Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Most of the next day, I was tied up sweating over paperwork while Max and my dad graded and washed oysters in the yard. On the radio in the background, newsreaders droned on about the latest series of strikes by rail workers and warned of heavy rains sweeping across the north, while football pundits attributed Paris Saint-Germain’s crushing four-nil home defeat against a strong Olympique Lyonnais to the absence of their star player.
So, nothing more than another routine, forgettable shift at work, right? Except that star player was holed up half a mile along the road, and I was meeting up with her later.
The last forty-eight hours of my reality would be imprinted in my brain forever. At every mention of the elusive étienne Salvador, a jumble of contradictions buzzed through my head. She’d gone from that gifted and idolised soccer player on the telly to a pretty riddle wrapped in a home-sewn dress.
Who was the real petit danseur? Or, rather, the real petite danseuse ? Was she that sad drunk woman, lipstick bleeding from the corners of her mouth and wild hair matted with sick? Or was she the edgy, shuttered sports celebrity, sewing clothes as a distraction from media vilification and offering a bleak financial transaction in exchange for my silence? Did the world’s greatest soccer star buy her friends' silence that way too?
Or perhaps the real woman was none of those. Perhaps she was éti, funny and charming, barefoot with a rare and cute chipped smile, finding simple delight in booting pebbles into the stratosphere.
My mum had walked down to the sheds for some fresh air; the short stroll tired her, although she brushed off my dad’s concerns, even as she let him shoo her into the cramped office and switch the two-bar heater onto full blast. Yesterday had been chemo day, so even getting out of bed this morning was an impressive feat. The proof of her bad night was writ large on her pale cheeks and wasted body. Her clothes had become two sizes too big.
While Max and my dad finished grading, I made her a weak cup of coffee.
“You’ve been quiet this last while, Nico.”
I had. Who would notice something like that after she’d gone? Not Max or my dad. And not Zo?, either. Florian, perhaps, but I was his old mate, not his boyfriend. I couldn’t go crying to him with all my problems.
Mon dieu, how I was going to miss her. Even this dulled, yellowed version. Corny maybe, but my mum was the glue that bound our family together. When she hummed, the whole family sang along. Whether cajoling my dad out of his curmudgeonly best, coaxing a smile from a sulky teenage Zo?, or throwing her arms around Max for a cuddle when every uptight bone in his body screamed don’t touch . But above all that, she was my friend and my mother, and a bloody decent one.
“I’m fine.” I placed a steaming cup at her elbow while pushing aside the temptation to share my extraordinary two days with her.
“Thank you, love. Just what the doctor ordered.”
After riffling in her handbag for a strip of pills, she counted out a couple in her palm. “Let’s see if these new anti-sickness meds do the trick.”
She flicked through a sheaf of health and safety updates both me and my dad had been avoiding and sorted them into piles. Ideally, we’d employ someone for a few hours each week to manage the paperwork, seeing as we both hated it and she had stepped back. And update our computers, perhaps invest in a streamlined accountancy package. That kind of software didn’t come cheap, although it wouldn’t make a dent in the money éti had on offer.
“Most of this is rubbish,” she declared. “The ones you need to address are on the top.”
She pushed the pile aside. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her gamely sipping at a drink she couldn’t taste in a room failing to warm her. Fucking chemo. Was there no better way than that medieval blunt instrument, hellbent on poisoning good cells as well as bad? Why couldn’t those thousands of scientists across the globe invent a cleverer drug that only did what it was supposed to, without ravaging every other part of her as well? Because where was the value in prolonging a life so unpleasant it became beyond worth living?
“I’ve been thinking,” I began tentatively. The sight of her made me wonder if I had said no too quickly, especially since éti’s offer was still open. “We could make an appointment to go up to that clinic in Paris if this round of treatment doesn’t work. Or even the one in London we read about, running that new clinical trial?”
She offered me a tired smile. “Are you going to rob a bank to put me up at Le Bristol or the Ritz for a month so they can stick even more pins into me? No thanks.”
