A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

December 20th. 14:09
I was clearing a space to shift an old plough from the edge of the forest – where it had been slowly rusting, slowly fading, for anywhere between six and sixty years – to the lane at the edge of the land – I was setting it free! – when all at once a bald man appeared, smiling. I had moved the plough only a couple of feet so far and was tossing lengths of fresh-sawn deadwood from its putative path when he popped his head over the makeshift hedge and wished me good day. I returned his good wishes with surprised alacrity and shook his hand over the bramble and broken branches between my land and the lane that runs past its bottom edge. His hand was as cold as a penguin’s flipper, despite the gloves that he removed to greet me. ‘I’m a fireman,’ he said, ‘and I have a calendar.’ Sure enough there was a glossy calendar in his left hand. He held it up for me to see.

‘Ah yes,’ I said. I noticed that the hand that I had shaken, which was now steadying the calendar in the harsh wind that shot up the lane like a frozen bomb blast, was badly scarred. I looked back to the man’s face and noticed only then that the lower part of his face and his neck was also covered in the puckered, slightly shiny scar tissue, which I assumed was the result of some major burning. I looked into the man’s eyes, lined with warm smiles, and I said: ‘I’m not very familiar with local French customs. Please let me know what I must do now.’

He continued to smile and to hold out the calendar. ‘I am a fireman,’ he repeated. ‘A local fireman, and at this time of year, I visit houses in the area and we deliver these calendars.’

‘For a donation?’ I queried, brightly.

‘Yes!’ he replied.

‘I have no money about my person,’ I explained, ‘so if you could wait here for a moment, I’ll go back to my house.’

‘Of course!’ smiled the fireman.

***

My friend Graham was here at the time and was just finishing up his toilet when I fell panting through the door and into the living room. ‘There is a fireman here!’ I shouted.

‘Whoa!’ said Graham. ‘Where’s the fire?’

I was still exhausted from running through the forest and up the hill to the house. I was breathing heavily, bending over, perhaps slightly melodramatically. ‘No fire,’  I said. ‘Just man. He wants some money for a calendar. Have you got any coins?’

Graham went through his pockets. ‘What kind of calendar is it?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is it saucy?’

‘I didn’t really get a look at it yet,’ I said.

He handed me a five-euro note. ‘How do you know he’s a real fireman? He might just be a Christmas conman who goes around saying he’s a fireman.’

‘He’s wearing a uniform,’ I said.

‘I could wear a fireman’s uniform,’ said Graham. ‘Wouldn’t make me a fireman. Ask to see some ID before you hand over the cash.’

***

I didn’t ask to see any ID, but I was just a tiny bit disappointed that my fireman friend wasn’t slightly more overawed by the sight of folding money. He never stopped smiling though, so it was OK. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He handed me the calendar and I thanked him back. ‘Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?’ I asked. I hoped it didn’t sound like a sexual invitation because it certainly wasn’t meant that way. It was purely social. Convivial. Seasonal.

‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I would like to, but I have a lot of work to do.’ Then he said something that initially I didn’t understand, or imagined I must have misunderstood because it was quite unexpected. He looked me in the eye, still smiling, and he said, ‘In the end, everything is fine, OK? But it’s important to be gentle.’ He made to leave but I called him back and asked him to repeat what he had said more slowly.

He repeated it. Everything is fine. Important to be gentle. I had understood correctly.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘OK.’ I thought for a second. ‘Cool!’ I said.

He shook my hand a second time. Then we exchanged yuletide felicitations and parted.

***

I took the calendar back up to the house to show Graham what he’d bought. It was not saucy. It was artless and cheap and slightly tawdry, with only one photograph for each quarter. The production values dated the calendar before it was even out of the print-shop. But of course it was the gesture that mattered, and the opportunity it afforded for local residents to show their appreciation.

The photograph for the first three months was of all of the local fireman lined up in the traditional group picture style. I glanced through the faces looking for the fireman from whom Graham had purchased the calendar. At first I couldn’t find him. ’He’s not here,’ I said. ‘Maybe he was a Christmas conman after all. Like those paramedics that have Münchhausen’s in reverse. A rogue fireman.’

