Lindsey Kelk 5-Book 'I Heart...' Collection (85 page)

‘Uh, eight?’

‘Eight?’ I repeated, except in a really rather high-pitched voice. ‘You won’t be back until eight?’

‘Angela, it’s almost twelve now.’ He pointed at the alarm clock beside the bed. What did you know, he was right. ‘I have to meet these record company guys for lunch and then do a bunch of interviews and meetings. I’ll be back at eight.’

He sighed, leaned over and kissed me on top of the head. ‘Get some rest, feel better and I’ll send room service up with some ice for your eye.’

For the want of a better idea, I lay in bed for another ten minutes, waiting for my eye to stop hurting. When it didn’t, I frisked the bedside table for my BlackBerry, unable to tear my good eye away from the quite terrible French soap opera on TV. I was making up my own storyline since I couldn’t translate, but I wasn’t very good at it.

Although it was fully charged, my BlackBerry still wasn’t showing any emails or phone service at all. Frowning, I tried to open the web browser, but it just wasn’t happening. Tossing the tiny black box to the foot of the bed, I gave a huge dramatic sigh. Flicking the TV over to MTV, I decided that sitting in bed, feeling sorry for my Alexand-his-hot-ex situation and ignoring the nagging panic that I was never, ever going to get this article finished wasn’t going to help me in any way, so I stood up, stripped off and headed into the bathroom singing along to classic Britney as loud as humanly possible. At the exact same time Alain arrived with my bucket of ice.

‘Pardon, Madame, ah, Mademoiselle,’ he stuttered, pulling the door closed as I scrambled for a towel. ‘Monsieur Reid asked me to bring up some ice. You did not answer when I knocked.’

I flailed around for a moment, trying to wrap the towel around myself, but only succeeding in flashing him a couple more times. I settled for holding the towel in front of me like a slutty matador, and backed up towards the wardrobe.

‘I had the TV on loud,’ I tried to explain, brushing over the part where I was singing along like a tuneless goat. Who had lost its hearing in a particularly nasty farmyard brawl. ‘You brought it up yourself?’

‘Yes, you left this on the desk last night.’ Alain handed over my map to the Apple store. ‘I think you might need it.’

‘Oh, I will, absolutely,’ I replied, taking it and setting it safely inside my handbag. I didn’t really have any pockets in my towel. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, looking away quickly while a very impressive blush spread from his neck all the way up to his pale blonde hairline. He really was cute. ‘If there is anything else, please call the front desk.’

‘I will,’ I promised, automatically edging forward to see him out before I realized my backside had been on full display in the mirror the whole time.

Thankfully, Alain was in almost as big a rush to get out as I was to get rid of him and the door slammed shut in record time. Hovering by the bathroom mirror while the shower ran, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the poor man. My hip was turning a fetching shade of yellowish-green from where I had fallen through the bed, and my face was a giant purple mess. And that’s without getting into what had happened to my beautiful tousled curls overnight. I looked like an extra from 28 Days Later. Except, twenty-eight days after that. What a picture-perfect couple Alex and I would make on his birthday. The hot hipster and his zombie love.

After a good twenty minutes of delicately dabbing my entire limited cosmetics stash over my eye and a good five minutes sniffling over my ruined Paul & Joe cat dress, I pulled on my skinny jeans, borrowed another of Alex’s shirts and thanked the Gods of Man Fashion that my boyfriend did not travel light.

Thankfully, Paris was insanely bright and sunny and so I was able to camouflage my eye Olson style, carefully perching my sunglasses on the bridge of my battered nose as I trip-trapped out into the cobbled street in the new flip-flops I’d picked up the day before. According to Alain’s map, the Apple store was only a few streets away. I crossed the wide main road and practically skipped into the narrow, windy streets of the Marais. I had decided I was in love with this part of Paris, it was just too lovely. Everything was charming and quaint and elegant and all those other lovely words that I wished would one day be attached to someone’s description of me even though I knew they never, ever would.

