Harm's Way (5 page)

When Stephen answered the door to their flat late the
following afternoon, damson thumb-prints pressed into the grooves beneath his eyes, I was surprised to find Beth still in bed. Wearing only one of Stephen's old T-shirts, the cotton rendered almost transparent with age, and in that quietly voluptuous state that too much alcohol and too little sleep can induce, she recounted, squirming girlishly beneath the duvet, the events of the night before. Queen had been so packed at first that she had wanted to leave. But Stephen, with the mixture of petulance and voracity Beth and I had often noted whenever there were possibilities of new sexual encounters, had persuaded her to stay on for an hour, buying her a drink to cement the deal. She caught the first words of an eighties song that she loved (discussing music, I had realised, always made Beth's age shockingly apparent) and the next time she looked at her watch it was two in the morning. The dance floor was thinning out. Making her way towards the bar to get a glass of water she had walked past two men: an Arab with long black hair that curled around the nape of his neck and a scar under his eye, and a serious-faced thirty-something man in a short-sleeved grey shirt and low-slung jeans.

‘I just couldn't stop staring at him,' she said, laughing at the blandness of her forthcoming description. ‘He had one of those faces that I could just look at for ever – sort of weirdly perfect, with something a bit sad in his expression.' The fact that the evening had ended well was becoming increasingly evident. The preamble and upwardly twitching corner of Beth's mouth conspired to create an itch of impatience in my stomach. What next? To distract herself from the man's looks, Beth had moved quickly to the bar: one last drink. Waiting for the barman to notice her, unable to resist another glance, she had turned to find this vision standing directly behind her.

‘Do we know each other?' he'd asked in a slightly aggressive manner.

‘No.'

‘So what's with the staring?' He broke into a smile, not waiting for an answer. ‘They're going to kick us out in a minute. Come and have a last dance.'

‘So I followed them on to the dance floor,' Beth continued with slow satisfaction, reaching for a tissue, moistening the edge with her tongue and moving it gently along the mascara-ingrained creases beneath her left eye, ‘and I'm thinking: why the heck are all good-looking men gay?'

That was the rudest Beth got: heck; my initial impulse not to swear in front of her had been right.

Somewhere in the next hour, she went on, time had speeded up. The Arab had left, and it emerged that his ‘beautiful friend' –
quelle surprise
– was not gay at all. Beth had asked him back to the flat for a nightcap which still stood, untouched, on the coffee table, and after a kiss and an adolescent fumble the pair had fallen asleep on – but not in, she took care to specify – her bed. She'd woken up, less than half an hour ago, cursing the ineffectual blind for allowing the sun to stream in, just in time to hear the catch on the front door click as he let himself out.

‘You just missed him,' she concluded. ‘But my God, Anna, I wish you'd seen him. And do you know what the worst part is? I didn't get his number and I can't even remember his name.'

With a theatrical muffled cry she disappeared into a quilted ball of duvet.

*    *    *

Beth wasn't keen on one-night stands. She'd spent most of her twenties trying to be like other girls – who themselves tried to be like men – unsuccessfully attempting bravado comments like: ‘I don't care if he doesn't call. I just needed some sex,' before hunching with embarrassment at the sound of her own words. Now Beth was pleased that the evening's outcome had been fairly innocent. It meant that she could replay the night's events without any sense of having compromised herself. On the few occasions she'd actually slept with a virtual stranger and never heard from him again, far from being able to shrug it off, she'd been left feeling brittle and ashamed. More than her Catholic upbringing, it was the result of a natural desire to be honest about her own emotions.

‘Wasn't he something, Stephen?' she shouted into his room, where a pair of anonymous women's legs were just visible through the open door. There was a pause long enough for us to think he hadn't heard before the weary reply, ‘How the hell should I know, Beth?'

‘Ugh, that's such a cop out,' she muttered to me.

At this point I stopped listening, bored by the topic of a faceless clubber Beth would doubtless never set eyes on again, and slightly dismayed at seeing the woman I admired beyond all others behave like a naïve young girl for the first time. In her I had observed and sought to emulate the self-assurance, elegance and intelligence of a grown woman. This feeble brand of a would-be youthful sensuality had no place in my perception of her.

