Have Mercy On Us All (2 page)

“I know my ships, Cap’n,” rasped the owner. “If you’re afraid of the
Nor’easter
, that’s fine by me. I’ve got ten others who’d take your cap at a moment’s notice. Men made of sterner stuff who don’t grouse about safety regulations like those wimps at the inspectorate.”

“I’ve got seven lads on board.”

The owner brought his fleshy, glowering face right close up to Joss’s.

“If you so much as whisper what’s on your mind to the harbour master, Joss Le Guern, you’ll be out on your ear as fast as you can say sea shells. Right round the coast, from Brest to Saint-Nazaire, it’ll be ‘Sorry, nothing doing’. So if you want my advice – think again.”

Yes, Joss was really sorry he hadn’t done him in right and proper the day after the shipwreck, instead of only breaking one of his legs and fracturing his sternum. But his crewmen – it took four of them – pulled Joss off his prey. Don’t ruin your own life, Joss, they said. They blocked him and then held him down. Later, they stopped him slaughtering the owner and all his henchmen, who’d blacklisted him when he came out of prison. Joss bawled the fact that the port authority fat cats were on the owners’ payrolls in so many bars that he made being taken back into the merchant navy simply impossible. Blackballed in one port after another, Joss jumped on the Paris
express
one Tuesday morning and landed – like so many Bretons before him – on the forecourt of Gare Montparnasse, leaving behind a wife who’d already taken her leave, and nine men to slay.

As the Edgar-Quinet crossing hove into view, Joss stuffed his ancient hard feelings into a mental back pocket, and clapped on full steam. He was running late, as the business with the coffee slops and the wars of the things had wasted at least fifteen minutes. Punctuality was a key part of his work, and it mattered very much that the first edition of his newscast should take place every day at 0830 sharp, with the second edition on the dot of 1235 and the late final at 1810. That’s when the street was at its busiest, and in this town people were in too much of a hurry to put up with the slightest delay.

Joss took the urn down from the tree where he strung it up overnight with a double bowline and two bike locks to secure it. This morning there wasn’t a lot inside, so it wouldn’t take too long to sort. He smiled to himself as he took the urn into the back room that Damascus let him use in his shop. There were still a few decent fellows left, he thought, people like Damascus who would let you have a key and a bit of table space, without worrying about you running off with the till. Talk about a stupid name, though! Damascus was the manager of Rolaride, the skate shop on the square, and he let Joss use the place to prepare his newscasts out of the rain. Rolaride – that’s another ludicrous moniker, if you ask me.

Joss took the padlocks off the urn. It was a big wooden lap-jointed box that he’d made with his own fair hand, and dubbed
Nor’easter II
in memory of his dearly departed. A great fishing vessel of the deep-sea fleet might not have thought it an honour to have her name perpetuated by a modest letter box, but
Nor’easter II
was no ordinary mail drop. It was a very clever seven-year-old indeed, born of a brilliant idea that had allowed Joss to pull himself up the ladder again after two years’ unemployment, six months spinning cables and three years in a cannery. It was on a gloomy December night in a Paris café that Joss had been struck by sheer genius. The place was full of nostalgic Breton exiles droning on about their families and home ports, about when the fishing was good and the onions too. Some boozed-up old sailor mentioned the village of Pont l’Abbé, and all of a
sudden
Joss’s great-great-grandfather, born at Locmaria in 1832, sprang out of his head, propped himself up at the bar, and said good evening.

“Good evening to you,” said Joss, tightening his grip on his glass.

“You do remember me, don’t you?”

“Sort of …” Joss mumbled. “You died before I was born. I didn’t shed no tears.”

“C’mon, Joss Le Guern, I don’t drop in very often, so cut out the insults for once. How far have you got?”

“Fifty.”

“You’ve taken it hard. You look older.”

“You can keep your views to yourself, thanks very much. I didn’t ask you to drop in. Anyway, you were no oil painting yourself.”

“Watch your tongue, young man. You know what happens when I get excited.”

“Sure I do, like everyone else. Specially your wife, who got thrashed all her life long.”

“Sure, sure,” the forefather scowled. “But you have to put that in context. In its appropriate cultural-historical circs.”

“Circs my arse. You liked bashing her up, that’s all there is to it. And you blinded her in one eye.”

“Belt up, will you? Or are we going to go on about that eye for another two hundred years?”

“Sure we are. It’s symbolic.”

