Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks

Author:Sebastian Faulks [Faulks, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-09-05T22:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Censier–Daubenton

Hasim had second thoughts about a new restaurant in the Marais when I told him how much it was likely to cost in rent and taxes.

‘I think it’s just that area,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of cheaper parts of town, I’m sure. Near where I live in the Thirteenth, for a start. Or somewhere out by the Périphérique.’

‘You can’t charge enough in those places. It needs to be somewhere that people pay a lot. Saint-Germain des Prés. They charge tourists eight euros for coffee there.’

Business plans were not my strong point, so I left him to it. I was beginning to be sick of PFP. Although the money wasn’t bad, the shifts were long, Hasim was depressed and the work was revolting. The many hours there also prevented me from searching for whatever it was I’d come to Paris to discover.

There was no doubt that I’d been quite lucky to find both a job and a place to live. Maybe it was because I didn’t try too hard. This was a part of my character that annoyed my father. ‘You just drift along expecting things to fall into your lap. You’ve got to engage with life,’ he told me. For some reason, things tended not to have a big impact on me. I wasn’t scared to ask the shopkeepers of the Marais about their overheads and I’d volunteered to deliver fried-chicken pieces to the frightening cités of the banlieue, because I trusted to my own luck. If some bad-ass gang leader threatened me, I’d just run. I was quick enough on my feet. Maybe this was something to do with being nineteen, though I was beginning to wonder if I ought occasionally to worry a little more. Not as much as Hannah, who seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown from listening to a sound recording, but just a bit. The only thing that made me feel really uneasy was how little I’d been able to imagine my mother and her life in Paris. Had she lived among the North Africans in Saint-Denis or in some other ghetto? I didn’t think so. Her father was a Frenchman, and I pictured them in one of those typical immeubles, a little shabby, on the fifth floor with a balcony.

I wished now that when I’d left Clémence’s apartment that afternoon I’d made some arrangement to see her again. At the time I wasn’t thinking straight at all. I’d stumbled out onto the street with my head whirling. It was partly the nature of what she’d told me. To think that those events had taken place just across the road from where we sat in her old-fashioned salon drinking mint tea. That the people who herded them in and locked them up, then put them on buses were not Germans with guns and dogs but the gendarmes they saw every day on the street. I decided that I needed to find out more. Feeling a little self-conscious, as though my father was watching and applauding, I embarked for the first time on some ‘research’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.