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Chapter 5

Penulis: Ukiyoto Publishing
last update Terakhir Diperbarui: 2024-10-29 19:42:56
The Port of the Moon

 

 

The sun was high above the poplar trees as they drove away from Chateau Nullepart, which looked, as it always did in summer, like the fairy tale castle of naïve children’s books. Teddy put on his sunglasses and waved away the pungent smoke from Lala's spliff. He unwound the window to let the air in and the fumes out, which caused a drip of ash to fall from the dog-end in Lala's lips and leave a little smudge on her summery dress. Her shaking was better now, and though sometimes an unimportant imperfection, like a smudged dress or a smile out of place, was the kind of thing to provoke a mountain of rage, like the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back, this morning, for equally obscure chemical reasons, she was able to resist.

The Girondine countryside slipped agreeably by, agreeable as all countryside vistas are, especially to those starved of them. Inversely, Lala and Teddy enjoyed the occasional trip into town. They drove along the route national as far as Langon, before taking a ticket from the automatic booth at the peage. There, they joined the flow of lorries, trucks, and cars making their way along the tarmac river flanked, intermittently, by the pine woods of the Landes, and rows upon rows of Bordeaux vignobles.

Teddy turned on the radio, and a France Bleu Gironde jockey opined on the ongoing referendum campaign in the United Kingdom. He, like most commentators, notwithstanding the serious agitators for leaving the European Union, thought it unlikely. There were plenty in France of a similar mind to those English populists. Rightists like Le Penn, and leftists like Mèlenchon, weighed in with their moon howling, jingoistic, entirely simplistic contributions. Though Teddy liked current affairs - in a quietly desperate way, fearful of being ill informed - he could not quite cope with the people who populated it.

'Why don't you turn that off. It doesn’t make you a better person,' Lala said. Teddy nearly choked on his next words, incredulous at Lala’s lack of self-awareness.

‘Well, what about you and that London station and that fucking awful man?’

‘I don’t take it seriously, Teddy, it’s just a bit of jibber-jabber, and I must say it makes a change from Mr Laconic and the idiomatic African.’

'Neither do I, and I’m not laconic,' Teddy said, not saying another word. He turned off the droning voices and stared at the road ahead, thinking of nothing. At the Bordeaux peage, Teddy paid for his ticket with his Credit Agricole bank card, and the barrier lifted and let them through. Customs guards had stopped a van on the other side and stood with folded arms while the poor, swarthy looking driver was made to unload its contents. The motorway joined the rocade, and from then it was not long before the sight of the Garonne, flowing muddy brown under the Mitterrand bridge appeared before them.

A pontoon bridge with provisional pylons buried in the mud below the river, led from the new, white, oval arena on the opposite bank at Floirac. It was deserted, save for a banner which said that work had stopped due to industrial action. Poor Simone Veil, thought Teddy, she will just have to wait for her bridge. Both sides of the river were undergoing enormous re-development. The old meat market was being pulled down, and tall block office buildings, and residential apartments were going up. Beyond them, the neo-classical façade of old Bordeaux gleamed golden in the sunlight. It had not always been like this.

When Teddy and Lala had first moved there thirty years before, the locals had called Bordeaux 'the sleeping beauty', because its ancient and beautiful limestone buildings lay hidden under a crust of black petroleum pollution. The serene riverfront was obscured by warehouses holding millions of cases of wine destined for America, and the rest of the world. Around those warehouses, junkies sat in niches injecting themselves with heroin, sometimes dying on the spot, while prostitutes took their johns up hidden alleyways and lifted their skirts. Maquereaux, pimps, flick-knife wielding assassins of virtue, controlled the bleak behemoths at night, and often during the day.

That era ended when Alain Juppe was elected Mayor of Bordeaux. He took control, banishing and vanquishing the ne'er-do-wells, and tearing down the Dickensian warehouses, sandblasting the buildings' façades, and building a sleek and modern tramline throughout the city. The metamorphosis was dramatic. The beauty, awoken.