“Joss Le Guern wants to teach his great-great-grandfather a lesson, does he? The same Joss who nearly kicked the guts out of a man on the dock at Le Guilvenec? Or have I got the wrong address?”

“He wasn’t a woman, in the first place, and in the second place he was hardly a man. He was a bloodsucking money-grubber who didn’t give a fart if men died as long as he made a pile.”

“Yeah, I know. I can’t really fault you on that one. But that’s not all of it, lad. Why did you call me down?”

“I told you, I didn’t.”

“You’re an obstinate bastard. You’re lucky you’ve got my eyes otherwise I would have given you a black’un. Can you get it into your head that if
I’m
here it’s because you rang, and that’s that. Anyway I’m not a regular in this bar, I don’t like piped music.”

“OK,” Joss conceded. “Can I get you a drink?”

“If you can still raise your arm. Because I’ll be so bold as to tell you you’ve had one too many already.”

“That’s none of your business, old man.”

The forebear shrugged. He’d seen a lot in his time and he wasn’t going to rise to this tiddler’s bait. This young Joss was a fine specimen of the tribe, no question about it.

“So,” the oldster said after he’d downed his pint, “no woman and no dough?”

“You’ve put your finger on it first go,” Joss answered. “You weren’t so canny in your own time, I’ve heard tell.”

“Comes from being a ghost. When you’re dead you know things you never knew before.”

“Are you kidding?” said Joss as he made a feeble gesture towards the barman.

“As far as women are concerned, there was no point calling me down, it’s not my strong suit.”

“Could have guessed that.”

“But work isn’t a hard nut to crack. Just follow in your family footsteps. You weren’t right in cable-spinning, that was a big mistake. And you know, things aren’t to be trusted. Ropes are OK, at a pinch, but as for cables, wires, let alone corks, well, it’s best to give them a wide berth.”

“I know,” said Joss.

“You have to make do with your inheritance. Copy your family.”

“But I can’t be a sailor no more.” Joss was getting ratty. “I’m
persona non grata
in the whole bloody fleet.”

“Who said sailor? If fish were the only thing, God knows where we’d be. Was I a sailor, then?”

Joss drained his glass and pondered the point.

“No,” he said after a pause for thought. “You were a crier. From Concarneau to Quimper, you were the itinerant town crier.”

“That’s right, my boy, and I’m proud of it.
Ar Bannour
was what I was,
the
‘Crier’. And the best on the whole south coast of Breizh. Every day that God gave,
Ar Bannour
strode into another village and on the stroke of half past noon he shouted out the news. And I can tell you, there was folk there who’d been waiting since dawn. I had thirty-seven villages on my round – that was quite something, eh? That made a whole lot of folk, didn’t it? Folk living in the world, thanks to what? Thanks to news! And thanks to whom? To me, my lad, to
Ar Bannour
, the best barker in Finisterre. My voice carried from the church steps to the wash house, and I knew all my words. Everyone raised their heads to listen. My voice brought the whole world to them, and believe you me, it was worth a lot more than fish.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Joss as he took a swig straight out of the bottle on the bar.

“Ever heard of the Crimean War? I covered that one. I went to Nantes to get the news and brought it straight back in the saddle, fresh as the new tide. The Third Republic, heard of that? That was me again. I shouted it on all the foreshores, you should have seen the commotion. Not to mention all the local stuff – marriages, deaths, quarrels, lost and found, stray children, horses needing re-shoeing, I lugged it all around. From one village to the next people gave me news to cry. The love of a girl in Penmarch for a boy in Sainte-Marine, that’s one I still remember. A hell of a scandal, that was. It ended in murder.”

“You could have been more discreet.”

“Hang on, lad. I was paid to read out the news. I was only doing my job. Not to read it out would have been robbing the customer. You know, Le Guerns may be rough customers but we never stole a penny. Fisherfolk’s affairs and squabbles were none of my business – I had enough of that in my own family. I dropped in on the village once a month to see the kids, go to Mass, and bed the wife.”

Joss sighed into his mug.

“And to leave her some money,” the ancestor added, with emphasis. “A wife and eight kids needs a lot of bread. But believe you me,
Ar Bannour
never left them short.”

“Of a thrashing?”

“Of money, you nitwit.”

“You earned as much as that?”

