A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  I’d moved out of Lisbeth’s house a few days before Christmas. I picked up my key, dumped my stuff at the new studio flat with barely a second glance, and caught a flight home to Manchester, returning to my parents’ bungalow for the first time since I’d moved to Paris. Basil was recovering nicely, but was still at the pet shop, in the incubator, in the bowels of Chatelet les Halles commercial centre. Christmas was a relaxing week at home with my parents and brother watching TV – the old favourites: Only Fools and Horses, Coronation Street, EastEnders. We drank sherry, and my mother was on her best behaviour, preparing home-made favourites such as mince pies and sherry trifle.

  Returning to Paris in the New Year I discovered that Fabrice, the prodigal friend, had pitched up during my absence, following a long voyage to the United States. His return marked the beginning of the end of our relationship. As Lady Diana went on to say only a few years later, ‘there were three of us in our marriage’. From that time on, there were three people in our relationship, only one of them should have been on tour with the Bee Gees.

  Friday nights, William informed me, were now to be spent at the Queen nightclub on the Champs Elysées avec Fabrice, who didn’t (quelle surprise) have a girlfriend but believed in open relationships with as long and as diverse a cast list as possible. Both before and after the nightclub there were drinks at Fabrice’s in the 14ème arrondissement near the Quai Bercy, and if we were at a loose end, which basically meant if it was just the two of us, William happily informed me that we could meet up with his old friend not only on a Friday night, but on a Saturday night too. Sunday night William would be back home chez les parents, and so the weekend was over before it had begun.

  The Queen nightclub was decked out in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the full-sized carcass of a plane wreck which filled the centre stage. Later, the club would become famous in the gay community for its Soirées Mousse, where foam was squirted into the audience to hide a multitude of sins. In our day, it was a popular pick-up joint for frustrated heterosexuals like Fabrice. He gyrated around the crash-site, targeting women under every wing. If he ‘pulled,’ he disappeared off down the runway; if unsuccessful, he trailed us till dawn, cigarette in hand until my throat felt like the bottom of Basil’s cage. In a puff of nicotine smoke, William, the gentle and considerate boyfriend I’d learnt to love over the past few months all but vanished.

  Fabrice’s attitude to women was plain: they were there for sex, and it was okay to have multiple partners without any form of protection. The end of my school days had been marked only a few years before with that chilling advertisement of a chisel carving a gravestone and warning of the dangers of unprotected sex. For Fabrice, AIDS was only something gay men picked up, and he slept with dozens of unknown women across the city without protection. William told me that Fabrice had lost his virginity when they were at boarding school to a woman in her forties, who he had kept as a mistress for many years, and with whom he still slept when at a loose end. I was surprised he could find one partner, let alone several, but gyratory apes sporting medallions were clearly more in demand than I had reckoned, and the stream of women he could lure back to his apartment never seemed to dry up.

  With the return of Fabrice, William’s other friends reappeared on the scene. There was Serge, a Corsican artist whose parents had a quirky house with a garden in the centre of town, with an original Picasso sketch in the toilets. Serge’s father had been good friends with Picasso who, being, a generous man, had gifted the sketches. Serge was the nicest of William’s friends and much higher on the evolutionary scale than Fabrice. Then there was Paul-Edouard, who worked as a consultant for an auditing company, and Hervé, who had shared a flat with William in New York.

  William’s friends had a closer bond with each other than any of the women they slept with, and suddenly I became the exception, tagging along week after week on ‘boys nights out’. In Fabrice’s mind, I was a threat. I pitched up at his man-pad on weekends, attending his parties and objecting vociferously to his plans to take my boyfriend to the Club Med in Greece without me. William assumed a different personality around his friend. When he was in ‘Fabrice-mode’, I wasn’t sure I liked him much anymore, and started to wonder who the real William was. English lent a softness to his character that was stripped back in his mother tongue – people become different things around different people, especially in different languages.

