The Paris Affair Read online

  Which is why it’s important to get out before anyone gets attached. I’ve trialled a few exit strategies now – blatant honesty, blocking, ghosting, slowly disappearing – and the only one that works one hundred per cent of the time is making them feel like they’ve dodged a bullet.

  Ta-da.

  But I can’t tell Thomas all that.

  It’d hurt my thumbs to type it all out and he wouldn’t understand anyway.

  He’d just tell me I’m scared, lend me one of his books on positive thinking, and try to change my mind the way people always do when I say these things out loud. Like my saying them is what makes them true and if they can just shut me up it might go away.

  But the truth is, despite growing up watching my mother have her heart broken on a biannual basis, I still wanted love to be real as much as the next person. And when I met Harrison I thought maybe it was.

  It wasn’t.

  And there are only so many times life can show you the same truth before you accept it. So here’s what life has shown me about love: it’s nothing more than a beautiful biological hoax; the only way nature can get any sane person to stick around long enough to procreate. And that wouldn’t even be a problem, I’d totally buy into the program if it wasn’t so fucking temporary. If it didn’t always end badly. But it does. All it does is fuck you up and slow you down.

  And I don’t have another 70,128 hours to waste.

  I take another sip of coffee and consider my response. We only hooked up once, I acted crazy and yet he’s still being a good human and checking I’m okay. So if I reply with anything semi-sane he might give me the benefit of the doubt and want to start things up again. But if I continue on the meet-the-parents track and reply with something uber-crazed he’ll have it in writing. He could show people. And we work in the same industry.

  So basically I’m fucked either way.

  This, right here, is why sensitive people like me drink.

  I reach for one of the little bottles of Scotch, twist open the top and pour it into my coffee then take a sip. Another. One more. There. A calm warmth flows through my veins as I glance out the window. There’s a grey and white pigeon sitting on one of the pots now. It gurgles some sort of pigeon sound and I take another sip of boozy coffee.

  ‘Bonjour, Mr Oiseau,’ I say, tapping on the glass. Oiseau is French for bird, but don’t get excited – my French is pretty sketchy. I did ‘A’ level French but most of what I know, I figured out via Reverso. ‘Tu ferais quoi?’ I just asked him what he’d do if he were me.

  He gurgles something back and flies away. And there I have it, my answer, delivered via a pigeon and a very boozy coffee.

  I should do nothing. Walk away. Just ignore the message.

  Thomas will forget me soon enough. We may live in the same vicinity, but this is Paris. It’s a big place. As long as I don’t make a habit of doing my laundry on a Sunday evening at that specific laundromat, it’s likely we’ll never bump into each other again. Soon I’ll just be a memory to him and my legs will be twisted in someone else’s sheets. Someone like…

  I open one of the five dating apps on my phone and scroll through my newest messages, glancing down through the profile pictures.

  Someone like… Nicolas.

  I click through to his profile. Good pictures. Good face. His profile says he’s five foot eleven which in dating language means he’s five foot eight when he’s standing up straight, but at least he doesn’t lead with his Uber rating. He’ll do. And so, as I finish my coffee, I reply to his message with: Hey x

  Chapitre quatre

  The little clock in the top right corner of my computer screen taunts me. It’s already 9.47 am. Wait, no, 9.48. That means I only have twelve minutes until our weekly editorial meeting where we talk about new ideas, compare how many likes and shares everyone got this week, and Hyacinth makes someone cry.

  I’ve been safe so far: nobody wants to make the new girl cry. But this is my third editorial meeting, and I get the sense my grace period is drawing to a close.

  I glance over at Wesley. He’s sitting across from me frowning at his computer, the blue rectangles from his screen reflecting in his round glasses. He’s already got sweat patches forming under the arms of his light blue shirt. I can’t tell if they’re in anticipation of our meeting or from his sprint into work.

  Wesley and I emerged from the Bastille metro station at exactly the same time this morning. And so I did the only sane thing to do in that sort of situation: I rushed like hell so we wouldn’t have to make inane chitchat for the twelve long minutes it takes to walk to the office from the station. And when I say I rushed, I mean I jogged part of it. That’s how strong my commitment was.

  When I arrived at the black, cast-iron gate nestled between two vast lighting shops that marks our office, I thought I was safe. But before I punched in the door code and made it inside, there he was behind me. Panting. Saying ‘Hello’ and following me in.

  And so we rode the teeny-tiny elevator in awkward silence, until the doors slid open and he bolted out and I was left thinking: Wesley doesn’t like me very much. But he was the only art and culture writer before I arrived. Maybe he sees me as a threat.

  Now in the office, I reach for my cup of coffee, take a sip and glance around. Printers buzz. People whisper. The strip lighting on the ceiling flickers. I was surprised when I first walked in here: it doesn’t look like a portal to an online English language magazine that syndicates its stories all over the world. It looks more like a makeshift employment agency, one bounced electricity payment away from closure. It’s a sprawling, messy open-plan room for us plebs, a glass-walled office for Hyacinth, a meeting room, two bathrooms and a poky little kitchen.

  I turn back to my computer, glance over my list of ideas one more time then press ‘print’.

