Flamingo Boy

  “But how?” I cried, the tears flowing freely now. “Look at it!”

  As I spoke, I heard the honking of flamingos above us, and the singing of wings. I looked up to see a great flock of them overhead, hundreds of them, flying over the canal into the setting sun, and it was only then I thought of Lorenzo, and Horse, which he loved so much to ride. I could see now, in amongst the debris of the carousel, one of Horse’s legs, and his battered head nearby. The rest of him was nowhere to be seen, lost amidst the wreckage. I knew then how devastated Lorenzo would be when he found out what had happened to the carousel, if he ever saw the remains of his beloved Val. It did not bear thinking about.”

  CHAPTER 14

  A New Dawn

  “All night, as the storm blew itself out, I lay awake in the caravan, not so much grieving any more over the carousel, but wondering how Lorenzo was going to react when he heard the news. Someone had to tell him that he would no longer be able to come for his rides on market days. Maman had already suggested that maybe it should be me that told him, because he knew me best, trusted me most, and that she would talk to Nancy about it in the morning. But how could I tell him Horse was broken, that his Val was in pieces? How could I tell him that? It would break his heart. I fell into a troubled sleep.

  I was woken by voices outside the caravan. There was no wind any more, no rain pounding on the roof. I sat up in my bed. Maman and Papa were not in the caravan. Their bed was empty. Then I heard their voices outside, hushed, as if they did not want me to hear – and there were other voices too that I recognised. I looked out of the window. Nancy and Henri were out there with Maman and Papa, all of them in deep conversation. Then I saw Lorenzo. He was kneeling in amongst the remains of the carousel, rocking back and forth, cradling Horse’s head on his lap, moaning softly over them, in a lullaby of grieving.

  As I came down the steps, I called to him, but he did not turn, did not respond. Nancy came over and hugged me to her. “I am so sad for you,” she said. “Lorenzo, as you see, is lost inside himself in his sadness, Kezia. He likes to be left alone when he is like this. Not like us. Sadness for us is often best shared, don’t you think?”

  I knew what she meant.

  She talked on as she led me over towards Maman and Papa and Henri. “It’s very strange, Kezia, but I think Lorenzo knew. I am sure of it. He knew something had happened. It was Lorenzo who made us come here this morning. All night, he was talking to himself, walking up and down, becoming more and more agitated. And it wasn’t just the storm. He would not lie down and go to sleep. He was repeating it over and over again: ‘Val Val Val. Zia Zia.’ He kept taking us by the hand, tugging at us, trying all he could to make us get up. If we ever closed our eyes and tried to sleep, he would open our eyelids and peer in. He would not leave us alone until we got up. He took us outside to the barn and climbed up on to the cart. ‘Val Val!’ he was telling us. ‘Zia Zia!’ He was making it quite obvious what he wanted us to do. We had to go to town to see Val, to see you. We had no idea why, but he would not be put off. So we came. He knew what had happened, not exactly, of course. I am sure he sensed that his Val was in some danger, and that you were too.”

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” said Papa, reaching for my hand. “You want to know what our friends here, Henri and Nancy, have offered us? They’ve said we can gather everything up, load the lot on to their farm cart. Four trips back and forth we think should do it. They’ve said we can take it all to the farm. They have a barn where we can store everything. It will be out of the weather. We can repair the carousel there, begin to put it all back together again. What do you think of that, Kezia? What friends they are to us!”

  “And there is something else, Kezia,” said Maman, “and you don’t have to do it. But it was Nancy’s idea. Tell her, Nancy. You should tell her.”

  “Well,” Nancy began hesitantly, “we have all been thinking, Kezia. We thought you might like to bring the caravan and live out on the farm for a while maybe, away from the town, while the carousel is being put together again. We could go on with your lessons. But we do have another reason for suggesting this, Kezia. Lorenzo will not have the carousel to ride on each week now, and he will miss that so much, and he will miss you. And, if I am honest, Henri and I, we should like the company of your papa and maman too. They have kindly said they would help out on the farm, and on a farm another pair of hands is always welcome. And, of course, there is the carousel. It may take months, maybe years, by the look of it, to put it to rights. But, if we are all there, we can all lend a hand, can’t we? What do you think?”

