The woman in front of me has hair so perfect it doesn’t look real: a black, shining bob, not a strand out of place. A silk scarf tied around her neck, some kind of camel-colored coat and a black leather handbag over her arm. She looks rich. Not flashy rich. The French equivalent of posh. You don’t have hair that perfect unless you spend your days doing basically nothing.
I look down and see a skinny, silver-colored dog on a pale blue leather lead. It looks up at me with suspicious dark eyes.
The woman behind the counter hands her a pastel-colored box tied with a ribbon: “Voilà, Madame Meunier.”
“Merci.”
She turns and I see that she’s wearing red lipstick, so perfectly applied it might be tattooed on. At a guess she’s about fifty—but a very well-preserved fifty. She’s putting her card back into her wallet. As she does something flutters to the ground—a piece of paper. A banknote?
I bend down to pick it up. Take a closer look. Not a banknote, which is a shame. Someone like her probably wouldn’t miss the odd ten euros. It’s a handwritten note, scribbled in big block capitals. I read: double la prochaine fois, salope.
“Donne-moi ?a!”
I look up. The woman is glaring at me, her hand outstretched. I think I know what she’s asking but she did it so rudely, so like a queen commanding a peasant, that I pretend not to understand.
“Excuse me?”
She switches to English. “Give that to me.” And then finally, as an afterthought, “please.”
Taking my time about it, I hold out the note. She snatches it from my hand so roughly that I feel one of her long fingernails scrape at my skin. Without a thank you, she marches out through the door.
“Excusez-moi? Madame?” the woman behind the counter asks, ready to take my order.
“A croissant, please.” Everything else is probably going to be too expensive. My stomach rumbles as I watch her drop it into the little paper bag. “Two, actually.”
On the walk back to the apartment through the cold gray morning streets I eat the first one in big ravenous bites and then the second slower, tasting the salt of the butter, enjoying the crunch of the pastry and the softness inside. It’s so good that I could cry and not much makes me cry.
Back at the apartment building I let myself in through the gate with the code I learned yesterday. As I cross the courtyard I catch the scent of fresh cigarette smoke. I glance up, following the smell. There’s a girl sitting there, up on the fourth-floor balcony, cigarette in her hand. A pale face, choppy dark hair, dressed in head-to-toe black from her turtleneck to the Docs on her feet. I can see from here that she’s young, maybe nineteen, twenty. She catches sight of me looking back at her, I can see it in the way her whole body freezes. That’s the only way I can describe it.
You. You know something, I think, staring back. And I’m going to get you to tell me.
Mimi
Fourth floor
She’s seen me. The woman who arrived last night, who I watched this morning walking around in his apartment. She’s staring straight at me. I can’t move.
In my head the roar of static grows louder.
Finally she turns away. When I breathe out my chest burns.
I watched him arrive from here, too. It was August, nearly three months ago, the middle of the heatwave. Camille and I were sitting on the balcony in the junky old deckchairs she’d bought from a brocanter shop, drinking Aperol Spritzes even though I actually kind of hate Aperol Spritz. Camille often persuades me to do things I wouldn’t otherwise do.
Benjamin Daniels turned up in an Uber. Gray T-shirt, jeans. Dark hair, longish. He looked famous, somehow. Or maybe not famous but . . . special. You know? I can’t explain it. But he had that thing about him that made you want to look at him. Need to look at him.
I was wearing dark glasses and I watched him from the corner of my eye, so it didn’t seem like I was looking his way. When he opened the boot of the car I saw the stains of sweat under his arms and, where his T-shirt had ridden up, I also saw how the line of his tan stopped beneath the waistband of his jeans, where the paler skin started, an arrow of dark hair descending. The muscles in his arms flexed when he lifted the bags out of the trunk. Not like a jacked-up gym-goer. More elegant. Like a drummer: drummers always have good muscles. Even from here I could imagine how his sweat would smell—not bad, just like salt and skin.
He shouted to the driver: “Thanks, mate!” I recognized the English accent straightaway; there’s this old TV show I’m obsessed with, Skins, about all these British teenagers screwing and screwing up, falling in love.
“Mmm,” said Camille, lifting up her sunglasses.
“Mais non,” I said. “He’s really old, Camille.”
She shrugged. “He’s only thirty-something.”
“Oui, and that’s old. That’s like . . . fifteen years older than us.”
“Well, think of all that experience.” She made a vee with her fingers and stuck her tongue out between them.
I laughed at that. “Beurk—you’re disgusting.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Pas du tout. And you’d know that if your darling papa ever let you near any guys—”
“Shut up.”
“Ah, Mimi . . . I’m kidding! But you know one day he’s going to have to realize you’re not his little girl any longer.” She grinned, sucked up Aperol through her straw. For a second I wanted to slap her . . . I nearly did. I don’t always have the best impulse control.
“He’s just a little . . . protective.” It was more than that, really. But I suppose I also never really wanted to do anything to disappoint Papa, tarnish that image of me as his little princess.
I often wished I could be more like Camille, though. So chill about sex. For her it’s just another thing she likes doing: like swimming or cycling or sunbathing. I’d never even had sex, let alone with two people at the same time (one of her specialties), or tried girls as well as boys. You know what’s funny? Papa actually approved of her moving in here with me, said living with another girl “might stop you from getting into too much trouble.”
Camille was in her smallest bikini, just three triangles of pale crocheted material that barely covered anything. Her feet were pressed up against the ironwork of the balcony and her toenails were painted a chipped, Barbie-doll pink. Apart from her month in the South with friends she’d sat out there pretty much every hot day, getting browner and browner, slathering herself in La Roche-Posay. Her whole body looked like it had been dipped in gold, her hair lightened to the color of caramel. I don’t go brown; I just burn, so I sat tucked in the shade like a vampire with my Francoise Sagan novel, wearing a big man’s shirt.
She leaned forward, still watching the guy getting his cases out of the car. “Oh my God, Mimi! He has a cat. How cute. Can you see it? Look, in that carry basket. Salut minou!”
She did it on purpose, so he would look up and see us—see her. Which he did.