Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
Nerves had plagued me as I’d driven over, which I put down to not wanting to come across as gauche and provincial in the presence of a megastar. I needn’t have worried; they melted away at the sight of éti, tapping her toe and checking her watch. Someone else was nervous too.
If she’d had a tail, it would have been wagging when we met at our prearranged rendezvous under the pines. As I signed her stupid form without even reading the small print, I complimented her on how pretty she looked. I hadn’t intended to, the words simply popped out, but her corresponding smile could have been a substitute for the sun. Maybe it was the way she was dressed, or her tumble of hair loose around her shoulders and the touch of makeup. Or perhaps it was something in the way she moved and spoke, but I soon forgot that three days ago I’d considered the handsome woman next to me to be a male soccer star named étienne.
Well, almost. Soccer was a highly competitive sport. I was swift to find out that kicking a pebble down the beach was, too. And an athletic young woman dressed in a flowing red dress and spangly gold trainers was thrashing me at it. Needless to say, there was no sight of the intimidating reserved éti. This one was all smiles and playfulness. As if she’d decided to trust me, drawn a line, and was fucking enjoying herself. So, I parked my immediate worries and enjoyed myself too. An afternoon beach date with an attractive woman? Nothing not to enjoy there.
Another bruised pebble soaring into the sky reminded me. “Now you’re just showing off.”
Putain , she was good. Rotting fir cones were fair game too, as were twigs, seashells, even a bloated dead crab. She hoofed that poor fellow high into the heavens, chuffing with satisfaction as he smacked back into the sea with a satisfying plop. The few people we passed—other beach strollers, runners, and dogwalkers—hadn’t given her a second glance. With her hair loose, sunglasses, and a touch of lipstick, she was no different to any other young woman making the most of the early spring sunshine.
Okay, maybe a smidge. “Can’t you walk sensibly in a straight line, like every other normal adult enjoying a late morning meander?”
“I can, yes. But do I want to?”
For the next fifty metres, she trotted alongside me doing a ridiculous heel-to-toe walk, her arms out for balance as if I’d arrested her for being drunk under the influence. No way would solemn étienne Salvador ever contemplate something as silly. I nudged her off her imaginary line, and she pirouetted away, laughing.
“I don’t go out very often, Nico! Not like this, anyhow. Not as me! I’m… I’m excited!”
“Tell me something I don’t know!”
Did it all seem a little crazy? Did I feel privileged? Like I was living in a dream that was going to come to an abrupt end when she said goodbye and drove back to Paris later? Yes, yes, and yes.
“I’m no doctor, but shouldn’t you be resting that hamstring, not kicking everything in your path?”
The heel-toe didn’t last long. She rounded it off with a spurt of backward jogging before resuming a more sensible walk interspersed with stone kicking.
“It’s much better. I did my usual workout routine this morning, and it was fine. I’m meeting the team physios tomorrow to be put through my paces, and, if that’s okay, I’ll be back to training with everyone else. We’ve got a couple of important games coming up—FC Nantes next Tuesday, then a Champions League match against Porto the week after. The boss says he’ll kill me if I’m not back for that one.”
That this surreal conversation was my reality hadn’t quite sunk in.
“So you’re driving back to Paris tonight?”
We reached the spot I’d earmarked for our mini picnic. I laid out a checked rug, and she flopped down on it with a groan. “Yeah. Don’t remind me. I need to set off in a couple of hours; my agent will be coming over to my apartment later this evening with his usual weekly list of crap for me to wade through.”
Even sprawled on a picnic blanket, she radiated fitness and energy, restless knees jiggling and busy fingers creating swirls in the sand. While pretending to concentrate on unloading the picnic, I admired her spare frame. Not an ounce of excess flesh anywhere; her belly like an ironing board, and no doubt as firm. Her arms were toned to perfection, and, though she was not as tall as me by three or four inches, and slighter, I didn’t fancy my chances in a wrestling match. Kicking off her trainers, she wiggled her pink toes in the damp sand. I’d noticed her pretty, shapely feet when they’d imitated little ice blocks the other night; today her toenails were painted a matte black.
