The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  Agde is a town on the Herault river about a mile inland from the Mediterranean, to the south-west of the Etang de Thau. It is sometimes known as ‘The Black Pearl of the Mediterranean’ because of the dark colour of the volcanic rock used in many of its buildings. In one of the town’s winding, narrow streets is a garage full of English books. They are all for sale, belonging to a former diplomat, or so I am told by Gerald, a member of Agde’s ex-pat community, who has tipped me off. Gerald has also hinted at the man’s mysterious past.

  After I rendezvous with Gerald in Agde, he takes me to a small house where I am introduced to an elegant man in his eighties called John. Before talking business, I am invited to sit in the kitchen where Gerald is instructed to serve us all a glass of chilled red wine. It is a good antidote to the heat of an Agde summer. John is proud of, and keen to share, his recent discovery of keeping red wine in the fridge. He seems on friendly terms with Gerald who is enjoying his drink. They both enjoy each other’s company.

  Too frail to accompany me to the garage, John leaves me alone to gauge his library, which consists, in the main, of the crime, thriller and spy genres. At a rough count, there are more than a thousand.

  I return to the kitchen where he is more than happy to accept an offer of 3000 francs. ‘Is that too much?’ he asks. I find myself shaking my head. ‘No. No. It’s fair.’ What’s happening to my negotiating skills? Am I being hypnotised by a diplomat’s charm?

  Gerald kindly helps me load this massive library of paperbacks into the Renault 5. It takes an age. John is amazed when we fit all the books in. Some spill over the gear stick and into the drivers’ footwell. Among the books is a sprinkling of classics, some being novels by Dickens whom, I am informed by John, the Russians revered. While based in Moscow, John learned that the Russians considered Charles Dickens to be a chronicler of the evils of capitalism. John is ready to reminisce further but I need to be making tracks.

  Driving back to Montpellier I’m feeling good. Surrounded by so many books, it reminds me of the Ales’ haul; a sea of Deightons and Le Carres rising up from the seats to obscure the view out of the back window. I find it difficult to focus. Poetry can be a dangerous thing too, it’s distracting me from the business of driving. Out of the corner of my eye, I can make out early editions of Auden and T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets in pamphlet form. At the traffic lights, a quick rummage turns up The Poetics of Rilke, an early translation. I catch the bemused expressions on the faces of nearby motorists.

  Fighting the urge to look further, I arrive home safely. After an hour of heavy labour, the books form a jumbled pile on the sitting room floor. I love the business of rooting through them; looking out for good reads (a subjective choice, obviously) and the rarities to be sold for a handsome profit.

  Catching the eye is The Fantastiks, W. S. Scott’s selection of writers (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan) of metaphysical verse. Highlighted is the poem: ‘To his Mistris going to bed’.

  ‘Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defie;

  Until I labour, I in labour lie.

  The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,

  Is tir’d with standing, though he never fight.

  Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glittering,

  But a far fairer world encompassing.

  Unpin that spangled breast-plate that you wear,

  That th’ eyes of busie fooless may be stopt there.’

  It is a guilt-tinged pleasure to go through someone’s collection of books; a kind of invasion of privacy. There are dedications to, and from, wives and lovers and friends. School prizes for promising compositions. Going by the books’ contents and inscriptions within, a person’s life and their interests can be loosely pieced together.

  John’s copy of The Scottish Songbook was presented to him at Harrow. There are references in other books to time spent in Cambridge as a student. His profile wouldn’t be out of place in the milieu of Kim Philby et al. Is this why Gerald had talked of spooks?

  Pink Floyd at Domaine De Grammont, Montpellier, August 1994

  We are on the outskirts of a park at dusk on the eastern side of Montpellier. Pink Floyd will be taking to the stage in about an hour. The crowd is making its way to the entrance of an open-air leisure centre.

  Mum has come along to give moral support. Mixing with the ticket touts, we are attempting to shift ten copies of a book on Pink Floyd. A Penguin rep. has palmed off them on me as sure sellers, exploiting my enthusiasm for the band.

