Of this I’m certain: we didn’t go to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange to take an additional trip, via the TV, to Texas.
I don’t contact my friend Neil because I’m ashamed of what we did to his exchange. One hot, clouded afternoon we went into the woods near Neil’s house, Neil and Rob and Fadil and me and Neil’s exchange student, and we threw rocks at this boy, who even before we started throwing things at him had something wrong with his leg, and who limped along behind us, wanting to leave, I’m sure, but having precisely nowhere else to go. I remember his name as François, which I hope is true because otherwise my imagination is a disappointment: François the French boy. Why not slap a beret on his head, tie a string of onions round his neck and be done with it? “My leg, my leg,” he called to us, falling further and further behind. We acted like he didn’t exist. Like his cries couldn’t reach us through the thick, still air. Neil told us that at night François would put some kind of oil on his bad leg, and that one time he had asked Neil to help him. “I told him to fuck off,” Neil said, but I hope that was a lie. I hope that in reality he showed that boy a kindness the rest of us lacked.
Céline, a great writer and a vile person, died in the suburb of Meudon. “You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past,” he wrote, but he has nothing to do with why we went to Paris when my brother was on his French exchange.
The Things I Don’t Remember
Owen Booth
It’s 1999 and I’m going blind in a hotel room in Paris. Paris, for God’s sake! The City of Light! The irony isn’t lost on me. Even in my condition I can appreciate the absurdity of it.
My travelling companion at the time is less sanguine about things. He wants to go out and see Paris, having never visited the city before. He doesn’t understand, because I haven’t told him, why I don’t want to leave the hotel room, why I don’t even want to get off my bed. Eventually he gives up trying to persuade me and goes out by himself, leaving me to wrestle with my awful future. He comes back a few hours later having had a perfectly pleasant time.
That’s when I tell him that I may have looked at the eclipse for too long — which was why we came to France, how we ended up in a field on the Normandy coast with six million other people — and without the appropriate eyewear.
It turns out that my friend did the same thing, has been worrying about it too, and we laugh, and probably feel a bit better. In the event, I don’t go blind, and neither does he — although nineteen years later I still have this thing in the corner of my vision, in my left eye, so…
And also: this incident will somehow end up being my last clear memory of Paris, despite my going back to the city a number of times since. That August evening in 1999: burned into my memory (although thankfully not onto my retinas). Everything else: blurry, vague.
So, in some ridiculously handy metaphorical sense, isn’t it in fact right to say that maybe I did go blind that night? Is it possible to become blind to a place?
There’s a story in my family about the time my brother, who doesn’t speak French, went around the Paris Métro, by himself, while on a family holiday — at the age of eight, or six, or four. He gets progressively younger every time the story is told. And, depending on who tells the story, this is either evidence of terrible parenting, or how different things were in those days, or my brother’s wild and adventurous streak, or something about Paris itself. I don’t really remember anything about the trip in question — I would have been three years older than my brother, however old he actually was at the time — except, possibly, going up the Eiffel Tower. And that may have actually been on another holiday altogether. Or not at all. Doesn’t everyone remember going up the Eiffel Tower, at least once, whether or not they actually ever did?
My parents — the same parents who let my brother travel around the Paris Métro by himself at the age of eight, or six, or four — had hitchhiked to Paris in 1968, just after they’d got married in a registry office without telling their parents. Neither of these were particularly common things for young working/lower-middle-class people from Leeds to do at the time, and I love them both for that. In the streets of Paris all the cobbles had been replaced after les événements, and the only remaining sign of the unrest was a piece of graffiti reading “La chienlit, c’est lui”. After asking a surprised gendarme to recommend a place to stay, my parents were directed to a by-the-hour knocking shop (“pas cher!”). As my mother remembers it — “We were youthful and energetic and walked and walked and thought we had arrived”, and I love them both for that, too.
