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Chapter 27
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Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 28
Bordeaux was empty. Never, ever, had Lala seen it so. As Sèdonoudè drove Teddy’s old fiat along the Rue Aristide Briand, near Place de la Victoire, no soul was to be seen. The cafes that served the milling university students and the shoppers of the Rue St Katherine were shut. The punters, vanished. Only at food shops here and there were shoppers with scarves wrapped around their mouths, woollen gloves on hands, even though the sun had come out to kiss the benighted people of Bordeaux. Matchstick Lowry figures, clutching reusable cotton bags, seeking food for their caves. Lala rolled own the wind and, the smell! It smelled fresh as spring! The throat burning, sinus clogging foul odour of petrol fumes were gone. As they got near to the hospital, a semblance of normality returned with the urgency of flashing blue lights and now, totally unnecessary sirens. The interior of the Institut Bergoniè was a near silent study in motion, as hospital staff moved around covered i
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 29
In the worrying days before her operation, Lala tried not to drink, but she could not stop. The doctors at a clinic in La Rèole ran test after test: blood, heart, lungs, but the results, astonishingly for one so cavalier with their health, all proved to be no cause for concern. Even the numbers for her liver, though the enzymes were high, were not catastrophically so. Lala was so afraid for what life she had, she locked herself in one of the rooms at Chateau Nullepart, the one with the Fantin paintings of flowers and the old wooden trunk, before persuaded by Sèdonoudè that staying at home in a room and allowing the cancer to grow and kill her, as it had Teddy, was not an option he would allow. He would break down the door and call the doctors if need be. Finally, she left, meekly accepting that whatever would be would be, and sat in silence on the journey back to the Institut Bergoniè. Once there, she donned the long, tight, white, elastic stockings to help prevent
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 30
Sèdonoudè stood in the grocer’s shop on the corner nearest the entrance to the Institut Bergoniè. Grapes, isn’t that what all sick people have? He had not been behaving himself in Lala’s absence, or in the confinement that was now supposed to apply to everyone. Except for the most important public service workers in those essential roles of health, food, transport, and public safety. He had printed off his ‘attestation de dèplacement dèrogatoire’, and gone out for cigarettes and booze, and trysts with Linda in the back of Teddy’s old fiat. A gendarme had caught them in flagrante, and, after watching his dark buttocks heaving in between Linda’s milky white thighs for longer than necessary, he proceeded to extract a 135 euro fine from each of them, and then angrily deliver a long moral lecture of the bit ‘the public’ can do to help the nation in its time of great need. It was idiots like them, he said, which prevented him from visiting his mother in the ephad, adding tha
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 31
There were no more hospital visits. From now on, those entering the sick world of hospital halls, or those trapped by infirmity in those halfway houses to the after world - old people’s homes - and, in some pathetic cases, little children, were to die alone, save for the remote compassion of those ordinarily dedicated to saving and nursing them. France, like the rest of Europe, was in a desperate fight against an exponential monster. Lala went home in an ambulance just as Teddy had done, but to a better prognosis. Sèdonoudè was there to greet her. ‘How are you doin’, Lala?’ he said, as two ambulance men unstrapped her wheelchair and rolled it down the ramp. They had tired, irritable eyes above the obligatory face masks. Eyes which had seen too much and were sick of seeing it all too often. They maintained a polite aloofness, which at least was better than that time in the hospital when a porter, clearly at the end of his wits, cursed under his breath as he banged the troll
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 32
Outside, the land never rested, and there was always work that needed to be done. Serge sat on the chugging, red tractor as it drew the teeth of a giant plough through the stiff soil of a fallow field. He sat back in the tractor seat and pulled his tobacco pouch from a pocket of his overalls as he always did, then rolled himself a smoke. He looked at the silhouette of Chateau Nullepart in the sunlight of this glorious spring day and thought about his place in the world. Well, the old, dissolute, anglais was dead, and Madame was not long for this world by the looks of her. Better them than me. But what about my house? He saw Sèdonoudè skulking around in the garden, which was not usual. And as for you, petit nègre, once Madame is up so are you my dark little friend. Serge laughed to himself, a snort of contempt, then carried on ploughing the field in the same way that it ever was.*** After wandering around Chateau Nullepart like a forlorn ghost, Sèdonoudè p
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 33
The recent past: the Brexit ravings, the murder of Jeremy Baden-Flogg MP, Teddy’s sad, mundane death, were now subsumed by a dull ache, a persistent paranoia, a reckoning with sad, individual failures, unhappiness’s, woeful longings, dreams never likely to be achieved. What matter were they, when one moment a person is happily chatting to others in a bar or a shop or peaceful social gathering, or sharing memories of themselves as little children or wonderful drunken nights on social media pages, when the next, those snapshots, are all that will ever be left of them as their bodies succumb to the evil magic of fate? What did they matter, the old girl and boyfriends they were delighted to find still thought kindly of them, a small flame perhaps still burning? Those loves for cigars, wine, music, art, dance, food, sex, violence, solidarity? ‘My glass is empty.’ Lala sat in Teddy’s chair which was now her permanent throne. Sèdonoudè brought her vodka and red bull. The habit
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 34
The next day, something had changed, and they both knew it. Whatever it was that they had - a kind of co-dependency perhaps - it was never going to be enough. Cooped up together like the proverbial birds, with no real outside distractions for comfort, even in so large a house as Chateau Nullepart, demonstrated it. Sèdonoudè felt it first. Lala second. In many ways, though she was the seat of power like a king on a chessboard, she was the more vulnerable, almost immobile, subject to the vagaries of other moves. It was like watching what remained of her life sliding out of sight. Things had never been bad for her as they had been for women like Quentin’s wife, Magali, who had escaped the torment at his hands, or for others living now with the tyranny of miserable men who knew no love but only control. Her suffering was relative, but she suffered. Sèdonoudè had drifted off into something else recently, a reluctant lover, a distant friend, a distracted man. Even if Lala
Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret Chapter 35
Of what ignominy there was in Sèdonoudè’s funeral, Lala would never be aware, for she refused to attend. Neither did Linda, who was denied the right by her now more assertive husband. Thus, it was left to the Camerons to stand in as mourners, while the humanist (none of them really knew what Sèdonoude believed in) celebrant celebrated what he could out of the patchwork of information they were able to supply him. In ordinary times it would have been a profoundly strange affair, a disjointed, remote, reckoning with an afterlife, or the lack thereof, but the disease that had been steadily decimating the aged and the unfortunate had already led to televised funerals streamed through i-pads and similar gadgets becoming usual, rather than exceptional behaviour. The lockdown had been released on the 11th of May and, while many restrictions remained, there was at least a sense of freedom for people like the Camerons, who were able to return to their large, beautiful but ram
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