Paris For One (Quick Reads) Page 5

  ‘Mademoiselle.’

  Nell turns, in a daze. She had forgotten the receptionist was there.

  ‘Your friend left a message.’

  ‘Fabien?’ She fails to keep the eagerness from her voice.

  ‘No. A woman. While you were out.’

  She hands over a piece of hotel headed paper.

  PETE IS ON HIS WAY. HAVE KICKED HIS ARSE. SORRY, WE HAD NO IDEA. HOPE WEEKEND STILL WORKS OUT OK. TRISH

  She stares at the note, gazes towards the stairwell, and then she turns back to the receptionist. She stuffs the piece of paper deep into her pocket.

  ‘Could you tell me the best place to get a taxi?’ she says.

  ‘With pleasure,’ says the receptionist.

  She has forty euros in her pocket and she throws twenty at the driver, then leaps out, not caring about the change.

  The bar is a dark mass of bodies, bottles and low lights. She pushes her way through, scanning the faces for someone she knows, her nostrils filled with the smells of sweat and perfume. The table they had been sitting at is filled with people she does not recognize. He is nowhere to be seen.

  She goes upstairs, where it is quieter and people sit chatting on sofas, but he is not there either. She fights her way back down the stairs to the bar where she was served.

  ‘Excuse me!’ She has to wait to get the attention of the barman. ‘Hello! My friend who was here. Have you seen him?’

  The barman squints, then nods as if he remembers. ‘Fabien?’

  ‘Yes. Yes!’ Of course they all knew him.

  ‘He is gone.’

  She feels her stomach drop. She has missed him. That’s it. The barman leans across to pour someone a drink.

  ‘Merde,’ she says softly. She feels hollow with disappointment.

  The barman appears beside her, a drink in his hand. ‘You could try the Wildcat. That’s where he and Emil usually end up.’

  ‘The Wildcat? Where is that?’

  ‘Rue des Gentilhommes des –’ His voice is drowned in a burst of laughter, and he turns away, leaning across to hear someone else’s order.

  Nell runs out onto the street. She stops a taxi.

  ‘Emergency!’ she says.

  The driver, an Asian man, looks up into his mirror, waiting.

  ‘Wildcat,’ she says. ‘Rue des Gentilhommes something. Please tell me you know it.’

  He turns in his seat. ‘Que?’

  ‘Wildcat. Bar. Club. Wild. Cat.’

  Her voice lifts. He shakes his head. Nell puts her face into her hands, thinking. Then she winds down her window and yells at three young men on the pavement outside the bar. ‘Excuse me! You know the Wildcat? Wildcat Bar?’

  One nods, lifts his chin. ‘You want to take us?’

  She scans their faces – drunk, cheerful, open – and she makes a judgement.

  ‘Sure, if you know it. Where is it?’

  ‘We show you!’

  The young men jump in, all drunken smiles and handshakes. She declines the offer to sit on the lap of the short one, and accepts a mint from the one in the middle. She is squashed between them, breathing in the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

  ‘It’s a good club. You know it?’ The man who first spoke to her leans across and shakes her hand cheerfully.

  ‘No,’ she says. And as he tells the taxi driver where to go, she leans back in a car full of strangers and waits to see where she will end up next.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘One more drink. Ah, come on. It’s just getting good.’ Emil claps a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m not really in the mood.’

  ‘You were in the mood. Come on. We will go on to Pierre’s. He said he’s got a whole bunch of people coming over. Party!’

  ‘Thanks, Emil, but I’ll finish this beer and go. Work tomorrow. You know.’

  Emil shrugs, lifts his own bottle, then turns back to the girl he has been talking to.

  It was bound to happen. Fabien watches Emil laughing with the redhead. He has liked her for ages, but he is not sure how much she likes him back. Emil is not unhappy, though. He just bounces onto the next thing, like a puppy. Hey! Let’s have fun!

  Don’t knock it, Fabien scolds himself. Better than being a loser like you.

