We'll Always Have Paris Read Free

thrown together by the
Catholic Herald
, share not only a room, but, to my prudish horror, a
bed.
We put one of those bolster pillows down the middle so as
not to roll onto one another in the night, but it is still odd to sleep so close to someone you have known for a matter of hours. It gets stranger still when I wake to realize the maid is bedding
down on a mat in the corner of the room. Over the next few weeks I wake occasionally to a low murmur and turn over, befuddled with sleep, to see her performing
salat
in the dim pre-dawn.
More often, I am woken by one of the cats, claws out, impassively massaging my leg.
    No one seems to have any idea what to do with me. Aurélie and I do not bond; we are strangers, two people sharing nothing more than a bed. Aurélie has her boyfriend, the jockish,
monosyllabic Robert, her modelling, her dance classes and her Slimfast-based regime. She has no time for me and my floral dresses and my Victorian novels, dithery and tongue-tied and painfully
embarrassed. I only go to school with her once (it’s terrifying, a giant purpose-built Lycée in downtown Casa full of lithe, brown French kids) and the rest of the time I am thrown on
the kindness of Aurélie’s mother and of the neighbours. Dozy with culture shock and sleep deprivation, I wake late, to be greeted by a pile of pancakes, specially prepared for me, soft
and full of holes like giant crumpets, butter and honey seeping through to the plate; then I hang around, awkwardly, reading or playing with the animals until someone finds me something to do. Once
I get to watch Aurélie’s ballet class, and another time she takes me to watch her record a lo-fi soft drink commercial. It’s Ramadan, and filming stops at nightfall so the crew
can go and eat dates and drink bowls of
harira
, the traditional Ramadan soup, in a tent behind the studio.
    But things are far better when Aurélie can’t be persuaded to amuse me. I am handed over to a fierce, semi-fascist elderly lady who lives down the road, who holds forth to me on
various subjects close to her heart, then takes me on the train to Rabat. We tour the city, which is completely fascinating to me: the beautiful fortifications, the ornate Mohammed V mausoleum and
the Tour Hassan, but also the modernity of it, the accommodations of old and new. Later, Aurélie’s mother takes me to Marrakech for the weekend. The drive is an enchantment, a fairy
story with camels and herds of floppy-eared goats sitting in the middle of the road and the snow-topped Atlas mountains sparkling improbably in the distance. We stay in a riad in the Medina, where
the lush tiled courtyard gardens hidden behind plain alleyway doors with peeling paint bewilder me with their beauty. The souk is a familiar image from a thousand films and photographs, but I am
not prepared for the lambs gathered shitting in terror in its narrow lanes in anticipation of Eid, or for the rivulets of blood, made sticky and slow-moving by the yellow dust, the smells of spice
and dirt and decay. We walk across the Djema el-Fna at dusk, all twinkling lights and smoke and hissing and I feel overwhelmed and cracked open, like the 1970s hippies. It’s all a very long
way from North Yorkshire.
    And then there is Karim.
    I have never had a boyfriend, not a proper one. I have ‘gone out’ with a couple of Wind Band nerds, more because they were available than because I liked them and it has always been
dreadful, excruciatingly awkward, a festival of sweaty hand-holding, silence and clashing orthodontics. Each time, there is a moment of triumph at the idea that I have demonstrated my normality,
but each time it is swiftly replaced by a desperate desire to get as far away from these boys as possible. My fantasy crushes are far more satisfying: distant figures like the electrician, Dafydd
the double bass player and Gary Speed. No one attainable has ever seemed desirable to me, and vice versa.
    But now there is Karim, a friend of the