Free My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones Page B

all liked that dog: regulation black and white, short haired and fatalistic, it was called Lucky.
    We went up to the orchards early every morning to finger-vacuum the cherries; there was a knack to it and a pro could make £100 a day, even then. The best pickers were a gypsy family who lived in an opulent motorhome the size of an articulated lorry. I met the father collecting snails from the dank verges one evening at dusk and he invited me round for a meal; I was sorely tempted because his plump, post-pubescent daughter – unblemished by any formal education – had been making black olive eyes at me and I was still young enough to consider all the openings that came my way. Never could eat snails: said No. Looking back, those people lived wonderful lives. No taxes, picking money off the trees in bucketfuls, browsing, moving leisurely from one crop to the next. Wish I’d married that girl now – she was straight from a French Darling Buds of May ; we’d be fat on snails, slouching around in white vests swelling around our Pyrenean tums, always brown, sleeping sweetly on the shores of the Mediterranean, perfumed with garlic and happy ever after, me drowsy with wine.
    Anyway, to cut a long story short, Lucky copped off with a poodle one morning in the orchard, early on, soon after sunrise in fact: the dirty dog must have been thinking about it all night. Still a few drops of dew on the leaves, delicious strands of coolness inside the branches. But the poodle was twice his size and he had his work cut out. He stuck to his task dogfully, though. At first he got a rousing reception from the onlookers, beating their buckets, shouting Allez Lucky! and Vas-y Lucky!
    A circle of about twenty, mainly French but some Spanish, looked down on him as he prepared to hump away among the cherry trees – making wood, as they say. Only one of them said nothing at all, a slip of a girl, small and slim, boyish, brown as a berry in a simple country dress or tabard made from felt in a burnt carmine brown. Simple but effective. Short black hair, fussless, freckles, olive skin, pumps, small breasts and violet eyes which never looked at Lucky or at me. No, not once.
    By eleven o’clock they were still making a fuss of Lucky, stuck to his poodle, stuck to his task, bobbing away on his scrawny haunches as we reaped the cherries. The red ran from the trees, lipstick smudged from lip to cup. Among the ladders and the stepladders and the buckets, somewhere by the weighing machine (ancient, rusty) he pumped and wheezed but my little French tomboy never cast a glance at him nor me, oh no, not a single sideways look. Such bloody insouciance. Not even when two little boys started playing with a scorpion under my tree, moving around it in frog hops, prodding it with sticks, not even then did she show a flicker of interest; little girly shoulders and apricot hips, slender, a body without a flounce or a bounce, that’s all I saw of her all morning – and she in the next tree, a short monkey-dash away.
    By lunchtime they were getting fed up of Lucky and his extravagant, illicit shagathon. His eyes had puddled into two small dribbles of yellow candle wax pooling in a smoky Parisian bordello. Dinner time came so we left him to it, climbed aboard Bruyes’ van, one of those archetypal Froggie things rippling with corrugated iron and confessional windows. Someone had crammed half a dozen seats in the back long ago; I’m not joking, that crate might have ferried people from the Bastille to the Place de la Concorde when the tumbrels were full. Come to think of it, was that cherry juice running freely on the floor, or blood?
    Mademoiselle Violette stayed up there in the orchard with Maupassant’s ghost, teaching sang froid to the sparrows and nibbling croissants with perfect élan, her pretty little nose in the air.
    When we arrived at the farmhouse Bruyes went into a rage and fired an enfilade of frank nasal insults at