wordsmith and mongrel

Tag: paris (Page 1 of 3)

heart’s on fire

She must already have been burning when I walked past on my way home from work, deep in a funk about how the best things in life are hard to get and easy to lose.

I walk past the Cathédrale Notre-Dame every morning and most evenings as I cross the river to and from the office. You get the best view of her (in my opinion) from the south-east, floating on the water, her intricate buttresses inviting you to pause and linger. My favourite place in all of Paris is a very specific point on the Pont de Sully, two-thirds of the way across from the Left Bank to the Ile Saint-Louis, where the Eiffel Tower peers into frame to the left and the Cathedral dominates the foreground. In three years she has become my reference point, my anchor, my talisman, a vast unmissable reminder of the fact that when life gets too real – too stressful, too uncertain, too lonely, too much – I am in living in Paris, and that if there are days when all I achieve is to be here, it is enough.

I did not notice she was burning.

After a long hiatus I’ve been running again, almost compulsively, pulling on my sneakers not out of obligation but to satisfy a rekindled desire. I got home at seven and by seven ten was stepping into my street. I saw the smoke almost immediately, a vast yellow-grey pillar rushing up from somewhere down the hill. Serious, and close. People were slowing down and staring upwards. But I had heard no explosion, saw no flashing lights, felt no urgency in passersby, and I’d been waiting all day to run, so I turned left with minimal curiosity.

Beside the Pantheon, a crowd was gathering to stare down the rue Valette towards the river. It was so close you could see the flames and I ran on thinking, I’m right to be scared of my heating. Someone’s lost their apartment tonight.

I ran a slow lap and a half of the Jardin de Luxembourg, taking the long way around the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs. As I headed for the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde for the second time, I paused to check my phone. Messages from London, Minneapolis, Guatemala City: awful news about Notre-Dame. What I had ignored, CNN had clearly not.

History was being made and unmade just around the corner and I shamelessly diverted my run towards the Pont de Sully, the perfect vantage point. The bridge was empty of traffic and packed with people, silent and still. Along the banks of the Seine, over the Pont de la Tournelle, crowds gathered with unnerving calm, saying uncharacteristically little, staring. Police with rare emotion etched into their features shooed us away from the edge of the bridge, clearly creating an exit route in case of panic or incident, but doing nothing to impede the swell of awestruck arrivals.

And we watched. We watched the steady rise of smoke, the regular flicker of the flames, the ineffectual arcs of water dabbing at the stone walls from poorly positioned cranes. We gasped when a portion of roof fell or caught anew, and we pointed at reddened windows that hinted of a nave alight. Against the perfect evening sky, the Eiffel Tower seemed hesitant to put on her lights.

There was a kind of welcome purity to the sadness. No one had died, it seemed. The Cathedral had been evacuated safely and there were no reports of trapped firemen or lost priests. There was no sign of intent or evil. We were not watching Timbuktu crumble, or the great Mosque of Aleppo surrender to heavy weapons, or Gumbi Gumbi trees fall under the tread of mining bulldozers. Fire is a terrifying force, but a neutral one.

Long after the cold had crept under my running gear I walked home and curled up in front of the television, unable to sleep until I knew what I would see from the bridge the next morning. On the screen, a series of images: the President and his wife on the parvis; bystanders praying, and – with no apparent sense of irony – lighting candles; drone footage from above, the whole Cathedral transformed into a fiery cross. The towers were at risk – it came down to a matter of minutes, they would say later – but survived.

If history has taught us anything, it is that it is in the nature of cathedrals to burn, and to be rebuilt. Before the flames were extinguished, billionaires were offering nine-figure donations in a kind of besuited dick-measuring contest. I thought about the gilet jaunes decrying the cost of living and the homeless man I greet every morning and wondered how much is too much for a roof.

I wake up early on Tuesday morning with a scratching in the back of my throat and I wonder how much of Notre-Dame I have breathed in during the night. In the cold light of day she stands resolute, her stonework intact, the scaffolding tricking the eye into thinking she’s exactly as she was. Today I slow down and take her in.

ignition

Paris, 1 December.
The streets smell of pine trees and revolution.

