Free Us by Nicholls David Page A

swatting them away.
    â€˜Perhaps it’s fibres from the carpet,’ I suggested hopefully.
    â€˜It’s everywhere! It’s like the chambermaid’s come in with a sack and
strewn
it.’
    Suddenly weary, I fell backwards onto the bed, and Connie joined me, the covers crackling with static like a Van de Graaf Generator.
    â€˜Why did we choose this place again?’ said Connie.
    â€˜You said it looked quirky on the website. The pictures made you laugh.’
    â€˜Not so funny now. Oh God. Sorry.’
    â€˜No, it’s my fault. I should have looked harder.’
    â€˜Not your fault, Douglas.’
    â€˜I want everything to be
right.
’
    â€˜It’s fine. We’ll ask them to come and clean again.’
    â€˜What’s French for pubic hair?’
    â€˜I never learnt that. It never came up. Rarely.’
    â€˜I’d say, “
Nettoyer tous les cheval intimes, s’il vous plaît
.”’
    â€˜
Cheveux
.
Cheval
means horse.’ She took my hand. ‘Oh well. We’re not going to be here much.’
    â€˜It’s a place to sleep.’
    â€˜Exactly. A place to sleep.’
    I sat upright. ‘Perhaps we should get going.’
    â€˜No, let’s close our eyes. Here.’
    She took my hand, rested her head on my shoulder, our legs dangling over the edge as if on a riverbank. ‘Douglas?’
    â€˜Hm?’
    â€˜You know the … conversation.’
    â€˜You want to talk about that now?’
    â€˜No, no, I was going to say, we’re in Paris, it’s a beautiful day, we’re all together as a family. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s wait until after the holiday.’
    â€˜Okay. Fine by me.’
    And so the condemned man, presented with his final meal, is reminded that at least the cheesecake is delicious.
    We dozed. Fifteen minutes later a text from my son in the adjoining room woke us to say that he intended to ‘do his own thing’ until dinner. We sat up and stretched, brushed our teeth and left. At the reception desk, in French so riddled with errors, guesses and mispronunciation that it was almost a new language, I informed the desk clerk that I was destroyed but there were many strange horses in our salty bedroom, and we walked out into the Paris afternoon.
33.
à la recherche du temps perdu
    Connie was still laughing as we crossed from the 7 th to the 6 th on the sunny side of rue de Grenelle. ‘Where on earth did you learn it?’
    â€˜I’ve sort of made it up myself. Why, what’s wrong with it?’
    â€˜The vocabulary, the accent, the syntax. You always get caught in these
est-ce que
loops. “It is that it is possible that it is that the taxi to the hotel for to take us?”’
    â€˜Maybe if I’d studied it, like you …’
    â€˜I didn’t study it! I learnt it from French people.’
    â€˜From French boys. From nineteen-year-old French boys.’
    â€˜Exactly. I learnt “not so fast” and “I like you but as a friend”. I learnt “can I have a cigarette?” and “I promise I will write to you”.
Ton cœur brisé se réparera rapidement.
’
    â€˜Which means …?’
    â€˜Your broken heart will soon mend.’
    â€˜Useful.’
    â€˜Useful when I was twenty-one. Not so much now,’ she said, and the remark lingered a moment as we reached St Germain.
    When Connie and I first came here, in the days when we referred to ‘dirty weekends’ without irony, we were dizzy with Paris, drunk on the beauty of the city, drunk on being there together and also, more often than not, literally drunk. Paris was all so … Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! All that cheese and none of it