Leaving Paris in August
The TGV ride from Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaulle is one of the most depressing journeys I have ever taken. Four days in Paris and I was sad for weeks. I sat in our London living room smoking and drinking beer and watching TV and trying to find a good reason to ever get off the couch. I drank myself silly the night before my flight to Lisbon, no longer excited about going to a new European city.
I sat on the metro, riding to Gare du Nord, eating a soggy panini. The Metro is nothing like the London Underground. It has large empty rectangular corridors and huge, pointless halls. It has rubber wheels. It has no happy people. Not that day, anyway.
Everyone on the Metro looks gloomy. A couple of boys asked me how much I bought my panini for. They looked like those kids you see in those depressing European movies at film festivals.
I sleepwalked through Gare du Nord. Out the Metro exit, in the RER entrance, down the stairs.
I waited a long time for that train. I stood on the dirty, dingy and dank platform underground watching people clamber in and out of other trains. The platform was sticky and brown and third-world like. One girl ran to a train just as the doors closed. She sighed and went away. I waited, getting sadder, waited to get the hell out of Paris.
I sat alone in the mostly empty train. A woman in a burkha sang a sad song in French. Or was it a man with an accordion? I know it wasn’t the guy with the curtain and the puppet. That was on the Metro earlier in the day when I was going back to Ariane’s from the Eiffel Tower. Whoever it was, I gave him/her a couple of euros. I think it was the man. He looked very sad when I gave him the money.
Out the window, I saw grey tenement blocks. I saw slums in a horseshoe shape in a yard. A clothesline hung between two houses. A lady in a burkha ran after a kid on a tricycle. I was in an Iranian film. Women in Iranian films are always wearing burkhas and running after kids on tricycles. I felt that tightness in my chest – you know, the type you feel when you think you want to cry but you don't really.
I got off the train at Charles de Gaulle and spent 15 minutes trying to figure out where the hell my terminal was. That seems silly in retrospect. I had taken a bus from the terminal to the train. I don’t know why I didn’t figure out that that was what I had to do to get back to the terminal. Lousy signage.
The bus to the terminal took forever. When we finally got to the terminal, they couldn’t raise the barrier. I sat there, 10 metres away from the terminal building, wondering what it would take to get out of that damn bus.
Checking in, I was fascinated by one of the check-in girls. She was white as snow, with a face so tight it looked like it might snap. She had her hair pulled back, the thinnest eyebrows I’ve ever seen and the sort of glasses that dominatrixes (dominatrice?) wear in porn. I sat on the pavement outside the airport and rolled myself a cigarette. A Sri Lankan Airlines plane rolled by.
A very pretty lady dropped her suitcase on the retro-futuristic moving walkway in the atrium. I picked it up for her and she smiled and said thank you. She stood behind me at immigration too. Also in the line were a few orthodox Jews, large families and two babies (one of whom had dropped her pacifier at some earlier point. I know this because a strange woman who reminded me of Donatella Versace came by yelling that she’d found a pacifier, offering it to everyone).
Once I got to the departure lounge, I still had half an hour before they opened the gate.
I bought an awful half bottle of overpriced wine and drank it slowly. There was little I wanted to do but get entirely smashed and wake up back in good ol’ London. Two very cute little girls sat next to me in the departure lounge, playing with something. I don’t remember what. Stuffed animals, I think. I felt quite bad drinking wine in front of them. It wasn’t just the wine. It was the way I was sitting there: limp, tired, unfriendly-looking. Either way, I drank my wine and looked around and tried to figure out who was French and who was English and who was, like me, neither.
I don’t remember the flight back home. I don’t remember which side of the plane I sat, what I had to drink, whom I sat beside, nothing. No, I must have sat on the right of the aircraft because I remember looking out of the window as we flew over London. I saw the river, I saw Canary Wharf and the buildings of Parliament and the Oval. I was glad to be back, sure, but I wasn’t very glad in general. I bought two very expensive cans of Carlsberg from the WhistleStop or whatever and went home. The living room was empty. I think everyone was asleep. And I had to get to work the next day.
What had I done that last day? I’d woken up late, I know. I went down to the Eiffel Tower and sat on the lawns and wrote out my postcards. I climbed up to the second floor, drank expensive water and climbed back down. I asked someone to take a picture of me. I felt like a fool. I went back to Ariane’s and we drank some of that shitty beer she had.
She helped me buy some tobacco and mail my postcards. We went to the café round the corner where I’d met her the first day. I bought a panini and we had Earl Grey tea. That cracked me up.
We talked a little, but nothing of consequence. I was sad to be leaving Paris but relieved as well. And I was sad to say goodbye to Ariane. I really liked her. She walked me to the Metro gates and I kissed her cheeks in the awkward manner that I do. I’d only been in the damn country four days. I still hadn’t quite got the hang of all this kissing. I said thank you and with one hand holding my Panini and the other holding my bag, I walked away from Paris.
