Consolation

  No, that’s not quite it. They were allowed to look, but not to go in. She had even stretched a rope in front of the door. The others were indignant, but she held her ground. This was her home. Her home on this earth that hadn’t wanted her and, with the exception of Nelson and his mistress, no one had right of asylum.

  You just have to have your documents in order.

  Charles and Sam had done things properly. The wolf could blow and blow, the bunker would hold. The stud partitions were supported by a cement screed, and the cladding nails were longer than Nedra’s palm.

  Besides, it’s visible on the photo – you can see she’s stressed out.

  When Granny finally allowed them to disperse, Kate turned to Nedra:

  ‘Tell me, Nedra, did you say thank you to Charles?’

  The little girl nodded.

  ‘I can’t hear what you said,’ insisted Kate, leaning lower.

  Nedra looked down at her feet.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Charles, embarrassed, ‘I heard her.’

  For the first time he saw Kate get angry: ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Nedra – two little syllables in exchange for all this work, that wouldn’t rip out your tongue now, would it?’

  Nedra was biting her lips.

  The legal authority, who had become as white as her shirt, added before walking away: ‘You want my opinion? I don’t bloody care if I go into this selfish child’s house or not. I am disappointed. Terribly disappointed.’

  She was wrong.

  The little word she had so hoped to hear was on the following page, and it would take a form that would leave them all speechless.

  The drawing isn’t one of Charles’s, it takes up two pages, and it isn’t really a drawing.

  It was Sam who copied out a rough draft of the required course, in order to memorize it.

  Squares, crosses, dotted lines and arrows in every direction . . .

  So here we are. The famous competition that had unseated him.

  Third weekend in the month of August. Charles had not yet had the courage to mention it to Mathilde, but their days were numbered. His voicemail was saturated with threats, and Barbara, crafty woman, had managed to find Kate’s number. Everyone was expecting him, there were already a dozen or more appointments set up, and already Charles could sense that Paris meant a workload worthy of an ass – to get back to the time we were talking about . . .

  A few hours earlier, Sam had won the final qualifying races hands down, and they were all camped out on the far side of the paddocks.

  What an expedition . . .

  Ramon and his driver had left the night before, at their own pace and to have time to warm up, so they had slept on site.

  ‘If you make it through the first round,’ said Kate, putting her basket under her seat, ‘we’ll come with our sleeping bags and camp out under the stars with all of you to lend you our support in your ordeal . . .’

  ‘Only lend, Auntie Kate? Why not give?’

  ‘Thank you sweetheart but I know what I’m saying . . . Because I’ve been giving my support to you and your ass for ten years already . . . Does that suit you, Charles?’

  Oh, Charles . . . Everything suited him . . . His thoughts were already being invaded by clauses about late penalties . . . And this would give him the chance to sleep less than a hundred metres away from her, for once . . .

  He was saying that just for the hell of it, no? He’d abandoned any dreams of getting his leg over a long time ago . . . This woman needed a friend more than she needed a man. That was it. Thank you. He’d got the picture. Bah . . . Friends, as Jacques Brel would say, are less perishable . . . On the quiet in his little room he would pour himself little drams of Port Ellen, and drink to the health of the wonderful holiday companion that he’d become.

  Cheers.

  Naturally, the children had jumped for joy and rushed off to their rooms to stock up on heavy jumpers and packets of biscuits. Alice painted a magnificent banner, Come on, Ramon!, but Sam made her promise not to unfurl it unless he was victorious.

  ‘It might make Ramon lose his concentration, you understand?’

  They all rolled their eyes. They knew that that stubborn beast would balk at a fly farting or a blade of grass pointing in the wrong direction.

  They weren’t up on the podium just yet . . .

