violet

LET ME take you back to that hot summer in France, more than thirty years ago: I can still smell the coffee and the drains, even now. Dry little dust bowls in the cherry orchard and soil trampled into fine talcum, blown onto our feet in cool puffball clouds. Blue ceramic skies, fired in a vast kiln, vultured with black dots now and again, and all around us a drug-crazed landscape warping and shimmering in a constant mirage, pale and unreliable. Four of us living in a barn with no windows, sleeping on the republic’s last remaining iron bedsteads, queer and crooked; feathers wafting in our sleeping quarters, floating on the stale air: blown in downy raspberries from a hole in my lumpy mattress, drifting also from a troupe of dowager hens in the entrance – hens which studied us, trying to learn our language, guarding us (contemptuously, I thought) from their sentry box in a fan of hot yellow sun in the doorway. When we clapped and flapped they treated us to a Gallic shrug, or the closest a hen can get to one. Mistrals and dog day afternoons: a huge, violent Alsatian darted from a lonely house on the road into town and bit my bum; for weeks I worried about rabies, waiting stoically for hydrophobia to drain me. I pictured myself in a hospital, tended by the nuns of Loudun, making desperate gurgling noises – sucking the last few drops of water in all of France into my arid intestines.

Chris went to Marseilles to buy a knife. We were all of us fateful about that knife.

I remember the shape of its blade, and the face of the old dog which loped around the yard. He’s been dead for years now; buried under a tree probably, but I can’t imagine old Bruyes, the farmer, crying over anything, least of all a dog. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of its skeleton, white and curved in its last sleeping position under the dun soil, with young rootlets threading their way through its bones, fanning bronchially in its rib cage. We all liked that dog: regulation black and white, short haired and fatalistic, it was called Lucky.

We went up to the orchards early every morning to finger-vacuum the cherries; there was a knack to it and a pro could make £100 a day, even then. The best pickers were a gypsy family who lived in an opulent motorhome the size of an articulated lorry. I met the father collecting snails from the dank verges one evening at dusk and he invited me round for a meal; I was sorely tempted because his plump, post-pubescent daughter – unblemished by any formal education – had been making black olive eyes at me and I was still young enough to consider all the openings that came my way. Never could eat snails: said No. Looking back, those people lived wonderful lives. No taxes, picking money off the trees in bucketfuls, browsing, moving leisurely from one crop to the next. Wish I’d married that girl now – she was straight from a French Darling Buds of May; we’d be fat on snails, slouching around in white vests swelling around our Pyrenean tums, always brown, sleeping sweetly on the shores of the Mediterranean, perfumed with garlic and happy ever after, me drowsy with wine.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Lucky copped off with a poodle one morning in the orchard, early on, soon after sunrise in fact: the dirty dog must have been thinking about it all night. Still a few drops of dew on the leaves, delicious strands of coolness inside the branches. But the poodle was twice his size and he had his work cut out. He stuck to his task dogfully, though. At first he got a rousing reception from the onlookers, beating their buckets, shouting Allez Lucky! and Vas-y Lucky!

A circle of about twenty, mainly French but some Spanish, looked down on him as he prepared to hump away among the cherry trees – making wood, as they say. Only one of them said nothing at all, a slip of a girl, small and slim, boyish, brown as a berry in a simple country dress or tabard made from felt in a burnt carmine brown. Simple but effective. Short black hair, fussless, freckles, olive skin, pumps, small breasts and violet eyes which never looked at Lucky or at me. No, not once.

By eleven o’clock they were still making a fuss of Lucky, stuck to his poodle, stuck to his task, bobbing away on his scrawny haunches as we reaped the cherries. The red ran from the trees, lipstick smudged from lip to cup. Among the ladders and the stepladders and the buckets, somewhere by the weighing machine (ancient, rusty) he pumped and wheezed but my little French tomboy never cast a glance at him nor me, oh no, not a single sideways look. Such bloody insouciance. Not even when two little boys started playing with a scorpion under my tree, moving around it in frog hops, prodding it with sticks, not even then did she show a flicker of interest; little girly shoulders and apricot hips, slender, a body without a flounce or a bounce, that’s all I saw of her all morning – and she in the next tree, a short monkey-dash away.

By lunchtime they were getting fed up of Lucky and his extravagant, illicit shagathon. His eyes had puddled into two small dribbles of yellow candle wax pooling in a smoky Parisian bordello. Dinner time came so we left him to it, climbed aboard Bruyes’ van, one of those archetypal Froggie things rippling with corrugated iron and confessional windows. Someone had crammed half a dozen seats in the back long ago; I’m not joking, that crate might have ferried people from the Bastille to the Place de la Concorde when the tumbrels were full. Come to think of it, was that cherry juice running freely on the floor, or blood?

Mademoiselle Violette stayed up there in the orchard with Maupassant’s ghost, teaching sang froid to the sparrows and nibbling croissants with perfect élan, her pretty little nose in the air.

