‘Forget the others,’ I told her. ‘Yours and mine. The reason why I ride out into the salt marshes at midnight to talk to you, the reason I phone you up with stupid questions at dawn on a Sunday, the reason I somersault over scooters, the reason I went along to your exhibition even though you asked me not to, is because I’ve decided what I really want. You.’
This was what had earned me my first caviar kiss of the evening. And this was why we were clutched together on the Pont des Arts, watching Paris’s golden street lights flicker over the dark waters of the Seine.
I whispered in her ear. ‘Come with me to my apartment, now, please.’
She tensed in my arms. Then I felt a breath of warm air on my neck as she relaxed. ‘Yes.’
I squeezed her then like someone who’s just been reunited with a kidnap victim. She’d been taken away from me and now she was back.
8
‘WHERE DO YOU live?’ she asked as we scanned the road for the white roof light of an unoccupied taxi.
‘Do you promise not to laugh?’
‘Yes.’
I told her. She laughed.
And she was the one wanting promises from me.
Luckily my front door was brand new. The landlady had had an indestructible metal frame fitted around the old varnished door, and if you treated it gently, it opened and shut with no more than a whoosh of air and a barely audible clunk.
There was the problem of getting across the creaky floorboards of the entrance hall to my room, but when I poked my head round the open front door, I could hear faint DVD laughter from the living room. Whoever was in tonight was engrossed in Friends.
I really did not want to go through introductions to my flatmates – Hi, this is Alexa and I’d like to go to bed with her as soon as possible, so goodnight.
We arrived at my bedroom door with the giggles but without interruption. I stifled any potential rattling from my keys and swung my room door open for Alexa to go in.
But she didn’t. And it wasn’t because she wanted to be carried over the threshold.
As soon as I’d squeezed past her, I saw why.
There, squinting at us from my bed, was a half-asleep, half-naked Nathalie.
Oh, merde, merde and encore merde.
Alexa was staring at me with the bitter shock of a fiancée who finds out that you postponed your engagement party so you could go to a swingers’ night with her mum.
‘Alexa, this is Nathalie. She’s someone else’s wife. Nathalie, this is Alexa.’ At least, I thought, something could be salvaged if we all respected a few social conventions.
‘Vous êtes Alexa?’ Nathalie, a sophisticated woman, grasped the full horror of the situation instantly. She pulled the duvet up over her shoulders, as if covering a few inches of flesh might make things more decent.
‘And someone else’s wife sleeps in your bed?’ Alexa had a tear in her eye again, but this one wasn’t accompanied by a smile.
‘No. No, not at all. It’s not my room. I don’t have a room yet. I’m sleeping in the lounge. But I thought I’d use Matthieu’s bed. He’s my flatmate. He’s away, you see. Nathalie is his wife.’
Sounded pretty damn convincing, I thought.
Alexa wasn’t quite convinced, though. Well, not convinced at all.
‘Paul. Stop talking complete crap!’ she snapped.
‘She is right, Paul, stop talking crap.’ This was Nathalie, nodding maternally from the bed.
The women were ganging up on me, but I saw that they were right. Now more than ever it was time for the truth.
‘OK, yes, I’m sorry, Alexa. This is Nathalie. I have slept with her a couple of times, but that was when I thought you weren’t interested in me any more. She’s married, I didn’t invite her here tonight, I don’t know why she’s here and I don’t think we’re going to sleep together again. Right, Nathalie?’ Nathalie nodded agreement. ‘That is the truth, Alexa, I swear it.’
I might even have pulled it off if Alexa hadn’t looked down for a moment as she tried to work out where she stood in this bedroom à trois.
She pointed to the dark object standing at the foot of the bedside table.
She didn’t need to say anything. She just shook her head resignedly, glowered at me for a second or two as if putting a curse on me, and marched out of the room.
The heavy front door slammed and shook the whole neighbourhood.
It was the bag, of course. She’d seen the handbag standing there, with the bottle of water beside it. Rather like a side view of Notre Dame, in fact, a monument to this whole new generation of lies that had reared up in front of Alexa and convinced her that everything I’d said that evening had been bullshit.
I could have explained. I could at least have said, ‘I can explain.’ But no one who says ‘I can explain’ ever gets the chance to explain, do they?
‘Well, you idiot?’ Nathalie folded her arms sternly at me.
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve really screwed up this time.’
‘No, you imbecile. Go and stop her. Run!’
Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?
6
Ex and the City
1
THE GREEKS GOT it right. There are times when the gods are with you and there are times when they sit on top of their mountain pissing with laughter at all the shit they’ve caused.
The toilet gods had led me into a trap. They’d allowed me to think I was getting away with my hopeless lies just long enough to aim a steaming bucket of merde at my head.
When I came out the front door of my apartment, an old lady in a blue raincoat was getting out of the lift. This was Madame Gibert, our next-door neighbour on the landing. She was even holding the door open for me.
I did a swift mental calculation. I usually preferred to take the stairs, but this was a new lift, and seemed to go up and down pretty fast. I could hear Alexa’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. Would the lift be faster? The fact that the door was being held open for me seemed like a sign from the gods.
