In fact, Jean did feel as he had when he was twelve. When he had seldom been lonely, but liked to be alone or with Vijaya, the weedy son of the Indian mathematician’s family next door; when he had been enough of a kid to believe that his night-time dreams were an alternative real world and a place of trial. He had once even believed that his dreams contained tasks that would move him up a rung in his waking life if he managed to accomplish them.
‘Find the path out of the maze! Learn to fly! Vanquish the hound of hell! Succeed and when you wake up, a wish will come true.’
At the time he had believed in the power of his wishes, which were naturally associated with the offer of forgoing something precious or important.
‘Please get my parents to look at each other again over breakfast! I’ll give an eye for it to happen, the left one. I need the right one to steer a barge.’
Yes, that’s how he had bargained when he was still a boy and had not been so … How had Jordan put it? So controlled? He had also written letters to God and sealed them with blood from his thumb. Now, only about a thousand years too late, he stood at the wheel of a gigantic boat and sensed for the first time in a long time that he did indeed have desires.
Perdu let slip a ‘Ha!’ and stood up a little straighter.
Jordan twiddled the knobs of the radio until he had found VNF Seine’s navigation radio, which controlled the river traffic. ‘A repeat announcement for the two comedians who smoked out Champs-élysées harbour. Greetings from the harbourmaster. Starboard is the side where your thumb’s on the left.’
‘Do they mean us?’ asked Jordan.
‘Who cares,’ said Monsieur Perdu dismissively.
They gave each other a wry grin.
‘What did you want to be when you were a boy, Monsieur … um … Jordan?’
‘A boy? You mean, like, yesterday?’ Max laughed cockily, before falling into a deep silence.
‘I wanted to be a man my father would take seriously. And an interpreter of dreams, which more or less ruled out the former,’ he said eventually.
Perdu cleared his throat. ‘Chart a course to Avignon for us, Monsieur. Find a nice canal route to the south, one that will maybe bring us … significant dreams.’ Perdu gestured towards a stack of charts. The maps showed a dense network of navigable blue channels, canals, marinas and locks.
Jordan gave him a questioning glance, and Monsieur Perdu opened the throttle. Eyes firmly on the water, he said: ‘Sanary says that you have to travel south by water to find answers to your dreams. He says too that you find yourself again there, but only if you get lost on the way – completely lost. Through love. Through longing. Through fear. Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.’
A bird awoke inside his chest, and it cautiously spread its wings, amazed to find that it was still alive. It wanted out. It wanted to burst from his chest, taking his heart with it, and soar up into the sky.
‘I’m coming,’ muttered Jean Perdu. ‘I’m coming, Manon.’
MANON’S TRAVEL DIARY
On My Way Into Life, Between Avignon and Lyons
30 July 1986
It was a miracle that they didn’t all climb aboard with me. It was irritating enough that they (my parents, Aunt ‘women-don’t-need-men’ Julia, my cousins ‘I’m-too-fat’ Daphne and ‘I’m-always-so-tired’ Nicolette) came down to our house from their thyme-scented hills and accompanied me to Avignon to see me actually get on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris. I suspected them all of merely wanting to go to a proper town and visit the cinema again and buy themselves a few Prince records.