We'll Always Have Paris (2 page)

Soon, France is my worst crush ever, worse than the man from House and Sons Electricians on Monkgate, worse than Gary Speed of Leeds United, worse than Dafydd, the double bass player who lives
down our street. I listen to Nina Simone’s version of ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ in my bedroom, rolling my ‘r’s extravagantly, and look round York’s second-hand shops for
a leather jacket like Romane Bohringer’s. Sadly, my outlets for Frenchness are very limited. There is staticky, dull France Inter on longwave on my radio. Our neighbour Geoff is translating
Madame Bovary
and he lets me read the manuscript (or rather, lets me keep the manuscript on my bedside table and say to myself in the mirror ‘yeah, I’m reading a new
translation of
Madame Bovary
’, because I find all the bits about the countryside tedious and search in vain for the sex scenes). My mum buys me
Le Grand Meaulnes
(deeply
improbable but stirring) and Simone de Beauvoir’s
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
(I like the bits about getting flashed at in a Catholic bookshop and drinking gin fizz, but skim over
whole chapters of dry Sorbonne disagreements about Hume). But my latent Frenchness does not receive any fuller expression until my French exchange trip, Easter 1992.

It is actually not strictly speaking a ‘French’ exchange, because my exchange partner, although French, lives in Casablanca. This rather eccentric arrangement comes
about through my stepfather’s mother spotting a small ad in the classifieds section of the
Catholic Herald
and after some exchanges of letters and an awkward phone call, an
arrangement is put in place for me to go and stay with Aurélie, the daughter of two French expats and an accomplished ballet dancer and model, no less, and for Aurélie to return to us
in the summer.

I set off with a suitcase full of nineteenth-century novels and Monsoon summer dresses and spend the next three weeks in a state of deep, dream-like culture shock. Casablanca is the strangest
place I have ever been. It is not so much the centre, which is broadly recognizable as a North African city from reading Paul Bowles or watching television (a souk of heaped olives and cakes and
insistent pressing bustle, the roar and odour of poorly fitted exhaust pipes, groups of men sitting around in purposeful idleness). The strangeness comes in the suburbs, the flat plains of desert
where Aurélie’s leathery, enigmatic family live. Driving back to their house from the airport we pass through huge swathes of nothing but grey-brown scrub, the emptiness broken only by
the occasional donkey or goat. Then, rising from nothing, come a series of huge, stupid, white elephants of villas. They are outlandish, architectural follies, the kind of mansions you discover
when a dictator is deposed and the rebel forces parade around, showing off the gold-plated toothbrush holders and His and Hers lavatories. One is shaped like an ocean liner and another like a Deep
South colonial bayou. They are all in poor repair, buffeted by desert winds and exfoliated by sand, and it’s impossible to imagine who, if anyone, lives there.

Aurélie’s own suburb is called ‘La Californie’ and it is just about conceivable why, since it is made up of low-rise, white-painted bungalows, the high protective garden
walls overhung with bougainvillea. Inside, the house is surprisingly small: three bedrooms, a tiny bathroom and a kitchen no one but the maid seems to enter. Seven cats and four dogs of wildly
differing shapes and varieties sprawl all over the house, lounging on the modish L-shaped sofa module, following the maid into the kitchen to beg for scraps, drawing the intermittent ire of the
gardener. The humans are more uniform: both Aurélie and her brother Ludo are almost comically attractive. Aurélie is tall and almond-eyed, her hair cut into a highlighted shaggy mane,
her cheekbones conferring the instant illusion of sophistication. Ludo is boy band handsome with a floppy dark wave of hair falling over his face, emitting strong teenage boy waves of contempt.
Aurélie’s mother wears thigh-high fringed suede boots and her eyes are heavily kohl ringed. Her father is tiny, neat and bronzed, almost always silent, one of those Giscard
d’Estaing style French men who wear navy blue suits and striped shirts with brown brogues, and who carry man bags, which they do not consider for a second might impugn their masculinity.

