 
Prologue

I woke up that day like on any other day, feeling alive, kicking and breathing. The air carried a faint whiff of patchouli coming from the women in my house and of the ghost of wood fires that, once upon a time, used to bring the disused fireplace in my parents' bedroom to life.

It was the beginning of the summer 1972 in Nantes, a port city on the River Loire, historically affiliated to the north-western French region of Brittany. I was seven and a half years old.

We lived in an amazing apartment occupying the entire top floor of a neo-classic building dating back to the French Revolution. Built as one of the very first structures surrounding the opulent gated park called _Le Cours Cambronne_ , our home was listed on the registry of Historical Monuments of France. To us though, it was just a tatty old flat...

It was a sunny first day of the week and my mother had opened the windows to air the place. Despite the early hour, I could already hear loud music climbing up the shaft at the back of our building. It was the radio of the concierge _Madame Garapin_ appropriately blaring out the latest hit song by Claude François _Le Lundi au Soleil_ (Sunny Monday).

These were good days... There seemed to be 'plenty enough' dough for the good people of France to make brioche, as Marie-Antoinette had once famously suggested, albeit in a far better turn of phrase. I was then too young to understand how oppressed and exploited by the conservative ruling class the blue-collar workers were at that time. Most of us who had the chance to live so well during this angelic period and in this blessed city of Nantes, whose wealth had by the way come from the slave trade, had absolutely no idea about nor any interest in their struggle. The joyous vibe around us kept us blind.

_Madame Garapin_ 's radio was now broadcasting the 8 o'clock news bulletin and all seemed to be just fine in this beautiful world...

President George Pompidou was at the helm of France's Fifth Republic. His Prime Minister Jaques Chaban-Delmas and his Defense Minister Michel Debré looked all the same to me: shorthaired strict-looking men in dark suits, just like my dad who was also very fond of another similar-looking man: Richard Nixon.

The Vietnam War was still raging. The _Red Fiery Summer_ offensive by the People's Army of Vietnam against the American forces and their allies had been particularly brutal. According to various news agency reports, close to 100,000 troops across both sides had lost their lives during this particularly fierce 6-month campaign.

As Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henri Kissinger, was keeping himself as busy as a blue-arsed fly whilst trying to extinguish the multiple fires his country's foreign policy had started.

Although his administration was as staunchly anti-communist as his predecessors were, Richard Nixon had established new grounds for a promising détente with both China and the Soviet Union after respectively visiting both countries in February and May.

Despite the US President's trip to Moscow, the image portrayed by his Russian counterpart Leonid Brezhnev in the West, including France, was that of a dangerous actor with his fingers well glued to his country's nuclear arsenal launch-button.

Amidst the cold and not-so-cold wars, the youth in 1972 was turning the other cheek while enjoying a life-style mostly geared towards laid-back, peace loving and even sometimes deeply spiritual pursuits.

Between the weekly shootings, car bombings, hijackings and hostage taking incidents perpetrated by various terrorist organisations such as the Irish Republican Army, the Basque Nationalist ETA, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the left-wing Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary factions, the summer 1972 was fun...

At the cinemas, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns with their spellbinding musical scores by Ennio Morricone, and countless French belly-tickling B-Movies topping the French box office managed to keep the youngsters out of mischief.

Since the far-reaching civil unrest by the French students in May 1968, the government had learned how to use the audio-visual means of communication to their advantage. The state-owned national agency for radio and television ORTF, responsible for the program selection of the main and only French TV channel _La Premiere_ _C_ haîne, had launched a daily variety show during the sacrosanct French lunch break called _Midi-Trente_. While bringing the mainstream musicians such as Johnny Halliday and Mireille Mathieu into the fray of people's homes, its ultra-popular presenter Danielle Gilbert also even occasionally invited international pop singers. Hence, a well-entertained population was unlikely to create havoc.

On my way to school this morning, _Madame Garapin_ 's radio was playing _L'Avventura_ by the French band _Stone & Charden_.

Chapter I: Dreamer

Named after an ancestral oak tree that used to stand on its grounds during its initial construction in 1883, my school, _Le_ Chêne-d'Aron, was a small primary education establishment with only five classrooms. Unfortunately, both the tree and the school had been flattened to the ground during the bombardment by the allied forces on the 23rd of September 1943. Although, the hundred B17 bombers' mission had merely been to destroy the area of the Port of Nantes harbouring a fleet of assistance ships supporting the German U-Boats, over a thousand civilians had died and thousands of buildings had been destroyed. Thus, it had taken a while for the city and for its people to forgive the American and the British forces for what had been subsequently referred to as somewhat of an 'unfortunate mishap'... Nevertheless, _Le_ Chêne-d'Aron had been rebuilt in 1957.

Upon arriving near the school, I saw one of my friends waiving at me and I completely forgot to watch the oncoming traffic while crossing the road. I suddenly jumped when I heard a car beep, barely avoiding an accident... These were times when we didn't dwell on what could or could not have happened. Thus, I simply apologised to the driver raising one of my hands up and held on my satchel with the other while running towards the school entrance.

It was far from being the prettiest of buildings. The post-war architectural style was barren to the core. In fact, there was neither cladding nor any finishing surface on its grey concrete walls and grounds. Somehow, the school planners had been merciful enough to leave a few trees here and there. However, as we did not know better, we couldn't care less and anyway, for us kids, the most important thing was our friends!

As soon as I crossed the imaginary line between the two pillars at the entrance, I arrived in a different world. Back then, we were very different from nowadays' seven-year-old children. We were not as savvy with technology because it just didn't exist back then. So, our minds had to be filled with other stimulating material, and the easiest ones to get hold of were simply the fruits of our imagination.

After playing for a short while with my mates, I sat down at my assigned spot at the back of the classroom besides my usual neighbour, a boy called Arnaud. I have never caught-up with him in his adult life but, back then, he used to frown constantly, making me wonder today if that was due to an undiagnosed form of myopia or if he was simply and utterly unclear about life.

It's difficult to tell from an old black and white class photo what people had in mind. As far as I am concerned, I looked rather grumpy! Knowing what was going on in my house, I guess it makes sense. So, I can only assume that some of my friends' look had also something to do with their own family set-ups...

Nevertheless, Arnaud and I were not best mates, but he was just a fine kid who did not bother me nor anyone else. He was just quiet, stoic and as bland as a glass of tepid tap water... I remember when our teacher had once caught both of us daydreaming at the same time. She was in her early 30s or perhaps even younger than that. However, her parting hairstyle right in the middle of her forehead made her look like if she was popping straight out of an episode of _The Little House in the Prairie_. "Dreamers!" She had viciously shouted at us, hence branding us with a word, which in her world was meant to be a dreadful thing but, in mine, sounded rather like a compliment...

On my way back from school, I ran past a few more beeping cars while jaywalking across the road. When I arrived near the park, I noticed some slightly older kids playing football in the grass beds. I felt excited knowing I only had a few more days left before the long summer break when I would be able to play there every single day for two and a half months...

When I arrived at home that afternoon, I was told that my dad had gone on a business trip for the rest of the week. Things were usually calmer in our house when he was not around. In fact, he was not a particularly fun guy to be with... He had jumped on German soil during the retreat of Hitler's forces in the Second World War and as my daddy once told me: "Once a paratrooper, always a paratrooper!" So, when he was around, the modus operandi in our household was rather strict: breakfast at 7 am; lunch at noon; dinner at 7 pm. However, when the cat was away, the mice were playing... And this literally happened every time he was travelling. Apart from me that evening, I was the only male in town. My mum and my grandmother, who we used to call _Mémé,_ were cooking supper in the kitchen. The poor old lady had been forced to move-in with us after my grandfather, a former officer in the French cavalry during the First World War, who we called _Papère_ _, had kicked her out of their home with a gun in his hand further to putting himself in a state of drunken stupor._

_After my elder sister Rosy had left France for a year au pair in the USA and had totally out of the blue got married to a Vietnam veteran from Nebraska, I only had three sisters left at home. Despite my young life experience, I knew this was not going to be forever and I enjoyed every moment spent with them... They were hanging around in our living room. Nickie, the oldest amongst them was nonchalantly painting her toenails on the sofa. Meanwhile Marnie was talking to her younger sibling Laurie about a new shop in town that sold cool trousers... They were respectively 22, 21 and 19 and only the youngest wasn't pregnant. While doing their things, the turntable was playing John Lennon's_ _Imagine_ _._

_After dropping my schoolbag in my room, which was actually in a corner of my parents' bedroom, I went straight into the common area where things usually happened and where the world used to often be reinvented time after time by imaginative philosophical drifters who had fallen under the spell of my sisters... I had been sitting quietly for a while under the dining table at the other end of the huge open space and the three girls were no longer noticing I was there when the front door bell rung..._

_It was one of their friends, a young chap called Lionel. I liked him because he wore a suede jacket and a cowboy hat! He had brought with him Ennio Morricone's newly released soundtrack of Sergio Leonne's latest movie_ _Once Upon a Time in the West_ _._

"Hey Stevie, come here!" He said to me, hence 'americanising' my first name, which was actually St _é_ phane. In fact, it was my sisters who used to nickname me that way after their favourite actor: _The King of Cool_ himself, Steve McQueen... I came forward and he asked me, "Have you heard about this movie?" while showing me the LP's cover. "Of course!" I said, even though I had never been able to see it because of its PG-13 rating. Nevertheless, I had seen enough advertising about it to know exactly what it was about: the _Wild West_ dreamland, with its passion, pretty women, cigarillos, whiskey _à gogo_ , guns, death and dust... Of course, I did know it. This was my world.

Lionel took his hat off, put it on my head, and sat me on his shoulders as if I was riding a horse. He then played _The Man with the Harmonica_ song and faked playing the score himself with an imaginary instrument in front of his mouth... Neither laughing nor crying, nobody in the room said anything. Nowadays, this act would have turned us into prime _meme_ fodder but, in those days, people took anything with a theatrical touch seriously. It was artistry! From my standpoint, perched onto the tall man's back, it felt as if I really was in the movie's scene. To this day, almost 50 years later, I still get the chills when I listen to it. Back then on that day, I was in the Californian desert, ready to draw and shoot anyone who would have dared challenging me! The instrumental crescendo leading to that moment when the violins took over your heart and soul and threw them into a 360-degree revolving panoramic scenery was breathtakingly invigorating. Being a kid in the seventies was a recipe for disaster in the making. I was bound to become mad one day and fast as well!

After riding my imaginary horse for a bit longer, it was time to kick Lionel out and have dinner. I don't remember the food we ate. It must not have been that great then. I do remember however every piece of music, the phantasmagorical sense of fashion, the deeply imaginative movies and the eye-opening television programs. Before going to bed that night, we watched the 8 o'clock news.

The newsreader was still bragging about the car race victory of the Frenchman Henri Pescarolo at the _24 Hours of Le Mans_ that had taken place two weeks earlier... The Watergate scandal was beginning to hang over President Nixon's head like a modern-time's _Sword of Damocles_ ... The British authorities had joined their Indian and Chinese counterparts in mourning their dead after the three consecutive air crashes at New Delhi, Hong Kong and Heathrow Airports had killed altogether 281 people... In France, the municipality of Soissons was also mourning the 108 passengers killed in the worst ever train crash in the country on June 14th after a tunnel had collapsed on two oncoming carriages.... In New York, the newly appointed Secretary General of The United Nations Kurt Waldheim was starting to make a name for himself on the world's political scene, despite some already emerging rumours of his past life as an active Nazi officer during the war... On a brighter note, the latest and sadly what would become NASA's final mission to send three astronauts to the moon was on schedule. Apollo 17's crewmembers were in high spirits whilst training hard for their expected moon landing planned in December that year.

I went to bed that night imagining how exciting it would be to go to space one day. The bad news about the weekly plane crashes, terrorist attacks and the Vietnam War did not really phase me. These bad things, which were happening on daily basis did not affect our cosy lives in Nantes. Anyway, there were so many amazing things happening around the world these days that the beautiful people of the 70s always managed to turn the worse situations around into cool stuff. That was true of course, only for those who were on the right side of the fence... For example, one could argue that the rise of the wonderful Hippy Movement had emanated as a direct countermeasure against the Vietnam War... So many beautiful songs and movies were coming through the woodwork just because of the atrocities perpetrated in such faraway fields that normal people would have never heard of if it weren't for these artful depictions of the unfolding horror. Despite all the misery in the world, the creativity of fashion designers, architects, car manufacturers, publicists, actors and singers made our universe a breeding ground for this amazing vibe. While it was bedtime in my city, dawn had already broken in Saigon and before the violent action of the day had taken its toll, GIs were still managing a smile and a laugh or even two while listening to the latest Harry Nilsson's _Coconut_ song...

Back to school the following morning, we kids didn't feel like listening to our teacher. It was hot and the windows were wide-open onto the big wild world. The feel of the nigh summertime was filling our hearts with hope and joy. We listened to one thing only. That was the song of birds being free as the wind, fooling around amongst the leaves... There were so many games to play, so many untold stories to tell... At that particular time, I was still on the right side of the fence... The rest of the week passed quickly, almost as if it had never happened. That was it. I was officially on holiday! The summer break was so long that we called it _Les Grandes Vacances_. These were times when important things happened to kids, times when young people had time to focus on what was really important to them whatever it might have been.

For my part, I had my large family to tend to whenever I craved stories to fill up my mind with... My parents were experiencing a dark patch in their marital lives. My dad was running an IT supplies trading business out of a small village called Renaz _é_ a hundred kilometres away from Nantes. The business was doing great and money was flowing in. Unfortunately, he stayed most weeks away from home and it did not sit well with my mum who was pathologically jealous. Whenever we heard he was returning from a business trip, we used to gear ourselves for sparks... Sometimes these awkward moments passed quickly just like a cold spell but, some other times, they lingered in our house like a bad smell until the atmosphere burst in lightning and hailstorm... On one occasion, I remember my dad had to physically restrain my mother who was going nuts over something trivial and was screaming her heart out: "You are breaking my arm!"

I was so traumatized by that scene that I hid under the bed in my sisters' bedroom for hours, refusing to come out... I remember Nickie talking to me quietly to comfort me: "St _éphane, take it easy, it will pass..." With hindsight into the adult world, I now guess that their outbursts must have somehow been tamed down by momentary passages of affection. What worries me is to consider which of the former or the latter had affected me most, considering that I was sleeping in my parents' bedroom... All I remember is that, night after night, after hitting my pillow, I managed to get almost instantly into an eerie half-asleep half-awoken state just before drifting away into the dreamland. Wasn't self-preservation a great thing?_

_Overall, I managed to stay unscathed, or at least that's what I thought. Unfortunately, I couldn't have said the same for my sisters, especially the youngest one... He always picked on her. Indeed, she despised our patriarchal society, and refused to bow to the authorities, the presidents, the priests, and the police who she particularly hated. In fact, she was rebelling against everything that our dad held dear and he knew that too very well. Thus, one of his mandates was clearly to straighten her up and he did just that as often as he could with the help of his backhand. One of these days, I remember my poor sister running away from him while calling the other members of the family for help. Through either sheer selfishness or cowardice, we all stayed put while he followed her all around the house, walking relentlessly like an unstoppable robot. Sadly, the beating wasn't the worse thing. It was in fact the chase and the mounting suspense that were the most traumatic ingredients in this recipe for disaster. It was like if we were in one of these dark_ _films noirs_ _that our dad liked so much to watch. If I had to describe him physically today, I'd say he was a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Tommy Lee Jones, not really the smiley type, hey?_

_To escape the darkness in my home, I found the hiding spot under my sisters' beds quite convenient. Far from being just a mere haven of peace, it was also a strategic corner of the house where I could stealthily see the world go by and hear loads of interesting gossips I was not supposed to know about... One of them rang an alarm bell in my little head. Laurie was planning to run away with one of her hippie friends. Out of my cheer love for her, I waited for her departure before spilling the beans and telling my mum: "I heard her say she was going to Estepona with Philippe!" This information was enough for my Dad to enrol my other sister Marnie's fiancé, a guy called Patrick, into an official search party... The two men jumped pretty much instantly after hearing the news into my dad's black Citroën DS and off they went to the Costa Del Sol. It was easy to guess where she was heading because our family had visited this Spanish resort every summer for the past few years. There was a hippie called Kamal who my dad hated with a passion and who was most definitely going to be a good source of information. Without failing, the poor girl barely had any time to adjust to the_ _farniente_ _lifestyle when she bumped into my dad on her way from the beach to Kamal's house. I never knew the full story but I reckon a few of these youngsters had probably enjoyed a good talking-to with our old man. For some reasons, the three older sisters who were no better than Laurie when it came to being virtuous had always managed to escape our father's wrath unscathed... In fact, after Rosy's lucky escape to America, Nickie's and Marnie's pregnancies could not have come at worse times. In 1972, Nantes was a very conservative outpost of Brittany where religious precepts were fully adhered to. Accordingly, as our family belonged to the local bourgeoisie, it was our duty to remain within the moral boundaries that our neighbours and acquaintances used to cherish dearly. Luckily, the two fathers-to-be who had impregnated the girls were both from excellent families... After meeting with their parents, our dad had agreed with them to hush up the double scandal by quietly marrying the two girls together in a single ceremony in September. Until then, we continued to attend the Sunday mass together as a model catholic family, concealing our dysfunctionalities by kneeling down in front of the altar a few times..._

_I still obeyed to all of the orders my father was barking at me and the subsequent reminders from his angel of death, his partner in crime, my mother!_

_In order to escape the pits of life, I hid under the bed one more time with a cigarette I had stolen from one of my sisters. I lit a match and before I started puffing away, I looked at the flame and got mesmerized by its depth and warmth. After two or three more attempts, I finally managed to get some smoke going. Before I ever had the chance to be sick, I was caught in the act by Marnie._

_" Who is the cigarette thief? He might have to go to prison!" She said whilst grabbing my foot and she pulled me out of my naughty corner. She was merciful enough not to tell anything to anyone. I survived this time!_

_That particular night, after forcing myself to sleep, I dreamed that my bed was raising above the ground just like a boat floating away from its mooring until it went through the ceiling and into the dark ocean of the night. Somehow, my dream brought me back in the middle of the room where I observed a red-haired and stark naked beardy devil squatting in the fireplace, engulfed in flames. He reminded me of the self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. He was staring at me in the eye and was smiling at me in a controlling way until his guttural laugh woke me up in horror. Somehow, I even knew his name... That monstrous ghoul was no other but Mr._ _Bolibone_ _himself! During this period, he came back haunting me on several occasions. One of them led to finding myself wide-awake on a sunny afternoon outside on the long terrace backing onto the park. My parents were keeping some outdoor furniture under a plastic cover to protect them from the elements and the rain. On that day, the material was bone-dry and it took me just one match to light it. I watch the flame grow stronger, mesmerized by the dark force behind this all... As I watched the plastic burning, I then knew that this red devil in my dream was dead alive!_

Chapter II: A Summer to Remember

Every time I was walking in the street with my parents and we crossed paths with someone dressed in black like a priest, a pair of nuns or a police officer, they kind of bowed... _The common thread between these people was their inner ability to project an aura that instilled respect and fear of the law of the institutions they represented. I remember being particularly terrified by_ _Les_ _Motards_ _who belonged to a branch of the French Army called_ _La Gendarmerie Nationale_ _, and who rode massive motorbikes at ridiculously high speed. Their outfit resembled a modern version of Napoleonic uniforms with dark jackets, epaulettes and white sashes across the chest. They would have made both_ _The Waffen-SS_ _and_ _Darth Vader's Stormtroopers_ _proud! They often stopped random drivers on the side of the road just to kill time, and eventually checked that these poor sods' vehicle and paperwork were in order. They were usually extremely rude and very keen on exerting their belittled power over the masses in order to make themselves feel bigger than they really were._

My dad loved these guys. He respected anyone in uniform or anything to do with law and order such as cops, prosecutors and executioners. One of his favourite programs on national television was Joe Mannix, yet another shorthaired guy in dark suit, looking similar to his own image and who also happened to be a detective... This TV character was such a goody-goody that, even from the short height I had reached at this young age, I had already realised how sickening he was, and how pathologically devoted his black secretary Peggy was... The platonic relationship between these two was similar to that of man and dog. Whilst the 70s was a powerful platform for societal changes such as the continuation of the 60's sexual revolution and of the advent of modern contraception and feminism, these were also times where the so-called Traditionalist Generation was in its prime. Accordingly, most of these people who were born between 1927 and 1946 such as my dad were in their thirties to mid-forties at that time. These authoritarian and old-fashioned tough cookies didn't want to let go of their 'Church & Country' values... Hence, amidst the people my father would have categorized as antichrist's sympathizers such as Jimmy Hendrix, mick Jaeger and John Lennon, there still were guys like Joe Mannix in town... One of these evenings when he was forcing our entire family to watch this daft program, providence knocked on our door... My sister Marnie, who was occasionally doing a bit of baby-sitting, had arranged to look after the children of a middle-aged couple for just a few hours while they were going out for a romantic meal on their own... She introduced us with their two kids. The boy who was about 9 years old was also called St _é_ phane. He had long frizzy hair almost like an afro despite of his white Caucasian skin. He was sporting a super-cool suede fringe jacket like one of the Apaches in western movies. His sister was called Jane. She was 11. There was something strange about them that I couldn't pin down...

We left the adults enjoy the rest of their American series and went to play in my parents' bedroom. We closed the door under the pretense of not disturbing their viewing but, in truth, it rather was in order to have more freedom for ourselves.

"What do you want to do?" St _é_ phane asked.

"What about hide and seek?" I replied.

We all agreed and then switched the light off to spice things up a little... It was dark but, as the window shutters were open, we were still able to distinguish our respective silhouettes due to the faint light emanating from the dwellings across the building shaft. As I had felt immediately upon meeting them, there was something strange and eerie about those kids. Indeed, they had agreed to partake in such a babyish activity, but somehow, I felt there was something else at play... Their real game was in a much grander scheme of things! While the boy and I were busy running after each other's shadows, the girl was oddly standing still in front of my parents' bed. Suddenly, he stopped me in my stride, saying, "Hey, you! Come here..." He then ushered me to his sister who was looking at me in a weird way with a smirk on her face. It felt as if they had planned this moment all along...

"Hey boy, have you ever seen this?" He asked, while his sister lifted her skirt up to her belly button with one hand and dropped her panties down to her knees with the other.

I felt utterly embarrassed, terribly scared of being caught by my parents, and totally confused at the same time, but, eventually, it was my curiosity that got the better of me... I watched in awe while Jane showed what she was really made of: sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice.

"Now, stick your finger in there and smell!" He ordered me to do for starters...

I looked at him in disbelief, but since he appeared to be totally serious, I did not wait for being asked twice... I accepted the challenge and literally took the plunge. I did it! The girl didn't seem to mind at all. Then, for mains, as if there was no limit to the weirdness where this situation was leading to, her own brother did it too... Although I was then too young to understand the implications of incest, I felt I had entered into a realm where the rebellious vibe projected by these two nutters was far beyond my reach! To finish off this appetising game, he finally ordered me to smell my finger and, in a strange and sickly sweet choreography, we both did it at the same time.

"Smells funny, ain't it..." He said when the bedroom door suddenly opened and Marnie began to take a peep inside the room. Instantly, Jeanne pulled her panties up and readjusted her skirt in a flash without my sister noticing...

"What are you guys doing in the dark?" She said suspiciously and loud enough for my dad to hear... As expected, he stormed into the room, sniffing around like a hound dog on the trail of a fox. I felt he was getting the vibe of my sins. I had no idea if my sister had seen anything compromising, but the important thing was that she hadn't said a word... It was a close shave! No need to say we didn't play anymore nocturnal games that evening... Understandably, this encounter with the opposite sex left a memorable impression on my young mind. The 70s were incredibly interesting times... This era could have been compared to a delta where salt water from the ocean would have met the freshwater of a river, hence forming a cocktail bound to affect the wildlife! Indeed, we were really at a societal estuary where two clashing worlds were eventually meddling in the middle. On one hand, were the ultra-conservative heads of state and their governments who were constantly fuelling some meaningless wars on communism and other devilish forms of ideological fornication, and on the other, were the 'freedom people' who sometimes appeared on the cover of Time Magazine for the very opposite reasons... Jane Fonda was one of these prominent figures leaning towards the left side of these clashing titans. She could have burned the American flag and would not have attracted as much controversy as when she had posed on an anti-aircraft battery belonging the North Vietnamese Army. Of course, it was clear that her stance was a mere attempt to sway the public opinion into rallying against the war. Nevertheless, the actress subsequently earned her infamous _Hanoi Jane_ nickname and was vilified by the media who portrayed her as a selfish, unashamed and inconsiderate brat. The drift between traditionalists and baby boomers, conservatives and liberals, old and new, wasn't only confined to the political scene. It happened also at home... My father was driving a hearse-like black Citroën DS21, whereas my mother had opted for a racier Ford Capri MK1 1700 GT orange coupé. When you saw them in their respective cars side by side, they were like chalk and cheese. It was yet another example of our departure towards new horizons. The 70s were the scene of an unstoppable tectonic shift where society had left the 'oldies' behind in the harbour of a past civilisation and was tailwind sailing towards a new era called the future. Despite their divergence in style and aesthetics, when it came to performances, my parents had to agree that they both needed good cars. Indeed, it was taking them well over an hour to drive door to door from our home in Nantes to their business in Renazé. In order to reduce tiredness due to excessive commuting, I had to join them on several occasions on an extended stay at the only hotel-restaurant in the village. I remember eating the best _omelettes aux fines herbes_ and bangers and mash I had ever eaten in my life in this very place! The owners were fine hard-working and honest people from the countryside. Apart from enjoying their food, I also spent a great deal of time playing with their son in the fields while my parents were at work. The young chap, who was only a year older than me, was proudly talking about the highlight of his young life...

"The Tour de France was here last week... The cyclists were only a few feet away from our restaurant. I was in the crowd with them. I could have touched them if I had wanted to! I saw _Poupou_ , Cyrille Guimard, Thévenet and of course Eddie Mercx..."

_Poupou_ was Raymond Poulidor's nickname. He was France's favourite cyclist. Countryside people were particularly fond of him due to his humble beginnings as the son of a farmer. We all also liked him because of his underdog status... He had terrible luck and the nation pitied him. Notwithstanding countless participations, the poor fellow had never won any of the major cycle races despite always coming close and finishing in third or even second place sometimes...

"I enjoy wearing overalls!" He then said out of the blue, in a mere attempt to justify why his parents had chosen to dress him in this clumsy outfit, which was usually worn by older menial workers.

"It's very practical, especially when you need a quick pooh..." He awkwardly added.

After playing for a couple of hours with sticks and stones as boys did when being in the middle of nowhere, we walked back to the village and stopped at his grandfather's house in order to quench our thirst. It was hot and we were pouring with sweat. The old man was a brave peasant smiling so happily from ear to ear that he could have easily swallowed the moon crescent. He pulled two glasses from a shelf and half-filled them with cold water from the tap. Then, he laughed and asked me, "You want a drop of plonk, son?"

"Sure!" I replied, timidly.

His radio was playing some old songs from the 50's and 60s. Watching me drink what was essentially a large glass of red wine cut with the same amount of water, this cunning old man was grinning while imagining what my dad would have said if he had known... I also was good sport and kept on smiling at him while happily sipping my drink. I was clearly relishing my time amongst these laid-by and unpretentious people. Indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent there, particularly while listening to Paul Anka's song _Diana_. I knew then that I was trapped in a time warp... We all kept this secret 'vacation' to ourselves, hoping there would be more to come. Over the remaining weeks in July, I felt the seed of rebellion growing in me.

As most businesses in France in those days, my dad's company shut down for the whole month of August. It was then time to travel again to Estepona where our family had religiously gone on holiday for the past two years in a row. So, as usual, we set off at a ridiculously early hour in the middle of the night. It was a long, slow and boring drive to Spain despite my father's relatively fast DS as we were also towing his latest toy, a large speedboat... As the great majority of people in Southern Europe who weren't working in travel & hospitality were all off pretty much at the same time, the only motorway to the South was chock-a-block. Patrick, my brother-in-law-to-be, was tailgating our car at the wheels of my mother's Capri whilst being accompanied by his fiancé Marnie, my younger sister Laurie and one of her boyfriends called Tony. As the traffic suddenly grounded to a half, my dad smiled at a classy lady who was driving an Alpha Romeo Spider all by herself on the adjacent lane of the dual carriage way... This drove my mum to go instantly berserk and, as my parents started arguing about this woman, she ordered me to go in the Capri with my sisters... At last, I was able to breathe! The ambiance amongst these youngsters was so refreshing after the vitriolic fog I had had to suffer. Rather than letting the parents' vile mood and traffic beat us, we switched the radio on to change our mind. Michel Fugain was singing _Une Belle Histoire_. Then, a few miles later, we listened to Michel Delpech's popular hit _Que Marianne_ _était jolie_ ...

"Dad says that Delpech is a communist and he doesn't like this song." I said, bluntly.

Nobody said anything back. Of course, the song was loaded with leftist political messages but nobody cared. It was just a damn good song! Was I a chip of the old block or was this the cry in the dark of an oppressed child? Perhaps I was just a plain grass...

"What's the hell is he doing?" Patrick said unexpectedly, wondering why my dad had suddenly taken over the people in front of him and was now driving on the hard shoulder at speed... We had no choice but to follow him... Some of the people stuck in the queue angrily shook their clenched fists in our direction, and shouted and beeped at us. One car even pulled aside and blocked our way, making my dad beep his horn non-stop until the traffic moved again. For the mere sake of beating the traffic, my dad had made us feel so ashamed that we would all have wanted to disappear at that particular moment of our journey. After driving the whole day and the whole night in such hectic conditions, only stopping for refuelling or for the occasional pit stop at a one of the traditional roadside cafés, we finally arrived on the Costa Del Sol. The trip had been so strenuous and hot, that when my mum found the sea so appealing that she demanded to take a break and have a swim. The beach was covered with pebbles as hot as a burning stove. After a quick change into our swimming gears, we all ran to the sea, scorching our feet in the process. Although the water was gorgeously warm and inviting, the waves were breaking so hard that it was almost impossible to swim. To everybody's surprise, my mother did not hesitate a second before diving straight into the breakers as if she was Tarzan's daughter...