‘You didn’t ask for any ID?’ said Graham, faux exasperated. ‘I warned you, didn’t I? You think because you’re out in the country, everybody’s all straight and narrow and nice as pie, but I’m telling you, there are bad people everywhere. There is evil…’

‘Oh, no, here he is,’ I said. ‘He’s got hair here though.’

‘Here hair here,’ said Graham. ‘Which one?’

I pointed him out. ‘That one,’ I said. I looked for his name on the key. ‘Vincent Gaudy,’ I said. Then I said it again with a French accent. In the photograph, he had shoulder-length blonde hair and a short, pointy beard, but the eyes were wearing the same bright smile. It was definitely him. ‘He must have been burned quite recently then,’ I said. ‘He must have lost all his hair in a fire I guess.’

‘He was burned?’ said Graham. ‘You never said he was burned.’

‘Yeah, all over his hands and face and neck. It was like cold porridge. Not so that you’d turn away in horror, but…’ I shrugged.

‘Poor bugger,’ said Graham.

‘He was completely jolly though,’ I felt compelled to point out, ‘and he told me that everything’s fine – in the end – and that being gentle is important.’

‘What?’ Graham was dubious. ‘Being gentle? What did he actually say?’

‘Um…’ I said. I was becoming flustered. My French was being questioned. And rightly so. ‘OK, I think he said,’ I stammered. ‘“C’est très important être gentil”.’

Graham pulled a face. ‘You nonce,’ he said. ‘It’s “be kind”, not “be gentle”. I thought you said your French was coming on.’ He laughed cruelly. I was embarrassed. And annoyed. I knew that. It’s the same in Italian. Schoolboy error. Balls. I tried to take it on the chin. But I was miffed. 

***

Graham went back to England the next morning. ‘Take care,’ he said before disappearing onto the train, ‘and remember – be gentle.’ I laughed. Then muttered some cusses. Faux cusses. As I rode my bicycle back from the station, the sun was shining for only the third or fourth time in two weeks and it felt good on my face. I rode past the fire station. There were a bunch of firemen hosing down one of their trucks, the wheels of which were caked in thick mud. I slowed my bike and looked over to see if Vincent was with them.

One of them wished me a good day, which made me feel welcome enough to saunter over for a chat. I told them that I’d bought a calendar yesterday. They shook their heads and shrugged. They didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. I thought for a moment I probably had the wrong word, then tried again, with the same word. ‘A calendar!’ I cried.

The shrugging continued, accompanied by slightly bewildered smiles. So I asked if Vincent was working this morning. Again, there was confusion.

‘Vincent who?’ asked one.

‘Vincent Gaudy,’ I said. ‘He’s the guy who sold me the calendar,’ I said.

‘What calendar?’ asked one.

‘The new year calendar,’ I said. ‘With all of you in it.’ I pointed at them.

‘We don’t have a calendar,’ one of them said.

I stood there for a moment or two, gaping, then I remembered that I was stopping them from getting on with their work and for no apparent reason. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s bizarre. Good day nevertheless! See you again!’ Then I was off on my bicycle and heading for home.

As I cycled, I tried to figure out what must have happened. It must have been something either criminal or supernatural I decided. Then another thought occurred to me. Might there not simply be more than one local fire station and Vincent works not at the one with the truck with the muddy wheels, but at the one with the calendar sales, which must be up the road at the next village? This was not unlikely. I felt foolish. I’d been reading too much Murakami.

***

Turning into the drive that snakes from the main road up along the bottom edge of my land, I was about to dismount and walk the bicycle up the track, tracing the same steps as my elusive fireman, when I heard a beeping from the road behind me. I dismounted and turned around to see a man gesturing to me from the car he had parked just a couple of metres away from me. I walked up to him as he got out of his car and began to speak. He started by wishing me good day and shaking my hand in the traditional manner. Then he said, ‘Excuse me for following you like this, but were you the man asking about Vincent Gaudy?’ I said that I was, yes. I was indeed. The man regarded me with a mixture of suspicion and disbelief. He was older than the fireman I’d spoken to at the station. He had dark, hooded eyes and stubble like charcoal. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I was just passing, I thought I’d say hello if he was around. He sold me a calendar yesterday, you see.’ I pointed up the drive that rose ahead of us. ‘About 20 metres up there,’ I said.