  He feels a faint dread at what will come next. The long evenings at his flat. The work on the book that he is no longer sure is worth working on. The disappointment because Nell disappeared. The way he will kick himself for thinking it was going to be something more. He can’t blame her – he never even asked if she had a boyfriend. Of course a girl like her would have a boyfriend.

  He feels his mood sinking and knows it is time to go home. He does not want to depress anyone else. He claps Emil on the shoulder, nods goodbye to the others, and pulls his hat lower over his ears. Outside he climbs onto his moped, wondering if he should be driving at all after all he has had to drink.

  He kick-starts the little bike and pulls out onto the street.

  He has stopped at the end of the road to adjust his jacket when he hears Emil’s loud whistle. He turns.

  Emil is standing on the pavement beside a crowd of people. He is pointing at someone, and waving for him to return.

  Fabien recognizes the tilt of her head, the way she stands, one heel lifted. He sits for a moment. Then, a smile breaking over his face, he turns his bike and rides back to her.

  It is two thirty in the morning. Fabien has drunk more than he has drunk in weeks. His sides hurt from laughing. The Wildcat is heaving with people. One of Fabien’s favourite tracks comes on, which he had played in the restaurant during clean-up time until the boss had banned it. Emil, who is in crazy party mode, leaps onto the bar and starts dancing, pointing at his chest and grinning at the people below him. A cheer goes up.

  Fabien feels Nell’s fingers resting on his arm and takes her hand. She is laughing, her hair sweaty, with strands stuck to her face. She took off her coat some time ago and he suspects they may not find it again. They have been dancing for hours.

  The red-headed girl gets up on the bar beside Emil, helped by a sea of hands, and starts dancing. They shimmy together, swigging from bottles of beer. The barmen stand back, watching. It is not the first time the bar of the Wildcat has become a dance floor and it will not be the last.

  Nell is trying to say something to him.

  He stoops lower to hear her.

  ‘I’ve never danced on a bar,’ she says.

  ‘No? Do it!’ he says.

  She laughs, shakes her head, and he holds her gaze. And it is as if she remembers something. She reaches a hand to his shoulder, and he helps her up, and there she is, above him, dancing. Emil lifts a bottle in salute, and she is off, locked into the rhythm, her eyes closed, hair swinging. She wipes sweat from her face and swigs from a bottle. Two, then three more people join them up there.

  Fabien is not tempted. He just wants to stand here, feeling the music vibrate through him, part of the crowd, watching her, enjoying her pleasure, knowing he is part of it.

  She opens her eyes then, searching him out among the sea of faces. She spots him and smiles, and Fabien realizes he is feeling something he thought he had forgotten how to feel.

  He is happy.

  Chapter Twelve

  They are walking arm in arm through the deserted streets, past art galleries and huge old buildings. It is a quarter to four in the morning. Her legs ache from the dancing, and her ears are still ringing, and she thinks she has never felt less tired in her life.

  When they left the Wildcat they had swayed a little, drunk on the evening, beer, tequila and life, but somehow in the last half-hour she has sobered.

  ‘Nell, I have no idea where we are going.’

  She doesn’t care. She could walk like this for ever. ‘Well, I can’t go back to the hotel. Pete might still be there.’

  He nudges her. ‘You shared with the American woman. Maybe he’s not so bad.’

  ‘I’d rather share with the American. Even wi
th the snoring.’

  She has told him the whole story. At first Fabien had looked like he wanted to hit Pete. She realized, with shame, that she quite liked that.

  ‘Now I feel a little bit sorry for Pete,’ says Fabien. ‘He comes all the way to Paris to find you, and you run away with a Frenchman.’

  Nell grins. ‘I don’t feel bad about it. Isn’t that awful?’

  ‘You are clearly a very cruel woman.’

  She huddles closer to him. ‘Oh. Horrible.’

  He puts his arm around her. She lost her coat in the club, and she is wearing his jacket. He had assured her he did not feel the cold. She didn’t either, really, but she liked wearing his jacket.

