Ren sneaked a glance at Sacha, her night-time guide, as he grimly regarded the prayer candles flickering in the hushed ambience of the church. Who was he, this man who weaved history with threads of meaning and wielded words so powerful they made her heart beat wildly?
Whatever his job was, she was certain he held a position of authority – that he used for the powers of good. He didn’t hesitate to tell her difficult truths. He’d stood up to Ziggy. But he’d been… gentle in the face of her outrageous requests and tolerant of her teasing him.
‘Gentle’ was the right word. He was a gentle man – a gentleman. He wasn’t the picture of a gentleman she would have conjured three days ago, with his neck tattoo in looping script, unruly long hair and creased forehead.
The light in the church was extraordinary. With no sunlight to brighten the stained glass, only the interior lamps illuminated the vivid colours of the mosaics, giving them a brushed quality, with extremes of light and dark.
Above the choir was an enormous mosaic, so stunning she could barely believe it was made of pieces of coloured stone. On a background of vivid blue, the figure of Christ looked as though he were about to leap out of the mosaic and give her a hug. The figures on either side were rendered flat in comparison: bishops and knights, women in robes and rows of saints with matching halos.
One saint caught her eye and she tiptoed closer to Sacha, leaning on his arm to point out the figure in the mosaic who’d caught her eye. ‘That’s Saint Denis!’ she whispered.
‘They are all the important saints of France,’ he whispered in reply.
‘Were you born in France, then?’ she asked. He nodded in reply. ‘In Paris? Around here?’
‘No, I didn’t grow up in the seventy-five,’ he said with a small smile.
‘You’re enjoying being mysterious,’ she accused, ‘you dork,’ she finished with a nudge to his arm. ‘Are you a tour guide?’
‘No, but I am mysterious and I don’t know what a dork is.’
‘You’re definitely one of those. Look it up.’ He pulled out his phone and chuckled to himself a moment later, tilting his head in agreement.
Contentment settled over Ren as she wandered over the marble flagstones. She wasn’t measuring every word; she felt no pressure to be anything more than herself. She was teasing him – a stranger. No, not a stranger, but not quite a friend, either. In her other life, she would have been desperate to label this unexpected relationship, to compartmentalise it and make it safe.
But whatever it was, she was fairly certain it wasn’t safe.
They stopped in front of the elaborate nativity, the ‘crèche’, sculpted of fired clay, with real moss on the roof of the stable. Sacha pointed out the three wise men.
‘This is Paris, come to honour the baby,’ he said with a smile. Ren didn’t understand the joke at first. ‘This one, he’s Congolese. This one could be Algerian and this one – well, that’s obvious.’
‘It is a bit,’ she agreed, studying the figure with the pointed hat – a clumsy stereotype of a person from east Asia.
Her stomach growled all of a sudden, filling the apse of the church. She clutched herself around her middle guiltily. She might be filled with happiness and freedom, but her metabolism was running on empty.
‘Is there a restaurant around here? A cheap, dodgy one?’
‘Of course there are restaurants nearby, all of them “dodgy” in comparison to the Ritz.’
‘As long as it’s not a “Siege of Paris”-themed restaurant, I’ll be okay.’
‘You don’t feel like cat or dog tonight? What about rat?’
‘No flowers, either. That sounded weird. What about a Lebanese restaurant?’
‘There are flowers in Lebanese cuisine – capers. But do you think a Lebanese restaurant would be dodgy?’
‘No! Someone’s touchy. I didn’t mean that at all.’ She still blushed. Her suggestion had been only 10 per cent prejudice and 90 per cent curiosity about him. It didn’t seem fair, when he had the Internet to find out about her. Sometimes it felt like her life was lived more in packets of data sent and received, rather than breaths or heartbeats.
He’d drawn her in, with his descriptions of a past neither of them had lived. For a second, she’d felt part of this great web of history, rather than simply the web of absurdity that was social media. She’d bet Sacha wasn’t even on Facebook.
‘You like shawarma, then?’
‘I don’t know what that is,’ she admitted. ‘But it sounds good.’
‘Let’s see what we find. On y va.’
She followed him out onto the cobbled street, where the drizzle misted into frost. The streets on the hill were narrow and the houses small and gabled, with leaded windows and coloured shutters. They peered at a tiny walled vineyard with its gnarled, dormant vines, and wandered through little squares and past art and antique shops. She could almost forget she was out in the dark, where every danger could be lurking. The bare trees were strung with garlands of lights in white or blue and gold stars hung from the iron lamp posts.
‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed as they reached a cobbled square surrounded by quaint cafés with bare vines that would be verdant in the summer. Some hardy patrons sat under the heaters, braving the elements for the sake of their friends and their rituals. A stand selling crêpes and mulled wine perched on the cobblestones at one end, steam emerging from the hatch along with the smell of cinnamon and cloves.
She grasped Sacha’s arm. ‘Vin chaud! I know what that means.’
‘I thought you were hungry.’
‘Wine first, food later,’ she said, tugging on his arm. He eyed her sharply, his brow low, and she dropped his arm. ‘You’re right. Food first.’
