The witching hour

As well as having the fear of waking up to find a stranger looking at me and being afraid of fear itself, like many people, I also have a fear of change, although this is not a fear which can't be overcome.

When I moved from London to Paris, in order to minimise the changes that would be involved, I vowed that I would continue to go to my London hairdresser. Every time I needed a feather cut or a fringe, I'd hop on the Eurostar to go and see Hans in Soho and listen to his tale of two cities and why he prefers London hair to Paris hair. Of course after two such trips i'd started to ease myself into Paris, and I decided that it was simpler to visit a hairdresser over here. Hans is probably still fuming and snipping his scissor-hands in the air for exclamation: "Why doesn't she come back? They don't know how to cut hair over there!"

After I'd been living in Paris for a while, I felt change was nigh again, the witching hour was upon us. Even though it was well and truly over between French and I, in order to make the impending change seem like it wasn't really a change, I set up a loveless cohabitation.

"See", I explained to French, "it's like nothing has really changed. We'll just continue to live together, except you are free to date tall women if you like, and I don't have to ring you and tell you where I am..."

But slowly I moved my body and its objects from our shared bedroom to the study (French's tall woman wasn't so keen on him sharing a room with his ex). And after I accidently brushed my hair with her comb (I found black hairs in my comb, I heard her whimpering on the other side of the wall), French gave me a gentle nudge in the direction of the door.

Even then, like a child clutching on to her blankie, I tried to stay in French's aura.

"The apartment upstairs is for rent, I might take that. We could be neighbours."

"You couldn't afford it!" he scoffed (nevertheless, he looked a bit nervous). But he was right. So I started scouting the nearby streets for any old place to lay my head so that I could still eat exactly the same shaped baguette every morning. But to no avail. Bad-breathed gods were blowing stifling winds of change, and I was swept in the direction of the nearest arrondissement.

I'd been warned that flat/studio hunting in Paris was going to be difficult. In fact, I didn't have too much of a hard time. The place I live now was the first I saw - something about its old world feel and the idea that if any ghosts lived here they would be the unsociable type - attracted me to it.

One proprietor further up the hill tried to get me to rent her closet with the selling point that it's two minutes walk from the Sacre Coeur. When I said no thanks, she barred the door with her body and baring craggy teeth demanded that I tell her why I didn't want to rent her place.

"Because I saw another place four minutes further down the hill for the same price, and it's bigger and has less orange, fluffy carpet."

She gave me a disdainful slap with her eyes and said: "Four minutes further down the road is not Montmarte, it's Abbesses."

"It looks and smells like Montmarte!"

But she made me agree to consider her place before she would let me go forth into the world again. As I was leaving she called eerily down the staircase: See you soon Pinochiette, which left me with the fear that she'd put a spell on me and that I would end up renting the closet.

In the end the spell didn't work. It was a toss up between a flat which had one entire wall of window devoted to a close up view of the Sacre Coeur so that if anyone entering my flat doubted I was living in Paris I'd have the proof, or my current flat which has a bath. No choice: who needs the Sacre Coeur when you can lounge in a bath. I'm a bath kind of girl which is one of the reasons why this book, which pays homage to the bath, is one of my favourite books.

I've already discussed in an earlier post how finally having a [b]room of my own was so important to me. It was in the early days of living in my new place, when I'd finally faced change, and I used to dance from room to room - doing a handstand in this corner, a pirouette over there - filling up my own space, that the hands of the clock ticked over and I had to face yet another of my fears.

It was a stinking August night, the building where I live was drained of its inhabitants. I was sleeping in the silence, broken up by the soft mutter of distant drunks entering through my open first floor window. In my dream someone was fiddling with the lock on the door of my flat. This noisy dream woke me and I saw my curtain moving. Wow, that's some wind! The curtain moved aside to reveal the human face of the wind. A twenty-something, unidentified man was standing there, in my bedroom.

Without hesitation I started to scream, layer upon layer of screams, like with each scream I was hitting the stranger in a different part of his body. He didn't stay around to hear my symphony. He was out the window before you could say Larry and I just kept screaming for John and Yoko, for headless jelly babies, for whatever reason I could think of to scream.

When he'd climbed back to the ground, as if to say, I may be an intruder but I haven't forgotten my manners, he called out: "ca va?"

To which I screamed "Non, je vais appeler la police!"

And he disappeared in a puff of screaming.

The hour of this visit, four in the morning, became the witching hour, and although my window which opens on to the street is always kept firmly shut now, it took me months after that incident before I could sleep before dawn.