  So, there they all sat, cross-legged round a campfire, some roasting sausages, others roasting marshmallows, some Camembert, others bits of bread, and their laughter and stories melted into the, um, pleasantly contrasting aromas. Every last one of their friends had come along. Bob Dylan was practising his scales, the little women were reading the palms of the little girls, Yacine was explaining to Charles that this particular spider’s web had been woven close to the ground in order to catch jumping insects, like grasshoppers, for example, whereas that one, see, up there, well, that’s for flying insects . . . Logical, isn’t it? Logical. And Charles is very friendly with his best mate. After fixing her a club sandwich, he went to steal a bale of bay to place behind the small of her back . . .

  Sigh . . .

  Kate had been particularly agitated since her mother arrived.

  ‘Is it to get away from her that we’re all having a wild time over here tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be . . . It’s stupid, isn’t it? At my age, to still be so sensitive to my old mum’s moods . . . It’s because she reminds me of other times. A time when I was the youngest and the most carefree . . . I feel down, Charles . . . I miss Ellen. Why can’t she be here tonight? I imagine that the reason people have children is to experience moments like this, no?’

  ‘She is here, since we’re talking about her,’ he murmured.

  ‘And why haven’t you ever had any?’

  Charles said nothing.

  ‘Children, that is.’

  ‘Because I have never run into their mother, I suppose . . .’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  He wasn’t expecting this question. ‘A word’, ‘a word’, ‘a word’, growled his brain, in a panic.

  ‘When Sam has won.’

  Well done, my hero. You had to go a long way to find that smile . . .

  *

  It was nearly eleven o’clock, they were wrapped up in their blankets, keeping watch over the embers, ‘like cowboys’, and trying to come up with the appropriate lullabies. What was that cry? That hissing sound? That rustling? What sort of bird? Or beast? And what was that distant braying?

  ‘Courage, comrades! In a few hours we won’t have to entertain these stupid bipeds any more!’

  And then a voice, Leo’s perhaps, came quavering: ‘You know what . . . it’s time to tell ghost stories . . .’

  A few raptor-like shrieks encouraged him. He embarked on a very gory tale full of viscera and haemoglobin, with cruel Martians and transgenic bumble bees. Nice try, but . . . it was hardly the sort of thing that would keep them from sleeping.

  Kate raised the stakes even higher: ‘Heliogabalus? Does that ring a bell?’

  Nothing but the crackling of the flames.

  ‘There were a lot of nutters among the Roman emperors, but I think this one took the biscuit . . . Right, he came to power when he was fourteen, entering Rome on a chariot pulled by naked women . . . Off to an excellent start . . . He was mad. Mad as a hatter. The story goes that he would sprinkle crushed gems on all his food, and put pearls in his rice, and he liked to eat bizarre, cruel dishes, and he craved stews made from tongue of nightingale and parrot, and coxcomb torn from the live animal, and he fed his circus animals with foie gras, and one day he massacred six hundred ostriches to eat their brains while they were still warm, and he adored the vulvae of I don’t remember which sort of female, and he . . . Well, I’ll stop there. This was just for starters.’

  Even the flames did not burn as bright.

  ‘The anecdote which I’m sure Leo wants to hear goes like this: Heliogabalus was renowned for the orgiastic banquets he hosted . . . Every time had to be better
than the previous one. Worse, in other words. He had to have ever more massacres, more terror, more rapes, more orgies, more food, more alcohol . . . In short, more of everything. The problem was that he got bored very quickly. So one day, he asked a sculptor to make him a metal bull that would be hollow inside with just a little door on one side and a hole where the mouth was so that he could hear the sound emerging. At the beginning of his lovely parties, they’d open the door and then lock a slave inside. When Heliogabalus began to get a little bored, he’d ask another slave to light a fire underneath the bull, and at that point all his guests would draw closer with smiles on their faces. Oh yes. It was really funny because the bull, you see, would start bellowing.’

  Gulp.

  Dead silence.

  ‘Is that a true story?’ asked Yacine.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  While the children wiggled and shivered, she turned to Charles and murmured, ‘I won’t tell them this, obviously, but – for me it’s a metaphor for all humanity . . .’

