Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  That night I have a dream. Something smells strange. I’m in Mum and Dad’s bathroom with the cough-drop lampshade and the shower door coming off its hinge. The basin reads Hermitage Shanks and Dad’s Old Spice is on it, beneath the sliding mirror with the tiny groove in it for your fingers. The place is splattered with soap scum. It is too silent.

  Something is behind the door. I can’t see it but I can feel it. The door is pushing against something soft. I peer behind it, heart racing. It’s Mum. She is a pile of yellowing bones. She looks up and holds out a jaundiced arm. Her eyes beg for help. I don’t know what to do. In a moment of panic I put the door back in its place. Then I go downstairs. I feel disgusting: I know I should have done something to help her but I just keep moving forward. Relatives are in the kitchen. Mum’s sisters, our cousins, Dad, Kate, Alex, Ben. It’s a tea party, but sombre. They begin to wonder why Mum’s not coming down. I say nothing, guilt deep in my belly. People whisper, ‘Where’s Annie?’

  My uncle bursts into the room. ‘She’s alive! I found her! She’s alive!’

  The terrible feeling at having left her is replaced by a searing joy. She’s alive! She’s alive!

  Mum stands on the staircase, radiant. We all stare. She looks at us all, then moves down the stairs into the kitchen. The dishwasher hums. Everyone goes back to the party.

  She walks towards me and smiles. She knows I left her there. But everything is okay now.

  I wake with the swelling feeling that she’s alive. Then the horror as I remember she is dead. The shock is intense, it cuts my breath. I sit up and clutch my knees, breathe, breathe. I won’t cry, I don’t know where I’ll end up if I start. Keep it together. You are here, in Paris. Breathe. Lie back down. Look at E.T. Go to school.

  Little Death

  EVERYONE, INCLUDING ADRIEN, goes away for the two-week Christmas break, leaving me and Kiki lying around drinking vodka during the day and eating hot things she cooks. On Christmas Day we dress up and walk down the deserted rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis to the exquisite brasserie Julien, but the lunch menu is exorbitant so we go next door to the Derya Turkish restaurant and share a lamb kebab for ten bucks. Then we walk to Notre-Dame and go inside, which I have never done before, and sit in the back pews listening to a choir of women’s voices reverberate around the ceilings, feeling like orphans, but really happy ones. It’s dark when we leave, and starting to rain slush, so we run across the bridge to Kiki’s place, trying not to slip. I want to stop and look out over the river with all the lights and ripples, but she tugs me on.

  I tell her about the Mum dream and she gives me a long warm hug. She doesn’t know how to interpret it. Just that perhaps dreaming about her isn’t good for me, as my sense of reality is already a bit warped. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t dreamt of her before, she says – it’s too destabilising.

  I don’t think my sense of reality is warped, I tell her. I just still can’t believe she’s dead. I have to bite my lip hard then, not to cry.

  ‘I just mean because you’re so far away from home you’re processing it differently,’ she says, hugging me again. ‘Here you can just forget it happened.’

  The next day, my family calls. It’s evening there and they are sitting by a pool. They each ask me about snow. Kate tells me that Jack has a new girlfriend. It’s an unexpected kick in the stomach, the frozen image I have of home cracking. I’m relieved not to have to tell him about Adrien. But it still feels like the ground pulling away.

  Adrien returns on New Year’s Eve and asks me to meet him for dinner at Odéon. As I arrive at the top of the métro stairs I see him standing beside a billboard, talking into his phone. Catching sight of me, he continues his conversation but turns his body around to look at me. The barrier of the person on the phone allows us to look at each other as long as we want, and he holds my gaze until my cheeks turn red and I have to look away and plunge my hands deep into my pockets.

  ‘Désolé,’ he says after he hangs up, pulling me towards him and kissing my lips then my neck. The fire I’ve had to dampen inside myself these past weeks takes no time to rekindle. He looks slightly different to how I remembered him – shorter, but still dashing. He is wearing a red silk scarf, which makes him look like someone from a period drama. He leads me through a series of alleyways, past the white stone archways of the Marché Saint-Germain and up the quaint rue Saint-Sulpice, where a fat drop of water falls in my hair. I put my hand out.

