Weekend in Paris Read online

  “Taxi? Taxi?” Molly whirled round to find a man at her shoulder, small and Arab-looking. His ingratiating smile exposed a gridlock of yellow teeth. “Taxi?” he repeated, gesturing vaguely into the darkness and stretching a skinny arm towards her suitcase.

  “Non!” Molly swung it out of his reach and stepped back. “Er, merci beaucoup.” Chin in the air, she strode back into the station, trying to look like someone who didn’t need a taxi, thanks all the same, not because she couldn’t afford one but because she had another, much better plan. But what was it?

  The station looked even emptier than before. The three blondes had become two. Someone was singing to himself, swooping boozily from note to note. Molly walked briskly, trying not to panic. During the train journey she had pinpointed an area of cheap hotels listed in her guidebook, only a couple of stops away on the underground system, though she’d been nervous of negotiating her way around this alone, especially late at night. And what if all the hotels were full? But now she had no choice. Her eyes skittered from side to side. Please, God, let there be a Métro station—and suddenly, miraculously, there it was, a blue-and-white sign hung above steps leading downward. Molly took them at a run, her heels clattering. She would not be mugged. She would not get on the wrong train. She had a brain, hadn’t she? Now was the time to use it.

  In fact, the Paris system was as logical and straightforward as London’s. All you had to do was get yourself on the right line, going in the right direction, feed money into a machine that disgorged a clatter of change and a ticket (a titchy stub of a thing, a quarter the size of a London one), then feed the ticket into another machine that released a turnstile. It was a little nerve-racking walking down the echoing tunnels, but it seemed to Molly that she wasn’t nearly so deep underground as she would be in London. True, the first thing she saw on reaching the platform was a man peeing against the wall, but she simply averted her gaze and walked on to sit near some normal-looking people, on a very strange plastic seat embedded in tiles. She studied the posters on the other side of the tracks. It struck her that nearly all of them, whether they were advertising soap powder, hair conditioner or fashion, featured an abundance of female flesh—not, she thought, as a provocative statement but as a matter of course. How very French. Molly felt a thrill of liberation. Je suis dans Paris . . . en Paris? . . . à Paris? Whatever.

  The train came surprisingly quickly—and quietly, on rubber wheels. It looked clean and unintimidating, two-toned in white and peppermint green. There was a kind of latch affair on the doors, which you had to unhook, but luckily someone opened it for her, and Molly stepped gratefully into the compartment and sat down. She looked around her with interest. Except at the ends of each carriage, all the seats faced forward or backward, not sideways as in most tube trains. This made her feel less conspicuous, and she glanced around at the groups of people, mainly young, apparently friendly, in all shades of white, brown and black, just like London. Reassured, she unfolded her map and started to work out how to get to the street she wanted, once she arrived at her stop.

  République turned out to be a vast, forbidding square, harshly lit by traffic lights and speeding headlamps, with a monumental statue at its center and identically wide, straight streets radiating from it in all directions. There weren’t many people about, just a few loitering shadows. Molly wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake (“English Girl Found Murdered”), but it was too late now. She started to negotiate her way to the other side of the square, squinting at signs. Ah, yes, rue du Faubourg du Temple. (What exactly was a faubourg?) She stepped off the curb onto a pedestrian crossing, then squealed with fright as a horn blared in her ear and a car shot out of nowhere, missing her toes by inches. Another roared close behind. Its passenger goggled at her like a maniac and tapped a forefinger to his temple. Of course. They drove on the right here: she’d been looking the wrong way. She must be more careful. (“Tragic Road Accident—Minster Episcopi Mourns.”)

  Her case was beginning to feel as if it held the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Every couple of minutes she paused to change hands, fanning her chafed palms. A group of rowdy teenage boys passed her. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?” they jeered. “Do you speak Eengleesh?” Molly walked faster. At last she reached a long, drab street lit with a few illuminated hotel signs hanging at wonky angles. “Don’t be put off by the crumbling façades,” her guidebook had advised and, truthfully, Molly hardly cared now where she ended up so long as she could fling herself onto some bed and stop worrying. The odd whiff of squalor hadn’t put off George Orwell, had it?

