‘Just call me Moses,’ he chuckled, and slowly pulled away.
As his truck disappeared out of sight, I counted the fistful of French francs I’d stolen from the wallet on his dashboard.
Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France
17 June
Waves from an inclement Atlantic Ocean lapped at my feet and made the hairs on my toes sway like a sea urchin’s spines. The rotating beams from a pair of lighthouses sliced through a bruised sky as night swept in. Three concrete walls framed the harbour and prevented the water and horizon from ever meeting. Unable to catch a breeze in their sails, a handful of windsurfers straddled their boards and paddled to the shore.
I was unsure how long my journey from the north to the south of France had taken, as without Doreen’s watch, time neither existed nor mattered. Hours blended into each other like colours in a tie-dyed T-shirt.
I’d spent long stretches of time hovering by French roadsides searching for a friendly smile behind a moving windscreen. Sometimes I found myself hiding in train carriage toilets avoiding ticket inspectors.
It was during my days of near solitude when the faces of those I’d left behind drifted in and out of my head. I questioned how she was coping without me. Had she presumed I was dead like I’d hoped, or was she still holding on to faint hope of my return? Because I wanted to fade from all of their memories quickly.
However, my rational side knew I had to nip these thoughts in the bud. If I allowed them to become more frequent, they’d only hamper me. So I began to train myself to think only of the future and not of the past – and, specifically, her. It wasn’t easy, especially with copious amounts of time on my hands.
Manipulating one’s thoughts is relatively simple for a few moments. But the part of your brain that holds in its core everything that’s amiss about one’s self doesn’t appreciate being contained for long. The longer I dwelled on the badness, the harder it would be to anticipate the good times ahead. But I had freedom to choose and I could, if I wanted to, reject those thoughts.
So as soon as something detrimental came into my mind, I snatched it mid-air and quashed it. I reminded myself those memories belonged to a person who no longer existed.
Of course, I couldn’t control everything I thought about, but I learned to manage and compartmentalise much of it. And by the time I disembarked at the beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the south-west, the wheels were already in motion. The key was to remain conscious of and fixed upon only the present and the future. To assist in that project, I created new memories by focusing on what I saw and sensed from the moment I arrived.
I began by inhaling the salty sea mist and the smells carried by the wind from the surrounding gastronomy. I appreciated how the beach’s harbour resembled a huge toothless grin, and I found myself smiling back at it. I was impressed at how the historic architecture of Saint-Jean-de-Luz had been kept so pristine. I could see a Basque church and longed to go inside it.
Ahead of me lay the ocean; to the left, the Spanish border and the mighty Pyrenees; behind me, the body of France. I could run in any direction and no one would catch me. It was the place I could begin again.
My personal hygiene had been restricted to washing myself in stained basins at truck stops and train stations, so my first priority was to walk down the concrete steps, strip off my musty-smelling clothes and run into the water in just my underwear.
The salt stung my eyes when I lay face down, grasping a seabed that slipped through my fingers. I swam towards a white metal buoy bobbing along under the spell of the ebb and flow. Linking an arm through its scaffolding, I took in the coastline.
I threw myself under the water and the sound of the waves tussling against the tide tore through my ears. I held my head under until my baptism was complete.
The harbour was a popular dock for boats and trawlers that ended a day’s fishing in picture-postcard comfort. The gentle vibrations of their engines gave satisfying tingles up and down my arms and legs as my nerves sprang back to life. Closing my eyes, I flipped onto my back and slowly paddled towards the beach to dry my new skin in the setting sun’s rays.
Instinctively I believed my new life had the potential to be perfect.
28 June
Fumes from the Gauloise had fused with the burning cannabis resin and floated up through my nostrils then deep into my lungs. I leaned back on my elbows, sank further into the sand and savoured the high before exhaling.
‘Good shit, man,’ said Bradley, who sat next to me, cross-legged.
‘Yep,’ I replied without looking at him, my eyes like crescent moons.
With the aid of my pidgin French and helpful locals, I’d been directed towards a backpacking hostel on Rue du Jean. The beachfront buildings were exquisite, but the Routard International was hidden three streets back, under a shroud of dirt and dilapidation. Its cream and olive-green facade had flaked, chipped and fallen like dandruff onto the pavement.
Inside, framed sepia photographs arranged carelessly on its reception walls revealed its previous incarnation as the H?tel Près de la C?te – a glowing, three-storey art deco hotel. Its geometric shapes were now muddied and barely visible behind a hodgepodge of cheap, modern bookcases and dressers. And its former elegance and stylish modernism had all but vanished.
Marble tiles had dropped from the ballroom’s walls and lay shattered around a grand piano, felled by two fractured legs. It had downgraded from a luxurious destination to an ad hoc home for fly-by-nights with limited means.
The remainder of Moses’s money just about stretched to a dormitory bed for the week. The nights I’d spent in a homeless shelter in London had quickly acclimatised me to others’ sleep-talking, snoring, and the smells produced by six bodies in a confined space.
It was mainly young European travellers, keen to explore beaches away from the glamour of Cannes and Saint-Tropez, who inhabited the hostel. I had more years on me than most, but I’d never looked my age. This allowed me to shave a decade from my date of birth. My hitchhiker’s tan gave me a healthy sheen and masked the weight I’d lost by irregular eating.
I made the acquaintance of small pockets of people who spoke in tongues I often couldn’t understand. But through botched German, Italian, French and plenty of exaggerated hand signals, we muddled along until we caught each other’s drifts.
I spent my first few days seeking potential employment, from menial and unskilled work pot-washing in café kitchens to being a trawlerman’s assistant. But the town looked after its own, and there was no place for an Englishman yet to prove his worth.