I Heart Paris (26 page)

The next thing I heard was a quiet buzzing underneath my ear. Grabbing blindly, I pulled out my phone and turned off the alarm, frozen in position, waiting to see if Alex had woken. After a couple of moments, I realized something didn’t feel right. Turning over carefully, it took a couple more moments for it to sink in. Alex wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the bed. He wasn’t in the chair by the window. He wasn’t in the room at all.

Alex hadn’t come back to the hotel.

Not even able to think about what that could mean, I clambered out of bed and pushed myself into the bathroom. I had made the right choice not to look in the mirror before bed, it was amazing how much damage a couple of days of trauma could do. Fortunately, the same trauma had more or less left me not giving a shit. Who needed to look hot on a train? I splashed my face with cold water, brushed my teeth and took a quick shower. I might not need to be hot, but I did need to be clean. Even broken people needed to keep up their standards of hygiene.

Back in the room, I stared at the empty side of the bed. I must have passed out as soon as I closed my eyes, aside from where I’d just rolled out, it looked just like it had when I’d climbed in the night before. Forcing myself not to think about where he was and what or who he was doing, I picked up my bag and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

‘
Mademoiselle
?’

Alain was still on the desk – really, had the last few hours even happened? The sun shone through the window, confirming that it was actually morning.

‘Morning,’ I said, surprised by the flat monotone of my voice. I sounded as crappy as I looked. ‘Is the taxi here?’

‘It is,’ Alain confirmed, gesturing to a large black car outside the door. ‘Will we see you this evening?’

‘Do you ever leave this desk?’ I asked dodging the question.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, giving me a single nod. ‘Not often.’

I smiled or at least tried to, and tried to think of something else to say. ‘Well, thanks so much. You’ve been brilliant. Really. Just really great.’

‘Your taxi is waiting,’ Alain said awkwardly, gesturing towards the door. Apparently not all hotel concierges thrived on excessive praise, I thought, nodding and heading outside. But then my experience of hotel concierges was relatively limited. Perhaps some people really did just love doing things for other people. Weird.

Throwing myself into the cab outside, I asked the driver to take me to the Gare du Nord and popped in the earphones of my iPod, picking something loud and obnoxious. Paris was only just waking up at six a.m., it was nothing like New York. If I’d taken a cab ride through Manhattan this early in the morning, even on the weekend, I’d have seen dozens of joggers, at least the same number of people on the walk of shame back home, and a whole line of sadists coming out of each and every Starbucks on their way to the office. Often via the gym. I would never understand it.

But not Paris, or at least not the parts I was travelling through. It was so still, so calm. I’d always thought of Paris as a night-time city, the sparkling Eiffel Tower, the Moulin Rouge, the bars and cafés, but in the dawn, the city sighed and whispered. It didn’t need to shout, it was far too refined for that. Paris was the city I wanted to be when I grew up. If I ever grew up.

It didn’t take nearly as long to get to the station as I’d imagined, so, with nothing else to do, I set up shop at a small table outside a café and pulled out my laptop. I really didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, they were not fun travelling companions after all. I tapped into the station’s WiFi and decided to blast out one last blog. God knows if
The Look
would actually publish it, but I was determined to have my say while I still had the chance.

The Adventures of Angela: Ooh la blah

OK, I have some stuff to get off my chest and I hope you won’t mind while I vent for a moment. I’ve had issues with girls before, we all have, right? But I have (very) recently had the misfortune to be completely effed over by another girl. And I do mean completely. And actually not just by one, but by two. Actually three. Shit. Three. In one week.

What’s going on? Has there been some sort of memo put out that I haven’t heard about? Did someone declare it International Shaft Angela Week?

I paused and stared at the screen. Where was this going exactly? What else was there to say? I didn’t really want to have an online breakdown. This had to stop before I was shaving my head in public and beating the crap out of a car with an umbrella. Actually, I didn’t have an umbrealla. Probably best.

After a couple of moments,
The Look
webpage melted away and was replaced with a photo of me and Alex. It was a candid shot Vanessa had taken at Erin’s wedding a few months ago. We were leaning over a balcony, watching the party below. Vanessa had caught Alex whispering in my ear, his tie was undone, the top, button of his shirt unfastened, his hair messy and hanging across my face. I was laughing with my eyes closed, one hand on the balcony in front of me and the other on Alex’s chest. My cheeks were flushed and my lipgloss all smudged.