I’ve only been to Paris with someone I was in love with once, and all I can remember about that trip was going to a museum that, for some reason, had a live crocodile (or alligator) in the basement. Did this really happen? There’s a story that an Egyptian crocodile was captured in the Paris sewers in 1987 and may or may not now be on display in the zoo at Vincennes, although I’m fairly sure I’ve never been to that part of the city. Another version of the tale suggests that it was 1984, and the crocodile was sent to an aquarium in Vannes, Brittany, where it lives in an enclosure modelled on the Paris sewers. I have been to Vannes, but not to any aquariums there, so I can’t categorically confirm or deny this. There were also reports of crocodiles on the loose in the canals of Paris following the floods of 2016, but that’s more than ten years after my last visit to the city, and the stories are widely considered to have been hoaxes.
Worried that I’m doing my ex-partner a disservice (she’s a very nice person), I get in touch to ask her what she can remember of our Paris trip. It turns out that she remembers even less than I do. “Emile Zola and the graves,” she tells me. “That’s all.” She has no memory of the crocodile/ alligator.
Neither of us can remember whether or not we went up the Eiffel Tower.
I hitchhiked through Paris once. On the way to see another ex-girlfriend who lived in the Loire valley (this was well over twenty years ago, and does not in any way reflect the person I am now — I haven’t had an ex-girlfriend in over fifteen years, and don’t plan on having any more). I used to hitchhike everywhere back in those days, but France turned out to be a challenge. I spent about five hours stuck on the edge of the Paris périphérique, trying to get a lift and staring at a giant promotional poster for the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Double Impact, in which the Belgian action hero plays estranged twin brothers who team up to fight the Hong Kong triads. I can’t remember what the film was called in French, but I remember the strapline, referring to the two brothers, was (roughly translated) “one has a weapon — one is a weapon”.
Thinking about it now, there’s a narrow possibility that this was actually the strapline for one of the films in the Lethal Weapon series, but I’m not sure the release dates match with my trip.
And, of course, I ended up inappropriately falling back in love with that particular ex-girlfriend, who lived by a vineyard and whose father used a shovel to swat the hornets that gathered outside their back door in the evenings, because this was France, even if it wasn’t Paris, and if you can’t end up inappropriately falling back in love with an ex-girlfriend in France — a French ex-girlfriend — then where can you? Although in the event the timings were all off, and I was still involved with someone else, and so nothing too untoward happened, and also I was only in my early twenties and what does anyone that young even know about love anyway?
Around that same time a university friend and I were briefly obsessed by a TV documentary that the writer and broadcaster Clive James made as part of his Postcard From… series. In “Postcard from Paris”, the middle-aged James returns to the city he visited as a struggling and idealistic young writer, interviews beautiful French women including Françoise Sagan, Béatrice Dalle, and Inès de La Fressange, and ponders the life he could have had, and the man he could have been, and the women he could have loved, if things had turned out differently.
My friend and I were both hugely moved by this programme. Clive James, it appeared, knew
all about love. Love and loss and longing and regret. Here was Clive, balding, overweight, in a loose tie and ill-fitting suit, his life apparently pretty much over, almost laughably mismatched with all these beautiful French women, warning us of what things were really going to be like. We, too, would end up looking back on our missed chances, our failed and doomed romances, our youthful relevance. We, too, would ache with regret for our own lost Paris.
And this, we understood, was what it meant to be old.
Well.
I re-watched “Postcard from Paris” the other day. It’s on YouTube. It still holds up. James and his crew knew how to make good television. It’s funny to see the boxy Eighties cars and the cheesy title font and the clothes of the BCBG Parisians. And all the smoking. James comes off as a little bit letchy (but only a little bit), and a product of his age, and keeps describing women as “creatures” and so on, but he’s a good writer, and it was a different time, etc.
And, of course, it was as I was watching it that I realised that I am now almost the same age that James was when he filmed the programme. I spent a lot of my late teens and twenties worrying about how I would feel when I was older, expecting to be spending most of my days full of melancholy sadness, remembering Paris, and cities like it. Constantly looking back.
