Almost French (11 page)

‘Oh, how’s it going?’

Alicia smiles sweetly. ‘Really, really badly, thanks. Just awful.’

With those words, my flimsy defence barriers tumble. As Alicia describes her growing stack of unanswered story proposals, I try hard not to beam. I am not alone! What a relief! Like me, she spends desperate days longing for responses.
Like me she is going stir crazy in her apartment. Details of our dreary existence blurt out in a reciprocal rush. Although we have all the time in the world, curiously, both of us have developed an irrational aversion to preparing lunch for one.

‘My staple is rice and soya sauce.’

‘I can’t be bothered cooking. I just have stale baguette and butter.’

‘I miss working with other people,’ I say. ‘I hate the silence.’

Alicia’s eyes glitter with a mix of effervescent fun and English madness.

‘I know! Let’s do a tape of office noise! You know, something people working at home can play. It’d be like (and her tone turns urgent and office-like): SARAH, THERE’S A FAX HERE FOR YOU! SHALL I PUT SO-AND-SO THROUGH TO YOU? DO YOU WANT A COFFEE, SARAH?’

It is no doubt a telling indication of our delicate emotional states that we find this side-splittingly funny. In fact, everything suddenly seems a wonderful joke—even our sorry piles of rejection faxes. We have both reread these so many times we know them by heart. (Never mind that they are negative. These are our beacons of hope. At least the editors acknowledged our ideas and some replies are even encouraging.) Clutching kitchen benches to avoid collapsing on the floor, we now recite, word for word, the reasons why our carefully crafted proposals will never become published stories.
Thanks for the recent offer but we don’t use contributed pieces.
What a giggle.
Thanks for the ideas. They’re all interesting but don’t suit the magazine.
Wheeze, wheeze.
Sorry, but our next twenty issues are full.
We can hardly stand up.

To the rest of the dinner party, it must have seemed a bit
tragic—two grown girls laughing like lunatics over something as unfunny as failure. But even slightly hysterical laughter is wonderfully therapeutic. Meeting someone whose struggles and aspirations mirror my own is a lifesaving stroke of luck. Together we will discuss ideas, help each other write the ultimate fail-proof story pitch and empathise and encourage. We share our big hopes for the future—Alicia wants to make a name for herself as a Paris fashion writer. And I have just applied to Journalists in Europe, an eight-month course which is based in Paris. I’d first heard of it through a friend at SBS, who knew someone who’d done it. It sounds like an exciting solution to my work dilemma, even if it’s only a temporary one. The program, which is designed for journalists with at least five years’ experience, involves lots of trips across the continent to write stories.

Of course, I had people to talk all this over with before meeting Alicia. Frédéric. My parents, who have been wonderfully supportive. Sue, who has followed these first rough months of mine through regular soul-lifting phone calls. But Alicia represents a different sort of confidante. She doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to be in my shoes: she
is
in my shoes, or almost. It is far easier to confide your despair in a friend going through the same experience than one who calls to announce a promotion or some new job perk like a company convertible.

By the end of the dinner we have resolved to spend culturally enriching afternoons at galleries and museums, instead of moping around our apartments. For special anti-stress treats, we’ll head to steam baths and soothe our brittle nerves with mud and scrubbing. But despite our good intentions, these plans are rarely realised. Invariably, the route to our destination passes an empty, tempting café. Shamelessly,
we invent excuses to justify our desire to drink. The paintings can wait, we can always catch the exhibition another day. We don’t even make it to the steam baths. Instead, we plough through
pichets
of house red, workshopping our futures and devising extravagant strategies for success.

In April, my aunt Joannie arrives from New Zealand, the first of what will grow to be a steady stream of antipodean visitors. Far from being upset about me living on the other side of the world, family and friends seem only too delighted with the prospect of a Paris pad. Straight off a twenty-eight hour plane trip, Joannie is her usual boisterous, overexcited self. Within approximately sixty seconds of meeting Frédéric, she has done away with any preliminary formalities.

‘My husband made me promise not to mention the Rainbow Warrior,’ she tells him. ‘But you know, Freddo, I think I’ll feel a lot better if I just get it off my chest.’ And shooting him a wicked wink, Joannie erupts in whooping, helpless laughter. Although momentarily taken aback, Frédéric quickly joins in. Soon the pair of them are swapping smutty, silly jokes which they both find hilarious. Before long she is on the back of his motorbike, her joyful shrieks ringing down the boulevards.

Far from being affronted by this easy antipodean familiarity, Frédéric seems to adore it. He loves having people to stay and seems to relish his role as host, getting up early to buy croissants and baguettes and squeeze fresh orange juice for breakfast. Inevitably he gets called ‘Freddo Frog’, and a packet of the so-named chocolate frogs even arrives from
Sydney friends as a joke. He seems to like the tickling, teasing humour. Although undeniably proud, the French can be excellent sports when it comes to poking fun at themselves. They can also be terribly self-critical, referring to ‘
les Français
’ in the third person as though they are a foreign, vaguely suspect people.
Les Français sont tous des râleurs
, is one frequent refrain. The French are all whiners. Too individualistic; hopeless with foreign languages. The French are hypochondriacs, they say, citing the way people expect pages of doctors’ prescriptions for a common cold. They seem resigned to their litany of French flaws, as though powerless to change them.

