Almost French (15 page)

But he thinks this is hilarious. ‘Who was desperate to leave Levallois?’ he teases. ‘Who’d had enough of those clean, leafy streets?’ Grinning, Frédéric gestures grandly towards the rats and the rubbish.

‘You wanted the real Paris?
Voilà le vrai Paris!
’

As luck would have it, inside our building most of the stairwell lights have blown. The concierge is on holiday in her native Portugal and no-one has replaced the bulbs. The staircase is a spiral of dark doorways and dramatic shadows. My buoyant mood has been dampened by the rats. The darkness makes the stairwell look even more grubby and grim than I remembered. Before I’d been undaunted by the lack of a lift, making gung-ho declarations about the benefits for the thighs and the bum. But now I count every torturous step. There are one hundred and twenty. Plus five landings, three flat paces in length. I imagine struggling up the stairs with groceries.

Tonight’s few possessions require only a couple of trips but by the end, our chests are heaving, our legs unsteady. Suddenly our decision not to employ professional removalists seems pure folly. Nervously, we itemise Frédéric’s furniture. One massive oak chest. One incredibly fragile, two-metre high antique mirror that weighs a crushing eighty kilos. A marble-topped console table. Not to mention tonnes of heavy books, dozens of paintings. We think of the friends who have gallantly volunteered to help us move. This will put these friendships to the test.

Back at Levallois, Frédéric and I begin the serious business of preparing to move. I pride myself on a certain professionalism when it comes to packing up houses and
apartments. Having a father who was an air-force pilot meant postings every couple of years, ensuring the family got lots of practice at moving, even if we were aided. At university, during several summer holidays, Sue and I had packed boxes for a Canberra removal firm. For a student, it was a well-paid job, if lacking in cool status and glamour. But the upshot is I’m uncharacteristically conscientious about details such as labelling boxes and the number of sheets of scrunched-up newspaper which are required for protective padding. Frédéric, meanwhile, has apparently forgotten his resolutions about being ‘
maniac
’: egg beaters are chucked in with books, unpaid electricity bills together with wine bottles. Jean-Michel is right. When it comes to moving house, his friend is ‘
une vraie catastrophe
’.

We are knee-deep in boxes, newspaper and kitchen utensils when we’re interrupted by a boisterous barrage of buzzing and knocking. Our team of removalists is at the front door. Some of Frédéric’s oldest friends from northern France have driven down to help us for the weekend: Jean-Michel, Léon, who with his wife Caroline had been so delightful at that lunch in the country, and Jean-René and his wife Corine. It’s all part of a pact this group has maintained for twenty years, and the tradition is now part of their historical superglue. Every time one of them shifts house, the others help, transforming what is a tedious task into a source of hilarious memories and finger-pointing stories which will be raucously recounted at dinners decades from now.

Jean-Michel assumes authority the second he steps through the door. This is his shining moment. For the duration of the weekend he is our general, we his loyal troops. He swaggers around the apartment, sighing theatrically at the still open boxes and untidy piles of odds and ends.
He fires a stream of interrogation at Frédéric. ‘Have you organised the truck? It better not be like the last
camion de merde
you hired, the one that kept breaking down. Why isn’t this stuff packed in boxes? What’s for dinner? Omelettes? What? No
frites
?’ He puts his arm around me, speaking in a confidential tone as though this is the sort of omission countries go to war over. ‘
Chérie
,
ma puce
, always, always serve
frites
with omelettes.’

I don’t know whether this is a French rule or just Jean-Michel’s opinion (I suspect the latter) but I laugh anyway. It is impossible to be offended by Jean-Michel, even if he is not joking about the
frites.
The presence of this group of friends fills the apartment with gaiety. Although we don’t see them often because they all live several hours north of Paris, right from my first meetings with them all, we’d hit it off. Their constant joking and easy acceptance of me is an antidote to the formality of many Parisian encounters.

A year or two older than Frédéric, Jean-Michel has always played big brother to his friend, alternating roguish pranks with protective responsibility. As kids, one minute Jean-Michel would be on his
mobilette
, chasing his friend who only had a bicycle, until he rammed him straight into a prickle bush. The next he’d be smoothing things over, reassuring Frédéric’s parents that
tout va bien,
when their son was slapped in an army detention cell during his military service in Djibouti for turning up drunk and patriotically painted to a morning parade. This weekend will be no different. Bullishly, Jean-Michel will grumble about Frédéric’s ‘château’ taste in furniture which is a pain in the arse to move. Then, when no-one’s looking, he will painstakingly wrap padding around the giant, sculpted mirror, careful that none of the tape touches the gilt.

Over a dinner of omelettes (no
frites
), pork terrine made by Léon’s mother-in-law, cheeses and red wine, Jean-Michel outlines our battle plan. Tomorrow we’ll wake at six. His voice rolls firmly over our squeals of protest. Not a minute later. This is a big job, a serious undertaking. He will be up even earlier to get our breakfast. We try telling him Paris
boulangeries
never open before seven but Jean-Michel holds up an impatient, silencing hand: leave it to me, he says. The morning will be spent getting the boxes and furniture down the narrow Levallois staircase and loading the truck. Then we’ll break for a restorative lunch. We’re going to need one almighty burst of energy for the afternoon to haul our belongings up six flights of stairs.

‘
ALLEZ, ALLEZ, ALLEZ!
’ Jean-Michel’s booming reveille the next morning must have blasted through all five floors of our building. The apartment smells of croissants, fresh from the oven. He passes them around with a flourish. Apparently the
charmante
woman at the bakery (who has never been especially charming to me) obligingly opened the door a little early. The others dunk their croissants in their coffee, a French habit I have never been able to fathom because a) it seems a waste of all that delicious crispness, and b) it leaves soggy pastry flakes floating in your cup. We spend the morning doing as we’re told, loading everything that will fit into the minuscule lift (not much), and lugging the rest down the four flights of stairs, into the truck. Exhausted, we arrive in the city centre outside our new apartment right on time; the move is running to schedule. Jean-Michel declares it’s time for lunch.