  I had a strong feeling even then that they were all holding something back from me, that this was not the whole story. Lorenzo, I saw, was still rocking back and forth in amongst the remnants of the carousel, still mourning his Val.

  “What about Lorenzo?” I asked Nancy. “He likes things to be the same. You often tell me he does not like change. Maybe it will upset him to have us staying so close by all the time.”

  Nancy said: “Then you’d better ask him yourself, Kezia.”

  So I did. I went and knelt down beside him in amongst the debris. I stroked Horse’s battered head and I asked Lorenzo whether he would mind if we came with our caravan to live on the farm for a while, and we could all mend the carousel together. As I spoke, he stopped moaning, stopped rocking and listened. He thought about it for a while, then he handed me Horse’s head to hold, folding my arms round it so that I would cradle it properly, the way he had.

  “Zia Zia,” he said. That was all he said, but it was enough.”

  Kezia sat back and was silent for a while. “When I talk about it, like this, it all seems like yesterday,” she said. Then she turned to me with a smile. “And that, Vincent,” she went on, “is how it was that we all came to live in our caravan here at the farm, how Papa and Maman lived and worked alongside Henri and Nancy, how I had my lessons every day, and how Lorenzo and I became even more like brother and sister, which is how we have stayed all these years.”

  It sounded like the end of her story.

  “All’s well that ends well, then,” I said.

  “How I wish that were true,” she replied sadly. “Happy ever after happens only rarely in real life. I will tell you more another time, Vincent. It is late. I am tired now.”

  So she went up to bed and left me lying on the couch by the fire, hearing the music of the barrel organ in my head, seeing the carousel going round and round, and Lorenzo clapping his hands with wild delight, and the great tree crashing down, and the flock of flamingos flying overhead. I fell asleep to the sound of their honking, of their wings singing in the air.

  CHAPTER 15

  Not in Front of Lorenzo

  I was getting better all the time, but it was a slow and unpredictable recovery. There were days when I woke up and was sure I was completely well, but then an hour or two later my head would be throbbing again. I was no longer feverish, but if I tried to get up and walk about I would feel weak all over. I still slept a lot too. And, when I woke, Lorenzo would often be there, sitting on a chair beside me, holding my hand. Seeing my eyes open, he would be on his feet at once, clapping his hands with excitement, calling for Kezia, and she would be there soon enough with a bowl of yoghurt and honey, or steaming soup, or cheese, or sausage, which Lorenzo would always pinch off my plate. He thought that was very funny, and I didn’t mind. I didn’t much like that kind of sausage anyway – it wasn’t like the sausage at home. To be honest, I preferred Watford sausage to Camargue sausage.

  They were both always delighted to see me eating so well. And it was true that my appetite and my energy were improving with every day. Lorenzo, I could see, was longing to take me out, often leading me determinedly towards the door, but Kezia was always there to stop him.

  “Later, Renzo,” she would say. “Later. Soon. When he is stronger, you can take him outside. For now, he must stay inside, stay by the fire.”

  My schoolboy French was just about good enough to understand w
hat she was telling him. I had noticed already that Kezia never told him not to do something if he really wanted to do it. She would simply suggest another idea he might like instead, often handing me the King Arthur book to read to him, which he rarely refused. It was in French, of course, which I read with my horrible French accent, and that made him laugh a lot.

  So for the moment my horizons were still limited to my couch by the fire, and to the one room with the photographs everywhere on the walls. I had the daily lives of Lorenzo and Kezia going on all around me, and Ami sleeping at my feet, or with his nose in the fire almost. Ami was a sweet-natured dog, though not beautiful, that’s for sure. He did rather smell too, especially when he had been out in the rain and was drying off. In all three, I had the best of companions. I had never felt more at home, not even back in Watford, and that seemed a whole world away to me now.