"Well, I never! I had no idea your mum was related to Mark Spitz..." Patrick said humorously, referring to the top Olympic swimmer of the moment... Eventually, as she had not yet re-emerged after plunging into the rolling waves, my dad ran into the water and started swimming frantically in the direction where he had last her. He went under a huge swirl and after a few interminable seconds that seemed lasting like an eternity, when we all thought they were both dead, he reappeared holding her under his left arm. Luckily, they both managed to swim ashore alive. We all thought this was a strange incident... Was it a suicide attempt? Was it her way to make the same call in the dark as the one I had presumably made? She could have lost her life that day. Nevertheless, despite this incident, the holiday continued and we finally arrived at our destination in one piece! Estepona was a bucolic fishing village with a huge spike of regular visitors in August who, just like us, had fallen in love with the authenticity of this picturesque resort. Eventually, due to the affluence of relatively wealthy North European tourists, cafés, restaurants and nightclubs had started to emerge. Understandably, my sisters and their boyfriends jumped on the opportunity to mingle with the local nightlife crowd, despite the constant moaning from our parents. My dad was particularly upset when he heard they were seeing again their old friend Kamal, who he suspected was doing drugs... One evening, while we were having dinner together, Laurie's friend Tony told us about his true passion for aikido, a relatively new sport back then. Somehow, as the young man had managed to capture everybody's attention, I got a bit green-eyed. Armed with the grit and wrath inherited from my father's bitter side, I was no longer able to contain myself and I suddenly lashed out at him like a Rottweiler: "Aikido is not a martial art; it's a girly form of ballet! Karate, that's a sport for men!" Tony, who was astound by such a rage spewing out of the mouth of such a young boy, was smart enough to understand this was, in effect, an argument he may have had with my father by proxy. Despite my apparent ignorance, he took the time to explain in minute details how aikido moves were actually capable of harvesting the energy from karate kicks and transfer it back against their opponents with interest. Nevertheless, Tony's matter-of-fact argumentation did not deter me from continuing to fight our guest with words. It eventually reached a point when I was deeply embarrassing my sisters and when I started making a real fool of myself. Despite of that, my dad, who everybody was expecting to shut me up, did not do anything. In fact, he appeared to enjoy this verbal bout. He was probably rejoicing in the fact that his own son was demonstrating true fascist virtues whilst putting this hippie in in place... At the end of the meal when we all began to leave the dinner table, Tony, who had certainly not enjoyed being called a girl by a seven-year-old brat, brushed past me and his elbow surreptitiously hit me in the chest in an apparent accident. Nothing happened instantly but, after a few seconds, I felt as if all the air in my lungs had vanished and a burning sensation began to take over my entire chest. In the meantime, Tony was watching me from afar with a strange smile on his face... I was sure he had done this on purpose, and I did my very best to refrain from crying in order to save face. However, after a short while, I burst into tears like a little baby. My father went to my rescue immediately and consoled me. After all, it was his violent military-style authoritarian education that had put all of these silly words into my mouth. This was a reflection of his traditional way of seeing the world: a patriarchal realm where real men like him and I were supposed to rule over the weaker kind just like Julius Cezar in Rome and his tight grip on the poor plebs. After this incident, Tony and I did not have any further altercations as he decided to leave on his own and return to France just a few days after our bout of words... Afterwards, apart from one or two bust-ups between my dad and my sisters' friends, and his sadly too constant arguments with my mother, there was nothing else worth remembering about this holiday. Eventually so, we returned to Nantes in a similar way as our outbound trip to Estepona: driving on the hard shoulder while beeping at the plebs stuck in the never-ending queue...

Back home, I still had two long weeks to go before returning to school. I happily returned to my good old habits of hiding under the dining table and spying on my sisters... As far as they were concerned, although the two older ones had dropped out of school before even obtaining their baccalaureate, they were still about to experience a steep learning curve while enrolling in marital life and eventually motherhood. Their respective marriage preparations planning was keeping them so busy that, at times, I felt pretty much on my own even when they were in our house. I was therefore really happy and excited when one of Nickie's clients sent over by the babysitting agency had dropped by without warning and had asked her to look after a young girl about my age for an entire afternoon... She was a long brown-hair cutie called Nathalie. At first, we were a bit shy with each other but, as the polar attraction between opposite sexes began to work, we soon dropped our respective guards and slowly became aware of our physical differences... The weather was still hot and the windows leading to the terrace were wide open. Naturally, we felt compelled to go out. Somehow, we didn't feel like talking. Yet, we were constantly communicating via our complex molecular system projecting sparks and cues loaded with hormonal scents. Nickie, who had been on the phone with her fiancé Frank for ages, suddenly realised we were not making any noise... She peeped out of the window and heard some little voices whispering in the wind. Reassured, she made herself a cup of tea and before returning to her own business decided to check on us one last time... As soon as she climbed up the steps leading onto the terrace, she saw the backside of Nathalie who was standing stark naked. She also found me wearing nothing but my fragile virtue... After giving us a good talking to, Nickie made us promise not to tell anything about this incident to anyone, especially not to our respective parents. Of course, neither of us wanted this story to leak and we agreed to keep our mouths sealed. After my wild hide-and-seek party with Stéphane and his sister Jane, this was my second close encounter with the opposite sex in this format. Somehow, the idea of being in the proximity of naked girls began to occupy a growing corner of my mind. This preoccupation grew even bigger when, on one occasion, as I was hiding in the bathroom without any particular purpose, one of my sisters' girlfriends had decided to take a bath in the middle of the afternoon... It was yet another moment when my fondness for stealth had landed me in hot water again. I felt a big lump in my throat when the young woman started dropping her clothes one by one. While taking her underwear off, she noticed I was there, "You are welcome to stay..." She said to me, so naturally... It sounded as such a heartfelt invitation that I accepted with pleasure. We then talked for a while making me feel we were equals despite our age and gender differences. She asked me many questions about my school and friends and I enjoyed being at the centre of her attention, until the moment when she decided to leave the bathtub. I looked at her without any shame nor remorse as she dried her naked body in front of my bare eyes. I reckon she enjoyed being watched as much as I enjoyed admiring her... That evening, I felt I was turning a page into the next chapter of my life.

The following day, Laurie's friend Philippe visited us. They were listening to The Rolling Stones' Angie in the living room. For some strange reason that I have never managed to fathom, I entered the room with only a bath towel around my loin while moving to the sound of music and unveiled my young body fully erected. The youngsters laughed, but, as we were in the 'live-and-let-live' 70s, they did nothing about it... Hence, they let me dance in this bizarre fashion until the song ended and I stopped performing my improvised take on corporal expression... That week, Nickie's fiancé Frank killed himself in a car accident while driving under the influence.

Chapter III: The Treacherous Road to Hell

The entire family was mourning... I do not remember who had told me about her fiancé's accident, but I will never forget Nickie's face when she returned from the hospital where they had tried in vain to revive him. It was not a pretty sight! At that particularly difficult time, Marnie and Laurie were no longer living at our family's home and were respectively staying with their boyfriends. As for my dad, he was also away on a business trip somewhere and the responsibility of comforting the poor Nickie had therefore fallen on my grandmother and mum. Our apartment, once the joyful recipient of the Anglo-American musical vibe brought into our lives through my sisters' hippie friends, had ended up becoming the silent repository of sorrow. I had no idea then that things were going to take a turn for the worse. It took just a flash of time to ignite the electrically charged atmosphere when my dad came through the door and my mother noticed an apparent lipstick mark on his shirt's collar... Boom! Bang! Kapow! Expletives and punches were flying around like flies in slow motion. I watched my world crumble before my eyes. All the good air left in my lungs had deserted my body. I was left breathing the fumes of the ghostly fire in my dead fireplace. I dreamed a lot of my imaginary friend the red devil Bolibone during these sombre times... Torn between Nickie's mourning on one hand and my parents' war mongering on the other, I had to focus on something more positive during my remaining days of vacation. Thus, my Memé and I watched a bit of television to change our mind. The Summer Olympic Games were in full swing in Munich. Mark Spitz was winning all the medals in the swimming competitions and the Soviet gymnasts were exhibiting extraordinary, superhuman, quasi-robotic prowesses that many people in the west attributed to either doping or brainwashing. It was the first time since the infamous 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin when Hitler had famously avoided congratulating Jesse Owens and all the other black and Jewish athletes that this sporting event had returned to Germany. I remember one day when, as I was playing alone on the terrace, I heard my grandmother Memé shout: "Oh my God!" This was the 5th of September 1972, a day when a group of Palestinian terrorists had taken the entire Israeli Olympic team hostage after killing two of their members for starters... The perpetrators belonged to the Black September Organisation whose name was reminiscent of a crisis that had taken place in Jordan in September 1970 when King Hussain's troops had killed and expelled thousands of Palestinians fighters... For years, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had set the entire Near East region ablaze. Several factions of pro-Palestinian organisations such as Yasser Arafat's PLO were particularly active. The following day after the beginning of the Munich crisis, a news bulletin announced that all hostages and five of the eight terrorists had lost their lives during a botched rescue mission by the German police. While these dreadful news filled our days and lives through non-stop television broadcasts from the Bavarian capital, my parents picked-up this sorrowful, raging and angry vibe. After incubating this malevolent virus for a day or so, they launched their own version of Armageddon. This is when I heard for the first time of my young life the dreaded word divorce being pronounced under our roof... After a deeply hurtful shouting, throwing and smashing about session, my dad packed his suitcase and left our apartment forever. He left behind much more than a pregnant daughter, an old mother-in-law, a tearful wife and a subdued kid. He left his heart in these walls, instantly killing the family man who lived in him. After being hit by life with such a major blow to her stomach, my mother, who had gone into shock, took a handful of Valium pills and only re-emerged from her semi-comatose state after a couple of days. During these difficult times, Memé had risen to the challenge of running our household and had been taking care of all our depressed souls. After coming out of her self-induced coma, my mum got up one morning still consumed with rage and jalousie... "The bitch must have drugged him!" She kept on saying aloud, alluding to the fact that my father was having an affair with his secretary and that she had finally brought him under her spell with the help of mind-altering substances...

"I am not going to let a country girl steal my man..." She said, grabbing her Ford Capri's keys, and off she went...

The next time I saw her was almost a week later when she returned from the hospital after an almost fatal car crash. After never returning home on the evening of her impulsive departure, my worried sister had made a few phone calls. My dad had neither seen nor heard from our mother, but the nearby hospital had...

"Maman has broken her leg and she is going to spend a few days in hospital to recover..." I had been told.

_When I saw her for the first time since her "mild" accident, my mother came through the front door wearing a bathrobe, assisted by my sister and by a nurse who was also pushing a mobile IV pole... Surprisingly, both her legs seemed all right and she was not wearing any cast as I would have expected. However, her fully bandaged head and bruised face painted a totally different picture than the porky pies I had been fed with for a week... To this day, I still shiver when I hear the dreaded words_ _traumatisme cranien_ _, French for cranial trauma..._

_" Let her rest as much as possible over the next few days or so. I will come back Saturday to check on her. She is going to be drowsy for the next 12 hours, so do not expect her to talk much..." The nurse said on her way out._

_I only managed to get the full picture a few days later when my partially recovered mother explained to me how a suspicious man in a big lardy car had pushed her off the road while taking her over on a bend. According to her, that guy was most definitely in cahoots with the rest of the nefarious group of devil worshipers who had brainwashed my father... She was totally delirious. I am not sure how people nowadays would understand the full spectrum of my predicament without immersing themselves in the context of my life at that particular period of time and this specific location... In 1972, the Roman Catholic bourgeois society we belonged to was not ready for my sisters' out-of-wedlock pregnancies and for Nickie's single-mother status, let alone now for my parent's divorce... We were still five years away from_ _Kramer vs Kramer_ _after all! But, the real cherry on the top of the cake was my crazy mother... She kept a straight face whilst proudly telling people that her doctor had never expected her to fully recover so promptly... Obviously, my poor mum had no idea why her self-proclaimed 'full recovery' had raised a few eyebrows... Indeed, since her accident, she had developed a new penchant for wearing a pair of knickers on her head while frantically cleaning the floor in her nighty and talking to herself or even sometimes to my absent dad aloud..._

_" Don't you see how evil she is? These people are Devil worshipers... They have drugged you. You can still come back even if you are ashamed... Come back now for Stéphane's sake..." She used to say, killing me softly with shame._

_I don't think anybody can realise how crazy this situation was, and whether I liked it or not, I actually was the cornerstone of this madness! Several years later, this would lead me to betray my mother when a girlfriend of mine who was visiting would ask me who the lightly dressed cleaning lady with the funny headgear was... Alas, despite all my bravado, I would not find the courage in me to reveal to that girl the true insanity that tarnished my personal life like the black spot coming from an incurable and contagious disease. Indeed, if I had, she would have probably run away, or would have perhaps even called the psychiatric hospital... Pitifully, I could only manage a deceitful lie:_ _This is the maid..._ _Thus, I would live the remainder of my life feeling like a small-scaled_ _Judas Iscariot_ _. Whether this was God working in mysterious ways or the responsibility of pharmaceutical advancements, my mum had become so addicted to_ _Valium_ _that she had lost touch with reality, making her parenting duties quasi inexistent. What this really meant for me was that I had departed from the hammer of society, the authoritative jurisdiction of life... I was still seven and was already in charge of my own self. I could have said that I was gone fishing for a week and nobody would have ever noticed... But, to be honest, despite having the freedom to do anything I wanted, I would have traded my entire broken-down existence for just a few seconds of my school friends' respectable domestic normality. On the other hand, in my mad world, I was free to listen to whichever music I wanted to, to watch whatever TV programs I liked or go to the park at any time of the day or night! Since my dad had left, we seldom watched any news. The women in my house couldn't have cared less about Nixon re-election or the state of the French 5_ _th_ _Republic... There were far more interesting stuff on telly such as a new British series called_ _The Persuaders_ _featuring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore. These guys scored way high on the coolness scale... At that time, I used to find the English culture remarkable, especially when it came to how well-spoken its people were and how subtle their sense of humour was... Even the thieves on British series had manners. They robbed you blind but never without living a bunch of flowers behind. This was perhaps a fantasy world I was accustomed to through watching too much television but that lifestyle suited to a T... I was then aspiring to be just like_ _Brett Sinclair_ _,_ _Danny Wild_ _or_ _James Bond_ _when I would eventually become an adult. In the meantime, I was also exploring the music scene through the stack of LPs left behind by my sisters and their friends. Hence, I started to '_ _walk on the wild side'_ _just like the good old 'uncle' Lou Reed would have said... Meanwhile, amidst this chaotic madness, my parents were going through the motions of filing for a divorce. As it would have jeopardised the negotiating tactics, I didn't see my father for months during these legal procedures. He sent a great deal of money home though, and, as a result, I got a beautiful red bike for my eighth birthday. I remember going to the shop with my mother... There was a unique mixed smell of bicycle chain grease and rubber in this place. To me, this smelled like freedom! There were quite a few bikes to choose from. I looked around the shop and I instantly spotted her: a shiny red_ _mini-vélo_ _(foldable bike) so beautiful that I could have given her a name. Although I didn't, she still fill a very special place in my heart for she was a lady, and I rode her like there was no tomorrow... Thanks to her, I started discovering many streets in my city that I didn't even know were there. I also passed by all the cinemas, including the naughty ones... I was intrigued and fascinated by the beautiful posters, which to me, were not only telling stories about the movies but were also an open window on the story of our human condition. Further to its nationwide promotion in newspapers and on billboards at each and every street corner in town, I would have liked to see_ _The Godfather_ _but, sadly, it came with a PG-13 rating. So, I had no choice but to get my kicks from something else and the answer was right between my legs: my red bike! I rode her like a cowboy on horseback. I_ _rodeoed_ _over every hill and earth mound in the park... One day, I met some kids who invited me to a game of marbles. The smaller one was called Jesus, an appropriate name for the youngest son of a Spanish family who had fled Franco's regime. Another one was nicknamed_ _The Artist_ _because of his magnificent football skills but they also called him_ _L'Artichaud_ _(The artichoke) because it half-rhymed and was funnier. The bigger one in this group was a gentle giant named Eli, strong as an ox, kind as a cow... And of course, there was Cyriaque, a clever kid whose dad had the reputation of being a sea captain and mum a whore... They were street kids who came from a poorer area of town half a mile away from the park, called Le Quai de la Fosse (Loire river docks). Most often, local folks used to jokingly refer to this area as_ _Le_ _Quai d'la Fesse_ _(The bottom's dock) due to its high concentration of lonely sailors and not so lonely ladies working in dodgy bars... Somewhere in one of the flats overlooking the park, somebody's radio was playing the musical score of the movie_ _Midnight Cowboy_ _by Harry Nilsson_ _Everybody's Talkin'_ _. That song could have been written just for that very scene we were in... We were all different and, yet, similar in so many ways. We had different backgrounds and were a few years apart but this didn't stop us from belonging to the same era and smelling the same street fumes. Although I was lucky enough to sleep in a posh bed at night, I was even luckier to have breathed the same mix of sweat, dust and smoke sniffled by those noble morons. Day after day before the school re-opened, I religiously played with this gang of street urchins. This was the first time of my life since I had felt such a strong sense of belonging... We all respected our differences and acknowledged our respective skills. To prove my courage, which, depending on the circumstances, often ended-up being either my worst defect or my best quality, this wild bunch had challenged me to perform a daredevil stunt. They wanted me to jump with my bike over a dune of rocks and top soil that the park rangers had temporarily dug out whilst re-landscaping the flowerbeds. This obstacle may have been only a few feet high but the slope on the other side seemed just as deep as the Winter Olympic's ski-jump ramp from the standpoint of my easily impressed 8-year-old's mind. Hence, I started my race at the top of the park near the entrance and was sweating profusely... The afternoon sun was already low behind the magnolias and I felt the warmth of its rays piercing through the foliage on my face. The spotlights were on me... Armed with all the might I could gather through my beautiful imagination, I began my road to hell pedalling with my butt off the saddle like a pro. I flew past my friends like a rocket. They were cheering as if all hell had broken loose. They were so loud and exited that it wouldn't have surprised me if they had placed a few bets on me breaking my neck. At that particular moment, I began to see myself as a young Evel Knievel surrounded by an outlandish crowd and ploughing through imaginary flames on either sides of my flightpath. Then, when I arrived in front of this massive wall of earth, it felt as if a big and terrifying tsunami wave was about to flatten me under its mass. Although I could have stopped there and run away, I chose not to... Instead, I accelerated to reach my top speed and I slowly watched the world around me sink into the ground. I imagined then that this was how Apollo 17 astronauts had felt while ascending to the moon during their launch. The wings of power were steadily keeping me as high as a kite. Then, all of a sudden, I fell down like a ton of bricks... Bang! I felt the impact on my small frame as hard as a crushing vice tightening around my spine, but, thanks to my strong core, I managed to pull myself through this ordeal and I survived! The back wheel skidded a bit and I turned around to contemplate my victory still in motion. Like a toreador who would have returned some of the flowers thrown at him by his aficionados after killing a bull, I grabbed a few tulips from the flowerbeds, threw them back at my fans and bowed. When I came home that day, I felt like Julius Caesar upon his victorious return from the_ _Battle of Alesia_ _. I was so comfortable in my own skin that I had forgotten all about the deadly mood in my home. It was quiet to the point of making silence sound like a musical instrument. Nonetheless, in order to maintain a high morale,_ _Memé_ _had cooked a delicious dish of_ _osso buco_ _with gnocchi fit for a king. During dinner, while I devoured the rich food like a lion tucking on a fresh kill, I heard that my sister Laurie had escaped to Canada with one of her new friends... At the same time, I also heard that I was not going to be invited to my sister Marnie's wedding because it was just a formality at the town hall and not a full-on ceremony at church. I was therefore going to stay behind with my grandma... It was only later that I eventually learned that I had been kept out of this event because my dad was going to attend, and my mum didn't want me to see him just yet. Although I didn't miss his harsh side, and although his harsh side appeared to be the only one that really transpired, he was still the only daddy I had. I wondered how he was doing..._

_In the meantime, I was staring to develop an awareness of what was going on around me and outside of my microscopic circle of friends... In French politics, the Communist Party was growing in popularity and a new charismatic leader called George Marchais had just been elected. He was a smart cookie but the speech impediment and abrupt demeanour he had inherited through his humble roots never failed to make him look like a constant loser. However, even his archenemies who fought him day in and day out on the political scene admitted that he was somewhat of a likeable buffoon, just like_ _Poupou_ _and all our other ever so popular home-grown underdogs... Christmas 72 had finally come and I did not even remember anything about it. It was like if the light on this passage of my life had been turned off. I only recalled that my mother and I had been watching a new historical series around that time. It was called_ _Les Roi Maudits_ _and it depicted the treacherous politics inherent to France's 14_ _th_ _century royal court. In this program, aspiring kings and queens were constantly plotting against each other with usually dire consequences. I vividly remembered one particular episode when one of the rivals of the heir to the French throne had arranged to kill him in a spine-chilling fashion... His henchmen had inserted in the poor fellow's bottom a bull's horn with a cut-off tip. They had then shoved a red iron through the victim's internal organs. Apart from the ensuing matter discharge, this technique did not leave any other traces of foul play. The entire series was extremely morbid and kept on depicting vile forms of torture and lurid killing methods. Fascinated by this nefarious vibe, I decided to replicate some of the torments I had witnessed in this program. Unlike the house in the song by Crosby, Still, Nash and Young (_ _Our House_ _), there was only one cat in our yard... His name was Cyrus. One late morning, while playing with him outside on our terrace, I re-enacted one of the scenes when villagers who had refused to pay their taxes were hung. Like the executioner, I systematically placed a noose I had prepared earlier around the pussy's neck and, after making a sound I meant to resemble a medieval trumpet, I slowly pulled the other end of the rope, which was hanging over a nail on the outer wall. I stopped as soon as the poor cat couldn't cry no more... Somehow, I don't know why, but I often felt like hurting those who I liked the most, including myself. That was just one of my own ways to take a walk on the wild side._

_January 1973 also came as a surprise. Elvis Presley was entering our homes through the lens of the cameras filming his concert in Hawaii and broadcasting the event live through our television's screens. This was great if you had a girl to_ _boogey_ _with I guessed, but to me, this was not a patch on_ _Arsène Lupin_ _, a new TV show based on Maurice Leblanc's famous '_ _Gentleman Burglar_ _' character. The posh old-fashioned hero with his cape, top hat and monocle, reminded me of a friend of mine who, despite being my age, had always been an old man at heart... His name was Archibald. He lived in one of the fanciest buildings backing directly onto the park. When you came into his home, apart from the extremely formal and antiquated Empire style Napoleonian décor, the first thing that would hit you was the hoity-toity attitude of the maid in traditional livery. If anyone survived the initial scrutiny of the loyal yet overzealous lady, it was actually quite pleasant to enter my friend's home, almost like stepping back in time and into an episode of_ _Arsène Lupin_ _itself... Archie, as we used to call him, was now the only child of an older couple who had lost his older brother in a freak accident. We had been going to the same schools since the kindergarten and he had leaned on me quite a lot after the loss of his sibling... Once, as I was playing football with my gang of street urchins in the park, I saw his maid in full regalia walking the family pouch, a ridiculously-named French puddle called_ _Rolls_ _... Archie was timidly following her from a safe distance. I was just about to kick the football into my opponents' goal when my peripheral vision helped me perceive the maid in black and something even darker than her outfit lurking behind her... Then he came,_ _Ecce Homo_ _! Dressed as a comic book hero, the child_ _Zorro_ _himself appeared suddenly before our eyes. His costume was so luxurious that it was obvious his parents had spent a small fortune on him. When my poor friends saw the spoiled brat coming towards us along with the other 'fancy-dressed' woman and her dog, whose hair had been artistically mown by the likes of_ _Edward Scissorhands_ _, they also began to sharpen their imaginary knives... These kids were a different type of animals than those who had once sung_ _The House of the Rising Sun_ _, but that song would have perfectly reflected their mood at that moment. Feeling short-changed by life and poor, they started walking towards the prince of darkness and some of them were touching the fabric of his outfit..._

_" Hey, hey, Milord, I had no idea that your Excellency was going to visit us paupers today. What a great honour that is..." Cyriaque, the gang leader said, sarcastically._

_" Have you seen those shiny guns and this leather holster? I didn't even know that posh toys like that existed... Unless they are not for real..." Eli said while trying to take one of his revolvers._

_Fearful of being mugged in broad daylight, Archie became suddenly agitated. He then pulled a plastic sabre from a scabbard hanging on his side and started hitting Eli repetitively with it on his head and sides. When the other kids in the park saw what was happening, they all joined in and a real battle began! They jumped all over Archie and a rain of fists started to fall on him like a hail storm. His housekeeper tried to intervene and grabbed Jesus by the ear. Without seeing it coming, she received a kick in the shin that took her breath away. Punches were flying away like boomerangs before swirling back and coming straight at Archie again._

_" Steve! Help!" He called and I eventually had to stop the carnage. While extracting him from this melee of rough kids I started to take pity on him... He was just a lonely cowboy who wanted a piece of the action. This episode made me decide to help him become streetwise. Thus, on a bright Saturday morning, I took him along to a shop in town that was selling toys and fireworks. With his money, we bought loads... We also got some cool pistols with an ingenious trigger mechanism that jutted out a sharp pointy bit at the other end of the gun when pulled. The explosive corks that came with those fancy toys and that you were supposed to shove at the end of their canons made such a loud and powerful explosion that anyone close by could have been seriously hurt. However, that was not all... We had a wide range of kiddie's dynamite too! So, when we arrived back at the park with our arsenal, I demonstrated how to handle the various fireworks..._ _The Froggy_ _was an interesting type that, apart from jumping around like an amphibian while exploding multiple times, was also leaving behind chunks of smoky paper shell that we thoroughly enjoyed smoking like cigars..._ _The Flying Saucer_ _made the same noise as a pressure-cooker just before reaching its bursting point._ _The Machine Gun_ _was made of one hundred tiny fuses designed to set-off in a staggered staccato... Then, there was_ _The Mammoth_ _, which was simply as big as a small house! After destroying a full bed of tulips for starters, the time came to let my friend handle one of those by himself. I therefore handed over a cigarette lighter to him, "Take this, and then, here you are my dear, the_ _Mammoth_ _!"_

_Archie took the large firework in his right hand and looked at it with an apparent puzzled expression before lighting its fuse with the lighter, and then he asked me, "and now what do I do?"_

_By the time I reached him and attempted to grab the_ _Mammoth_ _, it exploded in his hand. His scream was louder than the bang itself! I feared that his parents would have heard him from their top-floor flat at the other hand of the park. But surprisingly, nobody came, and I was left alone contemplating how this plonker had managed to bust his thumb open. I dragged him to his home, whinging all along like a baby, and I dropped him right in front of his front door and left before his maid had even had the time to open her mouth... Back to my house, there was another type of explosion... Nickie had broken her water. That was new to me. I didn't want to have anything to do with the birth. I was certainly not going to be one of these heroic children who assisted their older sibling or their mum with childbirth. I was a killer kid not a rainbow maker. My first nephew was eventually born that evening at the hospital. She had named her son after his late father: Frank. A week later, my sister Marnie had also given birth to a baby boy, also called after his old man: Patrick. How original!_

Chapter IV: Yet Another Piece of Marvel!

While my family had earned along the years the status of being fundamentally dysfunctional, I was slowly but surely metamorphosing into a superhero. The weather was getting colder and it was time to get back to school. To mark this occasion, my mother had bought me a very special outfit. We had found an incredible forest green corduroy fitted shearling jacket with a fake fur collar and a pair of matching flared trousers. Since my dad had left, I was no longer required to have a military hairstyle and I looked really current in my new outfit and with my long hair. The kids in my new class were the same than the year before. Like me, they were just a bit older. One of the girls called Mirna who was the daughter of a Jewish family in the garment retail business had complimented my fashion sense during the break: "Nice suit! Very cool..."

