Page 6 of Salt

We supped in silence for a few minutes. Old friends were good for that. “Léa’s at the bar.” I cocked my head. “She looks mad as hell. What’s the latest instalment?”

Sighing, Jerome ran a hand through his flaming red hair. It matched the tip of his nose, shiny from a day working his salt tile despite being coated in factor five trillion. The guy could get sunburnt frying onions. “She’s cross about something but is currently refusing to enlighten me.”

“She will, she’ll just make you sweat first.” Long-term covert studies of four women—my mother, two sisters, and Léa—had cemented my belief that homosexuality was much simpler.

Jerome wrinkled his freckled brow. “Mmm. This feels a bit different, somehow.”

I smirked. “You say that every time.”

I cast my gaze over to the bar. Léa seemed her usual annoying self to me.

“Have you spoken to anyone else about the Selco proposal for the cooperative, yet?” Jerome asked. “My dad says all the guys should have received it by now.”

I shook my head, my mood souring. “I haven’t discussed it with anyone.”

Chatting to Charles-the-Englishman had, for an hour, taken my mind off a looming saga I was desperately trying to ignore. In the 1960s, the seventy-five or so salt farmers dotted across the island had joined forces to form a cooperative, pooling their harvests at the end of the season to sell en masse. My grandfather was one of the cooperative’s proud founding members, as he took pleasure in reminding anyone who’d listen, trailblazing a path for others to follow. The cooperative, in a marginally more modern form, still ran today; every single one of us members. Jerome’s dad was the unofficial self-elected head, a role we hadn’t thought we’d needed until now. “He’s organised an informal meeting for Thursday, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah, just to hear people’s initial thoughts.”

I huffed. “Yeah, and to convince everyone that his way is the right way. He’s going to try to persuade us all to take up Selco’s offer, isn’t he?”

Jerome’s father, Michel, had a big mouth and an even bigger personality. If he thought the offer from Selco was a good one, he’d make damn sure everyone else did too.

“I know he’s your dad and I shouldn’t slag him off to you, but he and his cronies don’t care about folks like us, the younger ones. They don’t care about the future. They’re just ready to retire and are tempted by Selco’s euros flashing before their eyes.”

I knew Jerome agreed with me, although poking his head above the parapet and saying so wasn’t worth the aggro he’d get from his dad. He hesitated before he spoke. “Look, it will be in the interests of all the salt harvesters to come to the meeting. Yes, my dad will have his say, but hopefully other people will have an opportunity too.” He paused, caught between a rock and a hard place. “If you feel that strongly, why don’t you stand up and say something? You’re not generally one to keep your opinions to yourself.”

I sighed. “I would, except I don’t know what I think, to be honest. Only that we need to respond to Selco with a united front. It looks like a good offer on paper, but…”

What the fuck did I know? No better than Jerome or his dad. Salt harvesters weren’t businessmen. Neither were oyster fishermen. Or village policemen, or confused octogenarians. Mergers, takeovers, opening offers, projected dividends, stakeholder agreements—they were just fancy words, weren’t they? Doublespeak designed to trip and hoodwink simple people like me. Jerome’s father, Michel, might walk the walk, in front of his mates, but he was just as clueless as the rest of us. For all I knew, Selco’s offer was a brilliant one, the bosses of the corporation were fools to be making it, and we’d all be salt millionaires within five years, raking it in. Literally. Or it could be the biggest crock of shit ever, and the only fools would be seventy-five dumb salt harvesters in hock to a mega corporation and only just scratching enough of a living to keep roofs over our heads.

Papi’s boules match was winding up; his voice becoming more and more smug, his friends more and more despondent. At one point, when I’d been talking to Charles, he’d glanced across, but if he’d recognised the attractive man sharing a drink with me, then he’d shown no sign of it. I wouldn’t raise the subject of him getting lost, not yet anyhow. We all had our moments of forgetfulness, perhaps it had been nothing more than that.

“I think you should offer an alternative slant on whatever my father suggests,” said Jerome decisively. “At least so everyone hears a different point of view. You’re right, his generation are going to go along with what he says. He’s retiring in four years, of course he’s going to find the Selco offer attractive, and they will too when he points out that any problems further down the line won’t affect them. You’re bright, Florian, brighter than me. And you’ve got the nerve to stand up to them.”