  ‘Il pleure,’ I say.

  Adrien laughs. ‘That’s so cute,’ he says. ‘“It is crying.”’

  ‘No, I mean raining. Il pleure.’

  ‘Il pleut,’ he corrects. ‘Rain is pleuvoir. Pleurer it mean to cry. But it’s true, because ze sky he is crying.’

  He ushers me down a stairwell and into a cosy Italian restaurant. The waiters know him and he orders stuffed mushrooms and simple chilli pasta for us both and we try to eat but the table is electric. Our hands and knees and feet are touching below.

  When Adrien pays the bill the waiter calls me a belle demoiselle. It feels like the perfect compliment. I do feel belle. And demoiselle feels like the perfect compromise between mademoiselle and its staid alternative.

  We walk to a place called the Bar du Marché where a man in overalls and a sailor cap brings mojitos to our tiny table with a candle on it. The air is clammy with body heat and smoke. A strand of my hair falls into the candle and burns. It stinks. Adrien picks up his glass to clink with mine.

  ‘Joyeuse nouvelle année,’ I say. ‘I just realised I have no idea how to say happy new year!’

  ‘Bonne année.’

  ‘Good year? That’s funny.’ We drink the mojitos and then another each and it’s only eleven pm but I suggest we take a taxi back to my place. He smiles and grabs my hand beneath the table.

  The taxi ride is a flurry of lips and hair.

  At the gates of the Récollets, in a rush to get inside, we bump into Lamine, an actor from Mali who lives on the ground floor.

  ‘Jayne! You coming or not?’

  I’d forgotten he invited me to his friend’s New Year’s Eve party.

  ‘Do you want to go?’ I ask Adrien. ‘Just for a few drinks?’

  ‘Venez, venez, venez,’ says Lamine, grabbing both our arms. I tell Adrien how Lamine is studying acting at the Conservatoire and the two men chatter past the brasseries of the Gare de l’Est and across into the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and up the rue de Paradis. The streets are full of clutter and noise: it’s staggering how different the streets are here compared to the order and cleanliness of the Saint-Germain area we’ve just come from. It feels good to be back where it’s messy and loud.

  Lamine’s friend Franck lives in a sixth-floor chambre de bonne and the tiny space is crammed with sweaty bodies. An arm reaches out to fill our plastic cups with straight rum, as there are no mixers or champagne left. Adrien and I tap cups and I drink mine down as he sips on his. Lamine pulls his T-shirt up and ties it like a bikini, exposing the washboard abs he likes to parade around the Récollets. He spins me around and gyrates at my side as I toss my head back, laughing wildly. Adrien stands in the corner, stiff in all his clothes but smiling amongst the writhing bodies.

  People are climbing in and out of Franck’s window and after several shots I step up onto the rotting sill and beckon to Adrien. We clamber out and shimmy across a ledge to a tiny step that leads up to an abandoned balcony. He reaches his arm out to protect me. ‘Fais attention. C’est hyper dangereux.’

  We step up carefully and turn around. The view over the north of Paris is breathtaking. The balcony is only as wide as us, so we lean back against the building for safety. Though if I have to die, I wouldn’t mind slipping off this ramshackle ledge into the night with Adrien. The Sacré-Cœur glows like a meringue on the hill of Montmartre and for the first time I appreciate why the Parisians call it that. Two statues of men – or perhaps women – on chairs look out over the city from the top of the Gare de l’Est. The lights of the Gare du Nord cast an eeri
e glow over the neighbourhood that lies littered before us like a field of scrap paper. People move about in distant windows, chimneys sprout haphazardly, birds scratch and tap and roost.

  A great boom sounds and a series of fireworks lights up the sky. Throughout Paris, shouts and claps and clinks are magnified a millionfold – the whole city is alive at our feet. I squeeze his hand.

  ‘Good year,’ I say.

  ‘Good year.’

  It’s difficult to kiss but we manage it, standing side by side, the tiles behind us rattling as we fumble. A piece chinks off and goes flying into the night. I can feel an erratic move coming on, so I take his hand and we climb back down to the party, and back through the streets to my studio.

