Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Marlow and Sabine didn’t have to wait at the luggage carousel because they’d only brought carry-on. They made it through security quickly and emerged into sunshine. French sunshine.
Marlow had worked like stink on Oscar’s revised PowerPoint in the Toronto airport lounge while also texting with Noah, who started out by saying he really did hope she had a good time away, then asking what she’d do if she couldn’t get a refund on the house, then joking that he wouldn’t know what to do if she abandoned him for France and left him to fend off their parents alone, then worrying that that was a real possibility, and that he would be nowhere.
That descent, she knew, was the depression talking—the hounds that pursued her brother, less now that he was on medication, but more than she’d like.
She reassured him that keeping the house was never going to happen. It was impossible in every way.
On the plane, she’d slept no more than an hour, max.
She had trouble sleeping sitting up, so she’d spent most of the flight worrying about Noah and watching bad action movies to distract herself while finishing the slide presentation and queuing up emails, all of which she sent the moment they arrived, using the Paris airport’s free Wi-Fi. Done!
They found the pick-up point and spotted a run-down “Voyages Celeste” minibus. It was covered in rust, and where a window should have been, there was duct-taped sheet plastic.
“That’s not the way it looked on the website,” said Sabine.
In the driver’s seat, tilted way back, was a handsome but rumpled, unshaven guy, early forties maybe, snoring.
One bare foot stuck out of the driver’s window, jammed against the cracked sideview mirror.
His right arm was splayed on the passenger seat next to worn boots, dirty socks, and several empty coffee cups.
He, apparently, had no trouble sleeping sitting up.
Marlow took in his faded T-shirt. His old work pants, covered in paint, cinched in by a cracked leather belt. His very tanned arms and wiry biceps. His dirty blonde hair, long overdue for a cut—but locks you’d see on a model in a fashion magazine.
“Bonjour Monsieur,” she ventured. Nothing. “Monsieur?” she said louder.
He kept snoring.
Marlow whacked the minibus’s side. No response. “Maybe we should find some other mode of transportation.”
“But I paid in full,” said Sabine.
“Have I taught you nothing?”
“Who’s the one who bought an entire house in another country online!”
“Fair,” said Marlow, walking around to the driver’s side, reaching over the guy’s hairy leg, and pressing on the horn. It blared. He awoke with a jolt.
“Merde!” That was the desired response. “Pas cool, ca!”
“I’ll tell you what’s pas cool,” said Marlow. “Flying for seven and a half hours, being jet-lagged, and not getting to our destination because someone’s sleeping on the job.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Mum, I don’t think he speaks English. Let me. Monsieur, j’ai acheté deux tickets pour aller à Mirabelle-les-Roches.” She’d bought two tickets to Mirabelle.
“Ah.” He reached for his socks. “Y avait aucune raison de klaxonner.”
Yes, there clearly was reason to honk the horn. “Nous avons essayé de te reveiller,” added Marlow, explaining that they had tried in vain to wake him up.
“Madame, nous ne nous connaissons pas. Vous devriez me vousvoyer.”
He was right. In France, you had to use vous with anyone you didn’t know until they gave you permission to tutois them—even the unwashed masses.
He got out, observed Marlow, and chuckled, shaking his head.
“Eh oui, vous les anglos, vous aimez les leggings, non?”
Marlow looked down at her leggings. They were perfectly fine. What a jerk.
He opened the passenger door, waved them in, grabbed their bags, threw them in the back, and got into the driver’s seat. He had to turn the ignition key three times to start the engine. The smell of oil permeated the vehicle. Hopefully they wouldn’t die on this ride.
“Je m’appelle Luc,” he said, letting the minibus warm up.
“Et nous, Marlow et Sabine Linden,” said Sabine.
He explained, in rapid-fire French, that the minibus belonged to his cousin, Pierre, and Pierre’s travel company, Voyages Celeste.
Luc did occasional work for Pierre, but reluctantly, because he didn’t like tourists.
North Americans travelled with too much stuff because they were focused on things, not life.
But then Marlow and Sabine had shown up with only carry-on, so maybe there was hope for them yet.
Marlow was about to retort when Luc suddenly pulled into traffic. A tiny Citroen that looked like more of a toy than a vehicle cut him off. He slammed on the brakes.
“Mais branleur, tu fais quoi?!” Luc screamed to the Citroen driver, who swerved around the minibus, almost colliding with another car passing in the far lane.
