‘Good luck,’ Bruno said, and squeezed my elbow. I could feel the pressure of his fingers after he’d let go.
‘You too,’ I said, and hurried back to my gang.
With almost no warning, I went all wobbly with nerves during the first performance. I forgot the words, twirled the opposite way from the other two girls, and shook the whole time I was on stage. This was a little amateur village fête, and I was only standing at the back singing ‘ba ba ba baaa’ in the chorus, but you’d have thought I was doing a first night gig in front of fifty thousand people. Anyway, the little kids didn’t seem to notice I’d got it wrong. Their faces were adorable: they were laughing (mostly when they were supposed to), sucking lollies, clapping and trying to sing along to our punk songs. They seemed to be having a brilliant time. Despite being petrified, I loved it.
Claudine’s play was a lot more talky – I didn’t understand it at all – and the only music was played on an old fashioned lute-type thing. Bruno was the narrator, a wandering minstrel, and he came on wearing a kind of all-in-one lycra outfit, and, as he had promised all those weeks ago when he first mentioned the festival, there was dancing. And yet, none of this made him look stupid. For one thing, I couldn’t believe he had such a great body – his normal day-to-day clothes didn’t show his shape as well, and I have to confess my jaw dropped when I saw how fit he really was. The audience loved him, and he was loose and swish as he talked to them, sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling, winking at girls in the audience and making everyone laugh and applaud. And at one point, he found me in the audience and said a line in English looking straight at me, and my heart pounded the way it had when I’d been on stage myself.
Also, I became slightly obsessed with looking at his bum in the lycra outfit.
The next round of performances wasn’t for a few hours, and all the performers got some food – the day had flown by and I had barely realised how starving I was – and sat together on stairs outside the church. Bruno had pulled his jeans back on and came and sat next to me.
‘You were very good,’ he said.
‘You too,’ I said.
Bruno laughed and blushed. ‘It was nice of you to try, but no one believes you,’ he said. ‘I’m making an idiot of myself. My sister can be very persuasive. Will you be staying for all three performances, or do you have somewhere more exciting to go?’
‘More exciting than a medieval festival? Is that possible?’ I said, making my eyes pop. ‘You know I’m joking, don’t you? I can’t believe how much fun I’m having. I want to stay all night and do the same thing all over again tomorrow, except this time remember the words and twirl the right way.’
His face crinkled into a gorgeous smile. ‘Samantha, you’re lovely,’ he said, and both of us seemed a little surprised by it, and didn’t know what to say next. So we ignored it and pointed out interesting things in the square and watched the festival mascot dance around in his costume defying the summer heat, and I tried not to think too hard because that never got me anywhere.
Chapter 20
After the sun had set, the square seemed to glow with a thrilling new edge of danger, like a fairground. Tons more people had turned up. The tiny little kids had gone, the ones who’d been allowed to stay up were running around with sparklers, the stalls that had been quietly grilling takeaway snacks for everyone all day suddenly looked like blazing furnaces, and the people who milled around were louder and clumsier – I worried about them bumping into our fragile backdrops, which were showing signs of wear and tear after the first two performances. They only had to make it through one more show, and so did I.
We started setting up just after eleven. I saw Victoire first, wearing a white strapless dress and looking like a goddess. Then Rachel and Lucas followed, holding hands and laughing, Rachel leaning against his shoulder and stumbling a little in her heels.
I felt sick. I didn’t want them here. Immediately, I was on the defensive, my mind running anxiously through all the reasons our show was stupid and lame, and I thought about not going on. I was angry with her and frightened of her, but I owed her one more thing.
Lucas.
I hadn’t told her that the boy she was here with had made a bet about being able to sleep with her, or that he’d lied about having slept with me. She was my best friend and she needed to know. OK, maybe since making the bet he’d fallen head over heels for her, maybe he’d even confessed and they’d both had a big fat laugh about me together. You know how when you start imagining something that might have happened, you start believing it has happened – and just thinking about this possibility made me hot and angry again. She suddenly saw me and we stared at each other across the square, and in that one moment I wanted to tell her about Lucas to hurt her, not to protect her. The feeling was gone a second later, but still.
Our final performance was due to start in less than half an hour. The ‘cool’ Vernon crowd – about ten of them, now – were wandering around the square together, buying cups of hot apple punch and shouting jokey questions at the mascot, who was now relaxing with his cat-head off. During the first play they began to get quite rowdy, and were shushed by the rest of the crowd. I was dreading going on and wondered if I should just run away now. But Lucas wouldn’t let them shout things when his sister’s band was playing, would he?
What probably saved us was the volume of our music: it was near-deafening . . . and we rocked it. I could see a few of Victoire’s male friends making fun of our dancing, but I didn’t care. It just made me dance more crazily myself; I really threw myself into it, tossed my hair around, had a fab time. When we’d finished and the audience applauded like mad, we did a big group hug, and then bowed in a line, holding hands. I didn’t want to leave the stage. I wished we could start again from the beginning and go on playing all night.
Bruno’s play was next up, but they didn’t have a stack of amps, just a lute. Needless to say, the heckling got worse, and when Bruno came out in his lycra bodysuit they wolf-whistled and laughed and shouted things. Claudine was looking close to tears, and I was worried about her.