The man shook his head, but said nothing. He was clearly distressed.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened to him?’

At length, the man said, ‘He was killed. He died. In  a fire.’

My right hand instinctively rose to my face. ‘Oh my God,’ I said, unconsciously reverting to English. ‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. When did he die? I only saw him yesterday morning.’

The man stared at me as I babbled, his eyes narrowing. I hoped I was making myself understood. He looked up the lane past me and blew out his cheeks. ‘He died in a barn fire in a house halfway up that lane,’ he said. He pointed past me. I turned and looked. That’s where I lived. I would have heard. ‘Part of the roof fell, burning, unexpectedly. It hit a piece of farm machinery which knocked Vincent over and pinned him to the ground. In the heart of the fire. It took us too long to get to him. We pulled him out but it was too late. He died on the way to hospital.’

I stood transfixed through all this, unable to believe that I hadn’t heard any noises. Surely there must have been sirens. ‘Was it in the middle of the night?’ I asked. ‘What barn?’

The man shook his head. ‘This was ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Ten years ago this New Year’s Eve in fact.’

I smiled. Then grimaced.

‘What was ten years ago?’ I asked. ‘I only met him yesterday. He was here, standing there.’ I pointed again.

The man shook his head, not in disbelief, but in wonder. ‘How was he?’ he asked.

‘He was very jolly,’ I said. ‘He told me that everything’s fine in the end.’

The man seemed cheered by this. ‘Well, that’s good to know,’ he said.

‘He also said that it was important to be kind,’ I said. As I repeated those words, a rush of something powerful rose in my chest and took my breath away.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the man, holding out his hand for me to shake. ‘If you see him again, say hello from Monsieur Moulin.’

I watched Monsieur Moulin walk back to his car, and was about to turn back up the drive when I found myself shouting, ‘Wait! Monsieur Moulin, one moment!’ He waited at his car as I skipped down the drive to ask him, ‘What kind of machinery was it? The machinery that knocked over Vincent Gaudy. Do you remember?’

He remembered. And when I didn’t understand the name he called it, Monsieur Moulin described the machine for me. He described the row of long curving blades, the giant wheels and shining steel saddle. He described, feature by feature, the same plough I’d found in the forest, and moved for the first time yesterday morning, shortly before Vincent made his appearance.

I thanked Monsieur Moulin. We shook hands for a final time and he drove back on to the road to his village.

***

Back in the house, I picked up the calendar. I looked at the photograph of Vincent, smiling out at me. I remembered his words. ‘It’s important to be kind.’ I knew it was. I knew it. But it was good to have it confirmed.

I folded the calendar closed and placed it on the table I write at. Only then did I notice that it was a calendar for 2002.

Now the calendar is fixed to the wall over my desk with the firemen line-up, and Vincent Gaudy’s smiling eyes, facing out into my room. Monsieur Moulin’s on there too of course, looking good for the removal of a decade.

The dates are all wrong of course, but that’s OK, because  in the end, everything’s fine. I know. 

Vincent Gaudy told me.

***

And that’s exactly how it happened. 

Friday 13th January. 11:25.
Yesterday morning the sun was shining for the third day in succession and I jumped out of bed with a smile on my face. Unfortunately, the smile cracked the scab that had formed overnight on the cold sore on my bottom lip, which then began to bleed profusely. But I was undeterred. I was in a good mood. I was ready for action. 

On Tuesday I had been given a lift to builders’ merchant and Rastafarian sorcerer Leroy Merlin, where I had purchased ten rolls of 45mm rockwoll loft insulation. Yesterday morning, after the last of the Coco Pops, I went up in to the loft for the first time.

The first thing I noticed was what appeared to be a large slug on the inside of the hatch through which I was in the process of climbing. It was curled and black like half of an outrageous moustache. It was also solid to the touch and stuck fast to the hatch. It seemed to have been calcified with time. I finished climbing into the roof.