  I slam my door shut behind us and lean against it suggestively. He puts his heavy hands on hips. ‘Shall we go en haut?’ I say, pointing up to the mezzanine.

  ‘En haut,’ he says, pressing his body against me, ‘is pronounced ohaw. No “n”.’

  The complexity of phrases with no consonant sounds is far less interesting than the inside of his mouth, and the sex against the door is over in minutes. Then we go en haut and he is back for more but it goes too long – he goes somewhere else – and I clutch at him until his face turns red and the veins in his forehead pop out and he falls off me, apologising, wet all over.

  I feel strange but glad he went for it. It’s just the first time.

  In the morning I sneak out while he’s still asleep to buy croissants from the patisserie, because the confiserie and the traiteur and the boulangerie are all shut. The woman is cold and I am cold back and she gives me good buttery ones. Then I go to the épicerie and buy expensive milk because the supermarché is shut too, and when I get home I notice it’s out of date and curse the man who sold it to me. I make us both cafés allongés instead.

  Ça coûte la peau du cul. Ça coûte la peau du cul, I repeat in my head as I climb up to wake him. I heard Étienne say this the other day in an impro about a man buying a car. I think it means ‘It costs the skin off your arse.’

  I kiss his face lightly and his eyes open. ‘Hello, miss,’ he says.

  ‘Hello, man.’ I put my face against his. ‘Your eyelashes are as long as a girl’s.’ I bat my own against his cheek, then put my eye to his, like Dad used to when we were kids. ‘A butterfly kiss,’ I say. ‘Do you have those?’

  ‘No. A baiser papillon?’

  ‘Isn’t baiser a rude word?’

  ‘Baiser on his own mean “fuck”, but un baiser it’s mean a kiss.’ He kisses me gently on the nose.

  ‘Confusing!’

  ‘You have to be careful.’

  ‘I bet. Du café?’

  ‘Yes please, papillon,’ he says, climbing down the steps. His hair is rough and sexy. He goes into the bathroom and tames it with water.

  ‘Ça coûte la peau du cul,’ I say as I pour the coffee.

  ‘Don’t pronounce the “l” in cul,’ Adrien says. ‘Mon cu—.’

  ‘Mon kewww.’

  ‘C’est ça. A more polite way is to say, Ça coûte les yeux de la tête.’

  ‘It costs the eyes from your head?’

  ‘Les yeux de la tête, Mistinguett.’

  That’s the second time he’s called me Mistinguett. I like the way it sounds. I don’t know if it’s a person or a film title or an old show, but I’ve seen a giant poster at the back of Le Progrès, in Montmartre, with a woman clutching a flower on a blustery day.

  Adrien goes to the window, opens it and breathes in the cold air. There is cheese hanging off the windowsill and he pulls it in like a fish and sniffs it. It stinks so bad I can’t keep it inside. I’m sure it’s off but he says there is no such thing and licks the ooze from his fingers.

  ‘Is Mistinguett good?’ I ask. ‘Do you like her?’

  ‘I like you,’ he replies. ‘Papillon fou. You, crazy butterfly. My mother, she like Mistinguett. She like old music like this. Old personnages.’

  He eats a grape from the bowl on my table.

  ‘What’s your favourite fruit?’ I ask him.

  ‘Red berries.’

  ‘What kind of fruit would you say these are?’ I ask, putting my hands on the little round protrusions in my T-shirt.

  He blushes. ‘Des raisins,’ he says, crawling over to me to bite at my shirt. I kiss his greased hair and try to explain to him that raisins in English are small, hard and dry. He looks up and smiles with his eyes closed then puts his head back on my top and his hands up it. My top comes off, then my clothes one by one, and now I’m naked on the cement floor, it’s as cold as a morgue, he is over me, fully clothed, and the cold down the back of my body is in such contrast to the warmth of my flesh that I feel everything, and he does all the right things at just the right moments, and also surprises me, and I resist at first and then let myself fall right over the cliff. No wonder they call it a petite mort. I just died, hard. We go back upstairs and he dies too and this time he stays with me and his face is not red.