Bruno looked angrier and angrier, but it was when Lucas shouted in English – I’m not sure why, maybe it was to show off to Rachel – ‘Hey, pussy cat! Pooossy cat!’ as Bruno was dancing, that Bruno appeared to lose it. I could see him flush very red, and prayed he’d just go on and ignore it. But his hands were balled into tight fists, and as the taunts got louder he suddenly lurched towards Lucas, then stepped back again, glancing at his sister, who seemed to calm him down. The play carried on, and I stopped holding my breath and tried to enjoy it. But when the next song began, my back prickled with fresh sweat, and I scanned the audience nervously. Lucas began calling out again, this time on his own, ‘Poooossy cat!’ and making kissing sounds. Bruno’s eyes flashed up and stopped on mine and I tried to mouth ‘no’, but it was no use. He jumped off the stage and punched Lucas in the face. Lucas went down. There was a big crowd gasp, then it all went absolutely silent for a few moments. Then Lucas got up and threw a punch back, which Bruno ducked, and Lucas jumped on him, grabbing him round the neck with one hand, trying to mash his face with the fingers of the other, and then they were totally hard at it, punching each other, and the crowd went mad, half of them shouting at them to stop, the others telling them to go for it. Chantal was screaming at Lucas. Finally one of Claudine’s friends and one of Lucas’s friends pulled them apart.
They were still shouting at each other, and I could mostly follow their French, although it came very fast. Bruno was accusing Lucas of being the great stud and the great liar, and saying he owed his friends their money back from the bet. Lucas was shouting ‘How do you know?’ over and over, and his friends started laughing at him and telling him to pay up. Lucas suddenly flew at Bruno again and punched him, knocking him to the ground. Without thinking, I ran over and knelt down next to him. Bruno looked up at me with a dazed expression. You remember that tip I had for making boys want to kiss you, looking at
their mouth, then their eyes, then the mouth again, blah blah blah?
Well, you don’t always have time for all that. I held his face with one hand and planted my lips on his.
This sounds like I made it up, but I swear it’s true: at that exact moment, the firework display started up on the other side of the square – maybe it was to take people’s attention away from the fight – and when I opened my eyes again, Bruno was still looking dazed, but smiling, and the air smelled of gunpowder and above us the black sky was glittering with falling stars.
‘That was quite a kiss,’ Bruno said. I kissed him again.
Lucas had stropped away, having got in the knockout punch, and Chantal was following him, shouting at him.
Then I looked over and saw Rachel and realised I didn’t have anything to tell her any more, because, of course, her French was better than mine. But as I continued to watch her, I noticed her face was blotchy and tight, with that held-together look I knew well, the one she always had when she was just about to cry. All my anger and nastier impulses were gone in a second, and I just wanted to grab her hand and run for it with her, away from France. But she was already going, without me.
I got up and ran after her.
‘Rach,’ I shouted, but she kept going. I caught up and grabbed the top of her arm.
‘What?’ she hissed, whirling round to face me. Her eyes were full of uncried tears.
‘I was going to tell you about Lucas,’ I said. ‘I only just found out.’
‘Yeah, like you’re not loving this.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Rachel stared at the ground, and started crying. ‘Rach,’ I said uselessly. ‘Don’t cry. Please don’t.’ I tried to hug her, but she didn’t accept it, she just stood there, all hard, with stiff arms and shoulders, and I felt stupid and eventually had to let go.
‘OK, are we done, then?’ Rachel said, with her voice high and whispery.
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. I knew how this would come across, but I wasn’t angry. I was humiliated and scared for her; scared for both of us. But I wasn’t crying, or even close to crying, and I felt bad about that too. I watched her until she met up with Victoire again, and Victoire gave her a hug which she did accept, and then they both looked at me, and I knew I was being talked about. I stopped looking.
I went back to my friends. Chantal looked up at me with dark, angry eyes, and I could tell she thought this had all been about les Anglaises, and that she and her friends were pretty sick of us now. God, there was virtually no one in France who didn’t hate me now.
Virtually, but not quite no one.
Bruno, who’d been sitting with his sister while she fussed over his cuts and bruises, stood up and came over to me. He lowered his chin and tilted his head on one side to try to see my face.
‘Plenty of fireworks tonight,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘How are you?’ I said.
Bruno shook his head. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘You haven’t made up with your friend, then?’
‘No.’
‘It’s his fault, all of this. You should both be angry with him, not each other.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.
He reached out and pulled me to him, kissing my forehead. ‘And what are we going to do now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that you’re leaving the country in less than a week, and I’m inconveniently falling in love with you.’
Around us and under our feet there were burned out sparklers and half-eaten chicken legs; pink and purple streamers trampled into the dust, and broken plastic cups. The square was emptying. The party was over.
Chapter 21
So you’ve fallen hard for this boy, but in less than a week you have to separate. You don’t know when you’ll see him again, but it won’t be any time soon. What do you do with that week? Start it or finish it? Walk away now before you begin to care too much or live it up because this may be all there is?