Attached to my head and illuminating the loft was the headtorch I’d bought for Heidi for Christmas. Every cloud… As I made my way into the loft, moving slowly –  not quite upright - along the central reservation where the roof is highest, passing over the joists like a visually impaired mountain goat, I made a number of discoveries.

I discovered that a) there were calcified slugs all over the place, some of them in large, unpleasant piles, b) they weren’t calcified slugs at all – they were cat turds, c) the cat that had laid them was still curled up on the floor of the roof over the bathroom, unmoving, and d) the roof had already been insulated.

As well as being constructed from a thin layer of fibre glass, most of the insulation that was already there had been scraped away from its paper underlay to make nesting areas for the various creatures that had lived in the roof over the years. Or maybe there had been just one creature.

I was surprised that there were no nasty smells in the roof, because there were a lot of nasty bits and pieces. There were feathers and webs everywhere. There were broken eggshells and the occasional whole egg. There were strange chunks of honeycomb which suggested the presence at some stage of nasty things with wings and stings. And there were endless piles of petrified catshit. And of course the cat, unmoving.

Apart from spiders and stink bugs, nothing else in the loft seemed to be living. What was left of the cat was hard to the touch and stuck fast to the length of insulation on which it lay curled.

When I was done making discoveries, I got on. My first job was to start clearing up, so I fetched an empty bin bag and headed down one end of the roof, gathering what was left of the old insulation, collecting together the feathers and turds. I had to stop as soon as I’d started, however, in order to strap an old tea towel to my face to stop myself breathing in glass fibre.

It was surprisingly hard work. Most of the difficulty is caused not only by having to manoeuvre within a tightly confined space, but also by having to balance one’s body and limit one’s weight to a grid of two-inch joists 25 inches apart. Also, what makes the whole thing twice as hard again is negotiating the irregular beam-work that’s holding up the roof. There are beams all over the place, blocking almost every move you try to make. You can walk at a crouch from one end of the roof to the other, down the centre, under the point of the roof, but moving into the angle at either side means doing battle with a seemingly arbitrary tangle of timber. This makes collecting old fibre glass, feathers and faeces slow, arduous work.

It’s kind of like playing Twister in a giant spider’s wooden web, knowing that if you put a foot wrong, you could bring the whole ceiling down.

As a result of which, five hours in, my back went. Not violently – not so much that I couldn’t move or find my way out of the loft, but enough to force me to stop for the day, with the job just a little over half done.

I did manage to get the cat down though. See…

Poor thing. I wonder how it died, and when. I guess it was the intense cold of a harsh winter that finished it off, and I suspect that it was at least a year or two ago. Most of it has long been eaten away, with just the fur and some stiff leathery skin keeping most of the bones in place.

In the five or ten minutes that I disappeared back inside the loft with a metal bucket and then re-emerged with the dead cat therein, the sun went in and a thick fog began to roll in over the field out front. It was quite poignant.

Last night I had my first bath for two weeks.

Today, in quite a bit of pain, I am reading, writing and resting my back. The day is grey, the fire is on and my cats, very much alive, don’t know how lucky they are.

À bientôt.

It was just a couple of weeks ago, not so very long before Christmas actually, when I glanced down at an overflowing candle on my desk and lo! I saw the light. For it was she. The holy mother of Christ. See for yourself…

Praise be.

Oh come on. It’s better than this rubbish.

Let the bidding commence! 

Sunday 8th January. 15:50.

I was sitting on my bed playing guitar when out of the corner of my left eye I saw something move through the transparent plastic window of the catflap. Both cats were inside, sleeping on top of the cloth wardrobe. I turned my head to look more closely and the second I realised that it was a dog, its owner came into view at the other end of the lead, walking past the front of the house. ‘Whoa,’ I exclaimed, somewhat proprietarily, putting aside the guitar and jumping to my bare feet.

