Absurdité Emotionelle

In France it’s as if life is an insult. A series of domestic, pedestrian psychic injuries. You take a parent to Paris when you receive your scholarship offer, without having yet learned to converse. You get off at the wrong metro station and can’t read a map. You walk past a brasserie window, too posh and expensive for you, and you’re fairly sure you wouldn’t be seated. Oh putain – you are in the capital of all sorts of intersecting love, but it is the banality of your hotel WiFi switching on which allows you to emerge. You brush your teeth in the bathroom mirror and stare at a nascent wrinkle that you scrutinise as though you are learning to reflect Yoda.

A moped almost kills you crossing over from the Jardin du Luxembourg. Obscenities are examinations not worth taking but you have to take enough of them to learn to stop. His glove covers up the finger you otherwise would have matched – a not quite autosomal reaction, man on fleeing man.

Accept it, emotional absurdity has its limits but you smell roasting nuts and your parent suggests a bag and so you suspect that human kindness does not, apart from the limits of the Earth’s turn, the length of your arms and the untouchable will of karma. A Vedic discovery that slips from assessment. You spot two free city bikes but your parent is wearing a traditional dress that would catch the spokes. Understanding this, you fail to propose it, ask if she would like to avoid the metro again.

When Gertrude Stein studied medicine at the Grand Ecole de Paris, she refused the final exam, surfacing on some subterranean platform and took the train home. That’s not the injury, it was the smell of the carriage, the wait until reaching her wife and the temporary distance from the salivating springtime sun. You drop a sugar cube in to your tea and point out the Palais de Justice. Your parent turns back too quickly to seem impressed. She asks you to ask for milk and you do, turning to an equally unimpressed waitress. Seulement un frisson, you say, thinking it the right word. She lightens and smiles. You want only a thrill?

*

When you finally move to Paris you are no longer on speaking terms with your parent. Something to do with ‘that girl’ and her job in ‘marketing’. Gare du Nord is dirty and sparkling. Orientation at the university mostly passes you by but your memory starts with that girl sitting outside the Panthéon visible from the third floor window that afternoon. ‘Surprise’. She wears a smile wider than the lenses on her sunglasses. She carries a bag too feminine for her but she has excellent research skills. Tonight is la nuit blanche. Museums lit up with installations and concerts in the squares. You don’t know how to dance with abandon. For her, you try.

Soon it is 3am and you are on the never ending escalators at Chatelet. Espece de merde. People are shoving past you. ‘Last trains to the suburbs’ says a man in a gilet who takes your shoulders and leans you out of the way. She has made you some friends tonight. They approached as she lay on the floor of a Cathédrale listening to Gregorian chants and offered some free weed.

You made a grave mistake. Police are everywhere but so is the smoke. Hard to tell which one of you is you and which one is only a tourist still. You fumble in your language and your new friends find it hilarious. She takes you by the hand and follows them to a verdant outdoor shisha garden that faces the Grand Mosquée. For her, they speak English.

‘Boys here don’t know how to function’, one is lighting a cigarette to chase the smudged, copper-tipped shisha pipe. ‘They are in vegetative states’. They seem to pretend you are not together. You watch the three dangling light bulbs switch places in echoes and buzz with the unfortunate death of insects, the pink and white reflecting from the surface of the pool in the mosque courtyard.

*

University passes by like a whiteboard in the background of your mind which is busy playing reels of increasingly ancient dates upfront. You speak more on the phone to ‘that girl’ than you do in seminars. Seminars are hell. You should have taken language refresher lessons but you are too stuck up even to buy a dictionary. You need one in your first year examination, when you write an essay on the duty of care of sporting associations without realising that the sporting injury was caused by a loose baton to the head of a cheerleader. The mutter in the corridor, the oversincere outrage. A cheerleader. Damn. Every head shakes.

Your third anniversary together approaches. When you use your dwindling scholarship money to go back to London to see her, it feels familiar. Wheelie case and overcoat and you walk faster than you have ever in your life. It’s New Years Eve and tomorrow you will meet her parents. This feels like a life. When she gets you high, this time you know it’s you. You that has her legs in your lap under a throw blanket as she watches reality television. You that falls asleep after an orgasm without reciprocating. You that needs to be shaken awake in the morning by an irate lover. Nothing stresses her like family.

*

Her brother hates you and you put on ice skates in silence after having been called up to the counter as a pair. Ice skating might as well be a phobia – ever since you sliced a finger in youth, wondering what a carpet knife was, you have been wary of blades. The thought strikes you that you may fall and lie in his path, so you keep to the barrier.

He avoids you over lunch. A tray of champagne arrives and they are all looking at you, wondering if you will ask for some. You don’t and it will haunt you later, and none is offered. Only the cautious bubbles erupt as heroes in figures of ‘S’ – active, climaxing and progressively ascending into their mouths. A second round is dealt and they assume your answer is again no. When your lover goes to the bathroom, you sit alone with them. They ask you a legal question and you don’t know the answer. Your training is not in equality law but the life of a créance – an ineffable thing called a credit that passes from banker to banker. You escape to the same bathroom, catch your haggard hangover in the five star mirror and thank them for waiting once you emerge. Her mother laughs. ‘We wouldn’t have left you’.

*

She breaks up with you that night and you leave early on the Eurostar the next day. A student friend has loaned you their copy of Rilke’s “Letters To A Young Poet” and you contemplate your childhood and the relief you feel as you pass through the campagne with its yellowing wheat and apricots lounging in the air.

It’s impossible not to daydream on a train.

