Harm's Way (2 page)

I hadn't grown up to be beautiful; at best, I was occasionally described as ‘pretty'. I was too tall and boyish in figure, with deep-set eyes and my dark, messy features lacked the symmetry that traditionally defines beauty: the ‘before' picture in a women's magazine. The realisation caused me a moment's
pain, a snarl in the skein of my perfect existence, but I had one consolation: boys seemed to like me, and then men. In a mirror-like response to their collective gaze, I developed my own fascination with them. From puberty onwards – and this was a fault of mine – the only thing that secured my lasting attention was the opposite sex. Neither animals, landscapes nor objects held any value in my eyes. But my father, the look on a woman's face when she speaks of a man, and the sinewy forearm of the bus conductor as he took my change – these things captivated me.

Leaving the few girls I saw as friends posed no problem. Until that year – until I met Beth – my female friends had counted for very little. As an only child I had always found it hard to have the generosity of spirit that my friends demanded of me, assimilating myself more easily into large groups that I could drift in and out of. When people asked me how I felt about a particular subject I could never quite believe they cared what my answer was. I assumed that it was all a charade, that people only feigned interest in others so that they, in turn, would be indulged. I had always supposed that the kind of selflessness which made you interested in other people's emotions would occur naturally in adulthood. Selfishness, at that time, seemed to me to be a good thing, making you act on your desires and achieve them faster than those who check with everyone before going after what they want, and as a result are too late to get it.

My new apartment building was flanked on the right by a popular launderette, where men sat around pretending to read
Wallpaper*
magazine, pausing to tease designer briefs
from the jaws of the machines while critically observing their neighbours' laundry.

To the left of number 35 rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie was an even more surprising sight: the Sun Café, a bar and sun-bed centre where you could enjoy a frozen margarita from the comfort of your slippery-with-sweat glass bed. But my real joy, and the reason I had rented the flat, was the tiny balcony, just large enough to fit a flower pot and the skeleton of a chair I'd found on the street. Overlooking the blue slate roofs of Paris, it was a perfect spot. The only eyesore was the blackened plastic tubing of the Centre Pompidou, visible in the distance, like a mass of cancerous entrails.

When your spirits are uplifted you want to tell someone about it, but after twice dialling my father's number (my mother hated to be disturbed at the office) I hung up, knowing that his soothing voice would only induce the semblance of a complaint from me where there was none. At 3 a.m., I awoke to a banging noise coming from the flat next door: a slow, measured knocking on the wall. I waited for it to subside but instead it gradually increased in volume. Covering my face with my pillow and cursing French plumbing, I strove to sleep. Eventually the knocking stopped as abruptly as it started.

Despite the loss of sleep, the next morning I felt brighter. I bought a plant, attempted a French paper but gave up after a glance revealed an impenetrable thicket of statistics accompanying each and every article, and began to wonder how I would ever meet anyone in what I was starting to understand was a difficult city to break into. After the third day of speaking to no one, my cheerfulness receded and
anxiety set in. A film was the only way to assuage the panic. While I was buying my ticket to the third part of a Hollywood trilogy, a teenage girl behind me in the queue tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether the first two had been any good. I walked into the cinema elated by the few words we'd exchanged, wishing I could somehow have extended the conversation, but left the theatre despondent that the prospect of any further human interaction that day was slim.

I am pleased now, for those days of loneliness, because it was only after being forced to stare down the intimidating colossus of Paris that – all of a sudden and quite unexpectedly – I fell in love with it. In many respects, it is a city built for the lost: taking a wrong turn leads to such enchanting discoveries that one soon begins to do it deliberately. The French even have a word for it,
‘flâner
' – to stroll aimlessly – which I would do for hours, from the rue de l'Échaude, past the sleepy bookshop L'Or du Temps, down to the more refined rue de Seine, turning off at the rue des Beaux Arts to contemplate the hotel where Oscar Wilde died in poverty and disgrace. Like that of a medical student handed his first scalpel, my curiosity to uncover the city's viscera knew no bounds.

