“50 and you’re out!”  

Lydia Hanning surprised herself with this determined outburst, realising her utterance was not just a thought … it was her own voice, strong and bold.  Suddenly she knew this was the moment she had so often dreamed of but did not dare believe. Her eyes recorded the moment like the snap of a camera shutter, taking in the bright blue sky, the long avenue of plane trees, the picture-postcard view of the Canal du Midi with the lock-keeper’s cottage flanking the ribbon of green-brown water.  

In an instant a myriad of other tiny details were captured: a passing nuclear family of holidaying cyclists on the tow-path, the male clad in pseudo Tour de France clothing pulled a small buggy containing an incredibly ugly tiny child … the pink-clad wife with her pink face, cycled deferentially three metres behind with the hairy white head of a yapping small dog poking out of her front basket.  These images all burned into her mind, recorded forever.

“It’s serendipity!”

Suddenly she was an athlete lined up for a final huge challenge.  A few last long deep breaths and she exploded into action.  Her mind clear, everything seems to slow down as in one continuous motion she plucks the key from the ignition of the midnight-blue touring BMW R1200 motorcycle and then drops to the side of the bike.  Within seconds she has opened the right-hand hard-pannier and dragged out the soft stuff-bag liner that contained the few items of clothing that Judd limited her to.  Slamming the pannier shut, she slipped out of the tasselled leather jacket that she so loathed.  This added to the feeling that this really was the opportunity that she had known would one day present itself.  Slinging the jacket over the handlebars she swept up the small rucksack leaning against the front wheel and with both bags clutched to her lean frame, she starts to sprint.

Her imagination calls out to her … “run Lola run, run Lola run!”  

Two minutes earlier she had waved an acknowledgement to the helmsman of an ancient canal boat as it went through the procedures involved in progressing through the canal’s lock.  A limp and tattered flag with vertically-oriented red, yellow, and black panels hanging from an unpainted pole at the stern proclaimed it to be Belgian.  Whilst she had followed the necessary rituals of opening the lower gates and the slow filling of the lock chamber with interest, Judd had scoffed at the enjoyment the middle-aged couple were obviously having.  

“Silly wankers … won’t get far at that speed. Spend all week getting to the next village.”  Dismissively he stood up and farted noisily.  “I’m going for a crap!  If you need me … I’m fertilising the cornfield!”

“Can’t you wait?”  Almost as she said it she knew her querulous, moralistic tone would inflame and further destroy their fragile relationship.  She somehow knew this was the final tripping event.  For a day and a half, she had been marooned on 49.  She’d even forfeited an earlier opportunity, giving him one extra chance.  But now, she sensed the approach of her ‘road to Damascus’ epiphany.

“Silly bitch, when you’ve got to go … you’ve got to go!  I’m off to give birth to a Frenchie!”  And with that, he jogged across the narrow strip of rural Departmental Highway and disappeared into the tall corn.

Lydia had closed her eyes and momentarily wondered how she had got to this point in her life.  Shaking her head, she later would recall the clarity, the thoughts of “I am woman!  Hear me roar!”  

She had given him so many let-offs, so many opportunities to treat her with normal respect.  A week earlier when they had reached Paris, the so-called ‘city of love’, she had finally made her positive affirmation.  There was only so many times he could call her ‘bitch’ before he would reap what he sowed.  She even allowed him a false start in the Customs Hall of Orly Airport, but from that moment she was counting.  There was no reason why she decided on 50 as the magic number.  Perhaps it was a deep feeling of denial, of hope, of maybe thinking that this holiday, so un-expectantly won in a raffle, could somehow change things.

These reflections had barely lasted a nano-second, not interrupting her dash in the slightest.  Probably less than 30 seconds had passed since she had made the dramatic call to run.  The canal boat had already moved off from the top gate of the lock and was now steadily thudding its way towards Carcassonne, but due to the presence of a moored barge on the far side, it was no more than one and a half metres from the towpath. Without hesitation, Lydia timed her jump to perfection and she soared over the low bulwark rail, impressing herself and surprising the boating couple, who reacted in unison gasping “Mon Dieu” as she landed between them, with Henri as she came to know him as, letting go of the wheel in shock.