“But maybe it is a good offer,” I countered, tossing back the dregs of my pastis with a shrug. “Who knows? How could any of us know?”

“We don’t, but at least we should explore every avenue before committing the rest of our lives to it.” Jerome’s eyes drifted around the simple village square, unchanged since my grandfather was a boy. “I don’t want to work for a big corporation until I drop down dead. Do you? No matter how much money they float under my nose. Stick it to the man, Flor, isn’t that what we’re all about here?”

CHAPTER 5

CHARLES

I’d almost recognised myself. For a few minutes, with Florian, I’d acted like the Charles Heyer of old. Lifted an ordinary lager to my lips, taken a sip, put it down again then wiped the foam from my mouth. His silver had sat comfortably next to my own familiar forest green, untroubled for once, flat as a mill pond. I’d made inconsequential small talk. Shared a drink in a bar, forgotten about the dark amorphic shadows hovering at the edges of my vision, not worried at the frayed lines of stitching holding my soul in one piece. I’d even found the mental energy to consider the existence of someone other than me for a change, this handsome young Frenchman. I had skirted an old man’s inexorable slide into dementia, although neither of us had acknowledged that word, in the same way neither of us had acknowledged the mounting anxiety his caring grandson endeavoured to hide, even when orange threatened to outshine his silver. Florian’s extraordinary eyes had barely strayed from the boules match being played out over my shoulder.

And then the guilt set in, of course. I had enjoyed myself, albeit for a short while, and that wasn’t allowed.

I returned to my empty house to find that Marcus had sent me a snapshot of the London skyline at sunset. He’d taken it from the balcony of my apartment just off Sloane Square, having stopped by to check up on the place. It was a good shot, he’d spent some time over it, centring the London Eye in the distance and waiting until the light was just so. The caption underneath read some guys have all the luck. He’d also included a picture of himself from earlier today, surrounded by our senior management team, champagne flutes aloft and toasting our latest acquisition—a small tech company with exciting prospects but overstretched and floundering in start-up debt. It was a familiar and predictable story. Marcus and the guys would buy up the assets, flog off the dross, and around two years from now, sell it on as a market leader. And snaffle the profit.

A finger of orange mist prodded me in the ribs as I studied the pictures. I knew what he was doing, of course, with the photos and the cheery captions. Marcus was driving home the message. A subtle reminder of what I had, what I was missing, what would be mine again if I could just buck up my ideas and snap out of it. Tighten my loose screws, slacken the noose, and bloody get back on an even keel doing what I did best. What the two of us did best together. Screwing people out of millions.

Of course, now that Florian and I had made a brief acquaintance, my evening habit of loitering at the back of the photographers hanging around his salt harvesting patch would seem plain weird. So I rounded off my next couple of evenings by trekking over to the neighbouring town of Ars instead, and killed a few hours browsing the art exhibitions.

Hard to believe now, but before the slick suits, flash apartment and corporate bank account, this had been my life. An art history degree in London had been followed by a year in Paris playing at being a penniless bohemian artist. By day, I’d scraped a living waiting tables in Montmartre then, as night fell, sat around in grotty digs, cross-legged, with like-minded souls. Through a haze of roll-up cigarettes, caffeine, and poor nutrition, we’d put the world to rights and declared capitalism the scourge of the planet. We fretted about the polar ice cap melting, years before it became fashionable. I even developed a taste for absinthe, and had drunkenly kissed my fellow bohemian boys and girls alike, as if I hadn’t been a god-fearing, conservative, heterosexual middle-class boy up until this point. Clichéd, much?

My youthful follies didn’t make it into vices of adulthood. No heating and a cold winter had that abrupt effect on a young man. None of the battles we were fighting seemed quite as vital when attached to a dwindling bank account and an even emptier belly. Hungry, skint, and amongst strangers, I realised I’d joined the underground Parisian art scene a century too late. So I left behind the absinthe, the naïve dalliances with boys and my oil paints, to return to London. Whereupon I enjoyed a hot bath, a good sleep in a comfy bed at my mother’s house, then fell back in with my shrewd old school friend Marcus. I cut my hair and got a proper job. Found myself a sensible girlfriend and a mortgage. Began making money. Ignored the girlfriend and worked too hard. Came home one day to an empty house. Worked too hard. Made more money, lots, and lots of it. Worked even harder.

And my predictable path wound its merry journey onwards. Until I took a wrong turn and lost my way.

---