Paris Echo Read online

  Was I in love with Laila because she’d given me some encouragement and was therefore my best bet? I don’t know. But it pained me to see her and to go home without having done it with her. It really hurt. If I’d been offered the chance to sleep with all twelve girls in our lecture group one after the other or just Laila, just her … No contest, even if the twelve included Wasia and Kashira, who by any normal standards were both smoking hot.

  I didn’t discuss Laila with other boys, though we did talk about sex in general when we were hanging out. If Laila’s name came up, I changed the subject. But on my own I thought a lot about how great it would be just to feel my zib sliding up inside her. Just that simple thing. I thought it might feel really quite hot, almost burning on the skin. By then of course, thinking about it, I had a huge boner.

  My stepmother did nothing. Like all the women I knew, she lived mostly indoors and went out in the afternoon to the houses of her sisters or her friends. We weren’t rich, because my father’s schemes never came to anything, but we weren’t as poor as some families in the medina. We had a cleaner, for instance – a very large unsmiling woman who came in once a week. She only charged a few coins. And my stepmother did the cooking. I think she was interested in that. The other thing she liked was birds. She had two cages with small songbirds in them. ‘They remind me of my childhood in the Rif mountains,’ she said. She also left the door open onto the roof terrace so others could fly into the house, which was built round a light well with a glass roof. The golden-beaked sparrows always found their way upstairs and out again.

  A couple of days after the guy in the mirror told me to get going, I looked at some flights on the Internet, but they were expensive. Maybe I could get one of the ferries to Europe that were advertised all over town.

  You gotta get out … Well, all right then. I’d be better off not torturing myself by seeing Laila every day. I’ve done so little work I’m likely going to fail my exams at the end of the year. Even if I don’t, even if I complete the course, it still won’t get me a job worth having. I’ll have a degree in economics and business studies with a Miss Aziz Special in politics (including five hours’ free history). No one’s going to hire me for that. Go to the building site, you jerk, that’s what they’ll say. Go and join the line with the skilled masons and plumbers. So I am going to leave. I’m going … Somewhere. Somerealwhere. Somefuckingproperwhere. Paris probably.

  I knew almost nothing about Paris, but it was in Europe, they were Christian, they had bars, girls, old buildings, cinemas … So before the courage could leave me, I leapt off the bed and went upstairs. As I came near the door of the living room, a strange thing happened. I began to be outside myself, watching. I could see myself as a third person, my tee shirt and jeans, two spots on the chin, skinny arms and messed-up hair.

  I saw myself going to tell my father.

  There was me, Tariq, going into the living room. My father was sitting on a sofa where he was looking through his glasses at some papers.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘Sorry. What are you doing?’ said Tariq.

  ‘Accounts. They never end. Why aren’t you doing some work? I’m sure you’ve got reading to do.’

  ‘No, I’m up to date with my reading,’ said Tariq, pushing back the hair from his forehead.

  ‘Dinner’s in an hour. You can tell me what you want then. And your stepmother. You know how much she worries.’

  ‘I’m leaving. I’m going to live somewhere else.’

  ‘God give me strength. You want to give up your studies?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s not the reason.’

  ‘So what is the reason?’

  ‘I want to live in a different place, a better place.’

  My father laughed and put down his papers – so without them he’d be free to laugh harder. ‘Where? Fez? Algiers? I know you always wanted to go there. Think you’re a man for the big city?’

  ‘No. That would just be … bigger.’

  ‘Where then? Malaysia?’ He was really gasping now. ‘Australia? Why not? Go and be a sheep farmer.’

  ‘Paris, I think.’

  ‘What on earth for? You don’t know anyone there.’

  ‘No, but I’d like to see where my mother grew up. Find out some more about her. And I can speak the language.’

  ‘Think they’d understand your accent? Anyway, they hate us, the French. They always have.’

  Tariq rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t think they’d hate me. I think I’d fit in. There’s a lot of us there.’

