Top deck 281, Twickenham Green, 1978
From the top deck of the bus, I see people, with beer-induced hunger, congregating outside gaudily lit take-aways. Head against glass, I catch sight of my features coarsened somehow by the sombre reflection of them. I had wanted to discuss cosmetic surgery with my doctor but I chickened out when I saw that his nose was bigger than mine. But is my mug more ugly/interesting than ugly/plain? A passage in the The Catcher in the Rye draws a distinction between boys who are classically good looking and boys who are attractive in an interesting way. The book’s protagonist Holden Caulfield gets me thinking. Could I be ugly in an interesting way? I am almost the same age as Holden. My enthusiasm for the book rubs off on Eddy. We go into a bookshop to locate a copy. It’s equivalent to six Double Decker chocolate bars (complete with the accompanying Willie Rushton impressions) but Eddy buys it nonetheless. I recall the awe felt by my teenage self for how certain writers render experience into believable worlds.
Pipe dreaming in Nîmes 1991
Living off the proceeds from some good sales (including the Virginia Woolf), I am killing time with Marmite. We meet in the bar at the Youth Hostel. Being English and six foot five, Marmite stands out. A student at l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, Marmite is in between lodgings. And I am, in a sense, in between books.
We drink on average two bottles of rosé a day when we’re not high on dope. Marmite feels this is good preparation for his work as an artist. Attendance at the art school is not compulsory so we are both able to while away our afternoons amid the marble sculptures in the Jardin de la Fontaine. Marmite has an appetite for Byron and reflecting on matters of a philosophical nature, while I have a natural tendency to daydream. Marmite is also heavily into Sartre. (I doubt you could ever say that the other way round. Once, being overtaken on the M42 by a van in the shape of giant Marmite jar, the existential gloom of being stuck on a motorway lifts suddenly.) Lounging with lizards, we observe the tourists making their way up the hill on a stone stairway to the Tour Magne. Built by Augustus in 15 BC, the Tour Magne was originally part of the ramparts encircling the city. Bathed in light at night, this ancient block of stone takes on a magical appearance. It overlooks Nîmes where there is a remarkably intact amphitheatre. These days it is the bulls of the Camargue, rather than gladiators, who face slaughter inside it. Behind a large ornate gate, the tranquil confines of the gardens are, of course, closeted from the real world. Elderly locals sit and play cards. We admire such lethargy and take our cue from them. Marmite and I rarely reach the Tour Magne; our half-hearted ascents taking us no further than a small pond fed by a tiny waterfall. At the pool’s edge is a covering of lightly splashed grass upon which we sit, and peer in.
‘I always thought of you as being into pond life,’ Marmite says. Red worms wriggle below surface-skating insects. And there are tadpoles, those black fleshy commas, that make me remember meat string dangled into the class aquarium at primary school for them to feast upon. Mason Lilly used to delight us by fishing them out to eat. He’d trained on worms picked from the school’s sports field.
A small girl in a red dress distracts me from my reverie. In approaching the pool, she spots an inert tadpole stranded on the grassy verge. ‘Il est mort,’ she declares. But after dropping the tadpole in the water, she excitedly announces its resurrection. ‘Il est vivant.’ Her father smiles.
On most days in the gardens, we rarely make it as far as the pond. For we are becoming pétanque aficionados. Nicely stoned, we sit and watch the games that are played out in place Pablo Picasso. Pétanque is a form of boules where the aim (no pun intended) is, while standing with the feet together in a small circle, to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball, red in colour, called a cochonnet (jack). Other objects, for more impromptu games, are also used such as car keys.
They play every day after lunch upon a triangular patch of chalky ground which is Nîmes’ designated boulodrome. Sturdy sweet chestnut branches provide shade, increasingly so, as the weeks pass, with the development of the trees’ leaves and glove-like fruits. Place Picasso’s elite band of players comprise the bellyman and three others, all of whom we label as potential Mr Men characters for yet more books by Roger Hargreaves.
Scarcely visible below a black beret are telltale strands of whitening hair. His mouth, in contrast, is tenderly defined, resembling a child’s, but it isn’t really his face that captures our attention. To us, he is the ‘bellyman’. For he has a fine big belly which means that his back is straighter that the others when he crouches to throw. The cockiness of his spirit is familiar and pleasing to the spectators who habitually line both sides of his corridor of play. Visiting the Jardin de la Fontaine for the first time, even we, as novice spectators, cannot fail to see that the bellyman is the most accomplished of players. His prize possession is that of an easy swinging left arm that delivers a boule with enviable consistency.
For a man in his forties the ‘wigman’ is slim and agile, but the wig dupes few; its jet-blackness clashing with its wearer’s anaemic complexion. The wigman specialises in knocking his adversary’s boules to a safe non-point scoring distance from the jack. He also has a penchant for directing the jack towards the trunks of trees and their surrounding roots, thereby diluting the game’s skill factor. Above the trees’ knobbly bases, the bark has patches coloured white by the esplanade’s dust and earth. We derive a simple pleasure from watching the dust lift into the limpid air as a result of a boule’s emphatic descent. The bellyman copes with any sort of terrain; little troubling the lucid swing of his muscular arm. It has an air of roughness about it, a naturalness that is raw and unpretentious. There is also his laugh, a deep-throated explosion of goodwill. And accompanying cries of merde and putain, expletives rarely prompted by self-error. More likely a partner has strayed with a boule.
Rue Dorée is one of Nîmes’ quieter streets that seems permanently in shadow. Halfway along it is a small English centre where a middle-aged American woman sells teaching materials and some fiction. I buy a Penguin copy of The Red and the Black by Stendhal and become unhealthily obsessed by its central character, Julien Sorel, who has a young man’s ambition to become successful in the aristocratic society of 1830s France. Julien’s change of appearance, alternating between the uniform of the army and the church, between the red and the black, is symbolic of the conflict in his personality between truthfulness and pretence. It’s probably due to a diet of cannabis, wine and almond croissants, but reading the book gives rise to some pretty deluded ideas. A recurring one is to join the Foreign Legion. I don’t even need to run off to do it because there is an Infantry Regiment based in Nîmes. Marmite is sceptical and says he can’t see me in the uniform. He is soon sharing a studio flat with another ‘artist’ at the school. I decline an offer to flat share since I like the sense of impermanence that the hostel gives me; an illusion of unplanned adventure. It also provides a good cheap meal in the evening. We still meet regularly in the gardens. Marmite starts to talk of art instead of philosophy. His fellow students’ work is too abstract for my taste but I keep a diplomatic silence. There is endless talk about Pierre’s tank sculptures that are exciting the lecturers. I am invited to parties where Marmite and I are something of a novelty. Marmite’s promiscuous nature (both social and sexual) is given free reign. I don’t share his success with the girls, although Sandrine and her friends are tolerant of my tentative efforts to communicate in French. When my timidity isn’t taken for rudeness, I enjoy the evenings spent at the Salon Vert. The students soon allow me to park the Princess in the grounds of the art school; the caretaker doesn’t seem to mind. Marmite and I go for occasional trips to the sea, taking water with us for when the car inevitably overheats. These trips are meant to be hangover cures. I blame Marmite for his fixation with Byron.