“Batard!” screamed the guy in the Citroen.
“Salaud!” replied the third driver. Luc pulled in front of both while they all continued to yell at each other. Marlow made a mental note to look up the word “branleur.” Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
Despite their fatigue and the stress from Luc’s driving—sudden lane changes, late swerves to catch off-ramps, swearing at other drivers—leaving Paris for the countryside was a delight: they were surrounded by vineyards, medieval churches, chateau ruins, tiny villages, and forest.
In fast French and with gesticulation that took his hands off the wheel, Luc yelled over the window’s flapping plastic that he hated highway driving.
Life was not an autoroute, it was routes secondaires that mattered.
If you went too fast, you’d miss everything important.
Marlow did not need a philosophy of life lecture from a guy who clearly didn’t wash and couldn’t use a turn signal to save his life (or theirs).
“Et que faites-vous à Mirabelle?” he asked. “Avez-vous de la famille là-bas?”
He eyed her shaking her head in the rear-view—no, they didn’t have family in Mirabelle. Could he keep his eyes on the road?
“Vous êtes des touristes alors?”
“Oui,” said Marlow, ending the conversation with a partial lie: they were only visiting, so technically tourists.
More forest acted like a soporific. Marlow and Sabine slept, waking only as Luc drove up a hill, passing a sign that read Nenier, Petite Cité de Caractère—little city of character.
Modern stucco houses formed the town’s base near a pharmacy and a boulangerie, then as they climbed the hill, the houses got older, not stucco but stone, with red clay tiled roofs covered in moss.
A few houses’ shutters were open and painted in bright periwinkle blue, looking lived in and cared for.
Others had closed, weathered shutters or no glass in the window frames, dark and empty inside.
One had no front wall at all, like a sad, life-size, toy house.
Bedraggled official papers affixed to the fence surrounding it were notice of work long forgotten.
Luc parked in a gravel lot, got out, and pulled their luggage from the minibus.
“Merci,” said Marlow. “C’est Mirabelle-les-Roches?”
“Non. Mirabelle, c’est là-haut.” He pointed up the road where it split.
One fork took the main road back down the hill.
The other narrowed considerably and twisted immediately at an old, crumbling stone archway so that its destination could not be seen.
It felt a little mysterious. Enchanted. Like a medieval fairy tale.
“La camionette ne peut pas y monter,” Luc said, explaining that the minibus couldn’t get up there.
“Merci. Et les bureaux du mairie?” Marlow asked, asking for the city hall. She’d looked it up. A bigger town’s city hall was an h?tel de ville. A smaller town’s city hall was a mairie.
“De la.”
“Pardon?”
“De la. La mairie. Mairie, c’est féminin.”
Jet-lagged, exhausted, and operating in a second language, Marlow did not have the bandwidth to be corrected. It was also ridiculous that the French word for feminine was masculine. It should be “féminine,” not “féminin.” But she wouldn’t get into that.
Luc gestured to a well-kept building marked h?tel de ville, a European Union flag and two French flags flying above its front doors.
Should she get him to stick around so he could drive them to the hotel Sabine had booked? They were in the middle of nowhere, and he was their only mode of transportation.
“Mais ce n’est pas ouvert,” he said. “C’est l’heure du déjeuner. Revenez à quatorze heures.”
“Closed for a two-hour lunch?” said Marlow to Sabine. “How does anything get done?”
“Here in my country,” scoffed Luc, “we do not make it all about work. Here, how do you say, we work to live, not live to work.”
“Walked right into that one,” said Sabine.
“First of all, that’s a cliché,” said Marlow. “Second, you speak English! Why didn’t you speak English at the airport?”
“Nous sommes en France, Madame,” said Luc. “En France, nous parlons francais.”
Marlow would not ask if he’d wait for them to do their city hall business. She’d find another way. As if reading her mind, Luc headed down the hill on foot.
“Bonne chance, la dame et demoiselle! Bienvenue en France!”
Sabine decided to wander to keep from wanting to sleep.
She walked past a small store, closed up behind rusting metal shutters.
Its sign, dangling off a loose metal bracket, read Antiquités.
She found a patch of grass around a moss-covered stone monument.
The sun had found a hole in the clouds and was beating down on this very spot, beckoning her.
The jet lag was making her feel unwell, overheated, thick-headed. She lay down and closed her eyes.