  My God. She really did have a bad case of the blues. Something had to be done.

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ he continued, fairly loudly in order to drown out the sounds of their disgust, ‘that guy died a few years later, I think he was only eighteen, in the toilet, by suffocating on the sponge he used to wipe his own arse.’

  ‘Is that true?’ asked Kate, astonished.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Montaigne told me.’

  She pulled on her blanket, winking: ‘You are brilliant.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  But not for long. The story he told, about how they always found bones whenever they started digging a construction site, and how they mustn’t let anyone find out, otherwise the investigation would spoil the concrete that was ready to be poured, and make them lose a lot of money, well, all that failed to leave anyone remotely shaken.

  That one fell flat.

  As for Samuel, he recalled the only French lit. class during which he had not fallen asleep:

  ‘It was the story of this young bloke, a peasant, who refused to enlist as just another piece of meat in Napoleon’s army . . . Something they called the blood tribute . . . It lasted five years, and you were sure to die like a dog, but if you had money, you could pay someone else to go in your place . . .

  ‘He didn’t have a brass farthing, so he deserted.

  ‘The prefect summoned the bloke’s father, gave him hell and humiliated him, but the poor old guy really didn’t know where his son had gone. A bit later he found him starved to death in the forest, with the grass he’d been trying to eat stuck between his teeth. So the old man put his son over his shoulder and carried him without saying a word to anyone for three leagues until he got to the prefecture.

  ‘That bastard of a prefect was at a ball. When he came home at two in the morning he found the poor peasant on his doorstep, and the old man says, “Well, you wanted me to find my son, Monsieur le Préfet, and here he is.” Then he put the corpse up against the wall and cleared off.’

  Now that was spicier . . . Sam wasn’t dead sure, but he thought it was by that Balzac bloke.

  The girls didn’t have any stories, and Clapton wanted to keep the mood just the way it was . . . Gling, gling. He plucked some really macabre staccatos in the meanwhile.

  Yacine volunteered.

  ‘Right, I warn you, it’ll be short.’

  ‘Is it the one about the slug massacre?’ someone asked worriedly.

  ‘No, it’s about the lords from the Franche-Comté and Haute-Alsace. The counts from Montjoie and the lords of Méchez, if you prefer . . .’

  Some grumbling from the cowherd quarter. If this was going to be some intellectual stuff, thanks a lot.

  The poor storyteller, tripped up just as he was hitting his stride, didn’t know whether he should continue.

  ‘Go on,’ hissed Hattie, ‘give us the one about the dubbing and the salt tax. We love it.’

  ‘No, it’s not about the salt tax, that’s just it, it’s about something called the “the right to lounge”.’

  ‘Oh, reeeally? You mean, like sling hammocks between the battlements?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Yacine, clearly annoyed, ‘you’re really dumb. During the harsh winter nights, the lords had, so to speak, and I quote, “the right to disembowel two of their serfs in order to warm their feet in their smoking bowels”, close quotes, by virtue, as I just told you, of this “right to lounge”. There. That’s all.’

  It wasn’t a flop at all, actually. There were a few calls of ‘yuck’ and ‘gross’ and ‘are you sure?’ and ‘that sucks’, all of which warmed his heart just as effectively.

  ‘Right then,’ announced Kate, ‘we’re not about to improve on that one this evening . . . Time for bed.’

  There were already a few shouts of irritation against sleeping-bag zippers when a faint little voice rose in protest: ‘But I have a story, too . . .’

  No. They were not stupefied. They were petrified.

  Sam, with his usual class, said jokingly to defuse the moment, ‘Are you sure your story’s horrible, Nedra?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because if it’s not,’ he added, ‘you’d do better to keep your mouth shut for once.’

  The laughter that followed made him want to go on.

  Charles looked at Kate.

  What was the word she’d used the other night? Numb.

  She was numb.

  Numb and with deeply etched dimples on the lookout.

  ‘It’s the story about a urtwur . . .’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Speak louder, Nedra!’

