Jean Baptiste is many things – a talented chef and a fine builder, and a keen student of English – but he is disorganised. He works hard, six days a week, long hours a day, and yet barely, in an expensive country and with all the tithes and charges made on him by a bloated government, manages to make enough money to survive. It’s a dilemma so common as to be almost tradition among self-employed small French commerçants. Like the English migrants who come out to try their luck, they are constantly broke or on the brink of bankruptcy.
Late last Wednesday evening, as the three of them were nearing the end of their bottle of thick and very strong pineau, it became clear that Jean Baptiste was on the brink not only of bankruptcy but of jail. The men from répression de fraude, a.k.a. the tax inspectors, were on to him. They were coming on the following Wednesday to inspect his paperwork, the same Wednesday that this story begins.
‘Mais le problème est,’ he said, shrugging his broad builder’s shoulders, staring philosophically at the empty pineau glass in his brown builder’s hands. They were perched, the three of them, around the large kitchen table; the mended French doors to the terrace pushed wide open, and the soft breeze and the sound of crickets filling the warm evening air. ‘My big problem,’ he continued, ‘it is…que je n’en ai pas.’
‘Tu n’en as pas?’ repeated Maude incredulously. ‘No paperwork at all?’ She frowned at him. He looked green, she thought, beneath the golden brown skin. He looked exhausted. Terrible. ‘Mais dis donc, Jean Baptiste. Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?’
‘Je ne sais pas,’ he said simply. He shrugged again. He was out of ideas. Out of even trying to have any.
A silence stretched before them. Maude and Horatio glanced at one other, already nervous at what the other might be thinking. They scowled at each other. Shook their heads. Then Horatio stretched across the large kitchen table and carefully refilled Jean Baptiste’s glass.
Jean Baptiste looked at it, slugged it back in one, stood up, bumping his head on the kitchen extractor fan behind him as he did so. ‘En tous cas – I am too boring for tonight,’ he said, rubbing his head. ‘Je m’en vais. C’est la vie, eh?’ He smiled at them both, but it was clear the smile was a strain.
He was on his way out, at the front door and casting a casual, professional eye over a small splinter in the door frame when Maude and Horatio broke. Simultaneously.
‘Jean Baptiste. Wait!’ they cried. Jean Baptiste turned. ‘When did you say he was coming, this répression bastard?’ demanded Horatio. ‘How long have you got?’
‘…Because the thing is,’ said Maude, ‘…C’est possible qu’on peut t’aider, Jean Baptiste…I think we may be able to help.’
Over the weekend, and greatly against their better judgement (if not their better nature), Maude and Horatio knocked up a cargo-load of receipts for Jean Baptiste, and also, while they were at it, various other forms that were missing from his répression-pleasing portfolio. Combined, the Haunts’ illegal paperwork would place Jean Baptiste Mersaud squarely back on the right side of the law. Which place, considering how hard he works and how much the Monsieur from répression gets anyway, is exactly where the Haunts – and Jean Baptiste – believe he belongs.
So. Now the job is almost done. Their work only waits to be delivered. Jean Baptiste has of course been sworn to secrecy; Maude and Horatio have of course refused to accept any payment for their work. And since they are both intelligent, educated people, who believe a moral code is something to be worked out by an individual, not by an avaricious government, or by any government, their major dilemma this morning, as ever in a modern family, is not one of ethics but of time. Tiffany and Superman, the Haunts’ beautiful, matching children – round-eyed, round-faced both, with untidy mops of light brown hair and noses freckled by the sun – are impatient to leave for the beach. They want to have a go at catching the jellyfish before lunch.
However:
it is already ten o’clock.
the best beach for jellyfish is a forty-five-minute drive from the house.
the Rwandans hiding out in Nuneaton need their papers dispatched from the FedEx desk in St Clara, eighteen kilometres away, by noon.
Jean Baptiste Mersaud, who also needs his papers this morning, lives a kilometre or so in the opposite direction.
It seems obvious to most people concerned that, rather than hanging about in their parents’ workplace whining about the delay, Tiffany and Superman should try to help out.
‘Have you finished the stuff for Jean Baptiste?’ Tiffany inquires. ‘Is it all ready for him?’
Mr and Mrs Haunt don’t reply immediately. In fact, though she’s standing directly behind them, and in a very small room with a very low ceiling, they don’t even notice she has spoken. So intense is their concentration they may not even have noticed she’s in the room. They’re upstairs, working side by side at one of IKEA’s cheapest kitchen tables, in the room they call the COOP (Centre of Operations), which was meant to have been the new baby’s bedroom, except Mr and Mrs Haunt haven’t got around to having the new baby. They’re beavering away on their desktops like the pair of computer whizzos they are, utterly deaf to the world.
‘MUUUMMMMMM!’ yells Superman, so loud it gusts the papers off their table. They don’t respond. Absently, they hold the papers down, and continue working. ‘MUUUMMMMMM! TIFFIE ASKED YOU –’
‘Forget it, Superman,’ Tiffany says calmly. ‘This is Jean Baptiste’s stuff, I’m sure of it.’ From the corner of the messy little room, between light box and the new laminating machine, she picks up a wedge of papers with a yellow Post-It on top, labelled ‘J. B. MERSAUD’S STUFF’. She holds it in front of her father so it rubs slightly against the end of his nose.
‘Dad? Is this it?’
‘Yup,’ Horatio says, swatting it away. ‘Thanks, baby. Can you and Superman drop it off? You know where he lives?’
‘Sort of,’ Tiffany says.
‘I know,’ Superman says. ‘But first I need somebody to help with my puncture. Tiffie, will you help me?’
‘He’s on the road to Saujon,’ Horatio explains, blowing a molecule of dust off his 36-bit flat scanner, reaching for an eyeglass, which he thinks has slipped somewhere behind the machine. ‘Head south. It’s a bungalow. Not quite finished. More like a building site. You can’t miss it…Anyway, you’ll know it when you see it, I’m sure.’
At this exchange Maude is lulled from her highly focused work-trance. ‘Heck,’ she exclaims. (Maude always calls Horatio ‘Heck’. No one remembers why.) ‘Heck, for heaven’s sake, we’ve talked about this. I don’t think it’s right or fair or appropriate that our beautiful, innocent children…’ She tails off, unwilling to elucidate for fear of Tiffie understanding more than she ought. She shoots a meaningful scowl at her husband, who isn’t looking. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’ve talked about this. It’s out of the question. The children cannot be dragged into all this…any more than they are already. It’s wrong.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Horatio asks, all innocence.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says brightly. ‘Anything wrong, Tiff?’
‘Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Tiff, perhaps just a little too quickly. Tiff may be only eight years old, but she’s sharp. She doesn’t miss a thing.
‘Really?’ Maude turns to her. ‘You honestly don’t know why I should object to you delivering this stuff to Jean Baptiste?’