  Conversations between the men were invariably about les nanas or le sport. ‘Telephone’, a French rock group, blasted away in the background as the men rolled joint after joint and discussed who amongst their latest conquests was hot, and who was not.

  ‘Je rêvais d’un autre monde, où la terre serait ronde,’ the singer boomed.

  All of William’s friends smoked, as did the women they brought home on their one-night stands. The fact that I was a non-smoker (pot or otherwise) and a non-drinker (of whisky at least) made it easy for Fabrice to mock me as ennuyeuse or boring. I was back in my role as ‘Miss Goodie Two Shoes’. Never the ‘cool kid’ in school, I overheard Fabrice teasing William about the eczema on my hands, jibing his friend for having grown boring now he was shagging ‘snakeskin’ woman. Our nights together ended with me in the corner, disapproving and longing to go home.

  Back in the 13th, at my flat, we made love, waking late into the next day when it was already afternoon. Sundays were the worst. When I was young my father had worked away from home and left the house on Sunday afternoons at four timing his departure with the start of my favourite television programme: Black Beauty. Week after week I would watch that most magnificent of all horses galloping over the hillside, the dramatic theme tune punctuating my sobs. I dreaded the time the clock would chime four, just as now I found myself dreading the exact same time William would leave. Sunday afternoons became a symbol of sadness in my week, the depression lifting by Monday when I was back at work with Ron, or out drinking after work with the Brown & Mclane Software team. But on Sunday afternoons, as the curtains closed on our window of opportunity, I couldn’t enjoy our time together, knowing the minutes were counted.

  ‘Why don’t you stay one more night? It won’t matter.’

  ‘I don’t have my work clothes.’

  ‘Let’s go and get them.’

  ‘Let’s make love again instead. It’s too far to drive and my parents will want us to stay for dinner – and it will be awkward. My mother won’t have prepared enough portions.’

  ‘Bring your clothes to mine next week. Let’s spend a whole week together. I want to know what it’s like to be with you on a Wednesday!’

  ‘We’re fine as we are, aren’t we? We’ll be tired in the week from work. This way, we just spend the nice moments together. Besides, I told you, my parents won’t like it.’

  What was wrong with his parents! I’d seen my own just a handful of times in the last couple of years. William was an adult for god’s sake. When was he going to stand up to them and live his own life?

  With Fabrice’s return, I learnt secrets from William’s past that I didn’t like at all. Fabrice, sprawled back in his chair, cigarette drooping from his slack mouth, greasy locks of hair falling onto his brow, let these nuggets of information fall one by one, relishing the moment.

  ‘Remember that night you and Hervé shagged the same girl?’

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard properly. What? There was more.

  ‘Ouaiii, C’était très con. Stupid, you know. Years ago, now. This girl, she couldn’t choose, so we both fucked her.’

  ‘On the same night?’

  Fabrice laughed. ‘At the same time, more like!’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Well, darling,’ William said, trying to slip his arm around my waist, ‘it was not a happy experience. Not one of which I’m proud.’

  It was repulsive. These actions were so far removed from my idea of love that I pushed William away. I didn’t know anyone at university who had done that. Not even the rugby lot, or the porn brigad
e from the Ifor Evans TV room. There were the drinking games, and the Welsh boys joking that they were going out ‘on the tap’, but there was also a notion of falling in love, of being in love, of wanting to be with that special person – even if they did puke all over her.

  ‘C’est dégoutant! I feel sick!’

  ‘Thanks! I wish I’d never told you.’

  Later that night: ‘Do you want to sleep with every woman you see?’

  ‘I’m with you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  There was a pause.

  I blurted out without thinking: ‘Would you live with me? We could get a nice place together. With Basil. On both our salaries we could afford a gorgeous two-roomed flat, or a duplex apartment. Saint Michel perhaps. Or Le Marais.’

  This time the answer was loud and clear.