  ‘You know, Nell, you can stay with me. If you like.’

  She hears her mother suddenly. You go back to a strange man’s house? In Paris?

  ‘That would be lovely. But I’m not going to sleep with you.’

  Her words hang in the night air.

  ‘I’m disappointed, Nell-from-England, but I understand. It is the duty of a cruel woman to crush a man’s hopes and dreams.’ He pulls down the corners of his mouth, an expression that seems purely French to her. And then he grins.

  ‘Where is your flat?’

  ‘It’s a studio. Not smart, like your hotel. Maybe ten minutes’ walk.’

  She has no idea what will happen next. It is absolutely thrilling.

  Fabien lives at the top of a narrow block that looks over a courtyard. The stairs are lined with cream stone and smell of old wood and polish. They walk up in silence. He has warned her that elderly women live in the other apartments. If he makes any noise after ten p.m. they will rap on his door early in the morning to complain. He does not mind, though, he tells her. His apartment is cheap because the owner is too lazy to update it. Sandrine hated it, he tells her.

  As they reach the top of the stairs she steels herself. Trish once dated a man and, when she went back to his flat, had found shelves full of books about murderers.

  He opens the door and ushers her in. She stops on the threshold and stares.

  Fabien’s flat is one big room, with one large window looking out over the rooftops. A desk is covered with piles of paper. A sofa-bed sits in the corner, and a large mirror on the other side. The floor is wood. It might have been painted a long time ago, but is now pale and colourless. There is a large bed at one end, a small sofa against a wall, and the third wall is covered with pictures cut from magazines.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, when he sees her looking. ‘I did that when I was a student. I am too lazy to take it down.’

  Everything – the desk, the chairs, the pictures – is strange and interesting. She walks around, gazing at a stuffed crow on a shelf, the workshop light that hangs from the ceiling, the collection of pebbles by the bathroom door. The television is a tiny box that looks twenty years old. There are six glasses on the mantelpiece and a stack of plates.

  He runs his hand over his head. ‘It’s a mess. I was not expecting –’

  ‘It’s beautiful. It’s … it’s magical.’

  ‘Magical?’

  ‘I just … like it. How you put things together. Everything looks like it’s a story.’

  He blinks at her, as if he is seeing his home through different eyes.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ he says. ‘I just need …’ He motions to the bathroom.

  It is probably a good thing. She feels reckless, like someone she doesn’t know. She peels off his jacket, straightening her dress, and walks slowly around the room until she is gazing out of the window. The rooftops of Paris, dark and moonlit, are like a promise.

  She looks down at the pile of hand-written pages. Some are dirty, marked with the treads of people’s shoes. She picks one up and starts to scan it for words she knows.

  When he finally comes out of the bathroom, she is holding her fourth page and sorting through the pile for the fifth.

  ‘Read it to me,’ she says.

  ‘No. It’s no good. I don’t want to read this –’

  ‘Just these pages. Please. So I can say, “When I was in Paris a real writer read to me from his own work.” It’s part of my Paris adventure.’

  He looks at her as if he cannot say ‘no’ to her. She puts on her best pleading face.

  ‘I have not shown it to anyone.’

  She pats the sofa next to her. ‘Maybe it’s time you did.’

  Some time later he drops page twelve on the floor.

  ‘You can’t stop.’

  ‘The pages are missing. Anyway – like I said, it’s no good.’

  ‘But you can’t stop. You have to remember what you wrote, and send it off to a publisher. It’s really good. You have to be a writer. Well, you are a writer. Just not a published one, yet.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘You are. It’s – it’s lovely. I think it’s … the way you write about the woman. About how she feels, the way she sees things. I saw myself in her. She’s …’

  He looks at her, surprised. Almost without knowing what she is doing she leans forward, takes his face in her hands and kisses him. She is in Paris, in the apartment of a man she does not know, and she has never done anything that felt more sensible in her life. His arms close round her and she feels herself being pulled into him.

  ‘You are … beautiful, Nell.’