This year the snow came early and the rain has come late, so the streets are slick and grey but the temperatures have climbed back into the mild double digits. The lights have been hung and lit; in the Place de la Contrescarpe a canopy of gold and silver is reflected in the surrounding windows. Outside florists and supermarkets, squat Christmas trees line up neatly in height order, dusting the wet concrete in pungent needles.

On the Champs-Elysées, the flickering of December lights is more orange than usual, bright against the smoke. In the Place de la Bastille they’ve built windrows out of felled lampposts.

Little Manu, such a star performer on the international stage, has graduated at home from simmering suspicion to violent disgust. The head of state, it seems, did not bother to wipe the cake crumbs from his chin before raising the price of bread, and outside his palace the people are baying for his blood.

When it started, when those first high-vis vests began to block roads, I did not look too closely. I’ve become accustomed to the regularity of protests here but for the most part they still bemuse me, a cacophonous reminder of the distance between this culture and mine. After the last violence, in May, I had become more dubious of the value of manifestations that could be co-opted by the casseurs, those cause agnostics who capitalise on any opportunity to smash, and to burn, and to destroy.

A fuel tax? I thought from the smug comfort of my inner-city flat and my walking commute. That might be a good idea.

And then as I read, and listened, and the gilets jaunes bore down on the Arc de Triomphe, the whole frustrated, unequal, complex camel beneath the straw came into focus.

It was fuel that started the fire, but it was not what made it burn.

Queensland, 2 December.
My mother packs photo albums into her car, just in case.

Water bombers make throaty passes overhead en route to the bushfire that is bearing south towards the village and its surrounds. It’s 35 degrees and wind is stirring. Months without rain have sucked dry holes in the creek and slowly starved the earth and everything on it. A bolt of lightning started the fire, weeks ago, but it’s not the lightning that makes it snap hungrily at trees and fencelines.

My mother promises to keep me updated and I hang up the phone, wash last night’s mascara off my cheeks, walk to work through the quiet city listening to ABC Local Radio via the internet to hear the half-hourly warning updates. During a Board meeting I robotically write down everything that’s said because I know I’m retaining none of it. Every few minutes, on the Emergency Services website, I refresh the list of active warnings and have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, before I find the one that worries me.

Mid-morning Paris time, the wind changes and the warning is downgraded. Fight is winning; flight is, for now at least, no longer advised.

Paris, 3 December.
Eight days into eleven straight days of work, a poorly worded email makes me cry.

It’s been an intense year, urgent, unrelenting, punctuated with more than my share of genuine highs. But it’s been tough, too, particularly professionally, and I’m bone tired.

I’ve learnt a lot this year, not about who I am but about why. About how I got to where I am and just how far I still am from where I long to be. There have been no life-changing events in 2018 but I feel fundamentally altered, all the same. I’m worn out from digging, and uncovering, in search of bedrock on which to build.

I’m going home, soon, for a month. Home to my charred country, to my family, to a place where I look and sound unremarkable, to the straightforwardness I once fled and now, exhausted, crave. To the chirping of the bush and the sighing of the Pacific and the comforting murmur of Test match coverage. To rekindle my energy.

I’m looking forward to taking everything I’ve learned this year and laying it out under the sun. Letting it dry out. Seeing what happens.

offering

The moon?
Oh my darling, no,
the moon is too cold and too quiet.
Instead,
I would give you a roaming brass band on
Sunday mornings, Brazilian drummers on Saturday nights, the clinking
of dishes and the chatter of terrasses.
I would give you
the place de la Bastille the night we qualified
for the final, a cacophony of horns, a snapping of flags, a roar
of savage jubilation,
and I would give you my eyes,
bright with sunshine.

The stars?
Oh my darling, no,
the stars are too far. But I would give you the smell of baking bread
floating in my windows,
the murmur of passing visitors, a light breeze
to stir the geraniums or
make the candle flame dance,
I would give you the pavement below and
the stonework above, and I would give you
my hands, curled around the stem of a
late-night glass.

The earth?
Oh my darling, no,
the earth is too big
and too troubled. But, oh, my love, I would give you
Paris in the summer,
and by that I mean,
my heart.

here’s where you’re wrong

In the Square Armand Trousseau, a toddler in a blue jacket charges at a flock of pigeons with his arms outstretched, yelling YA, YA, YA, YA, YA over and over until long after the birds have fled. He is at once the universal child, and deeply French. I grin at him with so much love that his nanny positions herself a little closer, surveilling me.