  The first hotel was locked. Ringing the doorbell, Molly finally summoned an old man in slippers, and learnt her first new French word, “complet,” meaning “full.” He was desolated, but wished her a courteous good night before shutting the door firmly in her face. It was the same story at the next two. The fourth was unlocked and Molly’s hopes rose, particularly when she saw a large ginger cat sprawled in sleep on the windowsill, its face comically draped by a lace curtain. Anyone who liked animals was bound to be nice. She took a deep breath, stepped into the lobby and walked over to the high reception desk.

  A bald man in a cardigan was sitting behind it, watching television. When she repeated her request, he frowned with uncertainty and said he would have to ask his wife. He retreated to a door marked “Privé,” and in due course reappeared with a woman of about sixty, slap-slapping in sandals, her dumpy figure encased in a flower-print dress whose hem, Molly couldn’t help noticing, didn’t quite bridge the varicose-veined gap to the top of her pop socks. She and her husband spoke together, so rapidly that Molly couldn’t follow. Whatever the man said, his wife contradicted him scornfully, though the scorn seemed habitual rather than malicious—or perhaps the French always sounded like that. Eventually the woman turned to Molly. There was a small room on the top floor. Molly would have to share la salle de bain and les toilettes. The price was fifty euros per night, payable in advance, not including breakfast. What did she think?

  Flooded with relief, Molly smiled her acceptance. No, she didn’t need to see the room; she would take it. There then followed a tremendous performance of passport-checking and form-filling, of payment and the issuing of a receipt, of smiling and head-bowing, all executed with such precision and courtesy, and so many merci, Mademoiselles and je vous en pries that Molly felt quite overwhelmed. But at last she was in possession of a key attached to a clinking slab of metal with her room number engraved on it, and juddering slowly upward in the oldest, smallest, most fragile lift she had ever seen.

  When she pulled open the concertina grille at the top, she found herself at the end of a musty hall lined with doors. She walked down it, turning her head from side to side, checking the room numbers. Floorboards squeaked and shifted under carpeting thin and brown as cardboard. There were no other sounds. Everyone else must be asleep.

  She found her room, unlocked the door and switched on the light. Not too bad. There was a double bed with a shiny floral spread, a wardrobe and shelf made of cheap varnished wood, a bedside table with a yellow plastic ashtray advertising Pernod. Molly dropped her case, walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains, pleased to see that her room overlooked the street and faced a long run of steeply pitched roofs studded with intriguingly shaped dormer windows—arched, pedimented, oval as an egg. She unlocked the catch, pulled the windows open and leaned out. She could hear the thump-thump of distant music, then the wasp-buzz of a motorbike racing down the street. The air was sweet. She could see stars.

  Paris was right here, under her nose. She’d done it! All by herself. Molly sighed with satisfaction, then turned away from the window, kicked off her shoes and flung herself onto the bed. She stared up at the ceiling, with its sepia continents of damp. It was good to rest, after all that walking and worrying. Yet at the same time she felt tinglingly alive. If only she was braver, she would go out and do something. But where? And what? And with whom? She pictured herself in one of those mirrored cafés w
ith a cup of coffee before her—no, something more sophisticated like . . . a cocktail, that was it. Maybe a martini—a real one, not out of a bottle. “Very dry,” she would say, with cool authority, to the barman, “with an olive.” (Un olive or une olive? Damn. Okay, forget the olive.) She would be reading a book, completely absorbed. (Not a Paris guide, of course: something unquestionably fine, like War and Peace.) A shadow would fall across its pages. “Ah, Tolstoy. How extraordinaire to find a girl so beautiful and yet so intelligent.” And she would look up, startled, into the face of the handsomest Frenchman imaginable. They would talk deep into the night about literature and life, staring into each other’s eyes across the table, oblivious to the trivial chatter of the beau monde around them, until it was time to get into his open sports car and speed through the boulevards, her hair flying . . .

