We'll Always Have Paris Read Free Page A

family (his sister dances with Aurélie) who comes round to Aurélie’s house one night for some reason, and who, for some reason, asks
me out. I say yes, of course I do. He is older than me, in his early twenties, confident and funny with that fair Moroccan colouring, green eyes and dark golden curls. Why on earth wouldn’t I
say yes?
    Karim picks me up in the warm blue Casablanca night and we go to the cinema. It’s ten o’clock. I don’t even think there are screenings that late in York: how would you get
home? We drive through the barren suburbs and along the dual carriageway lined with scrubby palm trees, towards the city where the white cubes are closer together and strip-lit night shops
alternate with dark alleys. As he drives, we talk, or we try to, a halting mix of English and French. I understand, but speaking is harder, I fumble my answers and point, my chest tight and fizzy
with anticipation.
    The cinema is showing some daft recent action film, dubbed into French, with Arabic subtitles. It feels ineffably sophisticated to be doing something so ordinary in such a strange place and I
observe the audience covertly, young and old, snacking on paper cones of pumpkin seeds and drinking cans of Coke. After the film ends, the sky is darker blue still and as we drive, a vast inky mass
appears to my right: the sea. It is the first time I have spotted it since my arrival and I insist on getting out of the car and walking down the debris-strewn beach, the twinkling lights of the
refineries and chemical plants in the distance. I do not care. A warm salty wind blows into my face and nothing has ever felt so exotic, so romantic in my entire life. We kiss, and before Karim
drops me back at the bougainvillea-covered bungalow, we conclude with a breathy hormonal grapple in the dark, to the soundtrack of his Prefab Sprout cassettes. This is almost certainly the high
point of my life to date.
    Our fling continues for the remainder of my stay. Almost every night, Karim is there to take me out on adventures. There is something incredibly freeing about being somewhere where no one knows
who I am and what I am supposed to be like. In York, I am an introverted, vegetarian semi-goth. In Casablanca, I can be someone entirely different, and I am. With Karim and his sisters, I go to
nightclubs and dance and we drive around the city in the pink dawn to buy hamburgers. I sit on the floor at packed house parties as French stoners talk over me about The Doors, and ride horses
through the desert. I have a delicious feeling of uncertainty: I never quite know where I am or what will happen next, but rather than worrying I abandon caution and trust entirely. Nothing bad
happens. Usually, we end up back at Karim’s house drinking mint tea with his parents and playing Pictionary. I sleep in his bedroom sometimes. We don’t have sex – for all my
abandoned caution, I just can’t surrender to that extent – but it’s all a great deal more satisfying than my excruciatingly awkward encounters with the Wind Band nerds. I lose
myself, lose the inhibition and the doubt and the distaste for my own body in the warm darkness.
    It is there that they come to find me in the small hours of my very last morning, Karim’s sister banging on the door, phone in hand, reminding me my flight leaves in a few hours. After a
mad rush to pack – boxes of Moroccan patisseries stuffed in my backpack wrapped in those Monsoon dresses, the unread
Ejfi Briest
and
War and Peace
–
Aurélie’s parents see me off, waving a last-minute goodbye as I run to my departure gate. My heart lurches as the plane taxis, then climbs (last view of palms, white low-rise city,
sand, refineries, churning grey sea). Something has shifted in me: I feel older, taller, Frencher.
    My bubble is swiftly burst on my return to York. Karim never replies to my gushing letters and when I tell people at school that I rode Arab stallions in the desert, it causes an outbreak of