The Paris Affair

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  For the lovers, the dreamers and the Murderinos

  Chapitre un

  I met Thomas three days ago in the laundromat. Romantic, I know. I was bored, I saw him checking me out, I liked the look of him, and so I asked him a question in my broken, shitty French. But he’s not French. He’s British. He has big, rough fingers, and right now those fingers are interlaced with mine.

  We’re lying in his bed, on the border of the 7th arrondissement and the air smells of candle wax and his cologne. My gaze is on an oil painting circa 1750: a man in a high, frilly neckline. He has no chin and a stern expression on his face. It’s valuable. I know quite a lot about art, so I can tell these things from the subject, the craquelure and the grandiose gold frame. But even without all that, I could guess. Nobody keeps an ugly painting like that unless money is involved.

  ‘My parents are in town this weekend,’ I whisper, my eyes now on our clasped hands.

  ‘Already?’ he says. ‘That’s nice.’

  By ‘already’ he’s referring to the fact that I only moved to Paris five weeks ago.

  I look over my shoulder at him, my blonde hair catching the light. He has blond hair too, but his is caramel and has a deep side part. It’s the exact same colour as the tan on his forearms that hasn’t faded from the summer yet. His eyes are that kind of brown that flecks orange in the right sort of light, his eyelashes are long and pale at the tips, and his body is lean and healthy looking.

  ‘Yeah, they want to meet you,’ I say with a small, coy smile. And then I watch for his reaction.

  Is that a minute clench of the jaw I see? A bob of the Adam’s apple? The usual signs of panic? He’s wondering how I went from cool girl to stage-five clinger so quickly. Now he’s thinking, It’s the sex. That’s what did it to her. The sex was clearly that good.

  I let a moment pass. Let the anxiety settle in nicely.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I say, breaking eye contact and looking back at the man on the wall. Guy on the wall does not approve of the stunt I’m pulling at all. He can see straight through my little game. But guy on the wall was from another era. He wouldn’t understand. ‘I just know Mum would love to meet you,’ I add. ‘She thinks you’re super handsome.’

  His muscles tense up. I can almost feel his heartbeat accelerate. I swear to god the heat pulsing off him under the covers just went up a couple of degrees.

  ‘What? How does she know what I look like?’

  ‘I sent her a photo. Why?’

  Now Thomas is thinking, Shit, it’s only been three days and her mother already has a photograph of me? Wow. I’m the man. The MAN. But I need to escape. ESCAPE.

  This is the exact reaction I’m hoping for.

  Because he needs to think us ending things is a good thing. That it’s his idea. Things get messy when a man’s ego gets hurt.

  ‘I’d like to.’ His voice comes out a pitch or two higher now. ‘But I have plans this weekend.’

  Thomas is fibbing. He doesn’t have plans. I know this because we spoke about perhaps seeing each other on Saturday night or Sunday afternoon via text this morning and his exact words were: ‘I’m all yours this weekend. Wide open.’ That was when I knew I had to end things. That, and he liked three of my Instagram pictures in a row.

  But I expect now that he’s told the lie, now that those syllables are hanging in the air, that text is floating back to him. He’s thinking, Shit, shit, shit.

  Poor Thomas.

  This is why dating is stressful.

  This is why I avoid it.

  Well, one of the reasons.

  I pull away and sit up. The air is cool on my skin. Goosebumps form as I look around for my clothes. They’re lying in a pile on the floor by the bed, right by the condom wrapper. I loop my arms through my bra straps and fasten it behind my back as I scan the titles on his bookshelf. They’re mainly photography books – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Robert Doisneau – and a couple on positivity-slash-manifestation. I pull my white T-shirt over my head and can feel his eyes on me as I stand up, reach for my short black skirt and put it on.

  ‘Are you leaving?’ he asks. And there’s an edge to his voice but I can’t tell if it’s panic or relief and I’m intentionally not looking at him so I can’t read his expression.