Now the city was alive and growing, and the foreigners and Parisians moving to live there in droves changed the city's old parochial nature into a dynamic one. All that was left of the old city was its old-world charm, good manners, and a gentleness which surprised those more used to a dog-eat-dog world.

Teddy parked the fiat in a bay by the river, near to the car park where market traders still sold cheap goods from the backs of white vans. They were packing up for lunch like everyone else. Here, one still ate a leisurely lunch, though that too was changing, and businessmen in suits could occasionally be seen stuffing a sandwich or Burger King burgers into their mouths while walking and barking into a telephone.

Teddy had booked a table at La Tupina, on the rue Porte de la Monnaie, where the chef composed Basque specialties for gourmets and gourmands alike. The head waiter took their names and showed them to a table set for two, which looked out onto the quiet side street.

Shortly, a handsome, North African waiter appeared.

'Bonjour,’ he said, and gave them a charming smile which pleased Lala. He added, 'Would you like an aperitif?'

'I'll have a white pineau please,' said Teddy.

'Pastis,' said Lala.' The waiter gave a slight, graceful nod of his head, and disappeared through the swinging doors of the kitchen and adjacent cave. He soon came back with a small round tray carrying one tumbler filled with straw coloured pineau de charente, and another with the greenish yellow pastis two fingers deep in its bottom. The waiter placed them on the table and added a carafe of water. He offered a menu and began his spiel about the daily specials.

'Alors! Today we ‘ave magret de canard stuffed with foie gras with mushroom sauce, or, should you prefer, monkfish with butter sauce. Or would you like a set lunch menu, or a la carte?'

'Duck,' said Teddy.

'Fish,' said Lala.

'Tres bien!' said the waiter, 'and the wine?'

'Oh, let me see,' said Teddy, poring over the red leather-bound wine list. 'I'll have a half bottle of the Haut Medoc. Lala, do you want some white with your fish?'

'Bottle of Graves,' she said, feeling taciturn now that she saw that the waiter was not much of a flirt.

'Very well,’ he said, and again disappeared.

'Well, this is very civilised,' said Teddy, fearful that he was losing Lala. She said nothing but gazed out at the people passing by. She fought the rising high tide of insanity which swelled dangerously at her mind's dockyard. She thought about the nickname the Bordelaise had given their city: port of the moon, because it lay on a crescent bend in the Garonne. In times gone past, the clipper ships had sailed right up to the Pont de Pierre to load their liquid cargo. I am like a port of the moon, a mad moonchild, thought Lala. But she was not going to give in. Not today. The aperitifs were finished quickly.

When it came, Teddy chomped down the duck breast greedily, arranging a morsel of meat and a sliver of unctuous liver on his fork each time. He glided the delicious textures through the viscous sauce and rolled his eyes as they melted on his tongue. Lala ate one bite of her fish, then filled her glass to the top and drank it down, slurping as it went. The waiter, who had come to ask if everything was to their satisfaction, did well to hide his mild shock at the way Lala was putting away her drink.

'Lovely wine,' she said, 'so complements the fish.' The waiter drew himself up proudly. His own family had settled in the Graves, right in the heart of Pessac-Lèognan. His father was a sommelier.

'That is because wine is the blood of gastronomy,' he said, smiling proudly at their appreciation. Lala and Teddy smiled back. They shared, each in their own way, his love for something so important, even if their own obsession with it had for them, crossed a real-world Styx to Hades from a dream of Elysium.

After they had eaten, they caught the tram from St Croix, changing at Porte de Bourgone, and alighting finally at Gambetta. From there it was a short walk to the Musee des Beaux Arts.

The 18th Century Palais Rohan housed the Hotel de Ville as well as the museum, and the St Andre Cathedral and Pey Berland square were already busy with tourists waving their cameras and smartphones at the buildings and statues.

