Welcome to the family

“I believe you are my father.”

Silence. Then he says: “Call back in a week. Exactly this time.”

Kind of a short conversation. Still, hope is a pencil case with pencils in it.

I call back in a week. A girl says: “I’m putting you on speaker.” It seems like everyone in the room is drunk. They cheer, say ‘Hi Euan’ and ‘Welcome to the family’ and laugh, shriek and clink glasses.

“We checked out your background. You’ll fit right in,” my father yells over the noise, and they all whoop and holler. “You’re not working right now so you can join us on holiday. I’ll send tickets and instructions.”

“OK.”

Family? That’s a family? No ‘Welcome’. No ‘We’re looking forward to meeting you’. Just drunk laughter and a ticket in the post?

They checked out my background? Serial foster homes, repressed anger, senseless violence, Borstal, gaol. I’ll fit right in? What a pack of jerks. Still. A five-star hotel in Monte Carlo!

So the instructions are pretty comprehensive regarding what clothes to bring, where to meet them, expectations of behaviour. I threw that sheet in the bin. Like me or lump it. I’m hoping they will feel guilty, shunt me some cash and leave me alone. I’m happy to leave them as soon as the pounds sterling hit my hip pocket. 

Monaco. So many pockets to pick and none of them will squeal – they’ll just go to a cash machine and fill up again.

I’ve perfected a skill that is hard not to admire. I even admire it myself, and I made it up. I have dark glasses and a hat that fits the local scene. Incognito cognoscenti. I get into the wake of a target. Preferably a crowded street. Then I look for someone clearly of a different socio-economic background or who has a different skin shade. I ensure that they bump into my target who sees them as ‘other’. Nota bene – THEY crash into the target, not me. I extract the contents of two of the target’s pockets – pre-determined of course – while helping them to stabilise, ensuring the third person is right in their face.  When they realise their moolah has disappeared, they remember the face of the third person and can only recollect there was someone else there. No face. Clothes that are already deep in a charity bin or a skip. Not like that ‘other’ person who clearly lifted their wallet, watch and pictures of the kids who live with the ex.

So this jerk-ass family has bought deeply into my Ancestry schmalz story. How sweet. Pathetic really. They can’t have tried very hard. I’m all over a number of databases. Still, it sounds like they enjoy a party. And he IS my father. DNA don’t lie suckers.

They are flying before me, will meet me at Nice Airport. Airports are purgatory on earth, lost soul zones. Bad beer and soggy chips. Who the hell buys all the perfume and expensive watches? Zombies with tickets? Airports around the world are losing any semblance of the country they represent and are becoming the same Lego sets of squalid squillion-dollar shops.

Oh anyway, back to Nice.

The hottest babe I have seen in 100 years is holding up an iPad with EUAN. I wire my jaw up so it doesn’t sag open, and I try my very best not to look at her bulging halter-top, the pearl ring in her pert little navel and her shorts where the beginning of buttocks is apparent below the last of the denim. Oh my. The white, white smile, the deep, deep tan and the wavy long black hair. Oh my.

“Euan? Hi, I’m your sister Mel.”

My sister! Oh, shoot me now before the truth reaches my brain. All this and I can’t… Oh shoot me now, again. Maybe she has some friends with similar fashion sense? Hopefully not a similar sister though. There’s only so much filial affection a man can take.

We chat on the way to the hotel. Chit chat. Weather, the flight, been to Monaco before, love the Med, prefer Cap Ferrat, etc. I make shit up – I did look at a map so I recognise a few of the names she lets slip from her plump, lip-glossed, luscious tongue-swept lips.

She drives like a maniac. I’d drive like a maniac too if I had the keys to a Lambo Miura. I mean the classic FFS. No boring old Testarossa for my sister. I’d never before been in a taxi where everyone stares at the vehicle first and then clocks the driver and their eyes fall open like a 60s cocktail cabinet.

At the hotel she tosses the keys to a man in a jump-suit who is clearly a man’s man because he doesn’t even look at her chest. I follow in the lobby and the lift. The lift. I shrink into a corner while she pouts, perts and titillates at the lift mirror. And yes, I know the word titivates!

