Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (16 page)

BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING IT WAS too hot to travel. It was too hot to stay alive. I looked out for some shade and pulled under two trees, hacking and sawing. We roped up and had lunch, drew the curtains, switched on Blueski, and lay down until the evening. It was cooler then but the air was heavier too. After dark we closed the windows against the mosquitoes, and sprayed the boat with fly-spray, and went to bed.

Under the net I dreamed I was suffocating so I slept in the saloon with Blueski, naked, with sweat running down my sides and my eyes prickling. In the night my mosquito bites swelled up and I had to take tablets.

In the morning there were new bites, in rows, and I had sprained my wrist sawing our way into the shade and I had to clean my teeth with my left hand. Life contracted to the four hours before eleven in the morning.

WAULSORT IS A LITTLE RESORT ON THE Belgian Riviera, south of the belly button. We moored and plugged in and walked the long pontoon with Jim and met the
capitaine
, a thin man with no front teeth. He had a magpie on his shoulder. I didn’t know quite what to say. Perhaps Goodness you have a magpie on your shoulder, but he would have known that already. I could not say What a fine magpie, because it was a runt, hardly a magpie at all. Jim was pulling towards another magpie on the path. I wouldn’t let him do that, said the
capitaine
, that one can be a bit violent.

The
capitainerie
rivalled Péruwelz for simplicity. It was a shed with water that poured down the roof to keep it cool, and down your neck as you came in. There was a cat with five kittens in a box. In pens outside there were goats and two dogs bred to hunt mammoths. They barked in a dark bass and Jim tried to copy them, and did rather well. Pumpkins glowed in a little garden and ripening tomatoes begged you to steal them—went down on their hands and knees.
Nine bean rows will I have there
, said Monica,
a hive for the honey-bee
—it’s like the Lake Isle of Innisfree.

I work the chain ferry, said the
capitaine
—just stand at the quay and I will take you across to the village where there is a shop. Each morning I will fetch you bread. There is a fine bar and restaurant just here on this bank. Concerning the magpies, he said, there are usually too many in the nest and the strong one throws the weak ones out. I fed these two and they stayed with me. The one on the floor flew at Jim, who jinked just in time.

We asked the bald Englishman on the barge next door about the water—there were fish in the shallows and people bathing. The waterskiers say it is not too bad, said the Englishman, but there are pockets of salmonella underneath and the divers don’t like that.

Are you in this marina for long? we asked. Yes, he said, I have bought a big house nearby. The Belgians are poor but they will do anything for you. The people back home in Bolton are so pretentious. In what way? I asked. I asked him twice, but he did not tell us.

THE GRAND HÔTEL RÉGNIER LIES WRECKED on the shore. A hundred years have flowed through its Art Nouveau grace. Once it was six steamer trunks from Brussels and stay a month, but grass grows along the railway lines and the nettle has invaded the courts.

Forty years ago my husband bought the hotel,
monsieur
, but in the seventies trade began to die. In the nineties the Meuse came through the windows—the insurance paid ten per cent. If one of those curved windows is broken, one of the radiators fails, what do we do? They are works of art—one radiator is a thousand euros. But in ten days there is our big event—the dayflies will come down the river,
les éphémères
. They will come in their millions upon millions. They will be five centimetres deep on the terrace. They come every year, and they die.

At dawn we ran through the trees along the river. I blinked and Jim seemed to vanish. He was smiling and panting when Monica jogged back with him, and his eyes shone. We ran on together. Let’s get out of here, I said. France is only ten kilometres up the river. I don’t like Belgium. The rivers and canals stink. The moorings are derelict. The finest work of their engineers looks like a cockroach. Half of them don’t speak to the other half, you can’t get a pizza and you can’t even count on the mussels and chips. The whole country has clearly come under the control of aliens. One day a giant maggot in the
ascenseur
at Strépy-Thieu will press a button and release the salmonella from the bottom of the rivers and choke the whole of Europe.

Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, we will swallow them up—they do not know we have no sense of smell. And Orgon, old darling, turn up the wick—forty degrees if you please.

Seven

THE DRUNKEN BOAT

Charleville-Mézières to Paris

A
rthur Rimbaud glanced away—abstracted, beautiful, his hair uncombed. His museum in Charleville-Mézières has many rooms displaying the same photograph: in black, in sepia, in pen, in charcoal, in oils. There is not much else left of the young master, except his poetry. His most famous work is ‘The Drunken Boat’—

I came on Floridas you won’t believe.

Among the flowers were the yellow eyes

Of panthers with human skin! Under the waves

Green herds that swim through rainbows from the skies.

Rimbaud’s boat is drunker than ours, but he was probably on the hashish and you can’t compete with that. I bought a poster and went for a haircut.

Thirteen thousand people have died in the heat,
monsieur
, said Sophia Loren, twisting her magnificent body so that each hair on my head could be considered—alas there is no air conditioning in the hospitals and in the old folks’ homes. What style is your hair,
monsieur
?—we do not have such a style in France.

