Jacquot and the Waterman (17 page)

'So. The cops,' said Doisneau, taking a sip of his
pression
and wiping away the resulting white moustache. 'I
heard, you know?'

'Its a small town.'

'I heard about your mum, too. I'm sorry. I never got the
chance to say anything. Otherwise
. .
.' Doisneau
shrugged. Just the way he always did. He might have put
on a few kilos but the old movements were still there.

'It was a long time ago. But thanks.'

'You went away,' said Doisneau.

'To Aix. Went to live with my grandfather.'

It was thirty years ago now. The moment Jacquot's life
changed. The fork in the road and no signpost. He remembered how his mother looked that last morning, tired and
drawn, but putting on a show for her boy. And the clothes
she wore - the red, flowery print dress, the coral necklace
his father had given her, her favourite red shoes clicking
on the pavement as they walked together down the slope
of Le Panier into town, the kiss on both cheeks when they
parted at the school gates, the wave she gave him when he
turned back to see if she was still there. And then, three
days later, the shop windows at Galeries Samaritaine,
boarded up when they drove him past, bound for the
orphanage. An anarchist bomb, lobbed from a passing car,
while his mother painted a shop-window backdrop, insulated from the blast by nothing more than a sheet of plate
glass.

He'd read about the attack in the newspaper, searched
for some mention of his mother. But there'd been nothing.
Just one of the fifteen bodies recovered from the wreckage. For Jacquot, three months after his father had been
lost at sea, those rough wood panels hammered into place
over the shattered display windows meant that things
would never be the same again.

And that included the
Chats de Nuit.
At the orphanage
in Borel, curfew was ten. The
Chats
never met before
eleven.

Jacquot wasn't the only one thinking of the past.

'And then that try!' continued Doisneau, looking up at
the ceiling and smiling gleefully. 'That was the next we
heard of you. Oh boy, when we saw you make that
run . . . ooufff - from nowhere!' he said, skimming one
hand off the other to indicate the speed of it. 'And you
were always the slowest, remember?' Doisneau chuckled.
'How many times you nearly got nicked
. ..
But that day,
against
Les Rosbifs,
you had wings, man, wings on your
boots.'

Jacquot remembered it too.

A low steely sky and sheets of rain pelting down.
Twickenham. Outside London. A sodden pitch, mud as
thick and sticky as fridged honey. Seventy thousand crowd.
A merciless game. No quarter given. Brutal.

Jesus, thought Jacquot, he'd die if he tried it now.

And right from the start all the luck going the English
way. Every try, every kick going to the English, somehow
clawed back by the French until, in the closing minutes,
the English captain, stood deep for the purpose, dropped
the ball to turf and toe and sent it spinning like a
Catherine wheel between the posts.

Two points up. Minutes to go. It was surely over.
French supporters groaned like an upset stomach, the
band from Dax started packing its instruments and people
began making for the exits.

Out on the pitch, as fast as they could, desperate now,
the French had kicked from their twenty-two. Horrifyingly, one of the English pack caught it cleanly and ran like
an old bull, dragging half the French scrum with him,
barging on only to be mauled down a few metres from the
French line.

Around the pitch, that moment, you could have heard a
cat walk on concrete, it was so silent. As the French coach
said afterwards, seventy thousand scrotums squeezed tight
as walnuts.

So the referee calls a scrum five metres from the
French line. And, unbelievably, gives the put-in to the
English. Only a splinter of injury time left to play and
La
France
two points down. In goes the ball, a solid grunting
from the pack, and the English hooker gets it, heels it back
to the Number Eight who tiptoes round it until the
scrum-half sees his chance and reaches for it.

That was the moment it all went wrong. The tiptoeing
fazed him, made his hands skitter. He didn't get the grip
he needed and fumbled it on the turn, juggling the ball
like it was hot.

A second, maybe two, that was all. But it was enough.
Jacquot, debut flanker, brought on with twelve minutes to
go, took his right shoulder off Souze's arse, slid free of
Mageot and Pelerain in the second row and came out fast,
like a runner from the blocks, from the blind side. He
scooped the ball from the man's cradling arms, shouldered
him aside and set the hell off.

What Doisneau meant by 'ooufff - from nowhere!'

But someone had seen him coming, the English wing -
Courtney he was called. Except Courtney, like the rest of
the English line, was wrong-footed. By the time he spun
round, Jacquot, not the fastest runner in the world, was
pumping arms and legs and eight metres clear.

The thing Jacquot always remembered was the view.
The distant posts, the mud-churned field of play, the rain
slanting through the floodlights. So far to go. So empty.
The sideline inches from his left boot, the stands a blur of
faces, scarves, hats, umbrellas, flags.

All he had to do was run.

And, somewhere behind him, an Englishman in hot
pursuit. Just the two of them. And thirty thousand Frenchmen rising to their feet, raising their fists, letting their
scrotums unwind and their voices loose from deep down in
their bellies. Urging him on, realising what was happening
here.
La France
has the ball. Only two men. A race for the
line. Run, man. Run, run, run . . .

Jacquot never once looked back. Didn't dare. Just put
his chin in the air and made those legs pump.

Just run.

For a moment, he wondered if the whistle had gone
for some infringement. A knock-on? A forward pass?
Some technicality he wouldn't know about. Maybe he
should stop so he wouldn't make a fool of himself, going
the length of the pitch when the whistle had blown. Or
maybe it hadn't, and he'd make an even bigger fool of
himself coming to a halt in the centre of the pitch for no
good reason - handing the ball, and victory, to the
English.

So he didn't stop. He kept running. And now he could
hear Courtney coming up behind him, boots sucking the
turf. Which was when he knew for certain there'd been no
whistle. Not if Courtney was still after him.