Sunday, Samuel Beckett and Ghosts.

Yesterday - when the tale is set – is The Lord's Day. 

It is market day in the village and being a Sunday, so some people also go to church. 

Evelyne is out when Jack calls at her house.

“She’s in church” her friend Nadine explains.

“I had a fall and she insisted that I stay with her. You can come in.”

Jack sets his shopping bags in the corner at the foot of the stairs; he is happy to leave their vegetable weight behind for a while, and climbs the steps. 

Like himself, like Evelyne and like Nadine they are ancient by today’s standards, built for legs younger than his. 

A tubular metal run has been screwed into them on one side, and a foldable electric powered chair sits at the bottom waiting for Evelyne’s return.

The stairs our steep and long, the bend to the second and third stories where she lives, precipitous. 

Evelyne does not move much today, she sits on a pew in the church, she sits on the electric chair lift to come and go and she sits in an old arm chair next to the fire at home. The church is almost next door.

She gets her carnival thrills and spills on the staircase.

Sometimes she screams like a teenager.

“Strap yourself in,” her daughter says.

“Can I sit on your lap?” asks her granddaughter.

Jack is greeted at the door on the third floor by the dog. 

“Woof.” It is asking to go on the electric chair too.

On the door is a small paper sticker with the word expo.

 

In the kitchen Evelyne’s book is neatly displayed; it is the third volume.

Jack has read the first two, but has no money to buy the third.

He picks it up and reads the title.

The best of our misadventures.

 

In the past – which today is present – Evelyne sails around the world with her husband Hervé, an ancient mariner from the north.

It takes them the best years of their life.

Three volumes are little to show for it, but it is only what is on the outside.  

Inside she holds so much more.

“The illustrations are her daughter’s. She has had no training.” Nadine points to the pictures on the wall. Jacks has come to see them.

“They are beautiful.” He is being honest.

“Are they for sale?” Jack has no money, but he knows a deal could be made; he is finishing the third volume of his own memoir and Evelyne has only read the first. She doesn’t like it, but Jack remains optimistic.

What is the point of being anything else? 

It would be depressing.

“They are, but not these ones. She will do another if you want.” Nadine explains.

“Would you like a beer?” She adds.

It is too early for beer, for Jack, and it is too early for Jack to consider choosing a painting that doesn’t exist yet, so he makes an excuse about needing to buy cheese before the market closes and promises to return.

He hopes Nadine will forget this promise if he also forgets it.

Outside on the wintery street he forgets his intention to go to the opticians and collect his new glasses.

He remembers the cheese though, buying a hefty slab and imagines standing with a friend and explaining the difference between the raw milk range and the pasteurised.

He giggles at the thought that his new specs have also passed his eyes.

 

Jaqueline lives at the end of the market, and Jack visits with his invite to pass for lunch.

Many people are there.

Octav - who is convinced the president’s wife is in fact her own brother - talks about Hogwart. 

Adrian, who isn’t working on Jaquelin’s studio because toady is a day of rest - but does between the cheesecake and the coffee - talks about his third wife, sixth child and his vasectomy.

Jean offers everyone another dollop of salmon shepherd’s pie. 

Fisherman’s pie perhaps.

Katthy bemoans life and the way people spell her name with a C and an inappropriate quantity of Ts.

Keva speaks about buying a piece of land where she wants Adrian to build her a cabin.

A cabin that will look like a fairy’s palace.

Keva plays the baritone saxophone, but has not brought it with her.

There will be no room in the house for all these people if she has.

 

Upstairs, in the bathroom, a hand written sign by the sink requests that you don’t use this tap. By the toilet, another sates do not put paper here.

Jack takes the soap and writes a message on the mirror.

He is thinking about his dreams, after a night of little sleep. Awake, he is greeted by a portrait of Samuel Beckett glaring from the table when he sits to write. Samuel is neither the source nor the inspiration, but he seems to fit somehow.

Go not gently into that sweet night.

The soap lettering gives the writing a ghostly air.

Which also seems to fit.