Mwah-Mwah

by Chloe Rayban

  Mwah Mwah

  Chloë Rayban

  For Claudia, who became the perfect Parisienne

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  My Own Personal Private French Vocabulary

  About the Author

  Other titles by Chloë Rayban from Bloomsbury

  Chapter One

  ‘Mayjesweesewer. Annaseraravy! Weegrobeezoo. Abeeantow.’

  Mum put down the phone and turned to me with a delighted smile.

  ‘That was Marie-Christine!’

  ‘I’d never’ve guessed.’

  ‘She’s invited you to stay with Matthilde for the Easter holidays!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘In Paris. You’ll love it.’

  ‘Mum! I will NOT love it. Not with Matthilde. She’s so … uggghhhrr.’

  Mum frowned. ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, like, so French!’

  ‘Nonsense. I know you didn’t exactly hit it off the last time you met, but you were only … eight?’

  ‘Ten, actually. She was twelve, going on eighteen.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s all been decided. They’re expecting you on Friday.’

  ‘Friday! Why Friday?’

  ‘It’s the day I have to leave for that conference in Amsterdam, so it fits in perfectly.’

  ‘Oh, I get it now. This is just somewhere to dump me.’

  ‘No. It’s a wonderful opportunity to improve your French.’

  ‘I don’t want to improve my French. I keep telling you, I’d rather do Spanish.’

  Mum got up and made for the kitchen as if the conversation had come to an end. I followed her. She bent down, totally ignoring me, taking things out of the tumble dryer as if her life depended on it.

  ‘It might interest you to know, I’ve got things planned for the Easter holidays. I can stay with Jess.’

  ‘You know what your father and I think about Jessica.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Last time I saw her, she was smoking in the street. And she had a lip-ring.’

  ‘It wasn’t a real lip-ring, it was a clip on. And where else are you supposed to smoke these days?’

  ‘Hannah!’

  ‘Mum, listen, I don’t want to go to France. I’m going to miss loads. Everyone’s going to Angie’s this Saturday. Her dad’s hired a proper DJ’s deck and everything.’

  Mum put down the T-shirt she was folding and stared at me. ‘You can’t mean you’d miss out on a trip to Paris for the sake of a party.’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I hate France, you know I do.’

  ‘But you haven’t even been to Paris.’

  ‘It’s full of posey people. Everyone says so.’

  ‘But you’ll love it at the Poiriers’ – they’ve got a really stylish apartment.’

  ‘You mean they live in a flat?’

  Mum ignored me. She lifted the pile of folded washing and headed up the stairs. I was hard on her heels.

  ‘I’m nearly fourteen and I’ve got a life of my own,’ I growled at her back. ‘You can’t make me go.’

  Mum paused at her bedroom door and turned to me with a fixed expression. ‘I didn’t think I’d have to.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going and that’s that.’ I stomped into my room and slammed the door. Hard.

  Parents! They think they own you. Just because, by some random freak of nature, you happen to be born to them, rather than someone else – someone reasonable, generous and understanding – they think they have a right to control your life! Mum loves France, therefore I have to love France. Just because she took a degree in French and spent her one ‘dream’ year at Grenoble University where she shared a flat with Marie-Christine and where they got welded at the hip! Ugghhhrrr, Marie-Christine. The minute they’re together, Mum switches from being a nice normal English person to this strange kind of witch whose mouth goes in convulsions and comes out with pure gobble-de-gook. And Matthilde is a mini Marie-Christine in the making!

  I thought back to that last time we met. While Marie-Christine and Mum were laughing like hyenas in the kitchen at some gobble-de-joke of theirs, Matthilde and I were sent to ‘play together’ in my bedroom. Without a word being spoken – well, naturally, since neither of us spoke the other’s language – Matthilde instantly took charge. She found a pack of cards and tried to teach me the world’s most boring and unintelligible game, in which she always won. Or at least I think she did because she looked so incredibly pleased with herself. Then she went to sit with the grown-ups and joined in their conversation and drank a little cup of their black coffee, making it all too clear she thought playing with me was way below her dignity. Uggghhhrrr! And to think that Mum is expecting me to spend my precious Easter holidays with them.