  The sky through the window is a deep purplish grey. We lie in silence for a long time and then more questions come. Favourite this, favourite that. First this, first that. His first memory was breastfeeding from a dog. I sit up. No! Yes. When he was born, his mum’s dog grew milk, and one day his mother found him beneath her, suckling at her. She rushed to remove him – the dog tried to bite her – and took him to the doctor, who said dog’s milk is fine for humans.

  ‘Wow, good to know,’ I say.

  ‘Voilà.’

  He also remembers being on a leash. As a toddler he kept running into traffic and once tried to fly off his mother’s fourth-floor balcony.

  I tell him my first memory was when my sister, Kate, was born, though I can never be sure what is a real memory and what is just stories and photos.

  He says that when his dog died, it was like his mother had died. ‘My dog, she is more soft than my mother.’

  I consider telling him about my own mother but the moment has passed, so I ask instead, ‘Are you afraid of dying?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘No, but I’m afraid of getting sick.’

  ‘Death is the end of nothing,’ he says, adjusting his hair. ‘Shall we go for a promenade in the Marais?’

  It’s freezing outside and when I grab my umbrella Adrien laughs. ‘It’s too cold to rain!’ I stand for a moment trying to absorb this concept. He looks me slowly up and down. ‘You are going out like zis?’

  I am wearing jeans with two pairs of stockings and a pair of woollen socks pulled up under them, two thin jumpers and the leather coat. I’m still adamant about the doodoona.

  He takes off his scarf and winds it around and around my neck.

  ‘But what about you?’ I ask.

  ‘I am hot blood man.’ He lovingly tucks the scarf into the front of my coat. ‘Still crazy. You will die. But better.’

  It’s quiet out in the streets and most of the shops are shut. We have to walk all the way to the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple to find cigarettes and Adrien lights mine between my gloved fingers. The cold burns. A winter flea market sprawls over the pavements of the rue de Bretagne and we wander around picking up objects and putting them down. I get colder and colder until my whole body is aching. Just outside the Marché des Enfants-Rouges, I stop in my tracks. I have actually frozen.

  There’s a moment of silence as Adrien registers that I’ve ceased to exist. Somehow I manage to squeak through Tinman lips, ‘Vin. Chaud,’ and he ushers me into a café and orders an emergency hot wine. As I slowly come back to life it dawns on me that this winter business is not to be laughed at. To highlight my stupidity, my glacial cheeks, as they defrost in the warmth, turn a deep beetroot red. I am ashamed. I want to live.

  Later that day, tipsy from too much hot wine, Adrien takes me to a pragmatic store and helps me buy the ugliest pret-a-porter quilt I have ever seen, with ugly belt to match. Life with padding feels very different. The feeling of being cold had become like a friend, constantly reminding me of
my mortality and, conversely, my aliveness. Now I am warm, safe.

  It’s dark when we kiss goodbye at the Rambuteau métro steps. I dig my mittens deep into my warm jacket and marvel at how good it feels. Now I will be confident to go out more. And the colder it is, the prettier Paris is – the crisp edges of the buildings and naked trees, the sky the palest turquoise.

  The Métro is not a Train

  HE SAID TO take the train, but what’s the difference? I’ve transcribed his instructions on an old baguette bag and written train lots of times in big letters, but as far as I can see, the métro is a train and it will be far quicker to take it to the Place de Clichy, then change to line 14 for Asnières.

  I launch myself down the métro steps three at a time, feeling a great surge of gratitude for my functioning legs. How do people in wheelchairs survive this city? Come to think of it, I’ve never seen any disabled people in Paris. Poor and decrepit people, yes, but crutches and walking canes, no.

  A train is pulling out as I arrive on the platform and I try to jump on it but the doors slam on my hand and I have to wiggle it back out. Ow. A man in the carriage laughs at me and I flip the bird beneath his window, smiling at him as the train pulls out. She Who Smiles Last Wins. This is my new MO, to be added to my list of Paris rules to live by, along with The Lady in the Boulangerie is Not Your Friend, and Presentation is Everything.

  Three whole minutes to wait for the next train. The snack machine is advertising a new Mars Bar. I put in a euro. The Mars Bar sits silent and still in its holster, laughing at my naïveté. I give it the bird inside my pocket and smile furiously.