  The fire, the dogs, the raptors, even the wind, were hanging on her every word.

  She cleared her throat: ‘A, um, earthworm.’

  Kate was on her knees.

  ‘Well, um, one morning he comes out and sees another earthworm. And he says, “Fine day, isn’t it?” But the other one doesn’t say a thing. So he says it again, “Fine day, isn’t it?” Still he doesn’t answer . . .’

  It was tricky because she was speaking more and more softly, and no one dared interrupt her.

  ‘“Do you live round here?” he went on, wiggling ’cos he was all embarrassed, but the other one still didn’t say a thing, so the earthworm that was all annoyed turned round in his hole and said, “Oh drat, there I went talktootelgen.”’

  ‘What?’ protested the audience in frustration. ‘Speak more clearly, Nedra! We didn’t understand a thing! What did he say?’

  She looked up, her little face a pout of confusion, and removed the lock of hair that she’d been chewing on at the same time as her words, then valiantly uttered once again, ‘“Oh drat, there I went talking to my tail again!”’

  It was a sweet moment, because the others didn’t know whether they ought to smile or pretend to be horrified.

  To break the silence, Charles applauded very gently. Everyone followed suit, only soon they were clapping fit to break their knuckles. This startled the dogs who woke up and started barking, so Ramon started braying, so all the donkeys in the campsite asked him to kindly shut up. Swearing, clamours, more yapping, whips snapping, banging and clanking rose in the night from all around, as if the entire sky were celebrating the courtesy of an earthworm.

  For Kate the emotion was too much; she could not join in the Mexican wave.

  Much later, Charles would open one eye to make sure there were no coyotes at the door; he sought out her face on the far side of the embers, and tried to make out her eyelids, and saw them open and thank him in turn.

  Perhaps it was something he had dreamt . . . It did not matter, he snuggled deeper into his Himalayan feathers, smiling with happiness.

  At some point he must have believed that he would build great things and earn the recognition of his peers, but now he was resigned to the fact that the only buildings that would ever really count in his life were dolls’ houses.


  *

  For a reason that will remain a mystery to this day, Ramon refused to cross the last open water just before the finish line. The very same stream where he’d splashed about dozens of times . . .

  What happened? No one knows. Perhaps some duckweed had drifted down, or a facetious frog had cocked a snook at him . . . The fact remains that he stopped short a few metres from his title, and waited for all the others to ford the water before condescending to follow them.

  Yet God knows he’d been pampered . . . the girls had brushed him, combed him, made him shine, coddled him all morning until Samuel came along and grumbled, ‘That’s enough, now, he’s not My Little Pony y’know.’

  They hadn’t unfurled the banner, they hadn’t taken any photos or put on any dark glasses, to avoid any annoying reflections that might cause Ramon to shy, they’d encouraged him carefully and squeezed their buttocks painfully, but all in vain . . . He had preferred to teach his master a lesson. What was important was working hard at school, not acting the idiot between two haystacks . . .

  His master, who for the occasion had put on his great grandfather’s tail-coat, was the sole competitor to drive without a whip.

  The most powerful, therefore . . .

  All he had to say when everyone was pressing round him, each one more sorry than the next, was: ‘I suspected as much. He’s very highly strung. Huh, treasure? Come on, let’s get out of here . . .’

  ‘And your reward?’ said Yacine worriedly.

  ‘Bah. You go and get it . . . Kate?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks for the great support. I appreciate it.’ They continued in English.

  ‘You are welcome, darling.’

  ‘And it was a fantastic evening, right?’

  ‘Yes, really fantastic. Today I feel like we’re all champions, you know . . .’

  ‘We sure are.’

  ‘What are they saying?’ asked Yacine.

  ‘That we’re all champions,’ translated Alice.

  ‘Champions of what?’

  ‘Well, donkey champions!’

  Charles offered to go with him. Sam thanked him, but Charles was too heavy. And besides, he needed to spend some time alone . . .