Aurélie and I, thrown together by the
Catholic Herald
, share not only a room, but, to my prudish horror, a
bed.
We put one of those bolster pillows down the middle so as
not to roll onto one another in the night, but it is still odd to sleep so close to someone you have known for a matter of hours. It gets stranger still when I wake to realize the maid is bedding
down on a mat in the corner of the room. Over the next few weeks I wake occasionally to a low murmur and turn over, befuddled with sleep, to see her performing
salat
in the dim pre-dawn.
More often, I am woken by one of the cats, claws out, impassively massaging my leg.

No one seems to have any idea what to do with me. Aurélie and I do not bond; we are strangers, two people sharing nothing more than a bed. Aurélie has her boyfriend, the jockish,
monosyllabic Robert, her modelling, her dance classes and her Slimfast-based regime. She has no time for me and my floral dresses and my Victorian novels, dithery and tongue-tied and painfully
embarrassed. I only go to school with her once (it’s terrifying, a giant purpose-built Lycée in downtown Casa full of lithe, brown French kids) and the rest of the time I am thrown on
the kindness of Aurélie’s mother and of the neighbours. Dozy with culture shock and sleep deprivation, I wake late, to be greeted by a pile of pancakes, specially prepared for me, soft
and full of holes like giant crumpets, butter and honey seeping through to the plate; then I hang around, awkwardly, reading or playing with the animals until someone finds me something to do. Once
I get to watch Aurélie’s ballet class, and another time she takes me to watch her record a lo-fi soft drink commercial. It’s Ramadan, and filming stops at nightfall so the crew
can go and eat dates and drink bowls of
harira
, the traditional Ramadan soup, in a tent behind the studio.

But things are far better when Aurélie can’t be persuaded to amuse me. I am handed over to a fierce, semi-fascist elderly lady who lives down the road, who holds forth to me on
various subjects close to her heart, then takes me on the train to Rabat. We tour the city, which is completely fascinating to me: the beautiful fortifications, the ornate Mohammed V mausoleum and
the Tour Hassan, but also the modernity of it, the accommodations of old and new. Later, Aurélie’s mother takes me to Marrakech for the weekend. The drive is an enchantment, a fairy
story with camels and herds of floppy-eared goats sitting in the middle of the road and the snow-topped Atlas mountains sparkling improbably in the distance. We stay in a riad in the Medina, where
the lush tiled courtyard gardens hidden behind plain alleyway doors with peeling paint bewilder me with their beauty. The souk is a familiar image from a thousand films and photographs, but I am
not prepared for the lambs gathered shitting in terror in its narrow lanes in anticipation of Eid, or for the rivulets of blood, made sticky and slow-moving by the yellow dust, the smells of spice
and dirt and decay. We walk across the Djema el-Fna at dusk, all twinkling lights and smoke and hissing and I feel overwhelmed and cracked open, like the 1970s hippies. It’s all a very long
way from North Yorkshire.

And then there is Karim.

I have never had a boyfriend, not a proper one. I have ‘gone out’ with a couple of Wind Band nerds, more because they were available than because I liked them and it has always been
dreadful, excruciatingly awkward, a festival of sweaty hand-holding, silence and clashing orthodontics. Each time, there is a moment of triumph at the idea that I have demonstrated my normality,
but each time it is swiftly replaced by a desperate desire to get as far away from these boys as possible. My fantasy crushes are far more satisfying: distant figures like the electrician, Dafydd
the double bass player and Gary Speed. No one attainable has ever seemed desirable to me, and vice versa.

But now there is Karim, a friend of the family (his sister dances with Aurélie) who comes round to Aurélie’s house one night for some reason, and who, for some reason, asks
me out. I say yes, of course I do. He is older than me, in his early twenties, confident and funny with that fair Moroccan colouring, green eyes and dark golden curls. Why on earth wouldn’t I
say yes?

Karim picks me up in the warm blue Casablanca night and we go to the cinema. It’s ten o’clock. I don’t even think there are screenings that late in York: how would you get
home? We drive through the barren suburbs and along the dual carriageway lined with scrubby palm trees, towards the city where the white cubes are closer together and strip-lit night shops
alternate with dark alleys. As he drives, we talk, or we try to, a halting mix of English and French. I understand, but speaking is harder, I fumble my answers and point, my chest tight and fizzy
with anticipation.

