It is a cold blue-sky morning as we walk down to the Seine – well, Isobel, Chase, and Amy walk, but I hop, skip, and jump while waving my cigarette holder that now has a blue plastic flower poked into the end.
‘Nothing like a cup of the old coffee to get you going,’ I say, and leap-frog a post box taller than I am. ‘Boy, I sure feel springy!’
Chase puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Georgie, calm down. The traffic drives on the other side of the road here. You don’t want to go under a speeding bicycle.’
‘Good point.’ I take a slow, steadying breath in through my nose. ‘Can you smell coffee, Chase?’ I swivel around. ‘Look. There’s a cafe. And another and another—’
‘George,’ Isobel says, ‘there are a million cafes in Paris. You can’t have coffee in every one. Let’s just go down the steps to the river and watch these people painting. We might pick up some ideas on how real artists act.’
‘That’s a good point, Isobel, and a great idea!’
‘No need to shout, George.’ Chase laughs. ‘Boy, you’re on fire this morning!’
We walk down to the wide brown river. I see the huge Notre Dame cathedral that rises from an island; I see a stone bridge, and large black barges tied to thick steel rings. And standing behind four wooden artist’s easels are four artists painting this rather elegant scene. We sit quietly to watch and enjoy.
The painters, I see, are interpreting the scene differently. Now, I don’t know much about art but I do know what I like – gumtrees, a vase of flowers, perhaps an antique coffee pot or new coffee pot, I’m not fussy. Perhaps even just a coffee sack would suit me the way I feel this morning!
‘This school of painting,’ I explain, perhaps a little too loudly, ‘is known as plein air, Chase and Isobel. Amy, too, if you’re listening. Meaning it is done outside, in the open air, with the artist trying to capture the real world, although you can see this short dumpy chap on the left is struggling a bit—’
The painter, a little man with a floppy black moustache, a green smock and matching beret, turns around.
‘Shhh! You know nothing! You can do better? Okay! It’s your turn!’ With that, he rips his painting off the easel, balls it up, and throws it in the river. ‘Here.’ He comes up to me, holding out his brush like a dagger and his paint palette like a shield. ‘I triple dare you, Mr Purple Britches! You are a nasty critic with no talent but much rudeness and stupid hair!’
‘Well, sir,’ I say, feeling the full effects of the coffee, ‘since you put it like that, how can I refuse?’ So I take the brush and palette and advance towards the sheet of white paper on the easel. ‘Pointillist?’ I ask, utilising my coffee-fuelled recall of every art gallery tour my mother ever took me on, which would be upwards of fifty, I’d guess. ‘Impressionist? Romanticist? Realist? Cubist? Fauvist?’ I attack the paper as if I am at bayonet practice with the Tapley Grammar Cadets. ‘Or all of the above? Which will be now known as the George Parker school of coffee-fuelled, sugarcoated, pancake-produced creativity!’
The little artist stands with his hands on his hips. ‘You are a fool with bad trousers and smoking plastic flowers!’
The coffee has located my long-lost artistic abilities that have remained buried at Tapley Grammar, because artistic boys are ordered to voluntarily leave the school or endlessly repeat Year Five, even if they are one hundred and ninety centimetres tall and weigh ninety kilograms.
‘Touché!’ I slash diagonally with red paint. ‘A daring dash of romanticism here!’ I dab some smudgy blue here, there, and everywhere. ‘A splodge of impressionism there!’ Now I jab black dots like an industrial sewing machine gone mad. ‘And a spot of pointillism here! Plus plenty of George Parkerisms everywhere else!’
A painted river appears, as does a cathedral, a barge, a bridge, and voilà! Paris is captured in a miraculous bubble of brilliance, but I don’t hang around, as the little artist chap seems like he might want to chuck me in the water.
‘Thank you and goodnight!’ I back away bowing, waving my beret like a flyswat, and my cigarette holder like a magic wand. ‘Remember, art is the answer! Even if I don’t know the question!’
Chase and Isobel catch me up as I head off along the river. ‘That was incredible, Georgie,’ Chase says. ‘You’re a genius.’
‘Oh, it was nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing I could ever do again, I mean. I don’t know what came over me.’
‘Coffee came over you,’ Isobel says. ‘You have to be careful you don’t overdose, George. Anything could happen. Your entire system is obviously hypersensitive to caffeine.’
I laugh loudly from where I’ve swung up into the branches of a tree.
‘And is that a bad thing, Isobel?’
We sit beside the slow-flowing Seine and watch Paris and its people go about their daily lives. Chase writes a postcard to Clemmy, informing her of where we are, and Amy is trying to make friends with a poodle, which isn’t going very well, given the language barrier. I ask Isobel how she’s feeling.
‘I can’t remember everything,’ she says, her pale face surrounded by her wild black hair. ‘But I can remember our house, my school, the smell of the garden, and the view from my bedroom. Are you homesick, George?’
As I’m not sure whether my home is my house, where I don’t live, or Tapley Grammar, where I do live, it’s a hard question.
‘I’d like to get back to study,’ I answer. ‘Tapley needs help in the science and maths areas, as all the best students spend their time looking for lost cricket balls or campaigning to have whaling brought back as a school sport. Eventually, I want to help children in other places. Like the Congo, just to pull a country out of the hat.’
‘Very good, George.’ Isobel sips a cup of tea. ‘That’s beautiful thinking.’