A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  The man grabbed the cage and started to pull at the bars, rattling it and causing Basil to flap manically, letting off a jungle roar that resonated up and down the aisle. I gripped onto the bars, for the love of Basil, and also because I’d not yet paid my first monthly instalment at the bank. The man tried to prise away my fingers and wrenched the door open to free the bird.

  ‘Volez mon pauvre bête! Fly away! Echappez-vous!’

  ‘He was unhappy!’ I shouted. ‘I’m saving him.’

  The struggle continued until two other passengers became embroiled. Finally, the train lurched forwards and minutes later the doors were buzzing open and the man was gone.

  I took Basil home to introduce him to William and Lisbeth. He settled in well. We kept the roof of the cage open and he sat on the top, climbing down to run around the floor. He couldn’t fly because the pet shop had clipped his wings, but I intended to let them grow back. Soon Basil grew tame and became a part of the family, though never averse to the odd finger-slicing pinch of the beak if we brushed his feathers the wrong way.

  It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I was in bed at Lisbeth’s house one night, with Basil sleeping in his cage. It was a week night, so I was alone while, back at barracks, William had dutifully attended a regimented supper with his parents. Around two o’clock in the morning, I was awoken from a deep sleep by the sound of cries and screams from Lisbeth. I knew that she had spent the evening with Charles-Henri and it was obvious the noises were coming from her bedroom. Lisbeth was a vociferous lover and I stuck my head under my pillow, hoping it wouldn’t scare Basil too much. After a moment, it became clear that the cries were not cries of pleasure. There was the sound of a smash and a struggle, and the noise of the window slamming loudly shut and then open several times, as if Lisbeth was trying to push her lover from it. My stomach churned. I hated the sound of arguing, reminiscent as it was of my own parents screaming and shouting. Once again, I was the helpless child who felt somehow guilty, wondering if one was going to knife the other. I was too old by now to hide under the dining-room table and pull the tablecloth down.

  God only knew what was happening, but soon the couple were out on the balcony and the screams continued, piercing the frosty night air, silent now the throb of traffic had died down. After a moment the shouting stopped. Charles-Henri must have left. Or died. I didn’t know what had fired the argument, the rapid gunshot French was too difficult to understand from afar. Certain that it was none of my business, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The next morning, I emerged from my room to find Lisbeth drinking tea in the kitchen. She was wearing her white dressing-gown, her face dishwater grey and her hair dishevelled. I smiled, Basil on my shoulder, and asked her if she was alright, wondering if she would confide in me and tell me what all the shouting had been about. She ignored me, stood up, picking up her cigarettes from the table and swept past, her shoulder brushing mine so brusquely that Basil lost his balance.

  My flatmate didn’t wait for me, but caught an earlier bus to the office, slamming the door on her way out. We barely saw each other that day as Human Resources had relented and she was in training now for her newly upgraded position of secretary. That evening I returned to the house and discovered that my room was freezing cold. Condensation trickled down the window pane. The rest of the house was warm, but my radiator had been switched off. Basil huddled miserably in his cage as the cold air crept in through the windows. When Lisbeth returned, I asked her if she knew how to fix the radiator, but she shrugged.

  ‘Not my problem,’ she said in an unhelpful manner.

  She continued to cold-shoulder me for several days. Usually we ate our evening meals together, but she pointedly prepared a microwaved ‘meal for one’ and shuffled off to her own room to eat it alone. The next morning, I realised that she had removed the hair dryer from the bathroom, presumably because she knew I did not own one, and the television set had vanished from the living room into her bedroom. The temperature outside continued to plummet, and the inside of my window iced up. I moved Basil’s cage into the sitting room where it was warmer.

  ‘I don’t want that bird in here,’ she said, although she had always made a fuss of Basil. I dragged the cage back and started to worry. Basil had sneezed several times and was sitting with his head under his wing which was unusual during the day time. I had noticed that he was moulting and that the bottom of his cage was covered in green feathers.

  ‘Have you asked her what’s wrong?’ William suggested.

  I followed his advice and tried to corner her in the kitchen one morning.

  ‘Have I done something to upset you?’ I asked.