‘This restaurant is nice… enough, I hope.’
She followed him into a sweet, low-set building with green shutters and a string of multicoloured lights over the door. A taller man would have had to stoop, but Ren had decided Sacha was the perfect height. She could raise her face to his without stretching too much.
Inside the small restaurant, she was too pleased by the inviting smells of garlic and rosemary to notice the rustic brown tiles and plain wooden tables. Their table was charmingly set with a pillar candle surrounded by pinecones and looked out a window into the luminous Montmartre evening. Ren sat with a sigh.
The backs of her heels hurt and had probably been rubbed raw. Her cheeks were stinging and she’d taken none of her usual precautions for safety, but she refused to dwell on any of it. She wanted to be part of life tonight. Grandmama could keep her triggers and Ziggy could shove her rules.
Ren ordered something Sacha called a pot of fire and described as a peasant dish which she gathered was a hunk of pork with braised vegetables. Taking a sip of wine, she knocked over her handbag on the windowsill and as though it had been plotting its escape all afternoon, the blasted engagement ring tumbled out.
Sacha grabbed it and stuffed it back into her bag, treating the Fendi leather far too roughly. ‘You didn’t think to leave it in your room?’
‘I was kind of distracted this afternoon. Is someone going to mug me?’ She asked the question lightly so he wouldn’t realise she was serious.
‘Probably not. It… worries you?’ he asked.
Her gaze flickered to the window, feeling the horizons closing in again. She picked up her wine and took another cautious sip. It was a more complicated question than he could have realised.
‘Isn’t everyone worried about someone attacking them?’ She was dismayed at her own words.
‘I don’t think about it. And I have seen some… incidents.’
She studied him, wondering what he’d seen and where. ‘But you probably weren’t the target,’ she said before she realised what she was giving away. ‘But I realise a mugging is statistically unlikely and no one will recognise me here.’ She changed the subject before he could ask anything further. ‘So, Mister Mysterious, if you weren’t born in Paris, but you still insist you’re Parisian, what’s going on there?’
‘I am Parisian. But I grew up in grand Paris – outside the périph, the ring road. It is no longer soixante-quinze, it is the neuf trois, the nine-three. It is the suburbs, the département Seine-Saint-Denis, named after your headless saint. I grew up in the HLM, a… housing project, you know what I mean?’
Her gaze dropped to his tattoo before she could stop herself. She kept her mouth carefully shut.
‘Now, you say nothing?’
‘I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing.’
‘You weren’t worried about that with me before. I have judged you. You can judge me. That’s fair, non?’
‘That’s the problem, Sacha,’ she said. His eyes locked on hers when she said his name and she wished she’d said it more often. ‘I don’t want to judge you. I want to understand.’
‘No, you don’t,’ he countered immediately.
‘Why? Was it such a bad place to grow up?’
He regarded her curiously. ‘No, there is a… richesse from my childhood that I carry with me always. But it is a perspective that I had to fight for.’
‘What richness?’
‘Community, language – mine and others. No one speaks the language of my heart, except perhaps my sister, but neighbours can come close. Cosmopolitan, you understand? The world lives in my old neighbourhood, and so does art and music and literature. But… I moved into Paris itself when I could, so…’
‘Why did you move?’
‘My father dreamed of Paris,’ he began, but he ran out of steam and his expression drew taut. ‘I told you he loved literature – poetry en particulier. He always told me there was power in words, although I didn’t understand until later. My father had many, many words in several languages, but, where I grew up, he had no power – we had no power to change.’
‘I’m sorry you lost him,’ she said when she could no longer remain silent. ‘Has it been long?’
‘Yes, nearly twenty years.’
‘Oh, God, you lost him at a young age, at an important time.’
He nodded once. ‘I was fifteen. You’re right, it was an important time and very sudden.’ Ren stilled. She wished she didn’t understand the way past events could cling on in the darkest parts of the psyche. ‘You also… you have lost both parents, non?’
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘A helicopter crash. But I was even younger than you – only five years old. I barely remember them.’
‘That is another loss you live with. I at least carry memories.’ He glanced at her when she didn’t say anything. Loss was a powerful word, like grief, but Sacha was brave enough to say them out loud. ‘Did I say something wrong? Sometimes I am taking the French word and… feeling for the English. I have read a lot in English, but speaking? Not much.’
‘You didn’t make a mistake. I was just… trying not to cry.’ She waved a limp hand in front of her face.
‘Ouille, Ren. I’m sorry. You have enough troubles of your own.’ He raised her chin and wiped her cheeks with his thumb.
She grasped his wrist. ‘I’m okay,’ she insisted as another tear fell.
‘You… need the tears.’
She nodded wordlessly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said with a hiccough.
He shook his head. ‘You must feel the things you feel. It must be allowed.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, seeing sparks behind her eyes when she closed them. How her grandmother would hate that attitude, like she hated Ren’s fears and Ren’s uselessness. The world wasn’t ready for the things she felt. ‘I need another drink.’
