There was no reply.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I came out to get some food. I got lost.’
She looked feverish.
‘Where do you live?’
‘The Olympiades.’
‘I don’t know that. Do you have a phone?’
‘No.’
‘You’d better come with me. We’ll get you back there tomorrow.’
‘All right.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked again.
‘Sandrine,’ the young woman said, allowing herself to be helped to her feet.
Back at the apartment, I put a duvet and blankets on the bed in the little storeroom and moved my suitcase out of it; then I heated some vegetable soup from a carton. I saw no reason to distrust this feverish kid.
Three
Stalingrad (by night)
I hadn’t come to Paris on a mission, it was just to escape from my father and stepmother and the torture of not sleeping with Laila. Can you run away from a negative? You bet. Had I really ‘run away’ in any case? No one had tried to stop me going.
Plenty of people had headed up from Morocco to France looking for work, though my father said the French had recently become less welcoming. He didn’t put it as nicely as that. What he said was: ‘They always hated us. Once they’d murdered and tortured and killed and taken everything they wanted from us in our country, they just let us hang, the bastards. Then a few bombers from the banlieue gave them an excuse to hate us more.’ That was how he put it.
He went on a bit about jihad and brainwashed virgins, but I’d stopped listening by then. I didn’t care about colonial wars that had happened before I was born. I only knew that my mother had been born and brought up in Paris, had lived the best part of her life there. Her name was hardly ever mentioned at home and there were no pictures of her on shelves or tables in our house. It was as though my father resented her for dying. Once when I was going through his desk drawers looking for cigarettes, I did come across an envelope with some old photographs in it. One of them showed him as a young man standing with a woman in a floral dress who had large eyes and black hair. I looked, but could see nothing of myself in her. It might have been my mother, though there was no sign of affection or attachment between the two of them, they weren’t holding hands or anything, so it could have been a secretary at his office or someone he’d met at the beach. I think he tried to be a ladies’ man in his younger days, when that sort of thing was easier to pull off, before a lot of women wrapped themselves in black. They got that idea, by the way, from watching the news on cable TV, which showed their sisters in places like Iran and Yemen. It was like a fashion thing. At the same time, they were seeing US television for the first time and started wearing lots of make-up. And so: the hijab–mascara combination … Frozen fireballs, count me out.
When Maurice had left us, Sandrine and I kept walking into Paris.
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘I suppose I’ll get a job.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Maybe I can teach Arabic.’
‘No one wants to learn Arabic. They want less Arabic.’
‘All right, English then. But the first thing I’ve got to do is eat,’ I said.
Half an hour later we were inside the city itself, on a wide street, cold, with a dreary park to one side. Sitting in the doorway of a building was a homeless girl, huddled with all her belongings and a look of misery on her face, like she was posing for a picture called Despair. She was probably East European, not bad-looking if you’d put her through a hot car-wash and bought her new clothes. Her hand was stuck out in a half-hearted way, but what you noticed was how the look of maximum sorrow never let up, not for a second. Sandrine bent down and put a coin in her McDonald’s cup and said something I didn’t hear. She stayed leaning over, talking to the beggar girl while I looked up and down the street.
‘There’s a place we can go not far from here,’ Sandrine said, standing up.
We got walking again. ‘Ponscarme’, said the sign on a bus stop. It didn’t look like Paris at all. The buildings were new, they looked like children’s playthings with funny shapes and bright colours, but it seemed poor as well. And it was so cold compared to home. We kept walking on down these blank streets past the odd Chinese and Vietnamese place with paper lanterns in the window, but we couldn’t afford them.
It’s hard to say exactly what I’d expected. I hadn’t studied Paris, I’d just seen a few films over the years and got an impression from the Internet of somewhere very old-fashioned. Not old-fashioned like the medina at home, which had been the same for ever – but a place where the buildings all looked similar, with huge black roofs but lived in by ordinary people in heated flats where they kept small dogs and the stairwell was filled with the smells of different dinners. What movie had I got that from? But, it wasn’t like that at all, not the bit we were in anyway. It was so twentieth century and concrete and hard and opened up to the sky with no alleys or big wooden doorways. ‘Unforgiving’ might be a word for it.
