the Kings’ Cake
A Twelfth Night Story
© Jon Horne  

   Perpignan, 6th January 1998
    Rue Charles de Gaulle, running between the Place de Catalogne and the railway station (which Dali called the Centre of the World and no one got the joke) is empty - as are Churchill Boulevard, the Place de Roosevelt and the former Avenue Stalin (since renamed). Everywhere is the same: smart restaurants, small cafés and bars by the concrete banks of the river; shops, libraries and cinemas; even the central square where at any other time drunks and crazies vie for precious ranting-space with boules-throwers and politically-extreme newspaper vendors - all of it deserted. It is Twelfth Night.
    I turn away from Rue Charles de Gaulle and wander up a pitch-dark alley. I might as well because the local muggers (a pair of whom made the front page of yesterday’s paper) are probably at home too, eating the kings’ cake and unwrapping presents from their mothers.
    A black cat darts across my path. Which is just taking the piss.
    On the outside wall of Le Bar Kilt is a ten-feet-square painted Union Jack, leaning against which is a giant, bored doorman. Opposite, across a dual carriageway that must be the ring-road, is a council estate; long high-rise blocks kept erect by some sort of flying buttress arrangement with battered Renault 5s parked at their feet. Open shutters let the light out from a thousand bright-lit, decorated living rooms. I turn back to the bar. Inside, a sound system plays Afro-Parisian techno, interrupted by the garbled, amplified bellow of a DJ. Through tinted windows, obscured by adverts for Courage Best bitter, I can see shadows of people. It is not a welcoming place, but it is good to know I’m not on my own. I head indoors, and the doorman cheers up for having someone to frisk.
    The bar is full (not quite to the brim) of twenty-year-olds on the pull, a welcome reminder that this grand, historic, desperate, depressed little city is, at root, made up of the same sort of people as everywhere else. I was beginning to wonder.
   
    This morning I woke up with a cold and a hangover on a big iron bed in a dank and musty hotel room that faced the centre of the world. The cold was my fault. The day after New Year, in another rented room in another city, I dried a towel on the radiator and forgot to open the shutters, leaving me to sleep in what amounted to a sauna. As for the hangover, I blame Perpignan.
    From the high ground surrounding the Palace Of The Kings Of Majorca, the white caps of the Pyrenees Orientales shine in the distance, the foothills pockmarked with postcard villages. The road to Andorra rises from a vast, expansive plain and twists into the mountains. Turn around and on the opposite horizon, the Mediterranean is as deep a blue as everyone says it is.
    I mention this partly to explain why I didn’t just pack up and go somewhere else this morning, and partly because it throws into sharp relief the stubbornly miserable faces that I’ve been seeing for the past couple of days.
    Travel is easy to romanticise. The memories that I hold closest are of times when I have let myself be sucked, uncomprehending and usually drunk, into a random selection of other lives. There’s no logic to who will let you in: lonely or gregarious people naturally, but they come in all shapes. I’m like that myself sometimes. You forget the days when no one speaks to you (and when they do, you can’t understand a word they say) and you’re left looking at buildings and walking through picturesque streets, sitting on benches trying to decipher newspaper articles from the photographs, wondering what the blazes is going on. It’s been like that ever since I got here. Earlier today, a homeless girl smiled and thanked me when I gave her the leftovers from my dinner (roast chicken with potatoes and onions in an exquisite white gravy - this is France after all) and that was the only smile I saw all day. I don’t mean that no one else smiled at me, I mean no one else smiled.
   