“What have you brought me then?” she asked, craning her neck to see into my rucksack. “I’m starving.”
I handed her a thermos and two plastic cups and plates, then prized the lid off a little polystyrene cooler box packed with crushed ice. “Now is not the moment to inform me you have a shellfish allergy.”
“No way.” As she whipped off her sunglasses, her eyes sparkled. “I adore seafood. Especially when I have it here on the island—it doesn’t come any fresher.”
Her eyes widened even further when I held up a big oyster. “Waouh! These are from your farm, aren’t they?”
Pleased with her reaction, I gave a modest shrug. “Of course. Harvested at low tide at seven o’clock this morning. By my fair hand, just for you.”
And for twelve restaurants in and around central Paris, too, but I kept that to myself. I pointed out to sea. “This particular chap has spent the last three years growing over there, to the left of that clump of rocks. We have 12 frames built into the seabed, with around two tonnes of oysters on them.”
“Waouh,” she cooed again, like I’d presented her with a giant pearl, not a craggy lumpen shell.
As I fished out half a baguette, a few lemon slices, and an oyster for myself, she turned the one I’d given her over in her hand, rubbing the pad of her thumb across its coarse grey ridges.
“A feast for a queen, Nico. You’re spoiling me.”
“Hardly.” I delved in my jeans pocket for my penknife. “I’m the one who feels spoiled. I’m still pinching myself this is actually happening.”
She threw me a dimpled grin. “Well, if it’s any consolation, so am I. éti Salvador is wearing her favourite red dress and having an oyster picnic on the beach. She is not having to pretend to be serious, dull étienne.”
“She certainly seems a lot more… playful.”
“She is,” éti agreed. “Oh my god, étienne takes himself way too seriously. As befits his position as an ambassador and role model for the sport, and indeed, as a representative of our proud country on the national stage.”
She parroted the last bit in her idiotic, pompous commentator voice, and I chuckled. Could she be any different to that sad, drunk woman I’d rescued from the onrushing tide? Who hadn’t seemed to care if she’d been swept out to sea or not?
Levering with the sharp tip of my penknife, and in the blink of an eye, seeing as I’d done it a gazillion times, I shucked her oyster.
“?a alors. So manly, Nico.”
“Shuck off,” I said in my appalling English accent, trying not to laugh.
“It is, though! I bet a handsome fisherman has local girls flocking, don’t you? All that flicky-flacky hair falling over your soulful brown eyes? All those mysterious dark tattoos? And that lip piercing. Waouh . Very sexy.” She fanned her face. “Especially when you are trying to be cool. You have a stream of girlfriends dangling, I think.”
“Flicky-flacky hair? Me?” I tossed it from my forehead, playing up to her teasing. “More like 'can’t be arsed to get it cut' hair. And I don’t need to try! I am effortlessly cool!”
My lips twitched as I caught her doing more piss-taking eyelash-batting. This gentle flirting had snuck up on me.
“So, are there?” she persisted. “A string of women? Or are you saving yourself for Mrs Right?”
Amused, I snapped closed my knife. “I get by. My friend, Florian, loves to tell me my girlfriends never last for very long because I smell of dead fish.”
Leaning over, she sniffed my shoulder, and then pretended to sniff under my armpit, before wrinkling her nose. “Yeah, maybe he’s got a point.”
I squirted lemon juice over her oyster, making sure to squirt some over her hand too. “Get that down your neck, you horror.”
I watched as she tilted her head back, opened her mouth wide, and, with a hum of approval, swallowed it down.
“Mon dieu, that tastes amazing! So zingy and fresh!” She licked her lips. “Mmm. Like snogging a merman.”
Chuckling, I tossed down my own. Yep, delicious. I still adored the flavour, even if I did farm the bloody things all day. “Done a lot of that, have you?”
