A Stranger in Paris Read online

  A STRANGER IN PARIS

  A STRANGER IN PARIS

  Karen Webb

  First published 2018

  by Impress Books Ltd

  Innovation Centre, Rennes Drive, University of Exeter Campus, Exeter EX4 4RN

  © Karen Webb

  The right of the author to be identified as the originator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 13: 978-1-911293-31-6 (pbk)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-911293-32-3 (ebk)

  Typeset in Plantin

  by Swales and Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon

  Printed and bound in England

  by ImprintDigital.net

  For Gran

  With Acknowledgements to Roger Mathews, without whose patience and encouragement this book would not have been written.

  To my husband William who took care of everything else, so I could write.

  To Andrew Lownie who told me to put the stories on paper, and Jane Dorner on her Memoir writing course (A Chapter Away) who told me to go deeper.

  To Heather Whitehall Trochon and Debbie Stocker who said ‘next bit, please’.

  And above all Richard Willis of Impress, who liked the story enough to take a chance.

  Author’s note

  This book is written from memory almost thirty years after the events. Inevitably conversations are not transcripts of exact conversations and events may not always be strictly chronological. Names and identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence have been changed so that to all intents and purposes this book may be considered a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other …”

  Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

  Chapter 1

  Aberystwyth, 1989

  The ambitiously named ‘Sprinter’ wound into Aberystwyth station signalling the end of my university life. It was time to say goodbye to drenched hair, waxed raincoats and missed deadlines, never mind three years of not understanding the bottom half of municipal signposts. I was off to Paris, city of lights and romance, to be reunited with the love of my life, Monsieur David Azoulay. Standing with me on the platform to mark this momentous occasion were my closest friends of recent months – a group of men in long robes huddled against the spitting rain; their decision to don the national costume of their home countries adding a bright, if somewhat incongruous, note to the station platform. The guard threw a suspicious glance in our direction as he strolled past, blowing a sharp blast of warning into his whistle. We resembled a mislaid pantomime cast heading for Blackpool pier. Half the group were muttering in foreign languages, none of which were Welsh.

  The men’s’ grimaces and doleful looks were clear enough to decipher in any language: You bloody idiot, are you really prepared to lose your last shred of pride? You little fool, embarking on this journey; this hiding to nothing. In their eyes, I was a ridiculous English woman; chasing after a French man who had told me it’s over; pursuing a man of deep faith, whose parents had torn my letters before his eyes for he was an Orthodox Jew and I was not.

  Not that the man I had loved for the past few months had looked or dressed like an Orthodox Jew. Not, at least, when playing the field at Aberystwyth. I’d checked out stock images at the library. There’d been nothing to give away David’s game. No clues in his razor-sharp hair or hound-tooth jacket. He’d whispered nothing about Judaism into my ear when we first met, only sweet nothings in that drawling French accent which had left me dribbling into my snakebite at the union bar. If there were any subtler clues, then I’d missed them! And by the time I knew what all of this meant, it was too late. I should accept my fate and see the sense of David’s words. That’s what Rafi said. My station friends shared strict Muslim values. They were unsympathetic to what they considered to be my borderline stalking. My chosen one would never make an honest woman of me. This was their collective belief. My market value had been lowered, in Habte’s words, to less than that of a geriatric camel.

  They pressed me to the centre of our group; a rogue weed that had sprouted up between them, and the tears streamed down my cheeks as I realised that I would probably never see these men again. There had been sulking and fighting, yet they had been everything that family could be during those last months before finals. They had spent their energies attempting to exercise the control of a frustrated parent over a wayward child and I had repaid them with rebellion.

  Today was the day when they would finally wash their hands of me. It had been an emotional train-wreck of a journey, but I was finally free, and my adult life could begin.

  * * *

  Five months earlier I hadn’t a single Frenchman on my list of friends and acquaintances, let alone any intention of starting a new life with one.

  It was a bleak day during the first week of January and I had returned after a disastrous Christmas holiday with my Welsh fiancé Steve. There was a funny postcard circulating in Aberystwyth gift shops at the time. On one side there was a sheep pelted by hailstones in the winter, and on the other a sheep pelted by hailstones in the summer – with no difference between the two. I’d long since given up trying to brush my hair straight or keep my make-up on longer than half an hour. For nearly three years I was that bedraggled creature, hair curling wildly in the damp air. I trundled my case along the pier to a line of shabby Victorian houses. My room was part of an end terrace which faced out to sea towards the war memorial. Cold and damp had blistered the gaudy pink plaster so it resembled a pock-marked diva.

  Reaching my doorstep, the relief I had felt at making it home turned immediately sour when my key refused to enter the lock. I forced it, but it jammed, sticking half in, half out, the rattle of the door handle echoing through the damp, debt-littered hallway.