Mostly, they took photographs of themselves, wearing wide grins, pointing at the objects they could not be bothered to read about. As they were about to head up the side road towards the museum's entrance, Teddy suddenly spotted an unlikely sight. A gendarme, surrounded by a modest crowd of tourists and locals alike, was staring up at a sofa which had been somehow placed on the three metre high, thousand kilo, bronze sculpture of Bordeaux's favoured son, former mayor of Bordeaux and prime minister of France, Jacque Chaban-Delmas. How it had got there only God, and the perpetrators knew.

Teddy laughed but Lala stared blankly.

'How the bloody hell did they do that?' she said. 'Nutters!' Together they carried on and finally entered the big wooden doors of the museum.

Inside the museum, Teddy knew what Lala wanted to see, and they ignored most of the other pictures by famous old masters. Lala loved the symbolism and pastels of Odilon Redon. He had been born in Bordeaux, not that Lala knew it when she moved to the area, and she had steadily fallen in love with the outward expression of this man’s internal life, which culminated with a literal blossoming of esoteric images of phenomenal power and strangeness. It was as if the fin de era of the Belle Epoch had manifested its desire for peace and beauty, in a final desperate cry before the 20th Century in Europe got properly underway with its insatiable appetite for calamity and awfulness. Redon’s later painting were the songs of what might be, a realisation that The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity.

After the gallery, Lala felt tired, and the need for her marijuana and strong alcohol. They returned to the car and sat in silence while Lala lit one of her spliffs. She inhaled deeply, and felt the fuzzy disjointedness overcome her immediately, while Teddy rolled down the window to inhale the road’s petrol heavy air.

'Thank you, Teddy.' Lala looked at him through the calming buzz growing in her brain and felt a wave of emotion pass through her body. It was a powerful wave. Much stronger than usual. And, instead of finishing as it usually did, with the uncontrollable sexual urges all thoughts led to during the last ten, fifteen, (or was it twenty?) years, it broke, foaming with sympathy, crashing on the shores of her deepest being, dragging the sandy particles of her senses towards her heart. How strange, she thought, to feel like this again.

'Oh, you know,' said Teddy. 'Good to get out and about.' He knew, through the familiar eyes peering at him, scrutinising, that Lala was still in there, among the fractured parts of her being.

Teddy started the old fiat and had to brake sharply as he pulled out of the bay, while an impatient cross face sped in front of him, showing the lack of manners so many people suffer from.

They drove over to their apartment which over-looked the Place des Quinconces and parked in the car park nearby. Though the sun still sat happily up there, high above the city and beneath the never-ending blue sky, both felt exhausted by their day out. Teddy led Lala, his arm outstretched, as they slowly climbed the six flights, both thinking that buying an apartment without a lift had been an oversight. At the time they had been seduced by the locale, and young enough to think that old age was a place still very far away.

The Place des Quinconces was a public square - one of the largest in Europe - on the site of an ancient fortress strategically placed to guard the city of Bordeaux, where once guns were fixed upon the Garonne River to dissuade the ships of invading pirates or nation states. Now it was a space for events like circuses and funfairs, concerts, and markets. There were several statues, the most prominent of which was an extraordinary, giant pillar, surrounded by a fountain with the bronze heroes and creatures of ancient mythology. Teddy thought it overbearing and preferred the less imposing statue of Michel de Montaigne off to one side, a quiet figure thinking in the shade below plane trees like Handel’s Xerxes.

Lala and Teddy, on occasion, liked mingling with the other well-heeled and tasteful city residents at the twice-yearly antiques fair, who were always in abundance in a city as rich as Bordeaux. Sometimes they dined with Angel at the Belle Epoch restaurant, with its art nouveau décor and good food and wine list. They loathed the fun fair and made sure they were not in residence when the noisy, screaming, flashing tackiness descended, shrouding the elegant, stone and tree lined balustrades with excitable children and mountains of candy floss.

The flat was quiet, insulated from the bustle outside.