    Last night I stopped in one of the bars which line Rue Charles de Gaulle. I drank a half-litre of Pelforth Christmas Special and was handed a slice of cake.
    “It’s almond,” said a man sitting next to me at the bar, “and you are a stranger.”
    “Pardon?”
    He added something I didn’t understand. I thanked the barman anyway and bit into the cake, which tasted like a Bakewell tart. I spat out a fifty-centime coin. The man next to me tried to laugh, but gave up. The barman said: “It is the kings’ cake, you understand?”
    He held up three fingers, then made the shape of a crown.
    “We three kings of orient are,” I sang in English.
    “Pardon?”
    “Thank you, I understand,” I said.
    The man next to me bought me a Pelforth. I drank it and bought a round of Hoegaardens. He was impressed and bought me one back. All the time he was talking to me and I understood perhaps one word in three. When I asked him to speak slower, he spoke louder. He would begin with a subject (skiing, fascism, Catalan independence, his daughter’s new boyfriend - of whom he approved), expound for a moment with slow solemnity, then race into a diatribe that lost me after the second sentence; a shame since I was the only one listening. An hour later he was shouting between gulps of beer (we were back on the Pelforth) and I was making plans to run for it if he turned nasty.
    A girl walked in and the shouting stopped. She went around the bar kissing everyone with grim-faced formality. Her lover waited in a corner, greeted her with equally-grim passion, and the pair of them left together. The bar stayed silent for a long time after that.
    Another beer appeared in front of me.
    “Is something happening here?” I asked.
    “No,” said the man next to me, draining his glass.
    The brown, burnt-tasting beer had taken over my system and I wanted a distraction. I put some money on the pool table and won three straight games. A Hoegaarden was waiting for me when I lost the fourth. The man started talking to me again, this time a little slower.
    “It’s just difficult sometimes,” he said, maybe in answer to my earlier question. I nodded and he didn’t elaborate. The room began to empty. The barman took out the rest of the kings’ cake. Only two pieces were gone.
    “You and one more,” he said in a dull tone, then handed me another piece and replaced the cake beneath the bar.
    I took a bit, swallowed it and said: “There is something happening, isn’t there?”
    The barman said: “What do you mean?”
    “Something... dark.”
    He frowned. I might have said ‘something dull’. My French is very bad. On the other hand he may well get poetic drunks in here every night waxing lyrical and incomprehensible about the dark meaninglessness of existence (as I said, this is France). Or something dark may be happening. He closed the bar. The man next to me got up and bellowed a monologue into my ear. I didn’t understand it.
    “Catalan,” said the barman, “he speaks it when he’s drunk.”
    “What did he say?”
    “I don’t speak Catalan. Please, it’s time to go home.”
    The man was waiting outside. This time he spoke slowly in French, saying: “The other stranger, he ate the other slice.”
    “What?”
    He turned away and began to walk home.
    “What?!” I repeated; then in English: “What the bloody hell are you people talking about?!!”
    He carried on his way.
    “What’s going on here? Tell me, you...” I yelled. He was long gone.
    I rested my head for a moment against a lamp post. Two taxis negotiated the narrow entrance to the railway station side-by-side. The white facade of the centre of the world shone with an haunting glow by the light of yellow street lamps. Perhaps.
   
    In Le Bar Kilt, a girl’s laugh tinkles over a whoomping bassline. False but lovely, it impresses a nearby boy and gets the girl a drink. The DJ leaves his decks and jumps the bar in a slick movement, sliding onto a tiny dancefloor. There he spins and steps on his own. He lasts for three records, then goes to talk to his mate who has been mixing in his absence. They laugh at something shared between them, then take hold of the microphone together and rap appallingly (deliberately). A freckled barman brings me a Hoegaarden and serves it with a smile.
    Three goths in a corner, a boy and girl in leather and another boy in a long coat which drags on the floor by his chair, stare meaningfully into their drinks with mascara-deepened grey eyes. The girl, whose face is chalked white with black lipstick, cracks into a grin and then a snorting laugh. The rest follow.
    I’m smiling a lot at the moment. It’s only fair. I can’t laugh with anyone though, because I don’t know what they keep finding so funny.
    They begin filing out of Le Bar Kilt. I recognise the name of a restaurant in town, in overheard shouted conversations. This must be where the young and pretty of Perpignan are going next; maybe it’s a nightclub as well as a restaurant.
    I feel quite pleased with myself because I know what’s going on. I still want to know the truth though, about last night, and no one here can tell me. Perhaps they don’t know that something is dark in Perpignan.