I stopped to stare into the windows, scribble down the names of the cutest stores and generally dash from one side of the street to the other, oohing, aahing and sighing at the general beauty of the pretty Parisian things. There were just so many beautiful boutiques, and even the chain stores seemed to have more of an individual charm about them. I stalled for just a moment longer than was healthy outside a ridiculously expensive bridal salon, staring at the dresses in the windows. One was a long, slender column of elegant silk, a high neckline that draped down low in the back with delicate, floating angel sleeves. In the other window was a more structured, crisp white dress, almost a straight replica of the dress Audrey Hepburn wore at the end of Funny Face. A low, wide neck, three-quarter length sleeves and a fitted bodice with a full-knee length skirt. It was beautiful. I realized I’d been staring for far too long when the owner of the shop came to the door and smiled glowingly at me. Then glanced at my ring finger, tipped her head to one side, turned around and closed the door. What a bitch.

‘Maybe I don’t want to get married anyway,’ I said under my breath, turning and marching off down the street, red-faced. Patting my trusty, but knackered satchel, I tried to work out how many Marc Jacobs bags I could buy for the cost of an average wedding. It was surprisingly and upsettingly few. I tried to clear my mind by taking another look at Alain’s map. According to his scribbles, I was in the right place and, come to think of it, the road was looking slightly more familiar. Had I doubled back on myself?

‘I’m so going to get lost,’ I muttered, glancing back at the map. Every street looked the same to me and I had absolutely no internal compass to direct me. Stupid BlackBerry, where was GPS when I needed it?

I paused on a corner for a moment, took off my sunglasses and, ignoring the horrified stares my face was receiving, looked around. And then I realized why the street was so familiar. The store that made handbags out of leather jackets, Virginie’s top-secret Parisian find, was directly opposite me. I frowned, turning the map around a couple of times. It definitely told me to pass that store. Following the street down and enforcing the discipline not to go into the chocolate shop opposite, I reached the end of the road. And found the Apple store. Turning back, I could still see the handbag place, it was crazy, we had been so close. Relieved to be one step closer to an internet connection, I almost ran into the shop, narrowly avoiding being run down by a man on a scooter. It was disgusting how quickly I’d got used to looking only one way when I crossed the street. God, I was New York dependent already.

After a couple of minutes of aimless wandering around from computer to computer, a very young sales assistant sidled up to me, clad in the internationally recognizable aqua shirt of someone who is going to help you, but also make you feel really, really stupid in the process.

Realizing my ability to order coffee, croissants and wine weren’t going to get me through the purchasing of a power cable, I took out my laptop and pointed at the outlet.

‘Hi, I um, God, sorry,’ I gesticulated wildly with my free hand and pulled my best ‘I’m a really stupid tourist, I know’ face.

‘You need a power cable? Or an adaptor for your cable?’ he asked in a clear Californian accent. ‘People always forget them when they travel.’

I pulled a tight smile. Wow, he really wasn’t going to have to work at making me look stupid, I was doing quite a good job of that myself. ‘Power cable, please.’

While the child prodigy busied himself looking for a cable to work with my ‘wow, practically antique’ laptop (it was two years old), I hopped on to a stool and immediately logged on to one of the store’s MacBooks. The site of a browser window opening up in front of me was far more exciting than it should be, and I actually felt my blood pressure drop from ‘definitely-about-to-have-a-stroke’ to a ‘will-live-through-the day’ level as I clicked into TheLook.com.

There were about five emails from Mary, each one slightly more pissy than the last that I was ignoring her. And any number from Donna. My heart rate started to creep back up as I clocked through to the last message from Mary.

Dear Angela,

I realize you are far too important to acknowledge me now that you’re writing for Belle, but if you want to keep your blog, please email me immediately.

Regards,

YOUR EDITOR, Mary

Panicking, I pressed reply, hashing out a quick overview of what had happened to my case, my BlackBerry, my everything. Reading it back, I really didn’t feel ‘and it’s all because of that psycho bitch of an assistant, Cici. She’s totally mental’ was overly harsh. Spotting aqua-shirt man approaching with my cable, I pressed send and hurried over to the checkout only to have him wave his portable card reader at me. Seriously, was being a smug little bastard part of the Apple recruitment policy? I silently vowed never to be peer pressured into another Apple product again. Except for maybe a new iPod, who could live without that? And maybe an iPhone. Once I’d replaced my laptop with the new MacBook Pro.

