The Paris Connection

by Lorraine Brown

  It was now 8:10, according to the huge clock on the front of the station. God, it was like time was standing still. Even from out here the continuous announcements about trains arriving and trains departing and whistles blowing felt as though they were drilling into my brain. The rain had slowed, at least, and had morphed into the sort of fine, misty drizzle that made Paris look all foggy and romantic. Would I have felt differently about being here again, I wondered, if the circumstances had been different? If Si had been with me? If we’d come to see the sights together, had got the lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower to take photos of the view? I wondered whether I would have been able to forget about the past and let myself appreciate it for what it was. Because I couldn’t find much to like about Paris. It had a darkness about it, although I suspected that might come from inside me as well as from the city itself. Although I had actual evidence now that bad things happened to me here: there had already been the missed train, the twisted ankle and the stolen phone. I could only imagine what terrible event fate might throw at me next. The sooner I could get out of this place, the better.

  After killing a few minutes by wandering aimlessly around outside the station entrance probably looking highly suspicious, I noticed a blond-haired woman wearing a peacock-blue cardigan running across the forecourt. Something about her reminded me of Alison the bridesmaid. Not that I could recall her in much detail. She was very pretty; I remembered thinking that at the hen weekend. Even shorter than me, maybe five feet one or five two. Northern accent; I thought she’d said she was from Manchester originally, and had moved to Berkhamsted after her parents divorced and her mum got remarried to some local business owner. She was an old friend of Si’s family, and after getting a first at Cambridge, she was now in corporate law (or something).

  I felt a stab of envy about how sorted she sounded and then instantly berated myself for comparing myself to other women. It was nobody’s fault but my own that I was stuck in a job I hated. The thing was, though, loads of people were in the same boat. They had bills to pay and kids to feed and had long ago given up on any dreams they might have had. If I wasn’t careful, I knew I’d end up being one of them. I wondered how things were going with the wedding preparations, whether whatever drama she’d been texting Si about in the middle of the night had been resolved. I thought about them all getting ready in Catherine’s room without me, sipping champagne as they struggled to keep her calm. I would have been flitting in and out, getting drinks and passing on messages and reassuring an increasingly irate Catherine that I’d done everything she’d asked me to. Si and I would have been smiling at each other over some ridiculous demand she’d made.

  “Hannah!”

  I turned my head, imagining I’d heard somebody calling my name. It couldn’t have been, though, since as far as I was aware, not a single person I knew was in Paris.

  “Hannah! Over here!”

  And then I spotted Léo, standing next to a motorbike, a helmet in his hand, his hip resting against the bike’s frame.

  I gave him a half-hearted wave, wondering where he’d magicked the bike up from so quickly. I supposed he must live nearby. Unsure what to do next, I went to walk away, back inside the station. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that he was jogging across to me, stepping straight out in front of a taxi.

  “Va te faire foutre!” shouted the driver, braking sharply. He beeped his horn but Léo waved him off, seemingly not bothered that he’d narrowly escaped death.

  “Un moment, Hannah!” he called to me.

  I stopped. What did he want now?

  “Hi,” he said, coming to a stop in front of me, catching his breath.

  “Hello.”

  “What have you been doing?” he asked conversationally, the motorbike helmet lodged under his arm.

  “In the thirty minutes since I saw you last? Not much, funnily enough,” I countered. What did he think I’d been doing?

  The air was still hazy with rain, but when I held out my hand to catch some, it was so fine I could barely feel it. The air felt warmer, too, as though there was a chance the sun might break through.

  “Oh, right,” I said as it dawned on me what he wanted. “You came back for this,” I said, unzipping the hoodie.

  He put his hand out to stop me. “Of course not. It is yours to keep.”

  I looked at him quizzically. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he said with a slow smile.

  “Do you always give your stuff away to complete strangers, then?” I asked, tucking my hair behind my ear.

  “Not usually.”

  It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a plethora of other women wandering around Paris wearing items of his clothing.

  “I have been thinking,” he said. “You must report your lost phone to the police. If you have insurance? Otherwise you will have to buy another. They are expensive, non, these phones?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, of course, what with being eternally disorganized. I presumed I did have some sort of insurance, though, because my monthly repayments cost a fortune and I was always complaining about them, particularly because my direct debit came out right at the end of the month. I sighed; he was right. I’d at least need some sort of crime reference number, or whatever the French equivalent was, if I was going to submit a claim. I couldn’t really afford not to.

  “Would I need to go to an actual police station, do you think?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Isn’t there one inside the station?”

  “There was once, but it is closed now. There is the central police station in Rue Louis Blanc, not far from here.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the city.

  “Couldn’t I just ask a police officer? There must be loads of them inside,” I suggested. I had the creeping fear that I was going to leave the station, get stuck filling in form after form and miss the next train, even if it wasn’t leaving for several hours.

  “No,” he said, seemingly irritated by my incessant questions. “You cannot. Because you will need to complete a document. Which is only available at a police station.”