“We could, though,” I pressed. “Find somewhere nice to stay. Scrounge the money out of the business. We could even get in touch with that specialist in California if you think it might help.”
As I outlined all the avenues we’d yet to explore, she indulged me. I was clutching at straws, each one short, and we both knew it. But with éti’s money, we could do this. We could explore every last-ditch, honky treatment the twenty-first century had to offer. For nothing but this, the soccer star could buy my silence. She never needed to know I’d have stayed silent anyway.
But my mum was shaking her head.
“No need to rehash, Nico, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Our doctors are doing the best they can. We know the score.”
“But what if they were wrong? What if better chemo is out there? In America, or in England?” The constricting band, never far away these days, tightened its grip on my ribcage.
She put down her mug and laid her cold, dry hand on my arm. “Me and your dad have been through this, love. And I’m in the newest trial. That fancy doctor we saw in Bordeaux explained it all. It’s this or nothing, Nico. And I don’t want to go anywhere else. I want to be here, at home. With all of you when...”
Those types of sentences always remained unfinished. None of us had the balls to say the last part of out loud, although everyone knew how they ended.
An hour earlier, as she pretended an interest in Max’s longwinded explanation of how he’d changed a fuel filter, I’d seen defeat in her eyes, for the first time. Eyes listlessly following my dad around the shed, as if trying to catalogue everything about him before the cancer stole her memories. My parents didn’t have a showy love for each other; after all, they’d been married coming up to thirty years and been together much longer than that. Nonetheless, it had been a reassuring constant throughout my life.
A scratchiness prickled in my throat; I swallowed it down. Merde, I rarely regretted being single, but at times like this someone just for me would be nice. They didn’t have to be a big love or a life partner or anything. Like Florian once was, the way we were for each other before he found his soulmate. A person with whom I could share my sheared-off sentences and sheared-off pain, someone not suffering their own. Someone to give me a hug or lend a shoulder to cry on—not that I ever did cry. Everyone else had shed copious tears, at the doctor's when we first heard the news, and with each subsequent blow since. My own tears just… wouldn’t come. Someone needed to be strong in those situations, and the role seemed to have fallen to me. The older brother, the oldest son. The responsible business manager, my mum’s rock when it all overwhelmed my dad, and he went on one of his benders.
“Okay,” I said, “As long as you’re sure. You can always change your mind.”
As we’d arranged, éti came to the shed after the others had left. I made an excuse to hang around, told the rest of them I was going to tackle that health and safety pile. A sure-fire way to ensure everyone buggered off.
Half of me hadn’t expected her to appear. For a second after I woke this morning, I’d even questioned if I’d made the whole thing up.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She hovered in the doorway, incognito once more behind shades and a scarf. Very expensive shades and a scarf. My usual confidence around women evaporated. Still starstruck, despite having witnessed her drunk and puking.
“There’s no one but me here.” I stepped back so she could see for herself. “You can come in. I’ll lock the door behind you, if that’s okay? Then you can take off your sunglasses. Your coat too, if you’re too warm. We’ve had the heaters on. Can I get you a coffee?”
She flustered me, an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation, not unlike waving enthusiastically at someone, then realising a second too late they’re not who you thought they were. éti’s face was almost as familiar to me as my own, as if she was a person I knew really, really well, and yet… she remained a stranger.
Accepting a drink, she cast her gaze around. We called it a shed, but it was more like a big grain hangar. And not very impressive, as the real work took place in the ocean opposite. Storage racks lined the two long walls, rammed with empty packing crates, their shipping labels a who’s who of specialist seafood restaurants the length and breadth of the southwest and beyond. The far end housed tools and random bits of equipment in various states of repair, and nearest to us stood a row of filing cabinets, the office, and kitchenette. Strip lights and a too-small whiteboard covered in my and my dad’s scrawl completed the idyllic scene.
“Most of the work goes on outside,” I said, seeing her interest. “We package the oysters in here, and arrange shipping, but most of my day is spent on the beach at low tide, or in the yard, sizing them, grading them and moving them around the farm.”
“Where is the farm?”