It was. Get in, they were telling me, and you’re ours, all ours.
I got in, hit the zero button, lurched down a foot and stopped.
I could only think it was revenge from the lift gods because I visited them so rarely.
My neighbour seemed to have a different interpretation of the disaster that had just struck me.
‘Non, non, non!’ She began to harangue me through the glass wall of the lift about people not waiting for the door to shut properly before they start punching the buttons. ‘It got stuck like that last week, and this summer, Madame Lagrange from the third floor spent one whole Sunday trapped in there because the repair men were on holiday, and before that, the little crétin on the second floor banged the buttons so hard that . . .’
All I could think of was that Alexa’s footsteps were now getting desperately faint.
I hit a few more buttons. Zero again, one, four, five, anything to get the bloody thing to move, but this only raised the neighbour to a new level of hysteria.
‘Non, non, non, non!’ she howled. ‘You are going to destroy it once and for all. Call the emergency number, call the emergency number written on the door.’
My phone. Of course. It was switched off, and it took me two goes to get the pin number right, then at last it was ringing.
‘Come on, Alexa, please, give me one last chance.’ I begged the phone to get through to her, but it stopped trying as soon as it reached her voicemail.
I left a message explaining everything – the bag, the fact that Nathalie was a TV reporter, why I wasn’t running after her – but I’m not sure how audible it was. The neighbour assumed I was speaking to the lift people, and my pleas and apologies were set to a backing track of her whining on about this making three emergencies this month, and she for one was determined to ‘get rid of this menace to the tenants’.
Alexa would probably think I was calling to say I’d been evicted for sexually harassing a mad old French woman – for the
third time.
My flatmates were loving it. It reminded them of a Friends episode where ‘Hoss’ wanted to get it on with ‘Ha-Shell’ and an ex-girlfriend of his was in the apartment. Or was it the other way round? They had a little argument about this on the landing while I squatted in the tiny lift and tried not to scream at them that this was not some fucking episode of some fucking soap, this was my real fucking life that was being fucked up.
Nathalie kindly came and sat on the stairs for a while. Fully dressed, I’m glad to say. She told the others to bugger off and leave us alone. She even offered to go round to Alexa’s place and explain. But I said no, it probably wasn’t a good idea. Alexa had had enough of other women for one night.
Although I did suggest that a sworn, signed statement testifying to the fact that I hadn’t planned for her to be in my bed might come in handy at some point.
Yes, why had she been there, anyway?
Her husband, it seemed, had unwisely left her alone in Paris while he took the kids to visit his mum. So Nathalie was free to sleep where she wanted. She’d got my roommates to let her in, she said. She’d assumed I was still with Jean-Marie and would be in need of serious relaxation after meeting him, because he was being a general pain in the butt at the moment. He was pushing ahead with his plan to get to the top in party politics by turning his guns on the député – the MP – of the Eighth arrondissement by whipping up all kinds of attention-seeking trouble in the neighbourhood to discredit the incumbent.
This, Nathalie said, was why she had put off doing a film about Jean-Marie. She was checking up on him, trying to get a bigger story – the real story instead of some TV showcase that would just serve as part of his campaign.
Two hurried and sympathetic guys in silver overalls arrived and thanked me profusely for not peeing in the lift.
‘Never get in a lift if you’re hungry, thirsty or need the toilettes,’ they advised me.
‘What if you’re chasing after your girlfriend?’ I asked.
‘Depends if you want to catch her,’ one of the guys replied.
They laughed and I didn’t, because it reminded me how much I’d wanted to catch her.
Half an hour later, Nathalie and I were staring up at the glass-fronted loft where Alexa was probably sleeping. There was no light, no sign of life. The whole courtyard of converted warehouses was dark and silent.
No one answered my five long, hard prods at the bell. We could hear it buzzing up there like a giant fly trapped in an aquarium. If anyone was at home, they were either ignoring the buzzer or full of sleeping tablets.
‘Maybe I could shimmy up that drainpipe,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what shimmy is, but climbing up would be stupid. You must let her have a rest, and return here in the morning.’ Nathalie was already walking towards the exit. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘we should go to bed now.’
We did, too, but only to sleep. We both agreed that it would be a friendly, T-shirts-on night rather than something raunchier.
And even though it was difficult waking up next to a beautiful woman and persuading myself that one little morning shag was out of the question, I thought how great it would be if people could just bed down together now and again for a bit of company. Even if you only sleep with someone in the eyes-closed, snoring sense of the word, it’s good to feel that they’re there with you.
Just after dawn, we were buzzing at Alexa’s door again.
And still there was no reaction.
I called Alexa’s mobile number – voicemail. I tried her Paris number, and I could hear the phone trilling two floors above us until Alexa’s voice cut in.
‘Bonjour,’ she said. She informed me in French and English that she would be away for at least the next two weeks, and suggested I call her in London.
‘She’s gone,’ Nathalie said. ‘Perhaps she even went immediately last night. She is very, very angry with you, I think.’