Later, of course, I told her what she wanted to hear.

‘Of course you'll see him again. Paris is such a small place; just think of all the people you and I keep spotting everywhere. Tell me about Héléne?'

Héléne was the most famous drag queen in Paris, who spent her time flitting from club to club, stealing garnishes from barmen and throwing straws at bad dancers. Beth laughed grudgingly, like a child emerging from a fit of tears but not wanting to make it too easy on the parents. And I happily assumed that was the end of that.

As it turned out, she did see him again, less than a week later.

Beth and I had had dinner at Le Café, a little restaurant whose importance was explained by its definitive pronoun. Loud techno was blasted from speakers half the size of the place, and you were forced to wait patiently for the waiter to stop finger-drumming on the side of your table before he took your order. Subdued by an enormous slice of tarte tatin each, we trudged up the six floors of my apartment building a few hours later to retrieve a belt of mine Beth had insisted on borrowing. Breathless, and pretending to look forward to a night out when I secretly suspected we both wanted to stay in, we spotted a squat, slack-featured old man coming towards us down the stairs. Although I'd never met my infamous neighbour, Monsieur Abitbol, I knew without a doubt that this man with eyes like old marbles – so buried were the pupils beneath layers of cataract – was him.

He must have been a different size once. Although he was barely five and a half feet, beneath his shabby linen jacket were shoulders you could sense had been wide. Now that his outline had softened he appeared to be wearing another man's clothes. His skin, too, seemed to have become too big for him, and I could imagine it hanging in folds beneath his shirt. Not knowing what to say, and wishing to avoid looking directly at
him, I mumbled a barely audible
‘Bonjour,'
only to be stunned by the tirade of abuse that streamed like bile from his thin-lipped mouth.

‘How dare you say hello to me when you're the reason I haven't been able to sleep for weeks. Would you STOP that infernal banging, for God's sake!'

With that he pushed past Beth and me. We heard the rustle of his K-way, like emptying sacks of sand, gradually fade as he stormed down the stairs. I lowered myself on to a step, and stared at Beth before we both dissolved with laughter.

‘He, he, he,' Beth wheezed, ‘was accusing
you!'

Incapable of speech, she was still clutching a rib when the well-groomed mother of three from the floor below opened her front door and stuck her head round to see what was going on. Three neatly spaced parallel lines appeared on her forehead, her eyes flat mirrors of colour repelling all humour. I apologised in between hiccups of laughter, and let us into the flat.

That evening we had decided to try somewhere new: a place called Le Baron. As Stephen was to bring along Christine, a features editor from
20 Ans
– a cleverly marketed magazine aimed at oversexed, underactive teenagers aspiring to the grand old age of twenty – he was determined for us to go somewhere a little more straight. Le Baron was on Avenue Marceau. After paying fifteen euros to get in, the women were served free alcohol all night, while the men were obliged to pay. In Britain the place would have gone bust within a couple of hours, with ambulances queueing up to remove the intoxicated bodies of young females. Here, Parisian girls in tops just the right side of provocative sipped kirs, mindful not to raise their voices. They were precisely the type of women
who brought out the British
salope
in me, and while I started dancing with a group of Belgian stag-nighters, Beth went to the bar to collect the first of our free margaritas.

It was only when I began to feel the stiff leather of my shoe cutting into my toes that I realised how long Beth had been gone. I finally spotted her crossing the club towards me, empty-handed, and smiling like a lunatic.

‘Where are our drinks?' I shouted, surprised by the annoyance in my voice.

‘Guess who I just saw?' Beth replied.

It was the man from Queen, standing several feet in front of her in the queue for the toilets. They'd chatted and exchanged numbers, but by the time she had come out he had gone.

‘His name is Christian,' said Beth gleefully, ‘and I've invited him to my birthday do next Friday.'

