by Libby Page
‘Let me take your bag,’ he says in a quiet French accent, reaching for Mona’s suitcase.
The flat is small but beautiful. Two huge windows, the shutters currently open, look out at the street below. Mona immediately gravitates towards them and looks down at the café opposite, which is currently closed, and the bar a few buildings along where a large crowd is gathered on the pavement outside, people smoking and laughing. Her earlier nerves and uncertainty melt away and it feels suddenly wonderful to be up here watching the street below. Beneath each window in the living room is a seat lined with cushions in tasteful shades of grey and navy. There is a table where Antoine is currently pouring wine into three glasses, a full bookshelf and a sofa bed. The small kitchen area is in the hallway at the entrance to the flat, and two other doors lead to what Mona presumes are the bathroom and Poppy and Antoine’s bedroom. The living room walls are decorated with old botanical prints in modern frames. Underfoot is a pale grey rug and wooden floorboards that slope towards the windows. Candles are burning on the table and the shelves. It feels cosy and lived in, but not too cluttered. It has character and although Mona has called London home for twelve years, she can immediately imagine what it might be like to live here, right at the top of Paris.
‘Watch out if you wake up in the night, the first time you stay here you’re likely to get seasick because of the sloping floor,’ says Poppy, sitting down on the futon that will be Mona’s bed for the weekend and taking a glass of wine that Antoine is handing her. Mona receives hers with a smile, and the three of them clink glasses.
‘Bienvenue à Paris,’ says Antoine with a small but warm smile.
‘Welcome!’ says Poppy, beaming at Antoine and then at Mona, ‘It’s so good to see you.’
That night they stay in, Antoine cooking a simple pasta dish for them. He softens gradually throughout the night but it still intrigues Mona that Poppy, the most sociable person she has ever met, has chosen someone so quiet for her partner. They seem comfortable with each other though, and that makes Mona feel at ease too. She is surprised by how welcome and relaxed she feels, despite having never met Antoine and having not seen Poppy in so long. And she thinks too about the times she spent with Hannah and Jaheim when they were together in the flat and how different that was. She never felt comfortable then. Mona takes another sip of wine, pushing the thought from her mind.
Poppy and Mona spend the evening catching up, the conversation warm and easy. Antoine fills their glasses and chips in here and there, but seems content simply listening too. Poppy talks about the show she has been in for the past few years – she has this weekend off which is why she is able to host Mona, although she says she regrets that Mona can’t come to watch it.
‘Another time,’ Mona says, hoping already that there will be another time.
They talk about old course mates and what they are up to, sharing knowledge based on whom they have each kept in touch with. Poppy knows far more than Mona does – despite living in France she clearly hasn’t lost her interest in her wide collection of friends. Many of them are no longer dancing and Mona is surprised when Poppy tells her news of some course mates in particular. Like Lara, one of the best dancers in their year group, who is now eight months pregnant and who has told Poppy she doesn’t intend to go back to work. Some are now teaching dance, but many are working in completely different industries: human resources, advertising, recruitment. As they share these stories Mona feels the bond between her and Poppy tighten as they both realise something without needing to say it: they are two of the few still dancing. When Mona talks about her job at the café she knows she doesn’t have to justify it like she sometimes does when she meets people for the first time. She doesn’t have to explain the fact she still rents a one-bedroom flat with her friend, or that, however much she loves and admires them, she feels her life is very far away from those of her friends who have married and settled down. Poppy understands. Mona thinks about the upcoming audition and how this could be one of her last opportunities. In a few years’ time she just won’t be able to keep up with the latest influx of young performers coming out of dance schools and colleges any more. The thought terrifies her.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ says Poppy when they eventually decide it is time to call it a night. Poppy helps Mona with the futon and hands her a neat pile of clean towels. They are both in their pyjamas and seeing Poppy in her checked nightie, Mona feels a sudden rush as she realises how much she has missed her. How much she misses living with her and sharing moments like these – moments that have long since disappeared into the distance between them.