  The printer that sits beside Wesley hums and then spits out my pages. He flashes me a look of hatred – how dare I be ready – his eyes the colour of chocolate croissants. God I’m hungry.

  I give him a small, tight smile, reach for the pages, lay them down next to me and, with my final eight minutes, I go to Instagram, tap the little magnifying glass and type into the search function: N-o-a-h-X.

  I might as well start my research.

  There he is, right at the top: @NoahXartist.

  I click on it and scan the images.

  Boring.

  Boring.

  Boring.

  Old work – all geometric shades of grey that don’t translate well to social media. Ill-conceived comments: ‘My toddler could have painted that’. An announcement about the exhibition tonight. Some more grey.

  I glance left to his profile photo but it’s just another shot of one of his paintings. But – ooohhhh wait – there’s an Instagram story just waiting to be watched. Maybe he’s in it.

  I tap on it and a picture fills the screen.

  But it’s not of him. It’s a series of five coffee cups with the hashtags #upallnight #Montmartre #coffee and #artistsoninstagram.

  So basically he’s #dull.

  I exhale and Wesley shoots me a look.

  I focus on my phone screen, typing #NoahX into the search function. There must be something interesting about him out there somewhere. Something questionable he was tagged in…

  Up comes a page of square images. I scan them.

  Two lines down, there’s a shot of a young couple – she’s dark, he’s fair – posing beside a canvas. I click on it. It’s from an exhibition in Berlin. I keep scrolling.

  Photographs of articles written about Noah X. I make a note to look those up after our meeting. A shot of a very beautiful woman of about forty with a short strawberry blonde bob. She’s wearing a tailored navy suit beside a piece so huge it dwarfs her. It’s a magazine clipping. A gash of light catches on the glossy page.

  I tap on the photo and read the headline: ‘Agnès Bisset discovers yet another emerging art star: meet Noah X.’ It was posted in September 2018.

  Intere
sting.

  I keep scrolling. Keep looking. And then there it is.

  Something.

  Or rather: someone.

  The hot gallery owner from last night. He’s standing there all white teeth and blue eyes. I smile as I remember him, the way he smelled. I tap on the image and read the caption. Noah X at his exhibition in New York. #2019 #OMG #love #contemporaryart #hessohot #NY #NYforever #NoahX.

  Wait… what?

  My blood speeds up as I read the words again: Noah X at his exhibition in New York.

  I swallow hard. Make sure my synapses haven’t misfired.

  So that wasn’t the gallery owner I met last night.

  It was Noah X.

  I can hear my voice saying, ‘He’s my favourite French artist.’

  He’s not even French, Harper, he’s American.

  And I know I could be embarrassed right now, mortified that I stood there oblivious to who he was, talking about him in the third person while he let me. But I’m not. All I can think is: Touché.

  Because that’s the exact sort of thing I might do.

  Noah X just became a lot more interesting to me.

  But now the air fills with the sound of a chair being pulled across the floor.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Wesley asks. I look up at him, he’s standing now, holding a sheet of paper, a notepad, a pen and a coffee cup with a red cat on it.

  ‘Of course,’ I say, picking up my own coffee cup, notepad, pen and the printouts before following him along the grey carpet towards the meeting room.

  ‘Harper,’ Hyacinth says as I move inside. I try to read her expression – is that an I-loved-your-story or an I-hated-your-story blank stare?

  Everything you need to know about Hyacinth can be gleaned from her name and title: Hyacinth Cromwell-Scott, Editor-in-chief of The Paris Observer. She’s very British, very tall, has lived in Paris since the ’80s, has worked on everything important and knows everybody worth knowing in Paris. I know all this because I did my due diligence (i.e. cyber-stalked her) before I came over on the Eurostar for my interview. What the internet didn’t warn me of, however, was her poker face; it’s impossible to know what she’s thinking from her expression. Most of the time I find myself trying to figure out whether I’m on the verge of losing my job via decoding the grammar in her messages. It’s harder in real life. There’s no punctuation.

  ‘Close the door.’

  Shit. Not good.

  I do as she says then turn back to the room. Along the wall facing me, windows with peeling paint look out onto the streets of Bastille: a row of green and turquoise Vélib’ bicycles, a street-side café with black graffiti covering the stone-washed apartment above it and trees with leaves that are turning the colour of rust. I take a seat beside Wesley and glance around at the other faces.

  Twelve people are sitting at a big round dark wood table. Even though everyone introduced themselves on day one, I’m still not sure of all their names. The only one I’m certain of is Stan, the blond guy sitting at the other end of the table from Hyacinth. Partially because he does the news and politics stories and that’s the job I wish I had, and partially because when Hyacinth was walking me from desk to desk on day one, introducing me to everyone, he said, ‘Wow, you look just like the dead girl we’re not allowed to write about anymore’. Then he glared at Hyacinth.

  That’s the sort of thing that gets you remembered.

