Blue Dress

I have a second shower and breathe heat from every pore. I take water and a book, and leave the apartment, breathing in cigarette smoke as I walk slowly down the urine coloured honeycomb tiles. 

I buy her water as a housewarming present and think how much cooler she’ll be without me in her bed. 

Service Continu. 

This time I emerge onto the Paris street and am met by a wave of piss. The scent is familiar and rancid: the stench of nightclub corners and service station loos. I have plasters on my feet from walking too far and my Oura ring flashes a warning that I have “major signs of strain”. I have never felt better. I wake with a base level of happiness I had forgotten it was possible to feel; it lies in my stomach – the satisfaction after breakfast or the elongated stomach of a sleeping black cat. Everything is beautiful, and picture-worthy, and nearly very hot. I take a photo of the cheese van with cow hide splotches outside the Invalides, and watch as a boy curls his fingers through his girlfriend’s outstretched hand. Their Pomeranian squats on the pavement; she unlaces her fingertips and stoops to pick it up. They are young, visibly fresh from bed (her hair is static and drawn outwards, like child’s scribble). It feels almost like evening; honey-hot, post-dawn. I realise I am walking towards home; of course I am. 

The heat grows at a pace of knots. I can smell onions and see Sacré-Coeur on her hill. There is a wheel is the Jardins des Tuileries which makes Paris look like a fairground. The flames of 2024’s Olympic torch flick languid tongues up a hot air balloon. They seem to me to be lolling, and guarding something: they remind me of Cerberus.

The fountain starts as I lift a spoonful of kefir to my lips. I am swarmed by wasps, my yellow dress a mirror to their blind multitude of eyes, so I pop blueberries into my mouth quickly like paracetamol behind the lockers at school. The matcha is bad but the feeling is good. My artist is back — my lovers are the same. I am part of Paris, part of the fountain, part of the metal green chairs. I have strawberry juice on my sticky fingers and suncream on my curling toes. I sip obnoxiously on my matcha and pick the ice out of the cup in shards. (I bite down on a large ice cube and look around. A man is watching me, middle-aged, thickset glasses which adapt to the light, lounging. His feet are on the fountain’s edge (mine are too). The ice is too cold, too much. I chomp it, and try not to wince under his gaze. He is very sure of himself. He watches me). England fumbles in the heat, putting on too much deodorant and never quite knowing where to put her hat. Paris is direct, calculated, linear. She applies suncream to her face but wears her heeled clogs with the single fat leather strap and the block-flower printed midi dress with grace external from the environment and intricately internal to her physical self. She sits in the morning sun inside her tanned crinkling skin because she is a French woman and aesthetics come before protection. The heat goes on around her, like a feather floating on a pond. She is part of it but she is not it. She is the queen bee, the princess on a glass throne; her subjects are busy and moving and restless in their desire to please her, to give her pleasure, to make her theirs. The feather never sinks the way bird dung or pebbles eventually do. The feather never becomes the pond. (The ice has melted a little more, giving way to a pool of watery green liquid at the base of my paper cup. I suck it up, swill, suck. The man removes his feet from the fountain’s edge and slips them quickly inside his soft brown shoes. He stands up. There are three clean lines of sweat across the back of his blue checkered shirt, in blocks which exactly mimic the backrest of the green metal chair. He pulls a Galaries Lafayette tote bag over his shoulder, puts his plastic green bottle of Perrier inside it, and passes behind me as he walks away. I watch him go. I watch him). 

I knock over the matcha cup. It is empty, save for three connected blocks of ice I had judged too large to put directly into my mouth. They spill out onto the green metal chair, dripping carelessly towards the short rim of my bright yellow dress. I grab them and throw them into the fountain. The movement is instinctive, protective. They make a noise as they connect with matter one stage further than themselves, and dissolve, quickly. My heart feels full, and my phone says it is too hot to type. 09.36am.

I have the door opened for me into the Galeries Lafayette where I stop for the loo only (6ème étage). La dame pipi lets me in for free. The 1€50 it should have cost burns in my pocket. 

Montmartre is bloated in the sunlight, the late morning attracting a swell of tourists which makes it unpleasant to stop. I do not idle; I buy a postcard for my cousin with the remnants of my small change, and eat goûter on the pavement in the flow of unseeing passers-by. (I see myself as a shipwreck, a great pile of floating rock, a yellow light-house, a scraped-back bun, and I recall that no woman is an island). I gather my bag to my chest and bat strangers away. No, Good Sir, I may be beautiful but I don’t want your bracelet. 

Paris has shaded streets and sun bleached balconies. She remains hot, like a large woman’s body in the tiny long seconds after sex. Heat pulses out of her, throbbing. 

When does what you’re wearing become an outfit? Two little girls run off the Pont des Arts, weaving between their father’s legs like they are swinging on monkey bars. They are matching down to the beret: their green and white t-shirts match their green and white shorts match one another. Their berets are their distinction, their personalities, their world. One is red, the other pink.

I discover parts of Paris I didn’t know existed, like the little square just off the Pont Neuf. It feels quiet and soft and supple, like a ripe peach. (I buy a yellow plum in Monoprix and leave it in the bottom of my bag, inhaling it in a hurry over my cousin’s sink as soon as I walk back through her door). I exist in the fluff, the skin, the hair. (I exist in the outside, in the yellow juice which runs down the side of my palms as I pull my lips beneath the fruit in an attempt to catch every last drop).

Saint-Eustache chimes midday. I pass by the end of the bridge and note that where they used to sell hot chocolate they now sell squeezed lemonade. I was absent from this place for more than a year. It went on without me. Paris existed, and I did not. (They still have not fixed the road). I sit down to lunch in the down-stream fumes of his sushi, and do nothing, feel nothing, am nothing but lunch and air. I feed myself with the flavour of Paris and lick every inch of the bowl. It tastes of grapefruit and golden raisins, and the thick gelatinous cream of olive oil. 

