An American smartarse called out for some Captain Beefheart. We looked at each other, Don gave me a thumbs up and whipped up a mighty percussive burst from which we launched into something that bore a very faint resemblance to ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’. I’m sure to those watching it was just a cacophony, but, as I say, we were young and we were cute and they must have felt something of our own intoxication, because they laughed and cheered and put more money into the cap, then we saluted and promised to be back same time, same place tomorrow, and hotfooted it down the street just as the police came barrelling along in the opposite direction.
We were heading for the buskers’ café. It probably had some other name, maybe it was the Café St André des Arts or something entirely forgettable like that, but everyone knew it as the buskers’ café. It was full of 1970s hangovers, French guys with long hair and battered acoustics exchanging tips on how to play Neil Young songs. Up to now we’d held each other in amiable mutual contempt: they thought we were idiot punk rockers who couldn’t play an instrument, we thought they were ridiculous old hippies in Gauloise-reeking velvet jackets.
This time though, as we approached, I could see a whole bunch of these guys, five or six of them, mostly with guitars out, sitting at the big table in the window. They were banging their way through ‘Hey Jude’, which was not unusual, except for the fact that they were all joining in and two of them were playing the spoons on the table, and in the instrumental break one of them pulled out a kazoo. We stood there open-mouthed. The hippie bastards were stealing our act.
It would have been too embarrassing to go in there now. So, as usual, everyone looked to me to come up with an alternative. Ifor the anarchist had taken me to a bar around here, I was sure. Could I remember where it was? Of course I could. I led the way unerringly, and soon we were sitting around the front table of a real locals bar, counting our takings and drinking the cheapest vin rouge yet, while watching a Chinese kid, maybe ten years old, score several million on the pinball machine.
For a while we were all one, high on the adventure, but as the evening wore on Beth and I went back into our bubble and drifted towards the back of the bar. I walked over to the counter to order more drinks. There was a guy leaning there, a real classic French boho in his late thirties, looked like Jean-Pierre Leaud’s dodgy older brother. He looked at me, then looked at Beth and said something to the patronne, and she laughed and reached up for one of the good bottles of wine and poured off three glasses. Jean-Pierre smiled and handed two glasses to me, then raised his glass. ‘Salut.’
‘Salut,’ I said back, and Jean-Pierre motioned us towards the bar stools next to him, and told us his name was Laurent, and I talked to him in bad French and translated everything for Beth, and I could see in Laurent’s eyes just how fine he thought Beth was, and I was not worried, just proud, because I knew our heartbeats were just casing themselves together, ready to beat fast.
Soon we were sitting at a booth together and Laurent was talking about shoes. He had stared at Beth’s shoes as we’d moved from bar to booth and shaken his head and said that ‘a très belle fille like you needs better shoes than those’. Those being a pair of deliberately old-fashioned schoolgirl sandals. ‘I have some wonderful shoes at my apartment,’ he said. ‘You must come and see. I will give you some.’
I translated for Beth and she smiled and said ‘Oui merci.’
‘You like to come now. Is not far.’
We looked at each other and laughed, shook our heads.
‘No problem,’ said Laurent, ‘I will see you again,’ and he returned to his perch at the bar and we went back to the others, who must have been waiting for us, as they stood up as one and we headed out into the street.
I knew then, as the night air hit, that I was drunk. I picked out the route back to the gypsy’s hotel without thinking, almost without looking. As we passed the school on St André des Arts I turned to Beth, the self-same second she turned to me, and our kiss started there, lasted all the way home and up the four flights of stairs and into a room that was instantly ours and I’ll spare you the details, spare me the details.
In the morning we staggered down to breakfast late, sat in Renée’s parlour, eating croissants and drinking coffee from bowls. The bubble around us seemed positively hermetic and it was only when we were finally dressed and standing outside with the others, looking like a band of gypsies, that I realised it was raining, not just a shower but the implacable stuff that’s booked in to stay.
We did our best, tried a few bedraggled songs outside the Beaubourg, went down into the maze of Châtelet Métro, but nothing was right. The public hurried past us and the sense that we were a team had been destabilised by Beth and me. By mid-afternoon we’d barely earned enough for food, let alone another night at the gypsy’s. Don had had enough.
‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ he said, as we huddled outside a patisserie awning. ‘Let’s go back out to the forêt, go to the sports centre there, have a swim.’
The others grunted agreement. I wasn’t ready to give up, wasn’t prepared to cede defeat to the bloody weather, but Don was implacable and the rain kept on, so I opted for a partial surrender.
‘Fine,’ I said, then turned to Beth. ‘You fancy going to see a gallery first?’ She nodded and stared at her feet, embarrassed to be marked out like this as part of a couple, apart from her friends, but still clear in her choice, choosing me.
That settled, we said we’d see the others later, out at the forêt. They headed off to the RER and we took the Métro up to Notre Dame de Lorette and soon found ourselves the only people in the Musée Gustave Moreau, all princesses and serpents and opium, beloved of any young aesthete who’s read Huysman’s Against Nature, and yes, of course, I was that soldier. But its emptiness was really the thing, drifting through this grand house full of weird paintings midway between kitsch and powerful, in our bubble, sealed in our bubble. Did we kiss in front of… Did we… No, too much recall.
Afterwards we drifted south, walked down St Denis and goggled at the whores, found some little second-hand shops at the southern end and bought a ‘50s shirt we both liked. Skirting Les Halles, not going anywhere in particular, just putting off our return to the forêt, I took us into Parallèles, an anarchist bookshop Ifor had shown me one time. And there, reading a copy of Actuel, was Laurent.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘mes amis’
‘Hey,’ we said right back and we got to talking. We went to the bar a few doors down and Laurent bought the drinks and we talked some more, then he asked what our plans were.
‘Not much,’ I said, ‘we have to go out to St Germainen-Laye.’
Laurent looked disgusted. ‘But why? There’s nothing there, it is just… bourgeois.’
I explained that we were camping in the forêt and he laughed at that and said, ‘OK, but go later tonight. I’ll take you some places that are not so… bourgeois.’
Beth and I looked at each other, and I mumbled something about money and our lack of any, but Laurent brushed it aside. ‘I have money, don’t be so bourgeois.’
Well, neither of us wanted to be bourgeois, that was for sure, so we looked at each other again and smiled and said, ‘OK, merci.’
It was full dark by the time we left the bar. Time to eat, said Laurent and led the way up to Chartiers, off the rue Montmartre, a big old Toulouse-Lautrec place with mirrors and moustachioed waiters and cheap decent food. It’s a bit of a tourist classic, of course, I know that now, but right in that moment it was wonderful.