  So there’s him. Then there’s Wesley, Hyacinth, five randoms I’ve seen around intermittently and suspect might be freelancers, and three girls facing me, their hair backlit by the window behind them. Three little angels. The middle one is Claudia. She’s loud, brash, Italian, wears bright lipstick, and she’s the one that cried last week. She was barely in the office when I first started, but flounced in every now and then to talk loudly about how fantastic Paris Fashion Week was. But when she wrote about it, Hyacinth did not ‘love her work’. Mainly, however, Claudia writes about celebrity gossip, most of it secondhand and sifted from American or UK tabloids. Even though we might be broadly described as belonging to the French version of a tabloid – la presse people – France has stronger privacy laws than its international counterparts, and so Hyacinth gets very antsy when she thinks we might get sued.

  This was quite the culture shock, coming from the UK where tabloids routinely declare all sorts of personal and shitty things about celebrities and get away with it. I’m not really sure about the two beside Claudia – I think maybe it’s Nathalie and Helena – but we’re all going out for team-building drinks tomorrow night, so I’ll figure it out then.

  Everyone is dead quiet but the hum of traffic floats in from outside. I reach for my cup of coffee and take a sip.

  ‘So, my darlings,’ Hyacinth begins, dragging out the word: daaaarlings. ‘Who would like to take the floor first?’

  ‘Me,’ says Stan-who-has-my-dream-job.

  ‘Great, Stan,’ Hyacinth says. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I think it’s time to run my Femicide piece,’ he says.

  When he says ‘Femicide’ I immediately think of some graffiti I saw in Montparnasse soon after I arrived in Paris, in the space between unpacking and starting this job. I’d gone to see the grave of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre; I’d taken a photograph of the lipstick marks on their tombstone and uploaded it to Instagram. But on my walk home, there was this stone wall with the black spraypainted words: ‘une femme est tuée tous les deux jours en France’. It stayed with me and I looked it up later that night. And it was true: a woman is killed every two days in France. I’m not sure how that compares to the rest of the world but it sounds like a lot.

  ‘All the leads on Matilde Beaumont have dried up,’ Stan continues. ‘According to my sources they’re about to close the case. People forget. And then it happens again.’

  Stan takes special care to linger on the word ‘sources’ and there’s a reason for this. The police in France don’t trust the media as a rule, and keep us at a distance, not even using us to gather information from the public. So press reports are cobbled together from leaked information and snippets from whoever will talk to us. Thus, Stan thinks having a source at the police makes him special, and, well, it sort of does.

  ‘Stan, I appreciate your passion,’ Hyacinth snaps. I get the feeling they’ve had this conversation before. ‘It’s done. It’s been covered to hell and back. And, yes, it’s important, but it’s also a downer. People don’t visit The Paris Observer to hear about girls turning up dead. They want to hear about which restaurant to go to. What’s on at the ballet. That sort of thing. And we need people to read our magazine or nobody will pay to advertise. I’m sorry but the answer is still no.’

  I’m not stupid enough to argue with her, but this is blatantly untrue.

  People love to read about murder. Death. It helps to remind them they’re still alive. At least, I think that’s why I like it.

  ‘Right,’ Hyacinth continues with a big smile that is strangely scary because her eyes stay botox-still. ‘Who else?’

  ‘I’ll go,’ says the girl to the right of Claudia.

  She starts talking about a perfumery in Le Marais where you can mix your own scent. I remain aware of her vocal modulations and the way her hands are gesturing in front of her; her wedding ring catches the light. But I’m thinking about tonight, about the exhibition: as much as I’d love to chat to Mr Blue Eyes again, let him know the jig is up, I also can’t risk it. I can’t let him know who I am, where I work, or why I was there last night. Because I don’t know him well enough to know what he’d do with that information. He might think it was funny. Or he might call Hyacinth, make a complaint and blow my whole life up. It’s too much of a gamble. It’d be better if I could turn up, take some notes and leave without anyone figuring out why I’m there. And if Noah sees me and asks me, well, I’m Grace…

  ‘Harper?’ Hyacinth’s voice.

  I look up and around, everyone is staring at me.

  ‘Yes?’

&nbs
p; She gives a small smile and I realise she’s about to repeat herself. ‘You’ll be a guinea pig with Nathalie, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, no idea what I’m committing to, nor when, but maybe if I’m super nice and amenable she won’t fire me if she hates my story. And I know that makes me sound annoyingly insecure, but we’re all insecure about something. Usually the thing we think matters the most.

  ‘Great,’ says the girl who was just talking about perfume. Oh. So that’s what I’m doing. ‘I’ll send you an invite.’

  Then Hyacinth’s gaze bores into me. ‘Wonderful. So, Harper, pitch to me.’

  Chapitre cinq

  There are no white cloths over paintings tonight, and barely any room to move. I’m standing by painting number three, frowning down at my phone, pretending to type. What I’m really doing is pointing the camera lens at the canvas and snapping another picture. I took the first when I arrived fifteen minutes ago and uploaded it to Instagram with the hashtags: #LeVoltage #Paris and #rebel. The last of those refers to the fact that there’s a big ‘No photography’ sign in both English and French by the door (inspired by moi?), but I don’t have a choice. I need to leave before Noah arrives and I want to be able to describe a few of the images in detail for my article. Scratch that, I need to be able to describe a couple of his artworks in detail, otherwise my article will be pretty damned short.