'Fix me a gin, will you, sweetie,' said Lala, the moment they walked through the door. On an unfashionable dark wood, Alsatian buffet, stood a silver plate tray crammed with bottles of spirits. Of the three types of gin, Teddy chose Gordons, for though it was cheaper than the other brands on display, he knew that Lala preferred the taste. He pulled a can of slim-line tonic water from its cellophane wrapping of six, and pulled the tab, releasing the carbonated hiss into the almost eerily quiet atmosphere. Teddy filled a glass with ice from the large, American fridge in the small kitchen, and then poured in the gin halfway, tonic the rest, and handed the mixture to Lala, who sat, still smoking, on the Majistrati sofa, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

'Thanks,' she said.

'You know, I'm rather tired,' said Teddy, 'I might just go to bed.' He looked tired, thought Lala.

'Oh, go on. I won't be long.' Teddy shuffled into the bedroom and began to take off his clothes. He pulled a pair of clean, ironed pyjamas from the commode, where the maid had left them. She came twice a week, regardless of whether they were present or not, to dust and make sure everything was ready should they decide, as they had done today, upon an impromptu visit.

As he stood in his underpants, he caught sight of his reflection in the tall empire bedroom mirror. He held the black and grey striped silk pyjama top in his hands, like a capote de brega, defending his white Y fronted loins from the speeding charge of his own, ageing, falling apart image. His chest sagged like a Hogarth harridan's, the biceps in his arms hung like chicken wattle. His face, the nose and upper cheeks flecked with angry purple, protesting the liquid and smoke which flowed always through his veins, sharpening, and tightening the vessels of his blood. No wonder she wants to fuck others, he thought. He pulled the pyjama top over his head without bothering to undo the buttons, left his pants on, and climbed under the duvet.

Though it was dressed in clean linen, the bed smelled of something he could not put his finger on. Lack of use, he thought. Can something smell of lack of use? Not stale, like morning French bread in the afternoon. But a lack. His bed in the chateau did not smell like that. It practically stank. But Teddy liked it that way. Sloth, some would call it. Teddy lay in the bed and looked up at the ceiling. He heard the radio playing in the sitting room. Lala was listening to LCR, London Chat Radio. She had something of an obsession for one of the presenters, a man with an insufferably smug voice and high dose of sanctimony. Teddy had seen a picture of him once, a fat, bloated man, with the puffy eyes of one who stays up too late drinking and eating, and then gets up too early. Repulsive. But, then again, there was that reflection. Who am I to talk?

Presently Lala switched it off, came in and climbed into bed.

'Sleeping?' she said.

'No, I was listening to you listen to that awful man. Wasn't that Jeremy's voice I heard on the radio?'

'Yes, cheeky bastard has the effrontery to phone up from his house in France to demand that Britain must leave the EU. Do you think they'll do it?'

'Buggered if I know. And Jeremy would know all about that although he's the one who likes to do the buggering. Surely people aren't that stupid. Though if people are dumb enough to elect a man like Baden-Flogg as MP, they're dumb enough to do anything.'

'Oh well, I suppose Jeremy has his points, he's practically old family you know.'

'Yes, yours, not mine. He's certainly a plausible liar.' But Lala had already drifted off, leaving Teddy with words on his lips but nowhere to place them. Instead, Lala snored loudly, and Teddy remained awake, listening to her death's rattle snore, which sounded in the once again quiet night, like an awful premonition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 6

    'But where were you, Jeremy?' Eloquentia Baden-Flogg was very unhappy. Eloquentia by name, Eloquentia by nature. 'Thomas had a dicky tummy and he threw up! There was nobody there to help me. I told you we should have made Ginny cancel her holiday. I need help with the children. There are simply too many of them.' Jeremy made all the right noises. 'But darling, Lala was having an episode. Poor Teddy was at his wits end. Look, I've brought croissants.' He waved the bag at her like a flag of truce, but Eloquentia was not for surrendering. 'That's all very well, Jeremy, but what about us? What about poor, poor Tommy poo? There was sick on the rug.' Eloquentia looked so distressed as she uttered the word 'sick', that Jeremy tried to put his arms around her. She pushed him away saying, 'I'm not finished,' and nor had she. 'It's a bit much to expect me to put up with your disappearing acts. It's bad enough that you live a double life in London. I know you have your obligations