“Loads of money. News is the one line of goods that never runs short on this planet, it’s the one tipple people never get too much of. When you’re a crier, it’s like you’re giving the breast to the whole of humanity. You never run out of milk or of suckling babes. – Hey, lad, if you go on lifting your elbow like that, you’ll never make a crier. It’s a job that calls for a clear head.”

“I don’t want to depress you, old forebear,” said Joss as he shook his head, “but there aren’t any criers any more. Nobody even knows what the word means these days. ‘Cobbler’, well, just maybe, but ‘crier’, that’s not even in the dictionary. I don’t know if you’ve kept up since you died, but down here things have moved on a bit. Who needs to have the news shouted down his lughole in the church square? Everyone’s got the newspapers, radio and TV. You can log on at Loctudy and see who’s having a piss in Pondicherry. That’s the way it is.”

“You really think I’m an old idiot?”

“I’m telling you the way it is, that’s all. My turn now.”

“You’re losing it, my poor Joss. Pull yourself together. You’ve not understood much of what I’ve been telling you.”

Joss stared vacantly at the stately silhouette of his great-great-grandfather as he slid off his bar stool with considerable style.
Ar Bannour
had been a big man by the standards of his day. It’s true Joss was quite like the brute.

“The Crier,” the forebear declared firmly as he brought the flat of his hand down on to the bar to underscore the point, “is Life itself. Don’t tell me that nobody knows what it means any more or that it’s disappeared from the dictionary, or else the Le Guerns really have gone to wrack and ruin and no longer deserve to cry it out loud. Life!”

“What a pathetic old fool!” Joss mumbled as watched the old man depart. “What a load of balls.”

He put his glass back down on the bar and bawled out after him: “In any case, I did not call you down!”

“That’ll do, now,” said the barman as he took Joss by the arm. “Go easy, friend, you’re disturbing the customers as it is.”

“Bugger your bloody customers!” Joss yelled as he held tight on to the bar.

He later recalled that two guys much smaller than he was ejected him from the Mizzen and sent him rolling along the road for almost a hundred yards. He woke up nine hours later in a doorway at least ten metro stations away. Around noon he dragged himself back to his room, using both hands to hold up his splitting head, and went back to sleep until six the next evening. When he finally opened his sore eyes he stared at the filthy ceiling of his flat and said out loud, unrepentantly, “What a load of balls!”

So seven years had now passed since Joss had taken up the outmoded calling of Town Crier. It had been a slow start. It took time to find the right tone of voice, to learn to project it, to find the best site, devise the headings, acquire a clientele, and set the rates. But he’d done it and there he was,
Ar Bannour
. He’d taken his urn to various spots within a radius of half a mile of Gare Montparnasse (he didn’t like to stray too far from the main line to Brittany – just in case, as he said) and about two years ago he’d settled for a pitch on the square where Boulevard Edgar-Quinet crosses Rue Delambre. That location allowed him to tap the local residents who shopped at the market stalls as well as office workers and the well-camouflaged regulars of the local red-light streets; and he could also fish among the crowds pouring out of Gare Montparnasse on their way to work. Dense knots of people crowded round him to hear him bark the news. Maybe not as many as mobbed his great-great-grandfather Le Guern in his day, but against that you had to reckon that Joss gave three performances a day, seven days a week, on the same spot.

What he got a really large number of, though, were messages – on average, about three score were dropped in the urn each day. There were always more in the morning than the evening, as night-time seemed more conducive to people slipping things in without being seen. The routine was that messages had to be sealed in envelopes weighted down with a five-franc coin. Five francs wasn’t an exorbitant amount for hearing your own thought, your own announcement or quest cast into the Paris air. In the early days Joss had tried rock-bottom pricing, but people didn’t like to see
their
sentences valued as low as one franc. It cheapened what they had given. So the five-franc rate suited the crier and his customers equally well, and Joss grossed about nine thousand francs a month for his seven-day job.

Old
Ar Bannour
was right, there was never any shortage of material. Joss had to give the old man his due when he saw him again one drunken night at the Mizzen. “They’re packed full of things to say, people are, just like I told you,” the old man said, delighted to see his descendant getting the business back on its feet. “Packed as tight as horsehair in a mattress. Packed to the edges with things to say and things not to say. You’re doing them a good turn, and you clean up at the same time. You’re their outlet pipe. But watch it, lad, it’s not always a piece of cake. Flushing through pipework brings out the shit as well as the water. So keep an eye out for trouble. There’s loads of muck in men’s heads.”