  ‘No. I’ve decided to rent an apartment with Fabrice.’

  * * *

  Part of my desire to live with William stemmed from the loneliness I felt now that I had moved into my new studio. The apartment was 27m² and in a block of HLM (or Council) flats in the rue Domrémy in the 13ème arrondissement. It was located near the new Paris library which was under construction but as yet a wasteland. A cold wind blew down the rue Domrémy and when Ron and Olivia, his colleague from work, popped over, they soon baptised my street the ‘Wind Tunnel’. The flat was on the third floor, next to the lift. I would have preferred an older more Parisian feeling flat, such as the one provided by Magwitch our Chinese benefactor, but the innocuous and soulless decor was a small price to pay for keeping all my fingers.

  The door opened onto a small corridor with a showerroom and a toilet, and one room with a corner-kitchen fitted out with an electric hotplate. There wasn’t a fridge, so I put my milk on the window sill. The idea of popping out to an electrical goods store such as Darty never occurred to me. Finances were tough with my monthly direct debit for Basil. Basil’s open cage took up most of the main sitting room. I placed my faithful camp bed beneath the window, to serve both as a place to sleep and a place to sit during the day. There was a fitted cupboard in the entrance hall for my clothes, but I didn’t have a table or a chair; so most of my belongings lay scattered on the bird-seed covered floor. Compared to the flat I’d shared with Jessica, it was dire. The Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur felt like fairy-tale myths up here. And yet, however dreary it was, this was the first place I could truly call home.

  It wasn’t the sort of flat that Jessica would have dreamt of. It was a concrete box with a carpet floor. There were no old parquet floorboards to creak beneath my feet or cornicing on the ceiling to lift the sprit. It was a functional box in which to eat and sleep, fulfilling the old Parisian doctrine of metro, boulot, dodo (metro, work, bed). The flat made no allowance for aesthetics but was the sum of all I could afford.

  It was a cold winter, so I hung a plastic bag from my window to store my butter, cheese, and milk. I heated water in the only pan I owned, which served as a kettle and a utensil to cook spaghetti. I couldn’t make tea and spaghetti at the same time, so I boiled the water for the tea first and then make the pasta, covering it with ready made tomato sauce from a jar. The makeshift fridge worked quite well, until I was woken one morning to the sound of cooing, and a fat Parisian pigeon pecking at the lid of my milk and feasting on my cheese. From then on, the word spread across the rooftops of Paris that l’anglaise on la rue Domrémy was crazy enough to keep her food outside, so I resigned myself to pecked packets of Emmental cheese, or perforated milk-tops on my fresh milk.

  When Basil was released from incubation, he screeched at the pigeons from the top of his cage and relished the council-heated warmth of our tiny new box. I left the door of the cage open and he ran around on the carpet, leaving bird poo everywhere. I was glad of his company and even more pleased when William found me a second-hand TV set. He was endeavouring to creep back into favour, realising how disappointed I was that he’d decided to move in with Fabrice.

  François Mitterand was President and there was talk of phase two of the Gulf war and increased conflict. Not to mention Scud missiles landing on France and fear in the city. I started to think that if there was going to be a world war, I’d rather be back in England. I made some comment about this during my weekly phone call, but both my parents reassured me that I was best off where I was, despite being geographically closer to Iraq. A week home at Christmas was one thing; moving back for good quite another.

  Mitterand sat behind his grand presidential desk and made a special news announcement in which he told his country that the situation was growing worse. He comforted his fellow patriots and I felt reassured. With talk of war I was more relieved than ever that I resisted the temptation of selling my passport to Yazid.

  Madame Calmelane warned us that as a prominent American company we must be even more careful of suspect packages. One such packet arrived at my desk without a label. I called security and the whole tower block was evacuated. A thousand employees stood on the Le Parvis de la Défense in the biting cold wondering if there was to be a controlled explosion of the box. It turned out to be computer software from Provence, returned by a disgruntled client who’d lost his marker pen.

