‘Paul!’
With one huge tug she was free, and we grabbed each other like two people sharing a parachute.
‘You didn’t come,’ I said.
‘Why didn’t you wait?’ she asked.
‘I thought you’d changed your mind.’
‘No, of course not. The Tube stopped in the tunnel,’ she said. ‘There was an electricity cut. And I couldn’t phone until I got out – the London Tube is too deep.’ She pulled away and looked me in the eyes. ‘You never answered.’
‘My phone was stolen,’ I told her.
‘I took the first train to France, and a taxi from the Gare du Nord. And I ran to the train just in time. But I had no ticket. The contrôleurs thought I was with these two boys. They refused to look for you.’
She hugged the breath out of me again, and I realized that she’d been going through exactly the same kind of torment as me. She must have thought I was ignoring her calls because I was mad at her. She thought I’d given up on her. Well, she was right about that.
‘Je t’ai attrapé,’ she said. She’d caught me. She clung on even harder.
I took a deep breath of her perfume, as if I had to make sure that this wasn’t one of my mirages or hallucinations.
‘When I got on that train alone, I thought I’d lost you,’ I told her.
‘No, how could you forget? I’m a French girl. We’re always late.’
There are times when you just don’t want to let go of someone, and this was one of them. But we both knew that it would be rather difficult for us to climb back on to the train if we were hugging each other.
Only trouble was, when we finally felt reassured enough to let go, we saw that the ticket collectors had gone, the train was moving out of the station, and we were alone in the gloom of the empty platform with the two kids in baseball caps, who were still laughing together about how close they’d come to getting a free ride down south.
‘Stop!’ I shouted as loud as I could, but the locomotive didn’t seem to be listening.
We jogged alongside the train for a few yards, until we realized that we weren’t going to be able to follow it all the way to the next station.
‘Merde,’ I groaned, dropping Alexa’s bag on the platform.
‘Hey, where’s your bag?’ she asked.
‘On the train.’
‘And your ticket?’
‘On the train.’
‘But you do have your passport on you?’
‘No.’
‘And your credit card?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re really in the merde, aren’t you, Paul?’
I looked at her standing there in her battered leather jacket, her hair ruffled by the rush of air from the departing train, her eyes wide with concern for me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve got you.’
Epilogue
Eleven thirty p.m., Christmas Eve, commissariat de la Police Nationale, Jouay-sur-Seine.
‘Nom?’ the night-shift policeman asked me.
‘Paul West.’
‘Pool . . .?’
I spelled it out for him, and he keyed it one-fingered into his computer.
‘Time and date of theft?’ he said, his finger poised.
‘Well, I’m not sure that they have been stolen yet.’
‘Uh?’
‘I left them on a train.’
‘We thought that it was best to report it now, just in case,’ Alexa added, trying to clear up the confusion.
But the policeman had stopped listening. He was gazing at his computer screen as if he’d just found out what he was getting for Christmas.
‘Paul West?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Driver of a Renault Vel Satis? Accused in the debtors’ court of non-payment of architect’s bills? Owner of a tea room with a non-translated name?’
Oh, merde.
About the Author
Stephen Clarke lives in France. He has experimented with Gauloises, pétanque and suppositories, but only as research for his writing. He likes to spend his free time sitting on café terraces trying to think up a clever answer to the question, ‘Did those things in your books really happen?’
His first book, A Year in the Merde, which introduced Paul West, was first self-published in 2004 in Paris where it became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and has now been translated into fourteen languages, including French.
Also by Stephen Clarke
A Year in the Merde
and published by Black Swan
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain by Bantam Press
a division of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Stephen Clarke 2005
The right of Stephen Clarke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781407038674
ISBN 9780552773089
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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