Page 41 of Where Do We Go From Here?
It drives past her, just far enough to have her waving her arms and running and shouting and then feeling silly because obviously it was always going to pull up in the siding just along the way.
The cabin door opens jerkily, and then an overweight mechanic clambers down. Without any kind of acknowledgement, he strolls towards her, still rolling and then lighting hiscigarette. The sun is almost gone now. The sky behind the truck is shifting to red.
‘Alors !’he says, on reaching her. He nods at the car-shaped snow sculpture in the ditch and asks,‘C’est celle-là ?’
‘Oui,’Wendy says, doing her best to make sure no irony enters her voice. Because which other car could it be?‘Oui, c’est ça.’
He wrinkles his nose, pouts and shakes his head. ‘Nah,’ he says.‘… peux pas.’
Wendy feels her life force slipping away. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘… peux pas !’he says, with a lazy shrug. This is followed by his rambling incomprehensible mansplaining of all the reasons he can’t. If he removed the cigarette from his mouth it might make his diction a little bit clearer, but when she gestures for him to do so he misunderstands, generously,unhygienically, offering her a drag on his roll-up.
‘Do you speak any English at all?’ Wendy asks, once she’s refused his kind offer.‘Parlez Anglais ?’
He laughs at this and says, quite simply, rather dismissively,‘Non.’
‘Butvraiment ? Vous pas pouvez ?’Wendy asks, dredging the depths of her French and wincing at the subconscious knowledge that her grammar is all wrong.
She’d meant to ask if he really can’t move the car, but he seems to think she’s asked if he really can’t speak English, and this makes him laugh again but in a sour mocking way.‘Non, je peux vraiment pas,’he says, followed by something about being amécano, not aprofesseur.
‘Mais la voiture !’Wendy says, miming winching it from the ditch.
He makes a tutting noise and wiggles a finger at her before producing another long cigarettey phrase from which Wendy manages to extract only two words: damage and insurance.
He’s such a sad little archetype, this man, that she feels sheknows him, feels she hasalwaysknown him. The lazy, unfit garage mechanic who starts every day determined to do the minimum with as little joy as possible. In a way, she hated him before she ever met him.
Anyway, it’s over. The man – her supposed knight in shining armour – has already turned, is already slouching his way back to his lorry, flicking his cigarette butt into the snow-covered bushes. There’s one last moment of hope when he looks out of his window back at her, and Wendy thinks he’s going to reverse and hitch his pulley thing to the car, after all. Instead, he simply beckons to her.
‘Allez !’he says.‘Je vous dépose,’a phrase she correctly interprets as,Come on, I’ll drop you off.
So she walks to the passenger side of the truck and, feeling guilty for having hated him, climbs in.
She’s up at silly o’clock the next morning. This is partly because she had a couple of glasses of wine last night (enough to bugger up her sleep pattern but not enough to knock her out for the count) and partly because she was cold and had to get up to add logs to the fire. But mainly it’s because she’s stressed out by her not inconsiderable list of problems: no car, intermittent electricity, hateful snow everywhere and, worst of all, zero remaining minutes on her mobile because she wasted them all trying to call the dreadful car hire people. These problems, which have been churning around in her mind on their evil merry-go-round, even wormed their way into her dreams.
Add to this unpleasant mish-mash, a sprinkling of Jill at the airport going home and a dash of Harry, still at home in their bed with whatever-her-name-is, and it’s become impossible to avoid the most agonising question of all: should she give in and pack her bags this minute?
So yes, it’s not even six thirty, and she’s been up for an hour, stoking the fire, and staring at the flames while she waits for the electricity (and hence the wifi) to return so that she can buy more bloody minutes for her phone and give the owner and the hire company what for. And maybe, just maybe, buy a plane ticket home for tomorrow, or even (why not?) today.
She eventually manages to boil water on the stove for tea, and after half an hour of picking up and then discarding her useless connection-free phone, she digs her Kindle out. After a couple of glassy-eyed false starts she begins to read, but after a few pages the damned thing tells her that it too has a low battery, and a few pages after that, it shuts down.
She resists the urge to hurl it across the room and, stuffing it down the side of the sofa, allows herself a few tears.
Two astonishingly stretched hours later, the sun finally comes over the mountain, and an hour after this the electricity returns, shortly followed by the wifi, so she immediately buys two hours of overseas minutes from Tesco and connects to Airbnb to send an angry message to the owner.
I send someone, Madame Blanchard replies immediately.You are at the cabin this morning?
Yes, she replies.I’m here. I’m waiting.
She tries to shower but the water temperature is at the low end of ‘lukewarm’, so instead she washes with a flannel from a saucepan of water heated on the stove. ‘Welcome to the Stone Age,’ she mutters. ‘Only £900 a month.’
Just after eleven a car pulls up – an ancient orange Lada four-wheel drive, crunching its way through the snow.
The driver, an elegantly dressed retiree whose clothes mustcost more than his car, climbs down and crosses to the gate where she’s waiting.
‘Hello,’ he says, holding out a hand. ‘I’m Erik. Florence – Madame Blanchard – she tells me you are having some problems.’
‘I am!’ Wendy says, shaking his hand. ‘Wendy.’
