Poultry

Appears in

Published 1987

About

The church clock in Nuits St Georges strikes twelve and the streets empty. Shopkeepers cover their wares and pull the blinds. Old men, fat purple faces under flat berets, shuffle and waddle like plump bull frogs from their places in the sun. The manager of the bank bounces onto the pavement, pecks left and right across the square, throws his leather jerkin over his shoulders, checks the door of the bank and scuttles for a restaurant.

I am sitting, sipping a kir, waiting for Pierre. Inside the bar the school kids are rolling coins into the juke box which is very loud in the autumnal lunchtime. An orange JCB with big black wheels, like a huge praying mantis, jerks noisily into the square, roaring flat out for a well-deserved aperitif, and judders to a halt. A sixteen-wheeled wine tanker from Morocco backs into the shade – I hope it is arriving to take wine from this golden coast rather than to supplement its fine burgundies with heavy North African wine. Unthinkable, of course.