Sandrine took my arm and pushed me down a side street. We came to the back of what looked like a school. We went inside a bright room with a canteen along one wall and a couple of old men sitting at a table. We put our backpacks on the floor and went over to the counter, where a dozy African woman handed us some aluminium containers with food inside and a plastic spoon and fork.
‘Do we have to pay?’ I said.
The woman said nothing, just shook her head slowly. Then she gave us an apple and a piece of bread. We took it over to an empty table.
‘What is this?’ I said. There was meat of some kind, wrinkled and grey in a sauce with pieces of onion. It smelled bad.
‘Tripe, I think,’ said Sandrine.
‘Is that pork?’
‘God knows. Cow, maybe.’
‘What is this place?’
‘The girl in the doorway told me about it. It could be a religious thing, or Red Cross maybe.’
‘I can’t eat this.’
‘Just have the bread. We can buy some coffee and chocolate. I’ve got a few euros left. She told me about the soup kitchen at Stalingrad, too. We can try there.’
‘What else did she tell you?’
‘She thinks maybe we can find somewhere to stay in one of those tower blocks. She was there herself but she got kicked out.’
‘Everyone round here seems to be Chinese.’
‘Is that a problem for you?’
‘I suppose not.’
But it was. I’d never met Chinese people before and to me they all looked odd. Their heads had no sharp features, they were flat like a cartoon face when someone’s whacked it with a pan.
‘Do you want to find somewhere to sleep for free?’ said Sandrine.
‘Sure. But I thought you were going to England?’
‘I think I’ll wait a few days. I don’t feel well.’
It was true she looked even greyer than before as we set off for the Métro. We went down the steps and Sandrine stood in front of the wall map for a long time working out our route.
‘When we get to the barrier,’ she said, ‘just jump it.’
I put down my backpack and vaulted over. She passed over my bag and hers, then did the same, though it wasn’t so easy for her and I had to give her a hand.
The train took us fast for three stops, then we had to change lines. I’d never been on an underground railway before and I noticed that each stop was different. At Opéra the wide station had tracks in both directions, so the people waiting could look across at one another. At Château-Landon our single track was squeezed into one little tube and the station had red seats. It wasn’t a bit like home – the daily bus to college out of the medina, down the boulevard into the shabby Ville Nouvelle. It was exciting.
There was no one sitting opposite me, so I could stare at my own reflection in the window. The lighting made me look tired, with dark smudges under the eyes, but in other ways qu
ite handsome. We held each other’s gaze and neither of us blinked.
At the small stops there were a few film posters on the curved walls, but the big stations had pictures of food, of burgers, or of ‘all the tastes of Italy’, of kids leaping, hands above their head, made healthy by drinking special yoghurt – or of clothes, with giant women with no skirts showing their legs close-up in coloured nylon tights and open coats with bright shop logos. There was a warm, tarry smell.
About this time I noticed that Sandrine was laughing at me. ‘Your eyes,’ she said. She made a goggling expression with her tongue hanging out and I pretended not to care. I thought the Métro was cool.
At Stalingrad, we went down some steps not up, because the tracks were outdoors and elevated, held up on iron supports, like a viaduct. They looked like something I’d seen in a cop film set in Chicago. Boy, was it a cold and run-down place. On the Boulevard de la Villette we went past a giant food market called Goa. In each of its bulging windows was the name of a distant place – China, Japan, the Antilles, Africa, the Indian Ocean and God knows where else. France was meant to be famous for its cooking but this place sold food from anywhere but France. The bits of wall between the windows were covered in graffiti.