I’m almost surprised to find that life doesn’t turn out like that.
I have children. Consequently, I am not, and could not be filled with regret. Absolute terror of the future, yes. Most of the time. Worries about my failings as a parent, certainly. Tiredness. Boredom. Frustration. Desperate concerns about how to maintain the romance in a long-term relationship. Sometimes despair. All of that. For God’s sake.
Maybe it’s in the editing, in what we do and don’t remember. I certainly miss… the certainty I used to feel about things. The knowledge of where I was going and how it was all going to turn out. But the rest of it, like that time with the crocodile (or alligator), I sometimes suspect it could all have happened to someone else, in a different city — or to no one, and not at all.
My brother, incidentally, grew up into a fine man, and seems largely unscarred by his experiences on the Paris subway system. He has children of his own now. When I ask my mother by email about his youthful solo adventure she digs out some old photographs, and establishes that he was actually ten years old at the time, and only days away from his eleventh birthday. She adds that “he was a very bright kid and the world was a safer place then”. She’s worried about herself and my father being seen as irresponsible or neglectful parents.
I promise her that I won’t use their real names in this piece.
Always Fourteen
Rosalind Jana
Valentine’s Day and all the fountains
frozen — each a miniature, bluish rink. City
of fur coats and hats and hiked hotel rates and
every breath made visible.
Valentine’s Day and me — fourteen,
in long white boots in a flat. First time
in Paris — still spindly, never kissed,
enthralled by my own glamour.
No reason here for roses. Instead,
a rail of clothes with names that halt
my breathing. Romance enough to run
my hand along a slackened
shoulder; to shiver at the
slink of cold silk.
I am fourteen, playing dress-up, playing
fairy story elegance for a lens, while
my mother, in a corner, watches quietly,
baffled by this fussing over hair and
whether heels convey a mood.
I stare into the camera’s black, gobstopper eye. On
the pages of the magazine I’ll look poised
but very young.
I’ll seem assured — a leisured lady
sprawling on pale couches in long skirts.
I’ll stand coolly by a shelf with hands in
pockets; sit by a porthole window, wearing
shorts. I’ll be frozen like the fountains,
always fourteen. Always Paris,
with a perfect circle view of rooftops
behind my head.
I have only just started my periods.
Tomorrow we’ll be tourists — Mum
leading the way, unraveling
an eager parade of churches, graveyards,
markets, a length of sealskin Seine.
Then I will be teenage, tentative on
unfamiliar streets, hungering already
for the person I’ll become — the one who’ll flit,
no, stride under fierce, bright skies with
the poise of a woman in long white boots,
who wears her own body with ease.
Free Man in Paris
Jennifer Hodgson
Things had sort of spontaneously coalesced into a kind of dreadful shit tip around here. I had begun to think that maybe all of this would look better in a lot of that dove grey light. But I wasn’t even in Paris any more by the time I listened to it, but another city I had gone to afterwards so as not to be in Paris any more. It can’t have worked out that well for Joni, either, since she’s got that other song, the one about being in Paris and wanting to be in California instead and, in any case, the song is about someone else. Anyway, as I stuffed the buds into my ears I found myself inducted into a very tender world of other resigned people, all rolling their eyes at one another in sympathy. It was a lovely thing to shelter under — everything felt quite redeemed for a minute.
*
People from the place where I’m from are forever putting the things they would like very much, but cannot allow themselves to have, quite nearby but just beyond their grasp. Then they pine after them, but in such a way that they always seem to be taking the piss out of them. Into Paris we’ve sequestered a job lot of dreams of muckiness, permission to talk about philosophy on the telly and most versions of romance.
It used to seem like you weren’t allowed to actually go there. As a child, I would find myself swung around the ring road in an executive coach on the way to somewhere else, with an empty cool box by my feet to vomit into if need be. Or I’d be on a school trip, staying in a youth hostel in the far-out suburbs, on my way to somewhere else again, having my eyebrows tweezed into little spermy commas on a bunkbed fashioned after the Pompidou Centre — which I knew all about because I’d seen it in pictures.