  It wasn’t even lunchtime, yet I’d been up since dawn and done a runner from a man in Neath, who was under the mistaken belief that we were marrying after my graduation. As I paused to consider my predicament, the recollection of a pile of mouldy chilli con carne dishes pricked my conscience: the remnants of that last Christmas meal we’d left behind, along with the overflowing bins and the menace of mice. I wasn’t the only culprit. But where was everyone else?

  It wasn’t the first time the landlord had threatened us with eviction due to phantom rent payments, unwashed dishes and rancid student fridges. Frustrated, I lashed out, piercing the rotten wooden panel at the bottom of the door with my foot.

  The upstairs window to my room opened with a jangle. A long red ribbon with a bell hung from the handle and batted in the breeze. On the sill, there was a new addition: a canary in a golden cage buffeting in the breeze. The collection of Norse Sagas I used for blocking out the draught was nowhere in sight.

  A Chinese man leant out and stared down through thick-rimmed glasses. His denim jacket was buttoned up tight over his Adam’s apple: an Asiatic Shakin’ Stevens. Business Studies department no doubt; Economics at a push.

  I was more upset about the canary than my eviction. I knew from my early budgie-keeping years that draughts could kill birds. I may not have washed my chilli dishes, but I was CND and Save t
he Whale. An occasional vegetarian too. There’d been a police arrest to prove my convictions, following an incident with three lesbian housemates, guided by the Runes and the fervour of protest. That was the night I’d learnt that truly ‘biodegradable when it rains paint’ doesn’t need wire brushes, bleach and ten years of acid rain to remove it. The police had caught us, brushes in hand, painting ‘shadows’ in memory of the Hiroshima bombing. My portrait of a Scottie dog in the park, a reminder of the animals that perished, scoring ten out of ten with the local junior school. Animals were my thing. There’d be no cruelty to canaries in my room.

  ‘Open the door, will you!’

  The wind sucked the words from my mouth and hurled them out to sea.

  ‘Landlord throw your stuff out,’ the man said. ‘This is my room now.’

  ‘He can’t do that!’ I kicked the door again. ‘I’ve got rights! Where’s Nuclear Neil?’

  ‘Big man gone.’

  I took a minute to digest this information.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Tutor say Big Man play with Last Nerve. College dismiss him. Mother take him far away. Good thing. You go now. Bye.’

  The bird flapped, the bell jangled, and the window banged shut.

  My boxes were round the back by the bins, the unopened warning letters from my landlord still inside. The course books had gone, filched by some bastard and sold off at the student bookshop no doubt. My spider plant had survived and was sitting on the top, watered by Welsh rain. There was a pile of letters from Barclays Bank stuffed down the side. The paper had turned to mulch but there was no denying the red reminder ink which had leeched into the pulp. I didn’t need to withdraw the envelope’s sopping contents to know I was overdrawn. My student loan would have arrived by now, but it would only fill a hole and leave me back at zero. Dad was meant to send a ‘top-up’. Maggie Thatcher had calculated that he could afford it, but ‘topping up’ implied you’d something in the kitty to start with. Dad had a mortgage on our family bungalow and was moonlighting all the hours god sent; flitting over to Dublin in the dead of night to repair planes when he should have been resting on his compulsory four days off. There was never enough money in the pot, and we were still trying to get back on our feet from the Laker Airways fiasco when the company he worked for had gone bust, and we’d nearly lost it all.

  My mother was against university from the start.

  ‘She’ll only get married and have kids. We need to save up for her brother.’

  But despite her yelling Dad was adamant. With an AAB at A level – he reckoned I deserved my chance at further education. But now he was struggling to pay.

  I was about to kick the door again, when I heard the basement window of the house next door squeak open.

  ‘Oy! Over here!’

  I crunched across the pathway to an identical Victorian semi, also converted into a student let. Below ground level there was a small window far from the reach of sunlight. I peered into the dark, fusty room below.

  It was Vlad, my Russian neighbour. He was photosensitive and only emerged after sunset, living below ground level like the characters in Hobson’s Choice. Vlad had developed a knack for recognising people by their shoes and he’d seen mine stomping up and down the pathway.

  The rain was lashing down and my hair was plastered to my head. I’d abandoned my suitcase on the crazy-paving. ‘Come on then!’ I pleaded, ‘Let me in!’ It was Norman Bates creepy in Vlad’s pit, but anything was better than this. The head bowed in ascent and a hand reached up to close the window. I retrieved my Robin Reliant case, its fourth wheel lost at Neath bus station that morning and dragged it across the wet gravel. Vlad looked over my shoulder as if I might have been shadowed, pulled me inside and banged the door.

  He was the oldest student I knew. With the delay his department has accorded him for deadlines (lack of mobility during sunlight hours mainly), he was in the fourteenth year of his PhD with no signs of completion.

  He led the way through the stygian basement.

  It was dark and a drip of cold, mildewy water dripped down my neck. It was the perfect place to grow mushrooms.

