk. He saw her raise her hand and the paler skin of her forearm gleamed for a moment in the light of the rising moon, as she touched the papier-mâché beads around her neck.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Aw man!” said Laroche plaintively. “Alright then. Teach me something useful. None of that the cat sat on the mat crap. Teach me to write I’ll punch your fucking lights in. That’d be cool. And twat and wanker and perhaps Wotch you looking at? Or how about Woss your problem, dickhead? You could teach me to write dickhead. That’d be sweet. An’ tosser.”
“How about bellend?” asked Michael dryly.
“Yeah, that an’ all. Pillock, bollocks, knobber. Yer getting me interested now.”
Michael drew up a list of the foulest language he could think of and added every conceivable insult under the sun, some of them Shakespearean, for good measure. That covered most of the letters of the alphabet.
“I’ll write something down, we’ll read it together, then you copy it out afterwards.”
Laroche yawned. He unwound his spine one vertebra at a time until his head was resting on the table.
Michael smoothed the sheet of paper and began to write. A whistling breath came out of Laroche’s open mouth.
“OK, then…” After a little bit of trial and error, involving reading cards with individual words on them amongst other things, Michael tore up sheets of paper into little squares and wrote a single letter on each. Grudgingly, his head tipped back and his jaw slack, hardly looking at what he was doing, Laroche assembled his first autonomous word : COKSUCER.
It was a breakthrough.
Within days he was making phrases. I’M BLADDERED. ARE YOO FUKING ME OVA? CACK OF YOU GITE. One day, when Michael came back from rec, thirty five minutes outside in the greasy drizzle before they were herded indoors again, he found a note on his pillow.
I MEBE DICLECKSICK BUT LOOK AT ME DOING THE RITIN, GOBSHITE.
He glanced over. Laroche was lying on his back, his arms folded behind his head and his ankles crossed with loose nonchalance. His eyes were closed. He was fake sleeping, but his tight little mouth was twitching at one corner and an aura of supreme self-satisfaction was exuding from every pore. Michael regarded him for a moment with something he could have dismissed as grudging admiration, but it felt more humbling than that.
COULD DO BETTER, DOUCHEBAG, he wrote back in reply.
~~~
Michael’s first morning in what was known locally as the hobbit shop because only hobbits would work for fifty cents a day started unremarkably enough. The workshop was a skinflint construction with walls a single brick thick and ancient aluminium windows that had the permanent glitter of condensation on them. Looking up at the exposed ducts and piping under the pitched roof, lit unforgivingly by fluorescent lights which dangled from long chains, he thought the place was probably bristling with asbestos. The best spots – by the stove in the corner as far as possible from the door – were already taken by the regulars, but he squeezed into the middle of a row of sullen mechanics, where a dilapidated old bicycle upended and balancing on its saddle was waiting for him. On the bench was some WD-40, a hank of wire wool, a selection of allen keys on a ring and the kind of villainous wrench you wouldn’t expect to see in a high security prison.
The word Rosbif flittered round the room in audible whispers. It felt a little like being handled: it was deliberately intrusive. Michael examined the bike. It was a Bertin, or had been once. There was no chain. The rust of decades obscured most of the paintwork and the nuts and bolts holding the frame together were so corroded that they couldn’t be undone. He gave a quick blast with the WD-40 then set to work with the wire wool, rubbing away with specific, detailed movements.
Rosbif… Rosbif… Rosbif.
He worked at the nuts that were holding the front wheel in place, flecks of oxidised steel like gold leaf coming loose and adhering to his skin. At length, he was able to release the wheel and he turned his attention to the rear. He wiped his palms on his jeans, but the rust held tight to the lines in his hands. He started rubbing with the wire wool, causing infinitesimal erosions in the metal.
Rosbif… Rosbif… Rosbif.
The words were so persistent that he couldn’t be sure if they were still being mouthed, or whether they had lodged themselves in his ears and were eating away at his brain. He craned his head around, searching for one of the kangas. There were two guards at the far end of the shed, chatting, chewing gum. One of them caught his eye and held it, his gaze sustained, as corrosive as rust. The man scratched his chin and turned back to his conversation.
When Michael had used up his supply of wire wool he crossed over to the bank of cupboards on the far wall as he had seen others do.
“Oi! Rosbif!”
He glanced around then wished he hadn’t. All the men were studiously working on their bicycles. He tore off a length of wire wool from a huge bag full in the cupboard and went back to his place. The ring of allen keys was gone from his bench. He rolled the wool into a pad between his fingers, folding in the fraying ends. There was a threat in the air like the coming of rain: invisible, suggestive. He crouched down and resumed scratching away at the bike, concentrating on what he was doing. He removed the rear wheel. The pedals were next, but they were jammed on tight and he needed an allen key to release them.