The soup kitchen under the raised tracks was full of Africans, maybe from Liberia or Senegal, places further south than where I lived, people with dark black skin – men with white eyes and things to sell wrapped in bright bits of cloth. Under the ironwork, while the trains rattled over us, they traded cell-phone covers and drugs while they waited for the soup. They spoke French in loud nasal voices, sounding angry or urgent. Some of them looked at me suspiciously – as though I wasn’t hungry enough or black enough – but no one stopped me from claiming my cup from the woman at the table. It was better than the stuff in the canteen down by the Place d’Italie. It was hot and it had some lentils and carrots and tasted okay with the bread. The cup was made of styrofoam like we had at home in cheap coffee places, but it wasn’t very big or full.
One of the not so good things about being nineteen is that you’re hungry all the time, and one cup of soup with a piece of their funny bread, not round and flat like ours but torn from a long tube or baguette, was nothing like enough. I managed to get hold of a banana, a black one, before Sandrine dragged me off.
We walked for a long time again, but I couldn’t say where. I had the impression it was an area not many people chose to be. Sandrine had begun to cough and she looked really ill. We stopped in a doorway and she sat down, leaning against the wall. It was starting to get dark already.
‘I need a rest,’ she said.
‘Where are we going to sleep?’ As I asked the question it did hit me for a second that I really should have thought of this before. I hadn’t planned even the simplest things. I’d just wanted to leave. And I’d been told to leave.
‘There’s a guy I know. It’s a bit further on. He’s called Yves. I’ve used his place before.’
‘What does it cost?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you going to have to suck his cock?’
‘No. You are.’
‘I don’t think I can do that.’
‘I’m teasing you, boy. He used to be a junkie. He likes helping people.’
‘What sort of drugs?’
‘Heroin. Crack.’
‘Oh no. That’s bad.’
‘I thought everyone took drugs where you come from.’
‘Only kif. Or majoun, where you mix the kif with dates and nuts and stuff.’ (I hated majoun actually, you never knew if you’d had enough until it was too late, but I didn’t say so.)
I was thinking I’d better get a job pretty quick. Hanging out with all those Chinese was not my idea of fun. And then the Africans. When was I going to meet a French girl? I thought about Laila and how nice it would have been if only she’d been there, especially with her father’s credit card.
When Sandrine had had her rest, we started walking again and I must have got a few paces ahead because I was on my own when a woman stopped me. She’d been standing in a doorway of a building next to a canal and she was carrying two shopping bags. Her French was pretty bad, but I could just about understand. She was asking if I wanted to go back to her flat, which was nearby.
This seemed like a good break. Sandrine was struggling and I really didn’t want to sleep on the floor of some opium den, even if we ever got to find it.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘How far?’
‘Fifty euros.’
The French word for ‘how far’ is combien, which is also the word for ‘how much’, so I explained the mistake and said, still in French, ‘No. I mean, is your place a hundred metres, two hundred metres from here?’
As I was talking to her, I saw that she was wearing a lot of make-up. Her reply was spoken so fast and with such a strong accent that I couldn’t make it out. By this time Sandrine had caught up with me. She looked ready to drop.
‘This woman’s offered me somewhere to sleep,’ I said. ‘Her flat’s nearby.’
Then to the woman I said, ‘Can my friend come too?’ In reply she poured out some torrent of stuff, the only words of which I could make out were filthy. Sandrine took my elbow and said, ‘Come on. It’s not far to Yves’s place now.’
At the end of the street, I said, ‘She seemed nice at first, but then—’
‘How old are you, boy?’
‘Twenty-three. I told you.’
‘No. Really.’
‘All right. Twenty.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Almost.’
‘You just met your first Parisian hooker.’
‘But she had a shopping basket and a wedding ring.’
‘And she wasn’t standing under a lamp post singing Edith Piaf.’
I didn’t know who Edith Piaf was, but after a bit I said, ‘You can stop laughing at me now.’