  ‘As if you don’t know!’ she snapped, and then bursting into tears, flounced off to her room.

  Within three days the situation had deteriorated. Basil had lost so many feathers that I could see the white duvet that warmed his flesh, lining the bottom of the cage. The room was freezing and his sneezing had become worse and worse. He hadn’t touched his food.

  ‘We need to get the heating in my room fixed,’ I pleaded. ‘I am paying rent after all.’

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ Lisbeth snapped, her dark eyes lined with black shadows, ‘I just want you out. Salope.’

  I looked up the meaning of salope. The closest equivalent in English was ‘whore’.

  * * *

  With William’s help, I packed Basil into a small cardboard box wrapped with covers and took him back to the pet shop. The man in charge took him from me as efficiently as a doctor in ER.

  ‘He needs medication and to go into the incubator,’ he said.

  It was a relief they could offer a solution and that they appeared to know exactly what they were doing. I visited Basil in Chatelet les Halles every night after work. Within a few days his feathers had almost completely fallen out, so that he resembled a prisoner of war in his patchy undercoat. The small glass cage pulsated heat, and I wished I could crawl in, rather than return to my freezing damp bedroom.

  Ron came with me to visit the patient, and so did William. We did nightly visits and then went for a meal in town, eating our favourite carpaccio and chips à volonté in the bistros around the Pompidou Centre. We took Ron to Kitty O’Shea’s Irish bar behind the Opéra, where there was live music with an amazing jazz singer much revered by Jessica in the old days. She was called ‘Miss Thing’ and when she sang I felt as if we were in downtown New Orleans. I returned home as late as I could, drunk if possible, in the hope of avoiding Lisbeth.

  Irish bars and American restaurants were big news – all the French jeunesse hung out in them. They were fun places to be, with the ambiance of pubs back home. French cafés felt cold in comparison, with impersonal strip lighting more suited to warehouses than places of relaxation, flashing money machines and plastic tables blighting their decor. Old men huddled in the traditional cafés, dropping the butt ends of their cigarettes to the floor. This carpet of cigarettes was a tradition in all French cafés until the no-smoking laws came into practice some years later.

  Irish pubs didn’t allow cigarettes on the floor. They were warm and cosy, with wooden tables and warm lighting which illuminated dozens of young attractive Frenchmen who were there to chat up the American and Australian tourists, or the English au pairs. The wheel had come full circle. I was back where I’d started out with Jessica: working life in the city had taken me away from student haunts such as these, and thrown me into a more adult and grown-up world. I felt a pang of regret that Jessica had left and that she wasn’t with me for a drink and some mild flirtation with a stranger before we returned to the comfort and safety of the house of Axel Blanchard.

  Running away had seemed a good idea at the time, but then with our strained diplomatic relations with the Chinese, the sudden onset of working life and problems with both money and accommodation, I suddenly longed for the insouciance of those early days, where we raided the fridge when Les Blanchards were in bed and drank cheap wine in the Hessian S
ack. I’d have relished an afternoon ironing in the warmth of the Submarine, listening to Woman’s Hour. The shrill shriek of the switchboard had deprived me of any time for introspection and thought, far more than the ironing of Axel’s shirts or the folding of his underpants had ever done.

  On the nights when William slept in my room I felt safe again. I didn’t like being alone with Lisbeth in the house these days. Her animosity was tangible. She looked as if she might knife me. I still had no idea what I had done.

  Since Lisbeth had denied me access to the TV set, I was cut off from what was happening in the world, which increased my sense of isolation. I tried to keep up by buying an English newspaper from La Gare Saint Lazare in the mornings. To escape the ongoing misery of Lisbeth’s cold shoulder, I bought books in English from Shakespeare & Company by the Notre Dame, or WH Smith on the rue de Rivoli.

  The mystery as to what had happened with Lisbeth was resolved the following week. I was on reception when a Chinese girl from the 24th floor came to the desk. Her name was Ying Yue. She was an attractive woman who spoke extremely good English and French. I had learnt from Lisbeth some time ago that she lived with a Moroccan man who drank and beat her up. She’d also informed me that Ying Yue was bisexual. She had two children but had had a string of men, and a relationship with one of the female members of staff at the office. She was older than us, in her early thirties perhaps. She cut straight to the point, leaning over the reception desk in a conspiratorial manner. Her voice was soft and raspy with a snake-like undertone.