They serve pasta on chipped plates and we cut it up like children. Everything about the scene reminds me of home. We eat chai mousse on top of cashew butter-stuffed financiers and scrape silver spoons against silver plates with an air of greedy insatiability and end-of-meal fullness. It is delicious, luscious, light-dark like soft brown sugar. The Coke Zero tastes better, like cut-glass and crystals (lemon and ice linger at the bottom of the high-ball glass, melting together into a sweet-tasting lemonade). The bubbles pop on my tongue, and taste like summer.

I gulp down coffee on a stomach still full of truffle pasta, and I cut my nails over a bin in the street. We get the bus and she pays for me, because apparently my ticket is only valid for the metro. I buy her her breakfast and us both peanut butter lattes with almond milk. We are cousins, related by ties of blood and a taste for nut butter inherited from our shared paternal grandfather. (This is news to me, and when my cousin tells me this I feel tingles of joy and grief like wind chimes up my spine. We like peanut butter, and he did too. He died last year, but we taste him in the thick nuttiness which lolls over our tongues, suffocating the tastebuds underneath and burying them in a layer of but glue which sticks to the roofs of our mouths. We remember him in the antique shop windows, the cream in our coffee, the impossibly incorrect phrases we laugh over in French Bistros. I think of him when I see an angel flying over a stall at a morning antiques market, glinting gold in dappled half-light caught mostly by the trees. I think of him as he watches my cousin and I sitting outside a restaurant together in Paris, eating pasta. I think of him, smiling. He is holding up his right hand in a blessing, so I give a cheery wave up to the sky).

I lift the window blind on the train as we roll out of Paris. The baby in the aisle has the chubbiest cheeks and her father has the hairiest sideboards. The woman opposite me (Camille, scrawled across her Starbucks) flinches at the movement which brushes her shoulder, then smiles and shakes her head. I have to watch Paris as I say goodbye. I have to see her tears, see her cry. I close my phone and sit back. My Chat GPT search reads: how do I study for an international PGCE while living in Paris?

The base of the latte is all peanut brittle and grit. I lick it up, though it isn’t very nice. Everything melts like butter and causes friction like granite stones of salt. The crop has been harvested long and I have pomegranate stains on my new white shorts. The smell of rain and mellow blackberries makes red wine out of the air. I change trains in Surdon, dismounting into a warm towel of heat onto a platform of non-existence. It is like Adlestrop, only a name. Nothing happens in Surdon; I do not even believe it is a place. There is an apple orchard and there are raindrops suspended on the leaves, hovering like divers on the cusp of their boards, too scared to leap, to jump in. I walk up the road a little, stretching my legs. Charles Aznavour is floating out of the windows of the white station master’s cottage, which has the kind of cracked paint attractive to lizards and broken shutters attractive to bats. I am, quite plainly, in rural France. Paris is a memory at the end of a railway line, a city being rained on by blue clouds and written about in papers which arrive in a daily post van. Technology feels new around here. Perhaps I am in the war? The road has yellow grass spouting from its middle. There are no loos, only the wailing of the radio and a faint hum of crickets. My transfer is the next train on the Arrivals board: 52 minutes away. It is eleven o’clock in the morning and could be any hour of the day. Writing down the digits – 11:00 – feels too contemporary, too corporate, too exact. Minutes don’t exist here and seconds appear excessive in their finitude. We are spiders suspended at the end of threads of our own making, at the mercy of the unblown breeze and stagnant summer air. I turn off the road and crouch on the damp cornfield grass of an empty stubble field. (It has rained, hotly, like a tropical storm). There is a dead frog on the path, swollen as though, in an attempt not to expire, he puffed himself up to excess. His bandy legs are spread wide, splayed in an open diamond. My bag suddenly seems heavier than before, the platform from which I need to catch my next train further away. When I walk back past the station master’s tumbledown white house, the music has stopped. I pick blackberries for my lunch from the gates by the station platform and laugh at a text from my cousin: you know the nail scissors I bought at the Pharmacy last night? Turns out they’re for your moustache…

Familiarity does not always breed contempt but it does breed complacency. The flies hum busily and the two magpies delight in their joy. There is a film of olive oil around this heart which must be penetrated before a thought is conceived, accepted, rejected. It is like the melting outline of a knob of butter, translucent fat seeping softly into yellow. Figs drop on to the floor: small and yellow and supple like kumquats. Their skin is gently fuzzed and nipple-like. I scoop one up and take it home. 

Two water rats belly flop into the ditch, followed by a purple dragonfly. We judge the end of our holiday by the number of yoghurts left in the fridge, eaten straight from the pot standing at the open kitchen window watching hot air balloons rustle slowly through the morning sky. On the lawn, magpies play. The coffee comes in small mugs which retain heat right to the bottom. The sun does not gain warmth until 10am. After that, it cooks us like fat pigs on a grill.

The Great Pillow Reshuffle occurs at exactly ten to midnight (though don’t quote me on this, because I was half asleep. Reporting is difficult when under the drug of semi-unconsciousness). I feel like Margot Robbie’s Cathy, Summer Version (not Taylor’s): my nightie is slicked internally by body oil, lascivious and inviting as the juice off tomatoes. The champagne is living, like rolling tiny diamonds around the tip of your tongue. The cats make noises like mice and the mosquitos sound like yowling kittens. France softens around me, all translucent butter and apricot skin. August is a bottle of wine. But I took that from someone, didn’t I?