Minus 5

The night before I had read a few more pages of "Is Paris Burning?". Snuggled under the brightly coloured doona which was yet another mismatched item in our first floor Paris apartment, I had read to fill my mind with thoughts of what it must have been like here during the war, 56 years ago and to force the nagging realities of my present situation out so that I could get some sleep. It was now morning and I found myself recounting last night's chapter to once again force reality out and allow imagination to take over. The sharpness of the air was electrifying. Out of the apartment and onto the streets of Paris for all of 4 minutes, it was obvious that the thermal insulation of my Australian made business suit was inadequate. Coldness cut through to my legs as if I was wearing nothing at all.
I had a daily walk to the train station which generally took about 7 minutes. Along Avenue de Ternes, down the boulevard, across to the middle where the closest entrance to Porte Maillot protruded to ground level, disrupting the otherwise pleasant park and playground of Boulevard Pereire. The chance of this entrance being open in the morning was a bit of a lottery. A heavy gate of metal bars greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. The gate was almost as foreboding as the stench of human urine, a regular feature of most Parisian Metro and RER train stations. Any attempt by a Parisian to convince me that France was a culturally and intellectually more developed nation than Australia, would quickly fall in a heap when I raised the undeniable savage tendency of Parisians to piss all over their train stations. After 6 months I was becoming a self professed expert on pissing patterns of the secret and sometimes not so secret Parisian Metro pisser but more on this later.

