I'm not entirely sure of all of last night.
I began wonderfully. A handful of people packed into here, Caro and Annik and Guillaume, sipping port from a cave in Porto or cinammon liqueur from somewhere in Spain, chatting of this or that, singing along to the ecclectic collection playing off my mp3s.
I even got some work done while everyone distracted their own damned selves.
S�b was late, as usual, and we got to Maja's around nine instead of eight, her guitar was already in her hand and she looked beautiful.
Welcome to the next quarter century of your life, Maja.
Her fianc� Andreas was there, having secretly hopped on a train from Hamburg to scare the living shit out of her at the party at Bercy that I'd skipped out on.
He found her. In a stadium packed with over ten thousand people.
And he made dinner, bits of evenly sliced bread piled up in the ogranized manner that only an ex cub-scout could have conjured.
We ate and laughed and spoke english/french/broken german, Andreas very happy that someone understood his english/german mix, and very impressed with strange monstre attempts at humour in a language I've had all of three days contact with.
Then Maja brought the guitar back out again, and gestured me to her side.
She pulled out the score to that song we've been learning.
And everyone went real quiet. And I went real red, suddenly uncomfortable in my linen dress, suddenly aware of too many looks in my direction, and me not waving something silly in my hand and goofing off.
And then she started playing, hummed the first two bars to get me ready, strapped on the "capo" and jumped an octave to play soprano for me and...
I was off and running and trying desperately to find the notes.
We sang together, her mezzo and my high-pitched excuse for a melody, and before each crescendo we grinned at each other and she'd cue me with a nod of her head and I'd straighten up and suck in my meagre abs and we'd hold the note, seemingly forever, wavering here and there together, until we could hear the intakes of breath over our own trilling.
When everyone clapped I had my hands on my hips and was already hiding behind a wall of jokes about how hard she pushes me during class.
Caro, Alexe's friend who's staying with me until Tuesday, dismissed it with a secret wave and reached out to mutter something far too sweet about how hard it must have been to hit that second B, how impressively high my voice can go.
"Shrill you mean, impressively shrill", but she only shook her head.
We went on singing, for hours. A four non-blondes song, 25 years, all low and deep and Maja tickling me now and then to not follow her here or there and instead sing high while she sang low.
My first attempt at harmonizing. In public.
I fucked it up royally, but did it anyway, and frankly, nobody there coulda done much better, bunch of barbarians that we were.
And we sang and sang, Edith Piaf and more harmonizing, The Beatles and fancy falsettos, random german campfire songs that Caro and I managed to sing along to after the first couple of cues.
It was beautiful.
Maja is beautiful.
We made a bouquet of Marv's lillies with heavy blue paper (lillia, in german) for all the ladies, while Maja taught me a german lullaby.
THen we headed home, most of the kids already rarin' for their 8am wakeup for the amusement park.
Guillaume asked if he could crash here too, since it would make Seb's life easier when picking everyone up, and since he'd spent the day with Caro and was showing all the signs of being rather attached (fetching her glass of wine, offering her this or that, leaning in extra close to hear her speak) I figured...
Might be a good idea.
So I curled up on the little student mattress that stands in my hall for such occasions, and because of the heat of the evening, forgot to grab my sleeping back for extra covers.
By five in the morning I was shivering uncontrollably, and couldn't lie still anymore.
I got up to grab the sleeping bag off the top of my armoire, realized there was WAY too much stuff piled atop it to not wake anyone up.
Guillaume, who was wayyyyy over on Caro's side of the bed, trying rather pathetically to coax her into a little cuddling, waved me over.
Desperate for body heat, I went.
Completely forgetting that I was already furious enough with him to not want to be in the same room, let alone the same bed...
I have this thing with my feet, see.
I hate having them touched. Other people's feet are fine, and when princess strips off her sweaty knee-high boots and orders a foot-massage, I'm only too thrilled to comply.
Just don't touch mine.
Everyone knew this, we'd spent a part of the evening discussing it, and when we were all stuffed in the back of Seb's truck and Guillaume reached over to tickle my feet, I patiently explained that I'd prefer he didn't do that.
Fist fights, cool. Tickle fights, I guess I can handle. Water fights, beer fights, what have you, I'm generally too busy being weird to say no to much.
Expect touching my feet.
So when he wouldn't lay off, I snapped, and the car went quiet.
"I asked you nicely not to do that. I don't like that."
"But that's why it's fun."
"Look, fuckwit, that's the WORST idea of fun I've ever heard. It's not like your behaviour is on a particularly tight leash in this group, why in hell do you have to push limits and try to upset people for fun?"
In response, he tickled my feet.
And monstre said a monstre thing.
"It's people like you that are the reason for police and government. You're handed a relative utopia and you're not happy unless you're ruining it for someone, breaking a rule that had to be made up just for you, just so you can feel like a big man when you fuck up other people's serenity with it."
Silence. Shocked silence.
Seb swore at a cabbie and started singing something or other, the moment passed.
Climbing up the steps to my appartment, the moment was over. Guillaume pouted a bit, his horrendous ego letting out swarms of noxious gas, then went back to concentrating on bugging Caro.
Back in my kitchen, sharing one last porto before bed, he tickled my feet again, leering.
I had nothing left to say. I stalked off, made my bed, closed the window and said goodnight.
He pouted some more, got the picture.
Or so I thought.
And at five in the morning, trying desperately to wrap himself about the OTHER blonde, he reached for my feet again.
I moved them off the bed, and feigned sleep until it came.
This morning when Caro was in the shower, I gave him shit for it, and his mouth moved silently, imitating the rotted fish that I think he's got instead of a spine.
I miss the good old days of eight or nine people piling into my old canopy bed, utterly affectionate and utterly stringless. Somehow we managed to squeeze in and tumble atop each other and yet never invade each other's space. We kept so many lonely nights so warm that way, but then, that was a special Montreal crew. Filled with people like Caro (who's simply surprisingly wonderful) and princess and drugged-up hordes of whoever else, but nobody like Guillaume.
Not that I'm annoyed or anything.
This morning, they left at nine.
At nine thirty, Guillaume and Seb called from the road, to make sure I wasn't trying to sleep or anything.
I think suddenly that I'm glad I've got a packed day tomorrow and then I'm bundling myself into a suitcase for Limoges on Tuesday.
The weekend after, I've got a singing lesson, family dinner, and maybe, just maybe, I'll invite Cristal out for a one on one, or impinge on Alex' hospitality, and get away from this crew for a little while.
They're always good for a few lovely laughs, and once in a while they surprise me with their enthusiasm or good nature, but right now...
Right now, maybe I'm a little too riled up with work and things coated with the Big Capitol R of Reponsability to have the patience for certain kinds of possibly good-natured bullshit.
Either way, I think I'm going to be asking to share a bed with Maja when we all go to the Perigord in a few weeks, will be avoiding Guillaume like the [censors nasty words] he is, and by the end of June will have hopefully phased him out of the current gang.
In the meantime, I fixed the guestbook.
Four hundred and seventy three pages of document analysis to go...