  I tutted. “Typical.”

  “Come, I will take you.”

  “Take me?” I asked, frowning in confusion.

  “I have borrowed my friend’s bike,” he said, wafting his arm toward the road. “There is a spare helmet, I think. Let us see.”

  I laughed, incredulous. “You’re not seriously expecting me to get on that thing?”

  He flashed me a look of utter confusion. “Why not?”

  I shook my head in wonderment. “Because I don’t even know you.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t have a death wish.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “You worry a lot, Hannah,” he said after a long pause.

  “That’s just not true.”

  “It is. I can see it. You are always thinking.”

  It was frustrating that it was that obvious, even to someone I’d had only a handful of conversations with.

  “You must go to a police station, yes? And you cannot walk properly, non? And the next train is more than five hours away. So, this is the solution. It will take half an hour, no more. And then you can sit on your bench and wait for your train.”

  I looked around, wondering what other people in my position would do. Would Ellie go with him? Not that it mattered, she wasn’t here. It was me who needed to make the decision, something I was notoriously bad at.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, coming up with a compromise. “I’ll go to the police station myself. You can point me in the right direction.”

  He crossed his arms, looking at me pensively.

  “Let me take you. Otherwise I will feel bad,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Really? So this is about you, then, is it?”

  He shifted his weig
ht from one foot to the other. “You are right, it is a little about me. But it is mostly about you.”

  “You’re still feeling guilty for tripping me up,” I said triumphantly. “Aren’t you?”

  He held up his thumb and forefinger, indicating that he was, just a tiny bit.

  I looked into his eyes. Could I trust him? What would happen, I wondered, if I took a chance and agreed to go with him? I did need to report my missing phone, otherwise I’d have to pay for a new one when I got home and there was no way I had the money to do that. And it probably would be quicker to go with him now rather than trying to walk to the police station on my own when I had no idea where I was going.

  “I am a very safe driver,” he said enticingly.

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  He grinned. “Are you afraid of Paris, Hannah? Is that what it is?”

  “That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” I protested. Did he really think I was that pathetic?

  “Then a motorbike is the best way to get around the city,” he said, as if I’d already agreed. It was infuriating.

  “Is it, though?”

  If only I could see the world like I used to, again. Transport myself back to a time when I would take risks and do things just for fun and assume that people were inherently good until proven otherwise. I’d lost some of that spark, I knew I had. I’d become more cautious and paranoid as I’d got older. As though I was turning into my mum, which was the absolute last thing I wanted.

  I bit my lip. “You’d have to drive slowly.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And I can’t be gone long.”

  “Fine with me.”

  I followed him hesitantly over to the bike, a huge, shiny black monstrosity that looked as though it had a life of its own. There was still time to change my mind. Right up until the last second if need be, I told myself.

  “Where’s your bag, by the way?” I asked, thinking that if he was planning to have that huge thing slung over his shoulder, it would probably tip us both over.

  “You are concerned about the dead body inside?”

  I gave him a sarcastic smile.

  “It is at my friend’s apartment. I will collect it later,” he said, shaking his head to himself.

  While I waited for Léo to find a second helmet, I checked my ankle, slipping off my ballet pump and wiggling my foot around. It was still uncomfortable, but the pain was definitely easing off. I put my shoe back on and grimaced. They were soaked through and had started to leak; there was even brown sludge in the grooves between my toes. I crouched down to smear it off with my thumb.

  “Ah! Here,” he said, after opening a compartment under the seat.

  I stood up, taking my hair out of its bun and then putting it up into a neater, tighter one. I’d never even been on one of those little mopeds you zoomed about on in Greek holiday resorts because I’d always assumed that if I did, I’d be the girl involved in a fatal crash on the main road out of Kavos. As soon as I’d turned fourteen and had become more independent, going into London on my own and so on, Mum had kicked off her campaign to let me know that the world was a terrible, unsafe place full of evil people who were out to get me. She went on and on about all the bad things that could happen, telling me—in unnecessarily minute detail—about the awful stories she’d heard over the years, usually gleaned from either the local paper or the “real life” articles in Take a Break magazine. I brushed them off at first, doing all the things she’d warned me about anyway, like getting off my face for seven nights straight in Tenerife when I went with Ellie and her parents, and accepting lifts from older boys who’d only just passed their tests. But after a while I began to see how much it was affecting Mum; she’d even cried one night when I’d told her I’d be back from Ellie’s at ten and hadn’t got in until nearly midnight. She’d wanted to keep me safe like any mother would, I got that. But in hindsight, I wondered whether there’d also been a part of her that didn’t want me to be out having fun. She was stuck at home, scrabbling around to pay the bills, while I still had my whole life ahead of me. I could travel the world and have a rewarding career and fall in love with anyone I liked. Before she’d met Tony, Mum had always felt hard done by, and even now some of that sadness had stayed with her. She just never seemed happy. It was as though she’d wanted more from life and was angry with herself for not getting it.

