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Chapter 15
‘I’ll be glad when I don’t have to get on this thing again,’ I said, wandering over to join him.
‘You have not enjoyed the bike?’ said Léo, giving me a suspicious look. ‘Because I think you have started to love it, just a little bit, but that you are too proud to admit it,’ he said.
‘See, you can read people,’ I said, suppressing a smile.
I put the helmet on and did up the strap. After today, I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to fly around a city on the back of a motorbike again. I wouldn’t have the guts to do it somewhere else, with somebody else. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be the same. There was something about the idea of Léo and me, cruising around Paris, the small window of time that we had, the way his leather jacket flapped in the wind; the way he made me feel like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
We set off, juddering at first, the engine revving. His bag was slung across his lap, which I wasn’t too happy about, but he’d assured me it would be fine. Léo shouted something to his friends as we drove past and some of them waved in a cool, dismissive way, as though they couldn’t care less if we returned or not. I turned away from them and looked out across the canal instead, at the tourists streaming up and down across the iron bridges. And then we were moving faster, more smoothly, down a street I remembered from earlier, the one with all the Indian restaurants, and then a sharp left onto the busy main road with the exotic fruits. I braced myself as we pulled out into the traffic again and squeezed my knees tighter, burying my face into Léo’s back. When I next looked up, we’d stopped at some lights on a picturesque cobbled side street that climbed steeply upwards. I dug my fingers into Léo’s waist. He turned to look at me.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Where are we?’ I shouted.
The sun was high in the sky now, its rays beating against the bare skin on my shoulders.
‘Montmartre, already. Très jolie, non?’
I nodded. ‘It’s lovely!’
Although that didn’t quite do justice to the quaint, Parisian perfection I was seeing. When the lights changed we set off again, flying past trendy patisseries with windows full of tarts and eclairs and steep, winding staircases sandwiched between whitewashed, shuttered houses, which I would have loved to explore if we’d had the time. Cafés spilled out onto the pavement and locals chatted animatedly outside the supermarket, sheltering under the shade of its candy-striped awning. I looked longingly at a row of beautiful shops, the kind I’d like to spend hours browsing in if only I had the money: Aesop, Comptoir des Cotonniers, a gorgeous-looking concept store. Every corner seemed to house a cute wooden hut selling snow globes of the Sacré-Coeur and Eiffel Tower keyrings and bottles of cold, crisp water.
Léo pulled over, pointing to a leafy square on our left.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘See? It is a famous mural called Le Mur des je t’aime. The I Love You Wall.’
The wall itself was obscured by a swathe of heads and selfie sticks, but I strained my neck to see. I noticed the colour first – a glistening, midnight blue. White calligraphy was etched across the tiles, although I couldn’t make out the words from this distance.
‘Could we stop for a sec?’ I asked.
‘Sure.’
I slid off the bike and took off my helmet. A man wearing the quintessential black-and-white striped T-shirt and beret combo was playing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien on the accordion and somehow it wasn’t clichéd, like I might have imagined it would be in this scenario; instead it created the perfect atmosphere as I followed Léo through a tiny, fragrant garden. We worked our way to the front of the crowd.
‘What’s the story behind it?’ I asked, my eyes darting everywhere, wanting to remember this moment; how I’d felt standing in front of it.
‘The artist went around to all of his neighbours in the suburbs of Paris, where he lived. There are people from many, many different countries and cultures living there, and he asked them to write down the words ‘I love you’ in their own language,’ Léo told me.
I dabbed my face with a tissue and fanned myself fruitlessly with my hand. ‘How many are there?’
‘Two hundred and fifty different languages and over three hundred declarations of love. There is every language you can imagine, from English and French to Navajo and Bambara, which is the national language of Mali.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know about Paris?’
He looked up at the wall. ‘There is always more to learn.’
I took a close-up of the wording on one of the tiles, which I thought might be in Arabic. ‘Anyway, I didn’t think you believed in the idea of love,’ I said.
He took a step back, tipping his head to look at it from a different angle. ‘I do not believe in it for myself,’ he said. ‘I cannot speak for other people.’
I peered at the details of the wall, the different fonts the artist had used, the shapes of the letters, the splashes of red.
‘The red is to show how the world is turning on each other. That the wall is trying to bring everyone together again,’ he said.
I ran my fingertips over it.
‘Sylvie seems to know you pretty well,’ I said.