  ‘And everything you say sounds better because it’s in French. I might just have to speak in a fake French accent for the rest of my life.’

  He pours them each a glass of wine, and they sit, gaze at each other and grin. They talk about work and their parents, their knees touching, leaning against each other on the little sofa. He tells her that this evening has released him from Sandrine. She talks about Pete, and giggles when she thinks about him reaching the room and turning back to find she is not there. They imagine the American woman turning up at the room now, when Pete is there, and giggle some more.

  At some point she goes to the loo and stares at herself in the mirror. She is grey with tiredness. Her hair is all over the place, her eye make-up has rubbed off. And yet she glows; she looks full of mischief and joy.

  When she comes back, he is reading her book.

  She stops. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What is this?’ He holds out the list.

  REASONS I AM RIGHT TO STAY

  IN TONIGHT.

  ‘I am an axe murderer? I might want to have sex with you?’

  He is laughing, but he is a little shocked too.

  ‘Oh, God. I didn’t mean for you to see that.’

  She has blushed to her ears.

  ‘It fell out of your bag. I was just putting it back in. “Have to pretend to be impulsive”.’ He looks up at her, surprised.

  She is filled with misery. ‘OK. I’m not the person you think I am. Or at least I wasn’t. I’m not impulsive. I nearly didn’t come tonight, because even the thought of taxi drivers scared me. I let you think I was a different kind of person. I’m … I’m sorry.’

  He studies the list, and then he looks up again. He is half laughing. ‘Who says you are a different kind of person?’

  She waits.

  ‘Was it somebody else dancing on that bar? Chasing me around Paris in a taxi with strange men? Leaving her boyfriend in a hotel room without even telling him she was going?’

  He reaches out a hand, and she takes it. She lets him pull her to him. She sits astride his lap and studies his lovely, kind face.

  ‘I think you are exactly this woman, Nell-from-England. You are whoever you choose to be.’

  It is getting light outside. She is light-headed with drink and tiredness. They kiss again, perhaps for ever, she is not sure for how long. She realizes she is still quite drunk after all. She sits with her lips almost on his and traces the shape of his face with her fingertips.

  ‘This has been the best night of my life,’ she says softly. ‘I feel – I feel like I just woke up.’

  ‘Me also.’

  They kiss again.
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  ‘But I think we should stop now,’ he says. ‘I am trying to be a gentleman, and remember what you said. And I don’t want you thinking I am an axe murderer or sex maniac. Or … anything.’

  Nell winds her fingers through his. ‘Too late,’ she says, and pulls him from the sofa.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fabien wakes, and even before his eyes are fully open he knows something is different. Something has shifted, a weight no longer pressing down on him from the moment he sees light. He blinks, his mouth dry, and pushes himself up on his elbow. Nothing in the room is different, but he has a hangover. He tries to clear the fog in his head, and then he hears the sound of a shower.

  And the previous night filters back to him.

  He lies back on the pillow for a minute, letting the events come clear in his head. He remembers a girl dancing on a bar, a long walk through Paris, dawn spent in her arms. He remembers laughing, and a book of lists, and her sweet smile, her leg over his.

  He pushes himself upright, pulls on his jeans and the nearest sweater. He walks to the coffee maker and refills it, then runs down the stairs to the bakery to grab a bag of croissants. As he returns, he opens the front door just as she comes out of the bathroom, wearing the green dress from last night, her hair wet around her shoulders. They stand still for a moment.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  She seems to be watching him to see how he reacts. When he smiles, her smile is just as wide.

  ‘I have to go back to the hotel and catch my train. It’s … quite late.’

  He checks his watch.

  ‘It is. And I have to go to work. But you have time for coffee? I have croissants. You cannot leave Paris without coffee and croissants.’

  ‘I have time if you have.’

  They are a little awkward with each other now, the ease of last night fading. They climb back onto the bed, staying on top of the covers now, both dressed, close enough to be friendly but not enough to suggest anything else. She sips the coffee and closes her eyes.