  “I’m really not sure about this,” I said, my heart beginning to hammer harder in my chest.

  “What is it you are afraid of?” asked Léo.

  I looked around at the other motorbikes lined up next to us.

  “What if we have an accident?”

  “We will not.”

  I nibbled on my thumbnail. “Nobody gets on a bike expecting to crash, though, do they?”

  “You think about death a lot, Hannah.”

  “I don’t,” I said, although I knew I did.

  He handed me the helmet. “If we imagined the most terrible things that could happen every time we step out of our apartment, we would never do anything, non?”

  “I suppose.”

  I took it from him, swinging it about like a kettlebell. He did say it was the most efficient way to get around Paris. And the odds of surviving the journey were statistically in my favor.

  “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

  I put the helmet on before I changed my mind. He fastened and tightened it for me, his fingers tickling the underside of my chin as he grappled with the clasp.

  “There. Ready.” He shrugged off his leather jacket. “You must wear this,” he said.

  “What for?” I asked, noticing how everything sounded muffled now, as though I was underwater.

  “It can be windy on the back.”

  I thought it was more likely to be in case I fell off—the leather would offer my skin some protection, wouldn’t it? I took it from him, anyway, slipping my arms into it. I could still feel the heat of his body on the quilted lining.

  “You promise you know how to drive this thing?” I shouted.

  He laughed and vaulted onto the bike. He was Parisian, they probably all knew. I thought briefly about what Mum would say if she could see me now; what Si would think. And then I climbed on anyway.

  “Ready?” Léo called over his shoulder.

  “Not really,” I shouted back.

  The helmet was heavy on my head and the strap felt too tight under my chin, but I didn’t want to make a fuss. He turned on the engine and I felt the power of it shuddering through my body, making my bones vibrate. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, so I placed them tentatively on his hips.

  “Hold tighter,” he shouted back to me.

  This was more embarrassing than I’d realized. Did we really need to sit this close together? Cringing, I slid my bottom toward his, wrapping my arms around his waist, clasping my fingers together on the other side. I tried not to notice his stomach muscles as my thumbs brushed over them. Then Léo twisted his head to the left, checked behind him and pulled off into the road.

  I closed my eyes at first, not daring to look, not wanting to know how close we were to other cars, whether we might be boxed in between two buses and an articulated lorry. And then, as the minutes passed and we were still upright, I opened them just a slit, and then a little more, until they were fully open and my chin was almost resting on Léo’s back, and when I peeped over his shoulder I could see we were on a manic main road lined with grocers selling exotic vegetables, and Chinese restaurants from which I could already smell the aroma of steamed dumplings as we passed. There were shops with trays and trays of gold jewelry on display, and another with beautiful Indian fabrics rolled up in the window. The road was slicked with rain and because there were so many cars and buses and taxis, we were constantly stopping and starting and not gaining much speed, which suited me perfectly. But
then we turned off to the right, down a quieter side street, and he began to accelerate.

  “Everything cool?” he yelled.

  “No! Slow down!”

  He ignored me, of course.

  We flew past abandoned shops with their shutters clamped down, and tatty-looking burger bars, and hairdressers with garish pink signs advertising Coiffure. When we finally pulled over to the curb and he cut the engine, I could still feel the throb of it under my skin. I slid off the bike, stumbling as I put too much weight on my bad foot.

  Léo steadied me with his hand. “Ça va?”

  I nodded, unclipping my helmet and yanking it off. My legs were stiff from being pried apart at an unnaturally wide angle and I kicked them out, rotating my good ankle to get the blood flowing again.

  “See? I did not kill you,” said Léo, taking the helmet from me.

  “It was touch and go at times,” I said, patting down my hair.

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure how I felt. I knew that my heart rate was off the scale and that I’d had a proper adrenaline rush for the first time in ages and that I’d thought I was going to die at least once. Whether that was a good feeling or not, I couldn’t quite tell.

  Léo directed me up the steps of the police station, an intimidating, black office-like building on the opposite side of the road. Inside was a large room, dimly lit and sparsely decorated, except for three rows of gray plastic chairs laid out on a shiny lino floor and a wooden desk with a police officer sitting behind it, his face hidden behind a computer screen. I hesitated for a second until Léo nudged me forward, then hung back while I approached the desk.

  I coughed self-consciously.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” I said to the police officer. “Pourriez-vous m’aider, s’il vous plaît?”

  He was tapping away on his keypad and took ages to look up.

  “Oui, madame?”

  I didn’t appear to be able to recall any French whatsoever, with odd words popping into my mind and then disappearing before I could do anything with them. The French words for “lost” and “stolen,” for example, seemed to have permanently evaded me. Perhaps I felt too on display to grapple for the phrases I hadn’t used for years, what with Léo watching me and the officer giving me a stereotypically steely gaze. I resorted to “Parlez-vous Anglais?”