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me happy. It’s just for the people who are passing through for a few minutes; no one lives here. Maybe they’ll stop for half an hour. But still they bothered to make it beautiful.
    “JJ!”
    Gran yells from behind me.
    “Tene needs you.”
    This always happens. When I’m looking at something lovely and feeling happy, my family comes along to annoy me. They seem to get more annoying as I get older, I’ve noticed.
    “I know you heard me.”
    I turn away from the lake and go to lower Great-uncle’s chair down the trailer steps. The ramp is too heavy to get in and out all the time, so we left it behind. This is the bargain that I struck so I could come—as well as speaking French, I also help get Great-uncle to the toilet, because even though he’s got the Elsan, he won’t use it unless he absolutely has to. So Ivo and I take turns doing this. The speaking French part is fun, though a challenge; the toilet part is not a bit fun.
    “Watch out!”
    Great-uncle swears as I bang the chair on the side of the door. He’s really heavy—not fat, but he was a big man, and though he’s a lot thinner than he used to be, he still weighs a lot in his chair.
    “Hell’s bells, kid, what are you doing?”
    I can’t answer, as I need all my breath for lowering the chair down the steps without dropping it. It feels like the veins in my face are going to burst. Also, I’m sure it was Ivo’s turn.
    “Sorry . . .”
    “Right, let’s go and visit my aunt.”
    That’s how Great-uncle asks to go to the toilet. I’ve never heard him say the word “toilet”—it isn’t nice.
    Inside the service station there is French pop music and the smell of real coffee. I must say, French pop is pretty awful compared to English pop, which is the best in the world, but then, maybe that’s just the stuff they play in service stations. When I live here I expect I’ll find out about the good stuffthat they keep to themselves.
    We head for the gents’, where Great-uncle, as usual, asks me to wait outside. It’s to preserve his modesty, and mine, I suppose, but honestly, I’d rather go in than hang around outside the men’s lavs looking like a gaylord. I’m not allowed to walk away, either, as he’s been known to shoutfor me when he gets into difficulties. I try to look as though I’m not remotely interested in anyone else going into the gents’, but they always stare at me. Maybe it’s because I’ve got long hair. Yesterday, a man came up and asked me for the time. I told him, in my best French, that I didn’t have a watch ( “Je suis désolé, monsieur, mais je n’ai pas une montre” ), but he just smiled at me and jerked his head toward the door. I stared back, confused. Then he made a filthy gesture. Suddenly I realized what he meant, and I ran like the clappers. Great-uncle was really cross—he’d managed to drop his pipe, and it rolled behind the toilet where he couldn’t reach it. He kept yelling until some man and his wife came and found us. They said my grandfather needed me. They looked scared—people often do around wheelchairs. Great-uncle wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. But how was I to know?
    I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t love Great-uncle. I do. He’s interesting to talk to and can be really funny. We like the same TV programs—old black-and-white Western serials and police shows. He knows lots of bloodthirsty Gypsy stories, and used to tell me them when I was younger. He doesn’t do it anymore, because I’m too old—and maybe because I used to ask tons of questions that annoyed him—like “But why did the king’s son get a golden feather? He didn’t use it!” and “How could the second brother be so stupid? He sees his brother die, and then he does the same thing!”
    He also lets me listen to his records—Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Cash, lots of old American stuff. He likes country and western, as it’s about people having a really bad time, which makes you feel