It is 9:59am on a Wednesday. I am in the park because for the second time in three days I’ve had an argument with a postal worker that has left me in tears of frustration. The first time was after I sent a lettre suivie, a tracked letter, only to discover it had no tracking (bah en fait, the post office employee says, with complete confidence in his logic, you shouldn’t have sent it tracked if you wanted tracking.) Today’s iteration has involved my new bank card – without which I am relying on Australian credit and 20-euro notes loaned by kind friends – which is waiting for me, clearly addressed, at the post office. The staff refuse to look for it on their shelves because look at all those people behind you, they will shout at me if I stop to look for it.

This is why I am sitting in the park, soothing myself with a croissant and a café crème before braving the office, where further arguments await.

I am two years deep now. I have waded 24 months out from the shoreline of my expatriation and next week (inshAllah, as the French are fond of saying) I will collect a little rectangle of plastic that entitles me to four more years, should I want them. I have worked and played with locals. I have been fed and housed and cared for and, in many cases, genuinely accepted by them.

And yet it seems that with each passing day the cultural divide gapes wider instead of narrowing. The better I get to know this country, the more alien it (or I?) becomes.

There are a hundred little things, a midge-cloud of strangenesses that bite at my Australian brain: the flowery formality with which one must communicate with strangers and acquaintances; the bloody-minded inefficiency of all forms of administration; the smoking.

But it’s the arguing, oh the arguing, that gets me. When I eventually come home (yes, home, to my sunburnt country) I will be either entirely broken or a Jedi master of spirited debate before which all antipodean opposition will crumble.

I used to have a theory that the French weren’t rude, that they were perceived that way because if you ask them how they are, they tend to tell you the truth, rather than hiding behind a comfortable British stiff-upper-lip “fine, thanks”. I’ve now thrown out that overly limited and simplistic hypothesis and replaced it with a new one: the French are perceived as rude because arguing – although to them I think it’s just debating, or even conversing – is such a fundamental part of everyday life.

I relay to my colleague my thwarted attempts to collect my letter from the post office and how I’ll go back later today, armed with new information, to yell at my newfound enemy.

You’re becoming French! she says, beaming with pride.

Mais non, because I don’t enjoy it, I argue. You have to argue to get anything done here, but I still hate it. 

My preferred form of debating is the kind where you know the questions and the arguments beforehand, and you can refer to neatly-written palm cards throughout. Arguing, as far as I’m concerned, is reserved for things that really, really, really matter.

Here, it seems, everything matters.

– – – – – – – – – –

A week after the the Post Office Incident, and several days after I manage to acquire my bank card (the “tracked” letter, however, is lost forever), I pass through a metal detector and am herded into Room 5 at the police station, where I wait in line, hand over my papers which are stamped and scribbled on, take back my papers, receive a number, sit and wait, am finally called forward to desk 9. I’m here to collect my new long-stay visa, I tell the woman, trying to sound charming but not desperate.

Everything is in order. The card has been produced and is waiting for me behind the desk. But, my new foe squints at her computer, I can’t give it to you. You are here too early, you need to come back in two weeks.

I take a very deep breath. Madame, I say very calmly. You summoned me here, today, at this exact time. Would you like to see the email?

She shakes her head. Come back on the 30th. 

I go to a nearby cafe for another consolatory hot drink and add a new hypothesis to my theory on arguing. Perhaps the French have developed, or at least allowed to develop, bureaucratic systems of such staggering inefficiency and famous complexity, because deep down – very, subterraneanly unconsciously – they know that without them they would lose innumerable opportunities to argue.

Pont Louis Philippe

When she said, I need some space, your chest froze over and you wondered just how much she’d need, just how far you’d have to go away. How would you cope? And for how long?

I warned you, she says, it’s all too much. She goes spilling over in public, breaking down her walls.

They’re all watching but she doesn’t care. It’s too much, she says, and lets it out.

You leave her to it, her messy expansion. Steer clear. She wanted space, she’ll get it.

