Harm's Way Read online

  ‘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.’

  Three

  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 Jul
y, 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.’

  I struggled up, pulling my dress down clumsily, conscious of how much I despised that gesture in other women, and gave him the automatic kiss on the cheek. Still the intimacy of that act did not come naturally, and I felt that he must sense my awkwardness.

  An hour, several bottles of wine and one spillage later, a discussion about the differences between France and England was in full flow. Nathalie and Marie, a friend of hers, were the instigators. Their comments on British girls’ tendency to wear short skirts and no tights, even in winter, had prompted a surge of moralising interest from the women, and a more basic enthusiasm from the men. Christian had disappeared from view but was, no doubt, still either in the room or out on the balcony. I felt a sudden rush of desire for attention – to see every face turned towards mine – and feeling forgotten down on the floor I joined the realm of the standing and embarked on a well-used diatribe about how the French see the English, knowing that Beth had heard my turns of phrase before, but that the rest of the room, and Christian, had not. Gratified by the laughter I was getting, and the gradually expanding group around me, I started on an anecdote, knowing that the outcome painted me in a flattering light. It occurred to me that if an outsider had been observing me they wouldn’t have liked me much. Christian’s eyes flew into focus, and I felt them on me for a split second, while Beth’s lingered on me a second longer.

  As the evening wore on I realised that, though I had not yet been brave enough to look at Christian’s face full on, or stand near enough to overhear his conversation, I had somehow taken in the fact that one of his front teeth came forward a little more than the others, forming a broken triangular shape which forced his top lip to protrude slightly, and that his voice went up half an octave when he spoke English. His eyes were a dark-green colour flecked with gold, and slanted sharply at the edges, giving him the appearance of being either bored or amorous. I couldn’t be sure whether he too felt that we’d been walking in circles around each other all night, but was determined to find out. Around one in the morning I found Stephen and Christian in the kitchen, laughing over a photograph of Beth pinned to the noticeboard.

  ‘My sister says that at university Beth was always the one to suggest something really stupid at the end of the evening, something they would both regret the next day,’ Stephen was saying.

  They laughed indulgently. I felt sick – and very young. I’d drunk too much red wine, my teeth and the roof of my mouth coated in a metallic layer of it, and suddenly felt de trop in my dress. Sitting down too heavily on a bar stool I looked up to see that Stephen had left the room. I knew Christian was still there, leaning against the sink, and could feel his eyes on me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he eventually asked in a strong banlieue accent.

  ‘Fine,’ I answered, too quickly. ‘I shouldn’t have had that last glass.’

  Only then did I take the opportunity to look directly at him, drinking in the tortoiseshell eyes and dark strand of hair that lay like a scar across his forehead. He complimented me on my French, and I reciprocated on his English (‘ten years in the Parisian service industry is the best way to learn a language’), and when he asked, I began to recount how Beth and I had met. He was sitting at the bar now, leaning forward on his elbows, listening. He said my name with a soft inflection on the final a, as though scared to break the vowel. How nice it would be, I thought, to hear him wh
isper it. That instant, Beth appeared, placing her hands on her hips theatrically and scolding: ‘What are you two doing in here? Come through next door.’

  Back in the sitting room a group of people were arguing over the music, brandishing CDs they each wanted to hear. The ukulele player was asleep in the corner with his mouth open, two fillings discernible in the shadowy recess of his mouth. Opposite him, Nathalie gesticulated wildly to Marie about something neurotic. I looked at Beth and Christian, seated in the corner of the room. They were facing each other on the sofa, Beth pushing a strand of hair out of his eyes. Her sucked-in waist and extravagantly emphasised breasts betrayed the lusty confidence of alcohol. Who could resist her? But before I could break their intimacy by going over and announcing my intention to leave, the pair stood up and wordlessly made their way towards her bedroom, leaving the party in full swing.

  I awoke twice that night. The first time nagged by a needling sensation so akin to jealousy that I refused to subject it to full consciousness; the second feeling petulant and dissatisfied. I’d always despised girls who flirted their way through insecurity. Although in my view, even the worst behaviour could be excused by lust, any other motivation was deeply shameful. Pulling on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, I left the flat thinking I might go for a run, but instead weaved my way disconsolately along the already bustling river banks in search of equilibrium. I had counted three bridges, a dozen sun-glazed second-hand bookstall owners and five posters of Freud’s profile – ‘What’s on a man’s mind?’ – before a reassuring thought edged itself to the surface.