  The books, published to coincide with the group’s The Division Bell Tour, have failed to sell in my shop; and the concert-goers are showing a singular lack of interest in them despite of my best efforts at impersonating a cockney wide boy. We slash our prices as my desperation shows but this seems to repel any potential buyers. The English touts aren’t having any more luck. The consensus among them is that the French find their activities an alien concept, that of fly by night transactions.

  It’s a relief to give up upon hearing the strains of ‘Astronomy Domine’ that signal the concert’s start. ‘Lime and limpid green, a second scene. A fight between the blue you once knew. Floating down, the sound resounds…’

  Going to our car, I make out the tune ‘Money’ from The Dark Side of the Moon, which was one the first albums I bought. The irony is not lost on me.

  Teddington Lock, 1974

  It writhes in agony and I let it take the line out towards the pillar in the middle of the river. It disappears from sight. Nobody would have known that beneath that placid surface a creature is swimming in great pain. We have been unable to extricate the hook from its throat.

  Eddy calls for its execution. I agree, reeling in the eel. I have Eddy’s French flick knife at the ready. The sun is shining, but the blade doesn’t glisten. Eddy wedges the eel tight against a rock with his trainer. Then I take the knife and without hesitation shove the blade into the eel’s gill opening. The flesh is soft and cuts easily. But then the knife meets more resistance. By vigorously sawing, the eel’s throat is sliced apart. My hand slips off the knife’s handle, which remains projecting out from the eel. The rock turns crimson. Eddy watches on in morbid curiosity as I pull the knife free. The eel is still now. The wind has dropped. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Eddy. We take it to show Mike.

  Out it flops with a heavy thud. The head of an eel bearing prominent blood orange eyes with coal black pupils. Rigor mortis has set in, jamming shut the beak-like mouth. The body of the eel is slow to emerge but its hugeness is quickly apparent. The stratification of colour became more distinct towards its tail; a greenish brown top which contrasts with an anaemic yellow underbelly.

  We think the creature alien; an atavistic vision sliding out from a bag before our very eyes. Impeding a smooth exit are the eel’s pectoral fins which catch around the edges of the bag. Then it is fully exposed, more than three feet in length. The thickest part of its girth is the size of a man’s clenched fist.

  Eddy is irritated to see me with a book in hand. It’s the Observer’s Book of Coarse Fishing. I soon find the eel in question. The common eel (Anguilla anguilla), but ours is uncommonly large.

  Years later, I will buy other editions in considerably better condition. My edition as a boy would have tempted few buyers: Wheat, Peter. Illustrated by East, Baz. Frederick Warne. 1977. Observer book no. 59. 8 colour plates, 18 b/w photos. Damp marks to bottom edge of boards and badly torn wrapper missing pieces. Muddy fingerprints on most pages.

  * The Observer books are collectible, especially those with high numbers. I recently sold the Observer’s Book on Paris (1st Edition 1982, Book is in v. good con., no inscriptions, marks or tears. Front and rear boards are bright and white and corners are sharp and square, spine is unfaded) for £70.

  Top deck 281, Twickenham Green, 1978

  From the top deck of the bus, I see people, with beer-induced hunger, congregating outside gaudily lit take-aways. Head against glass, I catch sight of my features coarsened somehow by the sombre reflection
of them. I had wanted to discuss cosmetic surgery with my doctor but I chickened out when I saw that his nose was bigger than mine. But is my mug more ugly/interesting than ugly/plain? A passage in the The Catcher in the Rye draws a distinction between boys who are classically good looking and boys who are attractive in an interesting way. The book’s protagonist Holden Caulfield gets me thinking. Could I be ugly in an interesting way? I am almost the same age as Holden. My enthusiasm for the book rubs off on Eddy. We go into a bookshop to locate a copy. It’s equivalent to six Double Decker chocolate bars (complete with the accompanying Willie Rushton impressions) but Eddy buys it nonetheless. I recall the awe felt by my teenage self for how certain writers render experience into believable worlds.

  Pipe dreaming in Nîmes 1991

  Living off the proceeds from some good sales (including the Virginia Woolf), I am killing time with Marmite. We meet in the bar at the Youth Hostel. Being English and six foot five, Marmite stands out. A student at l’Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, Marmite is in between lodgings. And I am, in a sense, in between books.