  I had other plans – which had to do with Angie’s party, actually – only four more days to go! Plans which included a boy who Angie’s brother knew, called Mark. Not that I was really interested in him or anything. But he had almost asked me out. At least he’d asked me whether I liked Jackie Chan. And since I hadn’t actually ever seen a Jackie Chan movie and didn’t want to admit it, I said I could take him or leave him. At which he said, ‘Pity, because there’s a movie of his coming to the Odeon on Thursday.’ I still get a sinking feeling remembering the back of his head as he walked away. If only, if only I hadn’t said that. However, knowing my luck, if I’d raved about Jackie Chan, he probably would’ve said he was rubbish.

  Anyway, I was going to put all that right at Angie’s party. I’d double-checked that Mark was coming. I’d been preparing carefully for this event. I had a new strappy top, my best-fitting straight-leg jeans were washed and pressed ready under a pile of books, and those boots I managed to persuade Mum to buy me were still lying untouched in their box. I’d even got a couple of Jackie Chan movies out of the video shop by way of research. I was right – I can take him or leave him. However, I guess kung fu movies are more of a boy-thing really and it doesn’t mean Mark and I are fundamentally incompatible. In fact, I’m sure we’re not. The minute I set eyes on him I knew instinctively that Mark and I were ideal boyfriend and girlfriend material. So this Saturday was going to be the beginning of a totally new life for me. Coupledom!!! That is, if I don’t get packed off to Paris.

  I’ve been packed off to Paris. I’m standing behind all these people lining up with their bags and kids and grandmas and whatever, waiting to check in for Flight 8674 to Paris CDG. Dad backed Mum up. He said the experience would be ‘character-forming’. Personally, I think my character is pretty well formed already. Normally, I have my own opinions and make my own decisions. Having to give in to parents is a step in the wrong direction if you ask me.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked the ‘kind lady’ who was queuing for the X-ray machine in front of me. I could have killed Mum. At thirteen and three-quarters I am perfectly able to get on a plane, for godsake. But she had to tap this woman on the shoulder who she just happened to notice had the same check in-time on her ticket, and ask her if she wouldn’t mind ‘keeping an eye’ on me.

  Mum made off after that, said she had an ‘important meeting’, but I reckon in actual fact she wanted to get rid of me before I could have more of a moan at her.

  Going through security is like tenth degre
e. I actually have my can of Diet Coke confiscated and what precisely do they expect to find in my shoes? Once I’m through to the departure lounge, the place is heaving with people. There are monitors with loads of other flights going to Paris, which is just the teensiest bit confusing, so I’m sticking like glue to the ‘kind lady’ who seems to know her way around. But she’s spotted WHSmith’s and has taken it into her head to buy a newspaper. I trail behind her as she selects her paper and joins a queue to pay for it, which is so long, it snakes all the way through the shop and out the other end. There must be about eighty people in front of us. The queue is edging forward at about one person every fifty seconds. I start doing some extremely complicated maths, trying to estimate how many minutes it will take to get to the cash desk and whether this purchase of the Daily Telegraph will mean we’ll miss Flight 8674 and never get to Paris. Ten minutes, which feel like half a lifetime, scroll by. I start giving the ‘kind lady’ meaningful glances.

  She catches one of them. ‘You go on ahead, dear, if you like. Gate C11. I’ll see you there.’

  I swallow. ‘Right. OK.’

  I locate a sign pointing to Gates C10–25 and start out in that direction. I follow hordes of people down an escalator and through a corridor on to a moving walkway. Once on the walkway I’m wondering frantically if I’ve missed a sign somewhere and am being swept helplessly in the wrong direction. An endless corridor takes me past umpteen other gates. Gate C11 seems to have been spirited away to the very far end of the airport. I can feel my hands going sweaty with panic. At this rate I may well be walking to Paris.

