A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  I heard a small cry and realised she was pulling something in from the landing. It was a rectangular box all wrapped up and taped in plastic. A box of drugs perhaps? Maybe they wanted us to trade cocaine? Or guns? The door was wide open and strung from the handle I saw a smaller white plastic bag, knotted at the top. It felt warm. Jessica ripped and tugged at the wrapping and the strong white tape. My mind flashed back to memories of Christmas with my brother when we would pull gifts excitedly from our pillow cases on Christmas morning. Inside the box there was an electric hot plate with two rings and a plug. Jessica carried it over to the kitchen and plugged it in, turning both knobs. Within seconds the two hot plates had lit of crimson red. We had heat.

  ‘We should leave it outside; refuse it!’ I said.

  But Jessica was busy opening the plastic bag now. Inside there were two small white cartons of hot Chinese soup, a bag of six spring rolls, a sprig of fresh mint, and a wicker basket of small white dumplings filled with prawns. Rolled up in a serviette at the bottom were six hard sesame-seed biscuits. Her eyes caught mine with that same gleam I remembered from school, when the monotony of a history lesson was interrupted by the sound of the metal shutters to the school canteen squeaking open at noon.

  ‘Get the cutlery, Marilyn.’ she said.

  * * *

  Over the following week, a series of food parcels were left knotted to our door handle: sweet and sour pork; curried frogs’ legs; and spicy prawn curry. Each time these parcels were accompanied by a bundle of sesame-seed biscuits, which we nibbled when stocks were low. Jessica had invested in a pan and we heated water on the stove. Instant coffee and sesame biscuits in the morning; tea and sesame biscuits at four; hot chocolate and sesame biscuits before bed. Whatever else we found on the door handle formed the bulk of our weekly diet.

  The food parcels never arrived at the same time, which kept us on our toes. One of the deliveries occurred when we were out in the city and we realised that Chinese Magwitch had been into the flat. A can of tinned lychees sat ominously on the counter.

  ‘Are you sure he wants to use you as a sex slave?’ I asked Jessica. ‘So far he’s doing a pretty good impression of the Red Cross.’

  But my friend was adamant. ‘You weren’t here that day,’ she snarled. ‘He made it very clear what he wants. And he’ll be back to try his luck again – you mark my words. Not to mention the rent which we still don’t have.’

  Neither of us had made any headway finding jobs. Our first foiled attempt at finding employment had ground our egos into the splattered, dog-turd pavements of Paris. For the first time since sixth form I worried that we were not that special at all. There was no guarantee of anything in life, despite what we thought, especially not because we happened to be the first children in our families to make it to university. On first leaving the Blanchard household we’d clung onto our academic egos (despite my miserable 2:2). This over-inflated sense of our worth was a throw-back from school. Jessica and I decided that our initial job only needed to be a means to an end. If we could pay our first month’s rent and keep our fingers intact we’d have time to perfect our CVs and find proper employment soon enough.

  Chanting our carpe diem mantra, Jessica marched into the local supermarket, me in tow, reassuring me that wearing a red uniform and cap that said ‘CASINO’ wasn’t so bad. Anyway, it wouldn’t be for ever.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sit at the till, stack shelves? Who cares, if it gets us out of that flat.’ She’d been jittery of late, freezing every time the door banged closed in the foyer downstairs. Chinese Magwitch had rattled her more than I thought. She looked frayed and unkempt.

  The supermarket was packed. There was a row of girls at the checkout counters, hair tied back beneath red Casino caps, beeping away at articles while rows of frazzled shoppers packed their goods. Small French supermarkets like this one were traditionally scruffy around the edges. Stray lettuce leaves lay on the black-and-white floor tiles, there were puddles of water round the fish section and kids skidding up and down the aisles with miniature kids’ trolleys decked with poles and red warning flags. Jessica walked up to the Accueil and asked to speak to the manager. Five minutes later a man with a badge saying Xavier emerged from the back. His sleeves were rolled up as if he’d been stock-taking.

  ‘Oui, qu’est-ce qu’il y a ?’

  We’ve come about jobs, Jessica said in her best French. The man looked us up and down and asked if we had worked in a supermarket before. Jessica raised her shoulders and tossed him her Maggie Thatcher look.