Just when I began to revel in my solitude, an antidote to my loneliness came from an unexpected source: a schoolfriend, Sarah.

Sarah was the kind of girl who laughed differently in the company of boys. She'd rung to tell me about the last one she'd met, liberally interspersing her conversation with that large, slightly frenetic laugh, pausing only for the barest murmur of acknowledgement from me.

I let it all pass over my head until she suddenly asked, ‘Did you ever meet Beth?'

‘No. Why should I know Beth?'

‘She's that great Irish woman I told you about. You remember. The one I met doing work experience with that dress designer in London.'

I vaguely remembered Sarah's exultant description of Beth, at the time putting it down to her hyperbolic tendencies, but was soon to realise how accurate it was.

‘Anyway,' Sarah continued, ‘she moved to Paris a year ago to work at some fashion house. Can't think which … but quite a famous one, I think. She's practically my mother's age, but she doesn't act like it, and if you want her to she'll happily take you under her wing. Anyway, you've probably already got yourself a little clique …'

I took down Beth's number: it would be a good place to start.

I hesitated to contact this unknown woman but out of a mixture of desperation and curiosity, did so a few days later. Low-voiced but welcoming on the phone, Beth soon dispelled my embarrassment. Still, I was convinced that at best our meeting could yield little more than a few tips on day-to-day life in a Paris that seemed increasingly impregnable.

She had set a date for that Sunday at the Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen in Clignancourt, which sold every kind of bric-a-brac from vintage clothing to antiques. Once a place where social rejects found refuge, it now featured regularly in French gossip magazines like
Voici,
with the likes of Juliette Binoche and Sharon Stone (when she was passing through) pictured chatting beatifically to ancient Algerian stallholders.

At the gates of the métro station at Porte de Clignancourt I spotted Beth immediately. She was petite, with shoulder-length hair the colour of partridge feathers. The translucent whiteness of her skin was as recognisably Irish as the watery blue almonds of her eyes. She did not correspond to my childish idea of what a forty-year-old woman should look like for one simple reason: she was undeniably beautiful.

As I approached her I caught an impression of snug curves beneath flimsy linen trousers, hips jutting out exuberantly from a slim waist. Her eyes, flashes of colour in the grey of the
underground station, flicked over the crowd before alighting on me.

‘Hey,' she drawled with a lazy Irish lilt as I walked towards her with the fixed, determined smile you adopt when meeting someone for the first time. ‘I've been looking at that girl over there wondering if she was you.'

Up close I could see that she was twenty years my senior. Time had sketched fine lines around her eyes, and two grooves, lightly charcoaled exclamation marks, were already forming between her eyebrows. We brushed our lips awkwardly across each other's cheeks (would we have done that if we had met in London?), and as we neared the market I found myself blurting out: ‘God it's good to see another person. I've been going nearly mad since I got here. Isn't that pitiful?'

My speech sounded rushed, as though exhaling breath I had held in far too long.

‘Not at all.' Beth gave a gentle smile revealing small, curved white teeth, a smile which set off perfectly the lazy dance of her eyes. ‘You should have seen me when I first got here. I remember trying to buy some green beans and walking out when the cashier asked me to weigh them because I couldn't understand what he was on about. That, my friend, is pathetic.'

The ‘my friend' was a bonus, encouraging me to open up more. I began recounting some of my own, only slightly embellished tales of humiliation at the hands of Parisians. After a moment I became aware that I was sounding like a child, trying to match her experiences in a desire to make her like me. At first unsure of which tone to adopt with her (should I treat her like a friend or like one of my mother's
dinner guests?) I was quickly reassured by her easy manner. I liked the fact that her attention to me was steady, undivided. As we wandered past a Rastafarian sitting cross-legged on the pavement behind a patchwork of DVDs, she bent down to look closer at one while I chattered on, throwing me a ‘Really?' over her shoulder just as I began to wonder whether she was still listening. Beth's movements had a grace and fluidity which drew admiring glances from passers-by, without her seeming to notice.