‘Tomorrow we’ll show you the real Paris,’ Poppy says before they wish each other goodnight.
Poppy is true to her word and it’s this that makes Mona fall finally deeply, head over heels in love with the city. In the morning they visit Pain Pain, the local bakery where the staff wear pretty navy-blue uniforms and the cakes look almost too beautiful to eat (almost, because they also look delicious). Antoine buys the three of them a parcel of pastries that are handed to them in a paper bag decorated with gold and navy and that smells to Mona like heaven, even though she usually doesn’t let herself indulge in food like this. They eat the pastries walking down the street, crumbs dropping at their feet.
‘Do you mind if we quickly do a food shop?’ says Poppy, her arm slung through Antoine’s and the sun shining on her smiling face, ‘We’ve both been working late this week so haven’t had time. And it’s a bit of a Saturday morning tradition.’
Mona doesn’t mind at all because their food shop doesn’t involve a quick stop at the supermarket – instead they spend the morning hopping from small shop to shop. First, they visit the local greengrocers where the staff greet both Poppy and Antoine by name and Mona listens, impressed, as Poppy chats away in French.
‘I’m still not fluent,’ she says as they leave, Antoine carrying a canvas tote bag full of fruit and veg, ‘But I’ve definitely picked it up since living here. And Antoine’s been teaching me, haven’t you, darling?’
She turns to Antoine and Mona watches as he returns a smile full of such love that she suddenly understands why Poppy left London four years ago.
Next, they stop at the butchers, then a shop where Poppy and Antoine carefully pick out their favourite brand of olive oil, and finally the florist, where Antoine buys a bunch of delicate pink blooms that he tucks under his arm. After dropping the shopping back at the flat and arranging the flowers in a vase the three of them head out again, spending the rest of the day wandering around the twisting labyrinth of streets that makes up Montmartre. Occasionally they come to a busier street, noisy with crowds and backpacks, but when this happens Poppy and Antoine lead them off the main path, choosing a smaller road instead. And then the sounds quickly die away and it is as though they have stepped through a door into a completely different city. This city, the city of Poppy and Antoine, feels more like a village than a city. It is the tiny coffee shop they stop in for espressos where there is only room for three tables and a well-stocked bookcase, and where the barista immediately gets chatting to them, Antoine translating the entire conversation for Mona’s benefit. It is a dog barking on the roof garden of an old building, a small dog on the street looking around in confusion at the noise. It is white shutters and colourful window boxes. It is a grandfather carrying a baguette in one hand and holding the hand of a small child in a bright yellow jacket in the other, perfectly round red glasses making the child’s eyes wide like a puppy’s.
Poppy and Antoine show Mona the small cemetery where a fluffy cat presides over the graves, sunbathing on one tombstone before sleepily wandering over to another as if giving each its turn at attention. They point out the beehives and the small vineyard that have sat in this part of the city for generations.
Every now and then the tightly packed buildings break apart for a moment, offering a gap and a view down the hill and across Paris. Each time
they stumble across one of these Mona finds herself nearly breathless with the view. She can’t quite believe she waited thirty years before seeing it. It is a sunny day and a haze rests over the rooftops of the city. She spots domes and spires and an endless web of those silvery grey roofs. When she first catches a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower she feels the same way she did on spotting the Sacre Coeur for the first time. She knows exactly where she is in the world and it feels a long way away from the crowds at Gare du Nord or that spill out of Liverpool Street station back home in London.
They spend the evening in a wine bar not far from the flat, sharing a large charcuterie board and a bottle of red wine recommended by the bartender. The bar is small and filled with the glow of candlelight and conversation. It is exactly the kind of bar Mona pictured when she thought of Paris but didn’t believe would be quite as perfect. Poppy and Antoine spot friends at a nearby table and they try out their English on Mona, making everyone laugh. At one point her thoughts return to Hannah, realising she hasn’t thought about her all day. She wonders if she is OK at home in the flat and whether she should call. But she doesn’t. Instead she allows herself another glass of wine, relishing being decadent. She didn’t even bring her exercise clothes with her – it is the first weekend in a very long time that she has not worked out and she can feel her body sighing, enjoying the break.