  Molly arched her back and bounced energetically off the bed and onto her feet. What drivel. She fanned her flushed cheeks, extinguishing the fantasy, then heaved her suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it smartly. Just because Paris was supposed to be the most romantic city in the world, you didn’t have to be in love to enjoy it: that would be a very narrow definition indeed. There was romance of the mind, for example, inspired by beauty and, er, history. She unearthed her sponge-bag and pyjamas. Tomorrow there would be the Louvre and Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur. She was glad she’d be exploring them alone. Some people weren’t interested in culture at all: they only went abroad to wallow in drink and sex. It was much better not to have a companion than one who would distract her.

  Anyway, she did have a companion. For after she’d hung as many of her clothes as would fit on the three available hangers, and dumped the rest in piles on the wooden shelf, she had found Bertie squashed into a corner of her case among the shoes. She pulled him out by the tail and smoothed his thread-bare badger fur. His glassy eyes winked back at her with their usual cheeky expression. Good old Berts. They’d been together since she was three, when she’d found him peeking out of her Christmas stocking. Here was the bald patch where she’d had an accident with Superglue, and this was the wonky ear chewed by Alleluia when she was a puppy. Molly had cried into Bertie’s fur, taught him acrobatics, tested him on his times tables, taken him on holidays and sleepovers and even to college (although she’d sometimes hidden him in a drawer). He was all the brothers and sisters she’d never had. He knew all her secrets. Molly kissed his worn nose and deposited him on the pillow.

  Time for bed. Her blue cotton pyjamas lay ready. Somehow they looked terribly English—sensible, schoolgirly, dull. A breath of wind fluttered the net curtains at her open window. She heard an echoing click-clack of heels in the street and a high, flirtatious giggle. “Mais arrête, toi!” French women probably wore little silk nonsenses to bed—or nothing at all. Fleetingly, Molly put her hands to her breasts, feeling their fullness, the weight of warm flesh.

  Bang! Her heart gave a mule-kick of alarm. Someone was knocking at her door.

  3

  Molly stared at the door. Who could it possibly be?

  “It’s me!” someone shouted in English. The voice was loud, uninhibited and female.

  Molly opened the door cautiously. A tall girl in a denim jacket looked back at her in astonishment. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “I’m Molly. Who are you?”

  “Where’s Janine?”

  “Who’s Janine?”

  “Isn’t she here?”

  “Have you got the wrong room?”

  “You mean she moved out?”

  “I mean I just moved in.”

  “But where’s she gone? Where’s her stuff?”

  Even as she spoke the girl was pushing at the door so she could see for herself. Such was her aura of energy and confidence that Molly stepped back and let her, hoping this wasn’t some kind of con-trick. She kept one hand on the doorknob, just in case. The girl strode into the middle of the room and plonked her fists on hipbones that were just visible above a pair of perilously low-slung jeans. The silver rings in each ear and her close-cropped hair, so black it must be dyed, gave her a bold, swashbuckling look. Her eyes flitted over Molly’s meager possessions, and the weight of her body sagged onto one sturdy leg. “Aw, shit,” she said.

  “Something the matter?”

  “Mind if I take a peek in your cupboard?”

  “Er . . .”

  But she had already pulled open the doors and was scanning its contents.

  Molly scurried after her. “What are you looking for?”

  The girl muttered to herself and reached up to rummage behind the spare bedding.

  Molly’s imagination raced. Was “stuff” a codeword for drugs? What if something illegal had been stashed in her room? She’d be arrested by the police . . . interrogated in French . . . thrown into prison with lesbians and people with funny eyes. No one would know where she was.