  ‘Oh yes, sure. Living in filthy tower blocks in the banlieue.’

  ‘I don’t mind where I end up.’

  ‘And how are you going to live?’

  ‘Like a peasant.’ Tariq seemed to think for a moment. ‘Like a hero.’

  My father dabbed the corner of his eyes with a handkerchief. ‘And what are you going to use for money?’

  ‘I don’t need money,’ Tariq said. ‘I’ll live off my wits.’

  ‘Your wits!’

  ‘I hope so. You know I can speak English like a native.’

  ‘Yes, like a native of America. All that TV.’

  ‘And French. My mother—’

  ‘You truly are a ridiculous child,’ said my father, his shoulders no longer heaving. ‘Go and do some work.’

  He picked up his papers and put his glasses on again. Tariq backed slowly towards the door. It looked like he was hoping my father would stop him. With his hand on the doorknob, he hesitated.

  ‘Well?’ My father looked up from his papers. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Back in my room I heaved out a backpack and stuffed some clothes in it. I took my passport and all the money I’d saved up. It didn’t come to much, though it included some euros I’d got from a Spanish tourist for showing him round. Then I went into the bathroom and took a long hard look at my reflection. The lighting wasn’t so good as the time before and my face looked a bit greasy.

  Oh fuck it, I thought. Let’s go.

  After walking for about fifteen minutes, I got a lift with a lorry. There were crates of limonada and Sprite rattling behind us. The driver gave me a cigarette. We drove past Laila’s house and from high up in the cab I could see over the wall onto the lawns. There was a covered electric lamp glowing on the veranda. I wanted her to come out of the house, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. I felt for a moment as though someone had grabbed my lungs and was squeezing me to death. Fuck, was this what a heart attack feels like?

  I shut my eyes and let the road take me away.

  Maybe I shouldn’t say how I got into Europe. A long airless night in the back of a lorry in a cargo hold – not something I want to go into or remember. And for sure Marseille wasn’t how I’d pictured it. I suppose a freight terminal’s not the best place to enter a country.

  There are good and bad things about being nineteen. One of the good things is you can sleep pretty much anywhere – on a beach, in a field, or in my case between two pallets on the metal floor of a curtain-sided truck. I wasn’t even stiff as I fiddled with the fastenings of the canvas, waiting till we were some way out of the terminal. When the driver stopped at what I thought must be a traffic light, I hopped off.

  France at last. Except I could have been in any industrial area. Warehouses, roundabouts, lorries, everything in concrete or metal, the most human thing the words on the signs – Saint-Martin de Crau, Martigues. Even this ass-end of the country looked rich to me. All that expensive fuel turning into smoke as the drivers worked the gears, revving up to get the wheels turning under the big loads. To say nothing of the cargo itself, the loot that was weighing down the giant red artics of Norbert Dentressangle. I walked towards what I thought might be a service area, but turned out to be a weighbridge.

  It was an hour before I got myself into a café attached to a filling station where I ate a cheese sandwich from a cellophane wrapper. I didn’t have enough euros for a train
to Paris, so I thought I’d better try hitch-hiking. I knew that Lyon was in the right direction and Bordeaux wasn’t. But I guessed most of the lorries would be headed for Paris anyway, so it was just a question of getting one to stop.

  The toilets were pretty bad. The stench … It was as though there’d been an outbreak of dysentery. And the mess on the floor. Is it like that in their own homes – with torn paper on the tiles with piss and water squelching underfoot? But I needed to wash somehow, so I did my best while trying not to gag.

  Back in the cafeteria, I noticed a girl on her own. She had brown oily hair and looked like she hadn’t slept for days. She was maybe four or five years older than me and she didn’t immediately look away when I caught her eye, so I ordered a coffee and took it to the next table.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked in French, trying not to sound African.

  ‘North,’ she said.

  ‘Have you got a car?’

  She shook her head. ‘One of these lorry drivers’ll offer me a lift.’

