Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (20 page)

We walked along the quay and started up the steps to the street but there was scaffolding, and a little man covered in white dust.
Monsieur
, you are blocked, blocked I say. He went into a hole in the ground. We had to walk all the way down to the lock on the Seine but it was a sunny morning and Who cares? We waited for a boat to drop into the river and I carried Jim across the gate and we went up the other side of the basin into the world.

At the address on the map there was a distributor of religious vestments, but after a while we found the chandlery, which was shut. We’ll have a coffee, I thought, give it a chance.

In the café there was room for the Algerian
patron
, and me, and an Algerian drunk, with Jim in a corner being narrow. The drunk had come upon the secret of life. He was having trouble getting it across to Jim and me, but he was trying hard. The
patron
made a sign—he will not attack you.

I am desolated, I said, as I ordered a coffee, I have only a twenty-euro note. No problem,
monsieur
, said the
patron
, I beg of you. I gave him the twenty and he went into the street, and the drunk carried on explaining the secret of life. After half an hour the
patron
came back and handed me the note—It is too early
monsieur
, no one has any change. I will return, I said.

I went to another café and ordered a brandy. The French will take a brandy in the morning and it can help if things are starting to break loose. The barman took several bottles off the shelves and examined them, then lifted a trapdoor and went into a hole in the ground. After a long time he came up with a bottle. Alas, I said, I have but a twenty-euro note.
Monsieur
, he said, I beg of you, and took the note and brought me a brandy and turned to a bald customer with an eagle tattooed on his head. He bent over the counter with the bald customer, as if they were racing spiders. There was some confusion about the result of one of the races and I felt it was not wise to hurry a man with an eagle tattooed on his head and it was half an hour before I got my change.

We went back to the Algerian café and the
patron
took a euro and shook my hand and the drunk blocked the door and explained to Jim the concept he had not made clear before: the last piece in the jigsaw, the one that you knew all the time, revealing the beauty.

In the chandlery a thin man with white hair was curled at his desk behind an outboard motor, talking on the phone. He flickered his fingers at me. I looked around the shelves—one tenth of the stock in the chandlery in Stone. The French don’t go inland boating. The concept has not entered their culture—rather as we are unable to conceive of tea dances or tripe sausages, or Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Well, good luck to you, the thin one was saying, waving his hand, but my cousin lost his leg on the Rhône, so it didn’t work for him, did it? You should see him hopping around—he wished he’d listened to me, didn’t he? They never found his boat—crunched to bits, washed down the sink. He smiled and put the phone down—
Monsieur?

I seek fenders, I said, black fenders, seventy millimetres. No problem,
monsieur
. He backed away among the shelves like a crayfish and returned with a fender and bounced it on the counter and tapped its belly with a feeler. It was dark blue. I ventured a joke—
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le noir
. He smiled thinly and lifted a trapdoor and went backwards into a hole in the ground. A long time later he came up out of the sand—
Non, monsieur
. He didn’t seem sorry at all.

Jim and I walked back down to the lock and waited a long time while a boat came up into the basin and I carried Jim over the gate again and when we got back to the quay I chased him and put on his life jacket and handbagged him over the barge and on to the
Phyllis May
.

No fenders then, said Monica. And no help with cleaning, and you’re late for lunch. And you smell of brandy—you are so greedy—self, self, self. The dog and you, you’re the same. You’re as bad as each other. It’s the way he stares at you every night with his horrible slanty cunning eyes when he wants to go to the pub. He won’t eat his dinner, he just stands there whining. All he wants is to go out with you and eat scratchings. Now you’ve started doing it in the morning. I don’t know why I married you. It’s your mother, she spoiled you, she thought you were marvellous, she never let you go.

You know, I said to Jim, I think we are missing the leisure opportunities in this boating lark. Some days we should try not getting up.