  ‘You don’t know it,’ she said, ‘but one day you will marry Charles-Henri Rocheran.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said, shocked ‘Je ne comprends pas. You must have the wrong person.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I told Lisbeth you’d be surprised,’ she said ‘I see things you can’t. Messages from haut delà. The other side. You haven’t a clue what’s going on with Charles-Henri. And Lisbeth thinks you’ve planned the whole thing. But whatever you think, it will come to pass. You will have a child too. You won’t stay with him, but that’s for later.’

  ‘C’est ridicule,’ I said. What total bollocks. The woman was off her head.

  Madame Calmelane walked past reception for the third time and glared at me. Ying Yue was part of the influx of staff that had come in with the merger from the enemy company. It was pretty obvious from her look what my boss thought of Ying Yue.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ Ying Yue said standing her ground. ‘Show me a photo and I’ll tell you something.’

  The only photograph I had in my purse was one of my mum and dad and my brother Steven. She took it from me and stared at it long and hard.

  ‘Your brother will die young,’ she said. ‘I forgot to say not to ask me about the future if you don’t want to know bad stuff. Oh, and it’s possible your dad is not really your dad.’

  I snatched the photo back.

  ‘What’s this got to do with Lisbeth? What am I meant to have done?’

  She smiled, and I thought I didn’t like her much, with her sly, knowing looks. Telling me my brother was going to die – how sick was that?

  ‘Lisbeth is obsessed with Charles-Henri,’ she said. ‘She loves his children and his lifestyle and thinks she will be moving to his big house in the suburbs. He doesn’t love her. She is a plaything for sex.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She shrugged. ‘I just do. But that’s not the point. The other night when you were in bed, they were having sex when Charles-Henri said something that made Lisbeth mad with grief.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, pushing back a sudden thought of a demonic Lisbeth wielding a knife.

  ‘He asked Lisbeth if she would go to your room and invite you to join them both in the bed.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Lisbeth told me.’

  ‘What? He’s mad. I would never do that.’

  She looked at me carefully. ‘I know you wouldn’t. I think you are a romantic and I think he is in love with you. But you should be careful. Lisbeth wants to kill you. She thinks you encouraged him.’

  ‘I didn’t! I’ve never spoken to the man. Whenever I see him he’s always kissing Lisbeth. Anyway, what an insult to think I’d even want to go in bed with them. I’ve got better things to do. I’m going out with William.’

  ‘That won’t last,’ she said, smugly. ‘I tell you, you will marry Charles-Henri and William will sleep with dozens more women after you. I told Lisbeth there is no point killing you or switching the heating off. Did you know she’s trying to freeze you out of the house?’

  ‘My parrot is in intensive care!’ I said indignantly.

  She laughed. ‘Look for a new place. Your Lisbeth days are over. Think of me on your wedding day to Charles-Henri.’

  She was like the thirteenth fairy. I would need to look out for the pricking needles of a spinning wheel.

  ‘I don’t even fancy him! He looks like John Major!’

  ‘You say that now, but one day you will feel differently.’

  She walked to the door, turning as she got there.

  ‘By the way, I forgot to tell you, Lisbeth tried to jump from the upstairs window that night. Charles-Henri had to pull her back inside. She wanted to kill herself – or rather show the world how angry she was. I’d hurry up and find a new place if I were you.’

  I was angry with Ying Yue – angry that she had told me my brother would die, or that my father wasn’t biologically related to me. The crap about marrying Charles-Henri was one thing – that was just plain ridiculous – but predicting my brother’s early death when he was only seventeen was horrendous. I didn’t like her knowing manner, her evil comments or her sneaky smile. The other piece of worrying news was that Lisbeth, who was clearly on the edge of an emotional precipice, had tried to jump out of the window! It explained the banging and shouting.

