A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  I felt differently today. Knowing as I did that the end was nigh, the house had taken on the air of a hotel room on the last morning of a vacation. I absorbed its familiar objects: the pea-green kitchen, the wooden phallus, The Submarine, wondering if I would ever see them again. Thoughts of my departure were tinged with sadness, as I imagined dragging my case down the stairs for the last time and out of the front door to face the unknown. Part of me wanted to stay in the Hessian Sack; part of me wanted to escape to Paris to the life that was waiting. There’d been a lot of upheaval in the last few months; a lot of goodbyes. There was something to be said for staying home safe and pretending to be one of the children. But life was calling.

  Marcel on the other hand, most definitely hadn’t, though he must have received my declaration of love days ago. Now I knew his address in the Bastille perhaps I could go there one morning and accidentally bump into him on his morning trip to the baker’s for croissants. He might invite me to the roof-top terrace of La Samaritaine again.

  We arrived at the estate agency just before ten. It was in the north of Paris, at the Porte de Pantin. Our journey involved a trip through the bustling Gare du Nord which felt like Ghana more than a Parisian metro station. It was packed with commuters in bright robes and itinerant salesmen with rugs spread out displaying their wares. In the station, there was a vegetable stall set out with rows of bright bananas and papayas, the air tinged with the scent of urine. No-one seemed to mind trading in the bowels of the earth. A stallholder cackled with customers and tossed a bunch of speckled bananas into a wafer-thin plastic bag.

  The exit to the Porte de Pantin metro lead up to the Boulevard Jean Jaurès. We asked for directions and found the agency some minutes’ walk behind the park and down a narrow side street where there were few other shops. The shop window was Parisian chic, in contemporary steel and glass. In the window there was a neat display of about twenty rental flats, all of which were beyond our means. I nudged Jessica.

  ‘We can’t afford this, look! You must be mad. Are you sure that Chinese man fully understood our situation? What did you tell him exactly?’

  She didn’t answer. I knew she didn’t want the dream to end.

  ‘Carpe diem,’ she said, and marched into the shop.

  Two young men were seated at an office desk. On the side reserved for employees, a young Chinese man with black round-rimmed glasses was busy filling in a form. On the other side a smartly dressed man glanced at his watch and sighed impatiently. The men barely acknowledged us as we entered. The agent brandished a sheet of paper, which looked like a contract, in the air. Proud of his work. He handed it to the customer, and watched as the man signed the bottom of each page with a flourish of his fountain pen.

  Jessica, never one to wait in line, had begun to fidget noticeably and cleared her throat loudly. Just then the door opened with a jangle and a man in black heels with boots tip-tapped in – our friend from the Chinese restaurant. He observed the younger man busy at work, and fired off a stream of Chinese as authoritative as a round of gun shots. The younger man threw his pen down onto the desk, raised his arms in the air and retaliated. The conversation continued for a few moments, with our friend waving his arms and pointing at us, and the other man waving his arms and pointing at his client. Finally, the agent pushed his chair back and grabbed the contract back from the customer’s hand. The Frenchman was clearly not impressed.

  ‘Que se passe-t-il?’ he demanded.

  The agent shook his head and looked as if he might spit.

  ‘Je suis désolé. My apologies. The flat is already let. We appear to have wasted your time.’

  ‘Let, to whom?’ the man asked. ‘It wasn’t let a minute ago, when you dragged me out of a meeting to get me here.’

  The agent pointed to us, the sorry culprits.

  ‘The flat is let to these two girls,’ he said dolefully. ‘I’m sorry. I can show you a nice little deux pieces on the other side of La Villette if you will allow me.’

  The customer scraped his chair back roughly on the polished parquet.

  ‘There will be no more rendez-vous!’ he said, grabbing his briefcase. As he reached the door he turned to face us. ‘I hope you are satisfied,’ he added in English. ‘For one month I had this flat reserved and now, suddenly, mystérieusement, it is no longer available. C’est inadmissible!’ He slammed the door in fury and headed out into the morning sun.