  ‘It can’t be that hard,’ she said. ‘Ce ne peut pas être si compliqué que ça?’

  This wasn’t perhaps the best tactic. Xavier was immediately offended. It might have been better to have looked interested in his shop, instead of telling him any old chimpanzee could work there. He smiled, and for a second I was relieved, but then I realised it’s what the French called un rire jaune – a ‘yellow smile’: sarcastic and insincere.

  ‘You know how to work a till?’

  ‘Non, pas encore.’

  ‘You have experience unpacking the trucks and loading the shelves?’

  ‘Non.’

  ‘You are familiar with the home-brands of supermarket chains like this one?’

  ‘Pas du tout’

  ‘But you want to work here?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘And what makes you think you would be any good?’

  Jessica’s mouth froze open like the beached tuna fish on ice we’d just seen. I stepped in.

  ‘We need to pay our rent. We’re desperate. We’ll do anything. Even mop the floor.’ I pointed at the soggy piece of lettuce beneath the man’s shoes.

  ‘Je suis désolé,’ he said, ‘some of the women here have fifteen years’ experience. Nous n’avons rien pour des filles comme vous.’

  ‘What does he mean he’s got nothing for girls like us?’ I asked outside the shop.

  ‘Oh, he thinks we’re dykes,’ Jessica said breezily.

  This was not the first time that Jessica and I had been mistaken for a lesbian couple, which I could only presume was because of our clothing. One night we had tried to gain free access to a nightclub in the city, near the rue de Rivoli, only to be told by the bouncer on the door that: ‘Ce n’est pas un club pour des gouines.’ This is not a club for ‘dykes’. We’d spent all that previous day out at the park in Versailles, and I’d been bullied by Jessica into wearing a long, floral print dress like hers. When we got to the park we’d re-enacted scenes of Marie-Antoinette skipping in her gardens at the Hameau de la Reine, taking photographs of ourselves tripping over the bridge at the lake, or posing wistfully in the orchards. Jessica insisted on asking a tourist to take a photograph of her with her head on a tree stump while I mimed her decapitation. The German who took our picture found it funny, but others tut-tutted in disapproval. We’d gone straight into town from Versailles still wearing our long flowing dresses and straight to the nightclub door. The bouncer looked us up and down in disapproval. Most of the other girls were wearing tight, sexy little numbers. We clearly weren’t worthy of free entrance. Clothes counted for a lot in Paris, and in his eyes we looked like hippie, vegetarian lesbians. There were clubs for girls who dressed like we did, the man on the door told us, but his place wasn’t one of them.

  We walked home from the Casino supermarket defeated. Jessica bought a plastic bottle of wine from Mahdi for consolation. The cheapest in the shop. Back at school my French teacher, renowned for his side burns and adenoids, had snottily menaced a life spent on a supermarket checkout, unless I got myself an education. But the sad fact was, that even with an education, we weren’t good enough for the job. For any job. Okay, phoning the Opéra Garnier had been a little optimistic, but surely the supermarket guy could have given us a chance?

  We were almost home when Jessica grabbed my arm. There was a black, four-wheel drive outside number 27 and a dapper man in black boots was getting
out. It was Chinese Magwitch clutching a white plastic bag. We ran back towards the metro without a word, escaping into the safety of its gaping mouth, collapsing breathlessly by the ticket office and dragging the stale underground air into our lungs with relief.

  Chapter 17

  A week later I was sitting in a temping office in Gare Saint Lazare looking at a heavily made-up French woman with dyed blonde hair and black roots. It had been a week which had seen the delivery of food parcels galore: bags of soggy white dumplings, chicken Chow Mein, prawn crackers, plastic containers of beef noodle soup and enough sesame-seed biscuits to cause a peak on the nut commodities market. My breath smelt of curried prawn. And it was only nine o’clock.

  The women at the agency looked me up and down in the same way as she might examine an object retrieved from a blocked kitchen sink.

  ‘You don’t have a CV?’ she asked.

  ‘Non.’

  ‘You can type?’

  ‘Oui. I learnt on a machine when I was seven. I can touch-type.’