  We drink on average two bottles of rosé a day when we’re not high on dope. Marmite feels this is good preparation for his work as an artist. Attendance at the art school is not compulsory so we are both able to while away our afternoons amid the marble sculptures in the Jardin de la Fontaine. Marmite has an appetite for Byron and reflecting on matters of a philosophical nature, while I have a natural tendency to daydream. Marmite is also heavily into Sartre. (I doubt you could ever say that the other way round. Once, being overtaken on the M42 by a van in the shape of giant Marmite jar, the existential gloom of being stuck on a motorway lifts suddenly.) Lounging with lizards, we observe the tourists making their way up the hill on a stone stairway to the Tour Magne. Built by Augustus in 15 BC, the Tour Magne was originally part of the ramparts encircling the city. Bathed in light at night, this ancient block of stone takes on a magical appearance. It overlooks Nîmes where there is a remarkably intact amphitheatre. These days it is the bulls of the Camargue, rather than gladiators, who face slaughter inside it. Behind a large ornate gate, the tranquil confines of the gardens are, of course, closeted from the real world. Elderly locals sit and play cards. We admire such lethargy and take our cue from them. Marmite and I rarely reach the Tour Magne; our half-hearted ascents taking us no further than a small pond fed by a tiny waterfall. At the pool’s edge is a covering of lightly splashed grass upon which we sit, and peer in.

  ‘I always thought of you as being into pond life,’ Marmite says. Red worms wriggle below surface-skating insects. And there are tadpoles, those black fleshy commas, that make me remember meat string dangled into the class aquarium at primary school for them to feast upon. Mason Lilly used to delight us by fishing them out to eat. He’d trained on worms picked from the school’s sports field.

  A small girl in a red dress distracts me from my reverie. In approaching the pool, she spots an inert tadpole stranded on the grassy verge. ‘Il est mort,’ she declares. But after dropping the tadpole in the water, she excitedly announces its resurrection. ‘Il est vivant.’ Her father smiles.

  On most days in the gardens, we rarely make it as far as the pond. For we are becoming pétanque aficionados. Nicely stoned, we sit and watch the games that are played out in place Pablo Picasso. Pétanque is a form of boules where the aim (no pun intended) is, while standing with the feet together in a small circle, to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball, red in colour, called a cochonnet (jack). Other objects, for more impromptu games, are also used such as car keys.

  They play every day after lunch upon a triangular patch of chalky ground which is Nîmes’ designated boulodrome. Sturdy sweet chestnut branches provide shade, increasingly so, as the weeks pass, with the development of the trees’ leaves and glove-like fruits. Place Picasso’s elite band of players comprise the bellyman and three others, all of whom we label as potential Mr Men characters for yet more books by Roger Hargreaves.

  Scarcely visible below a black beret are telltale strands of whitening hair. His mouth, in contrast, is tenderly defined, resembling a child’s, but it isn’t really his face that captures our attention. To us, he is the ‘bellyman’. For he has a fine big belly which means that his back is straighter that the others when he crouches to throw. The cockiness of his spirit is familiar and pleasing to the spectators who habitually line both sides of his corridor of play. Visiting the Jardin de la Fontaine for the first time, even we, as novice spectators, cannot fail to see that the bellyman is the most accomplished of players. His prize possession is that of an easy swinging left arm that delivers a boule with enviable consistency.

  For a man in his forties the ‘wigman’ is slim and agile, but the wig dupes few; its jet-blackness clashing with its wearer’s anaemic complexion. The wigman specialises in knocking his adversary’s boules to a safe non-point scoring distance from the jack. He also has a penchant for directing the jack towards the trunks of trees and their surrounding roots, thereby diluting the game’s skill factor. Above the trees’ knobbly bases, the bark has patches coloured white by the esplanade’s dust and earth. We derive a simple pleasure from watching the dust lift into the limpid air as a result of a boule’s emphatic descent. The bellyman copes with any sort of terrain; little troubling the lucid swing of his muscular arm. It has an air of roughness about it, a naturalness that is raw and unpretentious. There is also his laugh, a deep-throated explosion of goodwill. And accompanying cries of merde and putain, expletives rarely prompted by self-error. More likely a partner has strayed with a boule.

