In Paris

By the bakery beckoning with brioche; by the thronging cafe and the mined-out shops where you can buy the tiniest clocks – a stooped gentleman waters his geraniums with a scarlet can.

By eleven, easels are up in the canopied square and the painters begin. A man with no socks carries a dog in one hand and a black cigarette in the other. I walk round the cobbles, staring into red doorways and plant strewn windows and settled lives that I have no entry to. Next Sunday I won’t be here and I might want to think about the particular shape of that street sign, or the shade of those curtains, so I photograph the ordinary and pretend that I’m not.

But then soldiers come around the corner, about twenty of them in combat fatigues and berets, with fingers on the triggers of live machine guns and the air shifts. I stare at the guns, aware that they could flatten every last one of us in seconds and it's no comfort that they're on our side. My camera hangs from my wrist. I want to use it. I want to be able to show the expressions on their faces - on ours - but my French isn’t good enough to get me out of the trouble that would follow. There’s a small hand in mine. I squeeze it.

‘They’re here to look after us. They won’t hurt you. Bad things happened here, not so long ago…’ 

'What bad things?' 

I am honest. I tell what needs to be known, a parent’s dance of truth and obfuscation, not easy to choreograph on a cobbled street in the presence of so many heavy boots.

Minutes pass. We are acutely aware of everyone on the street, of their colour, of the way they’re dressed, a miasma of threat shimmering, where before there was only soft rain and pastels and distant bells. That is how it is. That is the line gouged ugly across the canvas and we stare at it, much as we do the statues and river boats. 

A chink of glasses. Someone greets a friend loudly with three kisses and all is well. A waiter - the one who regaled me last year with tales of his swim in Loch Ness - smokes in his doorway, watching everything, unsmiling. The soldiers take it in turn to take their machine guns in for coffee. Well, of course they do. This is Paris after all, and nothing must get in the way of espresso.

I wander into a bakery to ask for pastry, more pastry s’il vous plait, whatever’s best this morning, and we let the sugar and fat fill us with good things again.  I eat from a paper bag while walking downhill, thinking vaguely of the tiny blue clock I’ve bought and the unlikely pink blossomed Paris on its face and the way that split seconds change days and lives. But we have maps, and Metros to catch and people to watch.

The old man is still fussing as I pass him again. We are in his garden, all of us. He deadheads a geranium, scowling.