I smothered a grin. I loved this question. The answer was obvious once you knew, but oyster farms were few and far between in landlocked Paris. I jerked my chin to the window, beckoning her over. A thick, earthy smell hung in the air; those northern rains were on their way.
“It’s there, right in front of you.” I pointed to where dull grey clouds gathered, knitting themselves to the murky grey ocean. A loose catch on the window rattled; the wind was getting up too. “You’re staring at it.”
This close, I inhaled a whiff of her floral perfume, not a strong scent but pleasant. It sure beat the smell of rain mixed with shellfish.
“I’m an idiot, aren’t I?” As colour swept up her cheeks, I caught a brief flash of chipped incisor.
“No, not at all. And believe me, you’re not the first to ask. We don’t always consider how food is grown nor how it gets to our plates. Anyhow, I bet people come up with all kinds of dumb questions about your life. I bet I would have done when I was younger.”
“They certainly do.” She huffed a laugh. “And not just kids. A journalist on live television once asked if I’d ever considered pro basketball as a career, because I’m so quick and agile on my feet. So, I told him to stand up, and I stood too. I came up to his shoulder, and he wasn’t much more than one metre eighty-two, one eighty-five maybe.”
I chuckled. The guy bags a rare interview with Etienne Salvador, and he comes out with that garbage? “Okay, so I like to think I wouldn’t have been silly enough to ask you that.”
“The commonest enquiries I get,” she continued, “especially from kids, is what car do I drive? And my favourite food. Or whether I’m good at playing FIFA on a games console. Nothing about soccer.” Her eyes returned to the window. “So, are you like Poseidon, or something? Do you own the sea?”
I smiled down at her. Her easy charm and this normal conversation were… unexpected. “Not exactly, no. You can’t see right now, because the tide is in, but my family have six hectares of oyster park here, in front of the sheds, and another three hectares over towards Ars.”
Her expressive eyebrows quirked. “I don’t know what nine hectares looks like.”
I performed some quick mental maths. “It’s equivalent to about twelve football pitches worth of land? We produce 140 to 160 tonnes of oysters per year. At low tide, you can see the rows and rows of metal tables embedded into the ocean floor. Covered in oysters. That’s our farm.”
“Waouh. How do you keep the oysters there? Don’t they swim away to avoid being eaten?” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “That’s another stupid question, isn’t it?”
As a matter of fact, it was a very sweet one. I smiled down at her. “No comment. They’re trapped in pouches, basically big sacks with holes in them and laid out in organised rows on tables. And oysters can’t swim beyond about three weeks of age—in the wild they have this narrow window to find a suitable spot, then settle there for life. The sacks keep similar ages and sizes together and protect our livestock from predators, like crabs. Our farm is like an oyster library but with all the books filed according to size and age. You should come back at low tide. It’s much easier to understand.”
“I’d like that. So, the oysters just sit there on their library shelves, waiting for someone to check them out?”
I hummed. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” Putain, was I really going to bore a megastar with this shit?
“We grow them from what is known as a seed and then move them around the farm according to their size and the growing conditions required at a particular age. From the time we start to cultivate them, it takes three to four years for oysters to reach the restaurants. Only about 25 percent, the lucky ones, make the grade.”
“The best sellers.”
She fingered the damp pouches on the rack next to her. Max had emptied them out this morning and brought inside for mending. Maybe I was merely comparing them with my own, but she had elegant slim hands, with nice nails. Her movements were elegant too, which shouldn’t have been a surprise considering her nickname.
“Do you like it?” she asked. “Being an oyster farmer?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose? I’ve never given it much thought. It’s what my family has done since 1921. Over a hundred years. La Forge blood, sweat, and tears run down these walls. I’m not sure I ever considered doing anything else.”
“It’s very cool. I’d like to come back at low tide and ask some more stupid questions.”
Mon dieu, she was polite. I’d give her that. “Will you tell me what car you drive if you do?”
“Sure,” she laughed, “but it will take a while. I have… several. I check those in and out like library books too. In some respects, I’m a soccer player cliché.”
Tipping her head back, she drained her coffee. “Not all respects, obviously.”