‘God, you've done so much already – and you've been here less than a month,' she murmured, shaking her head at an over-zealous stallholder's advances. ‘I've been so caught up in work that I've hardly had the chance to get to know Paris.'

‘The thing to do is just to start walking and see where it takes you. I'm only just beginning to find my way around but I feel I have to investigate every passage I see, you know? Just in case I miss something.'

She smiled, amused by my enthusiasm. ‘I'd never thought of it that way – but you're right.'

By the time we had walked past the long line of street sellers that led, like scattered human crumbs, to the real market, I felt proud: a schoolgirl who had made her first friend, and I suddenly recalled the special sense of privilege and prestige friendship brings in the eyes of children which, perhaps, we lose as we get older.

Together we weaved through the rows of stalls, so deep in conversation that we obstructed other buyers, who reminded us of their presence with a dry smack of the tongue to the upper palate. I bought a set of six 1930s-style Perrier glasses Beth had found hidden behind a cracked basin. I still have them today. I know exactly where they are: on the left hand-
corner of the shelf beneath the kitchen sink, but I would never use them again.

‘Where the hell did you learn to speak French like that?' she said, grabbing my elbow and leaning in towards me after her darting eyes had registered my bartering exchange with the stallholder. ‘I just can't get to grips with it – it's still a relief when people see me struggling and answer in English.'

I shrugged, pleased. ‘I did it for A level, and we've had quite a lot of holidays here, so …'

Beth blew a silent whistle through pursed lips, and I had the absurd thought that the gesture was too young for her. ‘Of course I might have learned more if I wasn't sharing a flat with an Irish bloke. Stephen's my best friend's little brother,' she explained. ‘He's from the same village as me, Skibbereen (you won't have heard of it), but he did French at university, speaks it perfectly, which means he really doesn't see the need to practise with me. Of course it might also have helped if my father had forced me to sit down and do my homework at the weekend, instead of helping him out on the farm.'

Seven years her junior, Stephen had witnessed every adolescent folly Beth and his sister, Ruth, had committed, and was able to remember them all with the disconcerting clarity of youth.

‘Stephen works for a big magazine company in London, and so when he was moved to their Paris offices a few months ago, I was hoping he'd be keen to share a flat with me. I just get lonely otherwise, on my own, you know? It takes much longer than people expect to make friends in a new country, don't you think?'

Beth had related all this before we'd chosen what we wanted from the handwritten blackboards adorning the walls of a crêperie in the hub of the market.

I liked the sound of Stephen, and began trying to formulate a question that might tell me how attractive he was. I was still too excited by men to be able to imagine them purely as friends. But the interest I had in the opposite sex had one, vital clause: it must be reciprocated. The second I arrived in any given place I would scour the room for the responsive gleam in a man's eyes, a reflex of mine that showed little sign of passing.

‘He's single and great-looking, in case you're wondering,' Beth said with an indulgent smile, looking above my head at the menu and then back, fixedly, at me. ‘But you've probably got someone, haven't you?'

I laughed. ‘Actually no.'

‘I can't believe that: why not?'

‘I suppose I rarely find people that I like.'

This wasn't true. I liked men all too easily: little men who looked up at you admiringly, big men who cradled your head in their hands, clever men, stupid men. I liked them but I was never affected by them.

‘You seem to be a pretty self-reliant person, one way and another.'

‘Oh I am,' I agreed. ‘Very much so.'

‘I'm not,' she rejoined easily. ‘I'm the worst kind of woman. When I like someone I can't help making it far too obvious. I call them constantly, try to book them weeks in advance, neglect my friends for the duration – which tends to be short – and generally become this terrible, fawning Irish mam. Naturally they end up running a mile.' She smiled to herself,
amused, but seeking no kind of reassurance from me. ‘You'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you? You'd think it was something you'd get better at as you got older, but the funny thing, Anna, is that you never do.'