We’d split off from the main group of students, myself and a scrawny woman with lanky black hair who looked like she was underfed—a thin woman with the reedy body of a bird.
Read moreThe two of us had gotten separated from the others when we were searching the restaurant that we’d booked—when we’d taken a path into the medieval quarter of Paris thinking it might be there.
When the whole group had first gotten lost I’d gone into an Irish pub to ask directions and the people in the pub had told me it was the other side of town. I walked out and down the steps to join the group outside to give them the news.
It was then that I saw a bundle of notes by the side of the steps on the ground. I picked the notes up and saw that it was a bundle of 500 and 200 Euro bills.
“What shall I do with them?” I asked the others.
I wanted to hold onto the notes though part of me felt guilty. No one would know if I held onto them, surely?
“You could ask inside?” One of the students responded.
So, I went back up the stairs and circled the bar to ask the barman. The bar was a small room with dark wooden panels, and quite old fashioned, but the barman was not available so I didn’t wait. Besides I felt like I was in enemy territory, the place being Irish and all.
I came back outside and that was when the scrawny woman and I split from the rest of the group to search for the restaurant.
We wandered down some dark brick lined streets which had tall walls either side of us, and which were deserted and not a little threatening.
We could have called ahead and cancelled but for some reason we didn’t do that because we didn’t have phones or because it was before the days of cell phones.
Instead we went to the woman’s townhouse and climbed the steps to go inside.
The woman stripped naked in front of me but she wasn’t attractive given her bony frame. Her shoulders were covered in blue ink which glistened under the pale white bulb of the living room.
I wondered if she had a disease or had just covered herself in ink for the sake of it.
“How about we have a bath?’ I suggested.
We went to the bathroom where there was a white claw foot bath tub and we got in under a pile of bubbles from the soap and I lay with my head at the bottom end while she lay with her head at the top.
She held her foot up for me and for a moment I thought to suck on her toes but they too were bony and they had little hairs on them that did not make her toes attractive. Under the knuckles of each toe was more blue ink—it seemed to spread from within each toe—and it made me realise that I would need to clean her toes too if we were to sleep together.