  It had been a few days since Kezia had told me her story. She had said there was more to come, and I was impatient to know what had happened to everyone. I did venture to ask her once whether they ever did manage to rebuild the carousel. It was a clumsy attempt to remind her, to prompt her, into continuing her story. Lorenzo was in the room at the time, standing at the window, watching for flamingos as he so often was. Kezia’s frown was enough to warn me that this was not the right moment. But Lorenzo had heard me asking about the carousel, and become suddenly and inexplicably agitated. Kezia went to stand with him for a while by the window, her arm around him.

  “Look, Renzo. Grette grette,” she said, pointing.

  “Grette grette,” he echoed. “Grette grette. Capo Capo.” And then suddenly his mood changed and he was clapping his hands, and laughing. “Flam flam!” he cried. “Flam flam!” He was happy again.

  As Kezia came by me, she bent down, hand on my shoulder. “Not in front of Lorenzo,” she whispered. “There are things that happened when he was little that he does not like to remember. He remembers, but he does not want to be reminded. He understands everything, remembers everything better than we imagine, better than I do, I think. He feels everything deeply. When Lorenzo is happy, then all is well in the world. But anything that upsets him, anything that worries him, like a bad memory – and just a word sometimes is enough to set him off – then he slips so easily, so quickly, into sadness and despair. Maybe this evening, after he has gone to bed. Maybe I will tell you more then.”

  That evening, Lorenzo seemed to take forever to get himself off to bed, almost as if he knew he would be missing something if he went upstairs, as if he understood full well I wanted him out of the room so that I could hear the rest of Kezia’s story.

  Kezia waited till we could hear him climbing into his squeaky bed upstairs. “He’ll hum himself to sleep for a while, then we will hear him snoring,” she said, smiling. She was leaning forward now, speaking low. “We do not talk much about those times, Lorenzo and I, because it makes us both sad. He hates to see me sad and I hate to see him sad. But, without him here, it is good for me to talk about these things, Vincent, to think about those days, because, in amongst the sad times, we had such good times too. I like to remember the people, all those faces in the photographs on the walls. I like to talk about them – it brings them to life for me. So I am glad you are here, Vincent, glad to tell you, glad and sad.”

  She hesitated then, looking at me thoughtfully, before going on. “I was just thinking how strange it is. I have told this story to only one other person, and he was English too – older than you, but English. Strange.” She sat back in her chair, listening as the humming upstairs finally subsided, and then stopped. We heard regular breathing, then snoring. She smiled. “Voilà,” she said. “Il dort. He’s asleep. Alors, where was I?”

  “You had come to live on the farm with your maman and papa, in your caravan,” I told her.

  “Ah yes, c’est vrai, that’s right, after the storm, after the tree came down. But there is something I did not tell you. For reasons I did not understand at the time at all, we loaded up the remains of the carousel at night, and made the journey to the farm in the caravan in the darkness, Nancy and Henri leading in two farm carts piled high with all that was left of our precious carousel. Maman took me aside and said I mustn’t make a noise or talk, that it was better if no one knew where we were going. But she would not tell me why, no matter how much I asked.

  All I understood was that we must be running away from some unspoken danger. I felt as if we were going into hiding, that in the town there was danger, that we would be safer out on the farm with the Sully family. Maman and Papa never went back into Aigues-Mortes after we left, not once. No one would explain to me why not.

  We would hear how things were changing in town since the Occupation from Henri and Nancy when they came back once a week from market. They told us just how grim and sad a place Aigues had become. Until then, everything might have seemed to be much as before, the children going to school in the morning, the shops and cafés open, the church bell ringing. But now there were always German soldiers in the streets, an ever-present reminder that the world had changed. Worse even than the soldiers, they said, were the feared and detested brown-shirted police they called the Milice. I did not yet understand who they really were or what they did, except that they were wicked people, were French like us, but had become friends and collaborators of the Germans. To me, as the child I was then, I thought of them as evil trolls or goblins. I may not have seen them, but I knew they were there in town, checking papers, manning roadblocks, Henri said – and always dangerous. Later I was to learn more, that they would betray their own neighbours, their own families, that they were in a way worse than the Germans themselves.