“Can I borrow your allen keys, mate?” he said to the man next to him, a jowly bloke with a hanging lower lip.
“Use your own,” the man mumbled.
Michael looked at the bench. His keys were back where they had been before. He stared at them for a moment. “Thanks, mate,” he said, after a beat.
It was a hard way to earn his fifty cents. The day was filled with an accumulation of inflicted setbacks. Minor hitches: things spilt, or removed, or bent out of shape. Rosbif… Rosbif… Rosbif. Someone tripped him up when he went back to the supply cupboard and he knocked a bicycle over as he tried to stop himself from falling. Rosbif. The guy mending the bicycle had him by the ear and swung him round in a half circle before the kangas could intervene. He
got twenty-four hours in the punishment block for fighting and as he was marched away by two officers a voice from behind him called out, “Oi Rosbif! It was me wot fucked yer wife.”
A day later, when Michael was returned to his cell, he found Laroche sitting at the table writing, his breathing heavy and laborious. He was working on a new list of words. BOOK PAGE SHELF TABLE LEND BORROW READ READING TALKING QUIET RETURN OVERDUE STAMP.
“I’m gonna get me a job in the library,” he said without looking up. “No point in poncing about in the hobbit shop. Only a BAMPOT would do that.”
“Bampot?” said Michael, strangely pleased to be home. “That’s a new one on me.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I’m not coming. I won’t come. It’s too hot for Amandine and it’s too hot for me.”
“Now look here–”
The two of them were not quite shouting at each other: Delphine was not quite shouting in a way that suggested she very soon would be and Colin was not quite shouting with the tested patience that comes from long practice.
“I don’t want to see the town. I’ve seen plenty of towns. I don’t want to come. I want to stay here.”
“But I need to get some petrol.”
“I don’t want to get petrol. You can get petrol without me.”
“But Joigny’s supposed to be nice.”
“Sens was supposed to be nice,” she answered darkly, as if that settled the matter.
High in the ozone, in the blue air, a helicopter hacked in lumbering circles, each one lower than the last. Colin shaded his eyes. “It’s coming in to land, I think.”
From the far side of the river an important little launch was skimming towards them carrying two men in evening dress, although it was only mid-afternoon. Delphine picked at a scab on her elbow as they tied up behind the Dragonfly, but as they started unloading a length of red carpet, she swivelled round to watch.
“Ah, Colin…”
He was briefly charmed by the way that, with her French accent, she could turn his name into the bars of a song; he liked the lilt and swoop of the syllables as she spoke them, “Colin…” For a moment he was entranced to be her reference point, the person she showed things to and shared them with. All the fight about fetching the petrol went out of him.
“There’s a restaurant over there–” he jerked his head at the other bank. “A famous one. People come from far and wide…”
The noise of the helicopter was raining down on them. Delphine covered her ears and squealed, “I think it must be the President. Or maybe Daniel Radcliffe or Lady Gaga.” The downdraught flattened Michael’s lavender tweed hat against her hair. “Do you think it is possible?”
The two immaculate men were rolling the red carpet from the launch up the river bank. One of them was not happy with the lie of it and half rolled it up in order to perfect the angle in relation to the launch. When they spread it out a second time he seemed painfully unconvinced. He brushed some dried grass from the pile with a morose sweep of his fingers and then shot his cuffs as if to have done with it. The two of them processed to the end and Colin had to physically restrain Delphine from jumping ashore and running after them.
“I think it is the Mayor of Joigny and his deputy and they are here to meet Robert Pattinson,” she declared breathlessly.
“I think they’re waiters, actually. Very smart ones,” he replied, conscious of the oil on his shorts and the fact that he had been wearing the same T-shirt for three days now.
As the two helicopter passengers, clad in expensive shades of camel and bent low because of the churning wind, came scuttling across the field, his granddaughter scrambled up onto the cabin roof and started waving Amandine high in the air.
“Bonjour! Bienvenue! Welcome to Joigny, Robert! My name is Delphine and this is my boat and we are making a grand voyage south until the butter melts!”
The couple sped along the red carpet without so much as a glance in their direction. Delphine slid back down onto the deck trailing Amandine loosely behind her.
“I don’t think it was Robert,” she sighed as the launch pulled away with its precious cargo, “Robert would have waved. He would have said hello at least. He probably would have come on board for a Coca-Cola and signed an autograph for Amandine. She collects them, you know.”
Colin tweaked her cap. “I’m going to get that petrol.”
“He probably would have,” her lower lip was jutting out and without thinking he nudged it back into place with the knuckle of his finger.
