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“Why, because he’s not phoning you every five minutes?” Jerome threw Nico a knowing look. “Flor, mate, you might not want to hear this, but perhaps he just wasn’t as into you as much as you were into him.”
“No, this isn’t about me. It’s about… him. He’s… I think he’s not well. And there’s nothing I can do to make him better.”
I sucked in a deep breath and spilled my guts. I told them about Charles’s weird colours thing, which sounded even more weird when I was half drunk and describing it with the verbal dexterity of a five-year-old. Because, in all honesty, drunkenly trying to explain to a simple salt harvester and an oyster fisherman that your lover pictured you as brilliant flashes of silver darting through a background of lush forest green, and that splashes of buttery yellow equalled calm, homey happiness, then yeah, I guessed those could be difficult concepts to swallow. At least I captured their attention, though.
“What, and this turned you on?” Jerome screwed up his big, freckled nose as if I’d just admitted an addiction to the late-night politics programme on the telly.
“Yeah, well, not that part of things, exactly. But yeah, the whole package did. It was more than being turned-on.”
Jerome snorted. “Mon dieu, and he was the one with mental health issues?”
Whatever. I didn’t bother outlining my theory to Jerome, but I’d come round to thinking we all had our own brand of strangeness. Maybe Charles’s fucked-up mind wasn’t so many steps away from having a passion for salt farming or oyster fishing, or an annoying girl you’d loved since you were fifteen. Or accepting that even though you were worried sick about someone and wanted to be with them every second of the day, responsibility, pragmatism, pride, and respect for that person prevented it. Anchoring you, instead, to a dull tourist island and its changing winds and birdlife and tides and a demented grandparent. And a piece of island history that needed rescuing. Who knew what was going on inside someone’s head? Maybe, when it came down to it, we all harboured strange thoughts and dreams, but that perhaps only beautiful and ingenious sensitive souls like Charles organised the mess of their minds into colours. Seeing as I had a riveted audience, I carried on.
“And when Charles felt stressed, a big orange ball would push all the other colours aside, out of his head. And if things turned really bad, then black shadows appeared too, which sometimes morphed into frightening creatures, invading his dreams so he woke up screaming. His mother had this stuff going on inside her head too, and she killed herself, and I think Charles believes it’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy that he’s going to end up the same way. And I don’t want him to, I don’t want to ever get that phone call, because I love him, and I kind of hoped that if we had enough time together, then he’d love me back. We could have had something really special; you know?”
Time ticked by while I swigged the dregs of my beer and my friends exchanged looks that said Charles most definitely had a screw loose, that it might be contagious, and that I was next. Or perhaps it was my simple, honest declaration of love that had rendered them mute.
“Waouh,” observed Nico, for lack of any other suitable comeback.
“That was exactly my response when he told me, too,” I answered. “But, trust me, all that shit feels very real and is happening inside his head. And most of the time, it’s beautiful and amazing and part of his genius, because did I tell you the man’s a fucking genius? At numbers and business and shit. But when it all gets too much, then the colours are ugly and overpowering and he needs professional help and I just know he’s not getting it. Because he’s hopeless at looking after himself, he becomes too caught up in his work and his mind and the cleverness of it. To the extent that he forgets everything else. But there’s nothing I can do about that, because he’s a full-grown man with a life in London and I’m just a fucking salt harvester living on a little island, whom he spent a glorious summer with.”
What could you say to that? Not much, and so my friends didn’t, they just eyed me with a little more trepidation than usual and bought me another drink. And then we talked about Léa and the baby and Jerome pretended he wasn’t too bothered about it when he was almost wetting himself with excitement. And then Nico began making eyes at a hot chick at the bar none of us had ever seen before, but whom I’d bet my salt tile Nico was going to be banging into the floorboards by midnight. So I zoned out for a bit.
“Does he know how you feel about him?”
Jerome had wandered over to talk to Julien and I hadn’t even noticed. Nico’s shrewd dark eyes watched me as he stubbed out his cigarette.