  I remembered David’s tales of terrorist attacks in Paris and grew nervous on the RER A line at rush hour. The train was packed with hundreds of commuters and there was barely space to breathe. The screeching doors pressed against heaving bodies to close. One morning I uttered a scream which filled the whole carriage, when a man lucky enough to have a seat remained standing, ceremoniously removing a device with a wire from his breast pocket. I realised a second too late that it was his Walkman.

  * * *

  With money so tight, I skipped dinner whenever I could, filling up on beer at Le Knit after work. Cooking at the flat was too depressing. I made up for poor diet at the weekend when William took me out for moules frites or carpaccio de boeuf à volonté in the bistros around St Germain-des-Près where I could stuff my face with third or fourth helpings all for the same price. Basil was a different matter, requiring maximum vitamins after his recent illness. I bought apples from the Arab shop to make sure he had his daily dose.

  After a time, my fears subsided. Not a single Scud missile had landed on Paris, and after the air strikes in early January of that year, the war appeared to be over before it had begun. I began to relax.

  Spring was in the air and the promise of May in Paris filled my heart with joy. The thought of cherry-tree blossom and afternoons in Les Tuileries, reading a book on the bench and eating a crèpe, sent a ripple of joy through my heart. It had been a long winter. The best thing that could be said about my new studio was that Basil was warm. Our Siberian days at Lisbeth’s were behind us, and I’d no reason to complain. Ron, who was a passionate collector of art, promised me he would lend me ‘one of his pieces’ to brighten my place up. But when he came over for the first time he stared at the blank walls as if he might cry, and did not renew the offer.

  ‘Come to my place, doll-face,’ he said. ‘If ever you’re down, just pop on over to la rue de Rennes.’

  But Ron was busy these days. He was ‘courting’ a wealthy German (married unfortunately) and his thoughts were elsewhere. Besides, I couldn’t leave Basil alone every night. I wondered why I’d tied myself down with a parrot. I’d wanted to rescue him, but it was more than that: I needed someone to love, someone with whom to form a family unit. I wanted a place to call home and someone in it who loved me, even if that someone was an Amazonian parrot.

  * * *

  Returning home one day, I noticed that Basil’s apple had turned prematurely black. It was strange. I had only put it out that morning: fresh, hard and green. Every day before work I pierced an apple between the bars of the cage, leaving his roof top open, so that he could climb up and amuse himself by shredding it to pieces and hurling clumps across the carpet.

  I reached out to remove the apple, and froze. It wasn’t black. It was covered in cockroaches. My love
of animals did not extend to roaches. Basil’s apple was covered with fifteen price specimens, their shining backs gleaming in my face as if to say, ‘Go on, salope, I dare you. Squish me’.

  The problem grew worse over the following days. I bought poison and traps, leaving them in the corner of the sitting room while I was out at work. Hopeful that these would have done the trick, I turned down the covers of my bed that night, to discover the mother of all cockroaches nestling between my sheets. Shower times were hazardous. Water leaked from the miniscule shower-tray when I washed, sweeping the traps from the corner of the bathroom, and filling them with water, so that dead cockroaches bubbled to the surface in a pool of frothy water.

  Each night, on my return, I inspected the flat from top to bottom. It didn’t take long. I crossed the floor on tiptoes, with the trepidation of a bomb-disposal officer. There was a fresh cull of victims each day, with new live trails of survivor beasts crawling along the walls. I killed so many it astounded me that they had time to breed. Was my camp bed surrounded by mating roaches each night as I slept; shagging the night away to ensure new growth spurts to the population?

  One night, I switched on the eight o’clock news, to ascertain the state of the world and to hear the latest update from our President (‘Mesdames, Messieurs, bonsoir,’), but was distracted by a line of cockroaches emerging in single file from behind the TV set. They had bedded down in the back amidst the wires, to the comforting warmth of François Mitterrand’s words.