  But at last I spot the mythical letters C11 and standing at a desk beneath them is a nice helpful flight person, who checks my ticket and confirms I’m in the right place. I sink into a seat feeling rather pleased with myself.

  Grudgingly, I have to admit this is a bit of an adventure. Of course, I’ve been to France before, loads of times, but always in the car with Dad and Mum. Mainly because they seem to think France is the only place where you can have a decent holiday. Other people foolishly fly off to hotels in countries that are too hot or too crowded or too horribly commercialised while we always drive to some slightly damp rented house in Normandy, which is called a gîte. We’ve stayed in countless gîtes; they can be crumbling cottages or spanking new bungalows, buried in the country or sand-blasted by the beach, but fundamentally they’re all the same. They all have that very particular gîte smell – an evil mixture of calor gas and loo freshener. And strange patterned plasticised tablecloths that smell of sick. And garden chairs that collapse under you and a table with one wonky leg. They have pillows stuffed with something festering and lumpy and their showers douse you with water that’s either icy cold or scalding hot, never in-between.

  By the time I’ve finished this resentful catalogue of memories a muffled voice over a loudspeaker is saying something about ‘proceeding directly to gate number C11’ and everyone around me is shuffling to their feet. I join the queue, wondering what has happened to the ‘kind lady’. At this rate she’d have been better off with me keeping an eye on her. But as my ticket and passport is checked, I spot her running down the corridor to join the very far end of the queue, waving her Daily Telegraph at me.

  About half an hour or so later we have flown over the Channel. Nice normal dependable England has been left behind and foreign unpredictable France is spread out beneath us. We’ve all had to wind our watches on an hour, because in France they don’t even stick to the same time as us. In their typical posey competitive way, they have to be one hour ahead. At this point, I remember Angie’s party tomorrow and experience another wave of suppressed fury over how I’ve been sent off like this against my will. I sit mentally listing all the negatives I have about the French.

  Negative 1.

  They’re not to be trusted – all that fake politeness and charm. All that mwah–mwah kissing on both cheeks.

  Negative 2.

  They’re rude. Think of the way French waiters treat you.

  Negative 3.

  Too chic to be true. They seem to think they invented fashion.

  Negative 4.

  They’re snooty. All that fuss about haute cuisine and haute couture, and blooming Club ‘Méd–it–erra–née’.

  Negative 5.

  They’re immoral. According to French movies, all married men have lovers.

  Negative 6.

  They’re cruel. They shoot everything on sight – then eat it.

  Negative 7.

  They’re totally weird about food anyway – committed carnivores who eat totally gross stuff like brains and ears and tails. I mean, have you ever met a French vegetarian?

  Negative 8.

  A lot of them don’t wash. It’s a closely guarded secret but that’s why they invented perfume.

  Negative 9.

  They’re pathetically old–fashioned. Aeons behind in pop music, infotech and trainers.

  Negative 10.

  Basically they’re so French.

  Grrrhhhh! I gaze out of the window at a dead flat landscape below us. There’s an endless patchwork of empty fields, mile upon mile, dotted with the occasional lostlooking farm attached to a road that seems to lead nowhere. Can there actually be people down there? What on earth do they do all day?

  An hour has gone past and I’ve read my magazine and consumed the apple juice and Kit-Kat that Mum has thoughtfully slipped in my backpack and listened to all of the six CDs I’ve brought. The plane is starting its descent and the flight attendants are checking that we’re all belted up and not endangering our lives by having our tables or seats at the wrong angle. Down below the fields are being replaced by a messy jigsaw of motorways, hypermarkets and car parks filled with tiny toy cars. My tummy does an anxious double-flip as I realise we’re arriving. The Poiriers, that is Marie-Christine and Matthilde, are going to be at Charles de Gaulle airport to meet me and I’m desperately trying to remember the phrase that Mum spent ages drumming into my head yesterday:

  ‘Bon-jour. Je-suis-ravie-de-vous-revoir.’