When we arrived at the farmhouse Bruyes went into a rage and fired an enfilade of frank nasal insults at Jo, one of our group, the fourth musketeer, who’d slept through the morning in our dormitory and now stood romantically in one of the empty windows, framed by it, playing a violin to one of the hens which was perched on the sill, listening to him intently with its head cocked to one side. At this point a train of storm clouds appeared over the horizon, thanks more to Bruyes’ language than the weather. We munched our baguettes in a sweaty sub-tropic of stormy promise, the air charged with electricity which tickled the fine hairs on our legs with waves of frisson. A row of gofers appeared in the caravan windows: our gypsies were peeking at the sky too, their faces wimpled by the chintz curtains. Dinner over, Bruyes’ dreamless nap finished, we returned to the orchard, a cartoon cloud of Roadrunner dust following us meep meep all the way up to the greenery where Mademoiselle Violette napped against the bole of a tree and Lucky shagged, still, clinging tenaciously to his poodle life-raft but half dead by now, a drowning rat drenched with sweat. You dirty dog said nearly everyone in French or Spanish or English or Welsh, disgusted by his antics. Some threw their buckets at him but Lucky continued, his sex storm unabated.

My little French tomboy turned her back on me once again and made love to her tree; cherries fell, clouds rumbled, people pointed, Bruyes grumbled; come four o’clock a few heavy drops of rain splattered and pocked the dust, bullets falling back to earth after a half-hearted uprising by revolutionaries in the far corner of the plantation. Lucky had finally attained nirvana but the couple were still inseparable, so to speak. They both looked pretty shagged out by now, two marathon runners clinging to each other feebly on the finishing line, stooped and breathless. Suddenly, people melted away from me and even Lucky made a run for it, divorced at last from his paramour – the parting was quite painful, I believe. I legged it though the trees and was just in time to catch them firing up the van, trying to escape without me. I clambered aboard as the heavens opened. A synchronised mass of identical raindrops, rubber-capped, muscular, Olympian, dived down together into a newly formed swimming pool then rested after the plunge on our windows, swimming in a slow back crawl along the glass while they recovered.

Oh joy, oh rupture! Who was next to me in the van, burnt carmine dress rucked and pressed against my hot little hip, but Mademoiselle Violette. She looked into the far distance, to a point just beyond Venus, to anywhere except my face as we rolled out of the cherry orchard and started homewards, the storm enfolding us and sluicing us with water; for a while we sat in a plein air car wash, battered and pummelled by thunderous rain. Hot mists of sexuality wafted from Violette’s body and I came close to levitating on garlic fumes and lust. In front of us, Lucky rested his weary head on Bruyes’ shoulder and regarded us with two bloodshot eyes. We eyed him back with mixed feelings; admiration mainly, with a soupçon of revulsion stirred in. Violette stroked his head briefly but he made no response, too enfeebled poor thing. I watched her little brown hand ripple over his head and felt giddy, my skin crackling with the static of base animal desire, craving her attendance alone in the cherry orchard where we could roll in a warm crimson mud made from dust and juice, savages, naked and wanton among the roots of the forest; I imagined leaf-shaped weals and cherry-stone indentations on her perfect little bottom, moss green stains on her divine buttocks.

Shocked by a huge rush of adrenalin my heart shivered: a sparrow’s last wing-flutter as the cat’s needle-mouth stitched it into the tapestry of death; I came close to madness, nearly dropped to my knees, nearly fastened myself to her perfectly-formed leg, came close to pawing her burnt carmine dress pitifully, whining, making a complete bloody fool of myself in our metal tumbrel. I hid my shame with my hands, wrested my eyes off her juvenile breasts and quelled the uprising which had swept through my head, travelled down my chest, past my febrile heart, a peasant’s revolt sounding drums and clarions, firing shots in the air, waving banners, seditious and streaked red as it plunged downwards into the gorge between my legs, mutinous, making me tremble, leaving me with toothless tricoteurs in the van, ready and willing toute de suite to enact my trial and execution in the pouring rain, my blood spreading along the farmyard floor, watered-down vin rouge running through the hens’ talons, through Lucky’s sodden and bedraggled paws, into the drains.

Ready to face my fate, ready for the zing of the speeding guillotine, I fingered my neck and prepared a brief but moving farewell speech, referring dutifully to my family and declaring my love for she of the violet eyes. In a calm but plaintive voice I told a seething horde in the, by now, hushed Place de la Concorde that although my love was but a few hours old, and although I was staring death in the face, I was the most fortunate man alive since I had tasted a coup de lumiere, a grand passion of the highest and noblest kind, indeed I was happy to go to my death that very day since I could rejoice in the knowledge that no other love, ever, in the history of the western world, had exceeded or could possibly emulate mine etc, etc.