“Not really.” I sighed. “We were having too much fun to dwell on what was coming next. And then, when it was on the tip of my tongue, he left, very suddenly. We didn’t get a chance to talk properly about the future. But I’m really worried about him, Nico. He… didn’t sound quite right.”
“You could pay him a visit? If nothing else, you’ll work out where you stand with him.”
As if I hadn’t had that thought every five minutes since the last phone call. I’d even gone so far as to check flight times. How would Charles feel if I turned up on his doorstep? He wasn’t out as bisexual, as far as I knew. The sudden appearance of a gay lover might be hellishly awkward. And maybe I was a total idiot and reading too much into the situation. Perhaps, as Jerome had put it, in his usual blunt manner, Charles just wasn’t that into me?
“Practically, that’s a challenge until the harvesting ends. And also, what’s the point? He’s living his life, I’m living mine. That’s not going to change. He says he’s fine. He knows where I am if he needs me. He’s a grown-up, you know? I can’t tell him to work less hard or trot along to the doctors.”
Had getting it off my chest eased the pain? Maybe a little, but it wasn’t changing anything. And as the evening rolled on, and in the days and weeks that followed, I came around to thinking that in the long run, maybe Charles leaving so soon was for the best. He’d have struggled to prise me from him if he’d stayed any longer, and I sure as hell couldn’t go back to London with him. So I did the next best thing, like a needy limpet on an oyster shell, I clung to every text he wrote and every phone call he made, even if the messages did become shorter and the calls more infrequent. And then, one sad day, petered out altogether.
CHAPTER 25
FLORIAN
On the face of it, shopping for pushchairs and a corporate bid to take over a modest salt cooperative didn’t have much in common. But Jerome’s accounts of him and Léa accumulating a pile of pricey childcare equipment and fluffy toys, which they were both adamant a tiny person couldn’t live without, got me thinking. Because God knew Jerome and Léa didn’t have enough cash to buy all that expensive shit, and neither did Léa’s feckless parents. Which meant a difficult, grumpy bugger must be footing the bill, which meant, just maybe, that grumpy bugger had a heart after all.
Every single salt farmer living on the island turned up to the extraordinary general meeting. By this time of year, the hangar at the cooperative building in Ars was crammed to the rafters with salt, dried out and ready to be packaged and sold off. So we couldn’t all squeeze in. The under-utilised function room upstairs in L’Escale was free, however, and if being on home turf made it any easier for me to face the masses and convince them not to follow the corporate cash, then I’d take it. And the bar had history—the first ever cooperative meeting had taken place here; I wasn’t above using nostalgic sentimentality to strengthen my cause. Nor, it seemed, was I above quoting Napoleon. I mean, why go to the trouble of inventing brand new speeches when France’s greatest orator had already created a few for you?
Credibility, logic, and emotion. That was what Charles had said. I could have done with him here now in the audience, for moral support. Or better still, at the lonely front table alongside me, filling in the gaps where my mind had blanked. Michel, Jerome’s father, had already laid out the schedule for the meeting and it was brief and to the point: I was going to present the arguments for and against, and then we were going to vote on it. The Selco representative had been invited along but declined, so confident that their offer would be accepted. Which left seventy or more expectant faces staring up at me, and me alone, from rows of glitzy velvet padded chairs I’d only ever seen dragged out for weddings or funerals. Jerome, seated on the second row, gave a loud cough, which brought me back to the present.
“Mesdames et messieurs,” I croaked, my throat parched like a desert. Nerves. Charles had said to ignore them; they just showed how much I cared. Sharpened me up for the challenge ahead.
“There’s no ladies here, you daft sod,” shouted someone from the back. “Apart from you, Flora.”
So much for credibility. My cheeks burned as the jeers of seventy blokes rained down on me. Ignore the goading, said Charles’s steady voice in my head. Don’t let them rattle you. Show them how strong you are. Focus on the prize.
Sucking in a big breath, I counted to ten, waited until the noise settled, then ploughed on.
“Messieurs.” Gentlemen.
“At the last meeting, someone suggested it was impossible to hold our own against big business. Impossible for us to be competitive, impossible to turn a profit. Impossible to exist as a small, independent cooperative any longer.”