  Our man was all apologies, begging us to sit down and drink a glass of water. The estate agent didn’t look pleased. He tore a fresh form from his pad and turned to face us.

  ‘We will speak in English,’ he said, more as a statement of fact than a question. ‘We need to take some basic details before showing you the property. Full names?’

  The first question wasn’t hard. Date of birth neither. When it came to the part about our current address, Jessica leant forwards and said in her snooty Margaret Thatcher voice, that we did not wish any letters to be sent to our current abode, thank you very much. The last thing we needed was for Florence to see a contract from an estate agency. Frowning, the man crossed out this section and wrote étrangères in large letters. The man’s final question threw us both. Even Mrs Thatcher had the grace to look embarrassed.

  ‘Name of your current employer and net amount of your monthly salary.’

  Luckily our friend from the restaurant was quick to step in. He said something in Chinese to the young man who raised a pair of neatly plucked brows in return. The agent returned to his form and crossed out the remaining sections at the bottom of the page.

  I was beginning to think of our Chinese friend as being a kind of Magwitch figure from Great Expectations: the escaped convict who set up a trust for the unwitting protagonist Pip; the mysterious benefactor who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that Pip had everything he would need in life. Our benefactor was a small man in high-heeled boots. It was nice to have a benefactor, though why this man had chosen to bestow such kindness on two girls who had eaten just once in his restaurant, and picked the cheapest meals possible, eating all the complimentary prawn crackers we could lay our hands on and holding out our bowls for more, I couldn’t imagine. I could only assume that it was because we were all foreigners together. Florence had told me how racist the French could be to her African friends; and how Fuschia had found it impossible to find a job coming as she did from Gabon. Surely it must be the same with the Chinese man too. Perhaps he felt for us and wanted to reach out and help us take those first steps to independence. He had nothing to worry about of course. If he would allow us the first month rent-free, as Jessica claimed, then we would easily find work, even if it was in a bar or a supermarket, to pay him back. Perhaps we could pay a bit extra to make up for his kindness.

  The agent opened a drawer and took out a set of keys. Then he wrote down a number on a slip of paper. The door code.

  ‘I will do the viewing myself,’ our benefactor said, picking up the keys. Whatever the relationship between the two men was, there was no doubt that our man was in control. The agent showed little resistance. We filed out of the shop. It occurred to me that I still didn’t know our benefactor’s real name, though we were following him to a viewing of a place that could potentially be ours. It seemed awkward to start introducing ourselves at this stage of the game.

  We followed the road back the way we had come, to the rue Eugène Jumin, which was on the road behind the metro station. N° 27 was a grand five-floor Haussmannian block with a sandy brick facade. Magwitch keyed in the digicode and we followed him up five flights to the top, his little boots tapping the wooden stairs all the way. He opened the door to reveal a spacious and sunny studio apartment, with two windows facing out towards Le Parc de la Villette. Although the balcony wasn’t big enough to sit on, there were two wrought-iron railings with plenty of space for flowers. My mind’s eye was busy filling the space with crimson geraniums in terracotta pots. The middle section of the room was divided in two by a kitchen counter which stoo
d proud like a bar. Behind it there was space for an oven and a sink. Beyond the kitchen area, there was a door to a compact bathroom with a shower and toilet. Hopes for a bedroom each and a sitting room to boot were dashed, but penniless and jobless as we were, if we could secure this place, it would be nothing short of a miracle. Magwitch dangled the keys tantalisingly before our eyes.

  ‘Well, what you think? Okay, yes? You want it or no?’

  We agreed that it was more than okay and that we would like to move in the following weekend. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in there, but Magwitch asked no questions on this front and we told no lies. We would need to send another request to the Universe for a sofa and two beds, not to mention some kitchen appliances, but for now I was happy to have four walls we could call our own.

  Magwitch invited us back to the office and demanded coffee from the man at the desk. Once served, the agent settled down at his desk, and produced a blank contract to be signed, which Magwitch explained was a three-year lease. When I came to the section marked DEPOSIT I hesitated. Once again there was a brief exchange in Chinese. Magwitch took the paper from me and wrote 9,000 francs in his neat hand. I protested.