“Take me away!  Hide me!  I have to escape.”  Not waiting for an answer, Lydia squeezed past them and hurried down into the cabin. Without any English comprehension, but with the intuitive understanding of one woman sensing the other’s need through the urgency of her actions and words, the short Belgian woman sized up the situation quickly and pushed her husband back to the wheel.  

“Vite, vite!” she snapped, then they all laughed in the realisation that there was no ‘vite, vite’ with a canal boat.  And so it was at a steady walking pace that Lydia moved away into her new life, a gentle wake arrowing out behind, secretly pointing to her desertion.  They were just gliding around a curve in the canal many hundred metres away when they saw the strutting Lilliputian figure of Judd closing in on the bike from his al fresco defecation.  From the safety of distance and hidden behind the angled glass of the wheelhouse Lydia became a tight-lipped voyeur, barely daring to breathe.  She pulled back against the side wall, needing something to support her now quivering body.

“Ca va? Ca va? … Je m’appelle Mimi.”

“Oui, ca va Mimi” Lydia hesitantly grinned back as the motherly older woman pulled a blanket around her shoulders and hugged her. She’d then stepped back a little, all the while keeping a physical contact by squatting down beside her and taking her shaking hands in her own.  Their eyes met and they both held the moment, Lydia feeling an inner-warmth she’d not experienced for many years.    The broad weathered face had deep laugh-lines radiating out as furrows from the ends of her eyes.  They seemed to have recorded an honest hard-working life that had known its share of love, tears and laughter.  It was a humble, earnest face that now shared the concern of the moment.  There was something about those grey-green eyes that Lydia found reassuring.  Their clarity seemed to give her an assurance that all would be well.  

The two Belgians spoke calmly and quietly, the sounds and rhythm of their conversation helping soothe the still excited young New Zealand girl.  A few minutes passed before a realisation hit Lydia like a bright light being turned on. She suddenly burst into hysterical laughter and grabbed the rucksack from the window seat beside her. Frantically she pulled on the sturdy zips like a woman possessed and within seconds she pulled a pale coloured money-belt into the light of the wheelhouse and held it aloft in triumph.

“Look, look!” she cried, pulling out the passport and credit cards of her now distant husband.  “It truly is serendipity!”  She recalled his strident demand that she took his money-belt because he found it uncomfortable.  He really was reaping what he had sown.  As the older pair gained the knowledge and significance of what Lydia held, they too joined in the laughter.  Lydia then stood and slid her right hand into the pocket of her jeans bringing out the pièce de résistance.  Once Henri and Mimi saw the key-fob with the blue and white quartered roundel proudly declaring BMW, the three of them released collegial laughter in gusts and waves. Like trying to stifle a giggle in church, their childish enjoyment couldn’t be immediately stopped.  One would manage control momentarily, before involuntarily re-joining the others, often with a spray of spittle and even more laughter.

It was fully five minutes and a near-miss with a canal-boat going the other way before they were fully able to reassemble a suitable level of decorum.  For Lydia, it was a euphoric period of immediate reflection.  She revelled in the thought of bombastic, impatient Judd, with no money, no passport and no key to the BMW.  Knowing too how xenophobic he was, gave her more joy as she recalled him always insisting that Lydia did all the social interaction with non-English speakers on the trip.  It was the ‘foreignness’ of the trip that nearly made Judd refuse to come.  Lydia had bought the raffle ticket at a Ulysses Club function earlier in the year dreaming that the prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe to ride a new BMW from Paris to Barcelona would be a wonderful respite from the bitter early winter that had been raging around the lower North Island.  The prize draw had been a very public affair and Judd’s friends’ raucous envy was probably the thing that tipped him over into a position of acceptance.  There seemed little recognition that it was Lydia who had bought the ticket.  Suddenly Judd was the centre of attention … a position he often assumed and sometimes demanded.  There was a lot of banter focussed on the fact that Judd wouldn’t be on his Harley Davidson … a machine Lydia hated with a passion … that he would be carried along on a magic carpet ride courtesy of the Bayerische Motoren Werke.

