1


My name is Louisa.

I was once like you. A monogamous speck inside the normal distribution curve. I expected a faithful marriage, two point four kids and a home with no distinguishing features. Maybe a dog or two and a well-paid job in a corporate company.

Then I met a boy. We followed my predefined script. We went out for a while, and we got married.

But what happened after…well, that wasn’t written anywhere.

In 2002, my favourite haunt was a grotty, rundown Irish pub just off Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris. The once-green awning was grey and torn and its name was… Le Galway. This had afforded me and my friends a few giggles since the quotable “le Big Mac” line from Pulp Fiction. It had also afforded me many raucous drunken nights and was as comfortable to slip into as a pair of old slippers. My home was split into two parts: my bedroom and bathroom, which were five minutes away, and this, my living room, which I shared with about twenty other regulars. We regarded it as ours and jealously evaluated every fresh face that slouched through the door to see whether they were worthy of paying for a pint in our dump.

One afternoon I had slipped into my second home for a yarn about the night before. I was sipping the black coffee for which I never paid and was bantering with the barman, discussing the exploits of some of our mutual friends. A man with long curly hair was also at the bar, and he was gazing at me with open admiration.

I turned to him and blossomed. He asked me out. I said yes.

We shared. We were emotionally intimate. We connected. He got inside my head. And then refused to get inside my pants. It was a first for me. When I said jump, they jumped. Usually I didn’t say anything at all, but they still jumped!

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Gilles. My French Not-Quite-Lover.

My French Not-Quite-Lover was erudite. A philosopher. A poet. He smoked cigarettes and said “bof!” at correctly timed intervals. He played chess at my local pub and beat most of his opponents. He studied aikido and explained Kant to me. And in a surprising twist of personality, he introduced me to the sitcom Friends by dropping quotes from it into our conversation at brilliantly timed comic intervals.

Gilles was the first one to love me…for me.

On our first proper date, after several hours of emails and instant messages, I got to our arranged rendezvous and had downed two apple martinis in the twenty minutes or so that I spent waiting for him, in an effort to calm my nerves.

“You took long enough,” I said as he strolled in.

“And you took less time to get here than Lindsay Wagner.” I was soon to learn about his love of the English language, gleaned predominantly from American television.

“What are you drinking?” he asked, sliding onto the bar stool next to me.

“Apple martinis,” I said. “I’ve already had two.” I dared him to frown in disapproval. Instead, he ordered me another.

“How come you managed to leave work so early?” he said. “You can’t have got much work done. We were messaging all day.”

“My company’s going bankrupt and has been for the last six months. You know what French administration is like,” I said. “It’s a company run by Americans, so you can imagine how the team feels about that.”

Anti-Americanism was so prevalent following 9/11 that I had seriously considered tattooing a Union Jack on my body to demonstrate my nationality before someone put a fist in my face from hearing my franglais.

“It’s the second company I’ve worked at that’s gone bankrupt. My friends are calling me ‘The Liquidator!’” I giggled at the name and tossed back another mouthful of apple martini.

He gazed at me speculatively. “And yet you look less manic than you did before. You don’t have that caged, hunted look that I remember.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“Um…last Christmas maybe.”

“You’ve been stalking me for a while, then,” I said. “How come you didn’t ask me out before?”

“You haven’t been around,” he said, ordering a Guinness.

“I used to go out with that bouncer at Polly Maggoo. We split up four months ago. I’ve been avoiding my usual haunts ever since because he spies on me. I’ve been trying to leave him for two years. That’s probably why I looked like that.”

“But if you were trying to leave him for two years, how long were you with him altogether?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, two years,” I said. “I guess I never really wanted to go out with him in the first place. But I never plucked up the courage to leave him until this summer. He hit me.”

I reached for my drink with an unsteady hand, and Gilles took both of my hands so I couldn’t.

“I don’t mind if you drink. But let’s stop that association. You should only drink when you think about happy things.”

“But why? Why don’t you mind?” My drinking was something I hid from myself and others. Something shameful. Something that would make others reject me.

“I have my own pain,” he replied. “I know why you do it.”

In his eyes I saw a mirror of hurt and knew that here was a man who would understand. So I told him about the roller coaster that had been my emotionally controlling and abusive ex-boyfriend.

In return, he told me about his mother’s depression and his escape to Ireland, his love for his best friend’s girl, and his betrayal of their friendship. I told him about my disastrous history of relationships, my one-night stands in search of love. He told me about tunes he had composed in his melancholy and sang them to me whilst he played the guitar. His voice was smooth, deep and gentle. It made me cry. And when I cried, so did he.

That night we slept face to face in the small single bed in his dead grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment. Two fuck-ups…together at last.

Gilles, mindful of my past and my emotional state of mind where men were concerned, decided that our relationship wasn’t going to be based on sex. It was going to be based on love. He didn’t sleep with me that night. Nor the night after, nor the night after that. And with every night that passed where he didn’t have sex with me, I fell in love with him a little bit more. He was an angel. A curly haired, blue-eyed angel.

In the days that followed, I met Gilles’s mother, his aunt and his sister. When I spoke on the phone to my mother that week, I told her that I was in love. And even though it had only been two weeks since we’d met, I told her that he was coming to our family reunion that year, and the year after that, and for the rest of my life. Months passed, and we spent every night in each other’s company until we eventually decided to save the money I paid for an apartment I was never in, and moved in together.

We dug up all his dead grandmother’s crockery and threw huge disorganised fondue parties at her apartment in the 5th arrondissement. We wrote ridiculous dialogue for spoof porn movies and then filmed them fully dressed in silly wigs with our friends. We learnt to rollerblade and spent hours careening round Paris risking our lives ducking around fiercely driven Citroëns. We played multi-player Tetris stoned off our faces on his old Nintendo 64. And oh, how we laughed together.

Two and a half years later, I married him in the caves underneath the Bastille as our friends read passages from Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Afterwards, we dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant and pocketed the candies they gave us with coffee. It was unbelievably idyllic, and I thought my future was set.