But maybe not, I wrote to my sister Nora. Tonight I’m eating an omelette and a baguette, but they’d be wrong if they looked across the carpark and thought I was French. Are we really what we eat? Has all that Mexican food given you olive skin?
When are you coming to visit me? You should come before it gets too cold – they predict one of the coldest winters on record and already I’m freezing my tits off. Olé. Come before Mum and Dad decide to do the routine check-up – if you’re here I can say there’s no room, and your watchful eye would put their minds at rest. Or maybe it would make them worry more, hey? And maybe they wouldn’t dream of coming anyway. Twisted wishful thinking on my part?
Then a whole page about the Durebex. I tried to make it funny. It wasn’t that hard, which surprised me because the Durebex were work and for me work was intrinsically boring, no matter what sort it was. Nora was on a scholarship, studying in Mexico, but her letters were full of parties, boys, and shopping sprees for Indian artifacts. She’d asked me about the shops here; she’d been to Paris once for a few weeks and mentioned names of places I’d never even heard of.
From the twentieth arrondissement to the seventh, my journey to work passed beneath the shopping paradise in the centre of Paris. Destination rue de Babylone, Métro Invalides, there was nothing much here that was worth buying.
One evening Mme Durebex sent me to buy winter shoes for Laurent. He threw himself on his bed, complaining bitterly at the prospect, until his mother gave him money to buy himself a toy on the way home.
We walked to a small boutique near Montparnasse, where Mme Durebex had already been to select a pair for her son. But Laurent was not satisfied. He plodded about ostentatiously in a large pair of brogues. The saleswoman followed him nervously, addressing him in the vous form.
– Is Monsieur sure he shouldn’t take the pair his mother chose? Is Monsieur sure those aren’t too big? she kept saying.
She glanced at me for help as Laurent ordered her to unpack another, even larger, pair of shoes. I sat with my legs crossed, concealing the ladder in my stockings and my enjoyment of the spectacle. Finally, Laurent suffered the pair his mother had chosen to be slipped onto his stockinged feet. They fitted perfectly. He winced at the mirror, contorting his body as though his feet were glued to the carpet. I told him to decide as it was getting late. Laurent turned to me haughtily and spoke in English, something he’d never done before in front of other people.
– No Shona, I don’ want. This one hurt me. It’s too small.
– What a clever boy to be bilingual at his age! the saleswoman exclaimed.
Laurent looked down his nose at the saleswoman and told her to wrap the biggest pair. The cost of the shoes was over half my monthly wage.
We went to Bon Marché on the way home and Laurent spent his bribe on a computer game and a toy machine-gun.
– Maman! he called as soon as Nadenne let us in. You owe me four francs fifty because I bought a ham and cheese croissant on the way home because walking makes you hungry, and that’s food!
– Four francs fifty? came the appalled reply. Qu’est-ce que c’est cher!
Everything at Montparnasse seemed dear to me. In fact, the whole of the left bank from the fifth to the seventh seemed dear, or tourist-ridden, or both. For this reason I had never spent much time there.
During my first weeks in the Durebex’ quartier, every time I got off the métro at Invalides I thought of Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurides Brigge, whose solitary despair had so seduced me. When I walked through the streets Rilke had written about I thought of Brigge in his room near Invalides, Brigge eating a boiled egg in a grimy café. I thought of Brigge thinking about himself.
But now this was a rich quartier, frigidly rich, a quartier of ministries and embassies, silence and security doors, and the occasional armed guard. It was sparsely populated for a city as residentially dense as Paris. The few people on the streets walked briskly. You didn’t see children playing, no one hung around, no one hurried to the boulangerie for the last baguette before dinner.
It was dusk when I left the Durebex’, the sky close, diffusing a soft light over the city. The métro that would take me home was in the opposite direction to Montparnasse, but that trip for Laurent’s shoes had tempted me. And sometimes I headed back there.