The mid-afternoon streets were boiling compared to the ice-cold air conditioning in the Apple store and I was achingly hungry. I wasn’t sure if it was my bashed-up face or the terrifying noises coming from my stomach that was scaring women and small children, but people did seem to be crossing the street to get away from me. Steeling myself, I walked into the nearest café and bought an orange juice and a croissant. The lovely, tiny grey-haired man behind the counter did a really great job of trying not to stare at my bruises and within a minute, without any major miscommunication problems, I was out of there. With the items I had gone in to purchase. It was a proud moment.

Going back to the hotel felt like admitting defeat on the article front, and so I trekked around a few more streets, looking for somewhere to sit and eat my bounty. After crossing a couple more streets, I spotted a group of French people walking along with bags of food. Following them through a giant set of wrought-iron gates at a safe and not stalkery distance, I found myself in a beautiful walled courtyard, all stone archways and manicured gardens. A small sign by the gates read Musée Carnavalet. I glanced around, trying to spot somewhere to pay, but I couldn’t see anything. Feigning ignorance, I bagged a spot on the steps and tore into my croissant.

For the first time since I smashed in my face, maybe since I’d got to Paris, I began to feel relaxed. Without the assistance of alcohol. I’d jotted down the names of lots of stores and taken crappy little pictures on my BlackBerry as I’d walked around, yes it was still very Marais-centric, but who at Belle was to say that the Marais wasn’t the coolest, hipster hangout in all of Europe? Virginie would help me take better pictures, but Belle knew I wasn’t a photographer. Their brief was just to get snaps and if we needed anything fancy, I was sure they could send a photographer out to get better shots. I was just the writer. A really, really good writer.

And Jenny couldn’t stay mad at me for ever. I would do whatever I needed to do to help her, and we’d sort things out. We always did. And Alex, well, my problem wasn’t really with Alex, when I thought about it. My problem was the fact that he’d dated a spectacularly beautiful woman before me and that spectacularly beautiful woman just so happened to be here, in Paris, with us. There wasn’t very much I could do about that. It wasn’t as if Alex was interested in her and it wasn’t as if she was interested in Alex, so what was I getting wound up for? Aside from the obvious ‘because I’m a girl’ reason, obviously.

The garden was so peaceful and ridiculously pretty. Tearing off a big chunk of croissant, my mind wandered off and I imagined myself solemnly entering the garden in the gorgeous Funny Face wedding dress carrying hot pink gerberas, my hair loosely curled and half pinned up, half falling around my shoulders. I had my dad at my side, Jenny and Louisa behind me. In something horribly unflattering. Like canary yellow Bo Peep dresses. My mum was sitting at the front of the congregation, complaining that we should be doing this in church and that I’d always been awkward. And at the front of the garden, under the archway, was Alex. And since it was my fantasy and not my mother’s, he was wearing a slim-fitting Dior Homme suit, a skinny black tie and his beat up black Converse. But he had brushed his hair to acknowledge the solemnity of the occasion. I walked slowly up between the two rows of seats, full of our nearest and dearest who had of course travelled to Paris for our wedding, and I smiled at him, and he smiled back and— woah! I blinked a couple of times and actually shook my head. Where did that come from? I’d been off weddings ever since Louisa’s debacle. It was way too early to start fantasizing about chasing Alex up the aisle. I’d only just decided I wanted to move in with him, there was no need to rush. As difficult as it was to accept, Beyoncé wasn’t always right, you didn’t have to put a ring on it.

My hands were empty before my stomach was ready to accept that the croissant was gone, so I forced myself to stand up and headed back to the gate, giving the group of late lunchers a quick smile as I passed. And got weird stares in return. Which reminded me to put my sunglasses back on.

After another hour of getting to grips with the Marais and adding several charming little cafés and bakeries to my notes, I declared my afternoon a success and attempted to find my way back to the hotel, only getting lost twice. Happily sailing past an Alain-less reception desk, I headed up to the room to plug in my laptop. The Apple logo glowed reassuringly and I kicked off my flip-flops, settling in for a lengthy blogging session.

The Adventures of Angela: Sacré bleu!

It’s safe to say that my first twenty-four hours in Paris were not entirely what I had been hoping for. There hasn’t been a single tandem bike ride down the Left Bank in Breton shirts and black Capri pants. And would you believe it, not a single beret in sight? But I’ve decided to take a more positive attitude from here on and be very laissez-faire, je ne regrette rien, and so on.