  Bulky as a troglodyte, Vlad’s inbuilt hunch was born from years of keeping his head down. His fine, blonde hair boasted that finger-in-a-socket style. His face was pimpled dough. But it was the room that did it. It carried that inimitable dank smell; that ‘I left my clothes in the washing machine for three days before drying them’ emanation, which permeated his cell; the same smell which, when I was in the library at night, led me straight to his cubicle.

  We entered the cramped space he called home. My eyes scanned the shelves, clocking the familiar neatly stacked back-issues of Playboy. It was crunchy underfoot, the floor littered with the disembowelled computers which Vlad spent his time dismantling when not perusing porn.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Go on then.’

  I prayed that just this once my friend might produce a silver caddy and fill it with strong black Russian leaves. Predictably, he fished a dried bag of Lipton’s from the sink which, judging from its squeezed-around-the-waistline look, had already been used more than once. With a quick flick of a match he lit the gas on a small camping-stove. The flame was the brightest thing in the room and cheerful as Christmas on a foggy night.

  Vlad’s rent was cheap because he was missing a proper window. His room was no more than a Glory Hole, lit by a feeble bulb which flickered on and off when the other tenants used the loo.

  He picked up a torch and strapped it to his head, flicking it on to interrogate me.

  ‘Your lot have gone,’ he said with satisfaction. Jealous of my other friends, I know he despised Nuclear Neil and the rugby crowd.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘They dragged the tall one kicking and screaming. Two long groove marks on the shingles.’

  ‘DHSS leaving you alone?’ I asked, wanting to think about something else.

  Vlad had acquired British citizenship and dole money, despite his PhD student status.

  ‘Not so very bad. They sent me to work a couple of weeks in a darkroom at Boots.’

  ‘Anything else been going on?’

  ‘Da. Your fiancé Steve phoned the landline. He asked me to report when you arrived at the house.’

  * * *

  Half an hour later and I was back out in the stinging wind and rain, heading for the Student Welfare office. Vlad had told me what to say. He knew how to play the system. I hated asking for State help and was allergic to filling in forms. But there was no choice.

  I needed to hurry. The weather was taking a turn for the worse. It wasn’t unusual for the sea to hurl rocks against the line of shabby pink and blue guest houses on the seafront, smashing windows and unhinging signposts to old favourites like The Sea Bank Hotel, or the ‘Sperm Bank’ as the students called it. There was no-one out on the promenade. A few sad Christmas decorations blew in the wind.

  I noticed an old woman dragging her shopping trolley along the seafront and hoped she wasn’t Future Me. I didn’t want to get stuck in Aberystwyth like Vlad; he’d be drawing his pension soon.

  I was coming to the end of an era and sensed the cogs of the university churning as it spat out another batch. The future was uncertain, but I refused to turn into one of those students who clung on to their college because they were too afraid of the real world, post-uni.

  Waves chewed at the wooden pier. I relished a quick blast of warmth as I passed the gaping mouth of the arcade with its garish row of bleating fruit machines. A lone student slumped on a stool, feeding coins into a flashing orifice, a can of lager in his other hand.

  It was hardly Brideshead.

  As I overtook the old lady she scowled. The locals weren’t keen on students at the best of times (particularly once their grant was spent) and my outfit didn’t help. I was wearing black fishnet tights, high-heel black evening shoes, a short skirt, and a long green jumper whose bobbles spoke of a long and rocky road since it first hung on a rail at Dorothy
Perkins.

  My coat was somewhere in South Wales with my soon-to-be-ex-fiancé who might already have burnt it. It was pretty crap coming back to find myself homeless, but at least I was on familiar ground. I just needed to survive the coming months.

  Chapter 2

  Christmas at Steve’s house had been a sorry affair, involving, in no particular order: flu, the death of our two pet cockatiels Ralph and Elgan, the announcement of our wedding date, and the certitude that I needed to get as far away from Neath as possible.

  I’d started going out with Steve at the end of my first year. Older than me, he’d graduated the previous summer, moving back home to take up a job in IT. Computer Science was the ‘in’ thing back in those days.

  The Yuletide season was an endless round of arguments with no time to work, the result of which was a half-finished essay on Keats which lay in tatters in my bag. I choked back a rising sense of hysteria at how far behind I was, and how I’d fucked up my degree. Choppy waves slapped at the pier urging me to throw myself in and put both me and my tutor out of our misery for good.

  Whenever I’d tried to take out my books, Steve’s mum had conspired to drag me to Argos. The Priddy family behaved as if my degree was only a formality before my real life as a married woman began. Returning from the loo, I’d find my anthology of the Romantics’ poetry replaced by a copy of the Littlewoods catalogue. The family was impervious to the need for essay writing. Steve’s mum spent all day choosing electrical goods to put on our wedding list, whereas Steve spent his evenings out with his dad, down the pub or at the rugby.

  When Steve’s dad came home tipsy, after one pint too many, he made a show of saying how pleased he was that his son was marrying me, slipping his hand down the back of my dress as he did so. I told Steve, but he didn’t believe me.