THE LAST PERSON I EXPECTED TO SEE IN THE Rue Daumesnil on a wet Sunday evening was my father. Jim and I looked along the long row of shops under the arches of the viaduct. I thought they would be artists’ workshops but they were showrooms for rich people setting up home. I liked a few things but something would have to go from the
Phyllis May
—something like Jim, who was pulling and whining and being a bugger. He does this now and then. Monica says it’s his hormones and the only solution is Off with his goolies, but you can’t do that to your best friend and anyway he wouldn’t look right.

We stopped outside a shop full of musical instruments and I thought of when my father had bought me my first clarinet. He knew I wanted to play jazz and he didn’t warm to that and he had very little money but he bought the clarinet. It’s cruel that sons have to reject their fathers to grow up. I suppose like a swan you have got to find your own territory—it’s the only way it can work.

I could feel him standing by me in his old raincoat and I could see his shape in the window, in the rain, and I longed for him like a lover. I wanted him now, if only for half an hour, to say I know how you felt and I wish I could have been kinder and I’m sorry and I wanted to press my face against his rough air-force trousers, and smell the tobacco and feel his hands on my head.

Come on Jim, I said, let’s go back to Mon. And stop pulling for God’s sake.

AT LAST THE BIG NIGHT OUT——THE CRAZYSHO. It said in the listings it was
transformiste
, with
imitation
and
parodie
. Brigitte Bardot would appear, and Céline Dion, and Charles Aznavour. Britney Spears would be there, and Whitney Houston, and Edith Piaf.

We walked east down an avenue of shops. It was dark, when you would expect shops to be closed, so they had opened, and the light bounced off the shoppers in a fine rain. Fire engines came past yelling like Grendel with his arm torn off and ambulances howled to the Saint Antoine hospital and birds fell dead from the trees. Then things got quiet and dark and there was the red neon sign for the Crazysho.

A huge queen was on the door with glitter on his eyelids and I couldn’t think what to say. Tell me all, young man, he said encouragingly, so I did and he showed us in.

It was a dining room for about fifty people. It had been painted black, and there was a small stage. It was nearly full, and the trestle tables were laid and people were testing the weight of the knives and forks. There was music, and everyone was shouting. Food and noise—Welcome to France. This is going to be great, I said, no tourists here—this is the turtle, not the mock.

A man in black who looked like Frank Sinatra leaned over with the menu. The aperitif
maison
, he explained, came from his home area in the Auvergne. The berries from which it had been distilled were from bushes planted in Roman times. They were gathered by farmers who lived on the edge of starvation and they were ripened between the breasts of young girls. We ordered one each and Monica said it was not bad and I had a beer to forget the taste. The meal was all right and so was the wine and the service was good and soon the performance started.

The show rested unsteadily upon two pantomime dames, including the one who had welcomed us. They mimed and camped unknown songs and impenetrable comic routines from tapes. I don’t think they actually spoke or sang a word all night. The loudspeakers convulsed, the tables shook, our ears rang, and the lights spun and strobed and blazed, usually straight at us. There was applause and laughter on the tapes in case we forgot. For each number the queens changed their clothes. The audience was good-humoured, and when Frank Sinatra sang he got a big hand because he was not a tape recorder. For the finale a couple of the waiters appeared in jockstraps and danced with the queens. We clapped the performers and our special enthusiasm was asked for the young lady who had shone strobe lights down our throats and we all clapped her too. Everyone who worked at the Crazysho was friendly and committed and the atmosphere was great but it was awful.

Our taxi driver was from Haiti, sending money home to his wife and family. I can’t believe how good the taxis are these days, I said—Paris taxi-drivers all used to be criminals—lose themselves, steal your luggage. It has changed, he said, there is study of maps, there are examinations and controls. Monica explained where we wanted to go and he put us down by the Seine, further from the boat than when we started, and we walked back in the rain.

THE DOG DAYS HAD TIRED US AND IN Charleville-Mézières we had caught a bug that kept us down for a week. Hi folks, it’s the bug again—I’m not what I was, but I will make a codswallop of all your plans for Paris.

How can I go to the tea dance? said Monica, I’m not right. Perhaps you could buy those shoes you were looking for, I said. No hamster went up its tube swifter than Monica up the steps to the street, with Jim and me in pursuit, along the Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine.