I was still too young to understand that her admiration may have been just a bit more than a mere insipid comment... Thus, I did not return the compliment and took the accolade like an arrogant king, chewing it, swallowing it and processing it in my mind with a pure matter-of-fact attitude: Ok then. This must be true... I am really cool! I then started walking differently in the streets. People often smiled at me and I even gathered further comments such as an occasional cutie boy! Yet again, I was too young to sense any foul play and, anyway, I was too fast on my feet to risk being caught by any pervert... Although I lived in a French provincial city, I lived in an imaginary global world through the TV screen in our home. I felt as a true citizen of the world long before this concept had ever been considered by society. I was particularly fascinated by the British culture, which I learned about through watching series such as The Avengers and The Prisoner. These programs exulted something we, French, used to call je ne sais quoi... Subtlety, nuances, understatements, and other insipid cucumber-sandwich flavoured societal attributes inherent to Queen Elisabeth's Kingdom were music to my ears. Our French culture was also great, no doubt about it, but pretty 'full-on' with bold garlic flavours and panache à la Cyrano de Bergerac... It was nice sometimes to taste something fresh and different. What about an After Eight? So truly delicious... After my nephew's birth, Nickie, who needed a moral boost, had travelled quite a few times to London, bringing back from her travels great music, chocolates and perfume. She once offered me a yellow cuddly elephant doused in a good splash of Old Spice. I still remember what this new smell had meant to me: a new beginning, a turning point in my life, a shift towards the stars. One day, she returned from the hip British clubbing scene with a new single in her sleeve. Along with her baby Frank, Memé, my mother and I, Nickie made the whole family groove to the smooth and classy sound of I'm gonna love you just a little bit more baby by a relatively unknown pop singer called Barry White... Back on the firm ground of the living souls, I continued to explore my immediate vicinity, which still held many secrets I had not yet discovered. One day, I literally bumped with my bike into a bigger kid on a Mobylette moped. While Italians and British Mods had Lambrettas and Vespas, we just loved our good old mopeds. The most famous type known as the VéloSolex, also referred to as the Solex, was the preferred choice of the students since the Second World War. Indeed, it was cheap to run and could still be used as a bicycle if you ran out of petrol, hence the appeal to youngsters of little means. The Mobylette however was a different kettle of fish. This was a heavy-duty two-wheeler with a relatively sizeable engine designed to last forever. Accordingly, this had become the preferred mode of transportation for the majority of the French blue-collar workers... Who was that guy and what was he doing here? I asked myself when I saw him for the first time. He did not fit the profile of the usual park folk. His name was Renaud. He was my elder by three or four years. Although he was old enough to ride a moped, he was also young enough to want to play with a kid like me. The best way to describe his predicament was to say that he was trapped between two ages. One could have also said about him that he looked rough. His prominent forehead and jaws reminded me of my pre-history book about the Neanderthals. His eyes were neither blue nor grey. They were the same colour as the sky, and in Nantes, it was most of the time cloudy. He was clearly poor. My friend Archie had warned me about him: "Beware that one. He is the son of our concierge, a dodgy gipsy who goes by the name of Gali Gadjo..." To me, the fact that he was from a different background made him even more interesting. Thus, I spent a fair deal of time with Renaud at weekends. On a rare sunny late autumnal day, I rode with him on his bike, sat at the back of his double saddle, and we headed towards a busy commercial street where they sold the best ice creams in town. We bought some refreshing vanilla and strawberry cones. We were so happy that Renaud started singing an old 1960 song by the famous comedian Bourvil called Salade de Fruits. I didn't care that it was totally out of fashion. It was not his fault if his sisters, if he had any, weren't bringing him the latest Top-of-the-Pops hits back from London... We felt so free on his Mobylette that it made me feel ecstatic about being a street urchin. Back at the park, he invited me to his home. He lived in the same building as my friend Archie. However, instead of going upstairs towards upscale pieds-à-terre, we went through the cellar door and walked downstairs towards the back of the building, crossing what resembled old prison cells along the way. His family occupied a rather insalubrious makeshift dwelling with a couple of small recessed round windows backing onto the park that hardly provided enough natural light... I was shocked to witness how such a level of poverty still existed in that day and age. It was just like going back into The Dark Ages. My friend offered me a drink. "You want a beer?" He asked with a cheeky smile on his face. His father looked at me with a similar amused expression, uncovering a mouth with barely any teeth at all. This reminded me of the sparkle of light in the eye of my friend's grandfather in Renazé when, in a similar situation, he had poured some wine in my water. There must have been something deeply satisfying and evidently funny to the poor folk in getting a rich kid like me falling into the habit of boozing at an early age... Had they known how successful their seditious attempt to make an alcoholic of me would, in time, turn out to be, they would have surely held a party! Unfortunately, soon after my visit of my friend's humble home, his father _Gali Gadjo_ _had been caught red-handed stealing some precious artefacts in one of the tenants' attic spaces. I have never known nor heard about what has happened to my friend Renaud and his family but, sadly, these poor folks have vanished from planet Earth..._

_Meanwhile, my sister Marnie had moved away from the hustle and bustle of town, into an old house on the outskirts of a picturesque village called Sucé-sur-Erdre with her husband and newly born son. This country dwelling dated back to the early 1800s and had apparently been used as a brothel during_ _Les Années Folles_ _in the 1930s. This explained the secret peeping holes drilled between most of the adjacent bedrooms... The house had a charming sloping garden with a gate at the bottom opening straight onto the bank of the river Erdre. It was an idyllic location for aquarelle painters and anglers alike. We often visited the young couple at weekends and had lovely family reunions and parties at their place. The period at the beginning of 1973 was overall a happy time for our clan. Meanwhile, on the geopolitical scene, the_ United Kingdom, The Republic of Ireland and Denmark had joined the European Union. On a more popular note, the French band Stone & Charden were happily singing Made in Normandie and The Last Tango in Paris was shocking the average bigots and inspiring the rest of the population to consume more butter... Sadly, there was also an incredibly morbid story surfacing on the news of a plane crash in the Andes and of the survivors having to resort to cannibalism for their lives. Moreover, the Israeli Airforce had shut down a regular Libyan airliner plane carrying 113 passengers. There was nothing better to make you feel good than bad news... Then, branding our decade with the permanent seal of the 'Era of Psychedelic Rock', The Pink Floyd had launched their fascinating album The Dark Side of the Moon. Soon after moving into her new home, my sister had a custom-made banquette seat built in the living room at the back of the house. It was backing onto a lawn, some trees, and a river at the far side. I used to sit by myself in this room at the tender age of eight. It felt like a haunted place but this was nothing comparing to when I used to play Speak To Me, the first song on the Pink Floyd album, at full volume... I was terrified by the heartbeat intro, the cash register, the lunatic laugh and the hallucinating scream finale... I kept on playing it again and again, until all the hair on my forearms were brutally raised by fear. On my way home, I could still hear the sound of the helicopter rotor on the next track On The Run buzzing in my ears and the clock of Time ticking. I felt feverish. My sister was dropping me back in her Austin Mini when we noticed an angry mob of students brandishing placards and screaming Debré salaud! Le people aura ta peau! (Debré, bastard! The people will skin you alive!)... These youngsters were protesting against the newly introduced law by the Minister of Defense removing the rights of university students to postpone their mandatory military service beyond their 20th birthday. Ultimately, this protest led Pompidou to replace Debré in order to avoid another May 68... The good old days of authoritarian style politics were coming to an end and the French President knew it. On the 8th of April 1973, another era slipped away as Picasso pulled the plug under the sink of Cubism whilst dying... The next time I returned to my sister's house in Sucé, it was to meet with my father during the Easter holiday. It had been almost eight months since our last reunion. When I heard the news about his incoming visit, I initially told everybody I didn't feel like seeing him. But, after a while, I changed my mind. When I arrived in the front yard of my sister's house, I noticed he had changed his car to the latest model of DS23IE in metallic green, a colour likely inspired by the fluorescent pellicle of vegetation found at the surface of ponds under the moonlight. With its googly front lights, the car looked ridiculously like the spitting image of a giant frog! Perhaps this is how the French received their famous nickname. I hugged my dad. He was well shaved as usual and still wore his favourite Vetiver after-shave by Guerlain. Since it was very early morning, we ate our breakfast at my sister's and left to the airport afterwards. He was taking me to Zurich on a father-and-son business trip... I had to learn again how to know him. Being in a plane was a good opportunity for that. We could have talked for a long time then. Sadly, my father was neither talkative nor affectionate. As I craved both more than anything, all the money and the fancy restaurants he threw at me fell into deaf ears. We stayed at the Carton Elite hotel and ate at the Locanda restaurant nearby. He taught me how to behave in society, how to skin a whole shrimp with a fork and knife, and how to differentiate my Bordeaux from my Burgundy... Somehow, the best intentions and the very best wines in the whole wide world never managed to remove that knot in my stomach that flared up whenever I was with him. Between his various business meetings, which I usually skipped by staying in my bedroom, he took me a couple of times to the most luxurious toyshop I had ever seen in my life: Franz Carl Weber. Right onto the uber-affluent Bahnhofstrasse where the top Swiss bankers and watchmakers were side-by-side, this place was out of this world and so were the prices. As I was allowed to choose whatever I wanted, I ended up buying an extremely realistic replica of the official state Mercedes of none else but Adolf Hitler, with the swastika flags and all the trimmings... Sadly, the bond between my father and me always revolved around luxury and money. Just as he was letting me go back to my mother's place with my sister Marnie who was waiting for me at the airport, he gave me two 500 francs 'Pascal' banknotes, which, at the time was the equivalent of a month salary for many blue-collar workers. It felt good and bad at the same time. The human mind and mine in particular, was such a complicated thing. My pain did not make sense at all, but I still suffered. True horror rarely showed up in my privileged life. Thousands of miles away, at the very same time, a little Vietnamese girl my age called Phan Thi Kim Phuc had been photographed running away naked from a napalm inferno... Her grief trumped my sorrow a million times over. She embodied the suffering of the two million civilians killed during the Vietnam War and of the many more people who had lost their homes or their families as a direct result of what truthful history should have referred to as a genocide.

Like a lonesome cowboy coming back to the Great Plains of Montana, I returned to my red bike and rode her all around town to make sure I hadn't lost my touch. Like a Peeping Tom, I always enjoyed passing by the Cinéma Ariel, which, at the time in my city, was the Mecca of porn. I didn't stop, but I slowed down really slow and loitered like a little pervert while admiring the poster of the latest X-rated movie called Deep Throat, the story of a woman whose clitoris was in her mouth... Another controversial movie by the Italian director Marco Ferreri called La Grande Bouffe was playing at the Katorza... This movie epitomized the 70s' depravity of a certain class of well-educated intellectuals in the French and Italian societies who, after departing from their privileged upbringing roots had plunged into a salacious world of Caligula-esque orgies. The controversial theme of the movie depicted a group of middle-aged men and women who had decided to commit a collective suicide by overeating... Gruesome belly-bursting and defecation scenes were introduced for the first time to the public and everybody turned a blind-eye. How low could our human condition reach? I wondered. We were all Peeping Toms...

Although I was not directly affected by this omnipresent moral depravity, I couldn't completely turn a blind eye on the windows of society, namely the box office movie posters and the TV commercials. I was once also able to witness first hand another example of these changing attitudes, this time from an increasingly rebellious proletarian layer of society... A football fan association supporting the Football Club de Nantes (FCN) had opened a block away from my school. In those days, my city's team was leading the Première Division (French Premiere League). As they were well on their way to become champions, Les Canaris (FCN team members' nickname) had reached the status of national heroes. My friends and I were so immersed into the football scene that the fan club next door had become one of our favourite hangouts. Moreover, as one of my schoolmates was the son of a former FCN player and trainer, we were allowed to coming in as we pleased. One day, the club's staff were busy preparing a large homemade banner for an important derby match against Le SCO d'Angers (rival team from a nearby city)... This 'tongue-in-cheek' masterpiece was depicting one of the Canaris mistakenly kicking the referee's bum instead of the ball. A caption at the top, written in bold capital letters, was saying: Aux Chiottes L'arbitre! This literally meant Bog off referee! The main artist putting the finishing touches on the banner looked at me smiling and winked. This was his cheeky way to repent himself from all his sins... In those days, the world of football was fundamentally working-class and the football-loving crowd was particularly vulgar and most of the time drunk on cheap beer and wine. Based on that, to this day, I still shriek when I remember how my mother, willing to take on some of the male-bonding responsibilities left vacant by my father, had dragged me to the Marcel Saupin stadium to watch a live game against the FCN's archrival St Etienne... With her fancy fur coat and her 'Jacquie Kennedy beehive' hairstyle, my mum didn't exactly appear to belong to this male-chauvinistic scene. As she had no idea where we were stepping in, she had booked a couple of seats in the lower zone where tickets were relatively cheap and where most of the hardcore fans usually hung out... As soon as we reached our seats, a group of rowdy drunkards gave us a welcome ovation and started chanting some colorful football songs riddled with profanities... I felt so mortified that I did not dare to watch anything nor anyone, including the louts, my mother and, sadly, the game itself. It would have been far easier to watch the match on our TV set at home I reckoned... Nevertheless, that year, to my great delight, the FCN won both the championship and the cup final!

In the meantime, life continued and Madame Garapin's radio kept on being the main source of popular songs and news bulletins to the rest of our building... France's image on the international scene was at an old time low further to resuming its nuclear bomb tests in the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific... A car bomb in Paris had killed a member of the Palestinian faction responsible for the Munich massacre. All fingers pointed evidently at the Israeli Mossad. On the music chart front, Michel Sardou was singing his latest hit: La Maladie d'Amour. Another type of music was playing in my apartment, something more 'colourful' but not obligatorily brighter... This was one of my sister's LPs, which I had always found particularly intriguing. For starters, I would have described the musicality of the Spooky Tooth & Pierre Henry's Ceremony album as being the exact opposite of melodious... Then, its cover horrifically depicted someone hitting a nail through his own hand and into somebody's head at the same time... I could not fathom why somebody would ever want to do that to someone, let alone to himself. It was bizarrely combining suicide and murder, a concept, which was unfortunately 'en vogue' at many of the dark & secretive sects of this period. I am sure Charles Manson himself would have fully approved this LP's cover as well as the mad experimental music in it, which was a real headache.

The spring 1973 was finally over and so was another school year... The Tour de France had started and the merry face of the country's favourite cyclist Raymond Poulidor was already on the front page of L'Équipe, the top French sports newspaper. Without a fail, his reputation of losing the top place on the podium due to his terrible lack of luck had been justified year after year, and 1973 was going to be, sadly for him and all his fans, no exception... Indeed, on the 15th of July, The sportsman crashed on a sharp mountain bend and was subsequently rescued in a helicopter. This time, his bloody face managed to make the front page of all national newspapers! Allez Poupou!

The start of the summer was hot and sticky and I stayed at home a lot, watching more television than ever... The American series The Invaders was being aired again after its initial success in the late 60s... David Vincent and his extra-terrestrial foes still managed to keep both adults and children on their toes. After watching the first episodes, I rode my bike all over town, watching for people with stiff pinkies...

Chapter V: A Rite of Passage

On my way home from one of my epic bike rides, I bumped into my buddy Arnaud, the so-called 'dreamer', and I invited him to my place. I literally had to drag him through the flight of stairs, as he wasn't used to walk to the top floor of a four-storey building and also, perhaps more likely, because he was not as enthusiastic as I was... I brought him proudly inside my home like a living trophy. I had difficulty concealing my excitement. I was obviously craving for his company, let alone anybody's... As he didn't say much, he must have felt how awkward the whole thing really was and waited patiently for this little escapade to come to an end. Apart from sitting beside him at school, we were never close and there might have been a good reason for it. As we did not have any specific thing to do in mind, I took him into my den, confident that we were going to have fun despite our obvious lack of reciprocal chemistry... My mother who I still shared a bedroom with was resting in her bed. When she saw us, she went to another room in order to give us some breathing space. The least I can say is that, by then, Arnaud looked pretty uncomfortable. Indeed, our family arrangements were far from being normal and he was clearly aware of it...

"Would you like to play with darts?" I then asked, hoping that he would find such a challenging game entertaining.

"Sure!" He replied, not knowing what he was stepping into...

To spice things up, I gave him my favourite shield with the Templar's cross and the matching helmet from my crusader outfit. I then told him to hide. My friend, who was not used to such madness in his uneventful life, submissively abode by my tyrannical instructions. He was crouching behind my bed when he started to fully realise that, in this game, there was no safety net... The rules were simple: as in real life, there were hunters and hunted, and he belonged to the latter... Eventually, he managed to dodge the first couple of darts, but as they were coming thick and fast, he couldn't stop all of them and, while some ended up stuck in the wall behind him, he was hit by one in the left shoulder... Ouch! He screamed and my mother stormed in to the rescue. When she realised what had just happened, she immediately diffused the tension by staying calm and tending to my injured friend. She removed the dart stuck in his skin, applied some disinfectant and put a plaster on him.

"I think you better head home now..." She said, and Arnaud did not wait a second more to get the hell out of my place. No need to say that he never came back. Feeling just like Peter O'Toole in one of the most poignant scenes in the movie Lawrence of Arabia, this incident left a profound impression on me... I had actually enjoyed pricking him with the damn dart! I was exploring a pure form of cruelty without remorse. I had already tasted a similar bittersweet emotion during the hanging of my cat. This was just another level. Making people you liked suffer was the ultimate sacrifice for a good catholic kid like me...

On another afternoon, my regular friends and I had decided to explore the nearby overgrown and derelict structure originally the port customs' offices, which the allied bombing in 1943 had flattened. This wasteland was a dangerous place to play. It was a mountain of rubble on top of some of the remaining floors, which had only partially collapsed. Thus, the ground beneath our feet was extremely precarious and could have given way at any moment. Moreover, as the municipality had left this area untouched since the bombardments, there was always a chance to bump into some unexploded bombs... All the kids in the area knew this place as Le Terrain Vague. To us, it was like the ruins of an ancient medieval castle. However, while playing on it, we clearly felt the ghostly vibe of the German troops who used to occupy the building during the shelling... It smelled damp and the odd urine whiff here and there was not uncommon either. To me, it simply smelled death. Despite the eerie and rather frightening atmosphere, we felt attracted to these inhospitable surroundings like if they were the resting place of a hidden treasure trove. Although we were after the elusive bounty, we never found anything but dirt and rubble except for when, on one occasion, Cyriaque spotted some movement near the far side of the structure where a wing of the old building was still standing... Apprehending something sinister, we cautiously approached the zone of perceived danger. Suddenly, we saw him, an old tramp faffing about for no reason at all... We silently observed his ins and outs for a while. He was dressed in a long coat reminiscent of what soldiers used to wear during the First World War in the Verdun trenches... He also wore a bizarre hat. It could have been military issue, but there hadn't been any war in those parts since the past thirty odd years... Could he have been the living ghost of a German soldier? I started to wonder, when Jesus broke our silence excitingly: "I know him! He is the Algerian man who scares me and my sister every day on our way to school..." Algerian? Well, I never... We all thought. From this day onwards, we called the poor fellow L'Algerosh and we made him suffer for annoying our young friend, and more importantly so because he was 'different'... We found the highest spot above his makeshift house and patiently waited for him to come outside... Eventually, the vagabond pulled his trousers down and began to squat, obviously tending to a nature call. We laughed silently and gathered some large rocks. On the count of three, we all threw the stones at him. As we were a fairly large mob, L'Algerosh began to feel as if the War had started all over again! He was hit on his back a couple of times and looked up, cursing at us in Arabic... We returned the compliment by throwing another salvo of projectiles. Eventually, the poor fellow opened his arms in an obvious sign of capitulation and said in broken French: "Why? What I did to you?" We stopped the attack for a few seconds, but the cease-fire didn't last long. Eventually, as we wouldn't stop, L'Algerosh came back into his den, wondering how on earth such an overflowing amount of hatred could cram into such small souls. Sadly, our cruelty did not stop there... We also picked on the park warden, an older chap wearing a uniform and a kepi hat. He was a tall bow-legged man with an amicable nature. Accordingly, he was not able to run very fast and even if he were, he would probably not have been nimble enough to catch us slippery eels. He was therefore the ideal prey. We spent a considerable amount of time devising the most ingenious ways of making his life miserable. Before we came into play, he had a very nice and quiet life. After opening the cast-iron entrance gates at each end of the park in the morning, his first duty was to boil some water in his little gate house and make some coffee. He had a wood stove that he also used to warm himself up in the winter and to cook hot lunches from time to time. Eventually, he also went out walking sometimes for the odd hand-rolled cigarette smoke even though he was not a heavy smoker. But, his main vice was to bet on the horses... To do that, he religiously walked down at the same time and on the same day of the week to his local PMU (Pari Mutuel Urbain), which had been the French official betting house since the 1930s. At that time, some rather shifty pilgrims frequented this place... The bar inside was ever so often the favourite meeting place where winners celebrated their wins and losers drowned their sorrow with the same medicine: Pernod. This drink, whose generic name was pastis, had replaced the original green absinthe made with woodworm, which had been banned in 1915 because of its devastating hallucinogenic properties. Nonetheless, those hooked on Pernod usually ended up brain damaged and with a very respectable cirrhosis... The burst blood vessels showing on the warden's face removed any remaining doubt over his liver's condition. He clearly was a revving alcoholic... One of our favourite tricks was to pull one hundred tulips out of the flowerbeds and to surreptitiously place the beautiful bunch of flowers in front of his door, just minutes before his sacrosanct walk to the café. We used to hide behind the camellia bushes in order to be in the front seats when the spectacle unfolded. He usually stood there, watching in disbelief and wondering what he had done to Providence to deserve such bad kids in his park... Another trick we also liked to pull on him in the winter was to throw a firework in his wood burner's flue. For this, we used to wait for a cold and miserable day when he was bound to spend most of his time inside the gatehouse. Then, we waited to see some smoke coming out of the chimney, which meant he was probably warming himself up near the stove. Then, one of us would climb stealthily on the roof, light the fuse of a massive Mammoth, and finally throw it through the rain cap before running for his life... Even outside, the explosion used to sound like a real bummer! One weekend, the warden who had had enough of all our pranks, had decided to talk to us in a peace-offering manner... We saw him coming towards us while we were playing some silly games in the bushes near the main gate. We were about to run away, fearing it was an attempt to catch us, when he gently called us: "Hey, kids. Stay! I just want to talk to you about something..." Then, the poor fellow started to explain that he had received a complaint about us from the residents who lived in the surrounding buildings... He was literally begging us to be a bit more respectful, especially towards the poor tulips and plants who had done nothing to deserve these treatments. While, we all looked at him chuckling, I furtively pulled a whole red geranium from one of the flowerbeds, climbed behind him on the gate from where he was addressing our group and carefully deposited the glowing plant right on top of his kepi hat... My friends started to laugh aloud and the warden, thinking they were taking the mickey told them angrily, "Grow-up guys! This is not funny! You are going to get in trouble if you continue like that!" He then left the park and started walking to the PMU for a well-deserved drink... In order to fully appreciate the final part of our prank, we followed the poor chap to the betting house where we finally saw his friends bursting out laughing upon his arrival. That is when he noticed the geranium over his head... I will never forget his face when he turned around and started looking into our direction. Although he could not see us, he knew we were watching him from afar...

We were not the only group frequenting our park. Jesus' family used to hang around there quite a lot as well. Since he had plenty of siblings of all ages, it was difficult to keep a count of them. The oldest, Antonio, was a big shot around here. He rode a fast motorbike and proudly belonged to a rockabilly gang of sorts. He was always nice to us kids and even nicer to beautiful girls, but he was really mean with everyone else. He was tall and muscular and he carried a nasty switchblade knife in his pocket. There was a girl I knew who seemed to be attracted to his Marlon Brando style... Her name was Jeanine and she was very polite. She had long auburn hair that covered part of her waist. She often sat on a bench while waiting for Antonio to show up and talked to me about school and stuff... Somehow, I had become a central figure in the park... Everybody knew me. One evening, we started playing a game of déli-délo, an exhilarating variance of hide-and-seek where cats and mice mingled a lot. While we, the youngest, were having fun, Jeanine and Antonio were busy enjoying a much more mature type of entertainment. I caught them kissing and saw him try to put his hand inside her jeans. She rebuffed him, but yet again, impulse being often stronger than reason, she finally let him have his way. I was in awe watching them being in love, listening to her occasional moan... It was a beautiful day and as we were all there, we split our group in two teams and played a game of football. L'Artichaud was on the opposite side and this meant trouble as he was really good. I kicked off the match, passing to my mate Cyriaque. Before he had a chance to pass the ball back to someone on our team, L'Artichaud himself tackled him and managed to keep the ball at play. He wiggled his way through the midfield and arrived in front of Jesus who was defending our goal area. Unfortunately, he was no match for the talented dribbler... Somehow, L'Artichaud managed to lob kick the ball over our defense line and ran past several of our players in disbelief who simply watched the champ intercept and volley-kick the ball towards our goal. He gave it such a swirl that, even with the big Eli as our keeper, we had no chance against that son of a gun and conceded our first goal. We equalized shortly after and the battle went on at a frantic pace for three quarters of an hour until it reached its climax at four all when our team was awarded a penalty kick... As we had all agreed that the first ones to reach five goals would win the game, the pressure was now on me... In the meantime, while we were totally immersed in the match, Antonio and two of his brothers had dragged Jeanine into a quiet corner of the park... Totally unaware of her ordeal, I placed the ball carefully right opposite to the centre of my opponents' goal and took seven steps back. I then took a deep breath, and as I was about to begin my run, I heard someone calling my name... "Stevie! Please, help me..."

"It sounds like Jeanine..." Someone said.

We temporarily stopped the game and went towards the area where the voice was coming from... Behind a neatly trimmed hedge, we found Antonio pinning Jeanine down on a grass patch. His two partners in crime were helping him pull her trousers down...

"Hey, kids! You want to play with us?" Antonio said, laughing, with one of his hands over her mouth.

She then managed to wiggle through and shouted, "Call the warden!"

"Go away, kids!" One of the men finally said.

Was this a game? I wondered... I had seen men and women play rough in a similar fashion many times at the cinema. This reminded me of the scenes in High Plains Drifter and A Fistful of Dynamite where, effectively, Clint Eastwood and Rod Steiger had respectively raped a couple of women... In both films, the victims had started rebuffing their assailants, but had sooner or later ended up moaning in the same pleasurable way as Jeanine when Antonio had his hands down her pants earlier...

"They are playing a grown-up game... Let's go back to ours!" I finally said.

Yeah!!!! Shouted all the kids in unison and we resumed our football game. I missed the penalty. This was the last time I ever saw her again... The following day, the warden came to us, asking, "Have you heard or seen anything strange last night? That girl Jeanine has made a complaint to the police..."

The way society looked at sex was a different ball game back then. We called it making love or even sometimes making babies. Although, I was too young to feel the physical urge that would eventually one day pull me towards the opposite sex, I was emotionally attracted to girls and women alike. Jesus had a lucrative scam where he traded a pack of chewing gums for a peep at her 7-year old sister Encarnacion. Although her name had strong religious connotations, this little angel willingly pulled her pants down for half of the pack of gums... I looked at her in that way once, but it did nothing to me. However, I cannot say the same for the first time I opened a Playboy magazine... On a hot afternoon, one of our friends called Ludovic had managed to steal one of these erotic publications from his father's stash... I remember being with Jesus, who was too small to partake in the game we were about to play, and with Ludo who was about the same age as me, almost nine... The cover was showing a young woman in a tiny bikini with very large bosoms. As soon as we opened the second and third page, we were hit with the most exhilarating nudity. With four older sisters, this was not the first time I saw a naked woman's body. However, these playboy bunnies were hotter than the sun! I started to sweat and the more pages we turned, the more I felt a big lump in my throat. Naturally, this was not the only part of my body that was swelling... We reached the peak of our excitement while enfolding the trifold flyer in the centre of the magazine. It showed a truly stunning fair-haired girl proudly showing her protruding pubis...

"Do you want to make love with her?" My friend Ludo asked me...

I looked at him and nodded, indicating he could count me in. With a penknife, he made an incision between the legs of the girl in the picture. Then, one after each other, we inserted our respective penises inside the makeshift vagina. That is how I lost my virginity to a Playboy magazine...

Chapter VI: BREIZH

My mum, still in shock since her divorce, didn't feel like going on holiday for the first time without her husband as a single mother. So, I spent the summer in my city, enjoying a 'staycation'... As the weather was nice, it didn't faze me at all. In fact, it couldn't have been better. I played a lot with my friends and I met new ones... One day, as I was lighting the fuse of a Tiger firework near the warden's gatehouse, a bigger kid who was walking through the park spoke to us:

"You should try breaking it in half..."

"Breaking what in half?" I asked, curious...

"The Tiger... Try it. It's amazing..."

So, I did exactly that... I broke the firework in half, lighted the fuse and threw it just a couple of metres away from us. To my surprise, instead of exploding as expected, it spun around madly as soon as the gunpowder inside the Tiger ignited. His name was Erwan. He was two years older than I was. He looked quite different from all of us. His long blond hair and huge nose gave him the Asterix-like profile of a Gaul. In fact, he was Breton through and through. While we all respected his knowledge in pyrotechnics, this was not the only reason why we clicked almost instantly with this guy... He was different from anyone else in our group and this was important to us as we proudly represented the true patchwork of life. We were not just black-and-white or yin-and-yang. We were as colourful as a rainbow on steroids. Like in Mission Impossible, we all had our specialties. In the meantime, I also felt that having a friend like Erwan was going to improve my own personal life. As an older kid, perhaps he was going to help me bridge the gap between childhood and the path to adult life I was about to tread on... He was interested in history, archaeology and geology, especially when it had anything to do with Brittany. Thus, I started to learn the amazing story of my region and city... The first settlements on the Loire riverbanks dated back to the Second Century BC when a Gaul tribe called the Namnetes had dwelled here. The Romans had conquered the area a century later and had remained in charge until the Visigoths and the Franks after them had taken over the settlement during the Fifth Century AD. Eventually, it was not until 850 AD when Nantes became a Breton stronghold when the first Duke of Brittany began to rule over the city who was then named Naoned. The city's name was finally changed to Nantes in 1532 after the unification of France and Brittany. Although Rennes has been the administrative capital of Brittany since then, historically, Nantes has always been the main city in this region. My friend Erwan's family had been able to trace their roots back to the first Breton dwellers. In 1973, he and his family were staunch supporters of an independent Brittany, refusing to accept the French Republic's rule over their land. He told me many stories about the city and taught me many things about its culture, which I have held close to my heart to this day. The first time I truly felt Breton was when I wrote the words BZH on the white wall outside of the famous college Lycée Gabriel Guist'Hau with a black chalk... This was an acronym for Breizh, the Breton word for Brittany. Beyond its mere linguistic translation, the BZH sign was linked to the infamous Breton Liberation Front (FLB), which, by then, had already been instrumental in the bombings of several French administrative landmarks. Besides becoming a guerrilla, Erwan had also taught me how to become an archaeologist. One day, he dragged me over the fence of one of the nearby private schools and then into a woodland along the banks of the river Chézine. There, amongst the overgrown brambles, laid the stone remnants of an ancient city in ruins. It felt weird being in that place. First, it was exhilarating to trespass, but the main thing was the aura emanating from these grounds. I could hear the telluric waves speaking to me... We sat down on a fallen tree trunk. Then, my erudite friend told me the daunting account of a battle that had happened right where we were standing...

"In 937, after almost a century of gruesome battles against the Vikings, the first duke of Brittany Alain Barbe-Torte (Alan Crooked-Beard) fought these blood-thirsty Normans in these very woods... The story goes that the duke single-handedly killed scores of these invaders. He was so strong that he had the reputation to kill wild boars and bears with a mere staff stick... People say there are still some helmets and swords beneath the earth here. Perhaps we should come back with a shovel one day... Hush!" He suddenly said.

I was daydreaming of medieval battles and treasures when he brought me back to reality and I heard voices getting louder and closer to us. It was a bunch of students running along the nearby path in their sports gear. Luckily, we managed to hide behind the tree trunk and no of them saw us. I knew in the back of my mind that we were not allowed here. Yet again, trespassing made things even more exciting... Being naughty was fun! From this time onwards, Erwan became a prominent member of our gang and he started being with us on a daily basis. Although we participated in many games and performed many tricks on ourselves and on other people, firecrackers were always a staple on our menu. One of our favourite recipes was Le Petard au caca de chien (firecracker in dog's poop). I will always remember when, on one occasion, as we were walking across one of the backstreets behind the park, we stumbled on a providential huge pile of freshly laid excrements... Without any hesitations, we all agreed to shove our last _Mammoth_ of the day right in the middle of the soft turd. We then patiently waited for a passer-by to turn up...