When Mona falls in love with Paris, it is not love at first sight. It grows and strengthens over the weekend so that by the time of her audition on Monday, what started as a frivolous idea has become something much more. She applied for the job on a whim and because she thought it would be a good excuse for a long weekend with Poppy and Antoine, and a chance to escape London. Because she had felt a sudden, urgent need to escape from everything that had been happening in the flat. But as she waits in the corridor of the dance studio it hits her very suddenly that she doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want to say goodbye to the pretty streets dotted with bakeries and cafés, or those views that make her stop still and simply stare. When she first moved to London she had those moments, but she knows it so well now that it’s as though she doesn’t always see everything any more. After twelve years she has stopped noticing quite so much. She misses that feeling of truly taking in every single detail, the way she has this weekend.
As she waits for her audition her mind drifts to Hannah and their flat together in Haggerston. Normally those are thoughts that would make her smile, that would calm her before an audition. But recently, something has changed. She isn’t even sure if Hannah has noticed it, but it is there, a shift in things. It isn’t the same as it was before. Mona hasn’t decided yet whether she even wants to get back to how it was; whether she wants to get back to her friend. That thought frightens her, so she pushes it from her mind and thinks instead about dancing. She is going to dance better than she has ever danced in her life.
*
Mona is usually the last to admit it, but even she could tell that that first audition went well. She could feel that her body had done exactly what she had wanted it to and more – it had added its own extra quality that she couldn’t exactly explain.
Despite it all, dancing hadn’t come naturally to her at first. She loved to dance as a child, but she was always taller than the other girls and often felt as graceful as a young giraffe in tights. She might have given up if it wasn’t for her first dance teacher in Singapore. Ms Lake was in her fifties, with an elegance to every movement even when she wasn’t teaching a step, or wasn’t even in the dance studio. You could tell just from watching her reach for something on a supermarket shelf (she lived in the same complex as Mona so they often bumped into each other) or turn her key in her car door or brush hair away from her face, that she was a dancer. She was also tall – five foot ten.
‘Do you love dancing?’ she asked Mona one session, when Mona was lingering behind, practising in the mirror while the other girls untied their shoes on the benches.
Mona nodded, looking up at the elegant woman who towered over her.
‘Then if you love it the most, you have to practice the most,’ Ms Lake said, ‘You have to practice more than anyone else. It’s not fair, I know, but that’s just the way it is. You might not have been born a dancer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t become one. That’s what I did.’
So that’s what Mona did. At university she made a point of working harder than all the other girls in her class, not out of a sense of competition with them, but because she felt she needed to in order to keep up. She went in each day more than an hour before her classes began; the caretaker left the key to a studio for her on a hook in the corridor so she could practice in the space before anyone arrived. Once, one of her teachers, Zoe, who wasn’t much older than she was, found out about these early starts and tried to persuade her to come in a little later. But Mona had been insistent. Eventually they came to a compromise. Instead of coming in at seven every morning, for the rest of her time at dance school Mona arrived at 7.15.
Mona has been practising and pushing herself for over a decade and finally she has got a break. The job is perfect – it’s what she has been hoping for but didn’t quite believe she could pull off, especially not at this stage in her career and in her life. And yet she doesn’t feel the all-consuming happiness that she knows she should. She wipes behind the coffee bar, scrubbing at some spilt coffee grounds and wishing that things were different.
2.00 p.m.
Mona
Eleanor is busy serving a large group of office workers, splitting the bill between the ten or so of them, so when Mona spots the group of older women looking in her direction, politely raising their heads and eyebrows as though trying to get her attention without disturbing her, she leaves the counter and heads across the café.
