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The rain had eased up and I wound down my own window, hoping the fresh air would perk me up. I could hear a siren, a creepy wailing sound, like something you might hear on one of those gritty French crime dramas. An undercover police car careered round the corner towards us, an old beige Citroen with a blue light stuck on its roof. In the passenger seat was a woman who looked like an actress playing the role of a detective; she was effortlessly beautiful, with long dark hair and a cigarette between her fingers, which she draped casually out of the window, as though chasing criminals around Paris on a Thursday morning was nothing out of the ordinary.
I sat back in my seat, combing my fingers through my hair, easing out a knot and then winding it back up into a bun. I rested my chin in the heel of my hand. We were pulling out onto the roundabout at Place de la Bastille, I recognised its column with the golden angel perched on top. I got out my phone and googled directions from there to the Gare du Nord, bringing up a map and feeling better and more in control instead of at the mercy of this driver, who had a football emblem tattooed onto his neck and kept accelerating and braking so sharply that I was beginning to feel car sick. I checked the meter: nearly ten euros already.
I texted Si, wondering if he’d listened to my voicemail yet. I’d been so caught up in getting to the station I hadn’t really considered what it would be like for him to wake up and discover I wasn’t sitting next to him. What would he do when he worked out the train had uncoupled in the night and that his girlfriend was not in fact in the loo or at the buffet car, but was hundreds of miles away, in a country she had absolutely no desire to be in?
Hey. I left you a voicemail earlier, which you probably haven’t heard yet. I’m fine, so don’t worry. I’m in a taxi on my way to Gare du Nord. Call you when I know what’s happening with the trains xx
I knew he would worry no matter what I said, it was what he was programmed to do. Not only would he feel like a failure for not getting me safely from A to B, he’d assume that I would fall apart without him. And he had a point – it was what I’d always loved about him, the fact that he was so capable and together, and that from the very beginning he had made me feel more cared for and looked after than anyone I’d ever met. For the first time in my life I didn’t have to try to work everything out for myself – he did it for me, and much more successfully than I’d ever managed. So I’d let him, happily taking a back seat when it came to anything vaguely organisational. According to Ellie, he was one of life’s ‘fixers’, which I’d suspected she hadn’t meant as a compliment.
I checked the meter again. 17.10 euros.
‘Um, are we nearly there?’ I asked the driver, leaning forward, projecting my voice through the Perspex hatch.
‘Two kilometres,’ he mumbled.
17.80 euros. And the traffic was terrible.
‘Remember I only have a twenty,’ I said, in what I hoped was an authoritative manner.
‘I remember.’
I looked out of the window, drumming my fingers on my knee, begrudgingly noticing how pretty the buildings were with their wrought iron balconies and their window boxes bursting with colour and the French windows thrown open behind them. I tried to follow the journey on my phone, twisting it this way and that, wondering where we were in relation to the Seine. That was what I remembered most from the last time I was here: walking alongside the churning water, angry at every single one of the smug, camera-wielding tourists chugging past on their sight-seeing boats, and internally railing against the unfairness of life in general. Killing time before my return train, although since I’d been too miserable to enjoy the city anyway, in hindsight I might as well have sat brooding on a bench in the Eurostar terminal.
We turned on to one of those busy boulevards you see on the TV whenever there’s some sort of transport strike, which even at the best of times appears to be permanently loaded with cars and funny coloured buses and crazy cyclists weaving their way through it all. It was so vast, Paris, and even more hectic than London, although perhaps it was me that felt all over the place in this city I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know. It was disconcerting to think that only one person in the world – in fact, perhaps not even him, yet – knew I was here at all.
‘It is at twenty, Madame,’ said the driver.
Fuck.
‘Stop, s’il vous plaît.’
He pulled over, I thrust my sweaty note at him and climbed out of the taxi, spinning around full circle, struggling to get my bearings. The taxi driver beeped his horn and waved at me, trying to help, pointing straight ahead. I gave him a relieved half-wave back and began to run. Paris was at its rush-hour worst, with horns beeping relentlessly and bus fumes muddying the air. Because the road sloped uphill, I was out of breath within a minute or two and had to revert to power-walking, my ballet flats slapping and sliding on the pavement. The sky was a dark ominous grey, with clouds so low it felt as though they were skimming the tops of the buildings. Sure enough, I felt a big splat of rain on my forehead, and then another and then of course it tipped it down. It would have to rain on me now, when I was completely exposed and didn’t have time to stop and find shelter. I broke into a jog, swearing loudly when I plunged straight into a puddle that was deeper than it looked, soaking my shoes. I squelched on, up the same never-ending road with its identikit restaurants and their drab, scarlet awnings, until at last I saw a sign for the Gare du Nord. Keeping my head down to protect my face from the now near-horizontal rain, I swung off the main road into the station forecourt, darting between cars with their boots flung open, sprinting through the nearest entrance.