Before I could start to cry, the picture faded away to be replaced by a shot of me and Louisa. I was pretty sure it was from my last birthday in London and we were belting out a big karaoke number in her living room, both of us doubled up with laughter and the emotion of the massive power ballad we were performing. Seeing that picture was a bit of a shock. I’d spent so long blocking out all of my happy memories of my life in London, it was weird to see one right in front of me. That night had been so much fun.

I pressed my hands over my eyes. There was no mascara to smudge, but I still really didn’t want to start sobbing in the middle of a train station. Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, I looked upwards, forcing away the tears. There was no need to cry. This wasn’t the same as last year. This wasn’t running away. This was making a choice. I wasn’t jumping on a plane and hoping for the best. I was walking calmly on to a train and knowing that the best wasn’t always the same as what you wanted.

Circling my finger on the computer’s mouse pad brought the screen flickering back into life. Rereading my post once more, I saved it and shut up the laptop. I’d get back to it. A very loud announcement that my train was finally boarding snapped me back to my senses. I shook my bag until all the crap moved around enough to reveal my ticket and passport. This wasn’t a reaction. It was a decision. It was the right decision.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

After stocking up on water, Toblerone (well, three Toblerones) and a load of magazines that I knew I wouldn’t read, I stalked straight towards the train. There was no turning back now. I was actually headed for home. If it still was my home. If anywhere was.

The train was mostly empty, just one group of young French girls, a few couples and the odd lone reader, so I ignored my seat reservation and threw myself at a table for four, two entire seats taken up by my arse and my bag, and my magazines covering the table. This was as unwelcoming as I was genetically capable of being. I just couldn’t bring myself to put my feet up on the seat in front. Across the aisle, a vomit-inducingly cute couple fell into their seats and snuggled up together, giggling, kissing and whispering in French. Romantic daytrip to London? Actually, it made sense. If you already lived in the one city the rest of the world visited when they wanted a dirty weekend away, where were you supposed to go? I pulled my iPod back out of my bag and tried to close my eyes. I just wanted to sleep until we got there. Maybe then I could convince myself the last year had all been a dream. A really expensive, impossibly involved dream.

The rowdy rock I’d listened to on the way to the Gare du Nord wasn’t right for the Eurostar, I didn’t want to drown out the voices in my head any more, I wanted to lull them to sleep, but nothing seemed to be right. Instead, I left my iPod on shuffle and watched the countryside roll by, trying to zone out. Every time my eyes flickered shut, I got a mental image of the empty hotel bedroom, swiftly followed up by a vision of Alex’s faded black jeans on the floor of Solène’s beautiful apartment. If only I hadn’t gone to that bloody stupid party, it would be so much more difficult to visualize my boyfriend’s underwear hanging off the back of the sofa if I’d never seen the sofa. Now, it was all too easy to piece it all together in my all too vivid imagination.

I’d been doing my best zombie impersonation for about thirty minutes when I first noticed that I wasn’t alone at my table. Two identical teenage girls, both with glossy shoulder-length black hair and Chanel 2.55 bags perched on their denim-clad knees were staring at me with a tempered excitement, as though they’d just seen a gorilla wake up from hibernation at the zoo.

‘It’s definitely her,’ one whispered to the other. ‘Look at her picture.’

‘I’m not sure,’ the other replied, looking at the magazine her sister thrust into her hands and then looking back at me with a wrinkled-up pout. ‘She looks a bit, erm, not like her photo.’

‘Yeah, she’s properly hungover or something,’ the first girl rationalized. ‘But it’s definitely her.’

I blinked at the girls once, twice, and tried to work out what was going on.

‘Can I help you?’ I croaked. They looked at each other in delight and grabbed on to each other’s hands.

‘Are you Angela Clark?’ the first girl asked.

‘Uh, yes?’ I rubbed my eyes and yawned, reaching out for the bottle of water on the table.

‘Oh, let me,’ the second girl snatched the bottle away from me, unscrewed the cap and passed it back.