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 7

    'Where's Don Don? Where is he when I fucking well want him?' Lala was having a turn. Teddy put his arms on Lala’s shoulders as if to calm an implacable storm. He admired and pitied in equal measure Sèdonoudè's ability to get it up in the face of such demands. 'But he's not here.' Teddy was not up for this. He had spent the night in agony, unable to urinate, until waves of sweat gushed from him, which, to his nose, smelled faintly like the urine he was unable to excrete. 'Find him. Find me something.' Lala sat down in her chair and her voice, cracking, emitted a tortured sob. She had to place her knuckles in her mouth to stop her teeth gnashing. There was nothing he could do. He tried calling Sèdonoudè on his cellphone. He fidgeted with the keys, cursing silently that his fingers, instead of doing his bidding, seemed to wander across letters and symbols with a will of their own. ‘Look Lala, I need to go to the doctors, can you drive me there? ‘Where’s that bastard hid

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 8

    Lala watched through the kitchen window as the fiat pulled up on the gravel outside for an interminable another time. Teddy and Sèdonoudè were drunk, barely able to clamber out of the car without falling over, having returned from the market with a basket of token items, some merguez, and a little salad. Thick as thieves again, Lala thought. If blood was thicker than water, then alcohol was much stronger than blood. She was sulking and glowered at Sèdonoudè as he stepped into the kitchen, his boisterous grin dropping to an apologetic smile. He vanished quickly into the warren of rooms in the chateau before her dissatisfaction turned to ire. She clucked her teeth and let him slip away, for though she was many things, she could never be anything quite so boring as a nag. She addressed Teddy. 'It's the referendum tomorrow. What do you think's going to happen?' Teddy did not know. After the murder of Jo Cox, he felt that the whole exercise lacked any real moral legitimacy, anyon

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 9

    The next morning started much as most did at Chateau Nullepart, with its meagre occupants rising from a groggy slumber. But something had changed, an invisible line crossed, one tentative step from certainty to its opposite. 'They voted out!' Lala started laughing. 'The silly fuckers!' 'I don't think it's that funny,' Teddy said, looking perplexed as Lala scorned his seriousness. 'What about our right to stay here?' Lala stopped laughing. 'They won't kick us out. Think of the money.' 'Yes, yes, I know but you never know what kind of demented passion this sort of thing unleashes. I think there are a lot of very unhappy people out there.' Lala thought about the word 'unhappy'. She did not often, but from time to time it leapt out at her like a bogeyman she had almost convinced herself was unreal. Everything she did, had done, consciously thought about, was a vain attempt to avoid that word. It followed her assiduously. Tapping at her shoulder. Here I am, it said, w

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 10

    The Letter It lay on the kitchen table where Sèdonoudè had placed it. Teddy walked around it for some time, making coffee, toast, needlessly arranging bits of crockery which he would not ordinarily bother with at the best of times. That was the cleaner's job, when she was around at least, and not taking to her bed for days on end to struggle with yet another existential crisis. He knew where it had come from; he recognised the stationary. It just sat and glared at him, a ray of sunlight giving it a glow, radiating like a beam from where it hit the filmy plastic oblong containing the address and his name. Every time he looked at it, it gnawed at him a little. Like the gnawing dull ache from his groin which these days would not go away. He needed whisky for a moment like this. The smell of it reeked from his coffee cup. He opened the letter with trembling hands and as he read the words at first, they seemed to swirl, as if he had suddenly developed acute dyslexia. But a