"Shush everybody! Someone is coming this way... Quick light the fuse Stevie!" Erwan instructed me.

I followed his instructions and then ran for my life behind a row of parked cars where my friends were already hiding. We patiently waited for the imminent blast a few more seconds but, unfortunately, nothing happened and we watched our target pass right in front of us unscathed...

"The fuse must be wet..." Erwan said, approaching the Mammoth...

Before he even had the chance to check upon it, we heard a loud bang! The light brown matter splattered around a three-metre radius. Our Breton friend who was the first attending the scene received the full blow of the explosion in his face.

"Merde (shit in French)!" He appropriately said.

We all agreed this was an unfortunate incident, but somehow, we all thought this mishap was also extremely funny... While we hardly managed to hold back our laughter, Erwan took it the right way and cleaned his hair and face with some dead leaves which he had picked from the gutter. He stank for the rest of the day, but he couldn't care less. From this day onwards, he earned an awful lot of respect from the rest of us. Apart from keeping his head high amidst such a potential state of disrepute, my Breton friend had many more talents in store. One of them was to know Brittany's geological landscape in and out... One day, as we were playing in the park, he passionately shared some of his knowledge with me. He drew a quite accurate map of Brittany on the ground with a stick and demonstrated how the Armorican Massif was spanning from Normandy to The Vendée region, including The Pays Nantais (Nantes area). He went on telling me how this ancient volcanic chain had been formed via tectonic shifts around 500 million years ago, and was actually made of an endemic type of granite aggregate containing minerals such as mica schist, quartz and feldspar. To discuss and illustrate his personal interest in local palaeontology further, Erwan invited me to his home where he displayed some of the sediment samples he had collected over the years. So, one morning, I followed him through the streets of an old part of the city. Before I came in, he warned me, "Whatever you do, don't sing the Marseillaise in front of my father. He does not recognize French sovereignty over this region..."

He lived in an old building probably dating back to the French Revolution like mine. As soon as the door opened, I felt I was stepping into a time warp. I could hear Breton percussions playing such a powerful warrior beat that I had no doubt could engulf the whole region into its own Che-Guevara-esque revolution. I entered this Breton enclave in the middle of Nantes like if I was going to see a movie at the cinema. The music was by Alan Stivell, an iconic Breton singer famous for his revival of the Celtic harp. Natural lighting coming from only a few period sash windows was not enough to brighten the house, which felt relatively dark even during the day hours. It smelled of cat urine and old things.

"Father, this is my friend Steve..." Erwan told his dad.

"Steve? That sounds English to me..." The old man said in a not so inviting manner. My friend had warned me about his dad. He didn't like the French, but he was also not particularly fond of the former allies after their devastating bombing raids over Nantes during World War II. So, I didn't take any offense.... Mr Caradec was a blind 70-year-old published and respected Breton poet. Apparently, he was relatively famous in some circles where hardcore dissidents used to revolve. He had long white hair and reminded me of the self-portrait of a man in red chalk by Leonardo Da Vinci. He could have been a druid! We left the old man alone tending to his reveries and went into Erwan's bedroom. There, he proudly showed me his stones collection. They were so magnificent that I got immediately hooked by their shapes, their colours and their feel. I became such a committed rock-lover since that very day that I began to make this recurring dream of finding these precious gems in caves and mountains. My friend had personally unearthed staurolites, a strange and magical stone made of silicate and schist shaped like a cross. How could nature make such a perfect design? I wondered. He had also found pyrites (fool's gold), also perfectly chiselled in man-made-like cubes. Although I knew their intrinsic value was insignificant, these small rocks made my heart vibrate with the very same sound the chords of Alan Stivell's harp produced... This was the sound of adventure at sea and on the grounds where monoliths and fairies shared their respective universe in harmony. There was something so nostalgic about Brittany that I was totally moved, heart and soul alike. On my way back from his home, I was daydreaming; my head filled with magical stories such as the tale of Merlin the Enchanter whose resting place was apparently hidden in the heart of the Broceliande Forest, which was not so far from where we were...

I was brought back to reality when I saw the front page of a newspaper depicting the tragic death of Bruce Lee. Like every other boy in 1973, I held the King of Kung Fu in high esteem. Even though he was only 5'8", we believed his fighting skills were beyond his mere physical strength and technique. There was something almost spiritual about the way he fought his opponents, something borrowed from his ancestral Chinese-dragon folk culture. These were times when people believed in something else than science and facts. We believed in the hidden powers of humanity, the esoteric, mythology and even in extrasensory perception (ESP). Bruce Lee was one of these people who made our humanoid race reach our next level on the evolution ladder. His latest movie _Fist of Fury_ was playing in cinemas... Sadly, my friends and I were too young to watch this Rated-13 motion picture. Without knowing it, we all built our own version of Bruce Lee's mausoleum in the meanders of our respective minds. There is a black and white picture of the great man on top of a mantelpiece in mine... He will stay there forever.

Later on in August, on a sunny afternoon, we braved the heat and went playing in the Terrain Vague's ruins. Unfortunately, our 'friend' L'Algerosh was nowhere to be seen. Thus, we resorted to our good old firecrackers for fun. It was Erwan who had the idea of cocking a Mammoth in two halves... We all knew it was dangerous to play with fire. Notwithstanding the potential danger of performing Erwan's favourite trick on such a big firework, we all agreed this was a risk worth taking. We found a dirt patch, which looked as safe as it could be and lighted the fuse... This time, the powder ignited instantly, the flame coming out of the first half of the Mammoth lit the other half, and this produced such a thrust that it flew up like an out-of-control spinning top and landed a few metres away in a bush. It merely took a few seconds for the bone-dry vegetation to catch fire, and after a couple of minutes the whole side of the hill slope where we were standing was engulfed in flames... We managed to escape unscathed but stuck around to find out how bad this blunder was going to turn out to be. Passers-by and people in the nearby buildings also came out to watch the blaze. Eventually, someone called the firefighters. It took only ten minutes for their red truck to arrive and even less time to put the fire out. Reassured there was more fear than harm, we were about to leave when a policeman stopped us... While Erwan, Cyriaque and I stayed put, Jesus, Eli and the rest of our gang ran away. So, we were fresh bait...

"Do you have any idea how this fire started?" The law-enforcement officer asked.

"Sure! These are those kids you have just seen running away who did it..." I said.

"Oh, really? And where were you when this happened?"

"We were in the park." Cyriaque said.

"In the park? So, how could you have seen who did it if you were so far away?"

This time, the man got us with his clever questioning tactics. We couldn't say anything else in our defense. I knew it and was clever enough to figure out that in such a case, being truthful would bring the best outcome for all of us. Thus, I was the first one to crack and I said, "we were with them; it was an accident..." And I pretended to cry.

"All right. All right. Enough of your whining! I will take you to the police station to take your written statement."

Hence, we got a ride in a police car... There, the policeman filled a report on his typewriter and drove us home afterwards. When I arrived at the top of the stairs outside my front door with him, I wondered what my mum's reaction was going to be... She opened the door in her nightgown. In the true style of a properly messed-up kid, I felt embarrassed, scared, amused and proud, all at the same time... That day, she did not punish me as she should have and as I deserved. In the back of my mind, I totally knew that getting away with such a misconduct was the wrong thing to do for my upbringing. I would have rather received a good hiding than being totally ignored... Unfortunately, as my mother was barely fit to handle herself, she was the contrary of a proactive parent. Apart from cooking and cleaning the house, which at least and to give her credit she did well, I was pretty much on my own for everything else.

The summer ended and it was time to get ready for school. I was looking forward to go back to my friends, but I apprehended my new teacher... His name was Mr. Robert. His reputation of being strict and scary preceded him. On the eve of the first day back at school, as I was preparing my satchel, I was loading my pencil case on my mother's desk when I found an unopened note from my previous teacher addressed to her... I swiftly asked my mum to check what this was all about, hoping it was not important. Unfortunately, these were the instructions of a summer project that all kids, including me, had to prepare during the course of the holiday and deliver on the first day of term... Damn! I thought. I only had a few more hours left in the day to figure out what to do...

"You should have opened this letter on my last day of school last year!" I told my mother, angrily.

"Don't worry. We will sort something out..." She said.

Then, she pulled a book about American Indians out of the bookshelf.

"That's perfect... I will help you. Get the scissors and the glue stick." She said unapologetically.

Her basic idea was simply to cut and paste each and every page from this book on some blank sheets of paper. As I was watching her putting the pages in a folder, I felt sick in my stomach. I thought of my friends and imagined how their parents would have spent a lot of time working with them on this project. This was an opportunity to belong together with our respective families. This was a way to show off how committed our parents were to our peers. In my case, both my mother and I knew that it was just botched work. Yet again, as if her words had the power to remove all shame and shambles by magic, she insisted it was all right, "It is just fine my dear... Just fine."

Chapter VII: 007

September 73 was warmer than usual and, on the first day of school, I wore my new short-sleeved brown car-print shirt. Although I looked as cool as ever and should have felt happy to rekindle with my classmates, I had a lump in my throat. I was dreading to present my summer project so much that I became deeply depressed. I only managed to escape this dark and suffocating universe when I bumped into some of my friends on my way to school.

"Hey, Stevie! What do you think about the new teacher?" They said, referring to Mr. Robert.

As I had never met him, I didn't have much to say, but the moment of truth was nigh. After a short catch-up with the other kids in the playground area, a tall man with a jet-black moustache and beard called us out in a deep masculine voice. We followed him quietly in a single line like well-behaved puppies into the classroom.

"Good morning, class! My name is Mister Robert. As you all know, I am your new teacher. Before we start talking about our class planning for this year, I would like each of you to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your family and anything that makes you unique like a hobby or something like that. Then, I will ask you to present your summer project... So, if that's ok, let me start with mine..."

Then, the new teacher told us a few things about him and his family... He was newly married and had a baby daughter called Alice. He was 34 year-old and was a passionate amateur rally-racing driver. His dream was to participate in the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans automobile endurance event. After telling us about his personal life, he told us about his professional expectations...

"Now, when it comes to teaching and learning, I expect my pupils to be attentive but, more importantly, I want all of you to participate in class. To make this year a success, you must also work hard. So, if you do not understand something, you need to stop me right there and ask... However, before you raise your hand, please make sure that what you are about to raise is relevant to the rest of the class. If it is not, I will show you what happens... You see this? Imagine it is your little finger... And this my friends is my summer project: The Guillotine!"

We were all gobsmacked. The teacher was holding a carrot, which he then positioned under the blade of a miniature guillotine standing on his desk... As we anticipated, he pulled the small lever that was holding the blade, which then came down at speed, and cut the carrot in half. No need to say that we were all shocked and many of us were starting to worry about being in this crazy man's classroom... On the contrary, that demonstration had made me feel good about the whole thing. Mr Robert was not that bad after all. In fact, he had a weird sense of humour, which smart adults would have qualified as caustic. Although we, children, were too young to understand the nuances between wit and derision, I did. So, from this very first day onwards, I started to like my new teacher a lot. Somehow, he must have felt it and it would have been fair to say that I was somewhat of a teacher's pet. He often referred to me as a 'rascal', which in his unconventional world didn't seem to be that bad at all... However, despite feeling good about him and his gig, the dreaded time to deliver our respective presentations finally arrived... My friend Didier was the first in line. He had brought with him some old newspapers, a basket and an encyclopedia.

"Please, give me a few minutes to set-up my exhibition..." He said, before lining his desk with paper. He then pulled some wild mushrooms and displayed them in a specific order.

"Hello. Today, I am going to share with you my passion for mycology, which is the study of fungi, the Latin word for mushrooms... My dad and I have collected all of these for you at the weekend. Please come closer and take a look, but please, whatever you do, don't touch them as some of these can kill you! So, if you are all ready, I am going to show you the edible ones at the front of my table..."

Despite being usually quite goofy, on this occasion, he was talking in a very professional manner. He obviously knew his subject very well and was somehow proud to share some of his knowledge with us. He then flicked through the pages of his encyclopedia that were marked with a sticker and that precisely matched the order in which he had arranged the mushrooms on the table. Being able to see real cèpes and chanterelles in the flesh and to then crossmatch them with an actual picture on his mushroom book added credibility. After going through the good ones, he then introduced the poisonous ones...

"Now, my friends, let me show you the most dangerous fungus in our forests, the Amanita Phaloides, also known as death cap. As its name points out, if you eat it you will die..."

We all found his presentation fascinating and extremely well prepared. Didier had set the bar so high that it was very difficult for anyone to follow in his footsteps... However, my friend Archie whose turn had come to introduce his chosen topic, had also arrived well-prepared with his personal collection of toy cars. Indeed, he had brought dozens of die-cast miniature automobiles made by the famous Solido brand. He proudly showed us each and every item with a particular emphasis on the oldest replicas that used to belong to his grandfather and were apparently worth a lot of money. His maid had painstakingly prepared some homemade cards listing the particularities of each model... Upon putting the last car down, we gave him a big round of applause. Then afterwards, it was Isabelle's turn. She was a very studious and charming girl who played the piano, and wore old-fashioned dresses with petticoats... Most boys, including me, enjoyed watching Isabelle play hopscotch at break time just for the sake of seeing the lace work under her skirt. She took us through a historical journey of the Pyrenees Mountains that she had just visited with her parents. It was a very thorough presentation focusing equally on the geographical and on the historical nature of this place. Then, after her, Nathalie, who was far from being the smartest cookie in town, delivered also a proper presentation about the dinosaurs. She had even brought with her some real fossils that belonged to her uncle... Throughout these successive demonstrations of the knowledge and evidently of the sheer hard work of my peers, I started feeling smaller and smaller... It reached a point when I simply wanted to disappear and that is when the teacher called me, "Young man! This is your time to shine..."

I felt as if the ground had collapsed beneath my feet and my legs almost gave way when I stood up. I then begrudgingly moved towards the front stage equipped only with myself and my little folder. I had no props nor any fancy heirlooms from my relatives and ancestors.

"Hi everybody! As you all know my name is Stéphane, but my four older sisters call me Steve after their hero Steve McQueen... I have a cat who I play with a lot at home, but the best thing I like to do when I go to the park after school is to ride my red bike... This is, of course, after I finish my homework..." I said half-jokingly, which prompted my teacher and the smartest kids to smile.

"Today, I want to talk to you about the American Indians..." I then opened my folder and started flipping the pages one by one. I spoke about the two most famous Apaches Cochise and Geronimo, then about Sitting Bull the Sioux, Crazy Horse the Lakota, and also about some less renowned chiefs of the Navajo and Ottawa tribes. Although my presentation was short, and obviously far less researched and academic than the other pupils', my topic was 'exotic' enough to captivate my audience. Mr Robert even complimented me at the end, "Thank you Sir for sharing with us your knowledge about this very interesting subject. I am sure the rest of the class agrees it was enlightening."

Despite his kind words, I felt he probably pitied me. I was sure he was aware of my parents' divorce through the school director Mr. Thomas who knew my mother... Even though the adults at school might have herd about my personal tragedy, the most important thing for me was that my friends hadn't. By all means, I wanted to avoid being perceived as a victim amongst my peers. This would have killed my image. I would have become a weak link and eventually a pariah. So, as long as no one other than my mum would spill the beans, this secret was safe with me. The next few days passed incredibly fast and the home-school-home routine quickly set in. Every day, I arrived at the very same time home after school. Before climbing the flock of stairs to the top floor where we lived, I always passed by the concierge whose radio was always broadcasting the live news bulletin at that time of the afternoon. That's how I heard about the death of the aspiring Formula One French star François Cevert, killed in a crash during the U.S. Grand Prix. It was a big disappointment for our country as, in those days, we did not have any other contenders to the podium of the F1 World Championship, let alone of any other sporting events. Following this tragic accident, the World's Champion Jacquie Stewart had eventually announced his retirement. This was a double blow for the French fans as Cevert would have definitely succeeded him as Tyrrell's number one driver and would have probably also become the new champion. Everything was changing so fast. On the 6th of October 1973, the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and his Syrian counterpart Hafez El-Assad had started the Yom Kippur War against Golda Meir's Israeli forces in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. I had no idea who was good or bad in this conflict. But, I knew their faces. I was particularly amazed whenever Moshe Dayan was on television. Indeed, Israel's defense minister wore an eye-patch and he scared the living day light out of me... Although this war did last less than three weeks, its effect on the global economy did last for years. In order to retaliate against the countries supporting Israel (Western Europe, Japan, Canada and the United States), OPEC steered by Saudi Arabia imposed an oil supply embargo on them. This crisis had directly affected the crude oil price, consequently quadrupling in six months! Obviously, the Israeli-Arab conflict had captured everyone's attention. Even the world-renowned French cineaste Gérard Oury had tried in vain to weaponise humour as an olive branch between the two sides. His latest release The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob featured both Jew and Muslim groups feuding at the beginning of the plot, but eventually reconciling at the end of the movie. The most famous comic actor in France, Louis de Funes, had been cast for the leading role in this farcical storyline. My mother, who needed to increase her dopamine inflow by any means, had decided to go see this presumably hilarious movie with me. It was also a way to christen her brand new light green metallic MK2 Ford Capri. As usual when we were going out, she spent twenty minutes just to get her beehive hairdo ready with a brush and half a canister of lacquer hairspray. Then, after donning her fur coat and long leather boots, she looked just as if she was coming straight out of the 1960s... During the short drive from our place to the movie theater, she managed to race a couple of 'competitors'. My poor mother had such a strong gestalt relating to the breakup with my father and her car accident, that she perceived any male driver in a big car as some sort of a harmful monster. In her distorted world, the antidote was to beat them at rally driving across the city. Now, in the 70s, this was like playing Russian roulette with a drunk Muscovite... As male-chauvinism was an inherent part of 1970s society, most of her 'targets' also saw her as competition, and this resulted in some absolutely spellbinding chases. Luckily, on this particular occasion, the drive was short and she lost track of those men relatively quickly... We arrived at the Katorza 45 minutes before the screening, which gave us plenty of time not only to choose decent seats, but also to order some ice cream and watch some commercials and trailers. Those days, the actual movie was only part of the fun. We sat comfortably in the first row on the upper stage, which meant that nobody was going to block our view. I ordered some delicious fruit flavored bonbons and a lemon-strawberry ice-lolly. We watched one of Mel Blanc's hilarious Road Runner cartoons, and the trailers of The Poseidon Adventure and of Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter. Somehow, I always preferred Wile E. Coyote and I would have really liked to see him catch and eat the arrogant Road Runner. Sigmund Freud would have certainly seen this particular trait of mine as an interesting bias forming in my juvenile psyche... After such an explosion of colour, sound and emotions, we eventually reached that moment when the screen turned black, the music stopped and everybody shut up except for the odd whisper here and there... With our heart in our mouth, we waited for the cinema operator to restart the projector after loading the actual movie's reels. The light suddenly came back on the screen. Everybody held his or her breath and boom! The logo of the theaters Pathé Gaumont appeared and their musical jingle filled our eardrums like smooth molten lava. In this movie, Louis de Funes played the role of Victor Pivert, a rich, middle-aged, white, catholic and racist executive. The plot led Pivert, who was on his way to get his daughter married, to fall accidentally into the hands of a gang of Arabic-looking terrorists. Eventually, after many unexpected hilarious adventures, Pivert escaped by hiding in the heart of the Jewish quarter in Paris. There, disguised as the famous Rabbi Jacob, he ended up reconciling his new friends of opposite faiths and accepted to let his daughter marry one of the dashing Arabic protagonists for whom she had unexpectedly swapped her consequently jilted geeky fiancé... The 70s were times when derision used to be a powerful weapon, especially in a country like France where freedom of expression had no limits. Some people in different places or eras would probably have considered this movie inappropriately racist and anti-Semitic. However, the main reason why Gérard Oury, who was actually Jewish himself, had made this movie was to make people of different ethnicities and religious backgrounds realise they should better learn how to enjoy their differences rather than fight against each other constantly. Of course, one could have said that it was not subtle, that it was in your face, and that it was totally over the top. By today's standards, this motion picture would have been likely censored due to its political incorrectness. But frankly, at the time, watching this movie was the most joyful and funny moment of the year for my mother and I. Equally so, it had the same effect on the 7 million people who went to see it upon its launch at the cinemas. Rabbi Jacob was No 1 at the French Box Office in 1973. Amidst the political turmoil in the Middle East and the Oil Shock, France needed movies like that as well as other forms of entertainment to forget about the looming economic crisis the country was slowly but surely heading for. A month after the embargo, the ultra-famous French pop singer Claude François released his contagiously uplifting song Une Chanson Populaire (A Popular Song). I kept on hearing its chorus everywhere: "ça s'en va et ça revient..."

In the meantime, despite the financial turmoil the rising oil prices had triggered, my father's business was booming... Information Technology was thriving and his company had become one of the top five IT supplies' wholesalers in the country. As I was never with him at Christmas, he had invited me to join him on a business trip to Paris mid-December. Although we were not going to celebrate together, at least, this was a chance to experience the magnificent festive decorations in the capital in each other's company. By then, I had become used to meeting him at my sister Marnie's place in Sucé on our way to the airport. It was always an early start. There was coffee and cigarettes for breakfast... My father had been a heavy smoker of Gauloise sans flitre (without filter) since the war. In fact, until the late 1980s, the official French army ration pack included a pack of cigarettes and a small bottle of 100-proof alcohol... As usual, I felt sick in the plane because of the kerosene smell and the foggy atmosphere in the smoking section. After landing at Orly Airport, we took a quick taxi ride and arrived fifteen minutes later at our fancy hotel near La Porte D'Orleans. We were staying in the same room, which was a bit awkward. After a shave with his electric shaver, which was groundbreaking technology back then, he splashed his face with aftershave and the room stank a distinctive Vetiver smell that never went away. After all this commotion, it was already time for lunch. The restaurant was perfect and the maître d'hôtel impeccable or perhaps it was the way around... For some reason, front of house staff always treated my father like royalty. I suppose it was partly due to his generous tipping habits, but probably also to his demeanour. He wore tailored Pierre Cardin suits and Bally Swiss shoes. His dress code reminded me of Roger Moore in the latest James Bond movie, which was already advertised on the billboards in town. Moreover, the way my dad chose his food and his wine let no doubt in anyone's mind that he was not only a gentleman, but also a connoisseur of les arts de la table (culinary arts). Although it was meant to be a quick lunch, we had a lobster tail salad with raspberry vinaigrette for starters, a faux-fillet maître d'hôtel (Striploin with herb butter) for mains and a plateau de fromage (cheese tray) for good measure. Matching crustaceans, red meat and cheese with one single wine was no mean feat. However, for my dad, who had earned an honorary diploma of sommelier through his connections in the world of fine dining, it was a piece of cake. He often showed off while brandishing his card with his wine knowledge credentials in front of the easily impressed waiters in the restaurants he visited. On this occasion, he chose a young premier cru Saint-Émilion and he asked for it to be served chilled, which, at the time, was a revolutionary new way to serve red wines usually enjoyed at room temperature. He then explained to the waiter that cooling some light reds such as this young Bordeaux reduced the acidity often inherent to young wines... After our 'quick' lunch, instead of taking me to a museum, we visited the newly opened Tour Montparnasse, a controversial architectural monstrosity with no other reason to be but to defile Paris' skyline forever. At 210 metres above sea level, it remained the tallest building in the capital, let alone in France, for decades. Parisians used to famously say that the best view over their city was from the top of this tower because it was the only place from where you couldn't see it... My dad, who was fond of progress and technological advancement, liked it despite its ugliness and critics. Yet again, time between meals flew so fast that it was soon time for dinner... We therefore ate at the new panoramic restaurant on the top floor of the tower. The following day, in order to compare this building with yet another widely criticized structure when it was built, we visited the Eifel Tower. As it was a crisp and sunny winter day, we approached the monument from the Champ-de-Mars area, walking through its magnificent gardens. The view on this metallic edifice was breathtaking. The closer we walked, the more beautiful and perfect she looked. Her proportions were just plain sexy and, to this day, I have been in love with her. We took the lift up to the top floor where, as expected, my father invited me for lunch in the fancy panoramic restaurant... During that trip we also visited The Louvres and Notre Dame, but to my dad, the highlight was understandably to have our final dinner in one of his favourite sea-food eateries in Paris, a place called Aux Armes de Bretagne, located Avenue du Maine... We arrived in style in a black Mercedes limousine and a porter ushered us to the entrance hall where someone took our coats and a very posh maître d'hôtel guided us to our table inside a plush dining area with beautiful architraves on the walls and ceilings, and seascape paintings. I was handed over a menu with no prices and let chose whatever I fancied... I couldn't resist to start with a dozen of my favourite oysters from Cancale in Brittany. The Parisians were so obsessed with food, that the supply chain between the Atlantic coast and the city, via the largest wholesale food market in the world Les Halles de Rungis, was second to none. You were guaranteed to eat the freshest seafood. The oysters on my plate had been harvested overnight, shipped in the morning and delivered to the restaurant on the same day. The way to eat them was with a shallots vinaigrette and a slice of rye bread with Breton salted butter. Although I was only young, my father allowed me have a small glass of a perfectly chilled Pouilly-Fuissé chardonnay, which he particularly suggested with oysters... For mains, we both had a St-Pierre fish (John Dory) grilled to perfection and served with a beurre-blanc sauce and a glass of Dom Pérignon. We never spoke much during our meals and, if we did, it was always about the food. Thus, I learned how to handle myself in society at an early age. We finished our dinner with a sumptuous île flottante, coffees and macarons and that was it. We flew back to Nantes the following morning with full bellies and a few extra pounds, and returned to our respective homes like two grownup men.

During the remaining days of my Christmas holiday, I went by myself to the cinema to watch Live and Let Die. At nine, I felt that watching this movie was a turn in my young life. It felt as if I was going to become twenty-one just by watching it. My emotions were running high and so were the hairs on my chest. When the screen turned black, my young mind teleported me immediately into the streets of New Orleans where the story began. It started straight away with some addictive action scenes leading to a moment when a massive fer-de-lance snake bit a British secret agent during a voodoo sacrifice. Just a few minutes into the film and I absolutely loved it. Then, as usual in a James Bond film, the title sequence with the movie's soundtrack came after the opening scene. The producers had awarded Paul McCartney's band The Who the prestigious remit to write and sing the film score. Both the credits' presentation and the music were mind-blowing. I especially liked the blend of beautiful naked women dancing in the psychedelic style, the mysterious notion of incoming danger in the form of an odd skull, and the violin melody suggesting a few potential lovemaking scenes... Over the next hour and a half, I went through many lives. When, at the end of the movie, I resuscitated in the body of a nine-year-old boy, I couldn't care less where I was nor how old I really was because, in all honesty, I was 007...

Chapter VIII: The Gemstones

For the first time in the city's history, a small retail centre called Le Drugstore had opened right in the middle of the most prominent area of town La Place Graslin. Built in 1787, the square included the famous Théâtre Graslin as its centrepiece, a grand neo-classic building with Corinthian columns. In 1895, the most beautiful art deco brasserie in France La Cigale had also opened its doors on the square. Hence, as Le Drugstore's footprint laid within the perimeter of an existing building, whose architectural style matched perfectly the rest of the square, its 'modern' ethos was somewhat of a controversial talking point. It indeed represented what people perceived as being the 'American' way of life... The commercial centre consisted of a self-service cafeteria, a hair and beauty salon, several boutiques, a newsagent and, most importantly for the younger generations, an arcade game area... There was a rumor spreading in town that a group of FCN footballers owned most of the Drugstore's retail units. No need to say that this place had become an instant hit with the youth. It was indeed one of our favourite hangouts after Le Terrain Vague and the Cours Cambronne Park. At the time, arcade games were merely electromechanical such as pinball and table football. However, to us, the main point of being there wasn't just the games. There was also a strong sense of freedom in those walls that only us, kids, were able to enjoy and understand. Hence, although adults weren't officially banned, none of them ever attempted to come inside. They were simply not welcome and they knew it! The sound produced by some of these machines was deafening. After an hour in there, our heads were spinning and our senses were numbed. So much so that we even had to be careful crossing the road on our way out, as we always needed some time to readjust to the real world afterwards. It was at the Drugstore where Erwan had introduced me for the first time to his friend Luis. This guy was about the same age as him. So, he was probably eleven or so, which to me sounded almost like a man... Respect! I thought when I met him. He looked different. He had bright red hair and eyelashes, and a few freckles on his face. He was half-English and half-Spanish, hence his first name. Luis wasn't a thug like us. He projected such a self-confidence that no one would have ever attempted to mess with him. He was sharp as a cookie and cool as a cat. He walked naturally like a panther and whenever I saw him, it sounded just like the track called Dove on an album by the newly formed British Funk group Cymande that Nickie had brought back from one of her trips to London.

"So, Erwan tells me you like stones..." He told me in a disconcerting fashion, which sounded like neither a remark nor a question, and rather like a bit of both...

"Yeah..." I replied in my coolest twang, trying to remain sane.

And that was it, I was in! He then invited us to his home. Luis lived at the very top of a hill on a never-ending street. It took ages to reach his house but this was part of the fun. We had to go through a time warp to enter his den, walking along some century-old terraced houses with shutters always closed as if everyone inside was dead. A strange feeling was filling my heart when we finally reached our destination. We came through a small door at the centre of an outdoor wall and arrived in a nice garden patio with some trees, a patch of grass and some flowerbeds all around. As if it was becoming a trend, Luis had warned me about his father before coming inside his house just as Erwan had done prior to going to his... This made me realise that I no reason for feeling hard done by after all... His old man was a staunch Marxist who had fled Franco's regime in Spain.

