CHAPTER 41
Our route wriggled and danced across the map, from Toulouse to Lastours, Carcassonne to Peyrepertuse, and then Beziers. Each held one or more castles, each held a story, and it was some time before I realised how much each place held for Alys. I had a hint of what was going on when we had passed Lastours, a spectacular chain of towers along a ridge, and continued uphill to a small hut with a tourist info place inside, where Alys had raved over some butterfly or other, as well as any number of short-toed eagles, lizards, plants, slime moulds, whatever.

I collared Nansi as we watched her daughter scurrying around with camera, notebook and laughter, and I asked directly. Nansi sighed, and gave me a hesitant smile.

“We thought we’d lost her, Enfys. We made that promise, remember? That we would take you both down the Rhine, or the Loire, whatever? Vic, me, we really thought… No. Not losing her, are we? Neil…”

She shook herself.

“This is her trip, really. Vic will get his photos, but she will have her fill, as best as we can manage. Do you mind?”

I laid an arm over her shoulder, giving a squeeze.

“How could I ever mind? How can I help?”

“Just keep doing what you have been. We’re going to be squeezing a lot in, this trip. Keep her head spinning. Next stop is a classic, sort of, and we have a couple of rooms booked in the new town, which is the old town, which is… Oh, Vic can explain”

We settled into our rooms that evening, once again a space for me and my lover apart from her parents, which still left me almost screaming with joy, and then set off for the old/new/whatever town. A reasonably large square was fringed by a lot of eateries, each with a drift of tables around its edges. We seated ourselves at one of them, after Vic had spent what felt like hours comparing their menus, and almost at once a waitress appeared, saying something in French.

We filtered our orders through Vic, and I went for a beer. The menu was clear on that one, with a variety of glass sizes, going up to two litres. I raised an eyebrow to Nansi, and she nodded to her right.

“There’s always an idiot, wherever you are. I am gambling that he is English, and… yup!”

The man Nansi had spotted was grotesquely muscled, wearing a white vest cut hack deeply to the rear, almost like a woman’s racing swimming costume. When he turned in his seat to take the oversized glass of lager he had ordered, I could see he had the tiniest of shorts on, the sort used by runners some time in the previous century. His head looked slightly odd, and when Vic caught the way I was trying not to stare, he spoke plainly to me, in a conversational style.

“I am going to use all sorts of odd phrases here so that he doesn’t hear a word we might share with his own language. That is the result of work done to move hair from parts of his body onto the top of his head so that there remains coverage that might have receded like the ebb tide. You can tell by the very straight hairline across his forehead. Mind you, I don’t think his partner’s hair is all hers, either”

The bodybuilder, or whatever he called himself, was grinning as he caught Vic’s sideways look, and brandished the best part of half a gallon of beer one-handed.

“Yeah, man-size drink, innit? None of your poncey Frog thimbles for me!”

Vic pursed his mouth and made a gesture involving bending his right arm at the elbow, with his left hand in the crook, saying in a passable French accent, “Ouai, faut avoir de grands bras!”

The gorilla grinned and nodded, totally missing the gesture, and turned to the blonde with the hair extensions sitting beside him.

“Yeah, darlin’, what I said: I got a right to appreciate the scenery. That’s what women are for, awright?”

We ordered, we ate, we kept to our own language, and the food was lovely, but it was only when a rock band started playing on a stage at the other end of the square that I stopped hearing his steady flow of sexist drivel. It wasn’t just his shorts that were from a previous century.

The band was interesting; called something French, they sang almost entirely in English, with emphasis placed oddly, and regular mispronunciations. By that, I don’t mean that they mispronounced a lot of words, but that the errors they made were consistent, as if they had decided on their own form and were convinced it was correct. One song, however, a happily bouncing tune that they were all smiling to as they sang, made it very clear that they didn’t actually speak English at all.

Alys was the one who worked it out first.

“Mam?”

“Yes, love?”

“Are you hearing the same song I am?”

“If it’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Stones, I think so”

“Why are they all smiling? Don’t they understand the words?”

Vic scooped up the last of his mousse au chocolat, and shook his head after licking the spoon.

“No, not at all. They learn the songs from recordings”

Nansi suddenly snorted, as the lead singer grinned his way through lines about a blitzkrieg raging and stinking bodies, and when she had caught her breath, waved a hand.

“Vic, remember that CD Neil showed us that time? The, um…”

She glanced at the deformed man, who was now on his third glass of what must have been horribly flat lager by then, before speaking again.

“I’ll change the name to Welsh, but the band is called air that is bent. Girls, a lot of recordings used to be very rare, and you would find editions from foreign countries, either sold off cheap or, more often, at inflated prices. I remember I found a Led Zep record once, their second album, on vinyl, with all the sleeve notes and song titles in Spanish. The one we are talking about was an album on CD by air that’s bent, which was a Japanese import, with a lyrics sheet prepared in Japan”

Alys squinted slightly.

