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Michel clapped his hands. “Quiet everyone,” he called in a pleasant voice. “Pretty boy has something to say.”
Did they all know I was gay? Most of them, probably. I didn’t exactly hide it. Did they take the piss? All the fucking time. If there was another gay salt farmer or oyster fisherman on the island, then he was keeping bloody quiet about it. No wonder the lonely policeman, Julien, had set his sights on me. Some days it seemed as if we were the only fucking homos this side of the bridge to the mainland.
“Come on then, Flora,” goaded Michel. “Spit it out.”
“He usually swallows, I reckon,” shouted a wag from the other side of the room. Connard.
“Only when it’s your dad’s dick,” I yelled back, and Jerome groaned next to me. Oh yes, we were a professional outfit.
A couple of cackles were silenced by nudging elbows. My face felt hot as I cleared my throat.
“We need to present a united front,” I began, as I’d already explained to Jerome, now shuffling away from me as if I’d just declared I had leprosy. With mates like that, who needed enemies? “What I mean is,” I began again, trying not to catch anyone’s eye and somehow managing to latch onto everybody’s, “What it boils down to, unless we debate this thing properly, is two groups—those for Selco and those against. With no firm basis for being in either camp.”
“No shit, Einstein,” muttered Claude.
“Selco are dangling euros under our noses.” I sounded more confident, even though my legs had turned noodly. “And it’s a trick designed to confuse us and tear us apart! Can’t you see? This is exactly what they want. But we need to ignore that and concentrate on the facts. We need to stick together and not allow greed to confuse our thinking. Money makes people like us who’ve never had much blind and foolish. In two years, if we let this windfall cloud our judgement, then our greed might lead us into a state of permanent servitude to this company.”
A round of deserved sniggers followed that outlandish pomposity.
“You auditioning for a lead in Les Misérables, Flor?” Jerome’s eyes were out on stalks. “Greed leads to permanent servitude? What the fuck?”
“Blind and foolish, maybe,” interjected Frederic. “But rich!”
“But for how long?” I countered. “It’s a two-year deal. What then? What if Selco change the terms and conditions like they’ll have every right to? What of our futures?”
“Why don’t we find out?” suggested Michel.
“Exactly!” I let out a whoosh of relief. Thank God I wasn’t the only one with any brain cells in the building, even if the other person was fighting from the opposite corner. “We have questions, but no answers, we have lots of opinions, but no facts. We need to make a list, find out more information about Selco. And we have plenty of time before we need to vote, we don’t need to rush into anything.”
Michel cocked his head as one of his friends murmured in his ear. Another one joined them; the rest shuffled their feet as if awaiting our self-appointed dear leader’s suggestion for whatever came next. Michel might be bigoted, selfish, and thinking solely of himself and his ageing generation, but he wasn’t stupid. I’d got a few folk on my side, I could tell from the nods of approval as I’d been speaking, and he didn’t want to appear too unreasonable and bullish in front of them.
Finally, Michel shifted and gave me a slow nod. “Looks like you’ve talked yourself into a job then, pretty boy.” He turned to the assembled men. “Everyone, listen up: young Flora here is going to give each of us his phone number and email. Send all your questions to him. No matter how trivial. Day and night. Send him all your opinions too. Feel free to write an essay! Our smart young man is going to come up with a list of pros and cons and all the answers to all your questions. We’ll gather here again eleven weeks from now. We’ll have an extraordinary general meeting and put it to the vote.”
Oh, fucking merde.
“Well, Robespierre,” began Jerome, as we cycled home in the dark. “What next?”
My heart was still pounding. “I don’t fucking know, do I? But I had to say something. We’re a cooperative. We need to fucking cooperate!”
God knows where I’d vomited all that crap from. Sure, I’d wrestled with it, truth be told, pretty much non-stop since the letters had landed in the letterbox. My list of reasons as to why the takeover offer was a bad idea ran onto several sheets, and some of them had been voiced here by others with a similar mindset. But sensible objections and even sensible supporting opinions had been lost in a mish-mash of self-serving individuals and others who were just pleased with the sounds of their own voices. A typical French debate, in other words.
“Vive la revolution, that’s what I say.”
Jerome was teasing me, but I had his support, even if I didn’t have the support of the majority of the older guys, or have a fucking clue what I was doing. But I did know I’d only got eleven weeks to come up with a reasoned, coherent argument as to why the cooperative should tell Selco to go fuck themselves.
“I’ll give you a quote,” declared Jerome, “Seeing as you’re in the mood for greatness tonight.”
I laughed; I was a long fucking way from greatness, but I’d take anything if it would help.
“’If you want a thing done well, do it yourself’. Napoleon himself said that. About the only thing I remember from our school history lessons. So do it, Flor. Do it well and let’s show those miserable old fuckers that we’re not handing our heritage over without a battle.”
We reached a fork in the road and Jerome veered away from me.
“Where are you off to?” After that fighting talk, I expected at the very least he’d be joining me in L’Escale to help me plan whatever the fuck I needed to do next. Or at least help me drown my sorrows.
“I’ll… um… I’ll see you tomorrow,” he replied, looking anywhere but at me. “I’ve got to go to Léa’s for the night.”
“Fair enough.”
