The leftover dahl in my one battered pot looked like effluvium from a wound. In Hôtel des Etrangers I felt like I was corroding within, and so sustained my exterior in compensation. I looked after myself well. I shopped and cooked carefully: salads, vegetables, grains and pulses. I ate wholemeal pasta and wholemeal bread. I fossicked through the little Asian and Arab grocery stores for the sort of rice and spices I liked. I always cooked too much, I always ate it all. I was getting fat on all this healthy food. But my excessive food habits were just another indication of the stoicism that was engulfing me.
Once, when I was very young, I made myself a huge bowl of Weetbix and stewed fruit for breakfast and couldn’t eat it all. Dad said, Never mind, Siobhan, we’ll put it in the fridge and you can eat it for breakfast tomorrow. The next day it tasted so foul I swamped it with more weetbix and fruit to get it down. Still, there was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Dad said again, Never mind, Siobhan, you can eat it for breakfast tomorrow. The next day Mum intervened.
She wasn’t too early; I’d sure learnt my lesson.
But I was my own teacher now. I wouldn’t eat that dahl this time – I left it there, encrusted pus in the old pot.
My father was a Depression man, his daughter a girl prone to depression.
I lay on my bed with a book. I could hear keys in locks and footsteps down the corridor. It was Saturday night and I wished I were going out too. What about Bar Sangria down on Rue de la Roquette? Matthew would never go in there. Too trendy, he said. But I’d always wanted to. A bit of lipstick, some money in my pocket, all those cute French boys. An exciting night in Paris was waiting for me just outside my door.
In I walked, immaculately dressed. I dropped my Bloody Mary all over my shirt. I sat in a corner furtively picking my nose, realising only afterwards they’d all been able to see me in the mirror.
No cracks of light under the doors as I walked down the corridor to the toilet. Everybody was out. The occupant of room twenty-seven had finally taken the sign ‘Je dors, merci’ off his door. It had been there a week.
I sealed the letter to Nora. The envelope stayed blank. I had hoped my address book would turn up once I’d unpacked properly, but now I knew I’d have to ring home again. It was a daunting prospect. I crouched over the toilet, feeling my thighs goose-pimple with cold. A man downstairs yelled, Bon! Je pars, and there was a rustling in the lightwell of rain beginning, slowly, softly.
That was lucky. Who wants to go out in the rain?
I was always up early scanning the column in the back pages of Libération. The rooms for rent required a hefty bond. Sometimes there was an obligation to buy the furniture already there, or they wanted to see a carte de séjour, at which I quickly made an excuse and hung up. Most often I stood in the phone booth redialling a number for up to an hour, waiting for the engaged tone to relent. Each of those beeps flashed a picture of someone else in Paris, phone to ear, trying to find somewhere to live. When you got through the place had gone.
I was from Sydney, bright brassy flippant Sydney. I thought the metropolis pulse was my heartbeat. But every body’s and every city’s heart beats with a different rhythm. Sydney moved with a slow chaos, Sydney’s motor was made of spare parts, a sort of jalopy you could ride no-hands, distracted by all the beautiful views. Sydney was languid, ambience frenetic – lying around on a hot day with the whine of insects around you. And permeating my Sydney was family, family with all its comforts and constraints.
In Paris I was on my own, no family help, no family hindrance.
Cold Paris. They say Paris is rich with things to do and see, a city of beauty and romance. Paris is a sleek automobile. The duco is chipping. From it come people lean and mean. Slick with haste to get the last métro, the crunchiest baguette, the most prestigious job, the most comfortable apartment. Paris, city of dogs marking out their territory, snarling at anyone who covets their bone. Faces sour with intent rush past, and I rush with them. Day-to-day survival is so important you can not afford to lose your grip for a moment. Paris, city of high standards, where most people just survive.
I looked at noticeboards in bookshops, I went back to the American church. I lined up with all the other hopefuls, hoping against hope. How could I have forgotten, rushing back like I did, that it was this accommodation problem that had driven Matthew and I from Paris in the first place? Foolish idealist, why did I bother, frittering away time and money? What did I expect?
The patronne was at the door every time I passed. Did I go to work today? Where was my husband? Was he going to rejoin me? Was I looking for an apartment? Ah c’est très difficile à Paris. You know Monsieur Untel in room seventeen? Well, he has been looking for nine months, and he is Parisian! She hoped I was not doing my washing in my room; that was absolutely forbidden. I must be back before eleven at night because the doors were locked then and no exceptions were made. What was that I was carrying? A picture? It was against the rules to bring things back to the hotel. Nothing but your personal luggage; this was not a storage space.
It was like being at boarding school, sitting over my quadrillé notebook at the tiny table. The trough bed. The rules stuck on the back of the door and my childlike fear at the pink stain my dripping shirt had left on the lino. My money had not arrived and I stole tins of tuna from the Felix Potin on the corner. I had finished my bag of brussel sprouts but their farty smell lingered in the room.
This is no good, I said to myself lying in the hotel room. Remember where you are, Siobhan. Paris, city of dogs and down-and-outs. Winter was coming and the clochards would die at night if the métro stations were closed. Paris, exotic and full of hidden delights for those who searched. Paris impervious, Paris charming. The Seine glowed at night and the Marais looked beautiful under snow. I wanted another winter here, at the very least.
A tap creaked on and off, somebody cleared their throat with jarring regularity. I lay on the bed, bored, rootless, listening to two women and a man talking in the corridor about chercher un logement. I’d been glad when the Durebex went away, but now, after a couple of weeks, even their company seemed preferable to just my own.
I hated the desperation of this city, I hated what it reduced me to. There was no consolation in being surrounded by others in the same boat, just more incitement to bailing out. But I couldn’t. The lower I was squashed, the more determined I became; like a repressed child, I only wanted to hit back harder.
In the corridor the man began to recount an anecdote about the strange habits of an old neighbour of his. The neighbour would bring a woman home on the days his wife worked at the hospital. The man reproduced the sounds of whipping and screaming he’d hear coming from the neighbour’s apartment.
The two women tittered. One of them fell back against my door. The man’s voice became low and urgent.
– Un jour, j’ai appelé la police.
Yes, I was going to stay in Paris. I wanted to understand this place better. I wanted to understand myself better and I thought I could here. My visa would expire soon. I would take up the Durebex’ offer and go to the Alps with them. It would give me a chance to renew my visa in Geneva.
A chair scraped across the floor above. The trio in the corridor dispersed. Somebody was kick-starting their motor scooter below the window. I opened my journal at a new page.