"Hi there!" His father greeted us with a strong Spanish accent, "You like my garden? I can give you a guided tour if you want..." Then, without giving me a chance to respond, he pulled me under his arm and walked me around the perimeters of his garden where lots of vegetation was growing... "These are potatoes. These are green beans. I prefer runner beans though, but they are too difficult to grow... Ah! This is my favourite: mushrooms! Don't touch them. This is my lunch... I am going to make myself an omelet." He then stormed off. The man was obviously an eccentric. In a bizarre way, although I felt instantly attracted to weird characters like him, my instinct also warned me that their mood could swing from ecstasy to madness in a flash. A moment later, his mum appeared through the kitchen door, which was opening directly onto the garden. "Luis. I have prepared some toasts with raisins for you and your friends." She said. "Sorry, but I have now got to go to work." She added before pulling a proper woman's bicycle out of a small shed. She left graciously... While her very short hair looked rather tomboyish, she was quite a beautiful woman I thought. I also liked her English accent. It was obvious they lived and breathed the tenets of the Marxist revolution. After being so quickly introduced to his parents, Luis brought a box of crystals from his bedroom. We happily sat on the patio, looking at his gems collection while munching on the buttered toasts with raisins. He claimed to have found most of the rocks in some nearby quarries. Suddenly, whilst we were fully immersed in our own little world, the garden door opened again and I could not believe my eyes... There stood a boy of the same age as Luis who looked just like him physically but had a different demeanour. "This is my brother Vladimir..." They were perfect twins. Vlad, named after one of his parents' inspirational heroes Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), was more butch and less refined than Luis. He never mingled with us and I felt it was better that way. I always kept my distance. He gave me the same feeling as if I were in the presence of a growling German shepherd... Somehow, he also reminded me of Bolibone the nightmarish devil living in the old fireplace in my bedroom.

Whenever Erwan, Luis and I met, it was never to write political slogans on the city's walls nor to destroy tulips with exploding fireworks. Our interaction revolved around a much subtler plane. Our encounters were always eerie, almost like meeting with ghosts in dreams. While we communicated by other means than mere words and quite often about immaterial matters, the main subject of our conscious discussions was always the same: rocks. Accordingly, we planned to visit a strange place in town that was a cross between a jewelry, a gemstone shop and an antiquary... There was a sign on the front entrance with a name written in a vintage font: Mister Pozzo Di Borgo... As soon as you pushed the main door and entered the place, a bell rang, letting the owner know about our presence. The least one could have said about this establishment was that it was rather peculiar... There were several counter-height and tall vitrines displaying precious stones, old watches, coins, stamps and odd pieces of jewelry. There was some dark wood everywhere and barely enough light from the shop windows to see clearly inside. There was no air circulation and no movement either; it was a complete standstill... Suddenly, out of the blue, the real Pozzo Di Borgo himself popped out from behind his counter like a creepy Jack-in-the-Box clown. He scared the living day light out of me. He was very old, balding on the top of the head, with piercing blue eyes and classic round-frame glasses. He wore a suit and a watch with a silver chain hanging out of his waistcoat pocket. He smiled at us, simply saying, "Yes?"

"We'd like to show you some of our stones..." Luis said.

The old man patiently watched us open a small box where each of us had put one of our favourite pieces of rock. The shop owner put his magnifying eye loupe on and smiled, "This is interesting... I reckon that this one is a green tourmaline... This is nice. When you are older, you should eventually consider getting this cut into cufflinks." From this day onwards, although we never bought anything from him, we visited his shop on a regular basis just to show him some of the new stones we had found or acquired. He never seemed to be bothered by us. In fact, he was each time extremely polite, as if he had always been waiting for that particular moment...

One weekend, Erwan, Luis and I travelled by bike to an abandoned quarry twenty kilometres east of the city, where, apparently, there were some interesting stones to find. Although it was admittedly dangerous to ride that far on two-wheelers, we were so committed to geology that it was in fact our passion, which drove us there... It took us about two hours to reach. Luis was leading from the front with the map on his handlebar, "Here we are, folks!" He said upon finally reaching our destination. This place was huge. People used to mine slate in this area and it was apparently a good spot to hunt for stones and even fossils. We carefully hid our bikes behind a mound of broken slate, far away from the main road, and resumed our journey on foot. We were well prepared, carrying some drinks and food, as well as some tiny geologist's hammers, which we had found in a specialized hardware shop. Everywhere we looked, the surrounding hills were made of slate. What we were after was like a needle in a haystack. To improve our chances to find something interesting, we decided to split and each of us chose our own slope, painstakingly looking for anomalies amongst the thousands of dark grey sheets lying on these grounds. It was exhilarating to handle such magnificent minerals. We felt deeply grounded, inherently part of a nature often harsh for some, but always welcoming to those who loved her. Just like hunting and gathering, collecting stones was only going to work if we were in full osmosis with our environment. Eventually, it was Erwan who found the first pyrites... The shiny prisms were literally anchored inside the slate almost as if they had sunk into this dark grey matter during its metamorphic state prior even to solidifying. I understood then why these golden metal cubes were also called fool's gold... It was because they made us feel just as addicted as if they were the real thing. From this moment, we frantically worked as hard as we could. We mined most of our respective hills in one straight shift without breaks. I found another two slates with pyrite and Luis found a piece of mica schist with some black tourmaline in it. But, yet again, it was Erwan who found the nicest rock of the day: a stunning quartz crystal about 8 centimetres long. We were sweaty, tired and thirsty when we finally sat at the top of the quarry and had our picnic. We looked at each other and laughed. We were all good. It was such a carved-in-stone moment that it had left an imprint in our respective DNAs with an indelible pattern of adventure that would have never departed from our souls. We were amongst the dreamers John Lennon used to talk about in his song Imagine.

In the meantime, 250 kilometres north of Nantes, a commando was preparing the explosive device ahead of blowing up the main telecommunication mast of Roc'h Trédudon. Overnight, all television signals in Brittany would stop emitting, subsequently taking the authorities over a month to repair the damages. Although all fingers pointed at Breton dissidents, the communist newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné published a conspiracy theory accusing the French government to be responsible for this attack and to resultantly destroy the FLB's image in the public opinion...

A few weeks later, we heard that a new shop selling semi-precious stones had opened its doors on the Quai de la Fosse. Of course, we checked it out immediately... It was conveniently located on the main road near a shop selling Patrick and Le Coq Sportif sports gear, which we often visited. That week, we must have admired the display through the vitrine about ten times before daring to enter the shop with only the few coins in our pockets... The owners must have had a good laugh while noticing such a bunch of little monkeys salivating in front of their beautiful ornaments. There was a real treasure on exhibition, including gigantic purple and blue geodes well over a metre high. After gathering enough pocket money to make a small purchase, Cyriaque, Erwan, Jesus and I finally went in. A man with large glasses and a brown roll-neck polyester jersey welcomed us, "Hello, how can I help you?"

I shyly replied that we were looking for some small gems for our respective collections. The shopkeeper smiled and opened a drawer where he kept exactly what we were looking for: the cheap stuff... He took a couple of drawstring black velvet bags out and emptied their contents on the glass counter. One was full of wonderful polished stones with orange, golden and dark-brown stripes. The other contained multicolored crystals. We had finally found our own Ali Baba's cave!

"The smooth orange and brown ones are tiger's eyes. They are from the chalcedony family. You can choose any of those for one franc a piece... The crystals are a bit more difficult to get by. They are mostly quartz. I sell them for one and a half franc each." The man said.

We chose several and paid him with a ten-franc bank note. On our way out, he told us that he was expecting a new cargo of supply from Madagascar where these rocks were coming from. We returned home happily with our loot. During that week, every evening on my way back from school, I ran through the courtyard in my building, barely listening to the music emanating from Madame Garapin's radio, and went to my bedroom. There, I drooled over the beautiful stones, in awe of such beautiful reflections of our planet's magmatic core. I promised myself to return to the shop at the weekend. Thus, we gave such good publicity to this merchant that kids from all over town started to visit them. Though, we remain his most loyal and best younger clients. The shopkeeper, who co-owned the place with his brother, was going once a year to Madagascar to collect these gems by himself. He told us once that to find the largest geodes, he had to travel further into the jungle and climb over mountains of solidified lava where these black spheres laid on the ground. It was then just a matter of breaking them in half with a hammer to unveil their precious content... Sometimes however, these ended up being mere basalt balls with nothing but dust in them. Yet, if you were lucky, upon breaking up, they glittered away with the magical sparkles of reflected light. The blue ones were called celestine, the purple ones amethyst and the green ones malachite. The most expensive and rare ones were the dioptases, the topazes, the red tourmalines and the emeralds. While listening to these adventurous stories, I imagined myself wearing a hat, cutting through the jungle with a machete, in a quest for these tectonic riches. Somehow, destiny had other plans in store for me, which would however still quench my thirst for adventure and treasure troves. In fact, it was my friend Cyriaque who had been chosen by providence to trigger this extraordinary twist of fate... One day, as I was in the middle of playing a football match with L'Artichaud, he called me, "Hey, Stevie! Come quickly. I've got something important to tell you..." Jesus and I stopped the game immediately and listened to what he had to say.

"Guys, you've got to hear this... This afternoon, as I was playing football in the street outside my home with Eli, this fat oaf kicked it so hard that it went over the roof of the store opposite my house. He helped me climb over the wall and I carefully walked towards the edge of the roof. I then looked down and there I saw my ball at the bottom of a shaft. Are you following me? Good. Then, I also noticed huge shelving bays, which were not visible from the street. I used them to climb down and guess what I found on them... They were full of geodes! This place is the back store of the gems shop on the other side of the street..."

This was a bombshell. We now had access to a real treasure trove and, of course, despite our catholic backgrounds, the fatal attraction of these mesmerizing crystals had become too strong for our frail willpower. Thus, we all agreed upon a plan that literally took us seconds to formulate: to go there on Sunday when the shop was closed. Therefore, this is how, we began our journey on a road to nowhere as thieves... We chose to launch this operation thirty minutes after noontime, when most people were already back from church and likely to be in the middle of stuffing their face over their sacrosanct Sunday lunch time. Eli, our 'bouncer', was keeping an eye on the south corner of the street. Jesus, our 'lookout', was taking care of the north side just in case someone would have come at that end. Cyriaque pushed me over the wall and I subsequently carried him up. We walked on the corrugated roof up to its very edge. There, I looked down and it was exactly as he had described it to me. There were some huge storage bays all around the perimeter walls and it was actually a piece of cake to climb down to ground level. I was scared, but in the same time amazed at the hundreds of rocks stacked on these shelves. We looked at each other, not knowing where to start. Somehow, we decided not to steel too much. Anyhow, as we had forgotten to take bags, it would have been difficult to carry more than a handful of rocks. So, that's exactly what we did. We stole a couple of small amethyst and celestine geodes. We then left as fast as we could and managed to run away to the park without looking back or being caught. At that moment, the veil of false pretenses of adventure and treasure-hunting escapade had flown away in the wind and the harsh reality had sunken down into the abyss of our conscience... We were simply a bunch of petty thieves! I came home that day with my tail between my legs and a couple of stolen rocks burning my legs through my jeans pockets like the devil himself. I was no longer able to hold them, nor enjoy them. I felt like returning them back to the store, but it was too risky. Anyhow, Cyriaque didn't care as much as I did. He was more rotten than I was. So, the bottom line was that we had stolen property from kind people who had spent an awful amount of time teaching us gemology with very little reward in return. We had ever spent more than a mere few francs there, and this was certainly not enough to cover the bills of such a nice shop, let alone make a profit. Although, I had no idea about business at that young age, I had already sussed out that these guys were avidly seeking more clients as they often asked us to bring more friends around with us... So, in all truth, we were stabbing these nice guys in the back! Thus, I was so mortified with remorse and shame that I decided to tell my mum... I do not know what went through her mind that day. I was expecting trouble, but she probably didn't want to upset me more than her divorce with my dad already had. To my surprise, she did not even mention The Ten Commandments... Nevertheless, I was clearly remembering the sentence I had heard so many times over at church: Thou shallt not steal... Instead, she took one of the 500-franc banknotes my father had given me at Christmas and asked me to spend the lot on anything I liked at the shop... In a way, she had figured out that the owners would have amply covered their losses through the profit generated by this large purchase. This is how, at the weekend immediately after the theft, we rode towards the shop on our bikes. As soon as we came through the front door, one of the two brothers gave us a strange look. He was no longer smiley as usual. I felt there was definitely something wrong. I was alone with Jesus and this was our own way to observe our Christian repentance. On the other hand, Cyriaque and Eli couldn't care less. They didn't have any conscience nor faith...

"Hello. We would like to buy some of your geodes." I said, as normally as I could.

"Geodes? I am not sure I can help you today... Don't you know we have been robbed?" He asked, looking at me straight in the eye.

I felt he knew. So, I figured out that it would make things easier if I pulled the 500-franc bill from my pocket and put it on his counter. After doing just that, he looked at me with a different expression. This time, I felt he knew I knew he knew... Thus, we had passed the point of no return. We had reached that stage when we had all laid our cards face-up on the table and it was fine. I was a thief and I had egg all over my face. This was now an act of contrition. Had I said to him I confess it would not even have been clearer. Half way through the deal, he picked-up a couple of medium-sized celestine geodes and said, "250 francs a piece..." Although, both Jesus and I knew we were being had, we paid the full price and left without a word. Mea culpa I thought on my way out with the bag of rocks. Neither Jesus nor I said anything on our way back home. This was the last time we would ever go back to this shop again, the end of the adventure with my hat and machete... Before we parted that day, I gave Jesus the bag of stones.
Chapter IX: The Muse

1974 was a very special year... First, I was going to be ten in November, which was no mean feat... At ten, you were supposed to be almost a man. So, I felt thoroughly excited at the prospect of soon meeting that image in the mirror of half the adult I was going to be... Moreover, it was also going to be my first World Cup as I was too young to have enjoyed let alone remembered the previous one in 1970... As soon as the New Year started, 'footballmania' was everywhere. Advertisers were using the beautiful game as a means to sell their gear. One of them was Panini, a marketing company who had come up with the genius idea to form a partnership with FIFA and launch a World Cup sticker book. We had about six month to complete the album before the end of our school year, which conveniently coincided with the last week of the tournament. So, in our school, there was a strongly contagious football fever in the air... The playground had turned into a huge bargaining temple where kids with the rarest stickers were kings. Bartering had become second nature to me. In order to be successful at this game, it was a must to purchase initially a large quantity of stickers. Then, after sticking everything you could on the vacant spots in the album, you'd be then left with your trading wad of spares... I had about a hundred duplicates, which was ten times more than the average kid's starter pack. At the beginning of the year when everybody had just begun collecting, we were all paying a premium for our favourite players, even if they were not that rare... Although France had failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, out of respect for Les Bleus, Panini and FIFA had still included our national team in one of the pages at the end of the album along with other countries who were also not participating that year. Thus, the sticker with the FCN captain Henri Michel was a big hitter. As I had managed to acquire three of those cards, I had kept one for my own album and had started trading the other two. I was such a born negotiator that I managed in no time to exchange five stickers for each of those. Hence, I temporarily earned my seat on the king of footballmania's throne in my school until the next kid with a rarer sticker came by... My two favourite players were Johan Cruyff, the Dutch forward midfielder, and Gerd Muller, the German striker. Cruyff was a real magician, distributing the ball like a croupier at a blackjack table. Muller was a hunter, ambushed behind his opponent team's defense line, waiting for any opportunity to strike. My friend Archie had told me that one of our favourite sports shops in town was giving away promotional booklets with a signed picture of Johan Cruyff... To me, if royalty had really existed in this game, the Dutch player would have definitely been the one and only 'King of Football'! As soon as I heard this news, we rushed to the shop and sheepishly asked the sales woman if we could have a couple of these booklets for ourselves. We must have looked proper enough that day. Accordingly, she figured out that giving us the damn thing was good publicity. Indeed, convinced that we could eventually come back with our parents one day to purchase something, she gave in... We came out feeling excited, just like the cat that got the cream. Although the signature was a mere print, I cherished that picture for years, luring myself into believing that the Dutch master had really autographed it...

In the grand scheme of things, my life was going nowhere. I was pretty-much self-educated when it came to extra-curriculum activities. Fireworks, rocks, football and Playboy magazines were not exactly the best avenues for a successful life... On top of everything, I was coming closer to puberty and being with the wrong crowd at the wrong time was a trap already laid beneath my feet that was about to open up and engulf me. After the stones shop robbery, it was just a matter of time for me to fall deeper into an even more compromising twist of fate. My lucky star however, had something else in store for me on that particular occasion... I was passing through the park gate when I saw a girl about my age or maybe a tad older sitting on a bench. She was strangely dressed in a very old-fashioned navy-blue school uniform. She wore a beret and her face was beautiful. She shone like a diamond on a twig crown... I looked at her and she smiled back at me. She invited me to seat on the bench with her and I gladly accepted. There were other boys my age playing around. Why she had specifically asked for me to join her was beyond me. It felt as if she had been waiting for me like a long-forgotten friend from a previous life sent back to earth in the shape of an angel... Although we had a long conversation, I did not remember anything she said consciously. I just recalled she looked as if all the splendour in the world had come to town. Sadly, I never asked what her name was. I only knew she was English and, apart from her appearance and her contagious love, that's all I could remember about her... I have never found out who she was nor where she came from. Strangely, apart from my own, there was no other school in the vicinity, let alone a private bilingual one... That was totally weird. After meeting her, I asked my friends who were in the park at that time if they knew her. They all told me the same thing: Sorry but I did not notice anyone... Nonetheless, this encounter made me feel special. Even though, I had no clue whatsoever about our conversation, I instinctively knew it was about my bad behavior and ultimately my wellbeing. I was not meant to be a thug! I had to change course and quickly. But then again despite this good omen, my friend Archie, who was also coming close to his own morality precipice, had suggested to go on a rampage in town with stink bombs... He had bought them in our favourite fireworks shop, a true prankster's paradise selling novelty items from itching powder to The Grim Reaper's costumes. In total, we had a dozen of small glass vials filled with a foul-smelling chemicals solution. It was just what we needed for a good day out... Naturally, we chose to walk to the most prominent shopping street in town La Rue Crébillon. Notwithstanding Saturday afternoon was the busiest day and time of the week, all the shops were heaving... Our plan was to ask shopkeepers for promotional stickers, which, at the time, were the latest marketing craze, and to throw our bombs while they would be looking for the decals... Admittedly, it took some serious bottle for us kids to pull this prank. Our first target was the famous ice-cream parlor and patisserie Chez Touze. This place was an institution. For decades, people had been religiously queueing up in the street outside its entrance door every Sunday morning after church to buy the most exquisite sweets and cakes. When we arrived, at least twenty people were sitting inside, enjoying a cup of coffee and some éclairs au café, which was a wonderful way to have some well-deserved respite in the middle of a shopping spree. As planned, we also queued up behind a couple of clients, until it was our turn to be served.

"Good afternoon." The lady at the till said.

"Hello. Please, Madam, would you have any stickers by any chance?" I asked.

The woman looked at us, amused, and said, "Sorry my dears, but this is a patisserie here! We sell cakes and ice cream if you want, but we don't have any stickers..." She spoke to us with a definite hoity-toity sarcastic and condescending tone, and loud enough to make sure that every other punters would have heard her... Accordingly, we felt that all the clients in the shop were watching at us being humiliated. Some of them had a grin on their face and it was obvious they were having a good laugh at our expense. Is that so? I thought... I then threw one of my vials in their direction, grabbed my friend by the arm, and we both ran for our life. On our way out, I heard someone shout: "What a stench!" We were running so fast that we bumped straight into people in the busy street. This reminded me of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and that scene when Paul Newman and Robert Redford were coming out of the bank they had just robbed in Mexico... But, luckily for us, there was no Mexican army ambushed outside of Chez Touze. After running for a while, we felt safe enough and resumed being on the prowl for easy prey... Thus, our next target was nothing else but a perfume shop! As their entire business was based on sweet fragrances, we thought that a good whiff of stinking poo would raise a few eyebrows and indeed, it did... We used the same routine and politely asked the person tending to us to let us have some stickers. This time, the lady rummaged through a drawer behind her counter and she was just about to give us a handful of decals when Archie threw a stink bomb right in front of her feet. It took her a few seconds to realise what was really happening and this gave him a short but sufficient window of time for a quick escape. I was just about to follow him when finally reacted and grabbed me with an incredibly strong grip. I had just been caught red-handed! During the commotion that followed, she managed to get one of her helpers to clean the floor swiftly and spray a large amount of Chanel No 5 all over it. After a few minutes, things had finally come back to normal in the shop, despite the lingering foul smell still haunting the premises like one of these rotten camemberts you often pass by in the cheese section of French supermarkets... She asked for my name and address in order to report me to the police. Accordingly, I did my best impression of a little lamb who would have given up the will to live on his way to the slaughterhouse, and told her my name: Dupont (the most common last name in France). Falling for my phony penance, she then made a huge mistake and released my arm while fetching a pen and paper to write my details down... The wolf in me reappeared instantly and I growled grrrrrrrr at her before vanishing away like a bad smell. Before exiting the front door, I made sure I threw another one of my malevolent vials inside her poncy shop. After this close-shave encounter without any after-shave, we decided to eliminate all chances of being caught by perpetrating our bad deeds from the safety of our bikes rather than being on foot. So, we went back to our respective homes in order to fetch our two-wheelers and took off immediately towards the less busy Rue Franklin... This time, our cunning plan was to throw our bombs directly at people, which would have been the pinnacle of annoyance. As I was leading the charge, it was my job to decide who was going to be the first unfortunate recipient of our exacerbated societal anger. Suddenly, I saw him... There, was a tall mid-twenties student-type sort of a guy with big frizzy hair and a beard. He looked like a right nerd and I thought he would be a week adversary. So, I gave the signal to Archie who was riding behind me to get ready for a quick escape. He was all set. I then threw the stink bomb as hard as I could on the man's shirt and, as predicted, it imploded instantly and splashed the foul liquid all over his back. The victim turned his head back to look at the damage on his garment and he noticed us as we were already pedaling as fast as we could. We thought we were out of the woods when I heard Archie shout: "Quick! He is running after us..." I then saw the geeky long-legged guy leaping forward like a grasshopper towards us. He was going so fast that he was catching up on us at great speed... We left the main road and took a shortcut through a pedestrian street where we thought we were going to lose him. Damn! I said when I saw that the crazy dude was still on our trail. He must have been either possessed by demons or a marathon man, or perhaps even both at the same time... Scary!

We then rode as fast as we could and headed towards Archie's home where we hoped we would be safe at last. Eventually, we saw him slow down. Thus, we regained confidence and resumed our journey at a more manageable pace. Upon reaching Archie's building courtyard, we were still shocked and tired after such a long and stressful escape. We had barely stopped for a few minutes and were still taking a deep breath on our bikes when we saw the freak passing by in front of the gate... By fluke, he almost immediately noticed us and he literally jumped on us, holding both bikes by the handlebars. Instead of shouting and punching, which we thought would have been a fair-enough reaction, the man asked us in a rather composed voice: "Why did you do that to me? I was just minding my own business... Don't you think it is wrong to do such things to innocent people? You should be ashamed of yourselves... Don't you think so?" At that moment, both Archie and I felt we were lucky to have fallen on such a goody-goody type of guy... It also crossed our minds that he could have been nuts... He reminded me of Cat Stevens on the cover of Morning Has Broken. Nevertheless, he did eventually let us go. After this scary moment, Archie and I had agreed that merely collecting stickers was a much wiser and far safer occupation than mixing it with a nefarious ulterior motive such as throwing stink bombs at people... Thus, we both started our respective collections and, by the same token, regularly visited all of the most prominent retailers in town, except of course for La Patisserie Touze and a certain perfume shop... Hence, by the end of the month, I proudly owned twenty-eight decals. In order to display my collection, I stuck them on the white table I was supposed to use for my school homework... This didn't help me with my academic input. Instead, I spent hours looking at the brightly coloured graphics, daydreaming. I was dumb, bad and lazy or even sometimes in the reverse order... After visiting all these shops, there was nowhere else to go and my interest for stickers died out. I returned to my old flame for lighting firework fuses near the tulips' beds...

I was riding my bike in the park on a Friday afternoon after school when I saw her again, the English girl with a blue beret... She looked at me, just as inviting as the first time. It was kind of obvious she had been waiting there just for me... I said hello and she replied, "How are you Stevie?"

Hearing her calling me by my name made me feel so loved that Francis Lai's Love Story's soundtrack could have very well been playing at that time...

"I am not so well." I replied, expecting her to make me feel good.

"Why? What happened?" She asked, looking genuinely worried.

"I don't know... Life, I suppose. I find it pretty tough being around here these days."

"You must get out of this materialistic world where you are stuck. Stop being so foolish! Aim for the stars..."

I didn't understand why we were having this conversation, nor its meaning... It was so surreal that I was not able to stop watching her beautiful and kind face. She was the nicest thing that had ever happened to me. I knew there was something special about her. I couldn't really pin it down, but surely, there was a kind of magic in her eyes. With hindsight, she could have very well been a ghost. Or perhaps, she was just my guardian angel...

I have got to go... See you around! Were her last words. I did not know what she meant exactly, but I knew she meant well.

Despite her good advice, I kept on bumping into my worst nightmares... There were a couple of new kids on the block who had just joined our school and I liked the sound of them. They came to the park a few times and I met them there. They were twins. We called them the Macé brothers because this was their name. The youngest, Anthony, was particularly agitated. The older one, who was born just a few minutes before his sibling, was called Frank. He was meant to be more 'grounded' than his hyperactive brother. Their reputation preceded them. They had been both kicked out from a harsh boarding school... Apparently, Anthony had been reprimanded by his teacher for dancing the twist on his desk. Then, not happy for being told off, the young rascal had emptied the content of his inkwell in his mouth and, before his teacher could stop him, he had even downed the ink from a couple of his neighbours'. Accordingly, they had both been declared unfit for pursuing their studies in this strict religious institute. The educational psychologist had even established that Anthony, in particular, was suffering from a severe form of hyperactivity (ADHD). Hat off to him! I thought.

They were both so blond that they almost had white hair. It happened that these two guys had an innate ability to take risks. Hence, they were able to wait until the very last millisecond before throwing firecrackers up in the sky. Bing! Bang! Bong! And boom! That's how it sounded when Les Frères Macé were around... Their father had just opened a restaurant downtown and they were relatively well off. Like my friend Archie, they also had a maid and a dog. The difference was that she was bloody good looking and preferred wearing miniature and sexy miniskirts rather than livery, and also their dog was a minuscule Chihuahua... The tiny little bastard was fearsome! He barked and growled so much that he had to wear a muzzle. Their maid was not as wild as the pooch. In fact, she was rather accommodating. Anthony once had told me that she had let him bathe with her on many occasions. "She has big melons..." He said once to me. I then, went to their house a couple of times, hoping I would be there in good time for bath time... Unfortunately, nothing as such ever happened, but I managed however to get a good lunch at their father's restaurant a couple of times. He was making the very best sandwiches in town with a mountain of salted butter and eventually some fillings like ham or bananas. The Macé bros were not the only new kids on the block. A footballer from the Ivory Coast had arrived in town. He had been scouted and bought out from his former club by the FCN for a fair price. He had brought his wife and two children with him, a young daughter aged seven and a boy who was already eleven. He was also called Anthony. The difference with his counterpart in the Macé family was that, instead of being almost translucent, he was as dark as a black panther. This Anthony had a lot of class. We all respected him because he was strong and courageous. He never had to prove it in a fight though. We all knew. It went without saying. After a month or so, his parents had bought him the biggest bike we had ever seen a kid riding in those parts... His two-wheeler had six gears and a double crankset. When I looked at it for the first time, I betrayed my small red mini-vélo by falling immediately in love with Anthony's green bike. In essence, I was committing a bicycling adultery, which for my catholic upbringing was probably as bad if not worse than the real thing...

I met my 'English muse' once again as I was playing on my own with sticks. I heard a warm voice calling, "Stevie. Is that you?" I turned around and there she was, as beautiful as ever. She was a stunning angel. I have never asked her what her name was, but even if I had, she would have never let me have it because its true meaning was unconditional love. It was strange, but that day was the last day I ever saw her. She appeared just three times in my life, but somehow, I felt I had already known her forever.

Chapter X: The Carnival

Madame Garapin's radio was broadcasting a quasi-nonstop live bulletin about the devastating news of the Turkish Airlines Flight 981's crash. All 346 people on board had perished upon colliding with trees in a forest near Paris. While the rescue teams were looking for the black box, journalists were not discarding the possibility of a bomb explosion. Sadly, these were the days when it was not uncommon to hear of a plane being hijacked or downed in a terrorist attack. In this case, the investigation had later proved that it was a mere accident due to a technical fault... One of the doors of the DC10 had simply been wrongly locked, hence opening in mid-air. The resulting loss of pressure in the cabin had led to the pilot's inability to control the plane and eventually to crash. This was not the first incident of this kind on record for the McDonnell Douglas flagship aircraft. Thus, the DC10 had acquired a terrible reputation... From this day onward, every time we travelled by air, we had to ask the ground staff what sort of plane we were going to board in order to make a quick stop at the chapel just in case it was a DC10. In the meantime, the travel industry was modernizing at a fast pace. The construction of the new airport in the North of Paris, which had started in 1966 when President De Gaulle was still in office, was coming to an end. Since the General's death in 1970, the French government led by Georges Pompidou had controversially changed its name from Paris North to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, its design was rather avant-gardist for its time and encompassed a ten-floor circular central core structure surrounded by seven satellites. The first time I travelled through CDG Airport was with my father on one of our 'business' trips to Zurich. As it had just opened, it was an opportunity for the both of us to experience the future... We had driven well over four hours to reach the airport from my sister's place in Sucé. So, I was hoping it was worth the ordeal of having spent that long in a speeding coffin with a Vetiver addict... From the outside, although the main building was slightly reminiscent of a flying saucer, I didn't find it much more striking than Orly Airport, and I felt disappointed. We left our vehicle in the car park and reached the main concourse a few minutes later with our luggage. Now you are talking! I thought when I was suddenly hit by the modern architecture inside the concourse, which was a celebration of the latest engineering techniques, revealing the bare beauty of raw concrete, metal and glass. What stroke me the most was the connecting tubes with their moving walkways, linking the main terminal building to the surrounding satellites. After checking in, we took one of these tubes on the way to our departure gate. The travellator was slow and gave us the opportunity to gaze around through the glass capsule. The soundproofing was so good that it felt like being inside a pressurized spacecraft. Then, we heard it: the signature CDG Airport's chime before every PA announcement. It sounded like nothing we had heard before. This was the work of a futuristic French composer called Bernard Parmegiani whose lack of musicality was hidden by the distorting sound of his synthesizer. It sounded like the noise I would have imagined only a Martian's spaceship could have made... We were witnessing the progress of humanity. While waiting for the boarding announcement at our gate, we watched planes landing and taxying on the runways through the satellite's windows. Happy to hear that our plane wasn't a DC10, we had a pleasant and relaxing flight. It was the middle of the afternoon already and, thus, I didn't feel as if my stomach was dropping in my shoes as I always did during our usual early morning departures. We even landed ten minutes ahead of schedule at Zurich Airport and arrived at the Carlton just in time for an early supper. We checked in quickly, dropped our luggage in our room and were one of the first clients to arrive at the Locanda restaurant that night. The maître d'hôtel was all over us, happy to see my generous father again... "Today my dears, the chef has cooked a very special Swiss stew of beef, pork and cabbage slowly braised in a white Riesling broth... This is highly recommended! And for starters, if you wish, I can suggest our cold locally-fished trout fillet with mustard sauce, served with a Swiss chard salad..."

