Paris Adrift Read online

  “I have no idea,” I say. “Birds aren’t my area of speciality.”

  The falcon gives me a stern look. “Your area of speciality is—at this stage—irrelevant.”

  I put the pillow over my face. “Look here, I’ve only been asleep for about two hours and that sun is hurting my head. I don’t want weird conversations right now. I want a pleasant, empty, cloudy kind of sleep. Preferably nice, fluffy, cumulus clouds. And preferably one that lasts for ten hours. At least.”

  “You are right, my dear,” says the falcon relentlessly. “You are asleep. But not—in the way you think you are. Not in the corporeal sense. As it were.” It lets out a miserable squawk. “This—life form—is really extending—my range! But not a pleasant—experience. Now. Quite soon, you are going to wake up—that is, it is going to wake up—and when it does—you will find that the world is a different place—from the one you thought it was. So here’s what I’ve come to say. Get your feathers in order.”

  I make a muffled, unhappy noise.

  “Now my dear—I suggest—that you take advantage of this beautiful day,” says the falcon. “Before you return—to the site. The Tuileries, perhaps? Shut-eye won’t—help you now.”

  I pull the pillow from my face. Once again the window is revealed: brilliant, sun-glazed, cruelly transparent. Through it is a pane of cerulean sky, devoid of avian life. I touch my sleeping bag suspiciously, and pluck a hair from my arm. It hurts. I decide not to inflict further pain upon myself. Then the bile rises. The throbbing at my temples intensifies. I roll off the bunk, fight my way out of my sleeping bag and feel my stomach contort as I stagger down the corridor. The bathroom is occupied. I hammer on the door, restraining tears as I curse whoever is on the other side. When the door opens I throw myself headlong inside and collapse, narrowly avoiding cracking my jaw on the rim of the toilet. I pray to deities I do not believe in. I whimper and compare Angel, arbiter of my downfall, to a disease-bearing bacterium. In the toilet basin, a slurry of regurgitated milkshake with indefinable lumps of matter piles up and up. It is beyond revolting.

  From the bathtub comes a rhythmical sound: click-clack, click-clack.

  The window is open. Wings, at the edge of my eye.

  “No, no, no, no,” I moan.

  The falcon continues to walk along the side of the bath. Its toenails click-clack.

  “The Tuileries,” it repeats. “This is—the last day of sunshine in October. There will be no more until after the rains.”

  “How do you know?” I manage, before another ghastly retch pulls me back to the toilet basin.

  “We will meet—soon. In a better—vessel.” It lets out a shrill cry. “A good day for preening!”

  Only bile is coming up now. When I look back, the bird is gone. I have never hallucinated before this weekend. Perhaps the bird was actually here, and it was just an auditory hallucination? Because that, clearly, is fine. Maybe it lives here. Someone in the hostel has a passion for falconry. Or my drink was spiked last night. That would explain my current state and—oh, Jesus God—my imbecilic introduction to Gabriela. Some malevolent client inflicted this poison upon me, probably because I can’t speak French.

  I flush the toilet, clean my teeth three times and wander miserably back to the bunk. I don’t dare look at the window in case my feathered stalker is there, so I pull on my jeans and sunglasses and crawl out of the hostel. I check the métro map and almost choke. The Tuileries are miles away. Who does the bird think it is? I go around the corner to Sacré-Coeur instead. I buy a can of Coke and find a secluded patch of grass on the other side of the hill, away from the tourists and the white glare of the Basilica overlooking the eighteenth, smug and resplendent. I spend the rest of the day with a scarf over my face.

  At seven o’clock, I get a call from Kit.

  “Job’s yours, babe. You start tonight.”

