Tom arrived on Saturday afternoon. He was so blisteringly fast through security and passport control that I missed him at arrivals. This annoyed me, but he was a good sport about it.
He’d got me a bottle of gin at duty free.
We dropped his bag off at my flat and went round the corner to Chez Coquille for a pint, which became two, which became dinner and wine. He knows a couple in Paris and had been in touch RE meeting up with them that evening, so we came back from dinner only to go straight back out again and took the metro up to Le Marais. Here, while we waited for Red to reply, we had a cocktail. It was a fresh night, so we sat outside.
Halfway through our drinks a tiny man turned up and sat opposite us. Right from the get go he was shifty, with a bottle of Heineken in his hand. Before he said anything, he insisted we both take a cigarette. We declined. He insisted. We declined. He insisted. We accepted. ‘Cocaïne?’ he asked under his breath. ‘Non,’ I replied. The subtext being: not from you.
He asked if we were locals and we said no; and despite the fact that every time he said something to Tom he was met with a confused stare, he continued to ask him muttered and barely understandable questions, between looking at me and just saying: ‘Ça va?’
The waiter spied his bottle and asked him if he’d bought it there. Yet more indecipherable mumbling. He was told to get rid of it. He put it under his chair.
‘Cocaïne?’ he asked again.
‘No,’ Tom said. We both put out our cigarettes.
‘Comment tu t’appelles?’ I asked him.
‘Georges.’
‘Tu viens d’où?’
‘Égypte.’
He asked us in turn where we were from and we told him. Did we like Paris? Yes. Were we having a good night? Yes. ‘Ça va?’… ‘Oui, ça va.’
The waiter came out again and caught Georges drinking from his bottle. His face said it all. He threw up his hands and told him he’d already said to get rid of it, so get rid of it.
Georges just looked at him.
The waiter turned to me and I gave him a frustrated glance. He asked Georges if he knew us.
Georges looked at us.
‘Non,’ I said, ‘on le connaît pas.’
A look of relief came over the waiter and he told our intruder where he could go. Georges looked back at us again and insisted he knew us. I insisted we didn’t. He asked me what I meant. I told him we didn’t know him. It was far easier being stern, or rude, or whatever I was, in French. In English I would have ended up entertaining him far longer than we already did.
After a bit of back and forth with the waiter, he finally fucked off. The woman next to me expressed her own relief at his ejection.
We paid and thanked the waiter again and joined Harry and Red at a nearby bar where we drank and ate chips and after, around midnight, went back to theirs. Harry went to bed. Red told us about his recent Boiler Room set. About his life in Sydney. His plans for the future. We told him ours and drank red vermouth and were home by 3.
***
Walking about Bois de Vincennes, Sunday afternoon. We were talking about La Nausée, another book, which, following on from reading The Master and Margarita together in December, we’d both read in January. Tom had read the Robert Baldick translation—that I read a few years ago—and I read it in the original for the first time. Neither of us were particularly moved by it as a whole, but certain parts were deeply affecting. Tom said something about Roquentin being autistic. I disagreed. There were Pomeranians everywhere. It was surprisingly warm, and as we followed the path around the lake I told him about a problem I’d had regarding the name of the town the book is set in: Bouville. Modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre was living for part of the time he wrote the book, the name is a pun on the words boue (mud) and ville (town). So, literally, Mudtown. Given that it’s very much a French book there’s no need to translate the town name—but if you did, how would you do it?
I’d been wracking my brain the past two weeks thinking of an option, but Tom, who barely speaks a word of French, answered instantly with what I think might be the perfect alternative: Dirton. It has everything. The ville/ton ending that French and British towns have, the affix implying mud or dirt or filth. Even down to the spelling, removing the last letter of the affix. The result being a totally believable town name. It’s perfect. He nailed it.
***
Monday. I’m writing as Tom cooks—a dish he picked up when he lived in Thailand and has been tweaking and perfecting since. It smells incredible. He’s playing The Cramps, loud. When we lived together in Manchester, the best part of a decade ago, we started cooking together, or for each other, and food has remained an important part of our friendship. At one point, for a year or so, we even worked together in the same pub kitchen. After that all fell apart, we didn’t; and now, whenever he visits me in Glasgow, or like today in Paris, it remains something I look forward to. Yesterday I made us a beef and pork ragu. This morning we had the leftovers with porridge (don’t knock this til you try it, I promise).