  ‘Is that safe?’

  ‘It’s fine. Tonight he’ll ask me to suck his cock. I’ll say no.’

  ‘Right … Shall I travel with you? It’d be safer … I mean, I can make sure nothing bad happens.’

  She managed a smile, but she looked so exhausted. ‘All right. But if you slow me down, you’ll have to leave me on my own.’

  ‘Sure. My name’s Tariq.’

  ‘Sandrine. I’m going to the bathroom.’

  On her way back she stopped to buy a Chupa Chups and said something to a grey-haired man sitting on a stool, stirring his coffee with a plastic stick. When he’d finished, he nodded towards us and we followed him out to his lorry. It was a medium-size green Iveco with room for three up front and a bunk behind. The driver had a ribbed zip-up sweater with a shirt and tie underneath.

  Sandrine winked at me as he manoeuvred us out on to the slip road. I didn’t know what the wink meant. This guy was a soft touch? He was a Christian fanatic? Europe was strange.

  One thing was for sure, the French radio was no good. A man and a woman were talking over each other at a thousand miles an hour. But even that was better than the music. French pop! I didn’t like to say anything in case Sandrine was a fan too.

  The driver turned out be called Maurice and he wasn’t much of a talker. I thought that was maybe why he’d picked us up, for some company, but he seemed happy with his own thoughts and le shit pop music.

  It must have been an hour before he said something. ‘La vallée du Rhone.’ The Rhone valley. He said it with a big wave of his hand, like he owned it or he’d been born there. Perhaps in his previous life he’d been a schoolmaster.

  I asked him where he came from.

  ‘Le Pas de Calais.’ You’d think it was Hollywood he sounded so proud – and if you came from anywhere else you weren’t being serious.

  He was headed home after a two-week trip. I asked if it was hard to be away from his family for such a long time and he told me he wasn’t married. There was a pause. I said I was aiming for Paris, but he only grunted. Sandrine had been asleep for a good twenty minutes, her head nodding against the back of the cab, her mouth slightly open. I wanted to check her out properly, but if you stare at people when they’re asleep it sometimes wakes them up. I felt it was a bit unfair as well – she didn’t look that great with her mouth open.

  At some point I must have nodded off too. The jabbering of the man and woman on the radio wove in and out of a dream. Then my stepmother merged into the speakerine to tell me off about running away from home. Several times she told me how wrong it was.

  ‘Lyon,’ said Maurice, waking me up. ‘On s’approche de Lyon, le ventre de la France.’ The belly of France. I sleepily asked him why and he told me it was known for its cooking. Snails in garlic, fried liver with sage, apple and cherry tarts with cream … Maurice’s little speech seemed to exhaust him. ‘Too many Algerians in Lyon, that’s the trouble,’ he said and slumped back into silence as the lorry ground to a halt in the traffic of the ring road. ‘Always have been.’

  It was getting dark and my stomach was rumbling as I pictured the kind of restaurant Maurice had described. Sandrine said she needed to go to the toilet, but he told her to wait. Eventually we came to a service area about an hour north of Lyon and left the autoroute.

  We pulled over in an area reserved for lorries and Maurice said he was going to a truckers’ café. He told us we could get food at the petrol station. Could that really be it?

  Sandrine and I looked at each other in disbelief. Then she led me over to the place where Maurice had gone and we looked through the steamed windows. Inside it men were eating pâté with long loaves of bread and plates of sausages with mashed potatoes and ketchup. It sure wasn’t the menu Maurice had talked about, but it looked pretty good and there were bottles of red wine with no label at intervals on the tables among the fat camionneurs.

  ‘Salaud,’ said Sandrine. Bastard. In the garage shop, while Sandrine was in the toilet, I bought another sandwich in a wrapping. It was meant to be cheese, but it was nearly all crumby white bread. A thin rain was falling when we crossed the parking outside and Sandrine pressed something into my hand. It was a chocolate bar.

