I half-smiled at him. “But you also told me that I could grow up to become Spider-Man.”
“I believe that too,” he said, getting up, more slowly than he used to I noticed (I always noticed people’s walks these days), and kissing me gently on the head.
Two Months Later
If one more person told me how lucky I was, I was going to scream. I didn’t feel lucky at all. At the huge, mobbed railway station in Paris where the Eurostar stopped, everyone had charged off in every direction as if holding a “look how well I know Paris” competition and left me standing there feeling totally exposed, so then of course I figured I would look like someone totally exposed and then become a massive target for pickpockets. This is why my mum and my dad have been to Scarborough every single year for a hundred and seventy years, I swear to God. At least in Scarborough, you know which end of the pier to avoid and you can tell if someone’s wearing a real police uniform or a novelty hat for fun, and here I couldn’t read the signs or know what to think and I didn’t dare take a cab. I limped down an escalator pulling my wheelie bag and thinking of all the people who’d swooned and said I was so lucky to be in Paris and how amazing it was going to be and all I could think was, well, yes, I’ll probably sit by myself in a room for six weeks watching it all go on around me and not notice a thing. That was entirely within the realm of possibility. And I wouldn’t like the food.
I looked up at the Metro map. It made totally no sense to me, none of it. I gazed at it, hand clutching tightly to my wallet and passport. It could have been on upside down as far as I could tell. None of the lines had names, just numbers, but the notice boards had names.
I finally figured out that they were giving the names of the stations at the end of the lines. Or so I thought. I boldly strode forward and got a ticket from the man behind the counter, who I then asked in my best French for the way to my stop. He gave me a gigantically long stream of hugely complicated directions. I didn’t understand any of them, but said thank you and went to walk away. He shouted at me loudly and I turned around, panicked, as he indicated that I had already started heading off in the wrong direction. I thanked him, tears pricking my eyes with embarrassment.
The tunnel platform was mobbed with every conceivable type of person, most of them speaking French loudly at a billion miles an hour as if showing off and a few of them looking like horribly lost tourists, just like me. We avoided each other like plague victims, too scared to reveal our vulnerability and ignorance. If I could have turned around and gotten back on the nice cozy Eurostar, I would have in a heartbeat. I glanced at my watch. I’d changed the time, so it was four o’clock here, which meant three o’clock in Kidinsborough. Tea break time. At Braders I’d have been sitting down with a cuppa and a packet of salt ’n’ vinegar chips. Even thinking of that stupid factory, which I hated and detested and where I slagged off almost continuously, was making me homesick now. Around about now in the hospital, they served custard creams.
I stared nervously through the dirty graffitied window of the loud silver train. It rattled past stops including, I thought, the one I should have gotten off at. Within another few minutes, we were practically out in open fields. Wherever it was I was meant to be going, it wasn’t out in open fields. My heart racing, I jumped out at the first station when the train, after a hundred years, finally started to slow down. Several people in the carriage watched me with amused eyes, which made me hot and cross and anxious. I took the first train going the other way, which thank goodness, did turn out to be a slow stopping train with two levels, halfway up and halfway down. I took a tiny orange plastic seat near the door and strained my eyes at the passing signs, trying to stop the train by willpower alone.
When I finally reached Châtelet-Les Halles, I got my suitcase shut in the revolving door but was helpfully freed by a very well-dressed man who was rushing past. I turned to thank him, but instead he shot me a look that gave me a very strict telling off for getting in his well-shod way. I stood up above ground again finally, dirty, hot, and grumpy, and tried to orient myself with my tiny map. Thank God she’d said island; a bridge, a bridge I could see. Stupid bloody Paris and its stupid bloody hard-to-get-about Metro and its grumpy people and its shouting railway staff and stupid well-dressed men…I was very close to tears. My toes were killing me.
Next to the Metro station was a little café with tables and chairs pushed out onto the pavement, despite cars running close by and exhaust fumes in the air and a florist whose blooms spilled over onto and under the chairs. I felt for my wallet for the 198th time that afternoon, then collapsed into a chair. A little man in trousers and a white shirt came running out importantly.
“Madame?” he said fussily. I didn’t know what I wanted, really. Just to sit down. And given the perilous state of my finances, I really would have liked just a glass of water, but that wasn’t going to go well, I could tell already. I glanced at the next table. An old man with an equally old dog dozing under his chair raised an eyebrow at me. In front of him was a tall, large glass filled with brimming, icy cold-looking lager. The waiter followed my eyes.
“Comme ça?”—like that one?—he barked. I nodded my head gratefully. Yes. Fine. Bit naughty at four o’clock in the afternoon, but then I’d been up since five because Mum was utterly convinced I was going to miss all my connections. And I was hot and tired and cross and it was nice, for two seconds, to stop panicking about everything I had to do and whether I was going to lose my ticket on the train or drop my passport or leave my bag unattended and have it blown up.
I sat back in the chair and turned my face to the sun. Having left England in a cold fog, I hadn’t expected spring sunshine, but out of the wind, it was warm and gentle on my face. Blinking and wondering where I’d packed my sunglasses, I took a deep breath as my beer arrived fast as lightning, took a sip—it was freezing and delicious—and glanced around me.
I couldn’t help but smile. Forget the dirty Metro or the rattling suburbs or the hard-to-maneuver ticket barriers. Instead, here, I found myself on a corner of a crossroads of cobbled streets, leading toward, on my right, a great hump-backed bridge over the Seine from which I could just make out the back of a huge church. My heart leaped. It was Notre Dame; it had to be. On my other side were long rows of huge white buildings, seven or eight stories high, one leading down the embankment of the river, one backward filled with shops, the road several lanes wide, shops and restaurants with striped awnings poking out onto the pavements as far as the eye could see.