Her own arresting officer, sitting opposite, told her to shut up and warned us all to do the same or incur an increased fine.
The blond civilian guy was at the far end of my own bench. He kept leaning forward and making faces at me, but I ignored him.
A few seats down from me, the commando with the dimpled chin was looking impatient, but didn’t seem too worried by his fate. He turned to grin at me.
‘You know, I think I have seen a sturgeon,’ he said.
I gave him an ‘Oh yeah?’ look.
‘Really,’ he went on. ‘A couple of months ago. We were doing some beach landing exercises.’
‘Shut up,’ the policeman opposite me ordered.
‘Tranquille, mon ami,’ the commando told him. ‘We’re only chatting to pass the time.’ A little staring-down contest ensued, the commando apparently warning the gendarme telepathically not to get too uppity with guys who spend their days learning how to hurt people.
The policeman looked away, and the commando took up his story again. ‘It wasn’t near here in Collioure,’ he said. ‘Where was it? Where did we do that beach landing?’ He nudged one of his naked colleagues, who was engrossed in making lewd faces at an undressed English girl.
‘The Camargue,’ the guy grunted, and went back to his tongue aerobics.
‘Ah oui,’ Dimpled Chin said. ‘You know Saintes Maries de la Mer?’
‘No,’ I told him, making a mental note of all this for M. If it was true, then it was prime information.
‘The sea wasn’t too clear,’ he went on, ‘but I’m sure that’s what it was. Long brute, half-catfish, half-shark.’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Did you see just one?’
‘Yes, only one. But why are you so interested in them, anyway?’
Good question. What could I say to allay his suspicions?
‘Photography,’ I blurted out. ‘My girlfriend, she takes photos of fish.’
Any further conversation was ruled out when the van lurched into movement, its engine rattling like a tumble dryer full of spanners, causing the seats to vibrate so much that one of the English girls said she was going to buy one for her bedroom.
We drove along the promenade, away from the phallic church. The van edged its way through the crowds of curious tourists, who took photos and filmed the seminudity through the windows as we passed by. A couple of the girls stood up to flash their boobs at the cameras. To them it was all part of the party.
We were unloaded in a brightly lit car park, then herded across chilly tarmac into the entrance hall of the gendarmerie. Here, we were greeted with a shocked silence. Two cops at the coffee machine stopped feeding in coins and gaped. An old lady who had come to register some kind of complaint broke off in mid-sentence and clung on to the edge of the reception desk for support.
The officer on duty barked an order at the arriving gendarmes, and we were shoved into a corridor with five or six doors leading off it and a long bench running along one wall.
‘Sit down and shut up,’ a gendarme told us. Two of the soldiers and four of the women were completely naked, and perched gingerly on the edge of the seat. The blond guy was still gesturing at me. Now he was giving me the thumbs-up. Bloody hell, I thought, didn’t he think we were in enough trouble already?
I tried to get talking to my sturgeon informant again, but we weren’t allowed to hang around for a chat.
‘You, in there. You, in there.’ An officer strode down the bench, assigning interview rooms. ‘You, you, you, you, you and you, don’t sit on the chairs until someone brings paper towels.’
I went and sat in a tiny cubicle just big enough for two chairs and a desk. It was a modern plastic-and-steel space, the only decoration a large, labelled diagram giving the French names for every part of a door, a doorframe and a lock. This was presumably so that burglary victims could describe exactly how their house had been broken into. I thought it would probably be just as useful to have a similar diagram of the human body. If you were grabbed by a visiting hen party, you’d be able to give a precise medical description of your attackers. ‘I noticed that one of the girls had a very pronounced ventral cyclops, and a tattoo that ran right down to her rectal fibula …’
I was still smiling at this idea when a painful thought hit me. The computer on the desk was almost certainly going to reveal that the French police and I had had dealings before. There was the little matter of a car crash after which the guilty party had not only left the scene of the accident but also blamed it on me. And, worse, there was the fine for refusing to translate the menu of my English tea room into French on the grounds that ‘sandwich’ was already English, and if you didn’t know what a ‘cup of tea’ was, then you were too stupid to drink one anyway. This disdain for the French language would tie in all too neatly, I thought, with my apparent lack of respect for public decency. They’d put me down as an amoral outlaw and lock me up with lots of men, who would see the arrival of a half-naked young Englishman on the cell block as a gift from the gods.