The cinema is showing some daft recent action film, dubbed into French, with Arabic subtitles. It feels ineffably sophisticated to be doing something so ordinary in such a strange place and I
observe the audience covertly, young and old, snacking on paper cones of pumpkin seeds and drinking cans of Coke. After the film ends, the sky is darker blue still and as we drive, a vast inky mass
appears to my right: the sea. It is the first time I have spotted it since my arrival and I insist on getting out of the car and walking down the debris-strewn beach, the twinkling lights of the
refineries and chemical plants in the distance. I do not care. A warm salty wind blows into my face and nothing has ever felt so exotic, so romantic in my entire life. We kiss, and before Karim
drops me back at the bougainvillea-covered bungalow, we conclude with a breathy hormonal grapple in the dark, to the soundtrack of his Prefab Sprout cassettes. This is almost certainly the high
point of my life to date.

Our fling continues for the remainder of my stay. Almost every night, Karim is there to take me out on adventures. There is something incredibly freeing about being somewhere where no one knows
who I am and what I am supposed to be like. In York, I am an introverted, vegetarian semi-goth. In Casablanca, I can be someone entirely different, and I am. With Karim and his sisters, I go to
nightclubs and dance and we drive around the city in the pink dawn to buy hamburgers. I sit on the floor at packed house parties as French stoners talk over me about The Doors, and ride horses
through the desert. I have a delicious feeling of uncertainty: I never quite know where I am or what will happen next, but rather than worrying I abandon caution and trust entirely. Nothing bad
happens. Usually, we end up back at Karim’s house drinking mint tea with his parents and playing Pictionary. I sleep in his bedroom sometimes. We don’t have sex – for all my
abandoned caution, I just can’t surrender to that extent – but it’s all a great deal more satisfying than my excruciatingly awkward encounters with the Wind Band nerds. I lose
myself, lose the inhibition and the doubt and the distaste for my own body in the warm darkness.

It is there that they come to find me in the small hours of my very last morning, Karim’s sister banging on the door, phone in hand, reminding me my flight leaves in a few hours. After a
mad rush to pack – boxes of Moroccan patisseries stuffed in my backpack wrapped in those Monsoon dresses, the unread
Ejfi Briest
and
War and Peace
–
Aurélie’s parents see me off, waving a last-minute goodbye as I run to my departure gate. My heart lurches as the plane taxis, then climbs (last view of palms, white low-rise city,
sand, refineries, churning grey sea). Something has shifted in me: I feel older, taller, Frencher.

My bubble is swiftly burst on my return to York. Karim never replies to my gushing letters and when I tell people at school that I rode Arab stallions in the desert, it causes an outbreak of
juvenile sniggering. Aurélie’s return trip to England does not seem to affect her anything like as deeply, either. We take her to a damp National Trust cottage in the Lake District,
where we introduce her to our traditional holiday pursuits: long, sodden walks, the occasional visit to a tearoom and a great deal of solitary reading, occasionally punctuated by a hysterical (to
us) game of Racing Demon. Each morning, Aurélie rows gloomily across the lake in the mist to maintain her ‘
poitrine
’. She seems distinctly less excited than the rest of
the family by the momentous discovery of a dead mole by the back door, or by the large tick lodged in my sister’s shoulder. She does, however, learn that ‘
cagoule
’ has
another meaning in English, so the trip is not entirely wasted from an educational perspective. On our return to York, we take her to the newly opened multiplex cinema, and to my friends’
houses for viewings of
Single White Female
and Spar popcorn. My male friends stare at her in open lust, a fact Aurélie accepts with a total and complacent absence of surprise. It is
true that she is magnificent. The problem is that she is also very boring. We part without regret at the end of her stay and soon our correspondence dies an inevitable death.

For me, however, the die is cast. Casablanca, Aurélie and Karim have shown me the transformative power of abroad: being in another place and speaking another language has allowed me to be
someone else entirely. If my identity can be up for grabs in this unexpected and welcome fashion, then I can pursue my plan with every expectation of success: I will become French.

When my placement comes through for my
assistante-
ship, my stepfather Joe looks it up in our huge
Times
atlas and shows me, then I laugh, hollowly. Madame
Cockroft would be happy: I am going to sodding Normandy. Will my knowledge of the nuclear power stations and cheeses, the industrial hinterland of the port of Le Havre and the meadowlands of the
Pays de Caux finally be put to good use?