  Chapter Five

  THE FALCON’S FORECAST is correct: the rain lasts all month. It’s blinding rain, a monsoon that disgorges over the Basilica and splits like lava down the steep cobbles of Montmartre. Past the boulangeries and the groceries, the brasseries with their stubborn patrons shielding cigarettes on the terraces, past the late night alimentations, past the Amélie cafe, past the cars parked nose-to-tail with scooters jammed between, the Chinese traiteurs which have become my breakfast staple, over the boulevard with its prostitutes and vagrants, past the Sex Emporium, where Angel’s arse is captured in a discreet black-and-white portrait, and onward; over the border of the eighteenth, racing towards Saint-Lazare and the Tuileries. Incessant rain that turns leaves to mulch and jeans to a chafing second skin, rain that wriggles inside your ears and your mouth. People say they’ve never seen rain like it.

  My life becomes very simple, very quickly. Five nights a week I tramp down the boulevard to place Blanche, my DMs squelching in the gutter rapids, the first cigarette of the night clamped between my lips. Sometimes I see a streak of grey at the corner of my eye. I twist, expecting to see the bird, but when I turn there’s nothing there.

  I learn that the hierarchy at Millie’s is political, and honour is earned by survival. Kit has the final word, and what Kit says is enforced by Eloise. After the managers in ranking come the bartenders. Angel, who works days, is the exception. Of the night staff, the boys comprise old hands Victor (French, a cycling fiend), Bo (Swedish, and correspondingly tall, egalitarian and universally beloved), Yogi Millis (Australian, possibly not his own name, but if he has another nobody knows it) and relative new kid Mike (American, self-professed history geek). The girls are Dušanka (Russian, student of philosophy and misanthropy), Isobel and Simone (both French, gentle and inseparable; they insist on working the same section of the bar and always go on break together, but they work hard and are dedicated, efficient drinkers, so nobody minds), and Gabriela (Colombian, and the bar’s amphetamine). Below the bartenders are the lowly floor slaves, where everyone begins. Where I begin.

  And then there is Millie. The boys think of Millie as a femme fatale, dangerous but alluring. Millie is Jessica Rabbit; she is Faye Dunaway in diagonal rain. The girls think of Millie as a distillation of feminist power: Millie is Daisy Ridley taking up the lightsaber in the falling snow; she is Serena Williams smashing her way to her twenty-third major title while eight weeks pregnant. We call upon Millie in times of trial. We ask ourselves: what would Millie do?

  Millie, we know, would not put up with insolent clients. Millie would carry a mojito stick in her back pocket and bash the knuckles of client hands that transgressed the boundary of the bar. Millie would rinse tips from punters as honey from a hive. Millie would shoot wisecracks from the side of her soft-lipped, slightly crooked mouth, as she prowled the heights of the back bar, hosing the night crowd with soda water.

  Millie would do all of these things and more, if only she were real. That she is not, and never has been real, I discover after a month of waiting patiently for her return from holiday. Angel explains it to me one afternoon in the bar, drinking lemonade and sirop de menthe whilst Janis Joplin’s voice slinks around the pillars, cracked with melancholy. Millie is a construct, he says. A figment. In this place, says Angel, it is necessary to use one’s imagination. We are creatures of the night (he delivers this line with an entirely straight face) and we need protectors.

  Gabriela gives me a hug. Now, she says, I am Millie’s for all times. My initiation is complete.

  I adore them all too much to be annoyed by the deception. I understand that I belong. Millie’s staff have become family in the way the word should be understood. They are family in the way that Transfusion is family—messy and layered but inextricably connected. Happy in my routine, I quickly banish any lingering doubts about my decision to defer my third year. I’m in Paris now, and Paris is, and always has been, a city of reinvention.

  Chapter Six

  THE TEXT FROM Gabriela contains three words and an old-fashioned emoji: I FOUND IT! :D

  I text back: Where? She sends me a photo. I stare at t
he image, my chest tightening. Yes—yes, it could be. It could be the place. I take the Polaroid out of my wallet and compare the two images. The colours in the Polaroid are faded but the backdrop is the same. There’s a wall, that creamy sandstone so characteristic of Paris; formed forty-five million years ago when île-de-France lay at the bottom of an ocean, mined and cut locally, built to Haussmann’s regulation six storeys. There’s a blue street plaque, out of focus in the Polaroid but clear in the digital image. To the right of the frame, the serpentine edge of an unidentified entrance to the métro.