“And…”

“And the Japanese hadn’t translated the words, they had just written down what they thought they had heard. Made no sense at all!”

“What? Like ‘kiss the sky’ versus ‘kiss this guy’?”

“Oh, a lot worse! Next time we see Neil, see if he can drag it out for us”

Nansi sobered abruptly, clearly due to the memories that bit whenever our friend’s name came up.

“Anyway, love, at least this lot are in tune. And our new friends are off at last. Carpets and piles, Vic?”

“I am not betting against a certainty, love”

The two English people rose and he started to walk away as she grabbed her bag, cigarettes and lighter before clattering off after him, and of course she was in a microdress and white heels that must have been well over four inches in height. Vic was nodding to Nansi, with a broad grin in place.

“Told you! So is it carpet world or Preparation H? I think we should be told!”

Alys was staring at her father, her mouth not quite fully open.

“Dad, how many beers have you had?”

He shrugged.

“Nit driving tomorrow, and we’re on holiday!”

He smiled something in French at a waiter, and raised his eyebrows at the rest of us. Sod it. We were indeed on holiday, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, Vic was fully relaxing. Our drinks came quickly, and after a quick sip, I smiled at him.

“Carpet world or haemorrhoid ointment?”

He shrugged, putting his arms out wide.

“They always walk like that, and I can’t decide whether they are practising to carry a roll of carpet under each arm, or if they’ve got piles in their pits”

Oh dear. I lay with Alys that night, and she was still smiling at the memory.

“You felt it as well, didn’t you, love? He’s happy, happy and relaxed. Not seen him like that since…”

Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head sharply.

“No. Not seen him like that. Close, but not there. Can’t really blame him, I mean, not with… I’ve not been easy for them, have I?”

Nansi’s plea was there, so I rolled over to kiss my lover, which shut her up for a short while, which became a much longer time, and then, as we lay in our sweat, I asked the important question.

“We getting any time on a beach, this trip?”

“Dunno, but I brought the snorkel packs, just in case!”

Subject changed, twice, and successfully, at least for a while.

Breakfast in the hotel was as bad as I had come to expect in France, but I didn’t care. We packed for a day on our feet in the sun, and after a long walk we arrived at the Aude river. An immense walled town stood on top of the low hill on the other side, and Vic called us to a halt in one of the refuges along the side of the old stone bridge.

“Right: a little bit of history, once more. This was a Cathar stronghold, till the French took it over, and that place we are staying, the Low Town, or sometimes ‘New’, was built after that by the people who used to live up there. They were all kicked out, with nothing except the clothes they were wearing. One of the towers was used after that by the Inquisition, and no: nothing at all like the Python sketch. There’s a torture museum there, believe it or not”

Alys was shaking her head once more.

“What’s in it, Dad?”

“No idea. I do have some limits, love. Anyway, this place was falling down, and they were going to demolish it, but a man called Viollet le Duc did a restoration job on it. When I say ‘restoration’, well, YMMV, as I believe you say, and my mileage really does vary. Apart from some standard overview shots, I am going to be looking for details, stuff they missed when making it all pretty. Some of the walls go all the way back to the Romans, for example. That means I am boing to be busy most of the day, so three of you will have a day to yourselves. There’s a lot to see there, and it is going to be crowded. My plan is to walk in through the main gate and spot an eatery, set a time and meet there for lunchtime. Set another rendezvous point for about five, and then eat back in the new/old town. That suit?”

The heat was building as we followed a curving ascent halfway around the fortress, until we came to a massive gatehouse, with a bas-relief statue of some cartoonish woman with huge breasts. Vic sighed.

“Ignore that; typical invented story to explain the town’s name. The last part of it, in the local accent, sounds like ‘sonna’, which can mean ‘rang’, as in a bell. So they invented Dame Carcas here, and came up with a story”

Nansi was grinning, obviously knowing the punchline.

“Think of Beddgelert and the dog, girls, except this was a woman with a pig”

Alys had squeezed my hand at the g-word, and I suspected that she already knew of the story, so I shrugged.

“Go on, then”

Vic nodded.

“OK. Short version: city was under siege, and they were down to the last of their livestock, which was one pig. Dame Carcas decided to fire it over the walls from some siege engine or other, with an announcement that she didn’t like to see the besieging army go hungry, plenty more where that came from, etc. So that army ‘said ‘sod that for a game of soldiers’ and cleared off, whereupon she ordered the city bells to ring. ‘Carcas sonna’, so to speak. Absolute rubbish, of course”

Nansi was still grinning.

“My sort of woman, though!”

Vic shook his head.

“Not mine, love. My two are better—they’re real, and they are here. Let’s do this!”