Having regained my composure sufficiently from my failed attempt to get my paperwork done, I tried again to get my carte de séjour done during the Toussaint holidays. I found the office straight away thanks to Mrs Straw Hat. Trouble was, I ended up waiting for three hours and then it closed for lunch. [...]]]> Previous chapter.

Having regained my composure sufficiently from my failed attempt to get my paperwork done, I tried again to get my carte de séjour done during the Toussaint holidays. I found the office straight away thanks to Mrs Straw Hat. Trouble was, I ended up waiting for three hours and then it closed for lunch. Not to be deterred this time, I was the first on the doorstep when they opened for the afternoon. The woman told me that I would need the carte that I’d had done when I was in Annecy, which was back home in England. Great. I didn’t get upset this time, though, as I was starting to accept that this was just par for the course and not a personal affront.

As I left the office, the heavens opened in a true pathetic fallacy. I ducked into the pharmacy to buy some sweet almond oil to put on my bites.  I had planned to go to the chamber of commerce to get my degree certificated translated for the CAPES, but I gave up on that idea. None of this sums up exactly how crap I was feeling, but I managed to contain myself until I called my mum to ask her to post my old carte de séjour. Thankfully, being an organised kind of person, I knew exactly where it was.

As it was the holidays and not much was going on, I passed by Amy’s place to see how she was getting along. Somehow I ended getting sucked down another vortex of weirdness. I ended up accompanying Amy and this teacher called Tim to look for a mobile phone.

“He’s a bit odd,” Amy warned. Possibly the understatement of the decade.

An ageing Skoda pulled up outside the school and executed a near-perfect handbrake turn. Impresses me every time, that’s for sure.

“Get in then,” he said without saying hello or anything. Rest in peace chivalry, I thought.

He started up with a barrage of questions, which I started to deflect rather skilfully. I was starting to regret saying I’d come. Then I thought, why not play along and have a bit of fun?

Tim seemed to take a macabre pleasure in the seedier side of life. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was into necrophilia, and I don’t say that about many people. During the course of the afternoon, he managed to introduce the subjects of sexual harassment, physical attacks (sexual and non-sexual), marital infidelity, murder, rape and various other crimes against the person.

Tim was in his early forties and from England. He was divorced, he told us. This was because his wife had walked out and left him for another man. I could completely understand why. He spent all afternoon referring to her as his “lady spouse”. He accused me of being a tree-hugging hippy and he didn’t even know me. I cannot really do justice to how obnoxious this guy was. The only surprising thing was that anyone would want to marry him in the first place. He would have been well on his way to becoming another statistic if the knife I’d just stuck between his shoulder blades wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. And that’s coming from a tree-hugging hippy freak.

Against my better judgement, Amy and I ended up at his flat. I thought I’d better go along as I didn’t want to leave Amy alone with him. He lived in Grand-Camp, so we made up some story about being invited somewhere at seven in a bid to escape from this weirdo.

Amy came back to mine and ended up staying over. It was good to talk to someone who was going through the same things I was. If anything, Amy was finding things even more difficult than I was.

I mentioned this Tim to Marie over breakfast the next day. Marie listened carefully and told me never to go to his flat again, advice I gladly heeded. She seemed to know exactly who I was talking about and was convinced that he was a maniac sexuel. She said he sometimes hangs around Match supermarket staring at passers-by. This would not have surprised me. He was a class A freak, at any rate and I’ve known a few.

“If it’s the same guy,” I ventured.

“Hope so,” she said, “Else there’s two of them running around the neighbourhood.”

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