  Rue Dorée is one of Nîmes’ quieter streets that seems permanently in shadow. Halfway along it is a small English centre where a middle-aged American woman sells teaching materials and some fiction. I buy a Penguin copy of The Red and the Black by Stendhal and become unhealthily obsessed by its central character, Julien Sorel, who has a young man’s ambition to become successful in the aristocratic society of 1830s France. Julien’s change of appearance, alternating between the uniform of the army and the church, between the red and the black, is symbolic of the conflict in his personality between truthfulness and pretence. It’s probably due to a diet of cannabis, wine and almond croissants, but reading the book gives rise to some pretty deluded ideas. A recurring one is to join the Foreign Legion. I don’t even need to run off to do it because there is an Infantry Regiment based in Nîmes. Marmite is sceptical and says he can’t see me in the uniform. He is soon sharing a studio flat with another ‘artist’ at the school. I decline an offer to flat share since I like the sense of impermanence that the hostel gives me; an illusion of unplanned adventure. It also provides a good cheap meal in the evening. We still meet regularly in the gardens. Marmite starts to talk of art instead of philosophy. His fellow students’ work is too abstract for my taste but I keep a diplomatic silence. There is endless talk about Pierre’s tank sculptures that are exciting the lecturers. I am invited to parties where Marmite and I are something of a novelty. Marmite’s promiscuous nature (both social and sexual) is given free reign. I don’t share his success with the girls, although Sandrine and her friends are tolerant of my tentative efforts to communicate in French. When my timidity isn’t taken for rudeness, I enjoy the evenings spent at the Salon Vert. The students soon allow me to park the Princess in the grounds of the art school; the caretaker doesn’t seem to mind. Marmite and I go for occasional trips to the sea, taking water with us for when the car inevitably overheats. These trips are meant to be hangover cures. I blame Marmite for his fixation with Byron.

  ‘Man, being reasonable, must get drunk,

  the best of life is but intoxication:

  Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk,

  The hopes of all men, and every nation;

  Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

  Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion.’

  I walk alongside the canals populated by swans and ducks. Swi
mming to avoid blooms of algae, these balls of living thread give purpose to the birds’ movements. They make me think about my current lack of direction. It is weeks since I have been book hunting. Marmite has an idea. To put up an ad – ‘We buy English books/On achete livres en anglais’ – in the Le Sémaphore cinema where English films are regularly shown en version originale. There is no immediate response but the initiative serves to assuage the guilt arising from a Protestant work ethic that lingers despite attempts to kill it off.

  Minutes before arriving at the boulodrome, I hear the collective hum of conversations punctuated by the clink of pastis-filled glasses. Marmite is already in position, spliff in hand, doing a convincing impression of Withnail. He points out the ‘young pretender’. Too young as yet to convincingly pretend, his skills might one day mount a credible challenge to the bellyman. He already has the measure of the wigman who resorts to his chief spoiling tactic by putting the jack in the vicinity of the trees. This does not unsettle the young pretender now he has hit form. But the young pretender lacks consistency and Marmite questions his temperament. A silver ring in his left ear glints in the sun, catching the eye as does the young man’s easiness of carriage and gesture. Endowed with charisma, he has a cigarette perpetually on the go. It releases into the fresh but warming days of April, plumes of pungent Gitane smoke.

  On most days the ‘flashman’ is the fourth member. On late Tuesdays and even later Thursdays, however, a thin man, with a gentle arm action, participates by default, stepping into the bellyman’s illustrious corridor of play. There is a price to pay for his flashiness, namely a job, one requiring his attendance elsewhere. It enables him to arrive at place Picasso in a Porsche, out from which he swaggers, clad in Armani. When present at the boulodrome, he lacks nothing in dedication. His costly garb captures the dirt and dust when he curls himself up into a human ball. A rapid upright movement then brings about the release of the boule. His skills, though considerable, are not given sufficient time to be honed. Before departing for work the ‘flashman’ gives the boules a thorough clean before attending to his own appearance. He keeps a tin of brown shoe polish in the boot of the Porsche.