Handing me her empty cup, she folded her arms across her chest, contemplating me. The other éti was back, the cool collected one that didn’t take any shit. “So, Nico, my offer is still on the table. And you’ve had time to consider and reflect. On all the expensive things you’d like to buy. On all the wonderful places you’d like to visit.”
On the life you’d love to be able to save but never could, no matter how much money you threw at it.
I thought of my poor mum soldiering on. Even though I fucking detested all the battle analogies associated with cancer treatment, I couldn’t deny her that one. Getting through the days as the clock wound down was all we had left. Like a punch to my stomach, that message had hit home today. Her death no longer something abstract, alluded to in conversations with doctors or each other behind her back, but very real and creeping over the horizon.
Maybe if I’d met éti a year earlier, when there was still a chance of cure, then my response would have been different.
“Keep your money. Donate it to a cancer charity. Do something good with it. Make a real difference to people’s lives. It won’t make a difference to mine.”
Silence stretched between us as we regarded each other. éti weighing up whether to trust my words, and me trying not to fidget under her steady gaze, to appear trustworthy. Day-to-day sounds normally smothered by noisy work activities pierced the void. The wind whistling through a split in a corner of corrugated roofing I should have fixed months ago. In synch with the window rattling. Gulls cawing, diving down to pick at detritus in the yard, no doubt dropping bird shit all over the tractor. A dripping tap in the kitchenette. The relentless rhythmic roar of the tide.
éti, motionless, breathing slow steady breaths, like she was focusing on lining up the perfect free kick. “Okay.” She nodded, just once, decision made. “I’ll have a non-disclosure form ready for you to sign tomorrow before I return to Paris. Come over to the house.”
“Fine, no problem.”
With business settled, she turned as if to go, then hesitated. “If you like or have the time, Nico, we could go for a walk along the beach afterwards.”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
She seemed startled. Her offer would thrill most folk.
“Sorry, that was rude. Yes, of course, I’ll come to the house and sign it. What I meant was—don’t you have anything better to do?”
A flush bloomed on her cheeks. “Um… not really, no. I don’t have to be back in Paris until early evening. And… no one knows éti, except you. It’s weird, but, as well as frightening me half to death, being myself with someone is kind of cool. We could take a stroll. You could show me your oyster beds and explain the work you were doing the other morning when you found me.”
What did I have to lose? As long as everything was status quo at home with my mum, I might as well milk the most bizarre episode of my life for every drop. “Sure, okay.”
“Don’t knock yourself out, Nico.” Teasing éti was back, the one I liked. “Chaps out there would sell their grandmothers for an exclusive interview with me. Not that they’ll ever get one, of course.”
Alarm zipped across her face, and she held a hand up to her mouth. “Unless, merde, you’re not married or something are you? I don’t want to tread on any toes. I should have asked first. I mean, not that I’m, like, coming on to you or anything.”
Mon dieu, now it was the turn of the most famous footballer in France to be flustered. And she wanted to spend time with me. How crazy was that? Even better that I’d already decided I enjoyed her company. Her potpourri of reactions puzzled me, too: eager like a child one minute, then closed off, world weary and suspicious the next. Of course I wanted to delve deeper. Who wouldn’t?
“No. You’re not treading on toes. I’m single. And if the weather clears up, then I’ll even bring a picnic.”
I accompanied her to the door.
“Do you really prefer rugby? I mean, it’s so violent, non?” She shuddered, pulling a face. “And the players are so… big. Us footballers are much more stylish and prettier, don’t you agree?”
She batted her eyelashes. This was the person the media never saw, ridiculous and coquettish and funny. “Some of them are,” I agreed. “Pretty players like you are the only reason a good friend of mine ever watches football.”
She raised a slim finger. “I dispute that you carried me, by the way. On the beach. I’ll acknowledge that you assisted when I may have staggered a tiny bit over some terribly uneven ground. But you didn’t carry me. I would have remembered that.”
“La petite danseuse always stays on her feet, yes?”
“Exactement . And as well as having a rotating collection of supercars, I’m a demon at FIFA. I don’t have a favourite food.”