  It seems you can’t just be pleased to see someone in France. You have to be ‘ravie’! As in ravished? It is such a posey language.

  I trail behind an endless stream of people, wondering where the ‘kind lady’ is – probably so engrossed in her Daily Telegraph she’s forgotten to get off. I’m led on to a long walkway which is abruptly swallowed up by a tunnel. Typical of the French: they can’t design an airport that’s plain and straightforward like ours. Theirs has to be a design statement – all globes and tubes snaking into each other like intestines. It’s like being digested by some huge monster and spewed out.

  At last I’m disgorged through passport control and manage to locate the carousel that has my holdall on it. I follow a load of rowdy guys who look like a rugby team towards the ‘Sortie’ which is French for Exit. I’m hoping they’ll provide some sort of cover for the first impression I’m about to make. Because unlike the other people in the airport, who appear to be normally dressed, I’m wearing my navy-blue tweed school coat. Thank you, Mum. There is no one else, not one single person who is in a full-length navy-blue wool coat. I don’t care if, as she warned, it snows or sleets or freezes at Easter – I feel humiliated before I’ve even got out of the airport.

  At the ‘Sortie’ there is a row of French policemen. They’re not like friendly English policemen who’ve been put on street corners especially to tell you the way. These have guns sprouting from their hips and they’re scanning the crowd as if hoping to single out a potential victim to shoot. I have to fight my way through a logjam of Japanese people taking photographs of each other to reach the barrier, where I can just detect someone I recognise. Marie-Christine is in a slim knee-length skirt from which her legs, shiny and perfect, disappear into neat kitten-heel shoes. She’s wearing a tiny tight little suede jacket and her smartly cut head of hair is clamped to a mobile phone. Beside her is a girl with impossibly long legs. She has cheekbones you could ski down,
dark shiny hair swept into a ponytail, a little zip-up jacket and a scarf wound in this year’s latest stylish way around her neck. This can only be Matthilde. Three years have certainly worked their magic on her. She has turned into a picture-perfect Parisienne.

  Matthilde has spotted me and is nudging her mother. Marie-Christine has snapped her mobile shut. My coat, with me inside it, makes its way reluctantly towards the barrier.

  ‘’Annah, comtooagrandee! Ohminyonne! Donmwaunbizoo,’ says Marie-Christine, grabbing me and giving me an enthusiastic mwah-mwah on both cheeks.

  ‘Bon-jour. Je-suis-ravie-d’errm-vous-voir,’ I manage to mumble in reply.

  ‘Maydisdonshayreetuparlfrançais!’ she replies, clearly impressed.

  Matthilde, meanwhile, is looking down on me from her superior height. I can feel her eyes resting uncomfortably on my coat. I feel horribly like a tortoise in a shell – I only wish I could draw my head and limbs in and disappear from sight.

  ‘Bonjour, ’Annah,’ she says, leaning down and giving me a rather cooler mwah-mwah.

  After the tremendous success of my first sentence, Marie-Christine has assumed my French is fluent. She grabs my bag from me and sets off with it in the direction of the taxis, talking to me non-stop.

  ‘Mayalorsquellinelestaxisputetnoudevondejeunaytoudeswee.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I try.

  ‘Dimwashayree. Esqutuafam?’ she asks, looking at me searchingly.

  I stare back wondering what I’ve done wrong.

  Matthilde comes to the rescue. ‘Are you ’ungry?’

  ‘Well yes, a bit.’ My eye has been caught by a coffee stall selling long crispy ham baguettes and my mouth is already watering.

  ‘In zat case we will eat on ze way ’ome,’ announces Marie-Christine, in English to my relief.

  The taxi drove at headlong speed into Paris. The driver kept dodging in and out of lanes as if his life depended on it. Maybe he was hungry too. At last we shot down a slip road, swerved under a bridge and arrived in the city itself.