Sticks and Stones 7

I got drunk last night and discovered that beer mats don’t do their job any more. Gerard, a local who was celebrating being given a new heart, spilt his Martini at Guillaume’s bar (in the little village where we bought the house) so I passed him a beer mat to soak up the dribble on the table. He spat on the beer mat, smeared it around and showed me the evidence. There was no soaking power at all.
We decided it was because the advertising had changed since the Seventies, when a beer mat did was it was supposed to do; suck dregs off tables and glasses.

Now, with the beer mat covered in printing laminates, it no longer did what it was made to do.

‘Le monde est devenu fou, non?’ I asked.

‘Le monde etait toujours fou,’ replied Gerard.

I then went for a roll-up and sliced off the usual third of the paper’s length.
Gerard asked me why I did that, and I told him I didn’t like smoking so much paper, and demonstrated to him how I could fit just as much tobacco in without using the whole width of the paper.

I said that I’d like to see Rizlas slimmer and with half the amount of licking-glue, but Gerard wasn’t sold on the idea, telling me that there was, in fact, no glue on cigarette-papers in the old days, when beer mats worked.

He pointed to his tongue. ‘La, il y a du colle, sur la langue.’

At that moment, I was sure I was onto a winning idea to make money. I’d go to Rizla with my prototype rolling paper specimen (it would be slim but the same length as before, only without glue).
I would demand copyright on the new format and make a packet.

I hurriedly rolled a glueless roll-up, having stripped off the gluey side, and licked it slightly more than normal.
It worked, damn it! I had inhaled glue for decades without needing to. Smokers would only smoke my format and Rizla would make a killing. The millions started to blow around in my mind.

‘Donc,’ I asked Gerard. ‘Ce n’est pas necessaire du tout?’ meaning the glue.

‘Pas du tout,’ he replied, smiling at my incredulity.

I called a hotel in Lavaur and then had a guick game of pool with Maf at the bar in Fiac.
I arrived at the hotel half-cut and fully stoned.
A few days have passed now, badly, although the worst has blown away.

Alan ended up staying till Sunday while I holed up at the Hotel Jacquemart in Lavaur, only a few miles away from my beloved daughter.

On the Friday afternoon that I returned to the house to play with the children, I had asked Suzie to get Alan out of the house so that I could relax. She agreed. I left her the two bottles of Gran Sangre de Toro (Spanish for bull’s blood) I’d brought back from Andorra and asked her not to drink it, especially with him.

When Suzie and Clara finally came to meet me on Sunday, I was happy but confused. Things had run around my head but just didn’t fit.

Why had Suzie been so accommodating to Alan and so uncaring to me?
Why had she not kicked him out on his heel for me and told him where to go for talking behind my back to old friends in Woking on numerous occasions?

On the Saturday night, I confided with the hotelier, Michel, also a dope-fiend and PMU horses-man, about my situation and he scoffed at my Englishness.

‘I’d have gone over there and kicked his teeth in!’ he screamed at me, frothing with anger, as if something close to this had happened to him in the past. ‘Tu n’as pas honte?’ which means ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ he asked.

That stuck in my mind, and I remember taking on his feelings of anger as the Heineken began to work.

I was confused but happy. I felt abused, perhaps deservedly so, but abused all the same.

I gave Suzie her present outside Le Ver En Soie, a bar in Lavaur, a black jacket from Weekend by Max Mara, and took Clara off for a stroll so that Suzie could disappear in her car to take Alan to the airport with Griff and Maddy.

Clara and I returned home at threeish. We played in the garden and walked for a bit, then we watched some telly and I checked up on Arsenal (we won). I made some food but, for once, she wasn’t hungry. She seemed quite lost and asked for ‘Mama’ from sixish, like Griff might have, every six minutes back in the old house. I began to worry at seven when Griff and Maddy’s father called up for their Sunday night chat and they still weren’t back.

I called them on the mobile and Maddy answered. She seemed elsewhere entirely.

‘Your Daddy called. Where are you?’ I asked.

‘We’ll be back in a minute. I can see the house now,’ she replied.

Moments later, they were back and, for some reason, I couldn’t understand a thing.

‘Why, Suzie?’ I asked.

‘Why what?’ she replied, seemingly unaware of the hurt she’d caused to Clara and I.

‘Why did it take you almost five hours to do a two-hour journey?’ I demanded.

‘The children wanted to play pinball and have a sandwich. Where’s the harm in that?’ she replied, adamant that she had done no wrong.

‘I thought you’d want to get back to see me,’ I said, a sad, shrunken man using a work-surface to hold me steady from the anger and indignation.
She said that they might have stayed for half an hour or so but saying long goodbyes to someone I couldn’t stand after abusing my friendship was intolerable.

‘I kicked him out the house for you, Jim,’ she said.

This alarmed me. ‘You kept me out the house for six fuckin’ days to keep him here! Did that occur to you?’ I replied.

‘I wanted you both to be here, getting along,’ she
said.

Clara didn’t like the look of where this was going, and went off to see Griff and Maddy, who could hardly bring themselves to look at me, let alone say hello. It seemed that Alan was more important than me now, that I had wronged them by getting their mother to ask him to leave. My blood began to boil.

The emotional dust of the family never settled that night. Griff had bad asthma after trying to talk to his father on the phone, Maddy ignored me, Clara fell asleep early and I pondered the possibility of sex.

I had had a quick joint and my heart was beating fast as we lay in bed waiting for the children to go off to sleep.

I wasn’t myself and suddenly asked her a stupid, adolescent question. ‘Do you enjoy sex?’ I asked.

She laughed quietly, but confidently answered, ‘Yes, I do enjoy it,’ happy to see me at an emotional loss of sorts.

But my fondling was premature and she was in no way comfortable. She’d never seen me like this before; a hurt, fearful, confused lamb with the heartbeat of a baffoon on heat, wriggling around for positioning next to her. She’d never made me go without before, but that night, she told me that she didn’t feel like it.

With Griff’s asthma growing in his sleep and Maddy tossing and turning next door, she couldn’t bring herself to have sex. It didn’t seem right, plus she needed to listen out for Griff’s breathing pattern.

‘So,’ I said, angrily. ‘Alan stays, you kick him out and, the same night that I arrive back, you refuse me sex for the first time ever. Well…’

But she defended herself. ‘You’re not suggesting I had sex with Alan, are you?’

The thought had crossed my mind, but I’d never allowed it to take me over completely. Weeks ago, I’d mentioned to Suzie my fears of losing her to someone new, but her reply came back succinct and pointed. It was too ludicrous an idea and, besides, he wasn’t her type at all.

I went to sleep with my massive heartbeat and my unanswered erection.