‘Get out, you moron.’
‘But why?’
‘I like to know who I’m dealing with.’
‘OK, I’ll tell you, but get a move on, I don’t want to die in a taxi.’
At last she starts up again. This woman’s stressing me out. With all the hassle I’ve got, I didn’t need this too.
‘Right, explain.’
So I describe my glamorous life in the square. Of course I don’t give names. I say I went into a diabetic coma on the terrace in rue Myrha. Rashid my neighbour’s got diabetes.
‘You don’t look like a diabetic. You were smoking dope and off your head, I reckon.’
‘I was not. I can control my drugs.’
‘Oh yeah, you’re in control. And now you’ve got all the dealers in Barbès on your arse, wanting to avenge their friend.’
I don’t answer but she’s right. We reach A &E, there are lights flashing, ambulances drive to and fro in front of the taxi. The knife digs into my shoulder when I move. Taxi woman turns to me and pushes back the blonde hair hanging over her eyes.
‘What’s his name, this dealer you didn’t warn?’
‘Why?’
‘Just curious.’
‘Roger.’
‘Roger who?’
‘Solal. You know him?’
She turns back to her steering wheel, leans back on her seat and says in a thin voice:
‘He’s my son. I knew it.’
Shit, what luck. I don’t know what to say. The shame of it.
Roger’s mother.
‘Get out, now.’
‘Uh, I’m…’
‘Get out!’
I quickly get out of the car, bent over like an old man, and walk slowly towards A &E, so as not to dislodge the knife.
LYDIE
Looking to pick up, I’m back on boulevard Sebastopol. And I realise: I never took the kid’s money. Roger’s face appears on my windscreen. A man. now. But it’s the child I still see. The child who cried at the physio’s, wheezing with broncheolitis. The child who held his breath, pretending to drown, leaving me gasping on the edge of swimming pools in the Essonne. Roger, going under a lorry with his bike, hiding his lacerated, stitched face from me. Roger at the Marley concert shouting ‘No woman no cry,’ mouthing the words in English, eyes shining with joy.
And now, Roger in a cell in La Goutte d’Or, destined for Fleury-Mérogis. I go back up towards Barbès Métro station: Mekloufi’s is still open. I park the car twenty metres away and go in.
Mimine is settling into an impro, picking up the melody from place de Brouckère. He’s learning new tunes, that’s good. I sit myself at the bar and ask for a Kronenbourg. Thinking of my boy. A few minutes later, I go down to the phone booth in the basement and call Patrick, my ex’s, number.
‘It’s me, I’m calling from Barbès.’
‘Lydie. D’you know what time it is? What’s going on?’
‘It’s not good. I picked up a young black kid and we were held up. He was knifed and Roger’s been busted with a load of coke on rue Myrha.’
‘Good God, Lydie, I live in Nice, remember?’
‘I know.’
‘He’s my kid, but he chose you. He chose Paris. Listen, I’m not saying it’s your fault.’
‘It’s always the parents’ fault.’
‘I quit the drugs squad in Nice. They offered me organised crime, it’s more hands on. You want me to put a call in for Roger?’
‘I haven’t seen him in six months. But yeah, I think we’ve got to do all we can. He’s at La Goutte d’Or, d’you know anyone there?’
‘The captain, Delpierre; I’ll call him, he owes me one.’
‘Thanks. I’ll finish my beer and go and find my darling boy. It’s good to hear your voice.’
‘And yours. Keep me in touch. Ciao Lydie.’
Now I’m walking towards the dark, narrow Goutte d’Or. Yes, I’m walking towards Roger – a man, it’s true. The kind of guy I’d have hated at twenty. I think of Patrick, cosy and warm on the coast, of the years I’ve spent in city streets, of the bad smells in the early morning, the bad food, the bad fucks. Of the guys I ditched, of life’s irony which made me save Roger’s lookout’s arse. The dozy police station is 200 metres away when suddenly I see two black guys in Tacchini tracksuits coming towards me. And I recognise them.
‘So, grandma, gonna show us your gun? We didn’t have time to see the make.’
I step out of the way to avoid them. We’re alone. As I walk faster, the bigger one’s hand stops me.
His body’s glued to mine and the bastard hisses in my ear:
‘You, you’re just pretending, but I’m for real.’
And he sinks a knife in my back. Christ, my legs give way, my head hits the edge of the pavement. I hear their steps retreating. I try to shout but there’s some kind of bubble between my lips. I think of all the things I haven’t done, the froth on a beer, triumphant jazz, the cops I’ll never see again. That’s the good news. My body shrinks. I say ‘Roger’.
And then.
And then I say nothing.
Translation © Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz
NEW SHOES by JOHN WILLIAMS
Sometimes when it’s late and you’ve been listening to Lucinda Williams and you have a bottle of Gigondas empty beside you and the noise from the drinkers in the rue Mouffetard down below won’t let you sleep, a line from an old song gets lodged in your brain, And I can never, never, never go home again, and you can’t help but remember, remember how you got here.
In the spring of 1981 there were only three places in Paris to busk. The first and easily the best, probably the best place in all of Europe, was outside the Beaubourg. Can I start to explain how fabulous the Beaubourg was back then? This building with its primary-coloured plumbing on the outside, with its giant Perspex escalator clambering across the front. I can hardly credit it myself – twenty-five years of living in this city has allowed familiarity to do its job of breeding contempt – but really back then it seemed to represent a whole world of possibilities, a future in which anything could happen. We’d lost sight of that you see, in those the first years of Thatcher, living in a city, Cardiff, that was closing down around us.
But back to the point. There were three places to busk in Paris that spring, and the big open space in front of the Beaubourg, always full of tourists and locals marvelling at this new wonder, was by far the best of them. The others were the Métro and the rue St André des Arts, but each of those had its problems, as we discovered.
Who were we? We were seven, no eight, refugees from the punk-rock experience, boys and girls hoping to shift our lives from black and white into technicolor. We’d pooled our dole money and student grants and wages from the anarchist print shop and crammed into the back of my old Transit van and headed to Paris to busk. Our act, such as it was, consisted of playing hits of the day – David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, Robert Wyatt, whatever – in ragged vocal-harmony style backed only by percussion and kazoos. At the time, and mostly because we were young, and in some cases even cute, it went over OK. I won’t bother you with all our names, since you’ll only forget them and anyway there was only one that really mattered. If any of the others play a part along the way I’ll name them then.
The one that mattered, matters even, was called Beth and the week before we left she had her hair restyled in a Louise Brooks bob. Actually I thought she looked more like Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie impersonating Louise Brooks than Brooks herself, if you see what I mean. Either way it’s obvious I was smitten. As for the rest of how she looked, well, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel inclined to go past her hair. Let memory fall lightly on what follows.