  ‘Yes,’ I say as I do up my boots. Ziiippp. The sound echoes in the silence between us.

  ‘Why?’ he asks. Small.

  I turn to face him and try to match the sour expression of the man in the ugly, expensive painting. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ I say.

  My bag and jacket are lying on the brown leather sofa. I move over to it, pick them up and head for the door. And without even saying goodbye I open it, move out into the hallway and let it bang behind me.

  I rush down the three flights of stairs – the same wooden staircase I came up just two hours ago – as quickly as I can. I pull open the security door and head out into the mauve dusk light, go right, past the red and white lights of a tabac and disappear around the corner.

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how it’s done. That’s how you lose a guy in less than three minutes.

  * * *

  There’s a main road ahead of me and as I walk towards the hum of traffic, a rubber band flicks something deep within my chest. Because I’m not some psychopath (I know this for certain because I’ve done an online quiz). I don’t fuck with people’s feelings for fun. And I liked Thomas; really, I did.

  Which is precisely why I needed to pull my bunny-boiler routine now, before things went any further. Because I could tell from the way he looked at me, from how he held my hand so tight after sex, that if I didn’t do something soon he’d get attached. And he needs to find a normal girl who’ll want normal things. Someone who listens to ‘How to keep your man’ podcasts and doesn’t sabotage things the moment a guy wants more than a casual hook-up. Someone looking for a white dress, a set of his-and-hers towels, a dum-dum-da-dum-dum and a couple of offspring.

  And that’s not me.

  Not anymore.

  And not just because I tried love once and it didn’t do what it said on the box, not just because I’m pretty sure the whole thing is bullshit. But because every time I open the newspaper a new continent is on fire, World War III is about to erupt, a big corporation is screwing over the vulnerable or some expert or another is talking about how sooner or later water will cost more than gold. It’s depressing. So, what? I’m supposed to ignore all that, pretend that Orwell isn’t the new Nostradamus, couple up, invest in white goods, pop out a baby and then leave it here in this shitstorm?

  No thanks.

  I prefer my life clean. Simple. My weekends free to write.

  So this is best for both of us.

  I look around as I weave between taxis, motorcycles and bicycles and cross the street. There’s an H&M sign glowing in the distance, lots of cursive, neon restaurant signage, one of those bottle-green Parisian newsstands with postcards on racks, and a homeless man sleeping beneath a pile of cloth in a doorway across from it. I get to the other side and am about to walk the short distance home when ‘Hot in Herre’ starts playing from my handbag. That’s Camilla’s ringtone – she’s my best friend. Who am I kidding? Camilla is my only friend but that’s entirely by choice; I don’t really like that many people. They’re fake and try to make me fake too and it’s tiring pretending I
don’t see it.

  I reach for my phone and move out of the pedestrian traffic, past the rows of postcards into the newsstand to talk.

  ‘Hey sexy,’ I say, pushing a finger into my free ear so I can hear her beyond the hum of traffic and chatter of pedestrians. I can still smell Thomas’s cologne on my fingertips and I have a flash of memory. His breath on my ear. Goosebumps.

  ‘So, I have news,’ she says in a sing-song happy voice.

  ‘You got the job?’ I ask, hopeful. She’s still back in London, works in corporate communications at an investment bank, hates her boss, hates her job, and has been waiting for word on a new one just like it for weeks.

  ‘No. But almost as good,’ she replies. ‘I think I saw my soulmate tonight.’

  * * *

  I first met Camilla twelve years ago when we shared a flat at university. We bonded over big dreams – I was going to change the world one hard-hitting news story at a time and she was going to revolutionise Vogue – and a shared hatred of passive-aggressive Post-it notes left on the fridge. But then life went how life went. Camilla finished her degree with first class honours but graduated into a market where the only job for a journalism student was corporate communications. And I quit after my first year to get a day job in an office (marketing) because my boyfriend at the time, Harrison, was a musician on the verge of big things. In my defence, we were a team, he was supposed to be my love story, and someone had to pay the rent until he got his big break.