“What about you?”
She leaned against him for a moment, a negligible gift of tenderness, and as she fiddled with a loose thread on the monkey’s little snout, he was conscious of the careless warmth of her arm against his shirt. A quick twist of an emotion that he couldn’t name spiralled inside him.
“Why don’t I set you up with a fishing rod?” If I’m getting the petrol, you ought to be doing something productive – it’s only fair.”
“I cannot do fishing – it is not possible.”
“It’s easy…” He dug the bag with his fishing tackle out of the everything locker. “I used to go fishing with your dad when he was about your age; he had his own rod and everything…”
Delphine ran the monkey’s paw across her cheek ruminatively as she watched him assemble the fishing tackle.
“It screws together like this; you put that bit on there and thread the line through here…”
“Did Papa like fishing?”
He broke off from what he was doing, flooded with the memory of the two of them sitting damply under an umbrella by the canal, a flask of warm tea and their sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper on the grass between them, with Michael ticking off everything they caught in his I-Spy book of river fish.
“Yeah, he did like it. He was very good at it, what’s more.”
He finished assembling the fishing rod. “You’re very like him, you know,” he said to his granddaughter, after a pause; he found himself wishing that she would lean against him one more time, but she was scanning the middle distance, her eyes darting this way and that as if she had mislaid something. “To look at. You’ve got his hair, and his colouring.”
“Papa’s going thin on top. That’s why he wears a hat.” Her voice sounded terse, as if she were correcting him, as if this was something she had gone over with him many times, but her eyes were still searching, on and on, trying to locate all that she had lost.
“That hat?”
She chose not to answer. He could see she was brimful with something, something which darkened her gaze further, which caused her to fold her lips tight and rest her chin on Amandine’s head, something which made her draw in a breath and look at him acutely, and then say nothing.
“And you laugh exactly the same way that he does, with your mouth curled up a bit at the side. That was one of the first things I noticed – the way you laugh.”
“OK, I’ll do the fishing. I’ll do it. If that’s what you want,” she shouted to shut him up.
He blinked in astonishment. He laid the rod along the locker, taking his time as he digested the sour taste of victory. “You don’t have to…”
Delphine rolled her eyes to the heavens.
“Not if you don’t want to…”
“I’ve said I’ll do it.”
“I just thought that it might–”
“Colin,” she shouted, then she clapped her hands over her ears and started making la la la-la la sounds at full teenager volume, although she was only nine.
“OK, OK,” he looked up and down the mooring, smiling and nodding at the one or two boaters watching them with interest. “Let’s hit the rewind button. Do you want to do some fishing while I go and find the petrol?”
“No.”
“OK.”
“But I will.”
Reflecting on the weird way in which you can win an argument and still feel you haven’t got what you wanted, he showed her how to bait the hook with a bit of old bacon and how to re
el the line in. He cast the rod for her.
“Amandine goes fishing often,” she observed dispassionately. “She catches sharks and everything. In Brittany, when we go on holiday.”
“Well, let’s see what she can do with the Yonne.” He peered down into the river and then passed her the rod. “I won’t be long. Don’t talk to strange men and don’t leave the boat under any circumstances. Understood?”
She gave him a withering glance. When he reached the end of the pontoon and turned to look back at her, she was up on the cabin roof with her headphones and sunglasses on, doing a kind of lying-down dance, the fishing rod with its line snagging in the water abandoned on the deck below.
~~~
To calm himself down, he had his one cigarette of the day over a furtive beer in a bar in the main square. 24/7 childcare! Not for the fainthearted, or the recently retired except in very small doses when there was a parent on hand to bundle the child back to. He stubbed his cigarette out half-smoked and checked his watch.
The route back to the mooring was downhill, thank God, and the streets were laid out in a thousand year-old grid designed to keep out as much of the sunlight as possible, but still the mediaeval houses, their walls the colour of scorched earth, seemed to glimmer and shift in the glare.
He paused on the bridge to catch his breath, his eyes seeking the Dragonfly. In the distance he could just make it out, lazing in its berth, moving with wide-hipped indolence from side to side as the current went swaying past. He took his hat off, wiped his forehead on his arm and fanned himself. Beneath him, the reflection of the town lay like oil upon the water and it was bliss, for a moment, to lean against the cool stone and gazing down, to lose himself in the marbling of clouds, the inflections of blue shot through with river green.
Beyond the port de plaisance was a recreation ground and he smiled to himself to hear children squealing and calling, their vaulting laughter the soundtrack of a summer’s day, picturing the games of chase, the terrible pleasure of a dare, the hide and seek, the racing to catch up, the always out of reach –
