Bordeaux Housewives. Daisy Waugh

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      ‘Yup,’ Horatio says, swatting it away. ‘Thanks, baby. Can you and Superman drop it off? You know where he lives?’

      ‘Sort of,’ Tiffany says.

      ‘I know,’ Superman says. ‘But first I need somebody to help with my puncture. Tiffie, will you help me?’

      ‘He’s on the road to Saujon,’ Horatio explains, blowing a molecule of dust off his 36-bit flat scanner, reaching for an eyeglass, which he thinks has slipped somewhere behind the machine. ‘Head south. It’s a bungalow. Not quite finished. More like a building site. You can’t miss it…Anyway, you’ll know it when you see it, I’m sure.’

      At this exchange Maude is lulled from her highly focused work-trance. ‘Heck,’ she exclaims. (Maude always calls Horatio ‘Heck’. No one remembers why.) ‘Heck, for heaven’s sake, we’ve talked about this. I don’t think it’s right or fair or appropriate that our beautiful, innocent children…’ She tails off, unwilling to elucidate for fear of Tiffie understanding more than she ought. She shoots a meaningful scowl at her husband, who isn’t looking. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’ve talked about this. It’s out of the question. The children cannot be dragged into all this…any more than they are already. It’s wrong.’

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Horatio asks, all innocence.

      ‘You know perfectly well.’

      ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says brightly. ‘Anything wrong, Tiff?’

      ‘Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Tiff, perhaps just a little too quickly. Tiff may be only eight years old, but she’s sharp. She doesn’t miss a thing.

      ‘Really?’ Maude turns to her. ‘You honestly don’t know why I should object to you delivering this stuff to Jean Baptiste?’

      ‘Of course not.’

      ‘Do you have any idea what you’re delivering?’

      ‘Eh?’ says Tiffie. Maude looks at her carefully. Tiffie shrugs. ‘Stuff he wants, I expect.’ She smiles, as if she’s been struck by a new idea. ‘Maybe it’s stuff he left behind?…Anyway, who cares? Only you said he wanted it before lunch and Superman and me –’

      ‘Superman and I,’ Maude corrects her automatically.

      ‘Superman and I want to go to the sea.’

      It is a source of constant surprise to Maude that her daughter, so intelligent in so many other ways, should continue to be so trenchantly, wantonly ignorant – and incurious – about the true nature of her parents’ work. What does she think her parents do all day, stuck up here in this tiny room with all this state-of-the-art machinery? Maude smiles at her, half relieved by it, half irritated. ‘Well. But even so. Even if you don’t know –’

      ‘Tiff and her brother have very kindly offered to deliver some stuff to our friend Jean Baptiste. Which he urgently needs, by the way…’ Gingerly, Horatio lifts a small PVC sheet from beside the laminator and carries it to the light box in the corner of the room. He has his back to his family. ‘I mean, before noon…’ he adds vaguely, lifting the retrieved eyeglass, squinting into it. He clicks his tongue. ‘…S’no bloody good, is it?’ he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. ‘Bugger! Maude? Come and take a look at this. Dyesub’s damn well playing up again. It’s not bonding.’

      ‘Honestly, Mum,’ says Tiff, watching her mother crossing the room to Horatio, bend over the light box, noticing with familiarity the instantaneous switch in her concentration. ‘…I don’t see what you’re fussing about,’ Tiff continues soothingly. ‘We’re just giving Jean Baptiste some bills or something, aren’t we? Because we want to get some jellyfish. I don’t even know what…I’ve no idea…Mum?…Mum?’

      ‘Christ!’ mutters Maude. ‘That’s no good, Heck. It’s no good to anyone. Wouldn’t get past the people at bloody Blockbusters. Forget the dye-sub. Don’t you think? Go with the Teslin sealer. Teslin should be fine. Hurry up, though,’ she adds edgily. ‘How much time have we got?’

      Horatio turns around while his wife is still tutting over the failed document, signals for Superman and Tiffany to take the package and run. Tiffie winks at him, covers her mouth to stop herself bursting with the excitement of it all. She and Superman carefully, quietly tiptoe over to the open skylight and onto the small, flat, hidden roof beyond.

      ‘Use the door!’ Maude calls pointlessly after them as they scamper quickly over the roof pretending not to hear her, scramble down the vine at the far end of the building and leap to the garden below. She clicks her tongue. ‘Why can’t they ever use the bloody door?’

      

      It takes the children twenty minutes to mend Superman’s puncture. Tiffany accidentally catches Superman’s little finger between the wheel and the tyre, and Superman thumps her, and then they roll around in the grass for ages, punching and kicking, until one or other remembers the endgame. The jellyfish. They stand up. Dust each other down and get back to work.

      Tiffany slides the ‘J. B. MERSAUD’ package into a plastic shopping bag and then slides the shopping bag into the purple rucksack which is meant to be her school satchel. And they set off, pedalling merrily through the lanes, discussing names for pet jellyfish. Wondering if there is a word for jellyfish in Russian. Discussing, in a roundabout way, the etymology of ‘jelly’, and then ‘fish’, wondering if they’ll have to share a plate of frites with their moules today, or if their parents will be generous for once and let them each have a plate of their own.

      ‘Because it’s not like we actually wouldn’t finish them,’ complains Superman. ‘Sometimes I really hate Mum and Dad. Do you, Tiffie?’

      A screech of brakes. (They need oil, Tiffie remembers.) ‘Superman,’ she whispers, ‘Shhh!’

      They have turned a bend in the sunny lane. The field of maize that has been obstructing their view has turned now into a stretch of vineyard, and at last the half-built wreck (work stopped the day his family was wiped out by a police car) that is Jean Baptiste Mersaud’s bungalow is upon them. As is the fact that he has a visitor. Jean Baptiste drives a white van and, when he’s not working, a moped. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows that. But this morning, parked neatly between the moped and the white van, is a smart, metallic green Renault. A saloon car.

      ‘I’ve seen that Renault before,’ whispers Superman. He is crouching close to his bicycle handlebars to evade detection. ‘…It’s that man from our shop. Who hated us. Remember, Tiffie? When he did a stinky old fart and then he just knew we smelt it. That’s why he hated us.’

      But Tiffie doesn’t remember. At least she remembers the incident, of course. It had been killingly funny. But she doesn’t remember noticing what car he climbed into after the event. And the problem with being called Superman and only five years old is that people are sometimes not inclined to take your observations seriously. ‘I think you’re wrong, Superman,’ Tiffie whispers back.

      ‘No I’m not,’ Superman says. ‘It’s definitely him.’

      ‘Anyway, what are we going to do now? You think we can just go up there and deliver the stuff? Even though he’s got visitors?’

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