The cafés were busy, people milled in the foyers of big cinema complexes. Greasy sandwich wrappers from fast food counters drifted along the boulevards beneath the Montparnasse skyscraper. In a dream I wandered through Bon Marché and the other department stores Laurent had dragged me into to buy toys. I loved the shining cosmetic stands in Galeries Lafayette, the rows of stockings, racks of bags with their heady smell of new leather, the big warmth of the first floor where winter coats were sold. I wanted to steal, but I couldn’t justify it. I didn’t really need anything, I only wanted. Never before Paris was I so seduced by things, and never since arriving back was I so conscious of what I was depriving myself.
I passed the Dôme Brasserie, then La Coupole, wondering how all those bohemians and struggling artists could have afforded to sit in such grand places, eating and drinking night after night. I wondered if the smart people I saw through the window were the next generation of bohemians and artists. If they were, I was suspicious.
Maybe it was a myth. Maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe it was just changing times and the lousy exchange rate for my little Australian dollar. But through the café windows things did look different: either the fiction hadn’t caught up with its reality, or the reality didn’t live up to its fiction.
I walked on. I didn’t need frivolity, didn’t want it. And I was alone now, less inclined to explore. Besides, I’d done the tourist bit in Paris already; I’d been out and about enough to want the quiet life, time for reflection. No more the daughter, the sister, the girlfriend. Just me.
I left the brasseries and went beneath the boulevards to the métro that took me back to my room on the edge of the city. Home to my lentil soup, or omelette, or whatever meal I could make in one pot on a hotplate. I did well – I could cook. My mother was never able to take short cuts with eight people to feed, so I’d grown up on good food. And I used to cook for my household in Surry Hills – curries, whole baked fish, huge bowls of pasta.
But cooking for one is uninteresting, and after a while it became an effort.
I cooked my dinner and I left the hotplate on to heat the room. I ate at a small table that folded out from the wall, and I read.
Rules
Each morning I sat at that same table and wrote. I kept a sort of journal in one of those French notebooks with narrow grids. I wrote along every one of them till the page was filled with impenetrable, cramped writing.
My books were stacked on the ground beside the table. A Collins Robert French-English dictionary, about ten books I’d read, and about five I hadn’t.
I washed at the broad white sink, heating saucepan after small saucepan of water on the hotplate. I washed under my arms, douched myself, hoisted first one foot then the other into the sink.
I had a pocket mirror that showed me myself in pieces. Black eyebrows that slanted down in the middle, giving me a perpetual frown. Little Miss Serious, my father used to say, what are we going to do with you? Dark brown eyes with drooping bottom lids; eyes which always seemed to be looking up, though I am not short, just average height. Maybe it was the way I held my head, chin pulled in, avoiding my mother’s, Hold your head high, Siobhan. The broken-looking nose that told my surname, bump in the middle, lump at the end.
I rubbed cream into the patches of dry skin on my temples and checked the pimple on my top lip that had been there for years, going up and down every month, gauging my hormones.
My hair needed cutting. The ends below my shoulders had become pale and rough. I was always running my hands through it then rubbing the ends together. My mother would nag, but I never lost the habit. I used to tell her it helped me think. I stood shivering with conditioner in it, waiting for another
saucepan of water to heat, when someone knocked at my door.
– Sophie? Are you there?
I let Chantale in. Her shrill voice filled the room like Christmas decorations.
– Mais t’es bête! You should come and have a shower at my place when you want to wash your hair.
– I thought you’d be at work.
– I quit.
The camp bed creaked under her weight. She was wearing three jumpers, a lodan coat, and walking boots. She had come to take me out for a walk, and a walk with Chantale could last for hours.
– Bar Piaf? she said.
Chantale lived in the building adjacent. Her father, who now lived in Provence, had rented the penthouse artists studio from the French government since Chantale was a child, and the room she was subletting me now had once been hers. I had met Chantale at an art opening when I was with Matthew. Too impatient to grapple with my name over the noise of the crowd, she had called me Sophie immediately. It made me think of Sophie Gilbert, who had done the most outrageous thing of anyone at my school: she had become a nun.
