Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil(85)

There’s a lot of talking in French among Marie Bonnaire and the other two men about the driver of the French bus. Bee can tell Capitaine Attal wants to explain to her dad what’s being said but the Dupont guy keeps shutting him down. Dupont tells Marie that the information he’s just revealed is for Downing Street ears only and not for the father of a witness. Bee is pretty particular about who makes her dad look like a fool.

“The driver of the French bus lived in North London in 2002,” she tells her dad.

Now she has everyone’s attention. Dupont isn’t happy. There’s more discussion about secrecy, and not letting the press in on anything. Once or twice the capitaine says something to her dad in the most god-awful English Bee’s ever heard. But then her dad responds in the most god-awful French in existence and Bee can’t avoid Marianne Attal’s eye roll. Whose father is the biggest dickhead of biblical proportions? Violette would ask.

Then they get down to business. Marie Bonnaire asks Bee if she wants a translator. Bee says in French that she doesn’t need one. She’s become obsessed with the French language since going to the Gothenburg junior athletics meet in May. There she ran the two hundred meters in lane eight. Marianne Attal was in lane seven. Bee won the race, but had to be happy with second in the four hundred meters. After the other girls left the dressing rooms that day, Marianne Attal stayed behind and asked Bee for her phone number. Kind of demanded it, in a way. Like she knew something Bee wasn’t willing to say out loud. So Bee told the French girl to sod off.

But her father and the capitaine and Marie and Dupont don’t need to know that. It’s enough that Marianne knows exactly what Bee is thinking and why she chose to be on a summer tour that began and ended close to Marianne’s hometown. Bee did her research when she got home from Gothenburg. Found an interview with the Pas de Calais junior sportswoman of the year. Marianne Attal was going to be a junior coach on the Calais junior football tour in August.

“Bee?” her father prods gently.

She looks up and finds everyone staring. Waiting.

“Ils veulent savoir ce que Violette a dit à propos du chauffeur de bus,” Marianne says when Bee doesn’t respond.

Two weeks of nothing and now this! Hasn’t Marianne frickin’ Attal heard of Facebook? Instagram? Snapchat? Anything? Does she really have to make them witnesses to what Violette said that night about the French driver just to get Bee across the Channel again?

She tries to work out what to tell them and what not to tell them. There’s the fact that things started with a fight between the Calais football tour and Bee’s bus on their first night at the camping grounds. The kids Marianne was chaperoning egged Bee’s bus. Charlie Crombie smashed a security camera so they could retaliate, writing the English national anthem all over the French bus. Rodney Kennington said it was a surefire way of letting on that they did it, but Crombie convinced them that the shaps would be too stupid to go for the obvious suspects. Which was true because the Germans were blamed. They were on a summer tour of cathedral architecture and were heard taunting the French and the English about the last World Cup victory.

Any which way, the shaps said thank God the French were going in the opposite direction. But then they all ended up at the same camping ground in Bayeux, halfway through their tour. Gorman thought it a good idea to organize a World Cup match between France and England. Having never traveled beyond these two countries, he believed they constituted The World. The French won that game. Blood was shed, mostly Crombie’s, and there was a rumble of sorts, and this one time, Marianne Attal straddled Bee and they just stared at each other for so long. Violette went to kick Marianne off, but she grabbed Violette’s boot, which ended up in Bee’s face, which is how she got a black eye. Violette and Marianne had a “C’est de sa faute à elle” argument, and then the shaps put an end to it. For days, all Bee could think of was the straddle. And how perhaps the next time she saw Marianne, they would exchange phone numbers.

On the last night, at the campsite outside Calais, the French were back. And so were the Germans, who’d spent their entire trip with a curfew for the graffiti. The seniors of all three factions ended up in the car park, shoving one another, calling one another names. Pretty pathetic. Someone threw a can, but that was as violent as it got. And suddenly, there was Marianne grabbing Bee’s arm, pulling her away, and once out of earshot saying something about it being personal, about her being the reason Bee was in Calais in the first place. Bee’s greatest fear wasn’t that everyone would find out; it was that every time the capitaine’s daughter beckoned, Bee would come running. That she’d be one of those girls.

And then the lights in the car park came on and everyone split, but Marianne wouldn’t let her go and Violette wouldn’t leave without Bee, and Eddie wouldn’t leave without Violette. Charlie Crombie was there too, so the five of them hid under the stilts of one of the cabins until the shaps were gone. Then, instead of walking back to her cabin, Marianne told them she knew how to hot-wire a car and they could head down to the coast for the night.

That was how they came to be pushing the security guard’s car through the woodlands surrounding the camping ground and coming across Fionn Sykes, who was out searching for night herons. And then the six of them were in the car, heading to nowhere in particular. It was the longest night of Bee’s life. The best night of her life. They talked about everything. It’s why sometimes she thinks she hates Violette: because Bee trusted them with all the stuff that keeps her awake at night. Stevie’s death. Her parents’ divorce, her father’s drinking. How petrified she is that one day there will be a phone call saying he’s done himself in, because he was headed for the edge. And how she had sex with a boy over Christmas at a party, just to prove to her friends that she wasn’t a lesbian. She cried when she said that. She had come out to Violette days before, but this was different. She knew there would be no turning back.