She bounces out and, I swear on my second foster mother’s cold dead heart, we step out straight into this massive whole-floor suite. Not a corridor with a hundred doors into pokey rooms hardly bigger than the single bed. Those are the hotel floors I know and recognise. This is a freaking palace on steroids. And the FAMILY! They cheer, they make drinks, they drink drinks, they ask a butler to make coffee, they push me towards a fruit plate that reminds me of this carved bowl I saw at the Burrell Collection outside Glasgow at a time when I thought I might be able to extract expensive stuff from museums.

My father, it turns out, is a dapper chap name of Samuel who has a vague resemblance to me but they all agree eventually that I look more like my mother who the older ones knew as a friend of the family but who had died a few years back. I’ve seen myself in a mirror. Poor woman is all I can think. Samuel, well, he just looks a bit sheepish. Family friend eh!

 Still, everyone is as cheerful as a Love Island semi-final and with not a lot more clothes. There are two young men older than me with biceps and pecs bursting out of their silk shirts, two gauche boys younger than me in Hawaii shirts and shorts, two older sisters – one going all Kardashian with skin tone body suit and significant bulges and one dressed for the cover of the Woodstock album, Mel in the middle, and two trainee-tart kid sisters with tied up boys’ shirts and flat chests, for which I breathed a brief sigh of relief. At least I might be able to talk to them without getting flustered.

They ALL hug me and swoon over me like I am the answer to all their prayers. Gotta admit, it ain’t half bad. I want someone to tell me Mel is actually adopted and not related to anyone in the room, but that isn’t forthcoming.

Looking back, I suspect the whole ‘being met by Mel’ thing was a test to see what kind of jerk I was. I think I passed that jerk test, being hot-blooded but repressed and unsure about girls. I knew how to reject randy 15-year-old lads whose gender is as fluid as mercury without getting my head bashed in, but there was a distinct shortage of the female persuasion at youth offender institutions. It’s the wrong kind of family test of course. They just don’t yet realise what kind of jerk they were dealing with.

I have to say though that I enjoy the ambience. Happy, shiny people, alcohol options on every surface, butler coffee. And people who listen when I talk to them. That really strikes me. I wished Mel would watch the road when driving those tight Monaco corners but she kept on looking at me when I talked, like she was really listening. Then into the cacophony of the family and it turns out they all do that. When you talk to them, it’s like you are the only person in the world. It’s initially disturbing, like, WTF is going on here? But eventually it’s engaging, maybe even embracing. No-one ever took much notice of me before except to thump me or dob me into the big A for Authority, whoever the big A prick was that day.

They show me to one of the many rooms off the central area and I unpack and fold my clothes neatly into the wardrobes. It’s what I do. It’s one way to maintain control when everything is going to shit.  Toothbrush beside the basin. Oh my GOD! The small bottles! They are ALL going into my bag at the end of this stint. All the soaps, the nail file, the toothbrushes, the shoe polish. Every hotel room I had been in before had dodgy squeeze containers of liquid soap in the shower and, if you were lucky, by the basin. This place even has BATH SALTS! I hold the containers up to the light, wondering if I can filch those too. Don’t even ask about the shower’s water pressure. OMG it nearly strips the skin off my back.

I guess this is how money talks, I say to myself. Maybe my life has changed for the better? Maybe I don’t need to hope that the 13^th wallet of the day would finally have a few hundred bucks and not another card that will refuse to spit cash for me.

So we go to Song Qi which has a Michelin star and eat Chinese food which actually tastes good. I always assumed those stars were for how much foam you could fit on a plate along with coloured dots of nothing much.

I note that poppa Samuel and big brother Romain are on the water, then they disappear for a while mid-meal. I’m chatting up 12-year-old Brigitte on one side and 15-year-old Barry Row-of-Tents who would have been Mr Popular at Feltham young offenders, I can tell you for certain. I never met a tent pitcher so confident and happy with himself though. He should have been riddled with safety pins, Gothed to hell and as surly as a dancing bear but he was a good kid. Reflected well on the family I thought. Brigitte was a barrel of laughs. I never met anyone so fixated on prawns. The hell? Prawn toast, sweet and sour prawns, prawn cocktail – none of them on the menu but they made them special for her. How much clout did this family have? At Mr Chow’s Chow Mien in Peckham I asked for something that wasn’t on the menu and I swear he spat on the dish after a flaming row in the kitchen spilled out onto the vinyl tiled floor and everyone stared at me like I was a louse in their baby daughter’s hair.