As it all sounded delicious, we both agreed to follow his suggestions... "For aperitifs, will you have a glass of your favourite Appenzeller, sir? Yes? Good... And for the young man? A glass of Coca-Cola... Perfect! To accompany your main meal, I assume it will be the Dole Pinot Noir as usual and a bottle of sparkling water. Yes? Marvelous..." The Swiss hospitality was second to none, especially towards those with deep pockets... Both the fish and the main course were a big hit with us. Although, we were fully satiated at the end of the meal, our host managed to convince us to try one of the chef's best culinary creations: a wild raspberry vacherin with a homemade vanilla ice cream... After such a sumptuous dinner, we retired to our room relatively early and fell asleep quickly on a very full belly. The following day, we visited the renowned Globus department store on the Bahnhofstrasse and bought some cashmere. We only stayed for a few more days, and as usual, my father spoiled me as much as he could between the odd meetings with his banker and a weird client, Herr Bütner, who I suspected of being a spy. The latest James Bond movie had impressed me so much that I was also convinced that my father himself belonged to a secret society, the CIA or perhaps even the hypothetical Fourth Reich ... Before we parted towards the end of the trip, he instilled in me a permanent love for Swiss timepieces by taking me to a fancy jeweler where he bought me a proper gold pocket watch. Eventually, as if it were not enough, we also stopped at a merchant selling Victorinox Swiss army knives on our way to the hotel. Of course, I did not leave the shop empty-handed. It was such a short stay that when I returned home afterwards, I felt I hadn't spent any time at all with him. I also felt cheated by life. I would have rather had my dad and my mum living with me under the same roof than any of this material stuff. No riches in the world were enough to make me forget that. Sadly, I buried this frustration in a shallow layer just beneath my conscious mind and it kept on popping up as anger out of my subconscious from time to time... On one of these occasions, it surfaced while I was playing with a band of street urchins. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon and we were hanging out in a remote corner of the park. A small kid had just dropped one of his toys through the metal bars protecting one of the apartments' ground floor windows. Somehow, I personally came to his rescue because I wanted him to stop crying, not because I was kind... As I put my arm through what resembled a prison cell's bars to catch the toy, I noticed that the window behind those was ajar... After making my good deed of the day, the kid was happy and silent at last... I then gathered my friends around, "Hey guys! Come here for a minute..." My instruction was so uncanny that Cyriaque, Eli, Jesus and all the bigger kids in the vicinity immediately stopped what they were doing and came near me like a bunch of sharks suddenly smelling blood...

"This is the window at the back of that social club where the warden and his mates get drunk every Saturday..." I said, while pushing the window open with a stick. In an Open Sesame-like moment, our eyes got used to the dark room behind the anti-theft bars and all of us noticed at the very same time that there were about a hundred bottles of wine and liquor stacked on the shelves inside... Somehow, my cruel mood led me to grab and cast the first stone. An invisible cloud descended upon us and fed our souls a demonic frenzy that filled entirely our bodies and minds. Just as if we had all been hypnotized, everybody took his turn to cast a stone, and the next one after him, until there were no more... In less than half an hour, we had destroyed everything except one last bottle of red wine. I stole the privilege to throw a large brick at it and the red liquid filled the air with a glossy rain of crimson droplets and glass shards. At the end of the carnage, I felt like an empty-minded wolf contemplating the carcass remnants of a beast he would have had earlier for a meal. This was the predicament I was in.

On another note, I was gearing myself up for the main event of my thuggish life: La Mi-Carême (Nantes' annual carnival). Every year, on the Saturday immediately after the first half of Lent, the municipality and the retail community used to sponsor this amazing festival, which attracted tens of thousands of people including visitors from other surrounding cities. Every time, it took months of preparation for the organisers to build the chariots and the big heads representing cultures from different parts of the world, such as Arabic Bedouins, Egyptian Pharaohs and African tribes. Although it was meant to be tong-in-cheek, the festival's theme seemed, even then, to be a tad racist... In the light of Nantes's historical heritage of being one of the main actors in the triangular slave trade, the organisers should have considered upholding an element of tact. Nevertheless, such necessity had never occurred to them and the results was often grotesque. But, beside its farcical spirit, the carnival exulted a more sinister side reminiscent of Albert Camus's classic movie Orpheu Negro. This motion picture had been awarded the 1959 Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival for its portray of a doomed love affair in the Rio's favelas during the famous city's carnival. I had seen the movie with my sisters at the tender age of seven and the scene of the skeleton-like assassin pursuing the young couple through the crowd until their demise had simply terrified me. The connotation to the Greek Mythology tale of Orpheus and Eurydice emphasized on the film's surreal theme by mixing legendary classicism with actual scenes. As a direct result of seeing Orpheu Negro at such a young age, I had developed a strong phobia towards crowds. People seemed to assimilate and merge into one single entity with more than one head when in a group, just like The Hydra in Homer's Odyssey. Although I feared the effects of deindividuation, I was ready to brave my worst nightmare and confront the multitude. I was ready to defend myself with a bagful of fireworks. I had chosen to go to town with Archie for being the best mischief-maker, with Cyriaque and Eli for protection and finally with Jesus, well, for prayers... We met in my courtyard at 11:00 am, an hour before the start of the event. For once, Madame Garapin's radio was switched off, but there was somebody else in the floors above playing a deeply thoughtful Harry Chapin's record called Taxi. The whole space filled-up rapidly with the vibe of the moody song. As soon as we exited the building, we were hit by an anticlimactic change of scenery and atmosphere... The smell of fireworks was everywhere already. The sound of people laughing and sometimes screaming indicated that the City's excitement was slowly ascending towards its climax via an unstoppable crescendo mode. The streets were already covered with confetti. I noticed several groups of youngsters fighting against each other with inflatable plastic clubs, which could have come straight out of an episode of The Flintstones. Instinctively violent, Eli and Cyriaque were immediately drawn to purchase some of these weapons. Reluctantly, I also bought one, although I knew it could have attracted the wrath of belligerent opponent gangs of kids... It was almost lunchtime and entire families were starting to come out of the woodwork in swarms. The smoke from the sausage-grilling stalls gave to this scene a touch of grey, reminiscent of The French Revolution. The people were, once again, ready for a fight in the streets of Nantes. Though, instead of royalists, they were fighting a different battle against the elements. March being usually one of the wettest months in those parts, it had always been impossible for meteorologist to accurately predict the weather on any of the past Mi-Carême days... That day was no exception. There were big menacing grey clouds blowing inland from the North-West Atlantic. We could not have fought them with our makeshift plastic clubs even if we'd tried. Even the tallest of men would not have been able to reach for the heavens. Clowns on stilts began to appear from nowhere and one of them, a Pierrot with a tear painted on his face looked at the sky and opened his arms with his palms facing up. His expression of sadness shed more than a drop of sorrow on us. The heavens suddenly opened and we felt the rain falling. The Breton weather was one of my main disappointments when I grew up. So many times, I remember rejoicing ahead of a picnic on the beach with my sisters or ahead of a football match in the park, and being suddenly drenched. This day was no different. Our firework extravaganza was about to drown in the overflowing road gullies. But, Bretons being used to ancient druidic incantations, we all began projecting a will so strong that it was able to break the pattern of the sky. The smoke signals from the food stalls had created a contagious vibe in town, threading a web around each cloud like a cocoon. Our prayers had waterproofed the ceiling over our heads. The maritime wind had blown the cloud towards Paris... We were dry! The parade had started and the first chariots were slowly approaching at the bottom of La Rue Crébillon. Eli who was the tallest amongst us had climbed on the steps of the Théâtre Graslin to spy on the oncoming gala. With our intelligence in place, we had all assumed our strategic positions to fulfil our mission... Our plan was simple: as soon as the baton-twirling majorettes were going to arrive, hence announcing the first carnival figures, we were going to launch our attack. Each of us had enough firecrackers to blow up the whole square. We were neither the FLB nor the IRA, but our inner spirit was the same. We had been stung by the same wasp at birth... With hindsight, it could have very well been a hornet! The drummers were drumming, the trumpets were blowing and we were lighting our fuses... The entertainers wearing paper-craft big heads were announcing the incoming chariots. The first ones to arrive were dressed as centurions, obviously manning the Roman-themed cohort. We welcomed them with a salvo of Tiger fireworks. Since our attacks were coming from all sides, the poor fellows stuck in the heavy paper heads made a funny dance when the firecrackers exploded around their thin legs. Then, as none other than Julius Caesar himself arrived on a huge trailer, sitting on a throne surrounded by local beauties, Eli was tasked to throw a Flying Saucer at him... As soon as our giant friend lit the fuse, it made the distinctive noise of what we all assumed could have been a Martian spaceship. Like a baseball player, he cocked his arm as far back as he could and threw what had suddenly become a hot potato in his hand towards the parade. The Flying Saucer bounced on the main chariot's deck and made a hissing sound before loudly exploding! The Roman nymphs screamed but eventually managed to regain their composure. Several people gave Eli a dirty look... It didn't go unnoticed and Cyriaque, who had agreed to assume our artillery's defense position, threw one of his machine gun firecrackers at them, carefully prepared for this particular occasion with twenty Tigers. This time, the multiple explosions created havoc and, as it looked as if the fireworks were coming from more than one location, nobody was able to pinpoint who was behind such a cowardly attack... Having fun on people's behalf was vicious but terribly comforting for the perpetrators at the same time... An early streak of Punk was starting to emerge in me. As for my friends, they had already been born that way. There was more than a mere soul in this crowd who felt prisoner and who would have wanted to fly away like one of the balloons that were taking to the sky. The wind blew a tourbillion of confetti in our hair and we ran towards Place Royale, a beautiful square dating back to the French Revolution with a Baroque fountain in the style of Bernini's earlier water features in Rome. New themes, even more extravagant than the previous ones, were entering our scenery like dreams popping up into our minds. Somehow, by these means, we managed to travel high. If it were not for our fury, we would have flown away like kites. It was our terrestrial fabric that kept us close to the mark. We pulled more firecrackers out of our bag and threw them at the gentle people. After a while, the King and Queen of the Mi-Carême parade arrived on a chariot made to look like a horse-drawn carriage. We through most of our remaining fireworks at them. However, we kept a few large ones just for the marching band, whose final appearance signaled that the festival was drawing to an end. Although the performer who played the cymbals did his very best to cover the sound of the multiple explosions, our artillery salvos were overwhelming. Our grand finale was like Verdun! Eventually, as all musicians managed to survive this ordeal, we felt sad because this had marked the end of a bloody fun day... We were on our way to leave Place Royale when we saw some grubby-looking men with FCN football shirts and scarfs jumping in the fountain. They were standing knee-deep in the cold water and were proudly holding beer bottles in their hands. These drunkards emulated the vibe that always lingered at end of the Mi-Carême. For many of those men who had been drinking the entire day since morning, it was time to eat a Merguez sandwich and French fries from the Moroccan barbeque stall. Although these blue-collar workers were racists and hated anything to do with North African immigrants, they didn't mind their food. Merguez spicy sausages were then the equivalent of nowadays donner kebabs... Place Graslin was almost empty and was covered with an inch of confetti. The only remaining people were either old drunks or kids playing with streamers. We were just about to say goodbye to each other when we heard some loud voices and shouts... A group of at least ten rowdy youngsters was coming down towards us from one of the adjacent streets. As we were still holding our plastic clubs and so were they, it would have been a real shame to miss an opportunity for one last battle. Unfortunately, those guys were all as big as Eli... Although, our strong friend managed to keep some of these thugs at bay, we, the smaller ones, received a jolly good and somewhat well-deserved beating.

Chapter XI: A New Era

On the first days of spring 1974, car manufacturers had to attune their marketing strategies and production lines to a new post oil-shock era where the new preferred motto was energy efficiency. Accordingly, Volkswagen was forced to replace their legendary Beetle with a new compact-styled car called The Golf. Their ensuing advertising campaign was not only praising the new automotive design and its technological advancements but it was also promoting a new breed of smart and affluent people aged 25 to 35 who were 'in' while the rest of us, either too old or too young, were 'out'... Changing times were shifting the planet off its axis. In April, President Georges Pompidou died after losing a long hushed-up battle against cancer and was temporarily replaced by the French Senate's President Alain Poher. Meanwhile, in Brighton, our British neighbours were hosting the nineteenth Eurovision song contest. The UK organisers and their partaking team had brought the big guns to seal the deal and their chosen contestant Olivia Newton-John, who had already earned a Grammy award, was the frontrunner. However, despite all the local media and fans pressure, the English native singer finished in fourth position and a relatively unknown pop band from Sweden called ABBA won the contest with their track Waterloo. Their style, or lack of, depending on how you perceived their white leather outfits and buffoonish hairdos, appealed to the masses. Times when songs were supposed to have meaningful lyrics and thoughtful melodies were long gone... Indeed, ABBA epitomized tackiness and people loved it just as they would have enjoyed a tommy-filling mashed potato without any gravy. They wanted an easy life and this band offered just that: an uncomplicated relationship with music; something to remember on your way to the way bathroom; something as naff as a diddy old knees-up... Luckily, resistance from new British bands such as Supertramp, Yes and Genesis was coming to the rescue of a discerning audience of youngsters who still preferred to challenge their minds and spirit with eclectic musicality and poetry. The latter amongst these three knights in shining armor had just launched their latest album, Selling England by the Pound... Here, Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and friends had crafted a real masterpiece. It was an important moment in the transition of Progressive Rock towards a realm where mega rock bands such as Genesis and Queen were well on their way to claim their corner of the throne. In this song, the boys from Surrey had managed to mix English folk music, classical escapades and a Mellotron-fueled psychedelic renaissance. I could have listened to the song Firth of Fifth over and over and I would have never surrendered to boredom.

One morning on my way to school, Madame Garapin's radio was blaring out the latest song by the Rubettes: Sugar Baby Love. Citing Jesus, I could have said, "Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani? (My God, oh my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)" This was a direct response by English music producers to counteract the growing popularity of ABBA... I felt the wind of change upon us. I was going to miss so much the early seventies with its plethora of ideologies where freedom, human rights and pacifism happily cohabited with activism, guerillas and terrorism. The tide of modernism was bringing brain-slushing material ashore. Without knowing, we were witnessing the penultimate moment prior to the surreptitious Anglosaxonization of our world. However, some 'old guard' people with hippie nostalgia were still promoting the good old tenets of the late 60s. A new television series called Kung Fu had just hit our screens at home... The storyline epitomized the early 70s vibe. Eastern spirituality and wisdom played a big part in it. It clearly depicted western materialistic set of values as a doomed fools-gold's quest. Somehow, in the bottom of my heart, I have always thought that the principles illustrated in any of the Kung Fu's episodes were damn right! Instead of listening to the Rubettes on my way to school, I would have definitely preferred to start my day with a more appropriate Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens... At the cinemas, the clash of civilizations was as evident as in the music scene. In the meantime in my own body and soul, I was heading towards a different kind of transition, namely that from childhood to puberty, and was feeling thoroughly lonely. So, going to movie theaters was my chosen remedy. Emotions generated though the Seventh Art were as real as life itself. As soon as I put my mind into it, I was able to picture myself inside of those cinematographic scenes. I was able to love. I was able to die. I was able to feel just like another boy, a woman or a man. I was a victim and an executioner all at the same time. I was a true cinema buff! Thanks God, there was still a great deal of 'classic' scripts. One of them, Papillon, was topping my favourite films' list at that time. Choosing such a harsh environment and period for a blockbuster storyline such as the penal colony in French Guiana during the early part of the Twentieth Century had been a risky move for the producers. The world was moving ahead not backwards... However, the phenomenal acting from both Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen had made this motion picture one of the very best adventure movies ever. The production was set in a remote island and was so realistic that I was able to feel the bite of mosquitoes and the sweat pouring on my face while sitting in my cinema chair. Since The Great Escape, the concept of fugitive prisoners had fascinated me. We, humans, were mere animals that Mother Nature had designed to be free. As Steve McQueen was portraying a safecracker wrongly accused of murder, his escape at the end of the movie filled me with hope. Thus, this had planted a seed in my mind telling me that I also could have escaped if I had wanted to. After all, my sister Laurie had done it and had never returned home. That was probably why they had invented hitchhiking... It was so easy to go anywhere then. You just had to make a placard and write Please Take Me To The Moon, and wait at the start of a motorway to be picked up. Most of the time, people used to enjoy giving a ride to young people. It was almost a civic duty... Despite all the open doors, I stayed. Nonetheless, while my body remained, my mind wandered... I went to see The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The music score was so cool that it had instantly unleashed generations of wannabe pianists. This was not the first time these two actors had played in the same movie. They had been cast together previously for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, yet again another brilliant script with an amazing soundtrack and production. I loved these guys... They were my true family.

Meanwhile, in my household, everything was also changing fast, much too fast... Nickie had moved out with her young son to her own flat and so had Memée. It was now just my mother and I living in our big, dark memory-filled apartment. However, this was not going to last... With the generous financial help from my father, my mum had bought an off-plan luxurious penthouse on top of a new building in the most affluent leafy street in town, Le Boulevard Gabriel Guist'Hau. Although, this was potentially a life changer, moving to a new place felt like embarking on a long voyage across the ocean on a dinghy... The human psyche's natural response to change was similar to that of death, which, according to a 1969 study by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross consisted of five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Sadly, I was stuck at number four... I was smart enough to foresee that I was going to struggle in order to survive this ordeal. As if a new home wasn't enough, I was also going to move to a new secondary school in September: Le Lycée Jules Verne. I had already heard from some of my friends who had older siblings tending to this historical institution how much bullying freshers like me were subjected to. There was also a rumor in town that caning punishment was still being implement within the walls of the hundred-year-old high-school. Furthermore, as bad things often happened in threes, my mother, whose ongoing psychiatric treatment was obviously working, had decided to resume working... As she was receiving a generous alimony from my father, her motivation wasn't financial but was led by a quest for personal achievement. Hence, she was about to start working as a sales person in a large furniture retail store that stayed opened late at night and at weekends. However laudable her drive to make something out of her life was, she was effectively going to leave me on my own for the rest of my young life... But, the cherry on top of the cake was that the rental lease of our current home was going to expire soon. So, I was told we were going to have to stay in a hotel room for a while until our new flat would be ready to move in. Notwithstanding my looming puberty, it would have been an understatement to say that I had enough on my plate to fear the future like the plague... With all that shit that was raining all over me at that particular time in my young life, I was doomed! Everything around me was collapsing. It felt as if I had made my bed unknowingly on top of an anthill. In the meantime, my friends had also started their own respective journeys between the present moment and adulthood... These were long solitary voyages, which young people seldom survived unscathed. I was no exception. We were all embarking on vessels sailing in different directions despite being moved by the same wind of change. We were not the only things on earth to evolve... Even my favourite football team the FCN, who had been topping the champions' league in 1973, had lost its title against its archrival St Etienne. The Canaris had even lost the Cup Final against the same team. What am I going to do? I often asked myself. I had nothing else left in my pocket but to draw some inspiration from the eerie acoustic guitar in the From the Beginning song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I was mixing genres. Perhaps the reason for this was that I was picking the faraway vibe from the Indian government of Indira Gandhi who had cunningly called its first atomic bomb test 'Smiling Buddha', invoking a supposedly peaceful aim... Calling such a devastating weapon a deterrent was the new buzzword of all politicians dressed in sheep's clothing. Hypocrisy levels were running high. Sadly, although Geiger counters, which by then had become a crucial necessity, were widely available, an even more in-demand double-standards detector was yet to be invented... When I returned home that night, Madame Garapin's radio was playing a much more serious song, Le Téléphone Pleure by Claude François. In this record, the famous French pop star was addressing one of modern life's recurring dysfunctions: separation and divorce. In order to illustrate this societal disease, Claude François had used a few props: a telephone set and a live 7-year old girl. Their conversation was slowly leading to a bucket of tears, mine...

Chapter XII: Electrical Impulse

In May 1974, after a long electoral campaign against François Mitterrand's socialist party, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became the third elected president of the French Fifth Republic. Soon after his victory, he appointed Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister. Together, these two men forged an alliance leading to a new strain of Gaullism. Their combined views were more open towards the looming globalization than Charles De Gaulle's who had always been wary of those he considered as hegemonic Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the ponds... Although their newly formed government was allegedly progress-oriented, these were times when the economy was still suffering from the cataclysmic aftershocks of the 1973 oil crisis. Notwithstanding the financial turmoil, this did not stop the still sexually-active generation of Baby Boomers to make more babies... Accordingly, the world population reached the staggering 4-billion-people mark. Even back then, we all knew that the critical mass gathered over the past millennia by humanity had already toppled our planet's capability to sustain our species' mere existence. We had officially reached and even gone beyond the point of no return. Thus, the day when the bough would eventually break was inevitable and looming. With such buoyant demographics, the world was in need of answers about its uncertain future. Accordingly, cults such as the Unification Church movement (Moon's sect) responded to the needs of many people. Hence, the popularity of gurus such as Sun Myung Moon was at its peak. By 1974, the 'church' was making a staggering 8 million US Dollars revenue per year, which included donations from hundreds of thousands followers worldwide and returns on investment from various business ventures. On the other hand, since the Sharon Tate's murder by the infamous Charles Manson's Family, sects had also earned a reputation of being nefarious organizations. Moon's was no exception and a reverse movement initiated by the parents of actual victims who had fallen into the hands of whom they perceived as an unscrupulous guru began to emerge. Being brainwashed was then a recurrent topic in the media, which many associated as one of their worse societal fears... In the meantime, interest in the main traditional religion in the West, Christianity, was dwindling, especially amongst the younger generations. A solution to curb the risks linked to overpopulation was clearly missing. As far as I was concerned, I found the answer in the movie Soylent Green... It was not the first time I watched a film directed by Richard Fleischer and, in my mind, his name rhymed with quality. In this motion picture, Charlton Heston was cast as a cop investigating a corporation manufacturing the only food supply available to humanity after decades of pollution in the not so distant future of 2022... During the course of action, this dystopian adventure led the detective to unveil a terrifying plot by the world's authorities to recycle people as mere pieces of meat into the food chain. Towards the end of the movie, his partner, an old man played by Edward G. Robinson, voluntary surrendered his body to this dark 'reprocessing' enterprise. In the concluding scene, Heston watched his friend's final moments as the old man was being euthanized whilst listening to his favourite piece of music, Beethoven's Pastoral. Nobody knew during the shooting of Soylent Green that Edward G. Robinson would actually die in real life from a terminal cancer only twelve days after finishing the movie. This was one of the most poignant scenes I had ever seen. After seeing spellbinding movies such as this one almost every weekend, it became hard to focus on my studies at school. Although my mind was as absorbent as a sponge, it was neither seawater nor geometry that was going to quench my intellectual thirst. I would have liked to discuss with both my teacher and my peers broad subjects such as the meaning of life... I am pretty sure that Mr. Roberts would have wholeheartedly approved of such a radical alteration to the French curriculum. Unfortunately, it was neither his place nor mine to change the education system. So, Mr. Roberts taught us about squares and triangles, and, while this was happening, I let my mind wander around each and every corner of the classroom ceiling... I also spent a great deal of time thinking. I imagined a world where teachers would have taught kids how to have fun... All of us would have rushed to school every morning with our eyes peeled and ears open. How about making a better world? I wondered how this topic would have changed us. In my very case, it would have metamorphosed me into a king... But, on this occasion, I was too late. There had already been a kid before my time who had actually put this very subject to work. As an adult, he had generously provided millions of people worldwide with joy, relief and acceptance of our own human condition. He had not only become a king, he was The King... Elvis had just released his latest album Good Times. His vibe was always in the air and his crooner's voice on air.

Whenever I was not daydreaming in the classroom, I was still having fun collecting the last remaining stickers to complete my Panini album. The 1974 FIFA World Cup had just started and we were all going cuckoo. I only had a couple of blank spaces to fill. I was missing Dragan Dzajic from the Yugoslav team and the famous English captain Bobby Moore. As we were only a small school, we all knew which stickers each of us were after. Someone had spilled the beans and had told one of the boys in another year that I badly wanted the two players... By chance, he had one of them.

"I hear you are looking for Dzajic... How many spare cards do you have?" He asked, starting the negotiation from a strength point.

"Why are you asking me that?" I replied, knowing exactly where this conversation was going...

"You give me all of them and I give you Dzajic." He said with a confident smile.

Although I knew I would have shot myself in the foot by declining his offer, I also knew that, if I said yes, I would end up with nothing left in my hands to negotiate the last missing sticker. So, I decided to play it safe and give a neutral answer, "Ok. You've got a deal if you throw Bobby Moore in as well..."

"I don't have it." He said, looking slightly puzzled.

I now had the upper hand, and made my final move, "Then, find it and I give you all of these..." I showed him at the same time the one hundred and fifty-two stickers I had left. The sight of such a large wad made him swallow his pride. I saw his Adam's apple go up and down a few times. Without waiting for his reply, I went back playing with my friends. The boy was not ready to see me leave with his coveted treasure in my pocket. Over the remaining recess time, I saw him discuss the matter avidly with his buddies. They all kept staring at me with envy. By keeping the negotiation open, I had totally destabilized my opponent. He and his friends were now working on my behalf, looking for the elusive Bobby Moore... Meanwhile, in Germany, sixteen teams from five continents were competing for the prestigious trophy, which had just been redesigned by the Italian sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga. The stupendous sculpture was made of 18-carrat gold with a malachite base and featured two human figures holding the world above their stretched arms. To me, the new cup looked like a cross between a tree-trunk, a crystal ball and chocolate in gold wrapper... It was yummy! As the tournament was held in West Germany, the national team was one of the favourites along with The Netherlands, and Brazil who had won the previous event in 1970. Each group consisted of four teams playing against each other, out of which the two best ones would be moving forward to the next round. The host team was paired with Chile and Australia, which were considered lower-ranked contenders, and East Germany. For obvious reasons, the latter was a red flag for 'The Kaiser' Franz Beckenbauer and his teammates. Indeed, since their historical split in 1949, these two countries had lived side by side embroiled in a love-hate relationship due to their respective governments' politics. However, since the construction of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961, the division had rekindled a spirit of unification, albeit secretly, between the two populaces who were essentially one and the same people. Although the match between the two neighbours held in Hamburg was played in the true spirit of football, there was a lot of political pressure on both teams to win this derby. Whilst the West German team had dominated most of the two periods, it was East Germany who scored the one and only goal during the second half. Sport was such a wonderful way to settle old scores without killing millions of innocent people... As the World Cup's first round was coming to an end, I was preparing for a school trip meant to mark the end of the summer term, and most importantly, our final year in primary education... On this occasion, we were going to travel to a medieval city in the Quercy region in the South West of France. On the departure day, I had asked my mother to let me walk by myself to school where transportation was waiting. I wanted to look like the big boy I was so desperate to be, rather than the small one trapped in a kiddy's body. My friends had already arrived and they were all with their parents who were making sure their little protégés had not forgotten their pyjamas and things... By denying my mother the pleasure of being a mum, I somehow felt sad for her whilst watching the others hugging theirs. We eventually left in a coach for a very short ride to the station where we boarded a train. It was a six-hour journey and another two-hour coach ride to our final destination: Rocamadour. We split in groups of six and I was eventually allocated the same compartment as the most beautiful girl at school... Every boy whose head and body were wired the right way around just loved Agnes. She was a stunning blonde, very mature for her age, looking just like a Barbie doll. As our teacher Mr. Robert had not been able to join us on this trip, Mr. Thomas, our school director, had taken the lead, along with several assistants. One of them, a young man called Pierre, was sitting with us. Somehow, he seemed to be fonder of Agnes than of any of us. I would not have blamed him if it were not for their somewhat out-of-place conversation... They started talking about all sorts of nonsense...

"Pierre, may I ask if you are married?"

"Not really, but I live with someone if you really want to know..." He said, clearly flattered to hear she was interested in him. Apart from them, the rest of us stayed relatively quiet, observing their every moves and witnessing the bizarre momentum full of innuendos unfolding before our curious eyes...

"How old is she?" She asked, cheekily.

"Nineteen." He responded without telling her to mind her own business, as he should have under normal circumstances. As it appeared, these were not normal circumstances...

"Oh, that's rather young..." She said, in a flirtatious way.

"Well, I am not that old you know..." He replied, playing the same game.

"How old are you?" She then asked.

Eventually, after gauging each other with rather personal questions for a while, the conversation took an even more inappropriate turn...

"So, you guys are going to turn a big page in the book of life... You'll all be in high school next year."

"Yeah... Puberty, the trampoline to adult life is nigh." Agnes said out of the blue. Pierre frowned upon her, not through anger, but through what appeared to be a deep form of compassion.

"I guess you are all wondering about what's going to happen next... Are you?" He asked.

This time, we all replied yes in unison. He then gave us a very detailed biology lesson covering puberty and reproduction. At that time in France, we were not supposed to have sexual education, especially not at such a young age. Based on the way he dressed and talked to us, Pierre was a young liberal with clear anti-conformist views. My father would have called him a soixante-huitard, referring to someone whose political views were similar to those who had participated in the 1968 riots against the government. In other words, my dad would have considered Pierre to be a filthy communist bastard! Although, I was, by default, a chip off the old block, my views on the subject were mixed... My conscience was telling me that Pierre was crossing the line by talking to us about matters of sexual nature, but I also saw him as someone who truly believed it was his vocational duty to enlighten us with some truth about the birds and bees at last. After hearing everything there was to know about our respective bodies and the physical love between men and women, someone raised a straight-to-the-point, albeit relatively pertinent, question...

"How does it feel to make love?" Agnes asked.