Despite the cold, I started to sweat.
My arresting officer came in and shut the door behind him. He booted up the computer with brisk little gestures. He was very thin and clean-cut, his hair shaved to exactly one black millimetre all over, his uniform neatly pressed, even though he’d just been out on a mission. All the tags and buttons were in place, and the leather of his belt shone as if he’d painted it with nail varnish.
He asked for my name, address, age and whatnot, and then got down to the interrogation itself. I could hear voices murmuring along the corridor. We were all getting the same treatment.
‘Now tell me what happened,’ he said, not at all accusingly. He had an open, almost gentle face. I found it hard to believe that he’d be good at the truncheoning and shooting parts of his job. Or interrogation, for that matter. ‘Give me the whole truth, and it’ll be OK,’ he told me. ‘No need to be ashamed.’
‘Well, I was having a drink on the beach …’
‘OK.’ The gendarme made a sign for me to stop while he typed the beginning of my statement.
‘I was having a drink on the beach, talking to a soldier, and then suddenly the Anglaises and the other soldiers began to …’ The next bit involved a delicate choice of verb, but the gendarme nodded and told me that he was typing that I’d seen certain men and women disrobing. So far so tame.
‘And when I, er, saw this, what you said, there were suddenly maybe eight or ten people, er, you know, on the sand.’
The policeman nodded again. ‘So they were engaging in heterosexual relations in public?’
‘Oui,’ I confirmed, and he typed out this sentence that could never have come from my limited linguistic repertoire.
‘And?’ The policeman was looking hopeful.
‘And then the police arrived,’ I said.
‘Yes, but you were not a participant,’ he said.
‘Yes, please say, you know, I do not do these things on the beach with drunken women.’ I left it to my interpreter to express this in decent French.
‘Exactly.’ He typed a long sentence.
‘I have done other things,’ I said, referring to the two misdemeanours he was going to find out about when he hooked me up to his database, ‘but I don’t do that.’
‘No.’ He typed some more, and then lifted his fingers from the keyboard with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Now, I’ll read this back to you, and you can sign it.’
He began to read, and I began to lose consciousness.
Apparently, I’d been chatting on the beach with my boyfriend, engaging in some manly horseplay that had resulted in my torn shirt, when we were shocked to find heterosexual relations being conducted nearby. We naturally found this repulsive, and had been in the act of leaving the scene to alert the authorities when the police arrived and arrested everyone present. As a morally upright homosexual, it was unthinkable that I could have been involved in, or approve of, the indecent acts that I’d been forced to witness on the beach tod
ay.
‘No, no,’ I pleaded. ‘I am – how do you say? – happy for gays to be gay. But I am not.’
‘Listen, mon ami,’ the gendarme whispered. ‘If you want to escape this charge of indecency, tell the truth and you will be OK. I guarantee it. You know, we’re much more interested in discouraging these gangs of Anglaises than … anything else.’
‘But … Oh, merde.’ I’d do anything to get out of here, I thought. What did a little fib about my sexual preferences matter? Besides, how could they prove anything? They weren’t going to get me to shag a guy on oath. I hoped. ‘OK,’ I said.
He printed out the statement and I signed.
‘Wait here a moment.’ The gendarme stood up, my false confession in his clean white hand. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’ With brandy and morphine, I wanted to add.
He left me sitting there, shivering.
A minute or two later, there was a commotion in the corridor and my door burst open. In strode a short, stocky man with close-cropped grey hair and a battered leather jacket. He didn’t look pleased.