‘Thank you?’ I said, taking it cautiously. I wondered if they fancied peeling some grapes for me too. Or at least running to the buffet car for a bacon sandwich. Then I wondered if they were planning on drugging and murdering me.

‘We’re massive fans,’ the second girl went on, still squeezing her sister’s hand and gurning at me.

Even if I wasn’t in the middle of a total meltdown, it was far too early for this nonsense. ‘Of what?’

The girls looked at each other and laughed.

‘Of you.’

They flipped over the magazine they’d been looking at. It was the UK edition of
The Look
and a very flattering photo peered back at me from my ‘Adventures of Angela’ column.

‘Oh.’ I took a couple of huge glugs from my bottle of water. ‘That’s my column.’

‘And we read your blog.’ The first girl held up an iPhone displaying TheLook.com and yet another photo of me that looked much, much better than the real thing.

‘My name is Sasha and this is my sister Tania,’ Tania gave me an awkward wave. ‘We’re twins and we’re like, totally, totally your biggest fans.’

‘We’ve been to Paris, our mum took us so we could “immerse ourselves in the language”,’ Sasha interrupted her sister to point across the aisle and down the car. An older version of the two girls sat staring directly ahead, looking slightly shell-shocked. ‘We’re starting our A levels in a couple of weeks and we’re taking French.’

‘And we read on the blog that you were going so we got Mum to take us too,’ Tania explained. ‘We’re definitely your biggest fans.’

‘Definitely?’ I asked.

‘Definitely. Like, we both have that Marc Jacobs bag that you used to talk about all the time.’

‘This one?’ I asked.

The girls looked at each other again, this time with a little sadness.

‘Uh, yeah,’ Sasha started slowly, ‘but ours are like, not completely wrecked.’

‘But we’re definitely your biggest fans. You’re our idol.’

Hmm, not the first time I’d heard that this week, and look how well that had ended. The girls smiled at me expectantly, but I really didn’t know what to say. I never really thought too much about the column. The UK edition of
The Look
had launched at the beginning of the year so I hadn’t actually seen an issue in the newsagents, or come across anyone reading it. I only knew for a fact that I was published at all when I got my copy of the magazine almost three weeks after it came out, received a tiny cheque, or when my mum emailed to see just what was going on in ‘that there New York’ because she’d heard from Carol at the library that according to ‘that magazine’ I was drinking an awful lot. Which to be fair, I was.

‘So, your blog didn’t say you were coming back to London.’ Sasha flicked her finger down the screen of the iPhone. ‘Isn’t it your boyfriend’s big concert today? In Paris?’

‘Yes?’ I tried to remember mentioning that on the blog, but I couldn’t. I didn’t give specific details, ever. I’d learned the hard way that the internet wasn’t always my friend. Brilliant, I had my very own mini-stalkers.

‘Well, won’t you miss it?’ Tania asked. ‘You can’t miss your boyfriend’s big show.’

‘It’s Alex Reid from that indie band, isn’t it?’ Sasha picked up the baton, not giving me a chance to answer. ‘I know you never use his name in the blog, but when there were all those rumours about you and James Jacobs, I mean, it was everywhere. Do you still see James Jacobs? Is he definitely gay? He’s like, the hottest man in the whole entire world. Tania is totally in love with him.’

‘Totally in love with him,’ Tania confirmed. ‘So, it is Alex, isn’t it? He’s hot too. We googled him.’

‘Can we do one question at a time?’ I asked, looking for any sort of pain reliever in my handbag, Advil, ibuprofen, revolver. I didn’t have a headache before these girls had started talking, but there was a blossoming pain in my left temple and I was fairly certain the two things were related. Now I knew why their mother looked the way that she did.

‘Why are you going to London?’ Sasha asked before Tania could even open her mouth.

‘It’s my best friend’s wedding anniversary,’ I said carefully. Not a lie. Score.

‘Your best friend whose wedding you were at when you found your ex shagging that girl in the back of the car? Was that a year ago?’ Tania expanded, entirely unnecessarily. I made a mental note to stop putting absolutely any sort of personal information in my blog. And possibly change my name. And get drastic facial reconstructive surgery.