I had a ponytail, I said, and it went wrong, so I shaved it all off a few months ago. Since then it has sort of grown. Perhaps we will try it in a brush, mused Sophia, pursing her swollen lips. There is always hope. I will need much time, then we will attend to your
lévrier
. He is not a
lévrier
, I said, he is a whippet, the dog of the English working man. He does not need a haircut because he has no hair, just a sort of plush. Perhaps a shave, said Sophia, for the whiskers.

In the market I looked for a Johnny Hallyday T-shirt. The French take Johnny Hallyday seriously, as if he mattered, as if his real name wasn’t Jean-Philippe Smet, as if he could sing rock and roll. The posters outside the newsagents’ have carried his picture for forty years, and now his son’s picture too, and France awaits his grandson. There was a navy blue T-shirt with Monsieur Smet’s face in yellow. I could not wear it even as an ironic T-shirt. I put it back on the hanger and the black gentleman who ran the stall reached for his knife so I bought a couple of bandannas for Jim. I tied one round his neck—a chic camouflage design, but too big and only Monica can get the knot right and he looked as if he had fallen into the curtains.

The Café du Port opens right off the street opposite the Arthur Rimbaud Museum. At the bar facing the door was a lady of the late afternoon, with a spider tattooed on her ankle and a short skirt and a cigarette. I sat in the corner and Jim stood by me waiting for the scratchings that deep within he knew would never come. Over the speakers a young lady was making short screaming noises, accompanied by guitars. Opposite us on the bar corner was a man of about fifty, slim, with a serious face, and one arm. He turned right round to face me and I thought perhaps he was giving me the eye, but as he was cross-eyed, and I am too, we will never know the truth about that one.

The
patron
brought a beer across and I marvelled at the navy blue walls and the black ceiling and floor, and the silver air-extractor pipe big enough to escape through. No one moved—it was that moment in the afternoon when the day turns round: the pause in the pendulum swing. It was an Edward Hopper painting—
Dayhawks
.

Françoise Hardy came in, as she was long ago, tall and slim and lovely, and started filling in her lottery form at the next table. Behind the cross-eyed man there was a machine with a glass bowl on top. I fancied some nuts but the cross-eyed man had an arm on that side, so I didn’t chance it. As we left Jean Gabin came in, with Edith Piaf on his arm.
Bonjour, milord
, she said. So much class, that Edith Piaf.

THE AMERICAN COUPLE ON THE BIG DUTCH Tjalk next door asked us over for a rum and Coke. It was a long time since I had a rum and Coke and as I drank it I remembered why. They told us about San Diego, their home town, which they said is always cool, despite a good deal of physical evidence to the contrary. They had spent thirty years afloat, sometimes at sea for months. You don’t get bored, they said, there is a lot going on in your head, and on the boat, and with the weather. And they had sailed for thousands of miles inside the USA, on the rivers and canals. You can sail on the Intracoastal Waterway all the way down the East Coast, they said, though it is hot, and there are hurricanes, and alligators, and flies. There is a fly, a green one—if you knock it off it attacks you again. But you can sail from Norfolk, Virginia, down the Carolinas and Georgia towards the tropics. We came on Floridas you won’t believe, they said, like Lake Okeechobee, and Mosquito Lagoon, and Indian River.

I had that turning feeling in my stomach you get when you think you might do something very exciting and very stupid, like squeeze the breasts of the prettiest girl in class, or take the narrow dog to Indian River.

THE PLACE DUCALE AT CHARLEVILLE-MÉZIÈRES was full of parked cars. I wished I could fill it with old refrigerators, so people could see what a seventeenth-century square looked like when it was filled with junk.

Up past the square is a photography shop. The owner of the shop was large and red with a moustache—a French dominant male, a type not known in Britain. You can tell him because he shouts all the time. A small audience follows him round, laughing respectfully and throwing him cues. In a restaurant he is the guy who joshes with the waiter. Often he is called Max. In Britain someone would say Oh don’t be such a prick, but in France he is a part of the culture—the national substitute for a sense of humour.

I asked the young lady if they had a slide viewer, and she said they might—the last one in France, because no one looks into slide viewers any more. She went into a hole in the ground and I asked Max if Monica and Jim could come inside the shop. English? he asked. Yes, I said. English! he bellowed, and with a wave drew the other customers into the drama. He addressed me for some time in a language unknown to science, and I smiled and nodded and his audience looked on adoringly. Then he looked through the window at Monica and Jim and dragged from his memory a phrase he had picked up while in police detention for rowdiness in Hastings in the sixties. No sheet, he cried, purple with strain and excitement—no sheet. His audience laughed and applauded and fell silent and looked at me.

It is an English dog,
monsieur
, I said, so he is very polite. I assure you, no sheet. But it is better if you tell him yourself. You must do that in English, because he does not understand French. The audience muttered approvingly.