The following week passed effortlessly. I had difficulty believing it was already a month since I'd moved to Paris. It was the beginning of July, and the nights were long and balmy. June had been relatively mild, and being able to sit outside after work for the first time that year made it feel like evenings had just been invented. Girls wandered serene and beautiful through the streets, gracefully accepting compliments. A crop of new films appeared in cinemas, all of which I wanted to see, and unknown songs made me turn up the radio. Life was laced with idle pleasures.

At work there had been a groundbreaking moment: Céline had volunteered some information about her private life. She showed me, with a perfectly buffed almond nail, a magazine picture of a handbag, which she had instructed her boyfriend to buy her for her birthday. I did my best to display interest. Not only did Céline have a boyfriend, one who perhaps was in the habit of buying presents for her, but she also liked handbags, a facet of her life which aligned her with roughly ninety per cent of the female population.

After work on Thursday, I ran down to Colette on rue Saint Honoré, managing to slip through its forbidding doors five minutes before closing time. The doorman let me in with a blind tilt of his head and a subsequent, imperceptible shake, as if to say: ‘Lady, if you're not going to devote proper time to your shopping, I'm not sure we can help
you.' Spotting the cream silk camisole that had enraptured Beth the week before, I pulled it off the hanger and over my head. Its broderie anglaise straps came down far too low in front, but would be ideal for Beth's fuller chest. Stores in Paris are not invariably friendly places, especially when you are keeping the staff there after hours. Unable to bear the glare of the assistants any longer, I made my way swiftly to the till.

It had taken longer than usual for the museum galleries to empty that Friday, and by the time I'd gone home and changed, Beth's party had long since started. In a sepia-coloured dress with thin straps that Beth had given me, I'd climbed the five floors of her building buoyed up by the appreciative glances I'd received in the street.

‘It looks perfect,' said Beth seriously, pointing a dangerously slanting glass of Pastis at the outfit. ‘Turn around.'

She was already well on the way to being drunk, and more striking than I'd ever seen her.

‘Is he here yet?' I whispered.

Beth mouthed ‘No', a fraction out of sync with the movement of her shaking head. ‘I don't think he'll come.'

It was a question – and one that I couldn't answer. Her mouth was wet and shiny, with tiny crystallised clusters at the corners indicating an earlier
friandise.

‘Just assume he won't and anything else will be a nice surprise,' I suggested, giving Beth's shoulder a reassuring squeeze and enjoying the fact that for once it was me playing the sensible, advisory role.

In the kitchen Stephen was taking out of white paper boxes intricate petits fours from the patisserie across the street. I
perched on a bar stool and quizzed him about his evening with the magazine editor.

‘Ugh. Remind me never to get involved with anyone in women's magazines again,' he moaned. ‘Just when you think they're actually interested in what you're saying, you realise they're plying you for information about what it is to be a man so as to have something to take in to a conference on gender issues the next day.' He licked a piece of jellied salmon off his thumb dejectedly. I laughed.

‘So do you reckon this Christian guy is actually going to turn up?'

‘Doubt it,' said Stephen, impassively, ‘I just hope it won't ruin her entire evening if he doesn't. She gets like this: sort of …' I sensed he wanted to say ‘desperate', but was trying to find something less harsh, ‘… over-excited.' Then he brightened. ‘But the ukulele player who lives opposite and cooks naked said he'd come.'

The doorbell rang and more guests appeared, the last of them the ukulele player, dressed in printed Indian trousers which tapered at the ankles. No sooner was the door closed than the bell rang again. It continued to do so for the next hour, each peal promising the excitement of a new arrival. As there were no chairs left I lowered myself on to the floor, next to Nathalie, a work friend of Beth's about whom I only knew one fact (gleaned from Stephen): that she smoked in the bath.

Beth had sprung up animatedly from her position on the couch and was guiding someone proprietorially by the arm through the room. His features were hidden by a mass of other, already less important faces, and I found myself craning my neck to catch sight of the man I knew must be Christian. He was standing in front of me now, smiling politely at
Stephen, and I worked my way up from the battered trainers to a flash of jawbone, catching a snippet of strongly accented English. Then a voice said: ‘Anna,
je te présente Christian.'