*

When you return to the six square metre box room in Paris that is your home, you take a sheet of squared paper because that is what is common in France and begin to list things. A calendar forms. There will be club parties, and social events and you will throw a do for your birthday next month. People will come because they are students and Parisian students never miss an excuse for a party. At first you search for hidden restaurants on a website on the first page of the search engine called Secret Paris, but it is for richer people than you and some of your friends.

Out shopping on yet another free afternoon, you notice finally the flabby layer that has grown around your stomach, or has always been there, and you limit yourself to two baguettes a day. The weight flies off like it has been waiting for this, a chance at Paris – the true version of it – thin, fashionable bodies that acclimatise well to shock. You buy turtlenecks in purple and black, three quarter sleeves long enough to cover the marks some fist has made banging on your arms.

It is dawn when you sit on your first city bike and attend your first non-mandatory lectures and it is now your turn to develop nerves of steel as you pass through traffic that moves the wrong way. Your friends are happy to see you at the Faculté and one buys you a McDonalds meal for solace once he hears your news. You take it to go and give it to the woman who sits in front of the Hotel du Ville, all day, every day, with a placard with writing too small to read as you stroll past. She raises a gap-toothed mouth and asks for money instead. You don’t understand, her speech too rapid, her voice too guttural.

Somewhat inevitably, there are long distance phone calls, tears and lines that go dead. You find out on FaceBook that she is dating again. You turn to your calendar and fill it denser. Alcohol becomes your friend and though you’ve dropped the weed, you are smoking enough to fill the box room with an atmosphere that sits on top of the usual aerial one, one that belongs more to a construction site than a metropolitan interior. That’s when it starts.

*

The urge comes on strong and there are no words for it, no clothes for it in your wardrobe, no instructions you know to follow. So you replace your jeans with your bedtime pyjamas which are still London cotton and not the Parisian silk you can’t afford. You lace up some trainers and take to the streets, one clumsy foot after another. There are frogs carved into the lampposts in this neighbourhood. After you manage a straight line, you begin to bounce, raise your hand to stroke passing railings and smack high fives to branches low enough on the trees that are planted in symmetrical increments along the boulevard. You make your way to the river. There is a couple picnicking under the Notre Dame, on a precipice that lies in the middle of the Seine, on a red polka dot blanket with two bottles of champagne. They must have had special permission. Perhaps one is proposing. Probably.

*

Next time, you prepare a musical playlist. A friend has introduced you to French rap with the qualifier that ‘French rappers are always apologising to their mothers’. You smoke less now and begin to eye the telephone again. It lies silent except for occasional vibrations that are advertising special offers from the sushi place you once ordered from.

You have a favourite route through the Jardin des Plantes with its dinosaur models and special grasses. The tallest trees in Paris live here, planted by an archaeologist after a trip to the Pacific North West where sequoias comfort the sky, or so you imagine. You have plenty of time to imagine. A curving path leads up to a look out point. It is hard on the shins on the way down. That’s when you realise you are running. Running with her on your mind in the gaps between thoughts. When you flag, you imagine her waiting. Just another hundred metres ahead.

*

You frequent a library that coats your shoulders with silence, an embrace that you welcome for lack of touch. Books stroke your pen and your language returns to you in easy passages of highlighted textbooks. You score a distinction on an essay, enough to compensate for the cheerleader incident last term. You don’t know where you are but when you run, you become gazelle, wandering the urban savannah. Yes, there are no promises from her to wait but you urge yourself on with the thought each time your diaphragm seizes or your calf becomes too painful. Soon the emails take days for a response and you write out essays instead of acknowledgments. You will come to regret this.

*

One night, a boat party. A coterie of off duty policewomen that jab each other and smirk. An Arab woman with a glint in her eye. You go sleeveless, pretend to take a call in the queue. Yes, here, waiting to get in. No one truly minds your solitude here. Another woman is crying in the smoking room so you hug and talk. Her friend is hot. The Arab woman invites herself to be a companion on your walk home. You are too drunk to understand the implication, and refuse. Two days later, you are sipping coffee and chain-smoking with her near your home. It is only a stone’s throw away. She closes the bedroom blinds for you. You invite her over again, buy fruit in anticipation, but she does not arrive. You may have played an Arabic song about love and asked the meaning too intensely last time. ‘It’s not a sin’, she explained, eyeing you as you bring your slender body close enough to block her sight.

The hot friend you see all over town. You talk at a new party, billed as a sexual soirée. You remove your shirt to show off young abdominal tone, and she watches you with that always unexpected French seriousness. You chase her. You lose your phone and keys one night. She says ‘oh, mince’ and you learn a new word for empathy. Her girlfriend is planning a trip to Tibet and months later, you come across the photographs online. There is another yet, in a leather jacket, who acknowledges your inebriation and does not push when you take her to bed but change your mind. The three all at once at a party. The Arab woman hides, the hot friend introduces you to her girlfriend and the leather jacket screams at you on the dancefloor. ‘Je suis pas un jouet’. I’m not a toy. You barely remember her but the phrase sticks in your mind. The DJ is playing a fierce remix with ethnic samples. Green lights erupt behind her head, some sort of furious halo. The hot friend is necking her girlfriend on the balcony.

*

You run with it, carry it over the bridge of sighs, up to la Défense, drill it in to yourself on the staircases of Montmartre. Je suis pas un jouet. Je suis pas un jouet. You’re not a gazelle but you run past the apartment with the blue crest announcing the previous residence of Monsieur Salvador Dalí.

Emotional absurdity has no limit. You should remember that.