– I looked up au pair in the dictionary, I said to Chantale in the lift, and it means on equal terms.
I’d been pleased by this discovery, it had confirmed my view that my job was a fair and equal exchange of some sort. I watched the countdown of numbers over the lift doors – murky steel blue, the same blue as the chairs in my uncle’s surgery. Like my father, my uncle was a doctor. The surgery was at the back of his house in St Leonards, and that house is an antiseptic smell in my memory.
– Quoi? frowned Chantale. I’ve never heard that expression. It’s just jeune fille au pair, as far as I know.
So, the dictionary had lied. How was one expected to learn a language when dictionaries were unreliable? Doctors and dictionaries – I expected definite solutions when things went wrong, definitive translations word for word.
The first words I’d looked up in dictionaries were sex words. The shorter Oxford’s definition of masturbation was self-abuse. I’d checked the new edition down the back of WH Smith the other day and the definition hadn’t been changed. All over the English-speaking world, people were still abusing themselves.
We bumped to a halt, then the doors opened.
– But that might be perfectly valid as the English translation, Chantale added. The English have au pair girls too, for instance.
On equal terms. Maybe it was possible. But when we walked out of the building I felt adrift again, drowning in a sea of unknown words, changing meanings.
We crossed the boulevard and entered a network of cobbled village streets. There were houses here – tiny houses of dark stone stacked one after the other up the hill. The paving stones were littered with dog turds and I couldn’t wait for winter when they would freeze.
We walked down the hill to where the streets flattened and widened. Plane trees along the boulevard were shedding leaves.
There were signs all over Bar Piaf announcing the arrival of the new Beaujolais.
– Santé. We clinked our glasses.
– I’m in trouble with the concierge, said Chantale.
– Why?
– For subletting the room. It’s against the law. Ça se fait pas.
She twisted her face in imitation of the concierge, a shrivelled woman with steel-wool hair and a voice like the métro when it turned, wheels straining on the tracks.
My stomach tightened. Nowhere to live. Why was I back in Paris? What was I doing? Were my parents right – was I really just wasting my time? Not to mention money. Where would I go?
I watched Chantale fold the coaster of a soggy wine-stained Piaf in half, and half again. She flicked it around the tabletop. It reopened partially, and from where I sat it looked as though the microphone were a gun Piaf was holding to her head. Chantale picked up the coaster and tore it into little bits.
– I hate the French, I hate Parisians.
I smiled ambiguously. Chantale had an unpredictable temper. I couldn’t disagree because the attack would be turned on me, and I couldn’t agree because she was a Parisian herself. Paris was her family: it was her prerogative to criticise. Outside, an alsatian lifted its leg on a motor scooter. Chantale jerked her head at me.
– Look at that! They think their dogs are more important! Nothing but rules, rules, rules! And they obey like sheep. There are ten thousand empty apartments in this city, and so many homeless people.
– And I’ll be joining their ranks, I said. How long have I got?
– You can stay another month. Je me fous de la concierge! How dare she tell me it’s illegal? It’s my room.
Chantale flicked back her hair, a mannerism that also belonged to my sister Nora. Nora and I looked nothing alike, but people sometimes mistook Chantale and me for sisters. I don’t know why; Chantale coloured her hair to make it that dark and she was pale like me, but like so many other millions in Paris as well.
– I’m sorry about the room, Sophie, she said. But don’t worry. Tu te débrouilleras.
She got up to go to the toilet. Through the window I watched eddies of leaves scud along the footpath, catch in the tree grates. Would I manage? Chantale made it sound so easy. Would I sort things out? I had no sense of my capabilities, only of my will, relentlessly driving me. I knew I was moving, I just didn’t know where.
I signalled to the waiter for more wine.
