“You don’t want to meet my friends?”
I really, really didn’t. For one, my French had finished. The end. Finis. The idea of going out with Sami’s doubtless colorful friends to somewhere noisy and coming over as a total dud was depressing. Really, what I wanted to do was slump in front of the television, but I saw the TV was already on and remembered—which was stupid, of course, why wouldn’t it be—that the telly was in French and seemed to consist of four blokes around a table shouting at one another. I sighed. I’d give anything for a dog doing cartwheels on Britain’s Got Talent, possibly accompanied by pizza. I’d thought at lunchtime I’d eaten enough for the entire day, but my stomach seemed to think otherwise. I should have gotten some shopping, but I wasn’t sure where to go. And there wasn’t a thing in the apartment, I could tell. It smelled of exotic shower gel and cigarette smoke and a large sandalwood candle.
Also, apart from meeting Claire, I had changed. The accident had changed me, it really had. I’d kind of felt up for anything before that, and the realization that I wasn’t, in fact, invulnerable was actually really hurtful. I’d called it getting better, but actually, it was more like hiding.
There was, as I was to discover over the course of many, many evenings, no point whatsoever in trying to avoid a night out with Sami. And also, a night out with Sami wasn’t like a night out for many people. When me and Cath went out, for example, we’d tell some other people where we were going, then there’d be lots of texts and messages from people about which bar we’d be in, then we’d always end up at Faces because it had a dance floor and we’d do some dancing, then we’d end the night with a kebab at Pontin Ali’s. That’s what everybody did. All the nights were roughly the same, some more fun than others. Normally we saw a fight, and occasionally Cath got into one.
Sami, however, had the skill, just as he did with his costumes at the opera house—he could take the everyday, the bland, the tawdry, and with hardly any money but a bit of imagination, he could turn it into magic.
He could always find out where an art exhibit or a flash mob was going to happen. One evening, he led us all to the great Monaco circus, which had just arrived in town, and we sat on the tiny roof terrace of a cheap restaurant that served the best bouillabaisse in Paris, at mismatched tables festooned with tiny fairy lights, and watched the elephant and the tigers march out of their smart transporters. One night, he insisted everyone wear the color blue, then talked us into a private showing of a hot young artist as the entertainment, where we drank their wine and talked loudly and pretentiously about the sculptures until asked to leave. He had an ever-shifting coterie of nighttime friends: bar workers, box office staff, butchers, bakers, actresses, and guitar players, anyone who worked antisocial hours, who finished when the restaurants and bars were closing up and needed to know someone who knew how to have a good time in the twilight world. He was the demimonde to me.
I didn’t know any of that that first evening though. All I knew was that, although I was tired, I was eager too; for company, to watch people who didn’t know all about me, who wouldn’t make tired old jokes week after week about Long John Silver (I had only just stopped using the cane; I kept leaving it everywhere anyway). My long sleep at lunchtime and the adrenalin of all the new experiences had left me energized and overexcited; it was the first time I had worked in so long. I felt I needed to do something; there was, I realized, no way I was going to sleep if I just went to bed. None at all.
“Go on then.”
I dressed in a very plain black dress that Claire had seen on an online shop and sent me over to suggest I buy it. To me it looked like absolutely nothing; I preferred things a bit more stand out-y, but she’d said this was more how to dress in Paris, so I had huffed, then agreed when it went on sale. It was weighted down in the hem, so it actually did lie very nicely—and the only, the ONLY benefit of being so stupidly ill was that I currently weighed less than I had done my entire adult life, so it fitted me smoothly without any of my normal lumps and bumps (usually I had two handfuls of stuff around the bottom of my back I could just kind of lift). Well, I supposed a couple of months of working in a chocolatier’s would sort that out for me.
Sami came and watched me getting ready.
“Aren’t you going to wear any makeup?” he said. I shrugged, then glanced over at him. He was wearing peacock-blue eye shadow that kind of glittered. Oddly, it didn’t make him look less masculine; it simply highlighted his luscious dark eyes and gave him a very dangerous look.
“Are you a transvestite?” I asked. One thing about having to get by in another language: I never was able to make space for niceties or anything other than being very up front.
Sami laughed. “No,” he said, “I just like to be beautiful.” He gazed in the mirror, obviously reassuring himself that he was. He certainly was, but I’d never heard a man speak like that before. He was wearing a tight-fitting black suit that looked incredibly expensive, with a new white shirt, a turquoise tie, and a bright turquoise handkerchief in the top pocket that exactly matched his eye shadow.
“You are,” I said approvingly. To me he was like some exotic bird of paradise. He turned me by the shoulders and put me in front of the mirror.
“You look half-gypsy,” he said approvingly of my pale curly hair that never would settle down. “Arrête!”
He vanished and came back with an enormous professional makeup case laden with potions and ointments.
“Stand still.”
I submitted myself to his bidding and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was amazed at what I saw.
Sami had drawn a thick line of kohl right across the top of my lashes, fanning it out way past my eyes. It gave them huge, smoky definition, and he’d smudged powder on top of that and added mascara. LOTS of mascara. Suddenly my eyes looked enormous in my face.
“No lipstick,” he said. “Better like this. You may look mysterious and like you are wearing black on purpose and not because you are lazy about your clothes.”
“I’m not lazy about my clothes!” I protested, but I knew it was true. There wasn’t much point in buying nice things when (a) I couldn’t afford them, and (b) I had to wear a uniform at the chocolate factory, so I just tended to sling on jeans and a top underneath. It was quicker and easier and I didn’t really have to think about it. Then Cath and I liked to dress up for going out at the weekends, but that meant I always needed new outfits, so I had to buy the cheapest I could find, really, so I didn’t wear the same things all the time.