Pierre thought twice before responding, "It's like an electric current going through your spine..." And that was it... We all left the train feeling strange after such an overload of information. It was quite some revelation to hear that we were all the fruits of a mere electrical impulse... We then arrived in Bordeaux feeling drained and tired after such a long emotional journey. After retrieving our luggage, we hopped into a coach, which meant another two or three hours on the road depending on the traffic... While some kids watched the world go by through the bus windows and others played some games, I took the opportunity to look for my last Panini sticker... I approached everybody including the adults, just in case they were collecting as well. The kid who I had offered my whole stash in exchange of his Dzajic card plus Bobby Moore noticed what I was doing. As he did not want to miss the opportunity to win such a big prize, he tried to beat me to the finish line. As I was going through each seat from the rear of the coach, he was coming towards me from the driver's side. He was offering ten stickers for Bobby Moore to any of the kids he was approaching, whereas I was ready to let go half of mine, which was well over seventy... As I would have given him the whole lot anyway, he never realised that by doing his share of the hard work, he was saving me time and efforts. Eventually, he got lucky and found the magic card before me! Eventually, someone I had already approached had heard what was going on and stopped the transaction, "Don't give your card away just for ten. You can get at least seventy from Stevie!" This was indeed a deal breaker. I was then dragged into this and had to make a decision in the King Solomon's style... Instead of cutting my stickers in half, I simply split them into two piles. To be fair, this was the best offer they would have ever received from anybody. After a bit more shoving and pulling, we all shook hands. They both received seventy-six stickers each, and I filled the last two blank spaces on my Panini FIFA album. When the coach finally arrived in Rocamadour, I was exhausted. Unfortunately, we didn't get much sleep in the youth hostel afterwards. Our bunkbeds in the dormitory felt like a prison sentence and, as most of us tried our luck at catching a glimpse of the girls in pyjamas in the adjacent section, it was chaotic all night. The following days, we visited the medieval fortified village, the famous Padirac Chasm, and the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. Despite such an interesting sightseeing session, my best souvenir of this trip was simply to listen to our school director Mr. Thomas sharing with us his passion for the noble art of poetry... This true gentleman was kind and had a heart as big as a boulder. He recited the verses of a relatively unknown poem by Maurice Fombeure.

"Les Écoliers (The School Children)... Vont à ga-lo-ches que veux-tu..." He almost shouted whilst putting a phonetic emphasis on galoches, an old French word for peasant's shoes.

"I want you to hear the sound of the pupils slapping their soles onto the ground as I recite this poem... Poetry is not only about the meaning of words, it is also about the way they sound, the feelings they inspire, and the imagination they unleash." He said, reflecting on the literary beauty he had just filled us in with.

Chapter XIII: A Greek Escapade

I should have been over the moon to be back from my school trip with a complete Panini FIFA album. Yet, I felt sad to have left my friends and teachers behind for the very last time. We were going to move out of our family home to a hotel in a nearby street a couple of months later. Just the thought of this impending drama was giving me the chills. I was so young when we had moved into this place that I was not consciously remembering living anywhere else. I was apprehending how it would have felt to be unrooted by life just as if I were a bad weed... However, before that, I still had a full month to enjoy my childhood turf prior to our forthcoming summer holiday in Greece. Therefore, I spent as much time as possible in the park, hoping to find my friends... Somehow, sadly, everybody was gone. They were either on holiday or had already moved to new horizons just as I was about to. Lighting fireworks on my own was not even funny. Solitude was dawning on me just like when the sad reality sets in upon waking up after a beautiful dream. Although I was alone, I could still hear the voices and the screams of my friends just as if they were there with me. Suddenly, I remembered all the heart-stopping matches of football we played, the exhilarating hide-and-seek games with the girls and the spellbinding bike races. Despite some troubles at home, I had it all! I had it all, and it's over... I thought, feeling sad, bitter, and angry. I jumped off the bench where I was sitting on my own, snatched my bike, and rode it as fast and as far as I could without looking back or stopping... I crossed the cast-iron gates without watching the incoming traffic and barely avoided hitting another cyclist. I travelled around the Place Graslin square at the speed of light and took off towards nowhere in particular in the universe... I just wanted to fly away from that nest of mine despite my yearning for it. Eventually, after a while, feeling a bittersweet taste in my mouth, I arrived in front of the cinéma Gaumont where I saw a big poster of the movie Emmanuelle. The actress Sylvia Kristel was wearing a lace skirt, sitting topless and crossed-legged on a wicker chair. This very scene had become such a cult image that even the rattan furniture piece had been immortalized under the nickname of an Emmanuelle Chair. It was rated-18 and I looked at this striking beauty, drooling and thinking: another eight years to go before the end of my prison sentence. Indeed, as the French government had just reduced the majority age by three years, everything was bound to change when I would reach eighteen. Watching adult movies was just one of the perks. I didn't care much for voting, but playing a game of blackjack at the casino, driving a Ford GT or buying a Beretta gun were things I would have gladly attempted.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the World Cup's second round was heating up. In Group A, Brazil and The Netherlands were leading the pack after beating East Germany and Argentina in their respective games. In Group B, a similar scenario had been unfolding as West Germany and Poland had both beaten their opponents in a row (Sweden and Yugoslavia). Thus, the last matches of the second round between the main contenders in each group were as important as semi-finals. In Dortmund, the Dutch team was playing against the former 1970 World Cup's holders... Despite playing a good game throughout, the Brazilians were neither able to score nor to control Johan Cruyff's side. His team was experimenting with a new technique called Total Football, where players were encouraged to shift positions with their teammates and cover for them whenever the latter moved forward during an attack. This strategy had eventually enabled defenders such as Rudi Krol to score against Argentina from a 25-yard distance. On this occasion, it was the midfielder Neeskens who scored the first goal. Then, during the second half, the Dutch captain himself, Cruyff, masterfully volleyed the ball into the Brazilian's net, hence making the final score two-nil. In the meantime, in Frankfurt, talented Polish players such as Deyna and Gadocha were demonstrating that their team was a force to reckon with. Not only they were holding the host team at bay, but were also dominating the first half. Sepp Maier, the German goalkeeper with his famous oversize 'Mickey-Mouse' gloves, had to turn away several on-target balls, which were dangerously hurling towards him from the Polish side. Eventually, as the laws of football were not always logical or fair, Beckenbauer's teammates had scored the only goal in this match during the second half when the opportunistic Gerd Muller had converted a ball landing inside the penalty box into a winning strike. Thus, on the 7th of July, in Munich's Olympic Stadium, a crowd of seventy-five thousand people attended the 1974 FIFA World Cup final live. Merely a minute into the game, a penalty was awarded to the Dutch team after one of their players was harshly tackled inside Sep Maier's goal area. Hence, Neeskens scored the first goal. Eventually, a while later, a similar scenario took place on the opposite side and a cool-headed Paul Breitner equalized via one of his perfectly executed penalty kicks. Then, the tension between the two teams reached its climax when, yet again, Gerd Muller who was ambushed behind the Netherland team's defense line, received the ball in his feet. As he was facing away from his opponent's goal, he pivot-kicked the ball in an awkward way, which fooled everybody including the Dutch keeper... After this exploit, the German team held onto their two-one score until the final whistle. Watching all of my football heroes, including those in the losing team, being handled their respective trophies during the final ceremony, made me consider the solemnity of this sport. With their long hair and 70's looks, I could have been watching a bunch of gunslingers after a quick-draw duel in one of Sergio Leone's movies... Yet again, I heard Ennio Morricone's music playing loud in my head. After all the excitement from the World Cup was gone, I returned to my lonely occupations... Coming and going in and out of my building, I heard the news on Madame Garapin's radio that the finance minister Jean-Pierre Fourcade had launched an austerity plan. Far from being proactive, the basis of his strategy was to get more money out of workers and companies via hefty double-digit tax increases. This was a direct reaction to the economic downturn after the 1973 oil-shock. It was time to tighten our belts... Despite this somber outlook, the sun was still shining and my sister Marnie had decided to take Nickie's son, her own toddler and me to the beach. I was sitting at the back of her Austin Mini in order to keep an eye on my nephews... They were only small but the toddlers were quite a handful. We were on our way to Pornic, a picturesque fishing village off the South Brittany coast. It was only a short ride from Nantes. We were driving through long country lanes and the closer we got to the sea, the bluer the sky was. It was perhaps due to its microclimate, or to the telluric current that ancient Bretons believed to emanate from this area, but it felt like if we were entering into a postcard. The scenery approaching Pornic was breathtaking... We were driving on a meandering road with maritime pine trees on either side. We could have been in Monterey, California... I felt the sea so strongly that I held my breath until, after a wide turn on top of a cliff, the trees vanished off the panorama and were suddenly replaced by the dark blue ocean with a touch of white crests. I inhaled the iodine-filled air and my heart bombarded my senses with the oxygenated bubbles of a Breton cider better than Champagne any day of the year... The road took us around the medieval castle and the fishing harbor where a few sailing and fishing boats were moored. Some of them were painted in a pale blue color that reminded me of the strength of the sap flowing in young trees. We finally arrived at the car park of our favourite beach. We got out of the car and stretched our legs... There were other people setting-up their beach gear. People in those parts took sunbathing very seriously. Sitting on the sand enjoying the sea breathe was only part of the fun. This was also an opportunity to picnic, which, here, often involved collecting and cooking your own seafood on the spot... At low tide, everybody was digging clams out of the soft sand and gathered mussels and wild oysters from the emerging seabed rocks. My nephews and I preferred hunting for small crabs and shrimps in stagnant pools. Snails, starfish, anemones and kelp popped into our city-dwellers' eyes like the reminiscent cry of a newborn baby telling people around him that they are still alive. Sometimes, nature poked us with another sort of cry, our own after stepping on a spiky sea-ursin. My sister Marnie was always ready with tweezers in her first-aid kit just in case... It was our way of life and we loved it. That day, I swam in a small cove as the tide was coming in. I felt the ocean waves ploughing through the rocky surroundings as if a giant god was tilting planet Earth sideways. I received my fill of water by the buckets!

On the way back from Pornic, except for my sister who was driving, we all dozed off in our seats, tired, bruised and content. Just as we were arriving in town, she put the radio on. It was playing a song by Dusty Springfield called Spooky... After a soothing musical interlude, a news bulleting was broadcast. Further to a coup by the Greek military junta, the Turkish army had staged an invasion in an enclave of the northern part of Cyprus... In the light of our forthcoming trip to Greece, this news was disturbing. The tension between the two countries had reached sky-high levels. Over the following few days, my mother who was worried, monitored the development of this crisis closely... Eventually, a couple of days before our trip, her travel agent called her and confirmed that the state of affairs in mainland Greece was safe enough to fly. Accordingly, we packed our clothes and got ready to live our old apartment. On the day of departure, I donned a new outfit that my mother had bought for me just for this well-anticipated occasion... I would have looked the part in an episode of _The Persuaders_ series with my emerald green stonewashed cotton suit and my trendy _Stan Smith_ tennis shoes. As we were flying directly to Athens out of Paris, we spent the night in the capital and had an early super at one of the trendy eateries, _Chez Dupont_ , where, according to its famous motto, everything on the menu was great ( _Chez Dupont, tout est bon!_ ). Indeed, my snails _à la Bourguignonne_ and my _entrecôte forestière_ were just how I liked it. The following day, after a four-hour flight, we landed in the Greek capital where the crew of our travel tour operator was waiting. They literally took us over, along with several other people who had travelled in the plane with us. As we were going to be together for a couple of weeks, it was customary to get along with other travellers. Despite being a single mother, my mum always managed to meet people during our trips. Somehow, she clicked with another lady who was also on her own with her son who was just a few years older than me. We sat near them in the coach and the two women talked with each other during the two-hour long journey to our hotel in the Peloponnese region. Eventually, we veered off the highway towards a beautiful sinuous mountain road surrounded by pink laurel shrubs. This was a private way just to access our resort, which was signed-posted: _The Kappa Club_. We all felt happy to notice how well maintained the surroundings were. It was five star! As we arrived near the main entrance, we passed a grandly decorated gate with ionic columns on either side. But, this was not the only imposing feature awaiting us. To everybody's surprise, a very large statue was standing in front of the reception building. It was a very realistic depiction of the Greek Mythology's god of fertility and wilderness, Pan... His sexual potency was unequivocally illustrated via his 15-inch long phallus. Although, many eyebrows were raised on that day, being concerned had nothing to do with it. We were staying in a two-bed bungalow and it was quite modern and comfortable. On our first evening, we were allocated a table with an older couple in the restaurant. The formula was a buffet and the food was plentiful and varied. As soon as one of the front of house staff had placed us, the other male guest had immediately stood up to help my mother sit-down. Based on his manners and safari-suit dress code, it was obvious that he belonged to the dying breed of old-fashioned gentlemen...

" _Guten abend_!" He said in a strict, yet welcoming tone.

They were typical Germans, overtly polite and formal... The man's wife did not speak French, but he was almost fluent. As he was in his 60s, chances were he could have acquired his language skills during the occupation. In fact, he kept on telling us how much he loved France in an almost apologetic way... It was clear he wanted to repent for his country's war crimes and perhaps his own... Nevertheless, this man with a _Bozzo-the-clown_ frizzy hairstyle and his very quiet wife were pleasant company. While choosing our desserts, we bumped into the single mother and her son we had met earlier in the coach.

"Hello there! How are you settling in?" She asked my mother, who responded, "Very well, thank you! The rooms are nice and we are finishing our dinner with the German couple over there..."

"Oh nice! Would you like to join us for a drink afterwards? My son and I will be in the clubhouse near the pool. We are told there is going to be some sort of entertainment..."

It was then customary for such resorts to have themed evenings over the holiday season. My mother accepted the invitation gladly. Thus, after finishing our meal, we saluted our German friends and made our way towards the bar. As soon as we arrived, the _James Bond_ soundtrack song by Nancy Sinatra _You Only Live Twice_ was playing... My mother and I felt at home. Our friends were sitting in the open veranda area near the pool illuminated by powerful underwater lights. We joined them and ordered some drinks.

"What are you having?" My mother asked.

"As my son is thirteen, he is having a beer shandy, but since I am slightly older, I am having _Daiquiris_ ..." Our lady friend said, laughing...

"Oh, Splendid! I will join you if I may." My mother said, with a cheeky smile.

It was new for me to see that side of her. Since the divorce, she had not had many occasions to let her hair down. The evening continued as it had started, in a fun and relaxing way. A team of entertainers welcomed the newcomers like us, and explained a few of the bookkeeping rules, such as dining time, dress code, sports activities, evening events and excursions. While the two women were honing their cocktail sipping cum nonsensical-chatter skills, we, the boys, were talking about serious things such as our favourite films... Despite having never seen it, we both agreed to like _Emanuelle_ for obvious reasons, Bruce Lee's Kung Fu romps due to the cool nunchaku scenes, and of course, all of the James Bond movies franchise... They were from Brussels. It was the first time for me to meet with our cousins from Wallonia and I found them smashing! After this evening, we met every day on the beach and we even went together on a few excursions to the _Acropolis_ and to other ancient Greek archaeological sites. The sea was magnificent, still as a lake and translucent as an aquarium. My Belgium friend, who was called Marcel, and I did a lot of snorkelling. We bumped many times into seahorses flying across the waters with their tiny wings like their large cousin Pegasus would have done across the heavens. We did some canoeing and ventured outside of the hotel's boundaries, exploring the first kilometre of pristine coastline with desert pebble beaches. Everywhere we went it always smelled the same mix of salt, fish, dry earth and wild thyme. There was also a faint scent of pink laurel in the air, which reminded me of honey and wee... Apart from the gentle swirl of the sea, the only thing we could hear was the chant of the million crickets who had been occupying this ancient land since the dawn of time. At any moment, I expected to see Poseidon emerging through the shallows with his trident or the odd _satyr_ in the hillsides... In such an eerie landscape and under such a strong sun, it was easy to succumb to the euphoric charm of the Greek Mythology and of Homer's legends... One day, I took a walk early morning in the mountain behind the resort. I wanted to find out by myself if all these tales were really true. I did find neither _Ulysses_ nor his friends, even under the guise of goats... I didn't find _Calypso_ either, but I found peace. I came back to our bungalow with hair raised upon my back due to the fear of invisible entities I was feeling without seeing. A young maid was cleaning our room. She was beautiful. She reminded me of the _caryatids_ I had seen at the _Acropolis_ : tall, austere and sad as a slave... When I mentioned this to my friend, he expressed his strong interest in her, "I will kiss her before the end of my stay..." Strangely, in life, sometimes one's vows become reality. In his case, Marcel had been right all along. He ambushed the girl one morning and revealed his love for her... Instead of letting him carry the torch, she allowed him to kiss her... "I have slept with her." He then told me one day. Although, she was at least five years older than him, Marcel was very strong and big for his age. I never knew if what he was telling me was true, but it made me dream that their love was real... At my age, I was still too young to consider such encounters with the housekeeping staff. This didn't prevent me from watching the beautiful curves of women though...

During the last remaining days of our stay, my mother and I had travelled to Istanbul on an overnight excursion. After a short cruise on the _Bosporus_ and an inevitable visit of the _Topkapi Palace_ museum, we ended up having dinner at a tourist trap with other Western Europeans... At the end of the meal, a veiled belly dancer with opulent bosoms began to cast her spell on all the male diners. One of them, a German fellow not able to contain his obvious attraction, had jumped on the dance floor with her. He probably had too many beers and he grabbed her veil while doing a ridiculously entertaining belly dance himself. In his dazed and confused mind, he must have dreamed he was in the company of _Scheherazade_ in _One Thousand and One Nights_. His wife had to drag him back to his table and to reality. In a snap, the hypnotised chap came back into the room, blushing after realising how much of fool he had made of himself. At the end of the show, the belly-dancing beauty came to our table and let an official photographer take an immemorial snapshot of these happy times. After putting a _Fez_ hat on my head, she stood behind me, put her hands on my shoulders, leaned forward and smiled... The man who shot the scene captured the sparkle in my eyes and her cheeky grin perfectly. Apart from a flash of light, the only other thing I could feel was the soft, warm and inviting cushions pressing onto the back of my neck. Just as the gift shop's reproductions of Ancient Greece plates depicting naked men in close proximity and the _Pan_ statue at the entrance of the resort, this Turkish night had been a real eye-opener... On our last day, the hotel had organised a sumptuous outdoor buffet. On this occasion, both my mother and I were dressed in white. A slow romantic instrumental called _Love Theme_ by Stelvio Cirpriani was playing. We joined the queue towards the barbeque, which was serving various cuts of meat. They had lamb skewers, half-roasted chicken and, more interestingly, whole spit-roasted pigs... No need to say that, after several trips back and forth to the pork-feast stall, I must have put on a few pounds that night.

Chapter XIV: La Cigale

By the time we came back to Nantes from Athens after transiting via Paris, it was late. On our way towards the city centre from the airport, the taxi driver kept on complaining about the latest tax increase initiated by our conservative government. He also ranted about the corrupt politicians such as Richard Nixon who had just resigned amidst the Watergate scandal. He was obviously a staunch leftist... Neither the foreign politics nor our own made any sense to me. The only thing I gathered was that, whichever side they were in, people seemed to complain about politicians on a constant basis. The taxi driver was getting on our nerves. My mother was obviously embarrassed because, to her, he was nothing but a working-class communist, which she loathed... I wanted to tell him to shut up, but, as it was a long way to our home on foot, I swallowed my pride and waited patiently for the journey to be over. Coming back from the bright and sunny Greece into a dark, cold, wet and dull environment full of depressing moaning losers like him was a drag.

"I see you live in the posh quarters... Don't forget my tip!" He said, before dropping us in a tactless fashion. When we finally arrived safely in our courtyard, it was chucking down with rain. Madame Garapin was already asleep and so were everyone else. We struggled with our luggage while climbing up the stairs to the fourth floor. By the time we reached our front door, we were exhausted and famished. We found our apartment empty of people, light and joy... Although I knew we were in a transition and better times were afoot, I was also aware of the dreadful passage in my young life I was about to get into. I had no hope to dwell anywhere soon. I was stepping onto the unstoppable conveyer belt of a sorrowful moments ahead. Before she did anything else, my mother switched on the light in the kitchen and, as the fridge was empty, she boiled some dry pasta. What a feast! I sarcastically thought.

The following day, my sisters came around to help with furniture packing, and a removal company arrived later during that week to collect our belongings and store them away temporarily until the move-in date to our new flat. In the meantime, we stayed in a dreary hotel a couple of blocks away from my old school... At least, the receptionist who showed us our room was polite. It was no luxury: two single beds, a washbasin and access to a shared bathroom in the corridor! Apart from toast and coffee in the morning, there was no room service at any other time of the day, no restaurant, no bar, nothing... If we needed to eat, we had to walk to La Cigale restaurant, which was just a few minutes' walk away. I suppose it would have been all right if I had been eating out with my parents... However, as, at the same time, my mum was also starting her new job in a furniture store opened until 10 pm, I was going to have to go there by myself. So, for the first few remaining days of my summer holiday, my mum gave me some money to pay for my food bills every morning before going to work. As I always kept a few slices of bread from breakfast, I had no intention to go out for lunch. Moreover, during the first few nights, I didn't tell anyone but I also refused to dine out on my own, and preferred to starve rather than facing a total embarrassment. As there was not even a television in the room, I voluntarily attempted to get myself into a semi-coma state in order to make time pass quickly. It didn't work. In fact, doing nothing made time go even slower... I became so depressed that I was a living dead. After finishing her duties, my mother came back in our room around eleven at night. She always tried to wake me up to check if I was ok. In response to her kindness, I always acted as if I was asleep despite being kept awake by my empty stomach... After a few days at such a slowly decaying rhythm, the time to attend to my dreaded new school came... To make things worse, my mum had bought me a cheap and nasty-looking fake fur coat from the supermarket. The poor lady had no clue about modern fashion. Moreover, it would have never occurred to her that kids' self-esteem dwelled in a fragile habitat, which clothing had the power to either build or demolish... People my age were very fickle when it came to style, and that horrendous synthetic wolf hide that someone had somehow sawn into a coat was crap! Normal people ought to purchase their clothes in department stores or shops, not from food merchants... To add insult to injury, she had also bought me an expensive light-brown leather attaché-case. Had she attempted to get me killed or worse, she could not have done any better! So, on the first Monday morning of September, after a fifteen-minute walk in the misty morning, I finally arrived in front of the steps leading to the huge wooden doors below the sign: Lycée Jules Verne. There were many other students who were also on their way in. Because of where my birthday fell in the year, I was almost a full year younger than anyone else in my league. As the college catered for pupils up to sixteen, and by that time, they were all barging in thick and fast, I felt like a grass leaf trodden on by giants. One or two of these monsters brushed past me and then turned back, laughing... After seconds in these walls, I already knew who was going to have me for breakfast... The main entrance hall was utterly chaotic. There were at least a couple of hundred kids trying to find someone to follow or to ask where their first assembly was going to be. I asked some official-looking man who begrudgingly pointed at a wall where instructions, according to him, were 'clearly displayed'. After several minutes of painstaking scrutiny of the dozens of pages with rules and regulations, I eventually set my eyes on an A4 sheet of paper with tiny writings, showing where the twenty classes were going to be held. I then wasted more previous minutes whilst struggling to locate the damn place... After yet another wild goose chase, I stumbled into one of my former schoolmates from _Le_ Chêne-d'Aron.

"Hey, Jean-Philippe, what are you doing here? I thought I was the only one getting into this mess..." I said, laughing at last.

I was pleased to see him. At least, there was somebody who knew me as who I really was, a cool kid from the Cours Cambronne rather than this daft nerd, dressed as a woolly mammoth ready for slaughter... We spent our first induction day meeting our new teachers. They were totally different from the ones I had in primary, less caring and personal, and far more detached to the point of being somewhat uninterested. As long as they were not going to shout at me, I couldn't care less. So, after surviving that first day, I walked back to my hotel feeling low and tired. I was frail because I had not had any dinner for three nights in a row. I then decided to face my fear of being ridiculed and walked to La Cigale. As it was still early, the restaurant was empty and that made me feel better. I pushed the door and came inside the art deco style brasserie. A waiter wearing an old-fashioned white apron looked at me inquisitively, "What is it you want?" After, I explained that I was on my own and that I had money in my pocket, he eventually let me sit at a small table at the back. Although I welcomed the fact of being as far as possible from the limelight, it also made me feel even more awkward. Nevertheless, I was so hungry that I quickly refocused my entire mind on the food. The menu was relatively simple, and I chose the chicken curry. I had not starters, no desserts, no fancy drinks, just this dull dish with a glass of tap water. When the food came, I knew just by looking at it that it was as blend as porridge. I tasted it and as it was edible, I ate... After just a few minutes at it, I felt suddenly satiated and depressed. I had only finished half of my dinner when I decided I had enough of this baby food and of this unwelcoming restaurant where the mere staring of the waiters was making me feel out of place. On my way to the hotel, which was just across the road, I felt the eyes of all people in the passing cars on me... Although, in essence, this ritual amounted to sheer child abuse, I came back, night after night for the same meager alms. It was such a cross to bear that I even made a dreadful dream inspired by this dire passage of my life: in the middle of the night, as I was fast asleep, my subconscious transposed myself as if I were effectively lying on the road outside of my hotel... As oncoming cars were flashing and honking, I stood-up and, as I reached for the safety of the sidewalk, I realised that I was stark naked... In an embarrassing moment of panic, I quickly looked for something to cover my modesty, but the only item I could find was a beer bottle cap. As it was too small, I struggled to hide my genitals in front of the people driving by. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling ashamed and mortified...

As Le Lycée Jules Verne was a boys-only college, it demanded a specific type of discipline... One of our teachers, the over-zealous Monsieur Barjot, had not only gladly accepted this responsibility, but had also added some of his own sick twists into the mix... Every now and then, he was administering a strange form of corporal punishment on anyone he considered to be a naughty child. On one of these occasions, he shouted at my friend Nicolas who had viciously kicked someone in the shin during a mere squabble.

"Mister Nicolas Berteau! You again... How many times will I have to tell you to stop behaving like a sheer moron? It seems you do not register when I speak to you... Never mind my friend, never mind... There are other ways to make people like you conform. Would you please join me at the stage?" Monsieur Barjot said with a strange and difficult-to-decipher expression that could have equally meant joy or pain...

Reluctantly, the culprit advanced towards the platform where the teacher had brought a chair. In the meantime, Barjot who was foraging for something in his drawer, said, "Just stand there for a minute, will you?" To everybody's surprise, the sadistic teacher suddenly pulled out a 20-inch bamboo stick... He then sat on the chair and simply said, "Come on Berteau... Bend over my lap, will you? You deserve ten today!"

To his dismay, Nicolas understood the man was not kidding... Hesitantly, he approached the clearly deranged teacher and laid over his lap as instructed... The resulting scene was utterly surreal. With his left hand, Barjot took a firm hold over his shoulders to keep him still, and proceeded to administer the punishment. As he was caning the boy, the man's eyes were bulging out in excitement, and he was biting his tong so ardently that its tip was sticking out of his mouth. Each whip made a horrible sound that reminded me of the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty movie with Marlon Brando as Fletcher and Trevor Howard as the dreaded Captain Bligh. Except here, it was for real and we were neither at sea nor in the 18th Century... Nevertheless, this was our lot. Luckily, not all teachers were like him. At the other end of the spectrum, the gentleman responsible to impart humanities was Monsieur Berthe. He was a pathologically timid bachelor in his late fifties with thick glasses, brylcreemed hair and a 1950's grey blouse. Soon after the very first minutes listening to him, we had realised he was more scared of us than we were of him. Sadly, once again, we, horrible kids, smelled blood and went for the kill... We started laughing and shouting, totally disrespecting his authority.

"Stop this chaotic noise, please!" He asked in a frail and unconvincing voice.

This gave us another opportunity to make a fool of him and test our boundaries. Not only did we resume our horrendous racket, but also some of us began pushing and shoving each other in a scene not falling short of a prison breakout. Despite this, the terrified teacher continued to write on the blackboard with a chalk just as if nothing wrong was happening. To add insult to injury, a crazy kid picked the sponge and started erasing simultaneously each and every word Monsieur Berthe was writing. Totally in denial, the poor man disregarded this latest attempt to make him mad, and, in order to counteract this direct attack on his authority, he began to write as fast as he could. Thus, a frantic race between the writer and the eraser took hold. Aroused by this surreal scene, a mischievous kid called Paul Dutertre shoved his Mac coat inside the front of his jumper, and started screaming as loud as he could like a pregnant woman in labor. The situation was so out of control that it had become too much even for the shy teacher... While the fake childbirth was reaching its climax and one of the kids, playing the part of the midwife, was pulling the raincoat out, Monsieur Berthe slowly but surely put his hat and scarf on, grabbed his umbrella and briefcase, and finally left the classroom without a word. This took us by surprise. Eventually, not knowing what we were supposed to do, we stopped our hullabaloo for a while. But, yet again, it was too good an opportunity to wreak havoc, and, after just a short moment, we resumed the strife. We were so loud, that, after ten minutes, the classroom door opened suddenly. It was the college principal himself! He was an energetic leader with a sporty outlook and he gained respect from his peers and pupils equally by giving heartfelt assembly speeches whilst looking normal... He asked us where our teacher was... Then, after we told him about what had just happened, he asked us to remain quiet until our next lesson, and that was that. Monsieur Berthe was not the only adult with 'special needs' at our school. Monsieur Charles, our math teacher was also 'different' in his own ways... First and foremost, he was extremely overweight and looked just like Oliver Hardy. Then, probably due to the scientific aspect of mathematics, he chose to wear a white lab coat, which he systematically donned each time upon arriving in the classroom. Somehow, he looked rather odd in the white outfit, which was obviously too tight and short for him. Although he appeared to be and sounded goofy because of a slight lisp, he was certainly not a pushover and we feared him. However, we literally got him back by shooting grains of rice at his bottom through an improvised blowpipe made of an empty pen casing every time he was writing an equation on the board. Perhaps due to the large layer of fat blubber between the impact and his nervous system, or simply because he knew he would lose this battle if he had picked a fight with us, he never said a word... We 'affectuously' nicknamed him Le Gros Lardof (Fat Lard)... Our French literature teacher, Monsieur Van Horn, was a different kettle of fish. Nobody messed with him. He was nasty as a rusty nail... Under the disguise of a longhaired romantic, this self-proclaimed intellectual enjoyed making the less-eloquent pupils amongst us feel like complete morons. He often asked us to write essays and made us read them aloud in front of the class to embarrass ourselves... Thus, even the toughest kids melted to the state of tiny babies when they entered Van Horn's classroom. He had the power to shrink us with words whilst squishing our minds with his razor-sharp criticism of our respective intellectual abilities. Strangely, as with Mr. Robert in my last year at primary, this tough cookie was somewhat fond of me. He kept on praising me and I managed to get some great marks throughout the year. I also liked him, and particularly enjoyed hearing him give my friends a hard time. Perhaps, he reminded me a little of my father, a gentle brute with a tender side between the knuckles... One day, one of my friends called Pierre Magot got the wrong end of the stick and it was his turn to be humiliated in front of his peers.