I cast meaningful glances at Violette while I delivered this panegyric to the tumultuous masses as they seethed on the blood-soaked cobbles; they would spare my life forthwith and promote me to the position of the First Republic’s chef d’amour, giving me her hand in marriage, as one would expect, naturellement.

Thud! would sound the guillotine behind us as we threaded our way through the crowd, towards the Left Bank where I would become an existentialist and she a painter, lovely fingers streaked carmine, burnt umber, French grey, violet, living dangerously and sleeping fitfully under an intense Parisian sky, playing chess moodily by the Seine; we’d drink coffee and share unspoken moments of tendresse following endless nights of tempestuous passion, her ardour pinned in butterfly beauty on the rumpled white sheets of our garret bed.

While I delivered my mute speech to the masses a commotion spread through the van and for a moment I thought we had joined a frieze from French history c1789, since everyone had turned to face the back of our tumbrel with excited and flushed faces – as if Marie Antoinette herself was in the cart behind us, clutching an exquisite silk handkerchief to her powdered breast: some of our company pointed, others exclaimed loudly. The air had cleared a little, enough to let us see the road snaking behind us, and a sight of tremendous beauty met our eyes, truly amazing: shimmering masses of ball lightning were descending from the heavens and bouncing off the ground like so many footballs at a pre-match practice session; they reminded me, for a moment, of the torsos of snowmen, made in winter by little boys with snow-encrusted mittens, begun with a snowball and rolled until too large to move; rough-hewn, lop-sided, fluffed all over with puffy snow – and just like fat snowmen’s bodies the balls of lightning shimmered down to earth, wobbling, jellies on the run, luminescent, evanescent, space-glowed, alive, frightening, getting closer, threatening, magnificent, unforgettable, and exactly the same colour as Violette’s eyes! Vraiment!

I tugged at her sleeve and when she looked at me I pointed to her eyes and then at the balls of fire behind us – and yes, yes! she afforded me the briefest of Mona Lisa smiles before returning her gaze to Venus, before returning her heart to the icy hospital container where it had lain until now, frozen, waiting for a suitable donor.

We escaped, but only just. It grew darker, we fell silent. All the way home we said nothing, none of us, silhouettes in the tumbrel, returning to the Bastille. We disembarked and petite Violette disappeared from my life for ever. We four musketeers left for home the next day. Our working holiday was over; it was time to return, to live normal lives again. Chris and Jo went on ahead together, heading for la Manche with an eight-inch Bowie knife in Chris’ rucksack; a shiny new knife with a mouthful of wolfish, serrated teeth. We looked at it silently for a long time before he sheathed it.

On the morning of our departure I went down to the village café-bar to say goodbye. I don’t know what happened exactly, but I think I drank too much strong coffee on top of a bad hangover; in the next few hours I came apart. As I started hitching with Tim, he and I the last two remaining musketeers, I descended into a frightening abyss, bitten by the black dog. I became panicky, shaky, very depressed.

France being France, no-one wanted to give us a lift and we stood at the roadside for hour after hour, dust creeping up our jeans until we had white puttees. Eventually a 2CV rolled up and I breathed a huge sigh of relief: I just wanted to get out of there.

I was about to get into the car when Tim’s hand hauled me back. I had just enough time to see what he had glimpsed before I dived into the car’s shady interior: a gigantic hulk of a man with long unruly hair, shrouded in a big black coat, straddling the back seat and playing with a flick knife. We moved away from him as fast as we could. I believe that Tim saved my life that day. Had I been alone, exhausted and emotionally vulnerable, I would have jumped in, I would have chanced it. But without doubt we were intended for a shallow grave somewhere deep inside a forest.

The years passed by and our trip to France became a fantasy; when we met occasionally in pubs we talked about the good old days, as you do. About old Bruyes and Lucky, the storm, the cherry orchard, the vigilante hens, the violet thunderballs. We remembered different things. Tim remembered his frequent trips up and down the ladder because he ate too many cherries and they made him want to wee all the time. Jo remembered all the tunes on the jukebox in the café-bar. Nobody else remembered the girl with the violet eyes, nobody except me. But we all remembered Chris’ trip to Marseilles to buy the knife.

So it was with an awful sense of fate that we all happened to be sitting in separate pubs, independently, when we heard the news. A man had been stabbed in the next town; he was dead. He hadn’t been stabbed with the Bowie knife he’d bought in Marseilles, but it was Chris who’d died. And although he hadn’t been named as yet we all thought of him and no-one else, straight away, when we heard the news.

From that day on I have believed in fate – not as something preordained, but as a collection of possibilities and probabilities heaped inside two buckets and balanced on the fulcrum of an ancient weighing machine somewhere just like Bruyes’ orchard, see-sawing throughout the duration of our lives. In a matter of seconds only, when the weight of the world tipped one way or the other, it was Chris who was taken down to the guillotine and it was I who was spared.