The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience … to cross that threshold, if it could be so called …
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender is the Night
The whole lot of us decided to go to Paris and then Daniel collided with a car on his motorbike and broke his leg. In casualty they cut off the tartan bondage trousers his mother had made for him. I left him behind and set off in my black plastic trousers and pointed three-inch spike-heeled boots, as if going out for the evening. The boots were killing me but I could not admit this and so kept them on during the three-hour train journey to Dover, the overnight ferry to Calais, and the four-hour train ride from there.
I was armed with a pre-war map of the city I’d found in a trunk at home (a red-leather bound book like a pocket novel) and a camera I thought was a Box Brownie because it came in a brown box. Tom was half French so we deferred to him and also to his aunt’s recommendation of a hotel, which turned out to be as out of date as my camera. The sheets and windows, walls and floors were grey-brown-yellow, the bathrooms even more so: they looked splashed and splattered, and sometimes they were.
We took two rooms with three beds in each and slept more or less girls in one, boys in the other. To reach our rooms, we had to sprint along corridors and up and down stairs pressing light-pushes which resulted in little more than a dim flicker. Sophie and I talked ourselves to sleep at night with stories of rape, murder and fire.
The Pompidou Centre was three years old and on that first day in Paris it was thrilling – modern and foreign all at once. My eyes were used to brick, plaster, thatch and concrete and here was steel and glass, and scarlet and turquoise tubes. Best of all, it was inside out. Everything that would be hidden was on display and so I could trace how it worked. I didn’t think it beautiful because I could not conceive of it as a whole but I had never before come across a building (or song, or person?) that did not hide how it was put together.
We followed Tom (‘He’s half French! He knows where he’s going!’) into the night and he chose the dingiest bar in the darkest backstreet he could find. The six of us squeezed in alongside two or three mute locals, ordered beer and looked at each other. What now? We didn’t talk much. Each of us was telling themselves that this was authentic and untouristic and rock ’n’ roll. We chose restaurants in the same way, wanting above all not to fall for what was waiting for a bunch of English teenagers unsupervised and abroad. We chose the worst-looking places in the hope that they would be a local secret. Many of the bars had jukeboxes, most of which carried the Belgian New Wave hit – ‘Ça plane pour moi’ by Plastic Bertrand. A year earlier, Émile had taught me the words, but only to the first verse, and now I sang along too eagerly and saw myself become a joke.
Refusing sightseeing and having little money, we had nothing much to do. We spent a lot of time in the hotel, as we would in our bedrooms at home, and once went into a cinema on the Champs-Élysées because it was showing the Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright.
One day we decided to move out of the hotel and managed to do so. Then I decided to go home. Before leaving, I set off for the Pompidou Centre, using my map. I stood on corners and turned it round and round, unable to find streets which were no longer there.
When I saw the Pompidou Centre for the second time, I felt tired of it already. I didn’t want to know how it worked, I just wanted it to work. I didn’t want to watch people travel from one place to another but for them to simply appear and disappear, as they did in life. I chose not to go in and stood outside, enjoying my decisiveness. I had celebrated my seventeenth birthday in Paris. I was walking around the city on my own. Robert had lent me his Vivienne Westwood mohair top, all loops and holes, scarlet, yellow and black. Two boys stopped and looked. One of them approached.
‘Punk est mort!’ he bellowed as the English do to foreigners.
‘Punk is dead?’
‘You English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. So’re we. From Harrogate.’
Two boys from Yorkshire shouting the news in French to a girl from Essex. I knew they were right. We could see how it worked and so it stopped working. Or at least we needed to know what next, what more?