She scooped up the second oyster I’d prepared for her, side-eyeing me. “What, snogged mermen or eaten raw oysters?”
Delicately, she tipped back the shell. “Not enough of either, more’s the pity.” She swallowed. “Mmm. I think I’ve discovered a favourite food after all. Next time someone asks me, I will be able to declare it is a platter of La Forge’s finest oysters while stretched out on a sandy beach, with Nico La Forge himself preparing them for me. Like a pampered princess.”
“I’m honoured.”
“It’s true! It’s like I’m eating the actual ocean. Why did that taste so good?”
“Probably because it was still alive and clinging to a rack until a few hours ago. And we have the perfect conditions here.” I prepared another and handed it over. “The area is well iodised, so they grow to the right size. Not too fleshy or scrawny. And my family have farmed these tides for over a hundred years. We know where to move them around, to maximise growth and flavour.”
In a much less ladylike fashion, accompanied by a louder and more wicked groan, she wolfed the third, noisily slurping the last of the salt water from the shell. Some drops escaped and dribbled down her chin.
“I need a bib.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
She was even messier and noisier with the fourth.
“I’m glad I didn’t invite you to one of the local oyster-tasting shacks, acting like that,” I chastised her. “Never mind snogging your merman. You sound as if you’re having full-on penetrative sex with him.”
Giggling with delight, she flashed that famous chipped incisor. Salty, lemony juice coated her lips, making them glisten. “Do I? I’ve never had sex, so I don’t know what noises I would make.”
“Christ, éti! You don’t tell people you’ve only just met stuff like that!”
“Ah.” She waggled a finger at me. “But you’ve signed my non-disclosure form, Nico. I can say what I like. And how can you expect someone like me to know the rules of what’s normal—I live in a gilded cage, remember? Have done since I was eighteen. Back in Paris, I can’t have a pee on my own without someone checking I haven’t drowned in the toilet bowl.”
I handed her a fifth oyster, drizzled with extra lemon juice to enhance the briny flavour.
“Anyhow, merman expert,” she continued, waving it around. “Enlighten me on how one has sex with a merman? Please tell me it’s not the whole tail? Though that would explain the loud sex noises, I guess, because… waouh.”
I snorted. In the last half hour, éti had lightened my heart more than anyone else had managed in weeks. She gobbled down the oyster with exaggerated vulgar sound effects, and I gave her a nudge.
“I think your merman just climaxed.”
Her shoulders jiggled with mirth, her laughter sunny and free. Loud and unfettered too, enough to be heard down in La Couarde. I basked in it for a moment, my worries shifting a little farther from the front of my mind and my ego rippling with pleasure.
“What noises do you expect me to make?” She wiped a tear from her eye. “You’re feeding me an aphrodisiac.”
“I’m not sure it works like that.”
“Well, I think it does.” Stretching out her elegant limbs, she closed her eyes and took a deep inhale. “Your oysters are making me sexier already. I can feel it.”
Aphrodisiac or not, watching her tilt her long neck and un-self-consciously wolf them down was having an effect on me too. éti was not unattractive. On the outside as well as the inside. The longer I spent with her, the easier it was to forget she was also this other person. A very famous person, who up until now had sat in my mind as a man. And I wasn’t attracted to men, even very beautiful ones, like my friend Florian.
But éti’s mobile, gamine features… yes, far from unattractive. And her energy and frankness—her naive lack of game-playing—were refreshing. Having established I was single, I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t been snapped up already, but I knew the answer, given that no one but me had seen her like this.
The grey clouds, hanging over me since my mum's terminal diagnosis, thinned a little more. “When are you coming back?” She hoovered up the last of the bread. “Or rather, are you coming back? Is the house yours, or are you renting it?”
“It’s mine.” She sucked the juice from her fingers, her lips closing around the end of each one like she was bestowing them with a little kiss. “I bought it a few years ago, as an investment, on the advice of my accountant. But it’s become so much more than that. It’s now my secret hideaway. I love coming here. I strip myself of étienne and become the real me, without the fear of anyone peeking over my shoulder and spilling my secrets to the world.”