  ‘Non, non, vous ne comprenez pas. We have no money.’

  The man was asking us for an impossible sum. Florence currently paid me 1,800 francs a month (about £180 pounds), which was the going rate for an au pair since there were no outgoings for food and rent etc. The agent was asking for a deposit nearly five times this amount. Magwitch smiled reassuringly and took a fat brown envelope from the breast pocket of his jacket. He opened it and fanned out a spread of notes on the table as if we were at a casino. The agent gathered up the notes and put them inside his desk drawer.

  ‘Soon you will have jobs,’ Magwitch said, seeing my look of alarm, ‘and then you will pay us back. This is how it works in our community. I place my trust in you today, when you have nothing. I help you when you are in the gutter. Later, there is payback. The system cannot fail – and if it does,’ he giggled suddenly, like a small rotund dwarf, ‘well, people who cheat us, they find the world is a bad place.’

  He placed a hand clad with golden rings before his mouth as if about to cough and I noticed that he had tucked his inner finger inside, holding it close to his palm so that it looked as if he had lost his middle digit. Jessica nudged me to make sure I’d seen. Magwitch rubbed his nose and laughed. Then he stood, shook both our hands and handed over the set of keys from his back pocket. The keys were still warm, a reminder of Magwitch’s vital presence in the whole affair.

  ‘Goodbye for now,’ he called, and scurried off.

  Chapter 15

  ‘That was a breeze,’ I said, dragging Jessica onto a café terrace next door for un grand café crème. Jessica was quiet but determined.

  ‘Did you see that whole finger business?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes, bit weird wasn’t it. At first, I thought he’d lost one in a meat-slicer or something. Then I saw it was tucked behind his palm. Like a secret code. You know … The Man in The Brown Suit, that kind of thing.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘It was a code. To say they’ll chop our fingers off if we don’t pay. They’re Mafia.’

  ‘Don’t be daft – the Mafia are Italian, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not if they’re in some sort of a Triad, or whatever it’s called, you know, the Chinese Mafia,’ Jessica said knowingly.

  It took four café crèmes and as many croissants to talk this through. By now my wages had been spent with only a few francs remaining in my purse, but for once Jessica produced a tightly folded note from somewhere in the cavernous folds of her bag. It was important to discuss this before we returned home. The silver keys to the apartment lay on the table between us, the promise of a brighter future.

  ‘Shall we take them back?’ I asked.

  We were both silent. I was sure Jessica was remembering the flat with as much excitement as I was. The uninterrupted view over the rooftops to La Villette; the jazz concerts she’d told me they held live in the park each year. I visualised the windows open, the music wafting over the geraniums and the two of us sitting down around the table with dinner guests. Marcel perhaps. We’d have a yellow gingham tablecloth and a jar of white tulips from a local market. We didn’t have a table or a vase – these were irksome details – but Jessica, as if reading my thoughts, reassured me that soon we would both be working in La Défense business centre, dressed to the nines in a slick office, and with plenty of cash for furnishings.

  ‘My French is too bad to be bilingual,’ I pointed out. ‘And so is yours.’

  She glared at me. ‘So, give the keys back.’

  We ordered a third coffee to share.

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Jessica asked, licking her finger and dabbing croissant crumbs from her plate.

  ‘They cut our fingers off.’

  ‘But in what circumstances?’

  ‘If we don’t pay our rent. That’s what he said, right? Though we would pay, wouldn’t we?’ I asked this question quite slowly and deliberately. It wasn’t often that Jessica’s purse saw the light of day, and I wasn’t taking any chances.

  ‘Obviously we’ll pay,’ she said, closing her bag.

  ‘So, what are the other risks?’

  We couldn’t think of anything. After all, I pointed out, Chinese Magwitch was only trying to help. He had a very pregnant wife – a father-to-be no less! – and he ran a successful business. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that we could also, once successful, help someone in the way he had helped us. It wasn’t a bad system in its own way. It wasn’t as if banks were ever bending over backwards to lend money to the penniless.