But you can’t help but go back, after, and you find her calm. Back inside herself. Inviting you into the space between you. It was too much, I let it out, she says. Does she shrug?

She does not care that they saw.

 

IMG_3412

Where:

Pont Louis Philippe, Paris 75004 (click for map)
metro Pont Marie (line 7) / metro Cite (line 4) / metro Hotel de Ville (line 1, 11)

Why:

Crossing the Seine over any of Paris’ 37 bridges is a treat, but Louis Philippe is one of the best, taking you from the trendy Marais over the tip of the quiet Ile Saint-Louis to the gardens behind Notre Dame. On the way you’ll often find waistcoated rollerbladers putting on a show. Why are you suddenly overcome with emotion? They’re playing the Amélie soundtrack in the background and it’s so movie-perfect Paris it hurts.

What’s nearby:

Notre Dame
Hotel de Ville (City Hall)
The Marais
Les Rives de Seine

things that have been wonderful lately

Sea foam that blows in over the walls of Saint-Malo’s old town and swirls like snow in the icy air. We take refuge in a teashop where the waiters smile and bow, and sit next to a woman who is methodically crunching her way through three bowls of sugar cubes while loudly discussing bank transfers into a flip-phone. The remains of a single espresso, long since finished, dry in front of her. We eat galettes oozing molten cheese. The waiter slips us two slices of raspberry cheesecake “just to taste” and fetches a fourth bowl of sugar cubes for our neighbour.

Sinuous crocodiles of school children, hand in hand in high-vis jackets, meandering along footpaths on their way to and from daycare activities during the Toussaint holidays.

Christmas lights pretending to be icicles strung out along boulevards. Winter comes to Paris in a rush of shedding and adorning, showing off and bunkering down. Terraces grow glass walls and sprout overhead furnaces. Leaves darken and die (a process I still watch with wide-eyed Queensland fascination). Five cold months stretch out bleakly ahead, five months of frozen toes and hunched shoulders and taking 15 minutes longer to leave the house because of all the layers. But five months, too, of bright cold air; of sharp sunshine; of elegant boots and belted overcoats. Of Christmas markets smelling of mulled wine and of cosy train journeys. Of the Paris I first saw at 20, the one that still feels a little more like adventure than any other version.

Hot chocolate so thick it can barely be poured.

Dr Anne the dentist in studded ankle boots and belted jeans, her smoky voice booming through her open-plan surgery while she grinds tartar from my molars. I forget to look up dental vocabulary before I go and spend a lot of my time nodding, hoping not to spot a drill in my peripheral vision. But she says pas de problème and sends me out into the morning unscathed.

Rough-edged cinnamon cookies fresh from an earth oven carved into the walls of the deepest dry moat in Europe. My friend and I are the only ones peering through the low stone doorway into what were once primitive cold rooms and pantries and the woman by the oven says, They’re a test batch. Try one. It’s not until much later, when the last of the crumbs have been licked from our lips and we have crept back through the subterranean fortress to surface level that we see her disappearing into a doorway and realise she still lives in the chateau perched above.

My cheeks when I have remembered to moisturise religiously.

Singing O Come All Ye Faithful at the top of my lungs in a village church at 11:49pm on Christmas Eve.

Singing Auld Lang Syne, arm-in-arm with my friend, at 12:01am on New Year’s Day in a hipster bar somewhere near Wandsworth (the dodgy end).

Staying in, making dense pumpkin soup with extra curry powder, while wearing Quidditch Captain pyjamas and Dobby Is Free socks.

Sitting in a room full of fundraisers, learning about tax exemption regulations and having the confidence to say in accented but perfectly comprehensible French, so just to clarify, this applies to all deductible donations?

The full-grown pig that lives on a barge on the Seine in central Paris, and goes for a walk each morning on a leash.

Rue de Nevers

“No smoking in the street,” the bouncer outside the Highlander says. “Smoking area is downstairs.”

He is the size of two rugby players fused together and he delivers this practical information with an air of calm menace.

I feel compelled to swear to him that I do not smoke before ducking past into the gloom of the bar. A guitarist in the corner shifts seamlessly from Bailando to Beds Are Burning. It’s Mexican night in one of Paris’s favourite Scottish pubs. The crowd is student-aged and student-loud, compressed and chattering. I order a pina colada, and then a second.