***
After dinner last night we went to see The Zone of Interest, a film both of us had avoided reading anything about in the run up. All we knew was that it involved the Nazis. How we’d managed to remain so ignorant to the subject matter I don’t know, but we did and I’m glad we did. However, a few minutes into the film it became clear that we’d remained a little too ignorant, when we realised that it was all in German. Going into it we’d presumed it would be in English with French subtitles, not German with French, leaving Tom relying on German lessons from 15 years ago and his 106 day Duolingo French streak. He said after the film that he saw the exact moment when I realised what was happening, and debated leaving, but—just as I felt unable to turn to him and ask what he wanted to do, given the crushing weight and tension of everything—he decided he’d just stick it out. Thankfully there’s very little in terms of plot, and while he missed out on some phenomenal dialogue, he managed to get the gist of things. After, there was a black hole inside me. We went for a pint and then came back to mine, I poured us each a whisky and Tom announced that King Charles has cancer.
We spent Tuesday afternoon wandering about Père Lachaise. I hadn’t been since I was 18 and it was Tom’s first time. Perhaps it was the heatwave, or the fact that I was laser focussed on only seeing Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde’s graves the last time I was there, but I didn’t remember it being so big. Nor that it was on a hill. In many ways it was like being there for the first time, which was nice. Occasionally I’d think I recognised somewhere, but I couldn’t be sure. Jim was always round the corner, but never was; then he was, and the image I had in my head was different. The bust was gone. Removed or stolen. Anyway, we didn’t spend too long with him and walked on. The topography of the place influenced the paths we took; some monument or stone would catch our eye as we crested a hill or rounded a bend, and draw us toward it. Balzac’s copper head looked down at us. Tom said his hair was like how I used to have mine. I agreed. Thank God I cut it. Tom agreed. We walked on. I babbled about the scene in Père Lachaise at the end of Le Père Goriot, how sad it made me, and wondered where Balzac saw it happening, trying to remember how specific he’d been. If he had, I said to Tom, had we passed the pauper’s grave? Who knows. Rain threatened. We all but stumbled onto Chopin’s tomb. Tom hummed the melody to the Raindrop Prelude and told me the story of its composition. In turn I told him that a few years ago, during a bout of insomnia, all I could listen to were his Nocturnes. For months I played Brigitte Engerer’s complete collection of them and nothing else: as I drove, as I lay awake, whenever the silence needed filling. There remains, whenever I listen to them, a shifting sense of comfort and discomfort. Few things mean more to me.
That night we went to Crazy Horse. It was our first cabaret and when we left we both agreed that it was good but we wouldn’t rush back. Conflicted. I’d write more but it would just descend into spirals of observations on the room and those who filled it and how I felt at the time and the price of drinks and questions of gaze and commercialisation and sex as entertainment, and it would go nowhere. It is complex. It was very impressive. I did not like how I felt when we left. I’ll leave it at that.
***
After wandering about Cimetière Ancien on Sunday, Montparnasse on Monday, and Père Lachaise on Tuesday, we spent Wednesday morning underground, and capped off Tom’s trip by visiting the apotheosis of burial grounds: the catacombs.
Much like Crazy Horse, we both agreed it was good but were in no hurry to return. Here, the issue was simple: the public. They’ll never act or react how you want them to, and acquiescing to this is part of life; but snaking about the dripping passages, surrounded by hundreds and thousands of bones, skulls that housed so many lives, bodies that experienced the same pains we do, and having to listen to the Spanish couple ahead of you bickering, after having already been indignant about having to remove their backpacks, really just didn’t sit right. Nor did the constant echoes of the audio-guides, which Tom refused to acknowledge, quite rightly, had anything remotely alluding to the voices of the dead, and instantly shot me down as I bullshitted a means of trying to be less annoyed by them.
Solemnity and death is a tough subject. Still, I think you should shut up around the dead. But the more I think of it (and after deleting a series of rhetorical questions about how to actually respect the dead) the clearer it becomes that above all, in this case, it’s a problem, once more, of commercialisation. Just like the Arc de Triomphe, or the Louvre, it’s just somewhere else to go, to tick off a list. It doesn’t really matter what you saw, just that you saw it. This, while annoying, is easier to shrug off with art or a monument. But when it’s people’s remains it all feels dirtier. That said, it’s not like Tom and I went to pay our respects to the dead, we went out of a macabre interest. Being respectful to the dead just feels like it’s implicit in the process. But hey, everyone else paid for their tickets too. We’re all a means of providing a financial support to keep the place running. Tom even bought a fridge magnet at the gift shop.
Our last meal was a sandwich on the steps of the Opéra Bastille. As we ate, the wind informed us of the patch of piss near Tom’s feet. We laughed. We walked home. We wondered when we’d next see each other. He left. A few hours later he text to say he’d landed back in Manchester. The flat is silent once more.