  It is hard to believe, I know, Vincent, but there are a few such rotten apples in any country, any community. They had become the eyes and ears of the occupiers, and they were watching everyone, watching and listening. Maman and Papa, Nancy and Henri would talk about the Milice only in whispers, and if I asked any more about them they would never answer my questions. All they would say was that if anyone ever came on to the farm, in a wide blue beret and a brown shirt, and carrying a gun, I must keep away, and hide.

  Out of town, living in our caravan on the farm with Nancy and Henri and Lorenzo, we were at least far away from all that. I felt we had come to an oasis of peace and safety and tranquillity in the marshes, which I hoped the rest of the world could not touch. We saw no German soldiers, no swastika flags, no brown-shirted Milice. There was no one watching us. We lived in our caravan, hidden away from the world, in a walled yard just across the farmyard from the house and the barn, where the remains of the carousel were safely stored, waiting to be repaired.

  When it came to rebuilding the carousel, it seemed the Charbonneau family, and the Sully family, complemented each other perfectly. Papa had been a woodcarver all his life – he and Maman had made the carousel after all, the caravan too – and Henri was a blacksmith and a mechanic, as well as a farmer. Farmers from all around brought their horses to him for shoeing, and he had been mending machinery all his working life.

  And in those early days on the farm, there was much talk of our plans for the carousel, how we were going to rebuild it, who would do what, what had to be done first, where we would get the materials from, the wood, the paint, everything. But then, somehow, after a week or two, all the talk and the planning seemed to stop. Everyone was busy with the farm, with the fishing, the cheese-making. The carousel was hardly being mentioned any more. Even Papa, who had been so determined to rebuild it, always seemed to find something else more urgent to be getting on with out on the farm.

  All of us, I noticed, were staying well clear of the barn. None of us went inside. The doors stayed closed. And I knew why. I think it was the same for all of us. We did not want to have to go in there again, and see the carousel in ruins. The memory was painful enough without being reminded of it. So the wreck of the carousel lay scattered in the dark of the barn, abandoned, but never forgotten.”

  CHAPTER 16

/>   Grette Grette

  “Maman had found a real soulmate in Nancy. The two of them worked together, collecting herbs and honey, making the sheep’s cheese, so that Nancy had plenty to sell on market days in town.

  As for Lorenzo and me, we were left mostly to our own devices, which we loved. We were having the best of times, running in and out of each other’s homes. The farm and the marshes were our playground. His friends – the farm animals, the flamingos and egrets and the terrapins – were all my friends too now, but not the frogs. I did not like frogs, I told him. For Roma people, they were bad luck. I should never have told him that, because whenever he caught a frog after that he would dangle it at me and chase me with it. But then he would always put it back in the water afterwards. In time, he even persuaded me to touch one, to stroke one. Bad things happened I decided, not because of frogs, but because of bad people who occupied your country, or wore brown shirts and berets, Milice people, troll people. It wasn’t the fault of the frogs.

  It is difficult to say how long we lived these happy times. Time means little to you when you are young – but you know that, Vincent. You do not even notice it passing. But pass it did. Sadly, the day arrived when the war came to us. It would not leave us in our peace.

  Lorenzo and I had been riding out around the farm, checking the sheep on Cheval, Lorenzo riding up in front of Henri, me clinging on behind. We came clattering back into the yard to find a dozen or so German soldiers gathered outside the farmhouse. There were raised voices. Nancy, Maman and Papa were there, confronting them, arguing with them. As we rode up, one of the soldiers had lifted his rifle, and was pointing it straight at Henri.