‘Yes. Do you reckon I’ll ever be able to calm her down and explain?’
‘I don’t know. She must be very – what is the word? Blessée?’
‘Hurt, wounded.’
‘Yes. You have hurt her. You must win her confidence again. Are you good at diplomacy?’
No, I thought. If I was a diplomat, I’d get caught trying to help the foreign ambassador’s wife dig a lost earring out of her bra.
2
IT WAS NATHALIE who convinced me to wait a few hours before rushing to the Gare du Nord on my diplomatic mission.
‘First you must tell your employees where you are going, and reassure them,’ she said. ‘Then you must take some clean clothes. Alexa will think you are very romantic if you go immediately, but she will also think you are a smelly imbecile.’
So I didn’t get to London till late afternoon, when the damp, grey dusk was descending on the double-decker rush of Notting Hill Gate.
I hadn’t been back in town for months, and I almost fainted from shock when the traffic lights turned red, the little green man lit up, and no one tried to knock me over as I crossed the road.
I picked my way along the pavement, instinctively scanning for dog merde, and felt confused when my lasers hit a blank. No dog merde in the streets? No drivers running red lights? Was this a real city or some sanitized Urban Experience theme park?
Nathalie had blagged Alexa’s address out of the Pompidou Centre people. It led me to a little mews that didn’t look like part of a capital city, either.
It was a wide, cobbled cul de sac, about fifty yards long, lined on either side with squat, old-looking townhouses. Some were bare brick, others had been whitewashed. One house had a teak coffee table outside, another had a pram. There were large potted plants guarding practically every door, and even the little individual dustbins looked quaint and rural compared to the massive wheelie bins that most Londoners have.
I couldn’t figure out why an ultra-rich East European would be living in yucca-plant Bohemia and not in a stucco palace in Kensington or a flashy loft overlooking the Thames. Nevertheless, before I’d even looked at the house numbers, I guessed which was Yuri’s – it had to be the one with the silver Mercedes sports car parked outside.
You could almost hear the other residents bristling with indignation at this scar on the face of their de-urbanized community. Apart from the lights in the windows, the ‘no parking at any time’ signs were the most visible things in the whole street.
I walked past the house, trying to look as if I belonged in the mews, and gave the front windows a casual but attentive going-over.
An open-plan kitchen was apparently empty. The entrance hall behind the half-glass front door was brightly lit and as unpopulated as the kitchen. The two upstairs floors were in darkness, except for the blinking red light of a burglar alarm.
I turned round at the end of the mews and beat a tactical retreat. Time for a think.
And time for a drink.
There was a pub on the corner of the street leading down from the Tube station. Sitting in the window I would be able to see anyone coming out of or going into the mews.
Offering a prayer of thanks to the gods of all-day pub opening hours, and hoping that they weren’t in league with the gods of disappearing girlfriends or violent fathers-in-law, I bought myself a frothy-headed amber pint and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and sat down to ponder on how my life had gone so far off track in just twenty-four hours.
Here I was, with my Paris tea room starting to cruise, abandoning everything to sit in a London pub and spy on the house of a DVD pirate in case the girl I was stalking turned up.
How many days was I going to keep it up for? What was I actually planning to do?
I had no idea.
Even if I did eventually come up with some masterplan, there was no guarantee it would work. Alexa might not give me a chance to try out my amateur diplomacy. I’d seen for myself how well she’d mastered that key phrase in English life – ‘bugger off.
It was all totally insane.
But at the same time it felt like the most sensible thing I’d ever done.
3
I’M SURPRISED THEY don’t call it the Hanging Gardens of Covent or something similarly exotic.
Honestly, Covent Garden felt like the Third World, with all those cycle rickshaws tinging their bells at me, touting for custom. No, not even the Third World, because these days most Asian cities have done away with this type of sweated labour.
It was the same with the poor guys standing on street corners holding their advertising placards. In Paris, you often see student hostesses handing out leaflets for restaurants, phone deals or department stores. I’d forgotten that here in Central London, you see real sandwich men, or guys holding placards on street corners – not students but bearded, backpacked homeless guys who clearly need the money to pay for more than their phone bill and their next pair of Timberlands. What a job, freezing your butt off all day as the caretaker of a sign saying ‘2 pizza’s 4 the price of 1, 50 yards on left’.
How soon till we saw shoeshine men and street dentists in London, I wondered. Or lepers.
My mate Chris had suggested we meet up in an Indian restaurant near Covent Garden market. It was still early evening, so I had time to get a table, order a beer, and regret that I’d agreed to eat here.
I knew it was going to be bad as soon as I saw the décor. It seems to me that the quality of Indian restaurants is often in inverse proportion to the price of the furnishings.
This place was Bombay meets Copenhagen – long, communal benches, minimalist cutlery, Bollywood posters, and light fittings like great robotic scorpions hanging over people’s heads but not actually lighting very much. The music was Oriental lounge, and the prices were truly international in that they were so big they made me wonder whether they weren’t in rupees. A starter was the price of a two-course meal with a carafe of wine in my local café in Paris.