  She looked pleased and leant forwards on both elbows. Her lipstick had run into the crack around her mouth. The butt-end of a cigarette smoldered in the green Cinzano ashtray on her desk.

  ‘So, you are familiar with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, I presume?’

  ‘No, I’ve never used a computer. I didn’t do Computer Science at school. I did Drama and English.’

  She waved a hand impatiently.

  ‘But you said you could type?’

  ‘Yes, on a machine. A real machine. You know, a Remington.’

  She sighed. Impatient now.

  ‘And are you, or are you not, bilingual?

  ‘Not.’

  The conversation had been held in English to prove this very point.

  ‘But you tell me you have been working for a French family in the suburbs, so you must have spoken some French?’

  ‘Oh yes, to the younger children mainly. The eldest daughter could speak English.’

  She smiled to show the gaps in her teeth which were filled with black plaque.

  ‘So, you can speak in French.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you it’s time for your bath and not to forget to wash your hair; I can ask you if you want an Alice-band or plaits, or what you want for dinner. Oh, and I also know the name of lots of Chinese food in French.’ The plastic bags on our door handle were conveniently labelled in French with a black marker pen.

  The woman shook her head, earrings jangling, and picked up her cigarette for a last drag before stumping it out hard on a cushion of earlier corpses, the tip of each Marlborough scored with red lipstick around the filter.

  ‘But could you manage the diary of a top French professional and type his letters and manage his accounts?’

  ‘His name’s not Axel, is it?’

  ‘No, it is not.’

  ‘Oh, good. Well, to be honest, probably not.’

  She was losing patience now. It was time for her own carpe diem speech.

  ‘Listen, you are clearly not stupid. You have been to University you tell me, n’est-ce pas? You have learnt a considerable amount of French in a very short period, now you must pull yourself together, as I did when I was your age. If you do not know how to do something, you keep quiet, you look around you and you observe how others are managing. Soon you will learn. This is what you must do in life to survive. This is what I myself was obliged to do on my first day in an office. Had I run away crying like a baby, I would not be here now. Vous comprenez, mademoiselle?’

  My main understanding was that the woman was anxious for her commission with the company for whom she was recruiting and that she was prepared at this point to throw me into the lion’s den, whatever my qualifications.

  As if reading my thoughts, she added somewhat slyly, ‘You will be paid for however many days you are retained, so even if it doesn’t quite work out, there will be some money.’

  The woman in the Saint Lazare temping agency pointed to a map of Paris on her wall and to the westerly tip and the white Arche of La Défense. I felt like Edmund as he stood with the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What choice did I have? And even if they paid me for a day’s work before booting me out it was better than nothing.

  ‘You will go then?’

  ‘Alright. Do I need to sign something?’

  * * *

  The next morning, I caught the RER A line to La Défense, dressed smartly in a white shirt with a black pencil skirt and Jessica’s black high-heeled shoes. Her suitcase was stuffed with an array of garments purchased from Oxfam and more suitable to a theatrical department: a fox stole, a mangy fur coat, sixties’ shoes and gloves. Not so long ago I’d cringed at the thought of wearing someone else’s cast-offs. It was bad enough knowing that Jessica had yellowed the armpits of the shirt without wondering who else’s sweat lay engrained in the cotton; possibly someone now dead who had leaked body fluids between the stitches. I had a strict rule about wearing an article of clothing only once, but our current living conditions had meant that I’d had to reign in my latent hygiene phobias.

  The metro was unbearably hot and the skirt, which was part wool, was itchy. I was a commuter now, one of thousands, travelling to my office in Paris. In my bag, there was a purse, currently empty, my carte orange train pass, and my passport. I didn’t know what else I should bring. A notepad and pen perhaps?

  I came up the escalator to the Parvis de la Défense. A huge esplanade stretched before me. Dotted all around were the sky scrapers of Paris. La Tour Elf, La Tour Atlanta, the CNIT, as well as Les Quatre Temps: a sprawling shopping centre. I was busy looking at my map, trying to work out where the Washington Tower was situated, when I heard someone call my name.

  ‘Karen, Karen! Ici!’

  My first instinct was to keep on walking. I’d been hiding from Magwitch for so long that although it was a female voice, I couldn’t imagine that being recognised in the city could augur anything good.