‘What’s this merde?’ He slammed my statement down on the desk. ‘You’re here with your girlfriend. Why did you lie?’
Oh shit, so it had been a game of good cop, bad cop, and I’d fallen right into the trap.
‘If you know I’m heterosexual, why do you tell me I’m gay?’ I asked, a question that was confusing enough to stop the bad cop in his tracks and make him frown.
‘Why are you here in Collioure?’ he demanded, plonking down on the seat opposite me. ‘Answer!’ He was calling me ‘tu’, as if I was a child or a poodle, and he bawled this at maximum volume. I jumped.
‘I’m just—’
‘We know who you are! We know why you’re here! You’re the Englishman come to fuck the merde in France!’ A rough translation.
‘No, I—’
‘Shut your mouth!’
I did so, but this only enraged him more.
‘Your girlfriend, what is she doing?’ he shouted.
Oh shit, I thought, they’d found out about her attempts to prove that the French authorities weren’t doing enough to clamp down on caviar piracy and save the sturgeon.
‘She’s trying to help France,’ I said.
‘Help France?’ He looked as though he was about to have a convulsion.
‘Yes, the …’ Dammit, how did you pronounce the word for sturgeon? The commando had said it only minutes ago. What a time for my French to let me down. It had to be the stress. ‘The big fish.’
‘The big fish?’ He suddenly looked serious. ‘You know where the big fish is?’
‘No, not exactly. But maybe here on the coast.’
‘He’s not French, is he?’ It sounded as if the cop was talking about a man, but of course the word for fish, poisson, is masculine in French, so they refer to it as ‘he’.
‘I think now he lives in France, in the Camargue, maybe. But originally, he was from Iran. Or Russia, no?’
‘Iran or Russia? Putain!’ The cop sank back in his chair and gazed into space.
The door burst open again, and a new official face appeared, looking just as angry as the leather-jacketed cop had done. This guy, though, was a uniformed gendarme with lots of braids and tags that seemed to suggest authority.
‘You,’ he growled. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ To my surprise, he was saying this to the cop, not me, and calling him ‘tu’ into the bargain.
‘What?’ The leather-jacketed cop looked as though he couldn’t believe anyone would dare to talk to him like this.
‘This is my station, and I’m ordering you to get out. Now!’ The braided guy didn’t back down.
‘You know who this is?’ Leather Jacket was pointing at me.
‘Yes, and he’s my prisoner.’ It sounded as if I’d just been auctioned off on eBay. I didn’t like to think what for.
‘Ecoute, mon vieux.’ Leather Jacket stood up and appealed to the other guy’s sense of solidarity. ‘Let’s talk. You – don’t move.’ He seemed to think I might go wandering off in search of a new shirt.
They went outside for a confab, and the solidarity came to a swift end. Voices were raised, threats exchanged and one of them was forced to back down, yelling all the while that it wasn’t the end of the matter. I wondered who had won, and where it was all leading. All I’d done was go for a drink on the beach, and now I seemed to be at the centre of a tug-of-war between two rival police departments, one specializing in sexual orientation and the other in the nationality of endangered fish.
The door opened, and Leather Jacket walked in, looking rabid.
‘You and me, we haven’t finished,’ he snarled, pointing a pistol-like finger in my face. And then, to my surprise, he left, slamming the door behind him.
Almost immediately, the braided officer walked in. Time for another interrogation about who I liked to shag, and where, I thought, but all he did was rip up my confession and ask me to follow him.
‘Please excuse us for the inconvenience, Monsieur West,’ he said, politely calling me ‘vous’ and leading me along the empty corridor like the maître d’ at a posh restaurant. ‘A car is waiting outside for you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, wondering why I was suddenly so innocent.
‘Your friend is there already.’
‘Really?’ So M had pulled some strings? I wondered how she’d managed that.
‘Yes.’ The officer opened the door and there, sitting in the back of a police car, beaming a huge smile of welcome and relief, was the blond civilian guy from the beach, the one who’d tried to pick me up.
