Style

In a cashmere sweater the colour of morning clouds, Mme Durebex stood over me as I wrote out verbs for Laurent. I pulled in my chin to avoid smelling her breath. She had brought me up to the kitchen to check what I was doing before I left for the evening, and Laurent was down in his bedroom writing out his vocab. Watching me write, Mme Durebex wore an expression of confusion and horror that was becoming very familiar to me.

– You must write clearly, Shona, she enunciated, as though I, too, were learning the verbs. Her bracelets rattled.

– Not as if for an adult. Write in big, clear letters.

I wrote:

     

– What’s that? she said sharply.

– French write very differently.

– Oh, I’d better do it.

She took the pen and wrote:

     

Too baroque, I thought to myself.

But from that day, to make myself understood, I began to change my handwriting. My ‘y’s and ‘g’s looped more and more extravagantly, till they overlapped their lines. My vowels developed frills; I began to cross my sevens and punctuate phone numbers. Gradually I cultivated the fussy elegance of French handwriting.

If handwriting dresses what comes from our minds, the clothes on my body were already changing. At our first meeting, Mme Durebex’ sagacious Parisian appraisal would have revealed just another girl in the casual chic worn by most people my age: oversized 501s, thick-soled shoes, baseball jacket of dark wool. My last op-shop skirt from Sydney had worn out, my psychedelic shirts had been replaced by one of denim and one of corduroy. I had sold my fringed suede jacket to a backpacker in Barcelona.

In Sydney I’d looked louder, I’d sounded more vulgar. I’d looked and sounded like most people I knew there. The same sort of people probably lived here, but they were hidden from me. My Sydney was loud; Paris more crowded, more conservative. I felt too powerless in Paris, too isolated, to assert my personality through clothes. The mere fact of being an Australian in Paris was an alternative lifestyle. I was finding freedom in anonymity.

Mme Durebex disappeared, saying she was getting something for me, and I finished writing the verbs in my version of the French way.

Suddenly, a screech from Laurent shot up the stairs:

– Maman! Shona wants me to tear a page from my book! Maman!

I looked up in surprise.

– He wrote his vocab in the wrong section, I tried to explain to Mme Durebex, who had returned to the kitchen with a large sausage bag.

The clunk of a key in the front door extinguished Laurent’s screeching. I heard the slow tramp tramp of the father coming up the stairs. I felt him pass on the landing, but did not turn.

Mme Durebex hefted the sausage bag onto the kitchen table.

– Voilà, Shona, she beamed. I made up a bag of clothes for you.

Out came a shirt and skirt. I turned up my nose.

– I never wear brown.

She burrowed deeper into the bag. I accepted a white blouse. There was a tailored camel-coloured jacket that might be warm. I took it, wondering if I would ever feel comfortable in it. I had a rush of guilt at all I was refusing and thanked Mme Durebex profusely.

Perplexed, she looked from the sports shirt in her hands back to me.

– Don’t you like Lacoste? You can wear it under a jumper. Very well. C’est pas la peine.

Laurent started to scream again. Mme Durebex pushed the clothes back into the bag with an apologetic, Oh, that’s hideous.

Her embarrassment soothed mine. Mme Durebex had all the presumptions of a rich person but none of the aplomb with which to carry them.

– I’ll give them to Nadenne’s wife, she said.

She clacked down the stairs to the bedroom. Laurent was making sure I could hear everything.

– But she wants me to tear my book!

– Shona knows what she’s doing. If she says that, she’s right.

Did I really look like some waif in rags? The camel jacket made me feel like a middle-aged woman. I imagined what Matthew would say: You look so North Shore.

But that guy was appreciating me. He’d run up the platform to get into the same carriage as me. We wobbled opposite one another on the fold-out seats next to the doors. I tilted my head to the glass so I could check my appearance, give him a view of the best angle, watch the lights curve in the tunnel ahead, and watch his reflection.

His dark eyes wandered the carriage and came back to rest on me. He sat with his legs loosely apart and I could make out every bone in his knees through the worn fabric of his jeans. He wore a thigh-length leather jacket just like the one Matthew used to wear, and a gold hoop in one ear.

Too cautious, I watched his reflection while he looked directly at me. I bet Matthew was with someone else now. Incapable of being alone, I thought contemptuously. But where was my affair? Paris must be très romantic, Nora had written. What about all those cute French boys?

This one caught my eye on him in the window. I rearranged the camel jacket across my lap and pulled my hair back, trying to ignore those moist eyelids and long lashes. He took off his jacket and imitated me, grinning. Wide, lazy mouth.

I got off at Gambetta, though I could have taken the métro two stops further. Paris is not romantic, I had written back to Nora, for an old cynic like me. Just another big city, beautiful, and full of lonely people.

The net curtain behind the concierge’s door twitched as I limped through the entrance. A poodle’s face pressed against the glass in imitation of its mistress above. I took off my shoes and socks as soon as I got into my room. They were Matthew’s socks. He had lots of pairs, all the same thick undyed wool. I dabbed the blister on my heel with tea-tree oil and put a pot of water on to boil.

I watched evening activity move into the building opposite. There was a woman at a stove; two storeys above, the Vietnamese family were already eating their dinner. A window opened and a bag of food was deposited on the ledge outside – the same environmentally sound cooling system I used. Somebody was taking off their clothes. Below, the car park was gradually filling and a mist had covered the distant view, leaving only a band of lights, moving slowly – the périphérique.

Matthew’s socks, drooped over the stepladder, were still warm when I put them back on. Summer and winter he wore these with walking boots and green King Gees, stiff with plaster. His T-shirts were so thin you could see the curve of his shoulder blades when he took a corner. He drove a ute with a floor covering of soyburger cartons, chisels, apple cores and damp towels. I hoisted myself in beside him and sat with my feet on the dashboard. The seat was always gritty with sand.

When I first met him he was living with the girl called Shona. He said he’d never really loved her, but he didn’t move out of there for another three months.

Matthew seemed rugged to me in those days. He was almost as old as my brother David, but he didn’t care about a mortgage and success. His hair was longish and unkempt, almost black, though it was a lot lighter when he washed it. His bottom lip was always cracked. He had a scathing and romantic view of the world, and he didn’t notice my flawed iris till we’d been sleeping together for six months. He didn’t like shaving, so I had permanent gravel rash. It’s your dry skin I’ve inherited, Mum, I would say at breakfast.

There is nothing as exciting as illicit romance. Illicit anything got me excited, as long as somebody else instigated it. I got wet just kissing him in the kitchen before his girlfriend came home.

He would drive me home over the Harbour Bridge, a John Lee Hooker tape crackling through the speakers that clattered back and forth beneath the rear windscreen. Parked in the dark street, we could hear my mother calling to my father that tea was made. When Matthew leant over and kissed my neck, a hot rush went down through my body.

Alone, I walked through my parents’ garden, heavy with the perfume of deadly nightshade. By the time I had chatted to them about the exams I was failing, Matthew would have snuck down the side of the house and climbed through my window.

He would be standing there when I opened the bedroom door, smiling at me. I missed him now. I never thought I would miss him so much physically.

The tea-tree oil made my room smell like the bush. Pungent eucalyptus, taking me back home. The boiling water had steamed up the window.

The branches of an old angophora would swing back and forth across the window while we fucked on the single bed. I forgot about that cup of tea; there were better ways to wind down. My hands were smaller and softer than Matthew’s: pleasure coming quicker, leaving quicker.