  ‘Karen, arrête! C’est moi!’

  It was a voice I was used to obeying, and eventually I stopped and turned. Leaning on her crutches at the top of the steps to the underground, in her baggy African trousers (un-ironed), with an army jacket slung around her shoulders over a flimsy T-shirt, was Florence! She looked like a busker, or any one of the itinerants in the metro liable to shove an empty cap into your face for loose change. My face flushed with shame. Running away was all very well when you thought you wouldn’t have to see the person you’d run away from ever again, but here I was on my way to meet my new employer, face to face with the old one I’d just abandoned. I wondered wildly if Florence had been to see my new employer. If she’d handed in a stinking reference, saying how unreliable I was, and how I didn’t work out my notice. Or if Axel had hung a pile of un-ironed shirts onto the office door handle.

  ‘Bonjour, Florence,’ I said.

  Florence flung her arms around me. When I pulled away I saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She was clutching a bunch of small printed leaflets. She pushed one into my hand. On it there was a picture of me in my baggy blue and white Mary Poppins dress. Underneath there was a typed description in English and French: ‘Slim, blonde girl in her early 20s. Terrible French. MISSING. PERDUE.’ Like someone’s pet poodle. My cheeks started to burn. I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d gone voluntarily to live with the Chinese Mafia and was in their debt cooped up in a posh flat in the 19th arrondissement and made fat on spring rolls and dried sesame-seed biscuits. Not only that, I was running late. I was expected on the 31st floor of the Tour Washington to meet the Head of Human Resources of an American software company.

  Florence grabbed my arm and launched into a tirade as to how the children were pining for me; how they refused to have another jeune fille au pair in the house; how Delphine missed our late-night chats with Jessica. Where had I been living? Had I been sleeping rough? (Did I look that bad?) Why did I leave? Was it something she’d or said done to offend me? And then there was the matter of my last
wages which I’d left without collecting. Florence told me that she had been coming here to La Défense, and to many of the other main train station exits of Paris, to look for me. I said that I was fine. Merci beaucoup. And that I’d been sharing a flat with Jessica, although I didn’t tell her my address. I’d got a job, I said, and I was going to be late if I didn’t get a move on. Florence trailed beside me, clutching my arm like a street urchin. I was so smartly dressed in comparison that a passer-by turned and raised his eyebrows to see if I needed help. Finally, having reassured her that I was not dead, and having categorically refused all offers to return to the house, I agreed to keep in touch, promising that one day, when I was settled in my new job, I would go back to the house to sleep in my old bed and to see the children.

  I would see Florence and the children again over the years, returning to the house to sleep in the comfort of The Hessian Sack on several occasions. The last time I saw her, I was a mother myself with a young baby in my arms. After my last visit, the family moved away, and we lost touch. I searched for Florence years later but found no trace of her. Perhaps she had finally bolted herself, changed her name, or gone away for good. That day outside the RER station, I pulled away with more confidence than I felt, not entirely convinced that I shouldn’t slip my hand into Florence’s and go back home with her like a naughty schoolgirl. I strode ahead, trying to look as if I knew where I was going, though we both knew I hadn’t a clue.

  Fortunately, I glanced up and saw a signpost for La Tour Washington. The road was a labyrinth of passageways which I followed to the foot of the tower and to a glamorous entrance hall with a security desk. I handed over my ID and was given a badge and told to go through one of the security turnstiles and to take the elevator on my right to the top floor.

  My meeting was with a woman by the name of Blandine Calmelane. I waited in the foyer until she came to collect me and led me to her office. Madame Calmelane was a tall, elegantly dressed French woman in a vibrant blue skirt and jacket. Her stiletto shoes jabbed the carpet as we passed reception desk, where I noticed a brown-haired girl hastily remove a bottle of nail varnish from the counter and endeavour to look busy. Madame Calmelane’s hair was set in a glamourous cut reminiscent of Crystal Carrington in Dynasty. It was clear she commanded the respect of her colleagues, as several business men jumped aside or rushed to open a series of double doors so that we could pass. She showed me into her office and we sat at a smooth mahogany desk. The window was a picture frame to the whole of La Défense. In the distance the Eiffel Tower scored the horizon.