  I was so upset that when Henriette Fresnel walked past she noticed the look on my face and invited me into her office. I told her the story. I know I wasn’t meant to, and that Lisbeth’s relationship was supposed to be a secret, but I was just about to find myself homeless a week before Christmas, Basil was in an incubator but needed to come home at some point, and I was meant to be flying out to Manchester by the end of the week for Christmas. Henriette made a few quick phone calls.

  ‘We might have a solution,’ she said. ‘It’s not the flat you were on the list for, but it’s better than nothing, and at least you can move straight away. It’s in the Chinese area; the 13th arrondissement.’

  * * *

  I was not too pleased at being back in the heart of the Chinese area, with my old friends lurking nearby, but it was probably the last place they would look for me. Anyway, I was too excited to finally have an address in Paris of my own to care. Basil was finally on the mend and after Christmas I would be able to bring him back to our own place. His feathers had started to push back through; hard, keratin-covered spikes, that made him look more like an emaciated porcupine than a parrot, erupting all over his skinny body.

  William helped me move. Lisbeth refused to speak to me, slamming doors and chain-smoking in the corner in her trusty white dressing gown. I was furious at Charles-Henri for causing me such grief. The idea that I would even have wanted to join him in bed while he was halfway through making love to Lisbeth was sick. I thought of Jay and his sex clubs, feeding coins into machines after work, and Charles-Henri with his ménage à trois fantasies, and realised that the real world was far different from that of Mr Darcy and all the other romantic heroes I’d grown up loving. I thought of Madame Blanchard, and her gentleman callers at the house, and Mr Blanchard turning the naked secretary from his room like Eve from the garden of Eden, and decided I’d rather find a husband as faithful as Mr Blanchard, with simple ideas on love, sex and fidelity, than any of the others. Even David, with his pages of looping and flowery prose, hadn’t lasted long. First woman in a grass skirt and he’d headed off into the tropical sunset. And William seemed mor
e intent on keeping his parents happy and staying home feasting on veal suppers than spending time with me. Maybe I didn’t need a man at all. Maybe from now on it was just me and my parrot.

  Chapter 23

  Any hopes that William could be the man for me were slowly diminishing. He was either at home obeying his father’s iron rule or, even when on leave from barracks at the weekends, devoting large chunks of his free time to a new arrival in our lives: Fabrice. Fabrice – the dreaded best friend – had been away travelling for the first few months of our relationship. But now that he was back our lives were about to take a turn for the worse.

  William and Fabrice had been friends since school, and although in many ways were entirely different, especially in their attitude to women, they were inseparable. Fabrice had a face chewed by early bouts of acne, a large, easy smile, tight jeans, a thick leather belt, and pointy black shoes. Worst of all he wore a gold medallion and left the top buttons of his shirt undone, to reveal a golden chain nestled in a thatch of dark hair. It was John Travolta with a hormone imbalance.

  I hadn’t realised that anyone other than the Bee Gees actually wore medallions, but Fabrice, like so many Frenchmen, sported both a golden chain and a heavy link bracelet. Jewellery was not the only cultural difference. Since my days with David, I had been initiated over time to the French ‘man bag’. Most Frenchmen carried some form of handbag or purse. I wondered where British men kept their keys, driving licence and loose change. I didn’t remember my father or any of the other men back home having a handbag. French men sported them with ease: little leather shoulder bags, satchels, or purses not unlike the one I carried myself. Fabrice and William were no exception and, not for the first time, I realised that although there was only the English Channel, La Manche, to separate us, we were worlds apart.

  Due to William’s curfew on week nights, our time together began on Friday nights and ended on Sunday afternoons at around four o’clock, allowing William enough time to scamper home in time for the Sunday night aperitif and the passing around of those little bowls of Pringles. I was not invited home on Sunday nights, as William’s father told him they all needed to get their heads down for a good night’s sleep and work the next day. For the first couple of months of our relationship, before Fabrice’s return to Paris, our weekends had been our own and I’d come to terms with the fact that although I didn’t see William during the week, he was all mine at the weekend. During the week, I could hang out at Ron’s and watch old-fashioned black-and-white movies.