She side-eyed me. “And I sense that even now my secret is shared with you, I can still feel that way.”
“You can,” I reiterated. “You, me, and these oysters. And shellfish are renowned for keeping their mouths clamped shut.”
She shot me a grin, then carried on. “I’ll be back after the Champion’s League game. My PA keeps my diary, but I usually have a couple of days off after international matches. Why do you ask?” Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Are you going to miss me, or something?”
“It’s impossible to! You’re everywhere! Or rather, étienne is. There’s even a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the tabac in Saint-Martin!”
“He is a cardboard cut-out.” Her face darkened. “And he is everywhere. éti has none of his freedom.” She picked up a loose rock and threw it, hard. “And that’s difficult to bear sometimes. The fans idolise him, but they’d never idolise the real me. Not if they knew. Quite the reverse.”
“You think?” I gathered the detritus of our picnic, over too soon. For two near strangers with fuck-all in common, chatter flowed between us like birdsong. And that didn’t happen to me very often. While I wasn’t quite as taciturn as my brother Max, I had my moments.
“I know.” She hurled another stone. “It’s a herd mentality. In large groups people become unthinking, unquestioning blobs of conformity. Coming out to the media as éti would be like standing in the middle of the school playground surrounded by a baying mob. I don’t have the strength or the nerve. Not yet anyhow. Maybe when I retire.”
“You’re still a few years off, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am.”
With none of her former enthusiasm, she passed me her empty plate, keeping the discarded shells in a neat pile on the blanket. I laid a hand on her arm as she reached for her spangly trainers, with cute little E.S. initials embroidered on the side.
“Sorry. I was teasing about the cardboard cut-out. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Her eyes met mine, accompanied by a gentle smile. “You didn’t. Don’t worry. This afternoon has been incredible. I’ll remember it forever. I’m being utterly myself in the presence of someone else, for the first time in my life. Up until now, I’ve only ever dreamed of afternoons as simple as this. Living as étienne day in, day out, is exhausting.”
“Sorry,” I said again. The most inadequate word in the French language. “That you have to. That you can’t always be your… your authentic self.”
She trailed her fingers through damp sand, in a figure of eight pattern. “Don’t be. I know how fortunate my life is, compared to most. I’m done with raging about it—I’ve decided to concentrate on the joy being éti brings me, whenever I am able. It’s just that… stuffing her back inside and jamming down the lid is hard. She’s like a jack in the box that refuses to be squashed. Even if étienne weren’t famous, it would be a challenge.”
“I bet. She’s… ah… a big personality.”
“She is.” éti’s plump lips curved into the hint of a smile.
I hesitated. Should I ask her? Why not. I might never see her again, and I’d always wonder. “Is that… is that why you did what you did the other night? Because you can’t be yourself?”
A pink blush stole across her cheeks. A hint of makeup—a foundation, I guessed—was just visible in the clear light of day, to smooth them over.
“Partly. But more than that, I was a bit bored, a bit upset, and experimenting. Doing the sort of thing most people did as a teenager, but I never had the opportunity. I’ve never drunk that much alcohol in one sitting in my life!” She chuckled. “It was reckless of me, and as soon as I’d taken the pills, I regretted it. I was drunk, and they made me dizzy and confused. I’ve never taken anything stronger than an aspirin before. Then I think I must have gone outside to try to clear my head and decided the middle of the beach would be a good spot for a nap.”
“Why were you so upset? Was it the leg injury?”
She shook her head. “God no. That was nothing—the manager being over-cautious because he wants to make sure I’m fit for the Champion’s League game.”
She fiddled with the shells, clacking them together like horse’s hooves. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot. But… I’d made friends—anonymously, obviously—with a man online in Canada. French-speaking Canada. On a dating website. He looked nice in his pictures, and we chatted a lot via direct message. He was funny. But better than that, in his bio, he described himself as pansexual.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’m a backwards island boy. You’ll have to explain. The pan bit. Does that mean he wants sex with everything, like furniture and things?”
