Society Girls

Chapter One "Bonjour Madame!" I greet the lady behind the desk and put on my most charming smile. It always does to treat these ladies well. Some of them have the power of a small country. She looks up from her work, peers at me over the top of her half-moon glasses and sniffs slightly as though she can smell my Englishness. My smile falters a little. I mean, I have been in a police station in England before. Once. So although I'm not exactly a hardened criminal, I do have some idea of the form. But do they do things differently in France? "Mon frere est ici . . ." I start haltingly in my GCSE French. The problem with GCSE French is that you have to fight a constant urge to ask people their name, how old they are and where they live before you can get down to the brass tacks of any problem. "Il est . . . er . . . em . . ." I'm trying desperately to find the word I need. I trawl through my limited vocabulary. It's no good, there's nothing that vaguely matches it. So I try the English phrase. "UNDER ARREST." It doesn't seem to fool her; she looks at me blankly. I try it again, this time with a French accent. "ARRESTE." "Il est en etat d'arrestation?" she queries. This sounds vaguely right so I nod. "Qui s'appelle?" "Il s'appelle Barney Colshannon." "Attendez l bas." She gestures to some chairs by the wall, so Sam and I duly wander over to them and sit down. Of course, I blame my mother for all this. She had just received Morgan the Pekinese's pet passport and suggested we all nip over to France for the weekend to see if it was working. He is a rather old and smelly dog with no teeth left in the front of his mouth and will pee on anything if you leave it in the middle of the room. I'm not quite sure what he is thinking when he tries to bite other dogs, he must be under the impression he can suck them to death. Anyway, despite being adored by my mother, Morgan and I have never quite seen eye to eye, so why we couldn't have just popped him on a cross channel ferry and waited to see if he came back I simply do not know. However, the pull of some French bread and cheap booze was simply too much for us and we all readily acquiesced. My mother always makes France sound absolutely delightful as she is a bit of a Francophile at heart, but her version is solely based on Gerard Depardieu and some adverts she did for the French tourist board back in the eighties which involved her getting pissed on Bordeaux. According to her, France is just one big bit of cheese with plenty of wine and a few ooh-la-las thrown in. Not a police station in sight. This is a clearly inaccurate opinion because here I am in a French police station with no cheese, no wine and certainly no ooh-la-las. We had all split up this morning to go our separate ways. I wanted to look at the shops, Barney went down on the beach and as Sam has the only real job out of all of us, he had to make some work phone calls. Sam is Barney's best friend. He has been since we moved to Cornwall about fifteen years ago and hence he's always been a presence in my life. I popped back to the hotel after my little shopping sortie (didn't buy anything as I am stony broke but that is another story) and the receptionist there gave me the message about Barney. I immediately went to get Sam because he is a lawyer and I was under the misapprehension that he might be of some use, and then we headed for the police station in double quick time. So at this precise moment my parents are sitting in a little cafe somewhere in Le Touquet, expecting us to turn up any second but nonetheless having a raucous time and probably some cheese too, blissfully oblivious to the fact that their son has been arrested. Whereas I, by virtue of my French GCSE, sit here (which just goes to show that too much education can be aMason, Sarah is the author of 'Society Girls ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345469571 and ISBN 0345469577.