The gate was closed again which meant a 3 minute walk at normal pace to get to the main entrance of the RER train station. Unfortunately, I had timed my departure a bit late and my train was now only 2 minutes and 30 seconds away. My previous personal best from this situation of 2 minutes 15 gave me confidence that I could still make the train. I turned and bounded back up the stairs and burst back onto the centre strip of the Boulevarde. The sight of a balding, thirty-something foreigner running in a suit with briefcase along the dark Boulevarde at 7:13am on a week day had not been a regular occurrence in the 17th Arrondisment, at least not until recently. I guess it didn't feature high on the weirdness scale for the average Parisian because the spectacle rarely attracted a cursory glance, let alone a raised eyebrow. I rounded the corner of the RER station at full pace, then took the steps down two at a time, I fumbled my wallet out of my pocket to get the train ticket which was much more than just a train ticket! Sacre bleu, it was a Carte Orange, not just a "train ticket". It even featured my noir et blanc photo de passporte of 8 months ago, sporting a more youthful face and considerably more hair than I had noticed in the mirror this morning. Passing through the automatic gate, I could hear the rumbling of the massive RER train, arriving painfully on time, two flights below me. The awareness of time and distance was never so apparent to me as it was now. Another 20 metres back meant another 2 seconds and it would all be over. Still moving at full tilt, I knew that I was going to be cutting it fine. The sound of the pneumatic woosh of the carriage doors opening had been at least 5 seconds ago, indicating that there would soon be the sound of the warning beeps, followed by denial and a 15 minute wait in the stinking station for the next train. Fortunately today, the gates had stayed open longer than usual and my ambitious burst of energy for the last 2 minutes and 10 seconds was rewarded with an open carriage door and a new personal best in the 'Gate closed, catch train' event. Breathing heavily, face flushed and sweat beads beginning to appear, I flopped onto the nearest 2 seater. I rewarded myself with a rest and a sense of achievement which was a relatively good start to my working day. Parisians are not early risers. The occupation of 3 seats on an otherwise empty carriage of 50 something capacity on a 7:15am train in the city said it all. After catching my breath, I realised I had not yet followed my usual ritual of paranoid 9/11 induced security and checked for abandoned luggage or suspicious persons of middle- eastern appearance on the carriage. A quick scan under my seat and of the people in the seats behind me, gave me confidence that I was going to survive yet another train trip in Paris, unless of course the bomb was on the carriage floor above me or concealed in something less obvious. As for the suspicous persons check, Parisians all looked suspicious to me and the proportion of people with dark hair and olive skin complexions suggested that middle-eastern was rapidly becoming western-European so there were no obvious baddies to avoid.
It was now early December in the year of our lord, 2001 or "der mill e oon" in phonetic french. The spectacle of the first major terrorist attack on American soil was still relatively fresh in my mind. A regular time waster for my morning train trip was to day dream the possibility of a bomb going off or a screaming suicide bomber bursting onto the train. The visualisation of chaos and destruction sharpened my sense of awareness but turned everything around in the process. Innocent activities by anonymous Parisians were scrutinised with relentless suspicion as if I was a spy on enemy territory. I was determined that terrorists were not going to stop me from doing anything but at the same time, the induced paranoia was spoiling one of my basic beliefs that people anywhere are mostly well meaning and non violent.
My office was just outside the peripherique, the major ring road around the city, in a place called Clichy. The peripherique is a phenomena of modern france in that it defines the border between Paris and the Banlieu, or the 'burbs' as Americanised english speaking people would probably call them. In france, they say that there are only 3 different places you can live. Paris, Banlieu or The Country. Each of these had different Arrondisements, Suburbs or towns but the style of living was basically the same no matter which part of Paris you lived or which part of the country you called home. The peripherique was the defining line. Like the ancient wall of Paris which still exists in places near the peripherique, your place in france and a major factor in how you would ultimately be judged was a matter of which side of the peripherique road you lived on. My office was located in a semi commercial area, somewhere between the Metro station at Clichy and the RER station at St Ouen. From home, I could take the Metro or the RER. The Metro option involved a change of train, about 20 more stops and 15 minutes longer commute. The walk from St Ouen took me past some dodgy building sites and some scary individuals but so far nobody had caused me any grief. Today however, instead of the daily insecurities of life in Paris, my mind was on the freezing temperature and whether I was going to make it to the office. The neon flashing clock / thermometer on Avenue de Ternes had confirmed my expectation that it was f'n freezing. -5 flashed at me like a beacon, the display seemed to hang longer on the temperature reading rather than the time, looking like the neon, like everything else on this exceptional morning was going to freeze where it stood. It was a Friday and while I had a lot to get through in the office, my thoughts had already moved to the weekend ahead. One good thing about the cold days was that the stench of urine in the train stations was not quite as noticeable. Stepping out of the RER St Ouen I drew a deep breath of cold air fragranced with hints of diesel and rotting garbage. The contrasting air flavours added to the diversity of my Paris experience but neither were causing me to feel good about being on the other side of the world from the city of Sydney. As every expatriate Australian was obliged, after the immortal verse by the iconic and all Aussie poof Peter Allen, I still called Australia home. Thinking of the weekend and home lead me to thoughts of friends back in Sydney. I'd seen the forecast on the cable news the night before for Sydney was thirty degrees. As Paris was diving into winter, Sydney was soaring into a hot and dry summer. The ten hour time difference meant that it was now 5:30 on Friday afternoon. The wonderful thing about a company paid mobile phone in Paris was that the cost of international calls, while exorbitant to mere mortals was a nit, a rounding error in the IT Department budget that was only scrutinised if it deviated significantly from the previous month's. Hence the trick was to talk long and often! The magic mobile could traverse everything from one side of the world to the other from morning to afternoon from winter to summer. I hit the address book for my mate Rob, whom I deduced by now would be stuck in traffic somewhere between Parramatta and home in Revesby Heights and hopefully happy for a chat. Since I had left Sydney in April, Rob had been trying to sell my car for me. A Salesman by trade, I thought my 1997 Telstar would be a piece of cake for him to offload. Unfortunately, the manual transmission and boring white, shabby duco had elimined all of the potential buyers. Each rejection was adding to Rob's frustration and bolstering his belief that a friend in need was truly a pain in the arse. In the true style of Aussie mateship, I was rarely delicate with his Salesman ego, choosing sarcasm regularly when commenting on his inept ability to sell. It had been a couple of weeks since I had spoken to Rob. On our last call I told him I had decided to ditch the idea of selling the car. I thought he might be sensitive and disappointed that he had failed on his promise to help me out. Instead the response was something like "thank f.... for that, now I can take this piece of sh.. back to your place and never take another f..ing call from a d...khead wog trying to offer me $100 for it, hoo-f...ing-ray!".

With the car issue behind us, the purpose of my call, for the first time since I had left, was purely as a friend catching up with a friend. Instead of the usual response of "Oh, its you, no, I haven't sold the f...ing thing" or "What do you want?", I was greeted with pleasantly relaxing "G'day mate, how's things?". Checking I had the right number, I quickly replied, "it's me, Steve, I'm calling from Paris". "Yes I know it's you d...head, how are you?" "F...ing frozen mate, it's minus 5 here and I think my goolies are gonna drop off" "F... its f...ing 35 degrees here, I've been sweating my arse off in traffic all f...ing day". The rest of the conversation, laboured with Aussie vernacular and abundant use of the word f..., covered the status of friends, whether Rob had been training at the gym every day and our respective plans for the weekend. Pausing outside the office to finish our call, I realised that the temperature was no longer bothering me. I also realised that while we were six months into our big life changing adventure, things in Sydney hadn't changed a bit. The magic mobile had just added another dimension that it could traverse with just the touch of a button.