Although Australians have a self-deprecating humour the difference in France is that often they’re not joking. This isn’t something I had expected from the French. They seem to be able to view themselves and their country from afar, serving up frank self-criticism while remaining glaringly Gallic. It is another paradox in the puzzle these people represent. Frédéric’s deep pride in his country doesn’t prevent him from ridiculing the Republic.

Several months after Joannie’s departure a parcel arrives from New Zealand. It’s addressed to Frédéric. Inside is a card and a present—a white Greenpeace T-shirt with a commemorative message splashed across the front:

Rainbow Warrior
tenth anniversary of the sinking

It’s from Joannie, of course. Frédéric wears it everywhere. The T-shirt is a reminder of the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace boat in Auckland harbour, carried out by French secret service agents, no doubt on the orders of President
François Mitterrand. The vessel was scheduled to sail for Mururoa to protest French nuclear tests on the South Pacific atoll. France wanted to stop it. In the end, the international outrage over the sinking—which tragically caused the death of a Portuguese photographer—forced a moratorium on French tests.

The T-shirt arrives just after the tenth anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior sinking. Ironically, when the date of the anniversary came around, France was already at the centre of another nuclear furore. And oddly, it would have an unexpected impact on my future.

Several months earlier, in May, I’d received a phone call which had delivered exciting news. My application had been accepted by Journalists in Europe! I was one of about thirty applicants who’d been selected. The idea of the eight-month course is to give journalists a chance to deepen their understanding of Europe through work experience. There are regular field trips to write stories and scholarships cover basic travel and living expenses.

The trouble is, I didn’t get a scholarship. The apologetic French voice on the phone explained that funding cuts mean the school no longer offers them to applicants from wealthy, Western countries, including the United States, Canada, England—and Australia. It is left to the governments of these countries to cough up some cash. The program co-ordinator advised me to contact the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. I tried to picture public servants in Canberra agreeing to sponsor Paris
séjours
for journalists. It seemed wholly unlikely. The government hadn’t provided funding in previous years and it wouldn’t help me
either. Because of the trips, the course costs a steep $22,000. Having blown all my savings on travel, I didn’t even have one tenth of that sum sitting in my bank account.

But I desperately wanted to do the program. It seemed just the lucky break I needed. Not that I’d been entirely luckless on the work front lately. My persistent faxing seemed to be finally paying off: I had delivered my first commissioned story to a weekend magazine a fortnight before. It was on an Australian brother and sister who manage a bar and restaurant in Paris, although it wouldn’t really have mattered what it was about—I was over the moon just to have had an article accepted. Two other editors had also responded positively to ideas and it looked like I would have more stories to write. But these last few months had left me with few illusions. Freelancing, by its very nature, can be precarious and never more so than when you’re trying to get started. Establishing myself as a writer was going to take time. This first article represented a breakthrough but it didn’t mean I was suddenly going to be swamped with ecstatic replies from editors.

The Journalists in Europe program would allow me to pursue my freelancing efforts and at the same time expose me to exciting new experiences. It might even help my journalism, because the stories we would write on course trips could then be sold to mainstream media. After four months of idling in the apartment, I was ready for a bit of excitement. I chased up former JE journalists living in Paris and I heard about their adventures in countries ranging from Moldova to Macedonia. Barely able to find these places on a map, to me these trips sounded thrilling. What’s more, after four months working alone, being part of a group would be fun. Although the field trips are carried out individually, back in Paris journalists attend lectures at the headquarters on Rue du Louvre.
The schedule leaves plenty of time for coffees and
kirs
. It sounded perfect.

Somehow I had to raise the money. But how?

‘I’ve got an idea! I know how you can do it!’ Several weeks after learning of my acceptance to the course, Alicia was on the telephone, practically gagging with excitement. Twenty minutes later she was buzzing my door, breathless, having come to pitch her plan in person. A great believer in writing things down, she pulled out a pen and a sheet of paper and in big, bold numbers wrote £9,000—the required sum rounded up and converted into pounds. She underlined it.

The plan was simple and—according to Alicia—fail-proof. We will hold a raffle, selling tickets to family, friends and acquaintances on both hemispheres. Each ticket will cost twenty pounds. Translating that into Aussie dollars my jaw dropped in disbelief but Alicia was busy scribbling and dividing and she ignored me. ‘So that means you just have to sell four hundred and fifty tickets.’

It was clear from her bright, suspenseful eyes that we were getting to the good bit.
La pièce de résistance
. The prizes, naturally. These had been given a great deal of thought. I could almost hear the drum roll beating in Alicia’s head. For the Australian winner: a weekend on Sydney’s northern beaches where my parents’ home which badly needs a paint job will somehow be transformed into a luxurious B & B. Mum and Dad will be required to serve champagne breakfasts on the balcony. The European winner will be treated to a sightseeing tour of Paris by night on Frédéric’s motorbike. Alicia was bursting with confidence.

‘Everyone will be falling over themselves for tickets.’

I stared in stunned amusement. Could she be serious? (Apparently, yes.) Forty – no, more like fifty – dollar tickets
for the chance to ride on a motorbike or stay with my parents! Who’d fall for that? I tried to be tactful.