Low life

My mother has various chronic illnesses and finds it almost impossible to remain both immobile and awake during the day. At night she can’t sleep owing to hallucinations caused by her Parkinson’s medication. I think she is also subject to a general delusion that the house is overrun with mice. There is hardly a drawer or cupboard without a wizened lump of cheese set in a trap. Otherwise, she is sane and serene and while her forgetfulness is infuriating to her, its origin doesn’t seem to be organic. She’s 87. I’ve been staying with her for the past few days. Also visiting is my mother’s sister, aged 91. Apart from her deafness and a bad foot necessitating sticks, push trolleys and an electric cart for mobility, she’s right as rain.

On Sunday morning we went, Oscar and I, to a vide grenier in the ancient, picturesque Provençal village. Vide grenier means ‘open attic sale’ — which is the French equivalent of our car boot sale. Oscar had €20 with which to buy homecoming gifts for his Mum and her partner, and his three half-siblings. The stalls were set out under the shade trees of the village boulodrome. Ex-dustman Grandad loves browsing in skips and charity shops and at car boot sales and he was in seventh heaven. At the first stall, I was very drawn to an old hand-tinted framed print of two peasants standing in a furrowed field. The sun was setting, their shadows were long. The man had his hat in his hand and was thanking God for their harvest, a pathetic basket of potatoes.

My grandson and I are reprising the 1968 film The Swimmer. Burt Lancaster is an advertising executive at a pool party who attempts to swim eight miles home via his affluent Connecticut neighbourhood’s outdoor swimming pools. We don’t have a pool, but our friends are generous with offers to use theirs. Our aim is to take advantage of these offers by swimming in a different pool every day and working our way through the expat society of this remote part of the Provence. It’s Oscar’s first trip abroad; he is staying for a fortnight. Today was day four. The effect of the contrast in his plastic mind between a flat above a hairdressers in Newton Abbot in Devon and a daily succession of private pools in a 42°C heatwave in the hills of Provence must be very great.

‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but this morning I had boarded the tour bus on time and I tutted along with the righteous. While we waited I picked up the driver’s copy of that day’s edition of El Pais. On the front page was an arresting photograph of President Trump going head to head with President Macron, in Paris, their forearms joined and their hands clasped in the arm-wrestling start position. At their first public handshake in Brussels, Macron had crushed Trump’s hand until the Donald’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Here was the second leg of the contest and the Donald was playing away from home.

Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather with a photo on his phone sent by his father-in-law. His father-in-law lives about an hour away. The photo showed a bus stop on a deserted street. Attached to the bus shelter was a temperature gauge with large green digital numbers showing 50.5°C. Little wonder, observed the taxi driver, that the street was deserted. He dropped me outside the Sercotel Sorolla Palace hotel where Eva was waiting on the steps. Eva was the Spanish PR lady, or shepherdess, in charge of 13 travel journalists from all over Europe on a three-day cultural tour of the city. ‘Eva I am ever so sorry,’ I said. ‘Shit happens,’ she said pleasantly and idiomatically.

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something or somebody was ‘cute’ or ‘insane’ appeared to be the highest possible accolade. Men and maleness were beyond a joke.

Up on the fifth floor the wind was like thunder. Wild gusts shook the window glass so violently I thought it might smash, which lent the occasion an unexpected drama and significance. I couldn’t entirely shake off the faint and appallingly egotistical suspicion that the universe strongly approved, or strongly disapproved, or something. My digestive system certainly disapproved. Viagra and the tart cheap fizz had brought on exquisitely agonising acid reflux. As it was getting on for nine o’clock, we decided that if we didn’t get up right now, leave the hotel, and go and find something to eat, we’d starve. As we walked down the hill into the teeth of the gale, raindrops hit us in the face like tiny bullets.

I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat and read the paper. A churchgoing charity worker had stolen enough money from a 102-year-old woman to buy three properties in the UK and to consider buying a village in Spain. Nearly one in three court cases at magistrates’ courts fails to go ahead because the defendants can’t be arsed to turn up. The British are now so fat that endangered breeds of heavy horses such as the Suffolk Punch are being revived as personal transport. A computer screen aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, our spanking new, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, launched last week, was seen to be displaying the logo of Windows XP (copyright 1985–2001). An NHS contractor concealed 700,000 test results in a cupboard because it couldn’t be bothered processing them.

‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting to have a word with the mechanic about my Clio.) ‘Yes. I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve driven German cars, and then I got this one, and I just can’t get used to it.’ ‘Why did you change then?’ I said, annoyed by the snobbery. ‘I’m a spirit medium,’ she said. ‘I have lots of wealthy clients. I was working with one in her home, and it came into my head to say to her, “He says you must give everything away, including Bella.” I didn’t have a clue who or what Bella was. The client was dumbfounded.

French supermarket cashiers won’t be hurried. Nor will their customers, many of whom seem caught out by a bill at the end, then laboriously write out a cheque. This might be a contrarian French anti-capitalist attitude (‘no, Monsieur: time is not money’),   which is wholly admirable, of course, except when I’m in a tearing hurry and waiting to pay. While the pensioner in front of me fruitlessly riffled through her handbag for her chequebook for the third time, I stared out of the window and was instantly rewarded by the sight of a Fiat reversing into the rear of a parked Citroën. Wallop! The drivers leapt out to view the damage, which was negligible, apparently.

