Metropolitan Lines Issue 2 - Brunel University

She hoped that they would be
spared the inevitable spasm of
violence that would spout forth
from Franco like the gushing of a
freshly severed artery.
For the next few years, life
changed for Pierre Lumbord
and his mother Janine. His name
was Pierre Laforge and his mother
was Jeanette Laforge. The town of
Toulouse was large enough for two
new arrivals to join it anonymously,
but was still small enough to have
the communities that made the
difference between a building and a
home. Keen to conserve as much of
the money as possible but, equally
careful to avoid the worst parts of
town, Jeanette settled on a small
community mostly populated with
first generation Indians and
Pakistanis. She liked the smells
from the shops and the friendly
people who greeted her in broken
and funny accented French. That
she was different from them was no
problem. She was black, however
her skin was light; unlike Pierre who
had taken after his father, a deep
dark brown. Jeanette settled in a
small block of apartments, the
tenants were all poor but proud and
the place was scrupulously clean.
Many of the tenants had small
children too and soon Jeanette was
able to go out to work, happy to
leave her little Pierre with Manjit,
her kindly next door neighbour.
Pierre was a quiet withdrawn
boy. Too quiet. Jeanette worried
about him a lot. She had put him in
a local nursery, however, after a few
days it became clear that he wasn’t
settling in and getting on with the
other children. Then there was the
incident with the two boys and a
girl. Jeanette still refused to believe
what he had supposedly done.
Anyway she had had to take him out
of the nursery and now Manjit
looked after him during the day.
School was a year off so she didn’t
have to worry about it yet, but all the
same it was going to be difficult to
get him a place anywhere that was
local. The fact that the little girl had
still not returned to classes was still
fresh in everybody’s mind and would
continue to be until she was allowed
to return. Jeanette had seen the
child and had always thought her to
be overly sensitive and there were a
lot of people that saw it the same as
her. She shuddered involuntarily
and pushed the thoughts from her
mind. She shouldn’t dwell on the
negative; after all she had so much
to be thankful for.
Jeanette worked at a local
Pakistani Cafe as a washer-upper in
the kitchen, then as a waitress and
as the years wore on and she became
a trusted member of the family, the
manageress.
For a time life was good. It was
hard work, but it was honest work,
and she was amongst people that
she cared about and that cared for
her and her son.
The Pakistani and Indian
community thrived along with the
Italians and native French, and
much was made of the success of
this town in France which, against
the odds and Jean Marie Le Pen’s
National Party’s exhortations, had
‘integrated’. To the extent that the
Prime Minister himself visited, to
congratulate the town and their
folk. Much was at stake in this
community, for there were many
detractors that sought to overthrow
the convivial relations that they had
enjoyed for many years. The
incessant nibbling at the edges of
their community by the Nationalists
had threatened to overturn all their
hard work. Ceaseless vigilance had
26
postgraduate fiction
prevailed. The elder representatives
of each community remained in
continual dialogue. Their doors
remained open to each other,
regardless of the reckless and fickle
deeds of the youngest amongst
them. That way many an incident
that could have been fanned quickly
out of control by the racists
withered and died, starved of the
oxygen of hatred, as the community
closed its ranks.
The informal structure that had
been employed to such success here
had been written about much
within the newspapers and been the
subject of scholarly works also. The
French government wanted to use
it those for places where the melting
pot had boiled over.
In a country where the
nationalistic opposition ran out of
fingers when counting out
illustrative examples of the great
integration experiment gone wrong,
this was the one the government
needed to combat the growing
feeling of resentment within their
borders. Perhaps they would even
be given an opportunity to look
down on their brothers across the
Channel, instead of wringing their
hands and looking at their collective
feet.
The choice of the face of this
community was so important that
the Prime Minister’s aides were
dispatched to find their poster boys
and girls. Their search ended when
they walked into the Pakistani
restaurant and saw the light skinned
negro manageress discussing the
layout for a wedding party with the
Pakistani owner, and the white
head waiter. The little black boy
playing with the small light-skinned
Pakistani girl was enough to make
the slim, conservatively-dressed civil
servant shudder in anticipation.
Metropolitan Lines Summer 2008
Chicken Jack
Perry Bhandal