Chapter One
"Bonjour Madame!" I greet the lady behind the desk and put on my most charming smile. It always does to treat these ladies well. Some of them have the power of a small country.
She looks up from her work, peers at me over the top of her half-moon glasses and sniffs slightly as though she can smell my Englishness. My smile falters a little. I mean, I have been in a police station in England before. Once. So although I'm not exactly a hardened criminal, I do have some idea of the form. But do they do things differently in France?
"Mon frere est ici . . ." I start haltingly in my GCSE French. The problem with GCSE French is that you have to fight a constant urge to ask people their name, how old they are and where they live before you can get down to the brass tacks of any problem. "Il est . . . er . . . em . . ." I'm trying desperately to find the word I need. I trawl through my limited vocabulary. It's no good, there's nothing that vaguely matches it. So I try the English phrase.
"UNDER ARREST."
It doesn't seem to fool her; she looks at me blankly. I try it again, this time with a French accent.
"ARRESTE."
"Il est en etat d'arrestation?" she queries.
This sounds vaguely right so I nod.
"Qui s'appelle?"
"Il s'appelle Barney Colshannon."
"Attendez lˆ bas."
She gestures to some chairs by the wall, so Sam and I duly wander over to them and sit down.
Of course, I blame my mother for all this. She had just received Morgan the Pekinese's pet passport and suggested we all nip over to France for the weekend to see if it was working. He is a rather old and smelly dog with no teeth left in the front of his mouth and will pee on anything if you leave it in the middle of the room. I'm not quite sure what he is thinking when he tries to bite other dogs, he must be under the impression he can suck them to death. Anyway, despite being adored by my mother, Morgan and I have never quite seen eye to eye, so why we couldn't have just popped him on a cross channel ferry and waited to see if he came back I simply do not know. However, the pull of some French bread and cheap booze was simply too much for us and we all readily acquiesced.
My mother always makes France sound absolutely delightful as she is a bit of a Francophile at heart, but her version is solely based on Gerard Depardieu and some adverts she did for the French tourist board back in the eighties which involved her getting pissed on Bordeaux. According to her, France is just one big bit of cheese with plenty of wine and a few ooh-la-las thrown in. Not a police station in sight. This is a clearly inaccurate opinion because here I am in a French police station with no cheese, no wine and certainly no ooh-la-las.
We had all split up this morning to go our separate ways. I wanted to look at the shops, Barney went down on the beach and as Sam has the only real job out of all of us, he had to make some work phone calls. Sam is Barney's best friend. He has been since we moved to Cornwall about fifteen years ago and hence he's always been a presence in my life. I popped back to the hotel after my little shopping sortie (didn't buy anything as I am stony broke but that is another story) and the receptionist there gave me the message about Barney. I immediately went to get Sam because he is a lawyer and I was under the misapprehension that he might be of some use, and then we headed for the police station in double quick time. So at this precise moment my parents are sitting in a little cafe somewhere in Le Touquet, expecting us to turn up any second but nonetheless having a raucous time and probably some cheese too, blissfully oblivious to the fact that their son has been arrested. Whereas I, by virtue of my French GCSE, sit here (which just goes to show that too much education can be a bad thing), with Sam who is busy smiling at some girl across the room.
Sam leans over and whispers to me, "Excellent French, by the way."
"Thank you."
"I particularly liked the ARREST thing."
"I couldn't think of the word in French."
"Saying it with a German accent was nothing less than a stroke of genius."
"It was a French accent," I spit out between gritted teeth. God, he is maddening.
"So tell me what the lady at the hotel said again?"
"She just said that Barney had been arrested for assault. He apparently broke some poor bloke's arm. My brother wouldn't assault anyone!" Barney is quite frankly the sweetest individual alive. He wouldn't come out of his room for three days when he accidentally killed the class hamster by tripping and falling on top of the shoebox as he was carrying it home for the weekend so you can imagine the tough sort of individual we're talking about.