When I leave the pub just after midnight, the bouncer and I have rue de Nevers to ourselves. The streetlight is disguised as a lamp that pours thick golden light onto the blank walls huddling in close, curving gently away to a dead end. At this time of night, the location of the Highlander Pub makes more sense: there’s an air of Edinburghensian close to this place.

I could take the handful of steps back to Quai de Conti, take the boulevard more travelled, but there’s a cross street hidden from view towards the end of Nevers that serves as a shortcut to the direction I need. I like the quiet of the street, like marching confidently down the middle of it, even like the eyes of the bouncer on my back, wondering, does she know where she’s going?

There is a van parked at the end of the street, just before the wall. A man in black moves from behind it toward one of the buildings. He is tall, abnormally so, and wears a full-length coat and a hat that tips forward towards his nose.

I get the strangest sense that his feet are not touching the ground, and remind myself to stop listening to The Black Tapes after dark. He disappears into a doorway.

I concentrate on keeping my steps even and my eyes clear of the van, eager now to make the turn into rue de Nesle. White-rum confidence, when it evaporates, leaves only a woman on a lonely street. My sneakers make tiny whishing sounds against the pavement.

I reach into my bag for a cigarette. I pause and turn my head to the side to cup the flame.

When I turn back to walk on, the tall man stands over me. Even looking up at him, his face is somehow in shadow. Between the hem of his long coat and the pavement there is empty space.

The street leans in. I glance back, heart in my throat.

The bouncer looks at me sadly, his murmur carrying in the icy air.

“I said no smoking in the street.”

IMG_2986

 

Where:

rue de Nevers, Paris 75006 (click for map)
metro Pont Neuf (line 7) / metro Mabillon (line 10)

Why:

Unless you’re ghost-hunting, there’s not much to see, but open mic night every Wednesday at the Highlander attracts some great artists. 

What’s nearby:

Pont Neuf
The Conciergerie
Pont des Arts
Monnaie de Paris (the Paris Mint)
Passage Saint-Andre-des-Arts
The Louvre
Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore

 

#metoo

The night you grabbed me in the street
Uber said,
Error. Try again later.

The night you grabbed me in the street
my friend was visiting
from Peru. As I left she clutched my face and told me
she loved me, and she was glad
I existed

The night you grabbed me in the street
there were no taxis.

The night you grabbed me in the street
I had almost not gone out because I was
sleepy, and it was
a long metro ride to find my friends, but they said
please come
so I put on a pretty skirt and some
red lipstick that made me feel
bold
and in the end we had so much fun, I danced
until 4am

The night you grabbed me in the street
I had just got off
the night bus, where I had been thinking about
how Margaret Atwood said men are afraid women
will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will
kill them.

The night you grabbed me in the street
had been so happy

The night you grabbed me in the street
I was hurrying home thinking about
the man who just stared at me for 20 minutes at the bus stop and
the man who had run across traffic to say
mademoiselle, can I stay at your place tonight?

The night you grabbed me in the street
you spoke to me first and when I did not answer
you called me obscenities and when I kept walking
your friend shoved me and when I kept walking still
you ran after me and grabbed my arse

The night you grabbed me in the street
was only the second time it’s happened to me. That’s how I told it to my friend,
the next day:
only the second time.

The night you grabbed me in the street
I turned back to look at you in disgust but I did not
break stride, or
tell you off, or
grab you back
because flight seemed the least dangerous option

The night you grabbed me in the street
I felt sick and scared and ashamed
and then grateful
that it was only a shove and a grope
and I wondered how you felt or if you had already
forgotten

The night after you grabbed me in the street I did not
dance,
or jog,
or walk
through the city I have made my home.

City of Lines

Not long after I arrived in Paris in 2016, I caught two trains to Manchester for a weekend to run 10 kilometres in an elephant suit. I stepped out of Manchester Piccadilly into light rain and a motley crowd of teenagers with blue hair and men with septum piercings and overweight women in fishnets and miniskirts.