"Now, let me tell you how well you have done with your essay Mr. Magot... Well, Monsieur, I can only tell you that calling this load of rubbish an essay pains me... I have never witnessed in my twenty-three years of teaching anybody like you! Gosh, what am I supposed to do in order to de-magot you? Even an F is too good for you!" He said to our poor friend who, from this day onwards, acquired the reputation of being the stupidest amongst us. Although using the made-up word de-magoting was pretty harsh, it was also extremely funny for those like me who weren't called Magot...

Feeling humiliated was an inherent part of secondary education. Some people called it a rite of passage. I preferred to refer to it as the emergence of our very own nasty streak. I received my fair share of this malevolent treatment on my way out of school one day, when a bunch of older teens decided to pick on me. To be honest, I had been asking for it simply due to my mother's incredible fashion sassiness... The louts were sitting on the steps outside of the building's entrance when I came out with my friends at the end of our morning shift. I stuck out like a sore thumb with my wooly coat and leather briefcase.

"Hey! Hey! That's a really nice satchel my son..." One of the smirking kids told me nonchalantly.

I took his comment as it was meant to be, a death threat, and I started running like there was no tomorrow... Like a pack of wolves on the first day of the hunting season, they all sprung up out of their lair and caught-up with me in no time. The fellow who had addressed me in the first place grabbed my case and, before I had the chance to claim it back, threw it with force to one of his friends behind... As I was not the type to let anyone steel my property, I fought back and ran from pillar to post towards my elusive briefcase, which kept disappearing. The boys were passing the item to each other as if they were competing against me in a live rugby match. I kept running so fast after it that I almost managed to catch it a couple of times, missing it by a whisker... This gave me the urge to fight back even harder. These boys were lazy and, despite my small size, my fierce demeanour began to take a toll on all of them, except for their leader who eventually stopped the play when he grabbed my case and held it at bay above his head. As I was too short to reach it, he began to regain face and confidence, and let his guard down for an instant... At that particular moment, the predatory instinct in me pushed my body to jump up like a jaguar. Thus, I finally regained control of my property and forcefully removed it from his weakened arms. After this incident, neither he nor any of his friends ever played this game nor any other with me again. Although I had literally gained the upper hand and had therefore managed to humiliate them back in front of the whole school, they did not retaliate and left me and my friends alone, especially after witnessing an incident that happened a few days after our cockfight... Indeed, one evening after school, as I was leaving the building, one of my classmates came to me in what appeared to be a right state...

"Steve, there are two real nasty-looking guys asking specifically for you near the bike stand..." He said in an overexcited and scared tone.

I was wondering what this was all about until I came nearer to the scene and spotted a tall boy in a black leather jacket and his sidekick who were tranquilly sitting on meanly decorated mopeds. I immediately recognized who these two rockabillies were...

"Cyriaque Galmot and Eli Monnier! It has been a while..." I said, confidently.

All my friends and the other schoolboys who were around looked at each other in surprise. They eventually got more to mull over when Cyriaque said aloud, "So, I have heard through the grapevine that you have left the gang and are now a respectable little bourgeois... Well Stevie, we wish you well. Eli and I just wanted to pay our respect! Let us know if you ever need help. You know where to find us."

This was the last time I ever saw these two rascals. From this day onwards, I became the leader of my very own pack of wolves.

Chapter XV: My Very Own Penthouse

I never knew how she had done it, but my mother had managed to orchestrate the move to our new home meticulously and in a clockwork fashion. Literally, it happened in a jiffy... She told me to pack my suitcase one morning, and ten minutes later, we checked out from the dreary hotel and drove off to new pastures... I didn't look back. Although, I could have shed a tear or two for leaving my beloved Cours Cambronne park area, I was so bitter to have had to endure such a difficult transition between our two homes, my two schools and, more importantly, between childhood and adolescence, that I remained emotionless throughout the short journey. Despite my silence, this episode of my life had not left me unscathed. I took a final glance at people on the sidewalk as we were driving by and I recognized some of them... I saw the park warden walking in the direction of the betting house, Madame Garapin crossing the street on her way to the baker, and one of the neighbours of my friend Archie having a gentle stroll with his dog... For these people time seemed to have come to a standstill. They were moving in slow motion, doing the same things, and going to the same places repetitively, day after day... As I was finally turning this page in the book of my life, I saw the park with its wide-open gates welcoming the mums pushing their prams and small pre-school children who had all the time in their lives to enjoy a jolly good play. I felt jealous and cheated by destiny.

Although, it took us less than five minutes to arrive at our new destination, it felt like the drive had lasted as long as the ten years I had spent in our old apartment. My mum had kept the exact location of our new home close to her chest. She had never asked me to visit the flat whilst the decoration work was going on under the pretense of being too dirty. I was not even invited during the furniture delivery because I was at school... In truth, she had simply wanted to surprise me.

"This is our new neck of the wood..." She proudly said upon driving through the Boulevard Gabriel Guist'Hau, a beautiful tree-lined avenue with fancy mansions. We drove towards the end of the road and I started to wonder where on earth our new home was going to be when my mother slowed right down and turned into what appeared to be the entrance of an underground parking. She opened her left window, took a key out of her glove compartment and inserted it into a lock pad, which operated the electric roller shutter preventing the riffraff from entering our basement. I was gob smacked! Our parking spot was located on the third and last basement floor. As the building was brand new, we were amongst the first occupants and there were just a few cars. The further down we went the fewer occupied parking slots there were. By the time we reached our level, the entire space was empty. There was a leak somewhere and water was continuously dripping. The concrete columns reflected our car's lights like ghouls popping in and out of a lucid nightmare. We finally reached our spot: Number 307. My mum asked me to switch the parking light on. It was pitch black but the light switches were illuminated with an orange glare. As I walked towards the closest one, I smelled a strong whiff of fresh cement and dampness. I imagined that, at any moment, someone was going to jump at me with a long knife... We carried our suitcases through the car park and followed a long scary corridor that led to the staircase shaft. Luckily, there was a lift. My mother pressed the button and I watched the floor levels go down on the display to minus 3. We hopped inside the elevator and she pressed the last button, which was Number 7.

"We live on the top floor." She said.

I felt literally elevated by this shift. I was experiencing flow. When the door finally opened, we stepped outside and onto a plush marble floor corridor.

"This way." She said, pointing to the left.

She then opened a fancy but modern wooden door. I was amazed as I discovered that the place was already fully furnished. She had bought the furniture from the shop where she was working. It was neo-classic with a lot of wrought iron and dark-stained walnut. The layout was amazing. We came in through an entrance hall opening straight into a huge open-plan dining room with a twelve-seater banquet table and a large living area with Ligne Roset sofas, a white wooly carpet and a customised mock fireplace with a ten-foot studded copper face. There was also a beautiful space-age colour television standing on a Spanish pirate chest. But, the best was yet to come... There were some incredibly sleek aluminium-framed bay windows opening directly onto a terrace spanning the entire flat's length. My mother, who had an eye for interior design, had hired an architect to finish the decoration. Every details had been thoroughly thought through and executed. There was even a concealed storage wall opposite the dining table with push-latch opening doors covered with a beautiful fabric with psychedelic blue circle motives. So, when the cupboards and wardrobes were closed, this fascia looked like a feature wall. There was a fully equipped lab kitchen at the end of a long corridor with a rubbish disposal chute, which was a novelty, a wonderful bathroom, and two large bedrooms respectively opening onto the terrace and a balcony. Mine had a breathtaking view on the city's skyline, and my mum's on the back of the building where century-old pink horse-chestnut trees welcomed the onlookers with their bright and beautiful flowers. My mother had even furnished the terrace with plush outdoor furniture, a parasol, and had even asked the architect to build a gigantic planter with a Mediterranean look-and-feel, where she had planted some papyrus and other semi-aquatic pond's plants. It looked like our own corner of paradise on the seventh heaven. At last I got my own private bedroom, a bright space equipped with a red mahogany secretary desk, a stool chair, a king-size bed and a work table. It was perfect! I was so pleased that I hugged my mother, which was something I hadn't done in years... I was such a materialist! She then gave me the keys of our very own cellar on the first basement floor and told me to have a look, which I did. I only found out why she had sent me by myself when I opened the door... Amongst all the boxes and some old furniture from our old place, there was a brand new green racing bike. I couldn't believe my eyes. This was a dream... It had everything I wanted, six gears and a double crankset, just like my friend Anthony's. I was now fully equipped to lead the life of a head honcho. Accordingly, I started to spread the word at school that I was now living in a luxury pad on the top floor of the Athos Residence building. With my already-established reputation of belonging to a street gang and my new apparent wealth, nobody ever messed with me again. I was one of the school's 'Godfathers'... I said to my friends do this and they did it. Thus, one day, as a new boy called Yannick Lebon was starting mid-term at our school, I experimented with my very own nastiness... He was strange and crazy, and even sometimes annoying. As we were working on a common project in the Design & Technology department competing against the other years for the best-engineered contraption, Lebon was tasked to drill holes in several pieces of aluminium intended to be used as brackets. It was a dead-easy job as we had given him a template to position the drill bit exactly where it should be. Unfortunately, this idiot managed somehow to botch it and he ruined a good dozen of these metal plates, which we sadly had to throw away. To punish us for being careless, our DT teacher told us that, from now on, we were going to have to cut our own aluminium plates from a plain sheet, which was going to delay considerably the project. We were so mad that I ordered my mates to teach Lebon a good lesson... At the end of the class, we dared him to get inside a locker to see if he would fit. As a real idiot, he did not even hesitate for a second and gladly accepted this stupid challenge. Of course, as soon as he got in, we locked him up. We then heard him laugh, but after a while, he stopped and called us in an unsure voice, "Hey guys, that's funny... So, can I get out now?" The only response he got from us was our laughs as we all rushed off to our next lesson. We then entered Mr. Barjot's classroom, all looking at each other with a complicit smirk on our face...

"And what makes you look so happy today gentlemen? Is it the joy of attending yet another of my spellbinding lessons? Well, thank you, but no thank you! I don't need your happiness, I need your concentration. So, stop having this silly grin on your face at once, or I am going to have to wipe it off with the chalkboard sponge! Is that clear to everybody?" The mad teacher then looked at each of us to make sure we had all registered what he was saying, and in the process, he spotted the strange face that Magot was pulling...

"Mister Magot, despite my good advice, you still appear agitated... Is that something I said, which is bothering you?" He asked our 'ethical' friend who could not bear withholding the situation in the lockers room any longer.

"You gentlemen have done what?" An incredulous Barjot asked Magot to repeat himself.

"We have locked the new chap Lebon in one of the lockers near DT..."

Evidently, the teacher went berserk and he ran down to the principal's office with Magot, after telling the rest of us to stay put. As expected, as soon as they left, we started to mess around. Some of us began to throw at each other Magot's bag, which he had left behind... After playing pass-the-parcel for a while, they got bored and no other but our naughty friend Paul Dutertre decided to spice things up... We helped him by opening the classroom door and by quietly checking if there was anyone in the corridor. Then, after we gave him the green light, Dutertre threw Magot's bag over the banister and thus it fell a couple of floors down until we heard it crash badly onto the ground floor. We then returned inside our classroom swiftly. A few minutes later, the door opened and the principle, Barjot, Lebon, Magot and the remnants of his schoolbag re-appeared...

"What do you think you are doing?" Asked the bemused principal, "In my twenty years in education I have never seen such a thing! You are a disgrace to all the pupils in our college. I can no longer tolerate such disrespectful behavior. I have decided to suspend the entire class for a day in order to teach you a lesson. I hope your parents are going to do the right thing, which I suggest can only be severe punishment!"

Hence, we were all sent home.

"Success! We should do it again so we don't have to come again to this daft place..." I said upon leaving the college. On our way home, I was messing about with Duterte and another kid called jean Lanote when the latter told us something interesting, "Hey guys, I have heard from an older cousin of mine that, apparently, you can do some sort of gun powder by simply mixing weed killer and sugar..."

"Yeah... Sure Lanote! And your grandmother is called Marylyn Monroe while you are at it..." I said in disbelief.

"No, I promise it's true. All we need is to buy a sodium-chlorate based weed killer from any garden centre and mix it with the same amount of sugar and bang!"

Of course, this information had not fallen onto deaf ears. I went home that afternoon with a plan for the weekend. My mother, who had changed job and was now working as an interior lighting designer for a company that belonged to one of her relations, came home early that day. As soon as she hit the door, she poured herself a daiquiri drink and played In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry a few times in a row on her turntable. She asked me how my day had gone so far and, as I suspected she was eventually going to receive a letter like all the other parents from the principal about the incidents at school, I told her what had happened. However, I omitted to mention that I was the main troublemaker. Anyhow, even if I had been truthful, after two of her favourite cocktails, she would have let me get away with blue murder. The music annoyed me. It was far too happy for me! Without asking her, I changed the disk to something I found more appropriate for a person of her age to listen to: a few ballads by Elvis Presley... The velvet voice and sweet melodies surrounded our flat as if we were on a beach in Hawaii with the King of greasy hair himself. To thank me for my tending-to-the-music and waiting functions, she let me have a couple of candied chestnuts soaked in Cognac... These fancies were a gift from one of her admirers and were presented in individual miniature pint glasses with a tiny handle. With half of their content being 40% alcoholic, a couple of those were enough to send my 11-year-old mind through the clouds. Indeed, as Elvis was singing, You Can't Say No to Acapulco, I felt happily inebriated and I decided to go for more. Thus, she let me pour her a third drink and I guzzled down one more chestnut and its delicious brandied liquor.

The rest of the week went quickly and I woke up on Saturday morning determined to get hold of sodium chlorate. I knew of a shop nearby selling some gardening equipment and I was hoping they had some in stock. I asked my mother some cash under the pretense of buying a gift for one of my friends' birthday and told her I'd be out for the day. I had in mind to christen my new bike with a long ride... I packed a kilo of sugar 'borrowed' from our kitchen's cupboard and some matches. When I arrived at the shop, one of the young ladies at the till asked me what I was looking for suspiciously...

"My mum who is ill today has asked me to buy some weed killer for her petunias..." I said in my most angelic voice.

She fell for it and I found on one of the shelves in the garden maintenance section a tub with the label Chlorate of Sodium and the mention Keep Away from Children! Of course, at my age, this didn't apply to me and I bought it. Now that I was fully equipped for my field trip, I rode towards the outskirts of town heading for an area called Le Pont de la Verrière. It was a 15-mile journey and it took me three quarters of an hour to reach my destination. It was an idyllic natural environment with a 200-year-old viaduct and miles of secret woodland paths following the meandering waterway known as Le Gesvres. In the summer months, it was not uncommon to cross the path of poisonous adders, herons and kingfishers. As we were already in winter, it was cold and bleak. I parked my bike near one the bridge's pillars and walked towards the two-hundred-year-old disused river lock. There were also some ruins of what appeared to be a timeworn mill and a five-century old oak tree on a slopping meadow. This place exulted the reminiscent aura of an ancient past, which refused to die completely and reappeared from time to time in the shape of a raven or as the shadow of a ghost. My concern today was more down to earth. In fact, I was there to blow up some dirt. I hadn't walked very far before I decided to test my concoction. I started by mixing just a tablespoon of sodium chlorate with the same amount of sugar. I then dug up a small hole in the ground, counted up to three and threw a lit match into it. It took a couple of seconds for the particles to ignite but a chain reaction starting with a hissing sound led to the entire mass to turn into a large ball of fire. A foot-high flame spewed out of my improvised volcano for twenty seconds or so. I was bemused by how slow this powder was burning but also by its sheer power. It was surely not as explosive as gunpowder. However, it was far less volatile and more compact. I repeated the operation thrice in a row, keeping on adding more of the mix to create a larger furnace than the previous time. Eventually, after a while, I felt I was already mastering this art and I tried something that nobody in their right mind would have ever attempted... I filled an empty can I had found near an abandoned campfire with the powerful mix. I shoved the can standing upright in the mud near the shore of the stream, making sure that the water level remained below its lid. I then threw a lit match inside and quickly moved away for safety... The hissing sound began as normal and as the sheer volcanic mass was engulfed in flames, the heat was such that it melted the can and water started to pour in... I was expecting the fire to stop instantly. However, outstandingly though, I watched the mass continuing to burn for five more never-ending seconds underwater... This made a glowing and bubbling reaction clearly visible through the murky waters. This was extraordinary! How could such a gooey mess sustain the power of the elements for so long? Perhaps I was on my way to becoming an alchemist. I knew Merlin the Enchanter had lived for a while in the Armorican Massif, which was the mother of this land. I didn't expect he was going to be there with me before I attempted this experiment. Now, I knew. I thought.

After this event, I couldn't wait to tell my friends or, even better, to show them... When I arrived back at school on Monday, I invited a few of them to join me in a small square nearby after our last lesson. After showing them my new tricks, they liked it so much that I launched a craze and kids of all ages began to tend to my after-school pyrotechnic lessons... I kept on adding new twists to my craft, such as throwing fireworks into the mix or even pink or blue die in order to create magnificent plume effects. All went well until our silly friend Lebon got hold of the recipe and began to conduct his own experiments with some of his even stupider acquaintances. Once day, he even thanked me for bringing this discovery to his attention, "Thanks so much Stevie! Bart and I have spent the whole Saturday in my garden blowing up some homemade rockets powered with your powerful mix..." Despite telling him to remain very cautious with this, Lebon and his mate, who had not one once of common sense between them, kept on adding more and more powder into their silly and precarious contraptions. Unfortunately, as he had chosen Bart as an assistant, I felt the worst was yet to come... Indeed, this fellow was a dork in all senses of the term. As he didn't have any friend either, he had jumped on the opportunity to bond with the only other chap who matched his own awkward skills and who was evidently Lebon... On a Monday morning, after a long experimental weekend, Bart came to school and told us that his partner in crime was at the hospital after being treated for severe burns... Eventually, after recovering at home for another day or so, the chief moron returned to school one morning. I saw him surrounded by a herd of aficionados who were eager to hear his story.

"Hey, what happened to you?" I asked, despite knowing already the results of the simple equation: Moron + Explosive = Boom!

As expected, he told me in his words his own account of the same principle: "I still don't know what happened... I was in my garden with Bart and we were experimenting with the dosage of sodium chlorate versus the sugar content when I threw a lit match in one of my containers and waited for it to go off... As, after a few seconds, nothing had happened, I decided to add more sugar to the mix. I then looked inside to make sure the match was no longer burning when, as I was moving the can around, it rekindled the flame and the whole thing blew up in my face! Can you believe it?"

I looked at him in disbelief... All his eyebrows and most of his antiquated fringe had disappeared. He was left with some superficial burn marks on his nose, cheeks and forehead. I finally said with an obvious hint of sarcasm in my voice that unfortunately went amiss, "Sure, I believe it..."

Chapter XVI: The Devil in Me

I was listening to the radio in my bedroom and Hot Butter's Popcorn was playing... It sounded like a fly with ADHD. After this never-ending musical torture, the host played the score of the recently released movie The Exorcist. I couldn't make up my mind whether Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells sounded scary merely because it was the theme of this particular horror movie or due to the composer's dark inclination. Everybody had heard about this controversial motion picture. People had literally fainted watching it. When my sister Nickie had finally taken the plunge and had begrudgingly agreed to go to the cinema with a group of friends to see it, she ended up being so scared that she had moved to our apartment with her son afterwards and had stayed for well over a week! During all that time, she had been sleeping with my mother and I have had to share my bed with my young nephew... The occult was making a strong impression on our society. France was still a deeply catholic country back in the 70s and people who believed in God also believed in The Devil. The chap was usually depicted in our French folklore as a dark looking middle-aged man with a goatee. My mother had given me a couple of books that used to belong to her when she was a young convent school girl... They were a collection of old legends and folk tales from a forgotten past where diabolic entities played an inherent role in people's lives... One of them was a living gargoyle who flew above the village roofs in the 19th Century's Alsatian skies and stole babies in lieu of better snacks... Lucifer was also there. An old etching in one of books showed his cruel and piercing eyes, his pointy shoes, and his sword and tail... I feared him immensely but, in the same time, he intrigued me. We all had our dark sides and I only had to listen to the news to witness and acknowledge this fact... The famous terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal had just masterminded a grenade attack on the ever-so-popular Drugstore Publicis café in retaliation of the clampdown on a Palestinian liberation front's cell responsible for the hostage taking at the French embassy in The Hague. The explosion had been sudden and brutal. Several people including women and children, who were just enjoying a tranquil stroll in the streets of Paris at that time, had been either killed or maimed. Evidently, Satan was already at the scene when the journalists arrived... He was certainly no laughing matter, nor something to refute or deny. He was part of humanity in the same way as Jesus was. I knew it and I totally understood why people were scared. The Exorcist carried some weight that was neither in the images nor in the soundtrack. It was something inexpressible that I could just feel in my stomach... With his Italian blood, my dad's Mediterranean features would have in some way qualified him for being a Belzebuth lookalike. Hence, this was perhaps one of the reasons why I often approached him full of fear. As Glen Campbell's 1968 Wichita Lineman song said it so well, sometimes you needed people more than you wanted them... My father was standing and smoking a cigarette near his brand new Citroën CX, which had replaced the legendary DS when I next saw him. He reminded me of Yves Montand in Jean-Pierre Melville's film noir Le Cercle Rouge. This time, our encounter was fairly brief. These were times when the IRA was bombing Oxford Street and Harrods. Although these incidents had nothing to do with the short attention span my dad seemed to have when it came to being with me, somehow there was a change of tide in the universe's weather vane. Just before seeing him, I had managed despite my young age to see Midnight Cowboy at the arthouse cinema Le Concorde. By exploring the world of American drifters, who were so vividly portrayed in this film, I had embraced their lifestyle emotionally. I was floating like a cloud over the roofs of the city and the smoke of the chimneys was mingling so much with my silhouette that my own envelope was dissipating in the wind. This was, in essence, how I felt. We drove for a while and my dad broke the silence by putting the news on the radio. Some paleontologists had discovered the remains of an Australopithecus hominid species. They had called her Lucy. This had sent my mind into orbit... Was it short for Lucifer? Alternatively, could that really have been Eve? I wondered. He took me to his company's warehouse on his way to his new home. He proudly showed me his stock of floppy disks. These so-called diskettes commercialized by IBM were able to store up to 512 bytes of data. Electronic filing was about to revolutionise the way people kept and maintained intellectual property. My dad was smart enough to have foreseen this drastic societal change. He was riding the tsunami wave of information technology. As money was flowing in nicely, he had purchased a large country retreat near his business where he lived with his new wife, who was none other than his former secretary. Upon arriving, my heart felt like the tune I had just heard in the car on our way to his home.... It was a song by Bread called Aubrey and it was beautiful and sad. These were pains that never went and would never go away. When the vase was broken down, no matter how much glue you put on the smashed up pieces, it would never look like new again. His house was on the grounds of an abandoned chapel. Though, it didn't feel holy. It was a group of several outbuildings, which had been rearranged and restored as one dwelling. There was a quiet and austere feel about it. He gave me the grand tour. As all the ground floor rooms were adjoining in-line, a small kid could have travelled on a trike from one end to the other without stopping... I was particularly impressed by the cellar where my father kept hundreds of precious bottles of wine and spirits. After dropping my bag in one of the bedrooms upstairs, we returned to the living room where he proudly showed off his top of the range Japanese Sansui stereo system. He then played a bizarre and eclectic cocktail of Neil Diamond albums and classical pieces such as Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. As we were not supposed to speak while we were listening to his music, we sat in his blue velvet sofas, awkwardly looking at each other in the eye, not really knowing how to react. Extraordinarily, he showed us the way by nodding his head to the melody. It was odd... As I refused to mimic his body language, he abruptly switched the stereo off before the end of the album and offered me a non-alcoholic aperitif. I drunk my Coca-Cola quietly. There was nothing to add to the silence. As he had missed my last birthday, he offered me a nice present. I got very excited when I distinguished the shape of a riffle beneath the packaging. Indeed, my old man had bought me a proper competition air rifle with a 50-metre range! I wouldn't kill anyone but could have a good go at it... I thought, while opening my present. His wife was a dreadful cook. We ate without saying any other word than meaningless pleasantries such as it is delicious thank you or may I have some salt. After dinner, we sat again in the settee for one last go at breathing the same space. As expected, after switching the TV on, he chose the channel without asking anyone's preference or advice. He then got really offended while watching the latest advertising of the Obao bubble bath brand, which portrayed a beautiful naked woman relaxing a bit too much in her tub... It was as steamy a commercial as it could get. This libertine vibe omnipresent in the French mid-70s media scene used to clash with my dad's ultra-catholic upbringing. "This is pornography!" He shouted before turning the TV off and sending all of us to bed at once as if we had all something to do with this incident. In truth, it could have probably been him who had been caught at committing the sin of indulging in an imaginary adultery... None of us present in the room needed to be Freud to have known this. Somehow, the following day was very similar. Neither of us ever mentioned anything important or meaningful to each other. Thus, another day and night followed and the weekend was over in a flash. On our way back to Nantes, I couldn't wait to try my rifle on the ravens on the rooftops across the street opposite our flat. When the car stopped outside of my building, we said goodbye and parted company like men did, without tears or any other nonsensical emotions that my father deemed to be reserved for women only. After greeting my mother with a quick Hi, I went straight into my bedroom and spent the rest of the evening targeting innocent birds with my gun. Since I didn't manage to kill any, I switched target and began to aim towards the top of a telephone booth. As I was shooting from the 7th floor, the gravity helped the pellet reach maximum velocity. Accordingly, I heard a huge noise and I saw a terrified man coming out of the cubicle with his hands on his head. As he started to look upwards in my direction, I crouched down and hid like a nasty coward... Afterwards, feeling satisfied with my cruel output for the day, I retired to the safety of my bedroom and switched the radio on. I then tuned to the France Musique channel, which was broadcasting a program called Jazz Night... I laid in bed and started watching the ceiling while listening to Yusef Lateef's Like It Is. It was an atmospheric piece of blues with strong urban connections and suicide vibe... I let my mind wander freely and I started to remember a few scenes from my earlier life when I was still in my family's old apartment near the park. I re-entered my younger body through the magic of my thoughts, and I let my current mind re-absorb these memorized emotions... I was crying inside me but had no real tears to cry. I was upset about something that I was not able to pin down. I was simply furious about life. As painful as it could be, I forced myself to relive again these dark moments. It was so real that I vividly felt the rage boiling over in my arteries and spewing out in a volcanic eruption as I destroyed the expensive collection of exotic butterflies my father had offered me for one of the countless Christmases that we had not spent together. The fury had left me in tatters amongst the destroyed display boxes and pieces of torn wings. Upon revisiting this dreadful thought, I briefly came back into the room for a few seconds of respite. As I was feeling that the pain was slowly lingering out of me, I decided that it was not enough. I wanted more... Thus, I then saw myself going down the stairs in a sequential memory-lane scene. Eventually, I ended up in the park at an early time of the day when none of my friends was there... I was playing with sticks and stones like a lonely hobo when my eye caught something moving beneath the bushes. It was a bird! A baby bird was hatching before my eyes. He had just broken his shell and was looking for his mum. Unfortunately, as his nest had fallen down from a tall tree, she was nowhere to be seen. I knew that, without her, he was doomed... I felt connected with him. Somehow, I had also fallen from the peak of life when my parents' marriage had broken down. Just like this fragile animal, I had landed on hard grounds at times when neither my mother nor I were able to help me fly. I have had to receive the full blow of the changing winds of life before I ever had wings. Though, I did not wish anyone nor anything to have to go through the same ordeal as mine. Furthermore, as I was no bird myself, I had no means to help him survive. Through the snide process of autosuggestion, I eventually managed to convince my conscience to end the hatchling's sufferance. I then found a large rock and, as I brandished this deadly weapon above my head, I felt, yet again, an influx of devilish rage burning in my veins. I squashed the baby bird to a pulp. Culpability caught up with me and I began to cry dry tears. This was worse than sadness. This entailed deep psychological self-induced scarring. I was furious with myself but felt even madder at my parents, my destiny, my life, and even God... The sad truth was that I had murdered an innocent baby bird and had enjoyed doing it. As a Christian, I remembered The Ten Commandments and knew that, by breaking one of them, I was as doomed! Thou Shall Not Kill... Which one of the Ten Commandments is it that I am going to break next? I asked myself. This awfully exciting thought brought me back into the room. However, I was not finished with my reveries... I dug deep into my memories one more time in order to unveil yet another black bag filled with dark psyche matter. This time, I was remembering a weird encounter that my friends and I had experienced while playing in the badlands... We were throwing firecrackers in the rubble when we heard a strange noise. We looked and found a man wearing a workman's cap standing on his own in the middle of nowhere. He was shamelessly pleasuring himself in broad daylight!

"Have you ever seen that?" He asked us as if he were merely inquiring about something banal such as asking someone the time or the directions to a shop downtown...

Jesus, L'Artichaud and I looked at each other for peer support and we did not say a word.

The weirdo did not say anything else either. He simply finished his business and went back to work for another day in paradise.

I then ended my daydreaming session by shifting my mental scrutiny towards brighter pictures... The beautiful playmates featured in the glossy Playboy magazines or its French equivalent Lui had always sent my mind into a frenzy... Merely thinking of them felt as if my whole body and soul were attracted to these 'creatures' like a magnet to a giant piece of steel... So much so that, without even knowing it, I was just about to experience for the first time in my life this 'electrical impulse' that our teaching assistant had so realistically described during our train journey to Rocamadour...

Ten minutes later, a news bulletin brought me back to reality and the present moment...

The crude oil price had almost tripled in the last twelve months, inflation was going at an annual rate of 16.8%, and unemployment was rising exponentially...

Then, the radio played something more cheerful... Thanks God (or the Devil for that matter) for the latest Supertramp album Crime of the Century! I thought before making my next move.