  That someone was me.

  In hindsight I suppose I could have kept writing; hindsight will always fuck you up like that. But somehow at the time there wasn’t enough oxygen for two artists in our relationship: our roles had been set. He was the creative one and I was the support staff. And at the beginning I didn’t really mind. He was hot and he toured Europe a lot and I’d use my holiday days to go along. I’d spend my days wandering through galleries filled with Klimt, Picasso, Warhol and Duccio, learning from gallerists about how the old masters used pinhole techniques for perspective, how the cracks in a painting can tell you as much as a fingerprint and what led each artist to the moment the world said: ‘ahhh’. It was always that last part that fascinated me most: who was Duchamp before Fountain? What did Picasso’s earliest sketches look like? Would The Kiss still be Klimt’s most famous painting, had a set of three ‘pornographic’ ceiling panels not been destroyed in a fire in World War II? So for me, it wasn’t the likes of the Mona Lisa, but rather the early works, the lost works, the clumsy sketchbooks that held secrets undisclosed by the glossy brochures handed out by galleries, that had me fall in love with art.

  Harrison, on the other hand, spent his days ‘rehearsing’ (code for fucking Melody, who will become more important to this story quite soon). I kept telling myself we were living the dream, and it looked that way to anyone back home in grey old Kent who was scrolling through my social media but if I’m honest, really honest, it was lonely. He had my heart and he wouldn’t give it back; he wouldn’t even let it beat beside me half the time. Every year that passed saw him becoming a bit more depressed that he wasn’t famous yet, while my life force was bled dry trying to make him happy. By the third act my soul was as shrivelled and dry as a fossil.

  It took eight long years for his big break to finally come. A record deal. With a major label. A song he’d written about me called ‘When She Sleeps’ would be the first single. It felt like finally – finally – all that pain, all that sacrifice, had been worth it. Finally things might get better. Then one evening, about a week later, I got home from work, poured myself a gin and tonic, plonked myself down on the mauve leather sofa I’d paid for and Harrison sat down next to me. He took my hands in his. His eyes began to water. And my heart began to pound: he’d always been anti-marriage, said he didn’t believe in it, but this was it, he was going to propose. Everything was finally working out.

  His exact words were: ‘Harper, you know what John Lennon said about how life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans? Well, that’s what happened to me, baby. You were my plan. She just happened. Don’t be angry.’

  But I was angry.

  And not just because he was leaving me for Melody, his keyboardist. I’d given up on my own dreams in favour of his, I’d lost eight years of my life – that’s 70,128 hours, I checked – and here I was with no degree, no writing career, a credit card debt (independent tours are expensive, you know), a job in an office that I hated, and no idea who the hell I was anymore.

  It took a long time for me to realise that was the day I was born.

  * * *

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ I ask Camilla, scanning the headlines of the newspapers laid out in front of me: last night the Paris police shot dead a man in a park after a stabbing rampage, the mayor is coming under scrutiny for something I can’t quite understand, and Le Monde’s headline translates as ‘No Justice for Matilde Beaumont?’ She’s been in the papers a lot over the last couple of weeks, so her picture looks almost familiar now as it smiles back at me: young, blonde, pretty. She could have been cast as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. And as I scan her features I can’t help but wonder how it happened. How does a normal girl like her end up on the front page of the newspaper?

  ‘In the elevator at work,’ Camilla says, breaking my chain of thought.

  ‘Well, what’s his name? Send me his Instagram profile,’ I say, still staring at Matilde’s picture. ‘I’ll vet him for you.’

  ‘Oh I didn’t actually talk to him,’ she says. ‘But he looks just like the sketch.’

  Six months ago, Camilla paid some guy on Etsy to draw a picture of her ‘soulmate’. She provided her full name, her date of birth and her address. She says he needed that information to tap into her aura and she has been convinced ever since that she can use that sketch to find her other half. I, on the other hand, have been convinced that it’s some sort of elaborate identity theft scam. The jury is still out as to which of us is correct, but that right there tells you everything you need to know about us, our respective life philosophies and the vital balancing role we play in each other’s lives.