I didn’t realise until I left how narrow Paris is, in terms of everyday fashion. In the centre at least, in the more expensive quartiers, the limits of “normal” and “acceptable” are tightly defined. I have joked lovingly about the Paris uniform – jeans, sneakers, shirt, leather jacket optional – and as a girl living out of little more than a suitcase I am infinitely grateful for it: my practical wardrobe is suitable here for both work and play, for early mornings and late nights and most things in between.

In summer, the rules change slightly to allow for cotton dresses, a-line skirts and t-shirts, wedge sandals. Jeans go, sneakers stay. The very occasional tailored short. Sleeveless is fine, strapless is unheard of. Everything is slightly loose-fitting, so that bodies move inside clothes not as though the clothes are too big, but as though the bodies are small and delicate.

It took me a long time to work out what the difference was, why I could tell the visitors from the locals instantly even if the tourists, like me, were wearing the uniform. But it’s possible, oh so possible, to get the uniform wrong: running shoes instead of casual sneakers, ill-fitting jeans, polo shirts. A lot of exposed skin that is not smooth and luminous. This is where non-Parisians go wrong all the time, in addition to the other blatant misstep of being overweight.

My Australian friend, visiting from London, pinpointed it over a long lunch.

Aesthetics, she said, doing an irritatingly good job herself in a patterned sundress, white sneakers, and tousled hair. I, sartorial sinner, lost cause, was wearing a Hogwarts t-shirt. They value beauty.

And beauty, it seems, is even more rigidly defined here than elsewhere. It is casual and practical, ready to step off a bike and into a bar. It is often loose-haired and fine-boned and light on accessories. It experiments with scientific reserve, one variable at a time (a brocade coat over jeans and a white t-shirt; a snakeskin boot with a straight black dress).

A Parisian friend is more blunt. If I see someone with blue hair, he says, I assume there’s something wrong with them.

 

Little wonder, though, that a city so physically dominated by lines – proud boulevards, stately avenues – tends sartorially to colour inside them.

The grandest and most recognisable line is the Axe historique, which since the 17th Century has been Paris’ spine and today marches on unbent from the Louvre, under the Arc du Triomphe du Carrousel (“the little one”, topped with a quadriga that always makes me think of the Brandenburg Gate), through the Jardin des Tuileries, across the Place de la Concorde, the length of the Avenues of the Champs-Elysées, la Grande Armée, and Charles de Gaulle (passing through the “real” Arc de Triomphe on the way), and finally over the Seine to the modern Grande Arche in the business district of La Defense. Crossing the road on a clear day at almost any point along this triumphal way, as it’s also known, is an exercise in awe and timing: the perfect linear grandeur of the thoroughfares between monuments demands to be admired, while Paris traffic charges on unmoved and willing to run down the momentarily mesmerised pedestrian.

If Louis XIV and Napoleon laid the foundations with the Voie Triomphale, it was Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the 1800s that turned her into the City of Lines; an ambitious project of demolition and creation with the explicit intent of making a grim urban landscape more spacious, interconnected and beautiful. Today it is impossible to imagine Paris without the perfect symmetry of Rue de Rivoli, or Boulevards Sébastopol, Magenta and Voltaire.

 

I have a theory that it’s the lines that have made Paris, throughout history, such a haven for artists. What better place for the beauty-obsessed and the subversive than a city physically and culturally defined by lines demanding to be either admired or transgressed?

Paris is an immersive masterclass in perspective and light, its arrow-straight boulevards lined by stone buildings dressed in much the same style as the modern Parisian woman: slight variations on an elegant theme. (While their balconies and turrets and windows are rarely uniform, Haussmanian buildings never exceed six storeys and their height is, or at least once was, proportional to the width of the street at their feet).

Although Haussman went out of style, lines never did. The Arch built at La Defense in the 1980s not only aligned perfectly with the arches at l’Etoile and Carrousel but also, in a different direction, created a new axis with the two tallest buildings in the city, the Eiffel Tower and the modern Tour Montparnasse in the 15th arrondissement.

What the lines mean, in practice, is that in almost every neighbourhood of Paris there’s an elegantly framed, precisely centred and often unexpected view of something. Round a corner in Grands Boulevards and you’re face to face with the domes of Sacre-Cœur; turn your back for a moment on the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower peers over the Jardin de Luxembourg. Even after 18 months these picture-frame moments still sneak up on me: from the very modern heights of Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton building on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower appears perfectly centred between two curved roof sections.

