The Things We Do To Our Friends

France

Three girls dance in front of him.

One of them has set up an old stereo, and tinny music blares, blocking out the sound of the cicadas that sing relentlessly at this time in the evening.

The garden looked beautiful when he first arrived, extending back to meet an old farmhouse where delicate vines stroke the white walls. There is grass that feels comforting – a damp rug under his feet. But things are not right, and the smell is a little aggravating. It makes his nose itch and his eyes water. When he focuses, the place looks like it has been left to become wild, and the fruits loaded on the trees are overripe. The garden has the heavy, sweet smell of the monkey enclosure at a zoo.

He struggles to concentrate on them, because of the sun on his face, perhaps, but it’s enough to summon the tangled beginning of an urgent lust, deep in his gut. Two of them hold hands high above their heads to create an arc and the third shimmies and then dives under. There is a screech of excitement as she does so.

He remembers that kind of frenzied joy. When he was their age, summer seemed to go on forever. He would get up to all sorts of things, unsupervised. Now, these months are oppressive, caked to his life like dry mud on a car. Summer means foreigners clogging the roads, children everywhere and the slog of work. Supplier events, tastings, factory rounds: in this part of the country, none of it stops because of the heat. It all becomes more tiring the older you get, and each summer is more difficult to tolerate than the last. An itch on the sole of his left foot. A gurgle, and a cranky, more than irritable, bowel. Each shadow of physical discomfort is worse in the evening heat, but these girls know none of the pain that comes with age. The girls are life itself, and things seem easy for them. They are too young to feel a pinch near the hips or the pull in the lower back as their bodies contort to the music.

They certainly hadn’t a care in the world earlier in the day. He’d seen them outside the shop on the bench in the car park, waiting for a lift that hadn’t come. When he picked them up, he could barely tell them apart. In that delicious way, the girls were preferable in a collection, a flick of hair, a flash of a smile. Tumbling in confidently, like it was their right to be taken to wherever they pleased. Their grimy knees up, pushing against the back of the seats in front with no consideration for the upholstery, something he would never have let his daughters do, and the smell as they’d chewed on strawberry- flavoured gum – a horrible habit – and chatted away to each other, ignoring him.