CHAPTER 44
It had started again. Marck told me a few days later that they had found nothing in the way of fingerprints, and so nothing could be taken further. Matty was around the day after that, and he began work immediately, with visits from Elle and my god-daughter, to install a system of television cameras connected to a recording device, as well as some strong external lights that would respond to any motion near them.

Four days afterwards, I awoke in the very small hours to the sound of breaking glass, as somebody methodically shot every single fixture with some type of air weapon.

There were other wrapped packages of excrement burnt at my door, and once a dead rat was nailed to it, but after the shooting Marck and Roland spoke to the chiefs, and for a few nights there was a car parked near the house, the markings clear. I clung to the strength I had found, Marck’s smile and promise and the presence of his colleagues, and each day I rode my little scooter to the University and the far more open minds of my students.

Pascale told me that I was near to full certification, and it would involve at some point observers in my lessons, my tutorials. I had found my own plan of academic action, and each day I tried to make a new joke in the English for the class to laugh at, after they had worked out what was actually amusing. Or, sometimes, what was not in any way amusing to a sane person, and then we would have a deeper discussion about the English people and how deeply strange they were. I remember one boy asserting that they suffered from some sort of odd complex deriving from the fact that they had only rivalled, never surpassed France in influence and power, and I found his parochial outlook both worrying and amusing.

Another informed me that if one were to live in perpetual rain, eating the worst food in the world, then perhaps one’s sense of humour might develop in a manner skewed to normality, which I thought perhaps more deserving of consideration. For the first boy, I simply showed him a map of the world from a century before. Ah. That was his response.

I had three weeks of relative calm before the next unpleasant stirring, which was the copying, and displaying throughout the University, of a letter sent to a local newspaper.

‘My sirs, my ladies.

Is it appropriate that a teacher removed from one of our schools because of his unnatural and perverted behaviour should now be employed in the same profession at our excellent University despite his disgusting advances and importuning of our vulnerable and innocent children at that school? What message are we to send people who may wish to attend that august institution if we allow a pederast and molester of children to continue to have access to young people, to deprave, corrupt and perhaps even infect with SIDA? I NAME AND SHAME SERGE LAPLACE, NOW CALLING HIMSELF SOPHIE!

Yours amicably
Elodie Blanchard’

It was a Tuesday when I found the first copy, affixed to the notice board in the language centre. I tore it down, but there were more, in the cafeteria, in the laundry room, at the bar, among the announcements for sporting events, and as I ripped them down there seemed to be more. Elle was to hand, and in a day I had a visit at my stained and charred door, and it was Abdullah. There was no observation of the propriety as he entered, for he gathered me immediately into a close embrace that I am sure would have scandalised his parents.

“Speak to me, Sophie, I would know all”

I did speak, of rats and graffiti, of paper wrapping excrement and nocturnal shots, of Marck and the meeting with the direction at the school, of…of Benny and his defence and then abandonment of me. There was a knock at the door, and I started, badly, and Abdullah saw.

“Calm, my sweet. It is a friend”

He opened the door, and brought in Pascale, who waved away my greeting.

“Chut, Sophie, I know how to use a kitchen. Speak to this nice man while I prepare some coffee. You have milk?”

“Yes, in the refrigerator”

I continued my tale, and Abdullah made his notes. Eventually, as he finished his interrogation of myself and Pascale, he sat back and sighed.

“So you know this Blanchard?”

“Yes, from when we all lived in the flat, in the city. She has a food shop”

“And she knew of, well, Sophie?”

“She met me when I had first stepped across the boundary, and she was loud, and she said I was a travesty. She had always known I was a queer, she said, and then Maman, she told her to bugger herself up her own arsehole….and that we were away to our new house, and garden…”

Pascale laughed. “Ah, a woman after my own heart, or at least my taste in spiced language”

Abdullah’s voice was quieter. “She is a grandmother now, Sophie. A little girl, one Tiffanie, which is spelled very strangely”

“It was her daughter Forgeron impregnated?”

“Yes indeed. At a young age, but unfortunately not THAT young, otherwise we would have little to worry about from his part. No, there are---Pascale? You would tell this part?”

My friend put her hand onto my knee. “Sophie, there are once more letters, letters of the same kind. It would appear there is a group, and they do not wish the, I am sorry, pervert to be allowed or infect their adolescents. They demand your dismissal”

I began to tremble a little. “And the direction of the University, they say what?”

She laughed once more, happily and coarsely. “Oh, they are of a more modern and tolerant view, but they share the same tastes in words as your maman and myself. They have instituted a security review to discover who is behind this little rash of copied letters, and when they do his course of study, or employment, with the University will come to an abrupt termination”

She leant forward to speak in earnest to me. “You must realise, my sweet, that I am not the only one here that values you, that sees how wonderfully you work with your students. They know, as well, of the lost children you have recovered. They have a talent that increases daily, and they would nurture it and make it their own. You are not alone in this, my sweet, you will never be alone”

In the end I had to weep, for it made sense to do so with my friends there to dry my face rather than later, alone in the dark. They would not stop my work, that was the thanks I gave to the Good Saviour that night. Matty began work on hidden cameras a few days later.