 

Haussmann would perhaps be disappointed to discover that the line that most powerfully defines Paris both physically and culturally today is its least beautiful. The Boulevard Périphérique ringroad draws a shaky circle along the city’s administrative limits, separating the city of Paris from her suburbs with absolute authority. If you live outside the Périph, you are not from Paris; you are from the banlieues and you will correct anyone who misplaces you.

The not-Paris beyond the Périphérique is infinitely more diverse; cross the physical boundary of Paris and you’re more likely to transgress her intangible limits. The word banlieue has become weighted with poverty and racial tension, with insecurity and ugliness.

But the banlieues range all the way from desperation to decadence; from the “hot” neighbourhood of Saint-Ouen in the north-west, it’s a short drive to the central business district of La Defense, all glass towers and global insurance firms. Venture south-west and the suburbs are village-pretty, filled with detached houses that smell of woodsmoke in winter and have little gardens where fat snails and lost hedgehogs take refuge.

 

The French Government – famous for drawing incomprehensible bureaucratic lines around everything from employment rights to handwriting – seems to enjoy sending newcomers to the end of metro lines in search of its elusive approval. In September I approach the Périph to visit the Prefecture de Police, an application for a French driver’s licence clutched in my hand. I walk a past a long, silent queue of people behind an A4 printout directing Asylum Seekers This Way, and join a shorter line that shuffles towards the bleak administrative building. I’m wearing my good sneakers and my leather jacket for the occasion. Please, my dossier says in triplicate. I’ll drive within your lines if you’ll let me.

the other side

what you might have seen

Late May, 33 degrees. I lean my croissant-softened stomach against the parapet of Pont Neuf and take a photo of the sun setting, fairy-floss pink and gold. My phone pauses, considers, balances, presents me with a high-definition memory. This will be a hit on Facebook. I upload it immediately, even though it’s not yet dawn in Australia.

I’ve been picnicking on the cool emerald carpet of Square du Vert-Galant, drinking cheap rosé, wearing a floral singlet, basking in the smug grandeur of our first real summer’s day. Softly spoken men offered to sell us things to accentuate our pleasure : cold Heinekens for friends, velvet-petalled roses for those who might be lovers. My fellow picnickers bought beers while I wondered how deeply the thorns would cut our palms if we took the flowers instead.

what you did not see

I was lonely when I took the photo, a vast echoing loneliness that stretched forward into the rest of my life. Old friends, friends with whom I could let down my guard, friends with whom I didn’t have to think too much, were distant and indistinct. New friends seemed impassably far off, protected by frontiers of language and culture and old friends of their own.

It took a year of expatriation for the shadow to fall; to make my way for the first time into the dark place behind the monuments and the cafes and the train stations. The place of isolation. The sad place of a stranger far from home.

You think a lot, in that place, about how things used to be: how comfortable you were, and how good you were at your job, and how you earned a decent living, and how you mostly sounded intelligent when you spoke. About how people didn’t listen to you speak with an infuriating mix of pity and concern. About how there were girlfriends you could call when you needed a dance or your Tinder date had murdery eyes or you just wanted to lie in the sun and say nothing.

You think about how tired you are, of filling in forms and asking people to repeat themselves. Of smiling too much, of laughing too easily, of wearing the wrong skirt and feeling eyes follow you the length of the metro platform. Of being not right.

And then, once you’ve started, you can’t stop thinking about other things, too: about the phone ringing in the night for someone to say, I’m sorry to wake you, or, Get on a plane, or, I’m so sorry. About what a bother it would be for your family to fly over to pack up all your things.

There’s a temptation not to document the unphotogenic side of expatriation, an unwillingness to admit it’s not all Instagram-ready. To admit there are days when you eat the last of your Vegemite and listen to ABC Grandstand and refuse to leave the house. That you’re living a real life, not just having an adventure.

What can’t be seen

I stay late underground, in a quiet bar whose stone walls lean in to inspire confidences. I make a new acquaintance. I learn a new word. I sleep long and late, until the restless adventurer in me has the energy to whisper,

tomorrow I will try again.

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