Page 2 of Where Do We Go From Here?
The view is so breathtaking she feels drawn towards the window, but halfway across the room a postcard propped on top of the wood burner catches her eye.
You are welcome to Caussols, she reads, once she has flipped it over.The pan is ready to burning and there is basic nourishment in the frigo. Enjoy your stay and any demands, demand.
My French might be better than your English, she thinks, even as she acknowledges that this isn’t remotely true. She’d promised herself she’d work on her French before coming here, but she simply hasn’t got around to it.
She crouches down and peers in through the curved glass window of the stove. A pyramid of kindling constructed around a fire lighter is waiting, ready to go. She opens the door, strikes a match and holds it until a thin blue flame starts to flicker.
As she waits for the fire to get going she walks around the space again and tries to imagine herself living here, then as the realisation takes hold, tries instead to convince herself that sheisliving here now.
She rubs her hands together and blows through pursed lips to marvel at the spectacle of her breath, hanging in the air like tiny, home-made clouds.Maybe there’s underfloor heating, she thinks hopefully. But as she can’t see any kind of switch, maybe not. She’ll send the owner a message, but right now she needs to keep moving, so after a quick glance at the bed upstairs (king size, comfortable, clean), she heads back outside.
By the time she has dragged her cases across the crazy paving, the wood burner is starting to take the edge off and she has generated enough body heat beneath her puffer jacket for the place to feel bearable – just.
One by one, she opens her suitcases and hangs her clothes in the wardrobe behind the staircase. That done, as the sun plunges behind a rocky outcrop to the west and the temperatureoutside drops to glacial (confirmed during her first cigarette break), she checks the contents of the fridge where she finds eggs, cheese and milk (albeit in single-portion quantities). There are packs of pasta and coffee in the cupboard, too, along with a tin of tuna which, because she’s semi-veggie, she’ll probably never eat. Eggy, cheesy pasta will do fine, she decides, for now. She can tackle the excitement of a French supermarket by daylight.
She picks up her phone to call the owner but hesitates about whether to try to speak French or be rude and go for it in English. On reflection, she chickens out entirely and sends a text message – a message that she knows the app will translate. She informs them that she has arrived and thanks them for the food. She mentions the cold and asks if there is any kind of supplementary heating.
The reply comes back almost immediately. Another,You are welcome to Caussols, which makes her smirk, followed by,Don’t worry the wood-pan is excellent, which she decides really means ‘no’.Cheapskates!she thinks again. Imagine renting a place for 1,000 euros a month and worrying about the electricity bill. She’ll buy a little blow heater at the supermarket. That’ll show them…
She considers, momentarily, texting best friend Jill, but when she picks up her phone to do so and sees that she doesn’t have a single message she’s overcome by a pique of resentment, closely followed by a ripple of melancholy. Because how the hell has she got to a point in her life where no one, not her kids, nor her husband, nor even best friend Jill, has thought to inquire how she’s doing, whether she arrived safely, let alone worry about her, on her lonesome, out here in France?
Jill will most likely be tipsy by now. Wendy can picture her perfectly, singing along toThe Voicebefore dozing off in front of the telly next to husband Frank. As for her own family, well… It’s not for no reason she’s here, is it? It’s precisely to get away from them – or rather, if she’s being honest, to avoid being confronted by the fact of their absence.
But it’s not just that either. She isn’t only running away. She’s here to think about it all, calmly, quietly. She’s here to take stock of her life and she has given herself six months to work out what’s gone wrong and what it all means.
It’s going to be her personalInto the Wildadventure, only hopefully without the starving-to-death-in-a-bus bit. So, taking a breath, she decides there’s no need to think about any of them tonight. Tonight, she will be proud of her achievement in getting here and if they can’t be bothered to ask, then at least she won’t have to tire herself replying.
By the time she has cooked and eaten, the cabin is a tiny bit warmer and within half an hour of returning to the sofa to stare at the flickering flames (more appealing this evening than any TV), she’s asleep.
At some point during the evening, she wakes up to find herself utterly disoriented until the chill in the air and the eery moonlit plateau beyond the window remind her where she is.
Up in the mezzanine it’s a bit warmer – hot air rising and all that – but as she slides under the covers, the sheets are still quite shockingly cold. She rolls herself in the quilt, using it like a sleeping bag, and adds an electric blanket to her mental shopping list.
She wonders briefly why – seeing as hot air does rise – the tops of mountains are so cold, and then, despite the indisputable fact of that cold, she slips back into sleep where she dreams of running through an abandoned airport hunting desperately for a lost boarding pass. At one point she thinks she hears a wolf howl and sits up in bed with a start. But did the noise come from her post-apocalyptic dream airport, or from this lonely mountain in France? She really isn’t sure.
She wakes from a momentarily remembered dream of being suffocated to find she has pulled the quilt over her head and truly is struggling to breathe. The second she peeps her head from beneath the covers, she understands why she has done so, though. The bedroom is icy cold again.
She pulls the quilt back over her head but realises that the fire must have gone out and that the only way to make the temperature bearable is to get up and relight the damned thing. Dragging herself from the warmth of the bed and grimacing, she hops barefoot down the chilly steps of the metal staircase. Downstairs, she grumbles angrily as she hunts for her tracksuit bottoms and a jumper followed by her thickest pair of socks.
Once dressed, she hops over to the wood burner and runs one hand across the metal to confirm that it truly is stone cold. She should have loaded it up before going to bed – obvious, really.
She searches for fresh kindling in every cupboard and, finding only full-sized logs, steels herself and pulls on trainers and her jacket.
Outside, the sun is peeping over the hills to the east and the air feels tingly with cold. There’s a magical mountain purity to the air that seems to make her blood run more freely – that’s the sensation, anyway. She pauses to look into the distance where a massive bird of prey – perhaps it’s even an eagle – is circling. She consciously takes in another icy lungful of air and tries to remember when she last thought to breathe consciously for the pleasure of it. It’s not something you do a great deal while living on a main road.
She’s overcome, momentarily, by the beauty of it all. The vista is quite astounding – a vast, flat, vibrantly green plain stretching into the distance bordered by a grey rocky outcrop on the left and greener hills to the right. Beyond the plain she cansee a thin strip of turquoise sea and above that an impossibly blue cloudless sky.
A shiver rippling through her, rising from deep within, forces her to remember that she’s on a mission to find kindling so she stamps her feet and drags her eyes from the view.
Along the right-hand side of the cabin she discovers a lean-to woodpile, but again there are only full-sized logs. At the rear of the cabin she discovers a vented metal door from behind which comes a vague electrical hum, but it’s locked with a padlock and she’s fairly certain she doesn’t have a key.
So no kindling anywhere…
‘Ridiculous!’ she murmurs as she starts to scramble around gathering twigs. She feels like she’s fallen through a wormhole to prehistoric times. ‘Absolutely bloody ridiculous!’
As soon as she has an armful of kindling, she returns inside to discover the one advantage of having had to go out – it now feels relatively warm.
With the help of some scrunched-up kitchen roll and the twigs she manages to get the fire going again and this time piles it high. That done, she returns to the safety of her quilt vowing not to re-emerge until the cabin is warm enough to support human life.
