Metro shorts - 9

Saturday night. I catch the last metro after a night of gypsy jazz and raspberry beer and sink happily into the corner seat of a square. Most people are tired, drunk or asleep, more or less equally droopy-eyed. At the window opposite me sits a young woman in her thirties, bright-eyed, wearing a silk shirt and shiny black heels. We exchange a look, the only ones awake in a sea of ghosts; then turn away apologetically.

At the next stop, two girls come in and take a seat. They look young, and I try to glean their age. They’re both wearing black and grey baggy pants with oversized sneakers. They seem at once comfortable and awkward in their clothes. I look at their faces: plain, no trace of make-up. They can’t be over 14.

The girl sitting opposite me is talking excitedly, with the exaggerated expressions of one whose facial features have not yet settled into their final positions. She plays with her straw-coloured hair and fiddles with an orange bracelet. Her friend is listening to her with a calm uncharacteristic for her age.

“I was supposed to be home 20 minutes ago, what will I tell my mom?” the first girl exclaims, bursting suddenly into laughter. A Saturday night like any other, I think, losing interest in the conversation.

Before I can turn away, I see tears appear on her cheeks. Her friend reprimands her maternally: “You’re not going to do that thing where you laugh and cry at the same time are you, I hate it when you do that.” The crying turns suddenly to laughter again. “What if we went to my dad’s he lives on Rue Montorgueil.” “What a loser – as if anybody would want to go there!”

At Bastille, the usual gang of sozzled 20-year old guys gets on. One of them sits next to me and falls asleep. Another one is exclaiming “Let’s go to a club and get some chicks”, waving a half-drunk bottle of rosé in the air. Another is going through the group, trying to find something to embarrass each person with and proceeding to announce it loudly to the rest of the compartment. “Look at how much belly button hair this guy has!” he shouts, reducing all of them to peals of laughter.

The girl across me has started crying again. “No no no, we’re going to make it, I’m going to stay with you till Les Halles, will you be ok after?”

“Yeah”, she says between sobs, “I think so, but my mom is going to kill me”

“All you have to do is be an adult, tell her you got held up” she said, using the word empêchement. “You’ll be fine.” The girl is now laughing again. “You know when you smoke up and then everything goes slowly…” her eyes roll and her head flops forward, as her friend begins to laugh again. Half the compartment is now beside itself with laughter. The other half is asleep.

The lady in the silk shirt looks at me again. It is a look of amusement and disdain, familiarity and distance. The look of one whose youth is still so near, yet far behind. We turn our gazes away simultaneously, our fleeting complicity replaced quickly by a decidedly adult politeness.