There were more letters in the paper, many of them defending me but still several that pressed forward the campaign of distortion and deceit, and outright falsehood. I smiled wryly at some, for a number of the alleged activities I had ceased to be equipped for some time previously, but they still hurt. Pascale kept me informed when each new latter of rage and accusation arrived, but the direction stood firm.

One day I went to enter the WCs, and a young girl I had not seen before turned to look at me.

“Not here. The men’s pissers are over there”

By the time I thought to challenge her for her identity, she had gone. I never saw her again, and I do believe she came in from the city just for the chance of abusing me. Someone, somewhere, was orchestrating events around me.

They found my University e-mail address, which was hardly difficult, and my box of receipt started to fill with all sorts of different problems. There was abuse, there was pornography, and there were advertisements for products that promised to enlarge the recipient’s penis. I changed my address a little, and they stopped, but Marck could hold no promise of any investigation. This was not, apparently, a hate crime that involved someone that it was officially illegal to hate, as far as his chiefs were concerned. The assaults, the shootings at the house, they were real: the electronic warfare was merely words.

I realised, at that point, that I was relying on Marck as much as my family. Rollo was absorbed by Margot’s approach to motherhood, and I wondered how it was that Marck did so much for me. One night, as his car sat bright, shiny, pretty and bearing the word ‘Police’ outside the sunflower house, and he sat in my kitchen for some of the coffee, I had to ask.

“Why? I suppose, my sweet, it is two things. Rather, two people, yourself and your brother”

I started up at that, and he put his hand on my arm. “No, Sophie, it is not like that. You…it is difficult not to sound cruel, but…”

His eyes looked beyond the walls of the house. “Sophie, I must say this in one utterance, so please remain silent. No, I do not desire you, because while you were a boy you were attractive but you were never a boy and you were always a girl and I see you are now a grown woman and that does not bid a welcome to my desires”

He stopped, and one of his eyes turned to mine. “You see? You are not alone here, in this state of difference. I am someone who likes young men, not young girls. This is our seal, our bond. Yes, I know it is not the same. Whore, I watched Serge as a boy, and he had a promise of what I desired, and yet I did not desire what he had”

He laughed, the tension breaking at last. “Brothel of shit, if you had been a boy you would have broken my heart into tiny shards when you grew, but I saw that you were so wrong in your life that when Roland told me, I said to myself, I said Marck, your piece had better eyesight and judgement than your brain”

He took a sip of the coffee. “Now, that is a very unusual thing for any man, no? Normally it is exactly the inverse”

I looked at him, seeking signs of those things I had been called, but they were absent. “Marck, what is it between Rollo and you?”

The laughter this time was hearty. “You do not think? Oh, no, absolutely not, my sweet! He is definitely not of my sort, and I watch him with that tall blonde friend of yours and I could weep, they are so utterly fitted soul to soul. What it is…what it was, it was some time ago, and I had a little friend…”

A little male friend, that was the French he spoke. ‘Un petit ami’

“We were not suited, and…look, girl, let me leave this as a simple statement. I was in a position where my life could have ended up as a real brothel of shit, and your brother, he found a way to make it better, make it work, so that nobody felt the need any more, the need to hurt, no? So your brother, this Roland, he is owed a debt, and I am an honourable cocksucker, so I repay”

Another sip. “Besides which, I am fond of you. The courage you have shown…shit, that day on the bridge, I knew exactly what you intended, but I did not know quite why. Now…today you fit your skin, and you make sense as a person”

That was indeed our bond, and I learned a lesson that evening. The homosexual man is shown so often as something like a distorted woman, but with a piece. They, the media, the prejudices of most people, show him as having a large sign over his head, and yet here was Marck, no different to any other man except in liking athletic young men rather than the hostesses of Carpiquet. That brought other memories forward, of his jokes and suggestions to Rollo about those girls, and I understood at once how he had to steer his life and his conversation like one of those inflated rafts in a rocky stream. What I had undergone could turn to bite him as surely as the sun arose each morning. When he left, I embraced him. He was yet another friend, one more I had missed in those days of misery.

The next evening he was not there, and I woke to find that eggs had been thrown at all the windows. Matty’s cameras had caught a few shapes, but they all had cagoules over their heads, and their action had been too swift to leave any useful detail. Another dead rat was in the box of letters. I took more photographs, and once more rode my little scooter to my young people.

I woke that night to the sound of alarms and sirens from police, fire vehicles, ambulances, all sorts of things, and there was a glow from the North and the East. I stumbled down my stairs, still in a state of drowsiness, and saw that the glow was orange, and came from somewhere towards Le Havre. I turned my television on, and found the chain that carried the news 24 hours, and it was shocking. The glow was from the terminal at the port, where the oils were stored. There was a fire, explosions, and the sounds I had heard were the services of urgency rushing to secure the area, fight the fire, aid the wounded. I watched the story for about an hour, praying to the Saviour that Marck and his friends would be safe, and I was just making a coffee when the first stone came through the window of the living room.