But far from reviving us, stopping for takeaway chicken, potatoes, salad and beers has a soporific effect. The morning’s work has wiped us out; muscles we didn’t even
know existed signal their soreness. Hot sunbeams stream through the skylights, sapping the last of our energy. We all want siestas. The jocular mood has sobered. Crashed out on the blond parquet floor, no-one can move. Even Jean-Michel’s bravado appears broken by the knowledge that the worst is yet to come. Parked on the street six floors below us, the truck is waiting, crammed to the ceiling with furniture and boxes. Just thinking about it makes me want to weep. And then four other friends turn up to help. Alicia, her husband Rupert, and some Australian friends Aileen and Brett, whom I have met only recently. When they’d gamely offered, I’d told them not to worry about coming—secretly hoping they would, of course. The timing of ‘
les Anglo-Saxons
’, as everyone broadly calls them, is miraculous. Prostrate, we stare at them as though they are angels.

Buoyed by the responsibility of more troops, Jean-Michel snaps back into command. We are to work in a chain: he and Frédéric will get the heavy stuff out of the van and up to the second landing. Léon and Jean-René will carry it up to the fourth floor, where Rupert and Brett will take over for the final leg. Corine, Aileen, Alicia and I form another chain, passing boxes.

In Paris, in an average year there are only a few days when the temperature nudges over thirty degrees centigrade. Today happens to be one of them. It is boiling and there’s not a breath of a breeze. Before long the stairs are slippery with sweat and we have pink balloon faces. At one point I stumble over Jean-René, flat on his back, his sagging body following the contour of the steps, cartoon-style. As we struggle under the seriously heavy weights, I worry about someone falling. You could break a limb, even your neck. Our legs quiver like twigs about to snap. But between grimaces and groans, our
team jokes stoically. By five, every last item is at the top. No-one has fallen down the stairs, even the massive mirror with its delicate gilt has arrived in one piece. Most amazing of all, these smiling people are still our friends!

That night, Frédéric and I take everyone out for dinner at La Fresque, a convivial bistro at Les Halles whose walls are covered in frescoes from its previous life as an oyster shop. Already the day has taken on legendary status—it is the Mother of all Moves. I am teased for cramming too many heavy books into my boxes. Frédéric is ribbed about his move-unfriendly furniture. Recklessly pouring more red, Léon proposes an amendment to their pact. Next time the workers will strike unless our place has a lift.

Squashed around the too-small table, surrounded by the happy banter of friends, I am in high spirits. Later, this evening will seem to occupy a pivotal place in time, like a bridge between two epochs. Looking back I’ll reflect that my jubilance stemmed, in part, from the first stirrings of a sense of belonging. But right now I just feel glad to have trusted my early intuition: everything
is
working out in France, slowly. After dinner, Jean-Michel and the others will crash at our place. Tomorrow, Frédéric and I will start settling into our apartment, unpacking boxes and hanging paintings. From this very first night in our new home, the future looks a lot more fun.

One of the tasks I most relish in the first few weeks after our move is setting up my new office. After eighteen months of working from the dining room table, packing up my computer every time we want to eat, having a separate space of my own seems a luxury. By the time we left Levallois I could no longer contain my burgeoning stack of story and research files. They’d invaded the lounge room—clippings and papers were strewn like litter across book shelves, chairs and the coffee table. My mess became a bone of contention: Frédéric couldn’t stand it. The French like their
salons
spotless, ever ready to receive guests. Having trained himself to be neat, to Frédéric it seemed unjustly ironic that no sooner had he achieved a perfect lounge room than I rolled up and wrecked it.

And so my new office, with its door that can be conveniently closed to hide the disorder inside, is an immense relief to both of us. We give the walls a fresh coat of white paint which makes the space light and bright. I buy a new desk and a filing cabinet which to our horror are delivered in boxes of parts you have to assemble yourself. The desk is pretty straightforward but the filing cabinet is a jumble of puzzle pieces. I try to make sense of the diagrams while Frédéric fumes about how scandalous it is to have to pay for
such self-punishment. Although his patience is limitless for tedious tasks like scratching off the green paint which covered his gilded mirror, DIY sends him apoplectic.

Finally my office furniture is assembled. The desk wobbles and the filing cabinet ejects its contents every time I open a drawer but I am thrilled. We push the desk into the corner facing the window which looks across the courtyard to the other wing of our building and the rooftops beyond it. Sky fills the top half of the frame, ensuring I never feel enclosed. It is hardly an exceptional view but it is mine and to me it is special.

The truth is I really need my own office now. Work has become quite busy. When the Journalists in Europe program finished, I had already begun writing regularly for three or four cherished editors, who now not only answer my faxes but also frequently commission stories. Mostly they are feature articles; I avoid news reporting. News is scary. How can a lone freelancer compete with the speed and resources of agencies like Reuters and AFP? Jacques Chirac might be assassinated in Paris overnight and I wouldn’t even know until I received an early morning call from a Sydney editor, who because of the time difference has had a whole day to find out the facts, so now wants the juicy details—preferably a scoop—and all within two hours. (This nightmarish scenario actually comes true when Diana, Princess of Wales, is killed in a Paris car crash.) This is not for me, these early wake-up calls, the impossibly tight deadlines, the sickly feeling in your stomach as you stare at a blank screen, knowing that any minute now the editor’s going to call (feigning casualness) with the dreaded question: ‘Um, how’s the story coming along?’.