Shop owner Delphine gave a shriek and Gerard, the owner of the one bar in town, who was standing next to her, dropped a carton ofjus de pommeto the floor. The apple juice started to leak out, but instead of anyone dropping to attend to it, Jacques was statuesque, staring at the pair and they were solemnly looking right back at him wearing the kind of expressions that told him hehadbeen the subject of their hushed talk.
‘Are you going to throw the tomatoes?’ Gerard asked eventually. ‘Because, if you are, could you aim for something other than my left knee? My arthritis is playing up again.’
Jacques looked at the tin in his hand and wondered what he had been thinking picking it up in the first place. This wasn’t the forest and this pair weren’t bears. They were civilised people. People who had been nothing but kind to him since he had arrived here with nothing but a backpack and a whole lot more mental baggage two years ago now. He placed the tin back where it belonged and looked to the contents of his shopping basket. What was he thinking about the things he’d put in here too? Bread, OK. Cheese, also OK, but he’d been indulgent about the type today. Muesli, no; he liked it, but it was full of hidden sugars. But this was worse, a particular brand of biscuits. Square. Plain on one side, thick chocolate on the other. He could almost taste them. He picked them out of the basket, looking at them liketheymight be his latest enemy.
‘Are you going to throw those instead?’ Gerard asked. ‘A wiser choice. Less chance of anything breaking. Produce… or flesh.’
‘No one is throwing anything,’ Delphine said, bending to pick up the juice that had fallen from Gerard’s hands. Jacques noticed the lack of fluidity in the movement, the slight jar in the woman’s rise and fall. Was she suffering with her hips again…?
Jacques put the basket down on the ground and before Delphine got to the carton, he picked it up for her.
‘I will pay for this,’ he told her, handing it back to her.
‘There is no need,’ Delphine said quickly. ‘I will tip what is left away. No problem.’
‘I said I will buy it,’ Jacques insisted. He took it back from her and before she could protest any further he put the carton to his mouth and began swallowing the rest of its contents.
‘I do not know what is wrong with everybody today,’ Gerard remarked as Jacques finished the juice and moved to put the empty carton into his basket. ‘It is like people go crazy the day the Christmas lights are switched on.’
Jacques grunted. He didn’t need another reminder about the annual festive light switch on. There were enough signs and posters from here to his cabin and beyond. There wasn’t even civilisation beyond, but still there were notices pinned to trees, in case perhaps a family of racoons wanted to come along.
‘They go crazy for mysablés de NöelI hope,’ Delphine said. ‘I have made over a thousand of them.’
Jacques felt his mouth water. Perhaps there was one good thing about the Christmas light switch on: Delphine’s exquisite shortbread cookies. Decorated by hand – some with icing, others with all variations of chocolate, nuts or sweets pressed into the top – he could probably eat a thousand of them himself.
‘Will you save some for me?’ he asked her.
‘I am afraid I have already had people try to bribe me for them in advance, but you know the rules. Not until the ribbon is cut on the opening of the celebration fête do I start selling them.’
‘Then I guess I will live without them,’ Jacques replied, turning into another aisle and trying to remember what exactly it was he had made the trek here for.
His turn wasn’t sharp enough to miss seeing the elbow nudge Gerard gave Delphine, however. This time he decided to ignore it and return to perusing long-life products so he didn’t have to come here so often over the festive period.
‘You’re not coming?’ Delphine exclaimed. Jacques could hear her footsteps quickening up behind him, sticky with spilt apple juice.
‘Why would I come to something I do not like?’ Jacques answered.
‘But I am premiering my alcohol-free Christmas beer,’ Gerard began, moving closer too. ‘Like with Delphine’s shortbread cookies, I cannot guarantee how long stocks will last.’
Jacques shrugged. ‘Then I guess it will be something else I will live without. Now, please, can I shop in peace?’ He hastened down the aisle. He was going to put the flat chocolate biscuits back on the shelf where they belonged.
‘But you can’t not come!’
The insistence in Delphine’s tone gave him concern enough to turn around again. As if realising she had been too loud and too eager, she put her head down and her hands into the pockets of her apron.
‘Why,’ Jacques began, ‘do I have to be there?’
‘Delphine didn’t mean youhaveto be there.’ Gerard spoke quickly. ‘Only that, you know, everyone in the village and the neighbouring villages will be here. And Pierre from Bousie… he is coming to do his world-famous walking-on-stilts performance.’
Jacques now didn’t know if he should laugh or cry. Only this area of France would brag about having someone with an allegedly world-famous walking-on-stilts routine. It would be terrible. It was always all kinds of terrible. From the out-of-tune singing to the axe-throwing demonstration. And the latter always infuriated him because Luc did not know how to throw an axe properly at all.
‘I feel my imagination has already filled in all the blanks that I might miss. But thank you, for thinking of me,’ Jacques said, preparing to stride off again.
‘Reindeer!’ Delphine blurted out.
Why was he here? There was enough to do in and around his cabin. Why had he sought provisions instead of work and solitude today? He turned around.
‘What?’