  I ask Gabriela which métro, and wait. I’m in her tiny studio, surrounded by her many things. The bottom layer consists of two leaning cupboards, a double mattress folded up against the wall, a sofa, an unlikely-sized single-leafed avocado plant, a standing lamp and a chest. Stacked on top are precarious piles of textbooks, headphones, cables, laptop, notebooks, stationery, magazine clippings, an SLR camera, photographs, bits of film, jeans, jumpers, odd socks, scarves, several pairs of ballet shoes whose significance I am yet to decipher, blankets, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels with a light bulb in it, a print I recognize as Dalí’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory and a five-foot-tall model giraffe wearing a fez.

  It is here that I’ve been crashing for the last few weeks, whilst looking for a place of my own. It is here that I showed Gabriela the Polaroid, and here that she vowed we would discover its provenance. As in all things, Gabriela was supremely confident about our chances of success. I was less confident, and now that the day had arrived, less certain that I wanted to be successful at all.

  My phone chimes. I get my things.

  AS SOON AS I see the place I know it’s wrong. Gabriela must see me before I see her, and my disappointment too, because she comes up and takes both my hands in hers.

  “No? This isn’t it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Sorry.”

  “I was sure. So sure!”

  “It looked right. It could easily have been the place.”

  “You still haven’t told me why it is important.”

  “It’s just history.” I glance back at the métro map. “Isn’t the cemetery close to here? Père Lachaise?”

  “Yes. Do you want to see it?” Gabriela points. “This way.”

  Leaving the wall behind, my initial disappointment fades to relief. What on earth would I have done if we had found it? What would it have meant?

  AT THE ENTRANCE to the cemetery I pick up a guide, but Gabriela takes it out of my hands.

  “We wander,” she says firmly.

  On the other side of the gates, the graves lie quiet under an overcast sky. The main path leads inward, lined with monuments of stone and overarching trees, their leaves turning slowly to gold. Ahead of us, a young couple are strolling arm in arm.

  We turn left. The ground rises, uneven with sunken steps and tree roots, and we quickly leave behind the orderly avenues and sightseers with their guidebooks. On higher ground we find the unattended graves, crowded together, overgrown with moss and weeds, their residents much older, deeper, entangled in their occupancy below the earth. I stop to catch my breath. We are the only people up here. I can hear the wind rippling through the treetops, shearing leaves from their branches, and the sound lifts me for a moment right out of Paris, into a more nebulous space, borderless and strange. I am reminded of field trips to study strains of rock, the unsettling feeling when one of my companions stepped out of sight and for a moment I feared the openness of the terrain would swallow me whole.

  Gabriela steps from grave to grave. She crouches by a small headstone, reading the inscription.

  “This one was so young,” she says. “Only sixteen years old. The age my—” She bites her lip. “My niece. She would be sixteen.”

  She doesn’t say anything more and her choice of words confuses me—has something terrible happened to Gabriela’s niece? Or is it just a linguistic mix-up? Gabriela’s face, closed where it is usually so open, deters me from asking questions. Instead, I tap her shoulder lightly.

  “Come on.”

  This time I take the lead, up a steep set of steps and along a narrow walkway. A white cat slinks out from inside a hut and rubs against my legs before proceeding on its way. Another is asleep on a mausoleum roof, triangular throat exposed to the sky.

  “Somebody feeds them,” says Gabriela. I think of the-cat-who-does-not-belong-to-us, curled up on the bass keys of the piano in blissful sleep, unaware that they have been tuned for the first time in a decade. It was the last thing I did before I left.

  “It must be a strange home, among the dead,” I say.

  “I like to come here. I never feel as if I am alone. It is like houses, there are always traces in the air. It is just we don’t always see them.”

  From up here we can see the cemetery spread out below, a jumble of grey stone and restless green. I watch the white cat wind its way between the graves with small, delicate steps.

  “Do you think they’d mind us sitting here?”

  Gabriela ponders.

