I get to Paris. It’s late, a Saturday. The streets beside Gare du Nord are full of confused Irish rugby fans and the remnants of an anti-restrictions protest. Gangs of teenagers fly flags from passing mopeds. I call R. She’s stuck in a kettle. She describes how her boyfriend is scuttling away from a riot cop and the air is full of teargas. She’s left the keys in a bar: La Chope, Barbès.
The centre of Paris feels more hospitable to people than London (a city that hates even the temporarily poor, like those who’ve lost their wallet). When I arrive at La Chope, I use my terrible state school French (my teacher was an alcoholic who had a nervous breakdown when the year above terrorised her over several months after learning of her fear of mice — slowly driving her insane with slow squeaks with toys) and I am presented with five near-identical sets of keys. I get a glass of red wine and stare at all the keys, despondent and exhausted.
I’ve come to Paris for a change of scene, much needed after two months of trying to find work and/or money. I have to force myself to go away because I know there’s a capacity to reflect on what you need to do that you can only get from leaving where you are; no need to dig deeper into the rut. And after R told me come Paris for a grand old time, I said fuck it. So, I swap apartments with a mutual, book a Eurostar, and a week later here I am, arriving to the predictable chaos of tear gas and protests.
R arrives, chain smokes, and we plot how she can become the communist Joan Didion. We talk about the grim freak show of the French electoral candidates and our love lives. After multiple demis in the neighbourhood, we go to this crazy bar that’s open until 5am to meet a bunch of her friends (one of the last of the late night bars in the city, most closing at London-like times post-covid).
In an elaborate fantasy that exists entirely in my head, the bar looks exactly like the one at the end of Clare Denis’ Beau Travail. Nevertheless, it’s rammed full of young and sexy people with mullets and long coats. I drink a pastis to get in the zone. The walls are adorned with weird kitsch murals of ballroom dancing — I love paintings of muscle tension. There’s a private gabba rave in the basement. They won’t let us in because it turns out the name of the person who’s birthday it is is not Jean-Paul.
We sit with communist friends. Apparently, some members of the Invisible Committee were here earlier, but we didn’t see them (honestly). The entirety of the bar is filled with chairs and tables with no space in between: sort the feng shui out yourself. It’s fantastically weird in the way that the unfamiliarity of somewhere can only really exacerbate. The soft pink and blue lighting keeps getting violently disrupted by someone turning the big light on. A table of women sat near us are eating a massive cherry birthday cake, people keep spontaneously voguing for no particular reason, sometimes a lone man tries to join in the voguing and everyone gets tense, the music is terribly brilliant (Madonna’s Hung Up gets played three times). Eventually we go home.
The days spin out into a blur. Self-ironised dérives in a city built for walking (the teenage Debordian in me fills with glee), six coffees a day coffee, sleeping in, eating food drenched in butter: the days have all spilled into wine. I marvel at how everyone drinks so slowly, and I realise that the people of my birth country drink like they want to die. I promise myself I will start to drink like the French, little and often. I spend the days supplementing wine fatigue and a bad cough with coffee and heart palpitations.
We march around Montmartre. I eat the best almond croissant I’ve ever had in my life from Boulangerie Raphaëlle — I can’t eat anything for six hours after. The temperature is incredibly mild. The sun beats down on my face and some old beatniks bust out Thelonious Monk’s ‘Well You Needn’t’ under a bridge on the Seine. They’re terribly out of time. I take great relish in knowing that if I were in London I’d be cursing at the triteness. That’s the freedom of a holiday: taking delight in being a massive basic, free to indulge in the most alienated of pleasures. Later, we stumble upon a protest for a teenager who committed suicide after possibly being assaulted by a senior member of the Communist Party. The marching crowd are all very young, fashionably Gen-Z (my little crust punk ponies?), waving anarchist and communist flags.
We go to a pretty rustic brasserie in Barbès: Trois Freres, an establishment run by three anti-fascist Algerian brothers with a penchant for bicycles. The food is pretty good, reasonable wine, and a massive vibe (I spend the whole four days in Paris saying “vibey,” again and again — much to the dismay of everyone around me). It’s Valentine’s Day. I am thinking a lot about love, which makes the day exactly the same as any other day.
On the table behind us sits a very charming older French man who looks like a sexier Trotsky with beautiful curled hair behind his ears (he even has glasses like Trotsky). He wears a very mischievous, constant smile. He’s having dinner with his adult daughter who looks like she could be famous but is wearing the disguise of baseball cap, hoodie, and long coat. We think she’s Australian — but gives off London.
Throughout the dinner, this cheeky gallant and his daughter keep coming to amorous blows. I think about the kinds of love that are para-romantic, like a bad dad and daughter. I think about the magic maintained in the tension between them, their deep affection expressed in the exchanges of verbal blows.
The Arctic Monkeys soundtrack the bistro. Bad dad keeps standing on his chair and waving his arms in the air during ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ (a song I don’t hate because it sounds like Bad Brains trying to play Pulp). We catch eyes and I give him an encouraging grin. I think I might fancy him a little bit, the daughter too. She gets extremely annoyed with him — ticking him off for bad behaviour, the present so weighted by the past. He chuckles. Her annoyance and his churlish disregard: they enjoy their dance. They leave. He fist bumps me. We settle our bill. The bar man gives us free drinks and toasts: “fuck fascists.” The idea of a communist bistro in London seems so implausible it blows my mind — how far we are from any sort of meaningful struggle.
On the last night we eat at a fancy place called Buffet in the Quinze-Vingts. I delight in people watching, developing entire back stories to their little lives. The stand out is the bottle of Sancerre. On leaving, we chat to the two young chefs smoking, one Aussie and one Brit, both learned their trade in London. “Do you prefer it here then?” I ask. “Too fucking right, Paris shits all over London.”
We traipse to Mouton Blanc on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis for just one last drink. The street has become my favourite in the city (a pompous thing to say when I barely know it), just rows of bars and incredible lights glistening in the drizzle. I chat with Cameron, a bohemian from New Mexico, about the work and life of the esoteric Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki — Cameron is some sort of maths genius who has fallen in with the commies. I like him because he reminds me of my friend Noah, another American bohemian exiled in Newcastle. There’s that particular kind of smart American weirdo who seems so comfortable in exile, soaking up the ambience of being outside the empire, extremely likeable aliens.
I get more drinks from the bar. The bar man looks at me like I’m a fucking idiot for trying to put my mask on. He gives us multiple free shots. The next morning, I am so hungover I nearly miss my train. I try to read Guillame Dustan’s third novel Stronger than Me but I can’t stomach the long, visceral descriptions of fisting. I think about moving to Paris. At St Pancras I shudder in repulsion at the anti-terrorism announcement, my romanticisms sunk by the inescapable dull terror of this world and its expenses.