Lydia had always felt that Judd’s motorcycling was a pose, something that went with his self-image of being a hard man.  The ludicrous ‘Live to Ride’ and spread eagle’s wings on the back of his jacket seemed so hackneyed and formulaic, as was his insistence that Lydia wore a jacket with tassels hanging from the arms and leather ‘chaps’.  Despite her protestation that the cowboy-style chaps left her with a cold crotch and weren’t waterproof, his dogmatic insistence held sway.  Almost every piece of apparel they donned to ride the 2020 Fatboy was adorned in some way with Harley Davidson or Milwaukee.  The whole assumed-lifestyle smacked of being a ‘weekend warrior’, the ‘born to be wild’ cry of the inadequate in her eyes, although she dared not express herself accordingly.

The BMW had been a revelation.  It was quiet, it was smooth and comfortable, it had luggage-carrying capability, it was an absolute wonder.  Her periods on the bike were bliss, a retreat into her own reflective world that gave her enjoyment and finally the hope and the inspiration to carry out her visualised threat of flight.  In a way, she would be sorry to no longer be carving her way through the lovely French countryside and dawdling through picturesque villages.  She laughed again at the simple recollection “the go’s were wonderful, the stops horrid”.

Although only 30 minutes had passed since her dash, Lydia now felt so at home watching Mimi beavering away making a simple lunch of ham, tomatoes and cheese, slipping the wholesome ingredients into a slender, crusty yet fresh, ficelle loaf for each of them.  Henri was at the helm, singing a song that Mimi regularly joined for the choruses, their harmonies perhaps reflecting their life together, Lydia thought. It was like being in a gentle foreign movie, one that she’d paid no entry fee for.  Her idyll was broken by the strident call of her cell phone. She gasped and initially shrank back.  Mimi reached over and put her hand on Lydia’s arm and shook her head.  They left the call to ring out.  Lydia could see it was from Judd and it took all her new strength to resist answering it.  When the shrill repetitive ring finally ceased, she dialled-in to change her answering message.

“This is Lydia, I am currently travelling in France and won’t be answering calls.  You may text and perhaps I will respond … in the meantime, au revoir!”

Two hours later, the three of them were exchanging warm hugs and bisous kisses to both cheeks.  The Carcassonne Railway Station beckoned.  If Lydia had gleaned the right information on her iPhone, there should be a TGV high-speed train leaving within the hour, with connections all the way to Paris.  With joyous resolve, she had decided to takeJudd’s passport to the New Zealand Embassy in Paris and leave it there for him to collect … or not.  As she entered through the portals of the elegant stone building, she passed a young gendarme, pausing for a moment before inquiring if he spoke English.  Receiving an affirmative answer, she then briefly told him that by mistake she had taken her husband’s motorcycle key and that she was about to board a train. Dazzled by her fresh beauty and persuasiveness, he agreed to take the key, nodding his understanding of the vagueness of her description of where to find the marooned moto rider.

When the doors to the train finally swished together and the platform began to slowly move past the windows of her half-cabin, Lydia couldn’t help musing “you’re on a roll baby!”  It seemed like a fresh spring sun was entering her world after years of greyness and deprivation.  She could recall when Judd was the centre of her universe … but equally, she could track the slow relentless path to the present, as she came to realise that the directness and single-mindedness that attracted her to him, slowly repelled her, as it revealed itself as arrogance and insensitivity.  His absolute insistence in controlling every facet of her life soon palled and morphed into an existence of dreary, resentful subservience. He’d squeezed her dry … she was his ‘trophy wife’.  His success in business brought fawning sycophants and the trappings of wealth, but not a bit of joy into her life.

“I haven’t been this excited or wicked since Bronwyn Parker and I wagged school and went on the ferry to Waiheke Island”, she said to no one in particular, not sure if she had spoken aloud or just to her new ‘happy self’.  The countryside rushed past in blurred squares of yellow, brown or green crops. Everything she was touching was turning to gold.  She was facing a new beginning, a new life … one that she could participate in … mould and enjoy.  She revelled in the thought of this freedom.  One last wave of realisation came over her with the recall that Judd had settled a commercial property deal on the day they left for France, and in the face of an impending Inland  Revenue audit, had transferred the total funds into her account.

“Let’s see the pricks get their hands on that!” he’d smirked with typical coarseness.

“Indeed” Lydia laughed and looked up to find an elegant woman looking at her with an interested, bemused smile.

“Mademoiselle is tres ‘appy!”

“Very … I’ve just left my husband.”

“Oh la la … I will get the Champagne!”

Photos that inspired the story

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