I beckoned Monica and Jim and they came in and stood in front of the counter. Max dredged his memory and came up with another word. Dog, he said. Jim looked at him expectantly. Such encounters could produce treats. Dog, said Max, you dog. There was a pause—his timing was impeccable. No sheet, said Max, and laughed and all the customers laughed. Jim lay down and gave up. The lady arose with a slide viewer made in Cardiff that cost seventy euros. We got it working and she showed us some slides of toadstools and we paid.

I pointed at Jim. There you are, I said,
monsieur
, no sheet. No sheet English dog, yelled Max. No sheet, all the customers cried.

As we walked back to the Place Ducale they were still shouting and laughing,
les Anglais et leur petit lévrier
, no sheet. We could hear Max shouting Dog, you dog, no sheet. They only charged us sixty euros, said Monica, and gave us the batteries free. The French do that sort of thing sometimes.

WE TURNED OFF THE MEUSE ON TO THE CANAL des Ardennes. Rivers take the low road, but on a canal you can see for miles from an embankment, or a hillside, or down the mirror of a mile-long straight. Rivers have untidy and hostile margins, but a canal has banks, and the Canal des Ardennes had banks where you could moor, and trees and sunny meadows, and hills standing back just like home, so far away. We moored in the wild and Jim took up his station in the long grass where he could guard the boat, and did not want to come on board again.

A scrap of black rag with a red spot squirmed under the water and ran away up the bank. It was a moorhen chick, in its first day of life. How can it know what to do? A water vole scratched itself and ate its dinner. It didn’t have a broad tail like a beaver but an ordinary tail like a rat. It didn’t have webbed feet either so it must be a good wriggler.

Plop
and a line of bubbles and it submarined away. You don’t know what is under that water, but it never stops moving. There is more going on down there than there is going on up here.

AT NINE O’CLOCK TWO GUYS FROM VOIES Navigables de France opened the top lock of the Montgon flight at Le Chesne, offered a few manly boating words to Monica and got on their buzz-bikes and buzzed off. We worked the rest of the twenty-six locks ourselves, pushing buttons and bars and dropping into the countryside. We finished six hours later without seeing another boat and found a mooring in a wooded cutting at Rilly-sur-Aisne and we were tired and had a hard time getting the ropes right and a
péniche
passed at the worst moment and nearly dragged us down, and a man with dark glasses stood on the bank, looking at us.

Jim and I went for a walk into Rilly-sur-Aisne and Monica settled down with
Le Charretier de la Providence
, a book about murder and barges and Inspector Maigret and his loyal assistant Lucas. In my mind was a beer, and in Jim’s mind were scratchings and sex and fighting and stealing things and running away very fast. A child limped towards us on the dusty track to the village. He looked at us and said something I did not understand.

There was no bar in Rilly-sur-Aisne; there was no one at all in Rilly-sur-Aisne, but there were sounds coming from a cellar like furniture being moved and someone groaning. I saw the child again on the road back, and heard an urgent voice call him home. A cracked bell with a double chime told us it was seven o’clock.

After dinner the radio said that Mars was nearer than it had been for sixty thousand years. I went out on deck to look, but the trees hemmed in the sky. There were noises coming from the cut. There was flipping and splashing and white bellies came to the surface and sometimes a fish sprang out. When we went to bed the splashing got worse and kept us awake.

This place is creepy, I said. The village is deserted. That child was trying to warn us about something. Who was the guy on the bank? And don’t awful things happen when the stars are out of their appointed course? I mean crazy things in the deep country. I know it sounds mad, but those fish scare me. It’s like that story
The Birds
, but it’s
The Fish
.

Sit down, Lucas—the minister woke me up. He’s under a lot of pressure over these fish deaths—he’s taken me off the killings in the St. Martin tunnel. Still not smoking? I couldn’t do this one without the pipe.

This your report? Oh how horrible. Two of them this time, and a dog, but the dog had gone—catfish, I suppose. We keep people off the
streets and do our best and then these foreign buggers come in with their boat and their dog.

So you checked them when they came, and they spotted you, but you went back after dark. Apart from the splashing it was almost normal. Then you went under the bridge for a pee, and you thought you heard something and when you looked in the boat it was too late. There was a forty-pound carp in the bedroom with its dorsal fin torn out, and nine bream had been flung against the wall and burst. God, they must have fought like tigers.

Not much soft tissue left, I suppose. Their faces—contorted with horror, as usual? At the end, when they are getting weak, they send the lampreys in.

Don’t cry, Lucas—there was nothing you could have done. When this gets out God help us all. Kissed to death. Sucked dry in little French village. Welcome to France.

THE APPROACH TO REIMS WAS DOWN A LONG straight, with a search for fuel in an empty port, where the old work of giants lay desolate. We pressed on in the sun. At the port the
capitaine
was on the quay. He was charming, but he charged us twenty-five euros a night.