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‘You promise you know how to drive this thing?’ I shouted.
He laughed and vaulted onto the bike. He was Parisian, they probably all knew. I thought briefly about what Mum would say if she could see me now; what Si would think. And then I climbed on anyway.
‘Ready?’ Léo called over his shoulder.
‘Not really,’ I shouted back.
The helmet was heavy on my head and the strap felt too tight under my chin, but I didn’t want to make a fuss. He turned on the engine and I felt the power of it shuddering through my body, making my bones vibrate. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands, so I placed them tentatively on his hips.
‘Hold tighter,’ he shouted back to me.
This was more embarrassing than I’d realised. Did we really need to sit this close together? Cringing, I slid my bottom towards his, wrapping my arms around his waist, clasping my fingers together on the other side. I tried not to notice his stomach muscles as my thumbs brushed over them. Then Léo twisted his head to the left, checked behind him and pulled off into the road. I closed my eyes at first, not daring to look, not wanting to know how close we were to other cars, whether we might be boxed in between two buses and an articulated lorry. And then, as the minutes passed and we were still upright, I opened them just a slit, and then a little more, until they were fully open and my chin was almost resting on Léo’s back and when I peeped over his shoulder I could see we were on a manic main road lined with grocers selling exotic vegetables and Chinese restaurants from which I could already smell the aroma of steamed dumplings as we passed. There were shops with trays and trays of gold jewellery on display, and another with beautiful Indian fabrics rolled up in the window. The road was slicked with rain and because there were so many cars and buses and taxis, we were constantly stopping and starting and not gaining much speed, which suited me perfectly. But then we turned off to the right, down a quieter side street, and he began to accelerate.
‘Everything cool?’ he yelled.
‘No! Slow down!’
He ignored me, of course.
We flew past abandoned shops with their shutters clamped down, and tatty-looking burger bars and hairdressers with garish pink signs advertising Coiffure. When we finally pulled over to the kerb and he cut the engine, I could still feel the throb of it under my skin. I slid off the bike, stumbling as I put too much weight on my bad foot.
Léo steadied me with his hand. ‘Ça va?’
I nodded, unclipping my helmet and yanking it off. My legs were stiff from being prised apart at an unnaturally wide angle and I kicked them out, rotating my good ankle to get the blood flowing again.
‘See? I did not kill you,’ said Léo, taking the helmet from me.
‘It was touch and go at times,’ I said, patting down my hair.
The truth was, I wasn’t sure how I felt. I knew that my heart rate was off the scale and that I’d had a proper adrenaline rush for the first time in ages and that I’d thought I was going to die at least once. Whether that was a good feeling or not, I couldn’t quite tell.
Léo directed me up the steps of the police station, an intimidating, black, office-like building on the opposite side of the road. Inside was a large room, dimly lit and sparsely decorated, except for three rows of grey plastic chairs laid out on a shiny lino floor and a wooden desk with a police officer sitting behind it, his face hidden behind a computer screen. I hesitated for a second until Léo nudged me forward then hung back while I approached the desk.
I coughed self-consciously.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ I said to the police officer. ‘Pourriez-vous m’aider, s’il vous plaît?’
He was tapping away on his keypad and took ages to look up.
‘Oui, Madame?’
I didn’t appear to be able to recall any French whatsoever, with odd words popping into my mind and then disappearing before I could do anything with them. The French words for ‘lost’ and ‘stolen’, for example, seemed to have permanently evaded me. Perhaps I felt too on display to grapple for the phrases I hadn’t used for years, what with Léo watching me and the officer giving me a stereotypically steely gaze. I resorted to ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’
‘A little,’ he said, looking at me blankly.
I glanced nervously at Léo, who was busy tapping away on his phone.
‘Um, I was in the ticket office at Gare du Nord and I put my phone on the counter while I tried to find something. And then when I looked for it about five minutes later, it wasn’t in my bag. I thought I’d left it behind on the counter at first, so I––’
‘Stolen?’ said the officer. ‘Pick-pocket?’
‘Maybe. Yes. I think so.’
‘Fill this out, please.’
The officer slid a document across the counter and I went to take a seat next to Léo, who was already sprawled out, taking up two of the chairs on the back row.
I started filling out the form, managing to complete all the basics: name, address, telephone number. When I got to the bit where I had to describe the nature of the crime that had been committed, I was stuck.
