Sticks and Stones 18

It’s now Saturday. The kittens were put in the garage this morning. The trail of runny shit that followed Princess around Griff’s bedroom was the final straw. She’d eaten the chocolates all night and now had to pay the price of thievery along with her entire family. I feel sorry for Bambino and Tigger because I never once found them eating from tables.
I’m ill with a shaky comeuppance of flu and a very dry tickly cough, so I phoned Suzie and she told me to stay away from the house to stop it spreading to the children. I asked if she needed anything from the shops and she placed an order for Orangina, paracetamol and cheese, which I put in the letterbox, returning to Lavaur cold and melancholic.
I had two courses at the Jacquemart for lunch and drove back to the flat to bathe, warm up and bet on the internet.
Friday wasn’t a good day.
In the morning, Maddy did her hand in at gymnastics but the teacher brushed it off as nothing ‘grave’. She went through the whole day with no call home allowed and no care other than a makeshift bandage. At nine o’clock in the evening, after having to miss her dance class, it began to throb and Suzie called for me to come back and look after Clara and Griff so she could take Maddy to hospital, but I’d just gone to Graulhet with a friend where it took twenty minutes to score the elusive hundred grams of shit I’d been after for so long.
At home, Clara and Griff played happily. I towed Clara around the kitchen and study on a plastic horse while Griff drew a lovely picture of the Christmas tree on the back of a chocolate box.
Suzie and Maddy returned. Suzie was livid but lucid and Maddy’s arm was plastered. She’d broken her wrist very badly at the radius. I gave her a hug and wondered what on earth would have been easier for the school than to get her across the road to the hospital when she asked for help with the intense pain.
I felt slightly angry with the school for allowing this to happen but then Maddy told us what really happened.
It transpired that a classmate had purposely failed to catch her after doing a flip exercise and she’d fallen in a heap on her radius. When she needed to be helped, the gym teacher all but ignored her and she was forced to continue with exercises.
My blood boiled. Maddy had told me how much she liked her gym teacher. From now on, she would trust her no more than any of the other bitchy girls in her class, and I was beginning to worry that her spirit had been broken.
She’d had her shoulder broken at birth, her leg broken in the old village and now the wrist a year later at Lavaur.
Suzie wants to leave France and it certainly looks as if we’re all but on our way back home now. It’s just a matter of when.
I went out at about seven for a Guinness and asked Francoise if I could have the night off. She was fine about it when she saw the state of me.
I was enjoying my pint when Philippe came up to me. He always seemed a good enough bloke, a local who had often taken up time asking how to deal with his Moroccan wife, who deals in black magic.
He waffled on about the usual shit, but I didn’t want him around, so I turned slightly and grabbed a newspaper from the bar.
But he just wouldn’t go away, asking me for the hundredth time how many kids I had. I told him I had the flu and that he should stay away from me if he didn’t want it. His reply was quizzical.
He told me that his children had been taken away from him and that he was a broken man because he couldn’t watch them grow up. I gave him a nod of identification and went back to my paper.
Philippe left after that.
The guy next to me, who I knew only by face, told me something that made my blood boil again.
‘Ce type,’ he said slowly, pointing towards Philippe as he waddled across the street. ‘Il est paedophile. Il a nique ses enfants.’
I’d been knocking about in Lavaur for three months, so I asked why no one had told me before now.
This guy said that people were lazy here, that it was each man for himself. There were no warning bells, the people weren’t conscious of their own immaturity, so the beat went on.
I hadn’t felt this alone, sat slumped at the bar, since venturing out to a sad little DJ bar in Andorra a few months back.
Everything seemed wrong and, as I looked around Les Americains, all the faces of the people I knew seemed hard and unforgiving.
This was their world, not mine, and I couldn’t help thinking that they instinctively knew I was on my way back to England. They knew I’d had enough. They could see it in my face, I thought.
Fuck them. If a child can go all day with a fractured wrist undetected at school, it’s no wonder that they turn out to be the aimless, sheepish, angry, misunderstood arseholes that make up France.
There is, even with all the downsides on the slippery slope back to England, an unspoken feeling of empathy there. France is parochial. They look after their own. England is all-inclusive.
I left the bar soon after promising myself never to speak to Philippe again, and elected to watch telly with the takeaway pizza as company. My fever had risen to the point of being hot one moment and cold the next with a head spinning around inside.
The shows were drivel. I flicked from one to the next but they seemed to last all evening. There were constant references to anything anglais; hats, music, writing, art, theatre and strange goings-on.
The French seem to be obsessed with anything that comes from the UK, but they treat us like tourists if we live here. I sweated out some fluid in bed and woke up at about nine-thirty.
What day was it? How had I done on bets yesterday?
It was Sunday and I’d lost over a hundred euros.
How had Arsenal done? Lost 1-0 at Newcastle, where I’d lost another fifty euros.
I went back to sleep after taking off my sweat-soaked shirt and turning over the damp duvet.
At ten-thirty, I got up and had a bath, after which I talked to the family on the phone.
Maddy has a thumping headache and can’t bathe properly with the plaster, Griff has been bitten badly by Clara and the kittens are screaming for forgiveness in the garage, all of which is making life hell for Suzie, who hasn’t the strength to cook or take them out for lunch. Maddy and Griff’s piano concert has been cancelled, as has the vide grenier at his school.
Suzie is having an awful time with the effects of the baby inside her, and finds the most simple tasks to be awkward and painful. I can sense that the next three years will be work-intensive and fulfilling, if only I can get along with Suzie.
I checked out some houses in Woking for rent on the internet and realised that all was not lost. For £1500 a month, we could have a house with a small garden in London or Guildford.
There was still enough money that we wouldn’t have to scramble home with our tails between our legs, and I estimated to Suzie that I had five good years of painting ahead of me. I’d thrive without dope and gambling. The new baby will have a loving Mum and Dad, and the children will be able to form friendships again.
Nothing will be easy, but we won’t be given too much to do that we can’t handle it.
For all the crap that one has to put up with in England, it is small fry compared to here.
For instance, Maddy has to ask her mother to book an appointment with a doctor to certify that she is fit and well for gymnastics, as does Griff for his basketball, and then the gym teacher lets her break her wrist, at which time life ceases to be normal for the whole family.
No more clarinet, piano or dance for Maddy for one month, with a whacking bill for the state to pick up at the hospital.
I just went out for a coffee and a bet at the PMU bar, but it was so cold in there that I had to come home before I got on the beer.
I spoke to Suzie on the phone again and told her that I’d be out of action for the rest of the day.
She can’t relax until she’s had it out with Maddy’s school tomorrow morning, and told me that she didn’t care one bit if they expelled her as a result.