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‘But what if I make the wrong choice and I don’t like it?’
‘Then what is the worst thing that could happen?’
I sighed, crouching down to look at the menu, trying to decipher what everything was so that I didn’t choose something with snails in it, or something equally as revolting.
‘I’ll take a Denise,’ I said finally, which I thought was apple, salted caramel and vanilla ice cream. What wasn’t to like about that?
‘Bon,’ he said, ‘good choice.’
He gave our order, and while we waited, we sat on a bench in the square, under the shade of a tree, resting our feet on his bag. Next to us was a working water fountain, which was getting lots of use today, with people holding their bottles underneath to fill them and kids running around its base. In front of us, peeping between buildings, was a charming view of the rooftops of Paris.
‘You know, whenever I travel somewhere new, I always stamp a picture of it in my mind’s eye, something really colourful and evocative,’ I said. ‘So that I can conjure up the feeling of being there when I’m back home.’
I took a photo, adjusting the brightness because the sun was right over our heads and everything look blanched and hazy. It had started when I was a kid. One year, Mum had rented us a caravan near Bournemouth and what I always went back to was an image of me walking out onto the wooden pier, holding a warm, pink candy floss in my hand, the tinkling music from the carousel and Mum – relaxed for once – with her sunglasses on, smiling down at me.
‘I think this might be it,’ I said. ‘The image I’ll think of when I want to remember Paris.’ I hoped it would replace the one from before, which leapt into my mind’s eye occasionally when I least expected it to. I’d get this flashback, this fuzzy-edged image of me walking by the Seine, the point at which I’d realised that coming to Paris had all been for nothing. And now maybe I would have this moment instead.
Léo nudged me in the ribs. ‘So I have convinced you after all.’
I slipped off my shoes, wiggling my toes around. ‘I suppose exploring Paris with you hasn’t been quite as bad as I’d thought it would be.’
‘I knew it.’
I laughed. ‘You’re really annoying, do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ he said, grinning at me.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the aroma of sweet batter and molten chocolate drifting across the square.
‘What happened before?’ he asked. ‘Last time you came here?’ And then, when he saw my face, he added: ‘You do not have to tell me if you do not want to.’
My throat felt tight. It wasn’t so much the thought of telling him as it was the fear of the feelings that might come with it. I knew that if I kept them buried, never talked about them, I could bear it. It was how I’d always dealt with the things I didn’t like. I had no idea what would happen if I actually addressed the past, said the words out loud. I’d never tried it before.
‘I came here alone,’ I told him tentatively. ‘I’d just turned nineteen and I was in a bit of a state. I’d fucked up my A-levels and all my mates had gone off to college or university. I was still living at home and working on the till at a clothes shop in my home town. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.’
‘So you came travelling? To Paris?’
I shook my head. ‘Not exactly. It wasn’t some nice trip, some gap year adventure. I came looking for my dad.’
Léo leaned forward, his hands clasped together on his thighs.
‘He was here, in the city?’
I looked down at my fingernails, examining them one by one. ‘I’d thought so. He’d sent me a birthday card, the first one I’d had in years. Except that it didn’t reach me on my birthday. He’d put the wrong house number on it, and the postcode wasn’t quite right. My birthday is in June, and I hadn’t got it until the September.’
‘You and your mother had moved house?’
‘Nope. It was the same house he used to live in. He couldn’t even remember where his own daughter lived, so that was nice.’
I became aware that Léo’s knee was pressing against mine. Without thinking too much about it, I pressed back.
‘I’d had some money saved. I was going to buy myself an old camera, funnily enough, and had been saving little bits here and there. I had just enough for a day return on the Eurostar.’
‘You had his address?’
‘He’d scrawled it on the back of the envelope. He must want me to find him, I thought, otherwise why would he have bothered? It was the sign I’d been waiting for all those years, proof that he missed me as much as I missed him. I went to Paris the following week. He was living in an apartment in Belleville, I can’t remember the name of the street.’
A yappy dog walked past us, jangling my already jangled nerves. We heard someone calling and when we turned round, it was the man from the crêperie, waving our order around, one in each hand, our crêpes wrapped in white paper napkins. Léo ran over to get them.