I can tell you what we did. We laughed a lot about the terrible timing. We told each other off for not doing something about it earlier.
‘You were, I think, swept off your feet by Lucas,’ Bruno teased me, picking a poppy and tucking it behind my ear.
Argh, if only this weren’t true!
I blushed as red as the flower and giggled behind my hands. ‘Lucas had the guts to kiss me!’ I said. ‘If I’d waited for you, we’d never have kissed at all!’
‘But I protected you from a dangerous street robber!’ Bruno said. ‘That’s not enough for you? It always seems to work in movies.’
‘You told me you just wanted to be friends. That’s what I say to boys when I’m dumping them.’
‘Oh, you always torture me by telling me about all your other boyfriends,’ Bruno said, whirling me on to my back and snogging me. But whenever I opened my eyes again, and sometimes his eyes were still closed and I could just look at him for a second or two, his soft lips just-kissed, I thought about the end. I thought about going home without him, and waiting and waiting for his emails and wondering who else had smiled at him that day, and I felt achey and sad. I knew ten thousand girls had holiday romances every summer and I was just a statistic – worse, a cliché. But some people must actually fall really in love, it can’t always be a spell the sun casts that fades with your tan.
Bruno rolled over and lay on his back next to me, dragging his hand through the long grass.
‘I’m not going to look at you when I say this, because I don’t want to see your reaction,’ he said suddenly. I was propped up on one elbow and I could see his face, his eyes were closed. ‘I want us to not let this go. You and me. I know the odds are against us and you may get home and smile with your friends about the boy you met on holiday and feel very differently. But I am home. And when you go, I’m going to start doing whatever I have to to get you back.’
Did I really know what he was feeling? Did it matter? The orangey evening sunshine lay on us like a blanket, and I felt fuzzy and safe, as if I had always been there and always would be. I lifted my head to rest it on his chest, and he stroked my back, and I thought that I would never, as long as I lived, regret this time, and how happy I was right now.
When I wasn’t with Bruno, my life was, like the brown meat at the Fayes’, quite a bit tougher. Word had got to Monsieur and Madame Faye about the fracas at the village festival, and they obviously blamed the foreigners. There were a few sarcastic comments over dinner about the English liking to fight in public, which was a bit rich – it had been their son throwing the punches. And all through the last few days I was totally dreading Lucas coming home for another visit and running into him at the breakfast table, cutting a slice off that horrible cold sausage. Luckily it didn’t happen.
Chantal didn’t seem to blame me for any of the trouble. I went out with her and the band one last time, and they were all great; we ended up laughing a lot talking about the night of the festival. It felt good to have been part of it, and to have been one of the performers, rather than one of the too-cool-for-school crowd who came along and spoiled the show. I liked that I’d somehow tumbled into doing the kind of thing I would never have done back home – and loved it – and couldn’t stop grinning to myself when I thought about the moment when Victoire’s friends started making fun of us and we all just went for it and danced like mad. All the same, because I’d been particularly involved in the fighting that ruined the evening, the confidence I’d built up with the band had deserted me. I felt shy and guilty, and mostly kept quiet.
I called Rachel every day for the rest of our holiday, but she didn’t answer. I started to get really worried about her and sent her a text saying, Just tell me you’re OK, then I’ll leave you alone. She texted back I’m OK, so I had to do what I’d promised. That was the last I heard from her until we met at Vernon station, with our bags. I was there first. I told Madame Faye I didn’t need a lift, and I walked there with Bruno, who wanted to take the train to Paris with me. We were s
itting on the bench together, not speaking much because we were feeling miserable, and I saw Madame Lacasse zoom past in her super-flash sports car, and a few minutes later there was Rachel, trying to find some place in the tiny station where she wouldn’t have to sit with us.
‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Yeah, hey,’ Rachel said, but she didn’t come over. The three of us got on the train together and Bruno carried on Rachel’s rucksack as well as mine, but she still went and sat away from us, and read a book.
‘You have to go and talk to her,’ Bruno said gently.
‘But in a couple of hours I have to leave you. We don’t have any time left. Anyway, we talked to her at the station, she doesn’t want to talk to me.’
‘Cherie,’ Bruno said. ‘She’s your friend, she’s on her own, and you’re here with me, of course she won’t approach you. Come on, let’s go and sit with her.’
‘But it could go wrong. And you’ll soon be gone,’ I said. I sounded whiny. He squeezed my elbow, and nodded towards her.
The two of us got up and slid into the double seat opposite Rachel’s.
‘We thought we’d join you,’ I said.
We talked in a clumsy way until we got to Paris, as if there was a camera on us that made us self-conscious. No one mentioned the fight, or Lucas. We chatted a bit about Victoire and Chantal, and Bruno and Rachel talked about some of the towns Rachel had visited, and we even laughed a couple of times. Then there was a fumbled, rushed moment when we transferred to the Eurostar check in – I’d thought Bruno would be able to come further but he couldn’t, Rachel had already checked through, and I thought I should go with her to build on the progress we’d made on the train to Paris. Our time was up. We were just standing there not knowing how to leave each other, I didn’t think my legs would let me walk away from him. I closed my eyes and leaned on him.