13
As the date of my departure for Auckland draws near, I start to worry. And all because of a French government pension reform.
A few weeks ago, I made a remark to Alistair about an article I was reading in Libération, France’s left-wing national newspaper (co-founded by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, no less, in the early 1970s as a true democratic publication, for and by the people). If that sounds pretentious, you’d be right. Because while ‘reading a French newspaper’ makes it seem like I am terribly erudite, the truth is I had subscribed to Libération months earlier but had scarcely glanced at it. The intention was to stay abreast of current affairs and improve my French at the same time. Except to date I’d read precisely one book review, and one celebrity interview with an actor from a French Netflix drama.
But on this occasion, I was actually engrossed in something serious. It was an article about growing nationwide unrest over what the French see as a slap in the face to workers’ rights. President Emmanuel Macron — using executive powers to push the law through, further fanning the flames of indignation — was planning to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. That’s right, the French retire at 62. The general response, when I tell this to people in New Zealand and the UK, is ‘What the hell are they complaining about? Even sixty-four is lower than most countries!’ But I see the protesters’ point. The retirement age was 60, until President Nicolas Sarkozy nudged it up to 62, back in 2010. You can see what’s happening here. It’s not just about numbers, but direction. No one wants to see their rights going backwards. I’m with them.
What in God’s name did all this have to do with me going to Auckland? Strikes. Train strikes, to be more exact. The French are consummate protesters, and when they are emmerdés (pissed off ) they don’t just sign petitions, change their Facebook profile picture frame, or write letters in capitals to their MP (all perfectly fine, by the way). They get properly angry. They take action, as they should. So yes, a few weeks ago I was saying ‘Go the workers!’ to Alistair. Right now, trying to get to Paris airport only to find the trains are not running, I’d like to amend my proletarian cheerleading to ‘Go the workers! But not on Tuesday, please.’
My flight leaves Charles de Gaulle for Auckland at 6 p.m., and trains are looking very patchy. So I have booked a bus to get me to Paris the evening before, staying overnight at a hotel near the airport. I am not looking forward to the journey, especially the bit where I have to figure out how to get from the bus drop-off point in the city to the airport hotel, quite a distance away. The details of this are still murky, and may involve an expensive cab ride and / or a futile search for buses.
Alistair has said very little. He’s usually the human equivalent of a Swiss army knife, with solutions for practically everything. He is also incredibly proactive, so would normally be busily helping me to investigate the best routes. I’m not about to ask him for help, determined to figure it out myself — as a reminder that I was a fully functioning member of society before I met him and quite capable of cracking this problem. But also, given that Alistair is so unhappy about my departure, it doesn’t seem fair to make him an accomplice in it.
I am fossicking around in bags and doing last-minute double and triple checks. Then Alistair says something entirely unexpected. ‘I will drive you. To Paris.’
I don’t even bother with the usual niceties of ‘Ooh, are you sure; no, I couldn’t possibly …’ From me, it’s an instant ‘Oh that would be incredible!’
Going in the car with Alistair is not just logistically life-saving. It means he and I get to have a little more time together. He will stay with me at the hotel and leave for home again the next morning.
Visually, this journey couldn’t be more different to our three-week jaunt. No beautiful coastline, no stunning mountain ranges, no idyllic restaurants, no azure skies — just bad-tempered grey clouds, traffic jams, and urban sprawl for miles and miles as we approach Paris. It’s by no means an Instagrammable ‘dream trip’. Yet here’s the funny thing. It’s magical. It’s everything our big roadie should have been. We chat more, we laugh more. Alistair is still driving fast, but for some reason it’s not making me wish I had made a will, nor am I clutching at the roof handles. The fact we’re not navigating bendy Spanish coastal roads but a simple stretch of motorway may come into it. But also I’m just generally more relaxed.
We stop off at a service station and act like a couple of clowns, trying on ridiculous sunnies and picking out hypothetical presents for one another. I threaten to buy Alistair a giant, grotesque Eiffel Tower ornament; he insists on reciprocating with a truly hideous paperweight.
Everything about the trip feels light, playful, absurd. We’re like two runaway kids relishing their shared adventure, rather than lovers with a turbulent dynamic about to be separated for quite some time. Perhaps we can be like this because the pressure is off. This is essentially a long commute, not a ‘bucket list’ tour of Spain. So this, apparently, is what we need to thrive … a terrain devoid of expectation.
Our hotel is a huge slab of a building, a U-shaped multi-storeyed edifice wrapped around a broad courtyard. It’s a few kilometres from the airport itself, but it feels like we’re sleeping at the end of the runway; just outside our window the control tower blinks at us like a giant alarm clock. The hotel seems perfectly fine — in a clean, modern, faceless sort of way. But there’s a shiftiness about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. The staff appear to be pretending, like this isn’t really a hotel at all. When Alistair asks how he will get out of the car park in the morning (the gate is locked), they seem genuinely surprised at the question, as if no one has ever wanted to leave before. They should change the name to Hotel California.
For our last night together, we head to a little Italian restaurant — improbably down a couple of desolate, dimly lit streets near the hotel. It feels like the restaurant at the end of the universe, the only other buildings being some modest bungalows and that control tower. Over pasta carbonara and a pichet of rosé, we have the strangest conversation. If you wrote it as dialogue for a movie, people would say, ‘Well that was weird; no one talks like that.’ It’s Alistair who sets the tone, telling me how much he loves 98 per cent of me. But there’s a 2 per cent (is there some kind of online calculator for this I don’t know about?) that is impossible. That 2 per cent Maria is too angry, and (he does at least have the decency to pause here) … actually quite mad. I’m not sure where he is going with this, whether he is about to break up with me or whether I should focus on the 98 per cent, but the strange part is I am not upset or offended. Nor is there any acrimony in Alistair’s words. They are spoken gently, without vehemence. He actually sounds rather disappointed in himself. Perhaps his engineer’s brain has kicked in, and he is merely frustrated because the answer to the problem in front of him — i.e., me — is almost within his grasp. Except for that 2 per cent.
I express a few things I’m not thrilled about either. How he sometimes seems so distant, unreachable. He nods and listens. It’s the first time we’ve spoken this openly without one of us triggering the other. We just speculate and explore, poking and picking over the relationship gently, with curiosity, as if we were sharing a plate of salad and trying to get to the olives. It’s reminiscent of a scene in a Murakami novel — both hyperreal (the uncomfortable chairs; the noisy crowd in the corner; the thick pasta sauce) and dreamlike (the location; my imminent departure; this new dynamic between us). If someone had wandered over and said, ‘Coffee is being served at the end of the runway,’ I wouldn’t have been surprised. Life gives us these moments — surreal morsels plucked straight out of dreams, with no rhyme or reason, just an overwhelming sensation that has no name. A sensation containing too many ingredients to fit on one label. Sadness, bewilderment, tenderness … a sudden desire to laugh.
The next morning, the surreality continues. Entering the ‘dining room’ in search of breakfast, we find it is dark and empty. Against one wall is a forlorn-looking coffee machine, the sort you get in hospitals. Oh, and a giant stuffed squirrel. Honestly, no idea.
So sitting on a sofa in reception with a terrible cup of coffee and just a few feet from an enormous stuffed rodent, we say goodbye. Alistair is talking about his route home, and looking at traffic reports, but I am only half-listening. I am nestled into his lapel, letting the tears soak into the thick fabric.
And then the airport shuttles arrives.