  My phone beeps with a text.

  ‘Hang on, Mills.’ I pull the phone away from my ear and squint down at the message.

  Urgent! Need you to cover an exhibition tomorrow night at Le Voltage. 7 pm. Brand new series. Due Friday 10 am. Make sure you network! H.

  That H stands for Hyacinth, my new boss. This new job is the reason I moved to Paris. I put the phone back to my ear. ‘Can I call you back later? I’ve just got to deal with a work thing.’

  ‘Okay, sure. Big love.’

  And then we hang up and I stand there rereading Hyacinth’s message. An exhibition tomorrow night. Due Friday.

  Shit.

  Because tomorrow is already Thursday.

  That doesn’t leave me much time to write something impressive. And it needs to be impressive. Uber-impressive. Because this will be only my third story for The Paris Observer. My first was a review of a gypsy-jazz band. I thought my piece was amazing but it only got a depressing twelve likes and two shares. And my second, a walking tour of Paris’s street art, is still on Hyacinth’s desk awaiting the ‘constructive notes’ she told me were coming. Mine’s an entry-level position and they’re easing me in slowly, but if I don’t hit it out of the park soon, Hyacinth is going to start wondering why the hell she hired me. And I can’t afford to screw this up. I’ve worked too hard to get here.

  Because after Harrison left me, let’s just say things got a lot worse before they got better. It didn’t matter what I drank, who I fucked or what colour I dyed my hair, every time my lungs moved they hit my newly returned and wounded heart. It wasn’t so much losing Harrison that haunted me; it was losing myself. I’d let this happen to me. I’d ignored everything I’d seen happen to my mother and let him in anyway. And he’d done exactly what I was scared of: taken what he could get from me and left.

  In short, I’d betrayed myself.

/>   And then, one very ordinary day that wasn’t marked by anything I can recall now, I was sitting at my desk, pretending to put together a pamphlet for work, when something truly miraculous happened.

  I started to write instead.

  I hadn’t written anything other than marketing copy in eight long years. But as I typed out the first line – Why I hate John Lennon – a light flicked on inside of me. And I knew: this was it. This was how I could make things right. Yes, I had given up my own dreams in favour of his, but I was only twenty-eight and I could still become a writer. And so every night that’s what I did: I wrote. I wrote rave reviews about the music Harrison hated. I wrote about the art I now knew so much about thanks to his tours. I wrote about fitness trends, movies, intermittent fasting, music, sex, mascara and had a recurring micro-column inspired by my love of true crime podcasts called: ‘How not to get murdered’. I even wrote about tax time once. Basically, I’d write about anything and everything as long as it added to my portfolio and took me one step closer to my dreams. And I did it largely for free.

  Then one day, after about two years of that, Camilla sent me an advert for a journalism job in Paris with the note: ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ It asked for one year of fulltime experience and a portfolio. I only had the latter, but I applied anyway. There was a call, a Skype interview, a Eurostar trip, an offer and now we’re in October and here I am.

  They pay me a (meagre) salary and I can put ‘Journalist’ on forms beside: ‘Occupation’.

  Yes, as of three weeks ago, Harper Brown (that’s me) officially works for The Paris Observer online magazine. It’s so official that my voicemail now says: ‘Hi, you’ve called Harper Brown at The Paris Observer. Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.’ I’m their newest art and culture writer. That makes two of us now: me and glum Wesley.

  I mean, no, I’m not writing hard-hitting pieces that end human trafficking or expose white collar crimes, but it’s a cool job in a cool area – Bastille – and I’m thrilled to have it. It’s a stepping stone to my dreams. Which is why it really matters that everything I submit to Hyacinth is impressive. So that, one day, when an opportunity in news comes up she’ll think of me. But how the hell am I supposed to put together something ‘impressive’ between Thursday night and Friday at 10 am?