  “No. I don’t think they would mind. I wouldn’t mind. I would like to think that people would come, maybe they would wonder about me, about the things I did with my life.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I suppose it would be worse if there were nobody.”

  “But you have family,” says Gabriela. “In the photograph, they are there. You must miss them.”

  “We’re not close.”

  “Not your brother? Your sister?”

  “Not really, no.” I select my words carefully. I know that Gabriela, who spends hours Skyping her mother in what are occasionally fraught conversations, with frequent references to the importance and vibrance of Bogotá and the irrelevance and mundanity of Paris, has a particular view about family. “You choose your friends. You don’t choose your relatives. If you could, maybe you wouldn’t choose the ones you have.”

  “It makes me sad, to hear you say that.”

  “But we’re very different. Your family are desperate to have you back. My family won’t even have noticed I’m gone.”

  Gabriela looks at me, startled.

  “They don’t know you’re here?”

  “Not unless they’re psychic.”

  “You haven’t spoken to them?”

  “No. They haven’t tried to speak to me, either. And I know that, because I check my English SIM card every few days.”

  “You should call them. They will worry. Promise me, Hallie.”

  Her eyes meet mine, radiating concern.

  “All right. I promise.”

  It’s a promise I have no intention of keeping. I’ve prepared my exit far too carefully to blow it in one moment of weakness.

  “Family is important,” says Gabriela, undeterred. “And you must think so, or why do you look to find this picture?”

  “Because it’s bugging me.” I pick up a stone, a reddish piece of chert, brushing away the dirt. “I don’t know. It’s just something I have to do.”

  “Okay.”

  I watch her push aside the conversation, albeit reluctantly. We head back downhill, through the clusters of graves. Gabriela removes the lens cap from her camera and takes a few photographs, checking the results in the viewfinder. I peer over her shoulder.

  “You know, you’re really good.”

  “You think so? It is the only thing I ever wanted to do. My true passion.”

  “I wish I could be that certain.”

  “Is it not this way with your geology?” She flicks left. “Ah, the light is very nice in this one.”

  “I considered a few different careers,” I say. I watch Gabriela editing her photo reel, wondering how it must feel to have such self-conviction. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m drawn to people like Gabriela because of a fundamental lack in myself. I try to work out the difference between my friend’s self-belief and my mother’s, how it is I can accept one but not the other, and I think the answer has something to do with generosity
. I’m lucky to have met Gabriela.

  “Gabriela?”

  “Mm?”

  “How long has Léon worked at Café Oz?”

  “Oh, some years now. Five? Maybe six.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Gabriela lowers her camera and gives me a penetrating look.

  “Hallie. You should not get involved with Léon.”

  “I thought you guys were friends?”

  “Yes, a good friend, and he is a lot of fun. That is why I know he is no good for any girl who is my friend.”

  “How so?”

  Gabriela frowns. “It is all too easy for him. It is like he does not need people.”

  “That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

  “Everybody needs people,” says Gabriela. I want to push further, to find out exactly how and why Léon does not need people, but Gabriela moves off, making it clear that the conversation is closed. “Come on. If we head back now, there’s time for an episode of Transfusion before work...”

  I let her pull me away, unwilling to push at the boundaries of this new friendship. Is Gabriela interested in Léon herself? And why am I even asking? It’s not as if I am.

  We head back down to the main pathway. On the way out, I notice a plaque on the wall with single stems and wrapped bouquets placed beneath it. Several people are posing and taking selfies with the aid of a foot-long stick.

  Aux morts de la commune 21—28 Mai 1871

  I point it out to Gabriela.

  “Was that during the siege of Paris?”

  She stops, frowning. “Yes. A terrible day.”

  I think of Gabriela saying she never feels alone when she comes here. I agree with her now: there is nothing finite about a graveyard. It’s a halfway house; a battlefield between the living and the dead. First to go is the flesh, skin and muscle and blood, but bone will eventually begin to compress and transmogrify. This is how stone begins. What we were feeds into the things that will become, and after the last memory of us has faded from the world, it is stone that remains to tell what stories it can.