"It does seem a bit strange."
"A bit strange? Sam, you're the bloody lawyer. You're going to have to make them release him."
"I am not a sodding criminal lawyer."
"But Barney wouldn't hurt a fly!"
"You just said that he broke someone's arm!"
"Do you think they're mistreating him?" I ask in a whisper, with a terrible picture of Barney in shackles thrust into my mind.
"Clemmie, we're in the middle of France, not a war zone."
An officer walks out of one of the side doors and comes up to us. He looks a bit scary and stern with a dark mustache and I can feel my knees starting to go with fright. He rattles something off in very rapid French which just sounds like "Blah, blah, French blah, Barney Colshannon, acute accent, blah, blah, catch the word for arm, blah."
I glance over to Sam, who looks none the wiser either, and then ask the officer to repeat what he's just said more slowly, which he does. I throw in the occasional question and so does he. He then asks us to follow him.
"What did Inspector Clouseau say?" whispers Sam as we go through the side door.
"He asked if you were here to represent Barney. I said that you were and I was going to translate. He then said that Barney had been charged with assault. This bloke was apparently standing on the pavement, cleaning some dog poo off his shoe, when Barney came along and hit him with a chair."
"A chair?"
"Yeah, from the cafe next door."
"Why would Barney hit him?"
"I don't know. Apparently the bloke had never laid eyes on him before."
The building reminds me a bit of a school and the officer leads us up to a door, which he opens to reveal some very tatty furniture and a very fed-up Barney.
I rush over to him. "Barney! Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Don't worry about anything, Sam will sort it out."
"Clemmie, I can only say 'two beers' in French. I don't think that's going to get us very far. Are you all right, mate?" says Sam.
"Oh, I'm fine."
"Barney, what on earth happened? Why did you hit that man?"
"I thought he was being electrocuted. He was holding on to the electricity line which went into the cafe and shaking all over."
"So you hit him with a chair?"
"A plastic chair. Yes."
"He was cleaning dog poo off his shoe."
"Was he? Well, he was doing it pretty vigorously, he was jigging his leg all over the place. It looked like he was convulsing."
"So . . ." says Sam slowly. "A man was cleaning some dog poo off his shoe and you thought he was being electrocuted and smacked him with a chair."
"That's right. And then out of nowhere this police officer swooped down and arrested me and carted me off here."
"I hope your French is up to this, Clemmie," murmurs Sam.
Christ. I haven't got a clue what the verb for being electrocuted is.
* * *
A difficult half an hour follows, where I have to act out being electrocuted, we make phone calls back and forth to the hospital and it's ascertained that the man in question was indeed holding on to something but it turns out to be the telephone line into the cafe. On occasion the police officers' faces start twitching. Luckily the man doesn't want to press charges so Barney is released. Sam and I are hustled back to the waiting room and told that Barney has to complete some paperwork but will be joining us shortly.
"Well, thank God for that," says Sam. "And thank God you speak French."
"Sam, I had to act most of it out. I'm sure they kept asking me questions so I'd have to carry on. At least they're not charging Barney."
"None of them could keep a straight face, let alone charge him with anything."
"He can be a bit loopy sometimes, can't he? Oh, that poor man. We'll have to send him some flowers."
"We'll ask which hospital he's at. Your parents must be wondering where on earth we are, they've been waiting for ages."
"I'm going to have the largest drink you've ever seen once we get to the restaurant."
We descend into silence and turn our attention to the French waiting room. The magazines are in French, the TV is in French and the posters are in French. No surprises there but still very boring. Sam must have come to the same conclusion. He leans over. "So, what are your plans?"
"To get to that bloody restaurant as fast as possible and order some booze and cheese."
"No, I mean for the future. Are you going to stay in Cornwall for a while with us?"
I have just returned in a fairly disastrous fashion from an around-the-world trip and am living with my parents at the moment until I decide what to do with my life. My parents live in an old house in a small village near the north coast of Cornwall which is a pretty nice...