Once in Birmingham Monica stayed in a branch of Monsoon for so long I reported her kidnapped. In Paris Jim and I went into a pavement café and I put my fleece on the floor and ordered a coffee and a brandy and settled down for the day and all Paris came by, three abreast.

You could divide them into men and women but that wasn’t much of a start. Old and young, but most were neither. Black and white, but some were brown. Pretty and plain, but many were in between. Fast walkers and slow—that’s more like it. Whether they were pushing to close a deal or meet a girl or whether they were just on the stroll. Whether they were on foot or on Rollerblades, brushing the walkers,
distrait
, feeling their balance. The pretty girls, dark, graceful, head to toe in one concept—student in jeans, African princess in bracelets, sophisticate in jacket and skirt, artist in black, gaol-bait with a ring in her belly button. The workman, the beggar, the drunk, the couples holding hands, all crowding by, knowing who they were, going somewhere.

How would Jim and I look to them? I wondered. The little yellow hound with the glossy coat and the bandanna, relaxed on his master’s fleece, and the old man, red with sun and wind, in his crumpled trousers and his mustard Tour de France T-shirt. Unlike them I don’t know who I am—I’m a mess, a foreigner, I don’t have a concept. But they don’t see me anyway when Jim is around. Like the man in the yellow jacket, I am invisible.

A lady came across to Jim, and looking hard, saw a disturbance in the air, and me, transparent, in the corner.
Monsieur
—I have one. A girl whippet. She is my love.

Jim knew Monica had decided to come back before Monica did, and went to the window, picking her from the crowd when she was a hundred yards away. The shoes, the shoes. They didn’t cost much, said Monica sadly, drinking my brandy. Oh dear, I said—would you like me to go back and give them some more money? They’re very nice, but they won’t last, said Monica. Better get another pair, I said, for when these wear out. Don’t be silly, said Monica, they’ll be out of fashion.

THE CHINESE GENTLEMAN SMILED AT ME AND swung to the left and swung to the right, his hips in counter-rotation, his elbows following his shoulders. I thought, Shall I smile back?—he looked like a villain in a Bond movie, the sort of chap who might take offence and kill me. I tried to twist a grin that said Goodness how quaint that two obviously heterosexual males are dancing together. Oddjob moved towards me cha cha cha and I thought, He is seeking his balance and he will chop me down with the side of his hand, but he was grooving at my partner, the American friend from the Tjalk. She knew the right smile to give before turning away. You don’t get to be blond and sixty in San Diego without learning to say No thanks, perhaps later but not now, no.

In the world of aquaria, in those rows of bright tanks with the streaming bubbles and the hair weeds there are darker tanks, and these contain the tetras. They are black but they shine with a cold light, brighter than the micro-organisms of the night sea: half an inch of neon blazing from their transparent hearts. In the tea dance the ultraviolet fired up shirts, blouses, cuffs, earrings. My partner smiled with luminous teeth, the whites of her eyes flashed and her hair glowed. We swam around slowly, under the glittering balls, under the woofers, in the disco dusk.

Everybody was there, the living and the dead, and as the lights came up and the music fast-forwarded to 1975 you could see that you knew them all. There was Giscard d’Estaing, his jacket close on his snake hips, dancing with Margaret Thatcher. There was Ann-Margret—time had not been kind to Ann-Margret, but she still had her lion hair. There was the lady from the news-stand at Meaux, looking good in a suit, and with her Sacha Distel. Jean Gabin and Arletty had struggled out of bed and come across from the Hôtel du Nord, and goodness me, Sir Norman Wisdom was in, his face against the jacket of Sophia Loren. François Mitterrand was there twice—how can that be?—once in a grey suit and once in a smart black blazer. The hairdos were careful, men and women: not boater’s punk but waved and sprayed and there was a chap in a full ponytail, and I’ll swear he was older than me. Must be taking steroids. Sitting at a table was the lady in the flowered dress from Armentières, and Jean Marais drifted by, smiling sadly, clicking his fingers, his body hardly moving but you could see the rhythm flowing through.