8
‘I’m so happy that at last we have an opportunity to talk in person together.’ His English was slow and formal, but I didn’t mind. I would have forgiven him anything.
‘Yes, and thanks for getting me out of there. It was scary.’
‘All your problems are finished now.’ He put a hand on my knee and laughed.
His looks, like his laugh, were boyish. He was very fresh-faced, and the tiny wrinkles at the corner of his blue eyes seemed out of place, like theatrical make-up on a teenager. He had floppy blond hair that had probably been cut exactly the same way since Hugh Grant made it fashionable in the 1990s. He could have put on a school uniform and enrolled in the sixth form at Eton.
‘I hope the gendarme will not be sad that we don’t invite him when we have a drink together,’ he said.
‘I don’t think there’ll be enough for anyone else to drink,’ I said. ‘The way I’m feeling, I could empty half the bar, and I’m sure you’re feeling the same way, too.’
‘I am.’
No, I wasn’t eloping with my new lover. The young guy had told me his name as soon as we had enough time to exchange a full sentence. It was Valéry. He’d come to Collioure to brief me about his family, hadn’t been able to reach me on the phone, and had been told by Elodie to try the small beach I’d told her about in my voicemail message.
And once he’d convinced the cops that his uncle’s brother-in-law was the region’s Préfet de Police, he’d been given the use of a telephone and the loan of a gendarmerie driver, and here we were.
‘It’s one of the two advantages of a grande famille,’ he told me as we cruised back towards the old town. ‘The first is that you don’t need to do anything. You are everything. You have the family name, so you will never be a nobody, even if you are a total imbecile. Like at least one of my uncles,’ he added softly, in case the driver understood English. ‘And the second is, there is always someone with your name, or who is part of your family, to save you from the little sufferings of life, like being poor or arrested.’
Suddenly I knew why Elodie wanted in. This was a club worth belonging to.
Valéry wasn’t arrogant, I realized. He was just being realistic. His family was rich, and always would be as long as France’s economy didn’t collapse entirely. And no matter how much the French complain, their economy has to be
amongst the most stable in the world. It would take a nuclear holocaust that wiped out all of the country’s vineyards, mineral water springs, car plants, oil refineries, art collections and picturesque chateaux to make a dent in its fundamental stability. And given that France is on suspiciously good terms with all the planet’s rogue powers, that probably isn’t going to happen soon.
‘But there is a disadvantage to the grande famille, too,’ Valéry said. ‘We are not free. To us, a marriage is not just two lovers who promise that they will pay their rent together until they divorce.’ He was speaking insistently, keen to get across the full import of what he was saying. ‘It is the – how do you say? – the initiation of someone into the family. It is like accepting an immigrant into your home. Except if you marry a cousin, of course, and I don’t want to marry a cousin. I have fucked most of the ones it is legal to fuck, and it felt like fucking my sister, so no thanks.’ The driver looked up into his mirror. He didn’t need a degree in English to get the drift of that bit of the conversation. ‘This is why Bonne Maman is so nervous.’
‘Bonne Maman?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ Valéry laughed. ‘Bonne Maman is the jargon in our milieu for the grandmother.’
‘So Bonne Maman is who Elodie calls grand-mère?’
‘The bitch grand-mère, yes,’ he said. ‘It is not a secret. And Elodie is right. She is the reason why you must be very, very diplomatic. She is the reason for our merde.’
‘She wants to stop the wedding, right?’
‘Ah, she wants to. This is why I am organizing it myself, and not in one of the family houses. But she can’t legally stop me. It is the twenty-first century, after all. So she is doing even worse. She is making a sort of campaign in the family to say that this is a wrong marriage. She wants them to – you know – boycotter la cérémonie. This is too bad. I love Elodie, but if all my family is against the marriage, it is very difficult for me. I am at the bank, I am de la famille, you understand?’