North of Bordeaux

N

o r t h

o f

B

o r d e a u x

Part One

N ORTH OF B ORDEAUX P ART O N E

PHOTOGRAPHS & FICTION 路 BY ALICE MERCIER

North

of

Bordeaux

Part One

I learnt to drive in a small town north of Bordeaux. It was the August after my fourteenth birthday, and every afternoon my father would take me out in the car. We would drive through the centre of town, past closed shops and shuttered windows, and back out onto the road to Saintes. The sunflower fields stretched out until the sky, and water towers dotted an otherwise uninterrupted horizon. Just off the main road there was a football pitch that was no longer used, and I learnt how to drive in the adjacent gravel car-park. The car-park was larger than the playing field, and there stood the dilapidated football stands to one side, and a wooded picnic area to the other. In the beginning, ours was the only car around and I practised my clutch control relentlessly; this was met with an unwavering patience from my father.

One hot afternoon when I had put the car into reverse, a moped swung round the corner, off the main road and into the car-park. I pressed too harshly on the brake pedal and gravel flew up, hitting the rear windscreen. The boy of about sixteen pulled up to a

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picnic bench, slowly stepped off his bike and removed his helmet. He smiled to himself for a moment, and then glanced round before taking some rolling papers and a bag of marijuana out from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. He sat down at the bench and paid no further attention to us. I looked at my father before resuming my unofficial lesson in front of this audience of one, but he was just amused at the thought that the young man would care. As daylight turned to dusk we would head towards home. Sometimes my father would talk to me about physics, or architecture or photography, and I would fall asleep listening to him, even though I really was interested in what he was saying. By the time we arrived back, my mother would usually have put my little brother into his pyjamas, and we would all sit down to dinner.

Another time, the picnic area was full of men in dusty overalls. They had pushed the benches together to make one long table, and were sat down smoking and eating. As we walked around the car to change seats some of the group looked over at us. My father recognised a couple of them as the stone masons that were working on the chapel in town, and he nodded towards their table. They nodded back and carried on with their conversation. I sat down in the driver’s seat, and hesitantly started the engine. I wound down the window to let a wasp out of the car, and began with exceptionally slow figures of eight around the trees. I

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could hear one man announce across the table that his wife was pregnant with twins. The rest of the group cheered, some shook his hand, and one made a toast.

I steered the car away from the picnic area, my father looked on anxiously as I narrowly missed a bench.

That evening my mother had made a chicken and rice casserole. My brother was already in bed because he had drawn indelible ink eyes onto a plaster bust of Beethoven. At dinner I drank red wine and water in the same glass, and my mother spoke to me in English so that I wouldn’t forget it - and because it reminded her of home. She asked me about driving, and I asked her if Beethoven’s indigo eyes would ever come off. She laughed, even though she said she thought that they’d probably be that colour forever now. After we’d washed up, my mother would plait my hair as we watched the television. In bed I lay awake listening to her play the piano downstairs, and I thought about the renovated chapel. It had been falling down ever since I could remember. I didn’t think that either of my parents were religious, although we would always go to midnight mass on Christmas eve.

By September I was practising three-point turns, and ours was once again the only car around.

It had taken me by surprise that my father, a generally cautious man, had agreed to teach me to drive at such a young age. Much later it had occurred to me that, with it being only a few months before my mother and father

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separated, he would’ve agreed to any time-consuming endeavour away from the house.

Late one afternoon, when the car jumped and stalled and I’d lost my cool, my father said to me: ‘That’s just what happens - you learn something new and everything else disappears.’ He rolled a cigarette, and I picked up the old Nikkormat camera from the back seat and climbed out of the car. I went to sit in the football stands which looked out beyond the playing field and over acres of vineyards. The camera had no film in it so I just looked through the viewfinder. I watched the little arrow of the light meter flicker as I gazed first towards the fields, which were soaked in the last light of the day, and then at the concrete stands that were cast all in shadow. I heard another car pull up and, after a minute, a woman stepped out of the passenger’s side and leaned back on the white railing that ran around the pitch. A man followed her out, slamming the door of his classic Porsche, and spoke at her in English as she stared straight past him. The wind carried his words away, but I heard her reply: ‘You can’t offer me anything more than this because you have a wife - remember?’ I stood up to leave which caught her attention for a moment.

She glanced at the ground and then spun round, so that her back was to the man who was rubbing the nape of his neck. He stepped forward and, taking hold of the railing to either side of her, softly put his forehead to her shoulder-blades. Neither of them moved as I

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walked hastily down from the stands. I reached our car where my father was trying to tune in a football match on the radio. I asked him if we could go and get a Fanta, he nodded and moved back into the driver’s seat. ‘That camera doesn’t have any film in it,’ he said as he started the engine.

The Autumn term had begun, and my father had gone to Paris to give lectures at the School of Architecture. One of the evenings that he was away, my mother asked me to look after my younger brother whilst she was out. I sat on the stairs that led up to the attic, my mother spoke to me as she hurriedly put her make-up on in the bathroom; ‘Try and get your brother to bed by eight, and there’s chocolate ice-cream in the freezer if you want it.’ She wore a white linen dress with a red silk scarf around her neck. As she checked her reflection one last time I knew that she was having an affair, but the thought evaporated as quickly as it had taken shape. She came over to kiss me on the cheek and then swirled away down the stairs and out of the front door. I stayed where I was for a while, breathing in her perfume long after she’d left. In the kitchen cupboard I found a tin with sponge cake in it. I carried the tin up to the attic where my brother had set up shop with Monopoly money and our mother’s jewellery case. He handed me a stack of notes and asked me if there was anything that I’d like to buy. I opted for a silver bracelet that needed untangling from a necklace chain.

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When my father returned from Paris we took the car out for the whole day, and he told me about his lectures, and I asked if the students had asked many questions, and he repeated the ones that he thought had been good questions to ask.

That November, a boy from my school was hit by a car as he walked home, and I decided that I didn’t want to drive anymore. The last evening that we had taken the car out had been cold and clear, and as we turned into the football ground I saw the boy with the moped sat on one of the picnic tables. He was writing in a notepad. The car stalled as I missed the biting point and the boy laughed a little to himself, and then carried on writing.

* * * *

I pulled up outside my flat in Highgate and took the key out of the ignition. I sat back in the seat and rubbed my face with my hands. ‘It just goes like that sometimes ...’ my driving instructor began. I looked out of the window and said, ‘You learn something new and everything else disappears.’

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P ar t O ne

Photographs & Fiction