Yves’s place was on the top floor of a building like the Goa food market, really dirty with metal-framed windows, and there weren’t any beds. At least he was there when we rang the bell from the icy street and he remembered Sandrine and he let us in. Yves was a big man with a beard and overalls. He looked like an American car mechanic – in fact he looked a lot like a character in The Messenger called Buster Bee. He gave us each a piece of baguette with a tiny round cheese in a red wax coat.
There were four or five other people sitting round, but there was just one couch so two of them were on the floor. Sandrine had a thin sleeping bag attached to her pack, so she rolled it out and lay down and fell asleep pretty much straight away. Her face was flushed.
Sitting with my back to the wall, I had a cigarette and listened to the others.
‘I had this room in Clichy-sous-Bois in one of the big towers. It was cool but this fucking métis chucked me out cos his brother and his kids were arriving in the back of a fruit lorry. So then I’m on the street and the schmitts picked me up for no fucking reason at all …’
Everything was someone else’s fault. They all had so much anger and they used bad words about other races, even the African did. I didn’t know exactly what all the slang meant, like métis means half-caste and that may be okay, and schmitt I guessed was a cop, but some of the other words for Arabs and Africans and Jews – ‘bougnoules’, ‘youtres’ – didn’t sound nice. I managed to escape to the bathroom where I cleaned my teeth, came back in and lay down close to Sandrine on the floor and hoped they’d all shut up soon. I didn’t have a sleeping roll or anything, but I put on a spare sweater and made a pillow with two clean tee shirts.
The thing was, I wanted to get as much of Sandrine’s body heat as I could without catching her filthy virus. I stuck my ass against her and kept my head turned the other way.
Through the night, Yves came and went, talking in a normal voice, as though no one had told him it was bedtime. Some of the others went droning on with their hard-luck tales and a new woman arrived in the middle of the night. I must have slept at some time or another because
I know I had strange dreams. One thing I knew for certain – I wasn’t going to spend another night in this place.
The next morning we took the Métro back down to the Place d’Italie, near where we’d had (or not had in my case) the tripe for lunch the day before. The idea was to find the beggar girl and see if she could get us into a room in one of the towers nearby.
I felt I’d somehow fallen out of normal life. We didn’t know the name of the girl, so we asked other street people if they knew where she was. Suddenly this was my world – not Miss Aziz or Laila and her garden, but this: let’s find a down-and-out and ask if he knows when a homeless person whose name you don’t know might be back on her step. It was still only about eight in the morning, a time I’d normally be asleep, but we’d already had hours awake and had crossed the city. This other world I’d tumbled into hardly seemed to sleep.
Eventually, we did get some names, and by late morning we were walking over an esplanade where the buildings had wavy red roofs in some cartoon oriental style. Les Olympiades, it was called, because all round were big towers named – God knows why – after cities that had hosted a summer or winter Olympic Games. Athens, Cortina, Tokyo, Sapporo … It was like a sci-fi thing where a planner had been given too much money. The shopping centre was called the Pagoda. What the hell did pagodas have to do with Olympic Games or the Thirteenth arrondissement? Frozen fireballs …
Floor twenty-one of Sarajevo was where we ended up. It was Chinese. Everything was Chinese in the whole tower. There was a small room with a single bed with no bedclothes and we could share the bathroom with eight other people. The owner was a Chinese woman of about fifty, whose name was something like ‘Baco’. She was hard-faced, flat-faced, but she gave us till the end of the week to pay and I told Sandrine I could earn money somehow. Sandrine really just needed to go to bed and sleep off this thing that was attacking her. There was no chance of her getting anywhere near England for the time being.
We made her comfortable with her sleeping bag and I lent her my sweater, which meant I had just my tee shirt under a sports top with a hood. It was acrylic, though, which is quite warm, so I thought I’d be okay out on the street. We put together the euros we had and I went off to get cheap food. I asked Baco where to go.
Paris Echo Page 4