KIKI TELLS ME to meet her in the section of the Galeries Lafayette with the plastic legs shooting up everywhere. When I arrive she’s in a corner with her hand wedged up inside a red-patterned stocking.
‘Bit slutty,’ I say, tugging at the lycra.
‘Perfect!’
As the saleslady wraps up the stockings, we laugh at the word ‘gusset’, and Kiki pulls up her skirt and flashes me hers. I fall to my knees laughing like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, banging my head on the counter, which makes us laugh even more, though my head really hurts. The saleslady gives us a look of perfect disdain.
‘Did you know the French call window-shopping “window-licking”?’ I say as we make our way to the escalator, past the socks and sneezy perfume counters.
But Kiki is only interested in hearing about the date at La Patache.
‘I thought it would just be a cool sex fling,’ she says after I’ve recounted the details.
‘Me too!’
‘Now,’ she says, leading me towards the coat section. ‘To the doodoonas.’
‘Oh, must we?’
Doodoona is Kiki’s word for the dreaded doudoune. It’s like wearing a down quilt tied around your body, with equal sex appeal. They seem to me constrictive, numbing – I can’t imagine life with such a thick layer between myself and air. Kiki, having experienced many European winters, swears by hers. It is worn into her body now, so isn’t as boxy as many, but it does turn her into a deep-purple cheese puff.
‘We must,’ says Kiki, grabbing me by the elbow. She pulls a blue, ankle-length coat from a rack and holds it against me. ‘How about this little number?’
‘Lovely,’ I say, peeling it away and moving towards a striped top, gasping at the price tag. Kiki continues rifling through the rack of padded misery as I drift from ugly practicals to sexy unneccessaries.
‘I went to Disneyland with my dream guy last night,’ she says, examining a black monstrosity. Norbert is from Kiki’s dream class, not to be confused with the man of her dreams. He is a nice, corporate German man. Kiki has been examining what it’s like to be with someone she is not attracted to. Her data is complete, she tells me: good once. You feel yourself in a whole new light. Not twice.
‘He gave me two magnums of fancy champagne.’
‘Did you go on the teacups?’
‘It wasn’t in the fun park, it was in a conference centre.’
‘A conference centre in Disneyland?’
‘It’s a shame, his dreams were really out there.’
‘I can’t believe there’s a conference centre at a fun park.’
‘So, no more Norbert.’ She pauses a moment. ‘And more Zahir.’
‘Who’s Zahir?’
Zahir is a Palestinian dancer who recently moved in to the Cité with his theatre troupe. He came to her studio the other night with friends and stayed last, drooling into her mouth while he was on top of her, which, she says, wasn’t disgusting.
‘Ew!’ I say, fondling a black silk dress.
‘If Norbert had done that …’
‘Nobody has ever drooled in my mouth, I don’t think,’ I say. ‘But I did have someone come in my eye once. It swelled up like I’d been punched. And I know a guy who accidentally came in his own mouth, as he jacked off on the couch. He was mortified.’
Kiki does that laugh where she stops breathing and goes silent, which makes me laugh so hard I go silent too, tears dripping down my face.
‘Zahir’s got an incredible dick,’ she says after she’s pulled herself back together, taking a pair of thick winter pants off the rack and holding them up against herself. ‘It’s long and lithe, just like his dancer’s body. Dicks don’t always reflect the bodies they’re on, do they? But his looks just like him.’
I think for a moment about the dicks I’ve seen. ‘It’s not always easy to assess. You don’t get much of a chance to look at them. And they have their different moods.’
‘I look at them a lot.’
‘I wonder if our boobs and lady parts look like us.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Look at this,’ I say, holding up the dress and moving it back and forth through the air, marvelling at the way it ripples and flows like water.
‘That won’t stop your tits turning into coins and sliding off,’ she says, but I’m already heading to the change rooms.
It’s one of those terrifying ones with a communal mirror outside, which means you have to come out and parade yourself. As I stand in Dad’s pilled explorer socks, looking at my pasty reflection in front of a growing queue of impatient Parisiennes, a man with a nametag on his lapel saying Gaspard buzzes around me squealing, ‘Non non non, c’est moche!’
The Parisiennes nod and murmur. Yes, yes, ugly ugly. Gaspard pulls and prods and swats and tuts and oh la la, non non nons with a look on his face like he just smelt off foie gras. But he is right, the dress is ugly on me. The front panels and straps are meant for a woman with boulders, not bee stings. Where it should fan Monroe-like, it just flops and sighs.
‘Merci,’ I whimper, and withdraw behind the velvet curtain. Though my cheeks are sizzling, I do appreciate his honesty. In Australia the salesgirl would have said it looked amazing and I would have brought it home, to do nothing but admire its coathanger majesty. I respect that, for Gaspard, the life of the dress is more important than his desire to make his quota.
I slink back out, past the waiting ladies who have seen too much of me. Kiki is staring blank-faced at a fox-fur coat.
‘No go?’ she says.
‘No, ugly ugly.’ I lead her towards the escalators.
‘But – the doodoona!’ she protests, turning back.
‘Beauty is pain,’ I insist, and it truly is as we walk out into the icy wind. We ride the métro back to Pont Marie, talking about dicks and vaginas and beauty and practicality. Kiki suggests we go to her favourite little bistro on the riverbank near her place, and it’s so warm in there I take off three layers, to Kiki’s one. We order split-pea soup and afterwards a warm chocolate fondant with a dollop of cream on top.
‘I am really hungry all the time,’ I say after gulping down the pudding in about three mouthfuls and wondering if it would be acceptable to order another.
‘Well, it’s getting seriously cold outside, so your body, sensing no doodoona, is adding its own layer of seal blubber.’
‘Oh, well. I can’t imagine Coco Chanel in a doodoona.’
Kiki smiles over her teacup.
‘No,’ I declare, ‘my mind is made up. I will weather this Paris winter in style.’
‘You’ll die –’
‘AND’, I interrupt, ‘Like the seal, come up clapping.’
Kiki laughs. ‘Fair enough. I’ll make lots of cake.’
We kiss goodbye on the freezing riverbank and I meander back through the Marais, buying a little pink glass bowl from a neon-lit shop called C’EST QUOI to drink coffee out of in the mornings, like the Florents used to do. I can’t afford the bowl – my small monthly stipend from the scholarship has to last another week – but it feels good to forget that for a moment. An icy breeze whips through me and I pull Mum’s coat tighter around me as I descend into the deserted métro cavern, grateful for its warm, stinky air.
It’s too silent back in my room so I put on Cat Power loud while I pick at the ingrown hairs on my legs with a safety pin until they bleed. There’s some vodka left in the bottle on the windowsill so I drink the last of it with apple juice, like Kiki does. Then I eat a Caramello Koala, brush my teeth and climb up to the mezzanine, sending a message to Adrien on a whim: Hi Adrien, hope to see you soon, yesterday was tres agreeable.
He writes back ten minutes later with the proper accents on his letters: Très agréable for me too. I call you soon. Je t’embrasse.
Je t’embrasse means ‘I kiss you’ and the thought of actually connecting with his lips gives me a little buzz. I think of the skin on his cheeks and his big butcher hands, the veins on the surface as he peeled a sausage. I wonder what his body is like beneath all those winter clothes. My own body stirs; my usual set of characters and scenes make way for Adrien’s hands, but he doesn’t hang around long – an Anaïs Nin scene I read recently in the back of a bookshop takes over and delivers me to the place I desire to go, then I drift off to sleep, hand in crotch, to dream of caravans in distant landscapes and the gypsy girls from the Gare de l’Est surrounding me, suffocating.