She sniggered. “Erm… not quite, although far be it for me to kink shame. It means someone who can be attracted to another person in a romantic way regardless of gender. So, I… I thought—stupidly, as it turns out—he might be attracted to someone like me. Like éti. And Canada is a long way from Europe, and Canadians aren’t much into soccer, so I had this crazy idea I could fly there for a holiday at the end of the soccer season, under the radar, and… and be éti. Leave étienne behind and just be myself.”
I could guess what happened next. Before he fell in love with Charles, Florian used hookup apps a lot, seeing as we lived on a small island with a severely limited homosexual population. He regaled me with plenty of tales of men writing absolute bullshit on their bios to hoodwink the na?ve or lonely. Sadly, éti was both.
“Anyhow,” she carried on, “I confided I was trans, suggested we meet up, and he then verbally abused me, accused me of leading him on, and deleted his account.”
“What an absolute connard.”
She let out a sigh. “Yes, but I… um… overreacted. I’d had a bad game the day before; I’d missed my first penalty in around fifty games. I hadn’t slept very well all week either—my hamstring niggled. His snub felt like nasty green icing on top of a very mouldy green cake. So when I arrived here, I had a drink, then a couple more, felt restless, and wondered what the pills would taste like.” She shook her head. “Idiotic, reckless. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Compared to my youthful exploits, necking half a bottle of vodka and a couple of painkillers were tame. “Don’t beat yourself up; we’re all allowed to do stupid things from time to time.”
“Mais, non.” She held up a finger. “You are, perhaps, but étienne isn’t. Because millions of people are always watching. But éti can. And she does. She’s desperate to try stupid things.”
“But maybe in the future not alone on a quiet beach at dawn, non?”
We packed up, then walked side by side back to the pines sheltering her villa, the empty oyster shells rattling in éti’s pockets. I sensed her dragging her heels, even though she chipped aside every vaguely spherical object with the temerity to cross her path.
“You can chuck them away on the beach, you know,” I said as she picked one of her empty oyster shells out and brushed sand from it. “It’s kind of where they belong.”
“I know. But I’m going to wash them and take them to Paris with me. As a memento of a very nice afternoon.” The smile she gave me was wistful, barely a little tilt to her mouth, before she glanced up at the house. “And now, I have to change back into étienne and endure a tedious drive back. And an even more tedious meeting with my agent and PA. Wish me luck.”
We shared an awkward moment. I would have liked to give her a hug, but her mention of étienne and watching her check the time on her flashy watch reminded me who she was. Hugging suddenly felt overfamiliar, so we ended up with a weird, prolonged handshake, as if our hands embraced on our behalf. Annoyed with myself and aware our last seconds together were ticking away, I took the plunge.
“As someone who doesn’t follow football, I’m not one hundred percent sure of when PSG’s Champion’s League game against Porto is scheduled. But my spidey-sense tells me it’s a fortnight tomorrow?”
She laughed, as I’d hoped she would. “Waouh. That’s an amazing guess. Especially for a rugby fan. Can you also shoot webbing from your wrist?”
My turn to chuckle. Mon dieu, was I really about to ask the world’s most famous soccer player out on a date? No, I didn’t do relationships. It would be nothing more than another opportunity to spend some time with her. “Alas, no. But although a shitty bloke in Canada doesn’t want to take you out to lunch and show you off, a smelly French oyster fisherman could be persuaded, next time you are back on the island?”
If I wasn’t mistaken, that sounded very much like a date. éti’s mobile face creased into a dimpled, almost shy smile and the chipped incisor gained itself a new Instagram follower. With a delightful rosy blush, she looked down at her feet and kicked at a stone. “The only thing I can smell around here is freedom, Nico.” Her grey eyes met mine again. “Thank you. Lunch with you would be lovely.”