  ‘It’s karma,’ Jessica said. ‘They help us, and when we’re on our feet we help someone else. Communism at its very best.’

  Jessica had flirted with communism during our Liberal Studies classes in the Upper Sixth, all for effect of course. It was a sure way to impress the boys who came over from the grammar school: little green-blazered beetles in pungent aftershave edging up besides the girls in their black blazers, skirts and ties. Jessica was always one to declare an allegiance: I’m an Existentialist, a Buddhist, a Communist! The truth was, when you scratched the surface, she was Tory blue through and through. Despite her upbringing, Jessica believed in helping herself, not others. It wasn’t a given that the Chinese would get their money’s worth with her.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘we agree on the following: 1. our restaurant owner is an honest family man, with a pregnant wife, and an established business – who we feel we can trust; 2. we intend to pay our rent, thus not offending said benefactor; 3. we are going to find successful high-powered jobs – we are young, English-speaking and keen, on the threshold of bilingualism; and 4. we can leave the house of Axel Blanchard and begin a life worthy of our academic studies.’

  Jessica agreed and we chinked empty coffee cups. My stomach churned. It was one thing pledging such things here in the 19th arrondissement, far from the leafy western suburbs, but quite another thing having the balls to walk out on the family who had grown to depend on me.

  ‘I guess I’d better tell Florence as soon as we get home,’ I said.

  Jessica spluttered on the last of her coffee froth.

  ‘Tell her?’ she cried. ‘What do you mean tell her! Imagine the stress we’ll have to endure in the next few days. We need to source furniture, beds, jobs. We can’t be working out our notice with Florence in the loop. Imagine the black looks and moods that would entail. We don’t have contracts; we’re slave labour when you think about it. Well, this is payback time. It’s what you get when you take on casual labour: casual labour does a bunk when it gets a better offer.’

  ‘But aren’t they fond of us?’

  ‘Fond of us! Are you kidding? We’re a pound of flesh, paid for under market value. That’s all. Two skivvies.’

  She sounded like a trade unio
nist now. Jessica was good at rousing a crowd.

  ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘We leave in our own time,’ Jessica said. ‘In the dead of night. We’ll do a midnight flit if we need to. There’s no time for sentiment here, not when our lives are at stake. We’ve given our word, we’ve taken that flat and now the clock is ticking for rent.’

  To remind me of the gravity of our situation she raised her hand to her mouth and carefully folded in her middle finger.

  On our return to the metro we found a cheap shop which sold an array of household goods at cost: plastic tablecloths, buckets, brooms and mop heads. Outside, propped up against a row of plastic clothes dryers there were two camp beds. The Arab man who ran the shop showed us how easily the legs folded in and how the beds could be carried like oversized deckchairs. He seemed to think we were going camping and tried to sell us a gas stove and a groundsheet for good measure. Jessica, proving my point about never opening her purse unless she needed to, waited until now to pull out some crisp notes and told me I could pay her back when I started work … with interest. We bought two beds and a quilt cover each. It was decided we’d invest in the actual quilts themselves in winter. The quilt covers were amazingly cheap: only ten francs, like most of the other articles in the shop. I chose a peach and turquoise pattern, almost paisley, and Jessica a plain white cover.

  We carried the beds and our quilt covers back up to the apartment, stopping at the corner shop to buy a bottle of red screw-top wine, a packet of plastic knives and forks, a crusty baguette which felt at least a day old, a packet of Babybel cheese and a squishy garlic-flavoured Boursin. It was our first meal in our new home. We sat on the floor with the windows open and feasted on the baguette and cheese, snapping frail plastic knives as we buttered hunks of hard bread, the wine staining our tongues bilberry blue as we got drunker and sillier by the minute. I’d grown careless of the time, aware that I should already be back home in The Submarine ironing. Instead, I lay prostrate on my new bed, which I’d prised open (nearly amputating three fingers) and placed in my designated corner of the flat, bathing in the warm sunshine that flooded through the windows. I felt (almost) free.