– Mademoiselle …
The wine was placed before me and Chantale returned. I told her that the other waiter had called me Madame.
– What?
– Before, when I ordered the first round, the other waiter called me Madame, not Mademoiselle.
Chantale shrugged.
– It’s your age. Twenty-one. You could be either.
– Yes, but I’m not a child. Anyway, Laurent gets the vous form.
I recounted the shoe buying incident to Chantale as though it were something extraordinary.
– It’s because he’s rich, Sophie.
– But, Chantale, I still can’t tell when to use the familiar form or not. It’s so annoying. At school they made it sound like one simple rule.
Chantale shook her head.
– Not even we French always know. It doesn’t matter that much.
Households
My ears ringing from that afternoons lesson, I followed the voice of Mme Durebex up the stairs.
But I found only Nadenne, alone in the kitchen. It was like coming to cool water in this hothouse of shouting, being there with his silence. I watched his elegant hands swirl lettuce around the sink.
– Didn’t Madame Durebex call me?
Nadenne motioned to the living-room door. Her voice started up again.
– Shona! Viens voir! Shona!
I walked through. I had never seen beyond the kitchen. My eyes went first to the gilt mirror above the fireplace – it was similar to the one at my parents’ house. On either side of it, tall windows overlooked the street. There was a grand piano in one corner and a white leather couch stretched along the wall, flanked by two enormous brass plant-stands which contained cumquat trees. They looked as though Nadenne had been cultivating them with furniture polish.
But I couldn’t see the trees for the forest: there were so many little paintings festooning the walls, so many ornaments on every horizontal surface, that as soon as I left the room I couldn’t remember what a single one looked like. I went through that living-room many more times, but I can’t recall one item in detail.
I walked across the oriental rugs, calling tentatively.
– Madame Durebex?
– Come into the bedroom.
The bedroom was big and white. Mme Durebex was standing in the doorway of a walk-in wardrobe, rummaging through her handbag. I saw past her into the bathroom and started in surprise at the sight of the old man who had come in the front door a week before. He was naked, his face close to the mirror. Without glasses his face was lean and sharp, a sharp beak of a nose which he was tending to with a pot of crea
m.
Mme Durebex looked at me looking.
– Wait for me in the kitchen, Shona. I’ll have to ask the Monsieur for some cash.
Back in the kitchen, I whispered to Nadenne
– Mais c’est lui, le père?
Nadenne raised his eyebrows at me. Everything I said to him, I said in French and English. He hardly spoke either language. Nadenne was Tamil: he had shown me a map of Sri Lanka with his territory coloured red and told me he and his family would be killed if they went back there. The map was on Nadenne’s passport, and the name above the photo inside was Nathan.
– Nathan? I’d said in surprise, pronouncing the soft ‘th’ that was so difficult for francophones.
He’d shaken his head and pronounced his name correctly. It sounded like garden. I told the long exciting story about the mutation of my own name between a French ear and a French tongue. Nathan’s eyes glazed over.
– Just call me Shona, I’d said, deciding I’d call him Nadenne.
I asked Nadenne again, this time in English, if that man in the bedroom was Laurent’s father. Nadenne nodded then opened the oven and beckoned me over. He had turned on the griller by mistake and there was a black crust on the piece of cod that was supposed to be baking.
– Nadenne!
– Monsieur va gueuler.
I laughed with him, imagining the shouting, glad I would be out of there before dinner was served.
– He’s so old, I said. He’s old enough to be Madame’s father.
Nadenne thought for a while.
– Seventy-seven, he said. Madame, forty-five.
– Even older than my father. Poor Laurent!
Nadenne sent me an enquiring look. Mme Durebex came into the kitchen nervously waving two five-hundred franc notes.
– Seeing as you didn’t work much this month, Shona …
She watched my face for any sign of protest as I pocketed the money, two hundred francs less than my promised wage. What was the money to her? She would go through that much worth of panty-hose in a week.
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