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 11

    Jeremy Baden-Flogg sat with two other men at a dining table in a club on London's Pall Mall. The magnificent palazzo architecture was designed to dazzle, to give the diners the fullest sense of their grandeur. The men with Baden could have been any faceless men in suits to the other diners, whose eyes were always drawn to more recognisable ones like his. Here, in any case, the room was full of such faces: politicians, civil servants, actors, writers, TV news reporters, and other media types, along with old men who had money and did not want to go home. Baden picked up one of the lamb cutlets by the little paper wrapper placed there to prevent grease getting on his fingers. As he chomped away one of his guests began talking about his investments. 'I've already made a killing betting against the pound, just think what we will do if we flog the whole ship!' Their lips greasy with fat but their finger-tips dry, they ate the lamb and drank red burgundy. They chatted and g

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 12

    Teddy mostly did not talk about his looming fate, preferring, as men - especially men of his generation - to believe it ignoble to do so in some way. He carried the unwelcome burden of his thoughts in silent misery. It frightened him, because although he read well throughout his life, he had never been able to make up his mind about anything. Lala, an atheist, had always laughed any time he mentioned a fascination for the numinous, but he was at the same time utterly without faith. He did not know what to believe in, and so believed in nothing. Occasionally, seeking that tenuous reassurance that our lives have mattered, at least in some small way, he confided in Sèdonoudè. ‘I can’t believe it, Don Don,’ Teddy said, ‘I mean, we all know it’s coming someday, but it doesn’t seem real. I mean, I feel alright, apart from the bloody pissing, and they’ve given me something to relieve that. The doctor said I haven’t got long.’ Sèdonoudè sat silently looking at him for what seemed

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 13

    Teddy lay on the hospital bed with the poison coursing through his veins. It is how a person dies. A withering poison turning their insides to stone. Lala sat beside him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was heavily drugged. She thought about him and their life together, the long years of chaos and sometimes harmony, and never imagined, not even for a moment, that she would see him lying there like this. A nurse entered the private room on the fifth floor of the Institut Bergoniè, closing the door almost silently behind her, leaving just a little click hanging in the air. She offered a sympathetic smile, which, once she decided she liked the look of her, Lala returned. Even the monitors were on low in the room, which was full of clutter: flowers, fruit, coats, bags. A traveller’s court. The nurse checked the absepto case connections, and the dial on the pump which controlled the flow of drugs. Teddy grimaced, though still asleep, when she gently wrapped t

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  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   About the Author

    About the AuthorDanny Campbell began writing articles and undertaking editorial work for Sulak Sivaraksa in the late 1990s, while living in Thailand. Sulak encouraged Danny to write, and published his numerous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories about Thailand, and one (his personal favourite) set in Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia.The themes for these books about Southeast Asia are the struggle to survive for people living on the edge of the diminishing wilderness, their political plight, and the plight of the incredible wildlife and nature which surrounds them. A Siamese Story is a brief biography of the Thai social critic and Danny's former mentor, Sulak Sivaraksa.One of Danny's first reading loves was in the horror genre, devouring Poe, King, Herbert and others as a child, and he has recently developed a side line in writing horror shorts for the author and compiler, Samie Sands, which he enjoys very much.Danny now lives in France, and his book, A Tale of Aquita

  • Lala's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret   Chapter 36

    Lala watched the thirsty flowers wilt in the hot breeze which blew across the plum orchard plain. Sometimes she fiddled with herself when she could be bothered. Her carer now long kept her disapproving looks and gasps of shock to herself, having been told once too often that if she did not like it, she could either join in or fuck off. Nothing so much as a protracted show with a dildo, though again, if she could be bothered it would have been what she preferred, but just a mindless fiddling with her parts as she sat on the Parker Knoll and drank her vodka or gin and smoked her spliffs. Shaky Trevor had taken to coming around and joining in, largely for the free stream of drink and drugs on offer. He had even had, on one occasion, the temerity to suggest that he could provide her with his sexual services should she require them. Lala’s laughter soon disabused him of the notion, and her telling him that she would rather fuck a dead cat confirmed the futility of it. Sh

  • 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

  • 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 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 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 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 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 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

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