Did you know king prawns bury themselves in sand during the day and come out at night to eat? Brigitte is a bursting bubble of prawn-related scientific facts. She is convinced they are good for her skin and she is damned if Mel is going to be the only one with skin like a fresh-washed peach. I wish she hadn’t said that, and I stare at my plate.

Anyway Poppa saunters back in after a while and gets straight back down to Song Qi chow. Handling chopsticks like he’s Chinese in another life. Chatting to the waiters in Mandarin. I swear! He had rolled his sleeves up doing whatever he and Romain were doing. Romain doesn’t come back though. No-one asks why, so I leave that question in the curiosity box.

We amble out to a suite of Mercs with darkened windows and pile in. I end up next to Beatrice the Woodstock girl and wish she had worn a bra and done up the buttons on her dress. I stare straight ahead while my brain tries its damnedest to make me look down and left. Xavier, the other biceps beast, chats beside her like it’s nothing. “It’s nothing,” I tell myself. “Family. Your half-sister.” I watch the driver. He’s good. Eyes ahead. Side mirrors only. He’s damn good. I need to learn.

The next day it’s breakfast at the dining table made for a horde. We take up almost all the seats, but there is no way we can eat all the nosh. So much French and Italian stuff with names I can’t remember. I am amazed to see bangers and mash and make a move, but then worry they’ll think me uncouth so I fill a plate with baguette slices and a cheese so stinky it would clear a blocked bog.

Brigitte has prawns. Mel has Spanish omelette. The big fellers have steak. Makes sense, with those muscles. The coffee is awesome. The juice pressed as we need it by the butler. I could get used to this. Everyone is solicitous. Samuel comes over and chats for a bit. I ask what he does for a living … and the whole table, I mean everyone, stops talking and looks at Samuel. What the fuck did I say?

“You’ll see. You’ll see,” he smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “Eat up everyone. Work to do today.” And the noise ramps back up to where it had been before my question punctuated the morning.

We check out – no-one pays so I guess Samuel has an account or something. There are three campervans out the front. As directed, I get in the one with Samuel and Romain. Campervans? With your money? Hold on. Who am I sharing a bedroom with?

So what happens is this. I learn this over the course of the next few days. One campervan has a heavy-duty stainless-steel container under the floor which is connected up to look like an overflow container for the toilet system. The body is in there immersed in concentrated nitric acid. They make their own. I am so impressed. As we drive, the vehicle’s movement ensures the acid gets into every pore and dissolves everything but bone over the next three days. The liquid is then diluted and pumped into the chemical toilet receptacles of each of the campervans and we go our separate ways.

France is very well-set up with campsites that can take the toilet waste from campervans.

The three family groups go sight-seeing, kayaking, whatever they feel like. Then, whenever they can, they empty their chemical toilets like they’ve had diarrhoea for weeks and have a big load to get rid of. Then they rinse them out and eventually head back to an old monastery in the hills outside Briancon. Me and the serious boys have another stop which is a company outside Payruis which makes fertiliser. Or, to be more precise, blood and bone. They have a chute in the factory yard into which are dumped and sluiced truckloads of leftovers from local abattoirs. Park over the chute, open the bomb bay doors and the raw materials for keeping the south of France’s vineyards ripe with fat, juicy grapes tumble down into the grinding gears of the fertiliser factory. Samuel has a button he just has to press. No need to see anything you don’t want to remember.

At the monastery a week later we sit down to a family meal at a long rough country table positively creaking under the weight of fruit, vegetables, sausages and stews, wine, juices and bread.

Samuel welcomes me to the family with a generous toast of a wine so good I could never afford it. He has privately made it clear that if I ever say anything to anyone I will end up as gross juice and bonemeal, but he reassures me he doesn’t expect it to come to that. I assure him I can keep a secret better than anyone I’ve ever met. I show him how I used to make my living.

“Euan has demonstrated his exceptional abilities with other people’s belongings and I am sure we can make good use of those skills in our family business. He has some additional skills to learn, but with youth, health and enthusiasm I am sure he will pick those up in no time.”

“Welcome, my son, to the family!”