Live and let live

I wish I could tell one day from the next but the wine's far too cheap here. He's found a small three star hotel near the Luxembourg gardens, still on the Rive Gauche but reasonably far from his sister. "I don't want her to kill you" he says, I'm sure it's some form of a compliment.

We watch people pass us by in the early mornings on their way to work while we're still high on the fumes from last night's Champagne and oysters. We try (unsuccessfully) to act sober as we look for cracks and tears in the fresh paint, something to offset the expected and disrupt the pedantic patterns laid out before us: someone under 40 wearing clothes from Desigual (impossible), young Parisian men without sneakers (hard), pretty women with broken hearts (this is where we start guessing).

I ask him again when we'll see his mother. "I told you I shouldn't have put it that way" he says, annoyed, "but we will". He takes another sip from his highball glass of Absinthe, church bells echoing melancholically across the river as he speaks. "You will".