I opened the front door and said ‘Bonjour’, but with just a hint of a question mark. A man in his early 50s with short dark greying hair and a friendly angular face turned to greet me. He walked the ten feet or so back to my front door and we shook hands. He said, by way of explanation as to why he was walking his dog on private property, that he had just noticed for the first time that this house is now inhabited. I told him how long I’d been here and what I was up to, and asked him if he lived local. He explained that he lived in the village above mine. He explained in quite a lot of detail exactly where he lived and I must admit I bluffed my understanding a little. On the whole, however, the conversation was smooth and fluent. Considering I haven’t spoken more than a couple of words of French for around three weeks, I was quite pleased. I was thinking, ‘Good God, I could pass for a slightly retarded Frenchman. I bet this man thinks I’m French.’ Then our conversation ended and my new friend Patrice said ‘Bye bye’ in English and wandered off with his dog.

I came back inside. And it was then and only then that I realised how much I must be missing human company. I started to think of all the other things I could have said to Patrice. I started wishing that he’d invited me to dinner in Pissaud, or maybe that I’d invited him in for a coffee so that we could have continued out conversation. But then I remembered that I probably looked a little freakish, with my long dirty hair, headache-inducing pantaloons and giant cold sore sitting on my bottom lip like a half-chewed piece of pepperoni. Then I looked around at my walls with the hundreds of French and English words now decorated with pictures of giant cats, giraffes, ladybirds and lions and I thought I probably wasn’t really ready to receive visitors at the moment. This is one of the least chaotic sections…

So I realised, following my brief conversation with my surprise trespasser, that I’m actually rather lonely. This – perhaps surprisingly – made me happy.

I like being on my own – and being able to be on my own – because I’m getting a lot done, and I need to get a lot done. But I don’t want to end up like one of those strange men who live in mountainside caves who forget how to talk and whose souls become pale for want of human society. You know the ones. Besides, it’s good to want things.

…

I am sick by the way. Physically I mean. For the first time in three or four years I have a cold (and concomitant sore) and frankly speaking, I want a piping hot bath and a cuddle.

But as I say, it’s good to want things.

Now back to work.

A bientot.

Tuesday January 3rd. 18:38
The weather is diabolical at the moment. Today it has rained ceaselessly. It is miserable. I wanted to go and do things but it was too miserable and wet. So I stayed in and wrote and read and cooked a meal that was so bad that it made me realise all the things that are wrong with me and actually made me want to leave myself.

There were harsh words. I think I might be on the verge of a trial separation from myself.

Another new development is that both of my armpits have started to smell extremely powerfully of coffee, and no, I have not been drinking coffee.

Jesus. What kind of world is this?

23:41
I lay myself flat on the bathroom floor with my head at the tap end, poking through the space in the tile surround, just under the toilet cistern. In this position, my head was no more than ten inches from a very small mouse that George had brought in and taken under the bath. She’d then returned to the living room. My fear was that she would leave the mouse corpse there to rot and stink up the place. With my head under the bath, however, I realised that the mouse was actually still alive but in fairly critical condition. I might be forced to take it outside and kill it with a rock if neither George nor Maddie would do the decent thing and just get it over with. I hadn’t performed a mercy killing yet, but I was ready to, when the need arose.

So, under the bath was a wounded wood mouse, small, brown, bloodied and dying. To the right of the mouse was George, who had returned, and to the left was Maddie. Maddie had claimed the mouse in George’s absence and was growling proprietarily. George, however, knows Maddie well. George remembers being allowed to steal one of Maddie’s own mice right then as Maddie watched over it, growling, threatening, but doing nothing as George, with one delicate claw, pulled Maddie’s mouse close enough to her own mouth to grab it with a growl of her own and scamper off to devour it. Maddie does not like violence.