‘Sorry for the delay,’ she says, ‘Are you ready to pay?’
‘Yes, we are, thank you love,’ says one of the women, who wears a checked shirt and jeans and reaches into a bright yellow shopping bag for her purse. Before she can draw it out, one of the other women, in a navy striped top with a pearl necklace resting on her collarbones, puts a hand out and grabs her arm.
‘No, Joan, I’m getting this.’
The first woman shakes her head and struggles to reach into her bag again.
‘No, Cynthia, let me.’
‘Oh, hold on there a minute,’ says the third woman, her hair dyed bright pink and her expression mock stern, ‘No you don’t, this is on me!’
The three women look back and forth at each other, all reaching for their purses.
‘I can split it three ways if you like?’ offers Mona.
‘That would be—’ begins Cynthia, but the woman with the pink hair interrupts, thrusting her card towards Mona.
‘Quick! Take it!’
She bats away the two other women and Mona smiles and accepts the card, slotting it into the machine.
‘Wait …’ says Cynthia.
‘But …!’ says Joan.
‘Too late!’ says the pink-haired lady, punching her pin into the machine with such vigour that Mona has to grip it with two hands.
‘Oh, thank you Barbara.’
‘Barbara, you shouldn’t have.’
‘My pleasure,’ says Barbara, brushing a strand of pink hair away from her face and briskly returning her card to her purse.
‘There,’ she says, ‘I’m glad that’s all settled then. Such a fuss!’
The women turn back to Mona now and smile.
‘Lovely coffee, thank you, dear,’ says Joan. Mona doesn’t tell her that it was probably Eleanor who made her coffee, or that if it was her, she made it in such a daze that she has no idea if it really was any good.
‘And tell your chef the Eggs Royale were top notch,’ adds Cynthia, ‘In so many places nowadays they don’t know how to properly poach an egg. But this was perfect, nice and runny. No point in a poached egg that isn’t runn
y, is there? You might as well go hard-boiled!’
She laughs slightly as she says this and her two friends meet eyes and each raise an eyebrow.
‘She’s prone to hysterics, our Cynthia,’ says Barbara.
‘Gets all boiled up over a poached egg,’ adds Joan.
The three of them look at each other and this time they all laugh.
‘This young woman must think we’re mad!’ says Joan, wiping her eyes.
‘She’d be right there,’ says Barbara.
Despite her mood, Mona finds herself smiling at these three women. They make her think of elderly sisters, bickering and joking with each other, although they look much too dissimilar to be related. As she ponders how they know each other, they stand, shrugging coats onto their shoulders and lifting handbags.
‘Until next week!’ says the woman with the pink hair.
Mona lifts a hand in a wave as the three women turn for the door.
Knowing they will be back makes Mona smile, but then she stops. She might not be here next week. The thought jolts her and she finds her eyes wandering up to Ernest the bear, meeting his familiar glassy stare. There have been many times over the years when she has wished she wasn’t coming back to the café, and that she could spend all day doing the thing she loves instead of making coffees and wiping tables. But she is pragmatic, too and has always understood that the coffees are what allow her the time and freedom to dance. And this job is so much better than others she did in the past when she was younger. There was a stint as a receptionist at an architecture firm when she was twenty-one, but she left when one of the directors forcibly kissed her in the lift one evening. She had been working late and he followed her into the lift and pushed his body against hers so quickly she didn’t have time to react, his wedding ring glinting in the glare of the lights as he pressed his hands on either side of her. He was well-liked in the company, a mentor to many of the younger members of staff, and she hadn’t worked there long. She knew they wouldn’t believe her. So she left. She tried another receptionist job but found sitting down all day made her restless – her feet tapped beneath the desk and her limbs grew stiff and heavy. At least at the café she can spend most of the time standing. Although it can be tiring it is worth it; she feels better when she is moving and during each shift she crosses the café so many times that she loses count.