‘Get ready for the stink,’ said Oscar as we walked up the concrete ramp to the entrance of the ape house. As we pushed through the swing door, the smell of herbal manure and the humidity were momentarily overwhelming. Once our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, we saw the usual crowd gathered in front of the reinforced glass window that separated the mountain gorillas from the human beings. We had stupidly left Oscar’s iPad on the first bus of the three it had taken us to get there, but by now our devastation had given way to depression. The sight of these mountain gorillas made the iPad seem curiously irrelevant. I have a theory that the gene responsible for obesity in humans also compels them to go to the zoo.

My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly got a wink. Vivid dreams made him lash out at me in his sleep with kicks and flailing arms. In the morning I opened my eyes and his clear blue eyes, three inches from mine, were studying me. ‘Did you have nightmares, Oscar?’ I said. The eyes considered. ‘Not nightmares,’ he said judiciously. ‘Dreams.’ ‘What about? You were kicking and punching me all night,’ I said. ‘I dreamt Dominic came to my school, and we didn’t do any work, we just played football all day.’ Dominic was Oscar’s best friend at his old school. Dominic is a gigantic boy and a Newcastle United supporter.

‘Jeremy, I want you to sit here next to me — unless you’re frightened of me?’ We were briefly introduced at her father’s funeral party; otherwise our hostess and I hadn’t met before. We were about to sit down in her recently deceased father’s house, which she has inherited, and this, she said, was her first dinner party. Her father and I became friends two years before he died, aged 82. Everyone told me he was a terrible snob with a vile temper but I only ever found him entirely jovial and an erudite and witty conversationalist. ‘Should I be frightened of you?’ I said. ‘I am who I am,’ she said. ‘What you see is what you get. I’m sorry. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. I know I’m not.

Chez Frank is a popular local boar-hunters’ bar, tobacconist and general store at a lonely crossroads in the forest. It also serves daily lunches of no-nonsense French country food. There’s no menu; you get what you’re given. You like it or lump it. The chap who first told us about Chez Frank, now dead and missed, said on no account to tell anyone else about it, especially the local English milords, in case they flocked there and ruined the authenticity of the atmosphere. Catriona took me last Sunday to celebrate my no longer being depressed. We sat at an outside table under the low boughs of a blossoming chestnut tree.

I was sitting between mother and daughter on the sofa, and we were having a ‘wee night’ as Glaswegians put it. Having a wee night roughly means ‘celebrating’. Yesterday the daughter finished the final exam of her English degree. On the low table in front of us were three gin and tonics, two packets of fags, a souvenir ashtray from Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, a packet of transparent French cigarette papers, a plastic syringe with hash oil rammed up one end, a disposable lighter, a portable Bluetooth speaker, and an open laptop. Mother and daughter were taking it in turns to choose music videos on YouTube.

‘Emmanuel Macron est le plus grand con du monde,’ said the elderly gent taking the vacant seat on my right at the Marine Le Pen rally last week. He had slicked-back white hair, a little hog’s-bristle moustache and broken-down white trainers. Plus grand means ‘biggest’, du monde means ‘in the world’, and con means, well, have a guess. A teenage girl and her pal squeezed past to occupy the spare pair of seats on my left. They flung themselves joyfully into the chanting and singing before they’d even sat down. The Palais Nikaia, a concert venue next to Nice airport, holds 8,000 people.

I went to a barbecue. Everyone was patient and well disposed towards the silent, depressed, two-toed sloth in their midst. The eye contact told me that I was included in the conversation but it was also understood that I need not contribute. They comprehended and they sympathised. If I didn’t want to, there was no need to go into it or explain. Or indeed to say anything. I sat a little apart from the nest of outdoor furniture and the circle of conviviality revolving around it, puffing on my new vaping contraption, emitting long plumes and billows of white, ‘fresh mint’-flavoured steam. Present were five adults and a child. The child was a seven-year-old boy called George Eagle. George Eagle was brimming with eager intelligence and vivid imagination.

When I was depressed 20 years ago, the (then) new antidepressant drug Prozac sorted it easily. It took six weeks for it to lift me up and I stopped taking it after four months. I experienced no side effects and lived happily ever after, believing that the episode was a one-off. Marvellous. Back in January, just before my 60th birthday, the black dog came back and I was again in front of a doctor, depressed but phlegmatic, confidant that a few months worth of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors would get me back on the dance floor with all my comfortable illusions restored. A friend had recommended I ask for Venlafaxine which, he said, worked more quickly than Prozac. So I suggested she write me a prescription for that, and she cheerfully agreed.

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into a seat beside a young chap who was turned sideways and chatting with the fellow behind him, who was leaning forward. They were speaking in English, quietly, about Melania Trump. The chap beside me was French; the one behind us, Turkish. They were agreeing on how good for her age she looked. She hadn’t had any ‘aesthetic’ surgery either, as far as he could tell, which was a brave choice, thought the Turk. She was Czech, wasn’t she? ‘Slovenian,’ said the French guy authoritatively. ‘Yes, they look after themselves those eastern European women,’ said the Turk. ‘I was in Budapest one time and even the middle-aged women were thin.