  “What exactly are you after?” she asked again.

  The girl knelt down on the carpet and lowered her head to look under the bed. (Oh, my God, what if Janine was there—murdered? Molly pictured herself in the dock facing an implacable French jury. “Mais je suis innocente! ” She’d never see Alleluia again. Her mother would die of a broken heart.)

  After interminable seconds the girl clambered to her feet and dusted off her hands with a clash of bangles. There was a scowl of disgust on her face. “I don’t believe this.”

  “What? ” By now Molly could practically feel the breeze on her bare neck as she awaited the rasp of the guillotine.

  “She’s done a runner with my Rollerblades.”

  “R-Rollerblades?” Molly echoed weakly.

  “Except they’re not mine. I sort of borrowed them off this outfit I work for. Now I’ll have to pay megabucks for a new pair. And I’m skint as it is.”

  Was that all? Molly felt quite giddy with relief. Now that reason had returned, it was perfectly apparent that this was no mad-woman or con-artist, just an ordinary girl perhaps five or six years older than herself, with an unusually upfront manner and an accent she couldn’t place. “I’m really sorry,” she said, thinking as much of her own lurid imaginings as the missing Rollerblades.

  “Not your fault, sweetie. Only how could Janine do that? We were supposed to go out partying tonight. She’s an Ozzie, for God’s sake. Sydney,” she added darkly, as if that explained everything.

  “And you’re from . . . ?”

  “Melbourne, of course.”

  Molly nodded. Her vague mental map of Australia showed the two cities only about a millimeter apart, but clearly the moral divide was a yawning chasm.

  The Australian girl sighed. “I’m too trusting, that’s my problem.” She rolled her eyes at Molly, twisting her features into a rueful grimace that was somehow comical. “Go on, call me a dickhead.”

  “Dickhead.” Molly grinned.

  The girl burst out laughing. “Gee, thanks. I’m Alicia, by the way.” Uh-lee-sha was how she pronounced it, in an accent as ripe and rich as Camembert running off the plate. “I lived in this place for a couple of weeks when I first got here. Now I’m kipping on someone’s boat. Paris is so ace, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I just got off the train from London. I’ve never been here before.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Actually, I’ve never been out of England before.”

  Alicia goggled and collapsed onto the bed, causing Bertie to somersault off the pillow and roll to a stop in a saggy hollow behind her back. Molly chewed her lip with embarrassment, hoping Alicia wouldn’t notice him. She was suddenly conscious of the contrast between this gutsy Australian, who had traveled right round the world and knew how to rollerblade, and herself, in her office-girl clothes with a stuffed toy for company.

  “I quit my job today,” she told Alicia, with a defiant swagger, “so I thought, what the hell? I’ll go to Paris for the weekend.”

  “Good on you!” Alicia was frankly admiring. “Freedom’s my motto. Freedom to
go where I like, do what I like, be the person I am.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Molly said fervently. “That’s why I’m here. Live a little. Go wild.”

  “So, what are your plans?”

  “Well, I thought I’d start tomorrow at the Louvre—”

  There was a scornful snort. “No, I mean now. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Molly faltered. Automatically her eyes swivelled to the pathetic heap of pyjamas and sponge-bag at the end of her bed.

  Alicia followed her gaze. “Aw, don’t be such a wuss.” For a moment she eyed Molly consideringly, as if judging her suitability for some unknown task. Then she slapped her thighs with both palms and stood up. “Come on,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Since Janine’s ratted out on me I’ll take you instead.”

  “Take me where?”

  “Get some shoes on.”

  “But—”

  “Grab a jacket.”

  Molly’s ears sang with excitement. Where were they going? What would happen? Who was this girl? But somehow the shoes were already on her feet. A jacket seemed to leap of its own accord from the hanger into her waiting hand. Alicia was at the door flipping the latch impatiently. “Got plenty of money?”

  “Yes!” Molly gave a breathless laugh. “But—”