Back under the bath and my headtorch illuminates the scene like it’s a pivotal moment in a cat crime caper shot in an underground car park with opposing gang-leaders facing off over a dying victim. This mouse is a symbolic mouse. It will set forever in stone the pecking order between the two rivals. Maddie continues to growl. George stoops low and moves toward the mouse with a defiant hiss. A fierce hiss too from such a mild-mannered purr-machine of a kitten. She follows up this hiss with a tentative reaching of a paw. Maddie’s growl grows louder but she makes no move to prevent what George knows now is only a formality. With another mighty hiss she drags the mouse towards her face, then she moves her entire body into the arc of light, into the space between the two cats, claiming it. When she gives the mouse momentary freedom, it staggers away from her and back towards Maddie. Even the mouse feels safe with such an ineffectual cat. But George drags it back into the foreground and takes the bulk of its body between her jaws and squeezes. Things crack and rupture inside the mouse’s body. Its eyes are facing mine, no more than eight inches from my face at this stage and as George takes another bite into its midriff, its mouth opens wide in a long, silent scream. Then it comes again, the scream, and I will George to get it over with. She does. She manoeuvres the mouse’s head into her mouth and with a series of short crunches, the mouse’s suffering is over.

George finishes her off quickly, leaving nothing. Maddie watches the whole thing in silence, less than a foot away, behind the legs of the bath.

It makes me sad that there has to be a pecking order, but obviously there does. Generally, I empathise with Maddie. I’m a growler. I spit and moan but do bugger all – you know, when something needs to be done, I mean. At the moment, nothing of that nature needs to be done, but this is my third day without alcohol or tobacco and I am growling like a generator.

However, importantly, I also empathise with George.

Hiss.

Monday 2nd January, 10:35

A few moments ago, Maddie broke my lamp. She climbed on to the box next to the bed where it was standing and she knocked it over and broke the glass funnel that probably has a name other than ‘shade’ because it’s not really a shade at all. Now it’s broken. I think it might be fixable though. Some tape and a fine hacksaw and maybe I can restore it to within two inches of its former glory.

Even if I do manage to fix it though, it’s not a great sign, is it? I mean, is that all 2012 has in store – darkness, destruction and death? I was kind of hoping for the opposite.

15:53
I am becoming irritable. No, wait.

I have become irritable.

I am writing, but it’s not going superwell and with every typo or fumbled key, I damn myself with such intensity or curse out loud as if it actually mattered, as if I were under real pressure and it really, really mattered. My stomach rumbles and I have to really make an effort not to punch it as hard as I possibly can. Instead I just shout. ‘Shut up!’ I shout. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’

So there we are. Two days in and I am fighting with my stomach.

21:30
Mealtimes are the worst.

Sunday January 1st, 23:34

This is not Paris, as I have mentioned, and I never expected to find romance here. I hoped, of course, because one must always hope, even when everything is utterly hopeless. So when I did – when I found love, or something that felt very much like love – although it was only allowed to breathe for two glorious months, I was pleased, and I remain pleased. Consequently, this New Year’s Eve wasn’t anywhere near as depressing as most of the others. Because there were no expectations. I still hoped of course, but my hope was a token gesture. I was just keeping up appearances. I still did a little flirting too, and I’m sure my attentions were very much appreciated, both by that very attractive young woman from Limoges, and her rather shy boyfriend.

I smoked my last tobacco at around 2am, then I went off to sleep on someone’s sofa.

Today I spoke to my brother for the first time in well over a year. Possibly two. I phoned him a few times a couple of months ago when I found out he was seriously ill, but he didn’t answer. So I sent him a text saying he should call me if he fancied a chat. He never called. I assumed he didn’t want to chat and left it at that. Turns out he’s changed his telephone number in the last couple of years.

My mum and my sisters had gone to visit him today. He has cirrhosis of the liver. Apparently his skin has turned a rather alarming shade of yellow. ‘He looks just like a Simpson,’ said one of my sisters. I didn’t ask which Simpson. I didn’t like to. He used to look like Snake. Now I guess he looks like Grandpa Simpson.

He sounds different on the phone too. He sounds far less aggressive. My brother’s cardinal trait has always been his aggression. Now, finally, it seems to be sliding away. Maybe death agrees with him. Life certainly didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if – right at the last minute – he starts being likeable, just enough so that everyone who’s left behind feels a little bit bad for having given up on him.

We’re not very close by the way. Is that coming across?

Close or not, I’m going to have to go and see him. Of course I am. For me. For him. For both of us. I suspect it’s going to be emotional. I used to really love The Simpsons.