Sticks and Stones 21

It’s now Thursday morning.
Yesterday, we tried to go to Toulouse for the second day running, but Suzie’s indecision over the trip to Marrakech, which would have been the first of its kind (plane, 5* hotel, transfer, breakfast and dinner all paid up front), led us all down the same dilly-dally path in the afternoon.
There were things to sort out, otherwise we’d lose the full amount, so I traipsed them all back to the flat where I called Xavier at Banque Populaire to get the lowdown on the Visa Premier insurance that came free with my debit card while the children surveyed my pad.
He said that if we had a letter of cancellation from the travel agent and a doctor’s note, we’d be reimbursed the full amount. So, I did a quick mix of Sting and Smash TV as they continued to scurry around the place, and then it was up to the travel agents, where Suzie broke down.
I had asked the travel agent, a nice old fella with a dog called Virus that likes to grapple for position on a visiting leg and hump, if he might try one last time to assure Suzie that the holiday was safe and sound in all ways.
He assured her that there had been no problem with this 5* hotel from past clients. No one had come back with any infection or complaint. ‘C’est le top du top,’ he’d said.
He also told her that it was of little importance to him what she decided (he’d get his whack either way), but that he hoped she would make the right decision for herself.
The French are very formal like that, it’s the language, and that’s when she cracked. Clara was tearing around and wanting to play with Virus, while Griff tried hard to stop her, with Maddy in her plaster and their mother in tears of indecision.
I asked for fifteen minutes’ grace to cancel and took them off to the car, where we sat, until Suzie finally told me to cancel.
I swooped back to the travel agents and was asked to provide the doctor’s note immediately, which was in Giroussens, to confirm to the tour operator our reason for cancellation, which would speed up the process for getting the letter of cancellation that Visa needed to pay out.
I dashed back to the car and asked Suzie if we could just go to the doctor for the note before swooping into Toulouse for the children’s cinema. She agreed, so we did that, but then Suzie felt giddy (she is entitled to be at nine weeks pregnant), so I took them back home and scuttled off to the travel agents one last time before he closed.
To celebrate another paperwork success, even if it had destroyed the day, I indulged in a quick pint of Guinness and called Suzie to see if she’d like to go out to dinner at Le Colvert tonight.
She’d like that very much, she said, so I got in the car and picked them up for a ‘Menu Decouvert’. We all went and enjoyed a nice meal
I stayed the night and slept with Suzie and Clara for the first time in what seemed like ages.
In the morning, I got up at the same time as Clara, about ten, and Suzie wasn’t happy when I sarcastically asked where my tea had got to.
‘I’ve been up for nearly two hours while you’ve been sleeping, and then you ask for tea? I’m pregnant, Jim. You’re the one who’s supposed to be supportive and caring.’
‘I know, petal,’ I replied.
‘You couldn’t even get me a cup of water when I asked last night,’ she went on.
‘I’d just stripped down, Suze,’ was my only defence.
She then laid into me for never helping around the house, which always bugs me.
Instead of going to Marrakech, I booked a four-night stay at Hotel Rey Juan Carlos in Barcelona, where we were treated like royalty. Maddy and Griff were with their father in England for a week, so it felt right to at least take a trip somewhere.
Suzie and I didn’t have a plate, bowl, cup or mug to pick up after usage for the whole time, and for that alone it was worth every second, but we still had time for a huge argument (in which I listened and she screamed and cried) on the first night (Arsenal had lost to Chelsea in an unfair contest at Highbury and I had watched in the cocktail bar from almost the moment we arrived, which didn’t help), which set the precedent for solo sorties with Clara thereafter.
The driver’s side window on my Skoda had decided to electronically bury itself into the door at a petrol station on the Spanish side of the border on the way down, and Clara had to be moved to the other side of the back seat for the hideously cruel wind that snuck in as a result.
So, I took Clara out on the second day to the Aquarium, which turned out to be so good that Suzie took her there the next day, after a difficult lunch together at the Hard Rock Café on Place Catalunya.
This resto, where I’d chatted up so many girls in London in the Eighties to devastating effect, seemed dated and dulled by the past in which I’d lived. I looked around and saw John Lydon’s black jacket in a casement and felt sick. This was my past, and here they were, passing it off as a burger meal. I felt old and resentful.
I sat there, stunned by my own insignificance.
Even the Budweiser pint was a fragment of a pint, moussed up and with more glass than beer. I complained but the manager kept nodding so I told him to sling his hook and nod at someone else. After the meal, Suzie and Clara went off, and I went off in another direction, feeling like a terrible father as Clara and I caught a little glimpse of one another.
I traipsed around town that day on my own, looking for clothes in El Cortes Ingles, coming out with nothing but the feeling that someone was watching me, and then on for a drink at the Irish bar I knew from before, which was still closed at six pm and pissed me off even more, so I went to Place Goya and stopped off for a beer and a shoeshine.
It felt good being in Spain, with no tax on food and drink. Barcelona was awash with a life that we’d wished for but felt no longer a part of.
It drained me at every step as I thought of how life could have been if we’d come here instead of sticking out in the Tarn when we sold the house in the village.
With only a slice of what I had received from the sale left, life felt on the edge again for the first time in a good year.
I didn’t feel edgy in a financial way, as I should have with only 10,000 euros remaining, but almost ever time I walked the fifty metres down the aisle on the 12th floor of the hotel to our bedroom at the end, I entertained ideas of jumping fatally. Sometimes, I thought of it and then just wanted to cry (but didn’t), and the rest of the time I shrugged it off within myself like a soul might a ghost.
Either way, there was a divide developing in me at a rather rash rate, and I felt it needed airing without justification to Suzie or anyone.
Besides that, I have developed a strange set of balls at my groin, especially when I cough. I’d felt them in the pub bogs when I’d had a few and put it down to the beer for a while, but it has now got out of hand. They, the new balls, were there, and the only way I would know what they were was if I went to see our doctor in the old village. He’d tell me.
Clara and I went for a swim in the beautifully heated indoor pool every day, but there were sour grapes between Suzie and I.
On the fourth day, I clicked my neck under the wing pulling bed sheets from under my bum to welcome Clara into bed for a bout of telly while Suzie bathed, so I booked a relaxing massage from the spa downstairs for that evening (the osteopath wasn’t available) and asked Suzie to pull my arm in an attempt to re-click it back into position, which proved fruitless.
Then, I drove the car downtown to the Skoda garage with Suzie and Clara and we happened upon a gorgeous little café/resto called the Blue Cat, opposite the garage.
For eight euros fifty the menu, we ate and drank comme il faut. The drinks bill alone in rural France would have been the same as the whole shebang in central Barcelona.
For a moment, in that restaurant, we, the family, felt as one, without the usual constraints of otherness and division.