Later, someone told me Paris was just like a crap West London really and I thought to myself, right, I’ll have that, that can be what I say whenever anyone mentions anything about it. And at the time I knew precious little about either of those places — certainly not enough to make any kind of judgement about their relative crapness. But it seemed like a thing I could say that would prevent me from having to say anything else, and so I would say it. Saying very much of anything was quite difficult then, so I found it useful to have something ready. And being casually disparaging can feel very nice sometimes. Anyway, I know West London much better now. I like to walk around it every now and again, smearing things with my lack of ease and comfort. And Paris isn’t like it at all.
*
People have told me very often that I will speak French — quite as if it were some ancestral skill that will be be visited upon me at some point without any effort of the will at all. They made it sound like playing the harpsichord or doing competent embroidery. I thought, I’m not having any of that. At school they would try to round out these flat, silty vowels by having me sing this one exceedingly melodramatic French folk song over and over. I just started singing it out loud into this empty room and to my surprise, there it is: deep woods, unhappy love, extreme horror — all of it, just coming out of my mouth like that. They said I talked like a little fishwife, and since then I’ve taken great care to make it worse on badness.
In the end I think the only way I would be able to speak French passably would be if someone could insert both of their hands inside my mouth and use their thumbs
and their knuckles to completely reshape its cavity as though it were Play-Doh. But even back then I suspected that my refusal might well make me even more tediously from the place where I’m from than anything else, and if you can’t win, it’s often best to say nothing at all. And so, when I’m there, I go more or less mute and the whole city becomes an analyst or a monk and will not take any of my usual bullshit.
This one time I had gone out in the morning to buy a baguette because the day before I’d seen several people carrying those flimsy red or blue striped carrier bags with large baguettes sort of protruding out. This small act, the carrying of the bread, was charged in my mind with a kind of endless and deeply desirable insouciance that I very much wanted a bit of. They weren’t those crap baguettes you get here, either, those ones that are all solid crust with the sawdusty, desiccated insides that crumble to nothing when you slice through them. And it was about 37 degrees outside, and the first time I had been anywhere that was 37 degrees outside, and I felt quite vaporous. I think I was striding, yes I was probably striding, down Boulevard de la Chapelle towards a boulangerie when a man appeared out of nowhere and took one tit in each hand and squeezed as hard as he could, as if I was an old-fashioned car, and these were my old-fashioned car horns, and he was making me go honk. And I thought at the time, I am having a madcap, humorous and irreverently cruel sexual experience, just like in those films — which I hadn’t seen but could well imagine.
This other time I was outside Serge Gainsbourg’s house with my cousin, for whom, I think, he wasn’t even that mucky Frenchman who was on Wogan and did that one mucky song. Words like “provocateur” and “men’s dark inner lives” and “untranslatable play on words” were coming out of my mouth and immediately melting down my chin as we sat on the kerb next to that graffitied wall. We shared a Gitane in his honour and then left when I felt like she had had to humour me for long enough. I still go there when I visit Paris, although having walked all the way over I’m never quite sure what I’m meant to do once I’m there. I sort of walk up and down a couple of times and then stand there for a minute, before going away to buy face cream at the pharmacy nearby that they always talk about in magazines. I can’t help but keep going to Serge’s, although I’m never sure what this little pilgrimage is really about. Years ago in an ASDA car park a song from Melody Nelson came on the radio and it made the dimensions of my dad’s Ford Ka seem to sag and go all languid. Some days, I’ll play it through my headphones as I go up the escalator on particularly dour mornings to try to reproduce the effect. But I can’t still be paying homage to that. There’s this other song of his I like very much but one minute forty-one seconds in you start to hear a woman weeping on the track underneath. I don’t know whether I used to listen to a different version, but these days it’s all I can hear and I have to turn it off.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 3