  ‘Have it. I took a whole lot while the guy was changing the paper roll on the till.’

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’

  ‘In the back of the lorry. If he lets us. Do you like sausages?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Are they pork?’

  ‘Not really pork. They’re just odds and ends. Come here and keep watch.’ She led me round to the back entrance of the drivers’ canteen.

  I was left standing in the rain for at least fifteen minutes before she came back with a plate in her hand.

  ‘Have some. Use your hands, boy.’

  I took a sausage and pushed it through the mashed potato.

  ‘Put some ketchup on it. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes. How did you get it?’

  ‘Waited for the right moment.’

  ‘No one saw you?’

  ‘No. They don’t care anyway. Most of the people in the kitchen are kids. Some of them probably illegal.’

  The sausage had a peppery taste. ‘Are you illegal?’

  She laughed. ‘No. I’m French.’

  Sandrine took the plate to a bin, then marched into the café where Maurice was finishing his dinner. She certainly had balls, this girl. Through the steamed-up window I could see the drivers laughing and pointing while Sandrine stood with her hands on her hips. Eventually Maurice stood up and came out into the drizzle. He walked over to his lorry, took a blanket from the bunk behind the driver’s cabin then unlocked the back and told us to get in. There was room to lie down on a wooden pallet between the tied cargo.

  ‘Don’t fuck in my lorry. I’ll hear you if you do,’ said Maurice, throwing in the blanket and closing the doors behind him.

  We lay down and made ourselves comfortable. There was a bit less space than I’d thought and Sandrine’s hip was touching mine. She wasn’t my sort, Sandrine, with her lank hair and grey skin, but it was dark now and when she turned over I felt one of her breasts for a moment on my elbow and I immediately got a hard-on.

  ‘Is it okay?’ I said. ‘Will you have to … You know. Do anything with Maurice?’

  ‘Nothing. No. I’m not his type.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m too old for him. He’s a paedo.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The shirt and tie. That’s why I chose him. The worst are the married ones. They want you to do disgusting things.’

  In the middle of the night I woke myself up coughing. Sandrine was sitting up, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Is that safe?’ I said. ‘We don’t know what’s in the cargo.’

  She ground it out on the metal floor of the truck. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know. Paris at first. Th
en maybe England.’

  ‘Why do you want to go there?’

  I sensed she was smiling in the darkness. ‘I want to see the rain and the fog and the Queen on horseback in her crown.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not really. I know some people there. I think I’ll be safer in London.’

  ‘English people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘English people?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d never met one. Except an old pervert who lived in the casbah.

  ‘I’ll let you know. I really want a smoke,’ said Sandrine.

  ‘You just had one.’

  ‘I mean weed. Have you got any?’

  ‘No. I didn’t want to be stopped.’

  ‘I can’t sleep without it. Unless I have sex.’

  ‘Do you want me to—’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-three,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ She put her hand on my trousers. ‘Oh. Sorry, boy. I thought you might have …’

  I thought about Miss Aziz’s skirt and Laila’s qooq and Farida’s breasts and all the usual things, but for once it was no use. My zib was like a dormouse.

  Eventually we both fell asleep and in the morning I found I’d come in my underpants, something that often happens if I’m not at home but in a strange bed, or in this case lorry.

  Maurice opened the doors and the grey light came pouring in. I squinted out and saw he had a smirk on his teacher’s face.

  ‘I’m going to get breakfast,’ he said. ‘We leave in twenty minutes.’

  By noon we could see the outskirts of Paris and half an hour later Maurice dropped us at a junction as he headed round the Périphérique until he could pick up the road for Calais, the Hollywood of the North.

  I watched the green Iveco indicate then merge. Sandrine and I walked for a long time towards the middle of the city. It was a relief to get away from that music on the radio.

  ‘What are you going to do in Paris?’ said Sandrine eventually.

  We were still on a dual carriageway with modern blocks on either side, but at last there was a Métro station, Maison Blanche.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe find out about my mother.’