Carrie Williams - The Exchange

Rachel surprised me by accepting, with few questions. I think she even surprised herself. But then sometimes you meet people when they’re right on the edge and, without knowing it, ready to leap – all they need is a little push in the right direction. I did that to her, it seems, and I did it to myself. I gave myself the little push I needed so much.

I like to be controversial. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up doing the work I do. I was a fighter as a child – I rubbed my parents and my siblings up so badly that eventually, when I was eighteen, they packed me off to do my A-levels at a boarding school in the UK – one deep in the countryside in Hampshire, where my mother’s best friend from university headed up the French department. But the strictness of that god-awful place only hardened my resolve to be free. After a couple of months of terrible behaviour, I finally managed to get myself expelled and then headed back to France – not home, to my parents, but to a squat in a Hausmannian building on the edge of the Parc Monceau in Paris. Lack of any education at the tender age of eighteen had me doing all kinds of jobs – supermarket cashier, cinema usherette, chambermaid, nanny. I hated them all, although for a while I found the voyeuristic aspect of the chambermaid’s job rather titillating.

Gradually I ended up dancing in Pigalle – friends who had gone down that route said it was easy money, and when I gave it a go it was immediately apparent that I had a talent for it. And there were things, as I said, that I did love about it: the female camaraderie, the knowledge of one’s inherent power over other people. But it was very definitely love-hate, and the hate grew inside me without me really knowing, like a strange, secret plant, feeding off me before I really knew of its existence.

And then suddenly it was in full flower, and I needed to hack it down before it took me over.

It was the first day of the rest of my life. Just as it was for everyone else on the planet. It’s a cliché. But whereas most people would be doing pretty much what they did the day before, and the day before that, and all the days before that – the past receding away from them like a play of infinite mirrors at a fairground – I was starting anew. I couldn’t have been more excited.

It was hard to work out how I got so stuck in a rut. At eighteen I had felt on the threshold of something, of everything. Life was unfurling for me like a flower its petals. There was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t reach for, if I really wanted it. Everything was fresh and exciting and rampant with possibility.

Four years down the line, my art-school friends had begun to bore me, my art-school boyfriend – now dumped – totally bored me, and even my art, I sometimes thought, had lost its way, its oomph. Everything had wilted, somehow. I felt like an elephant encased in its tough, hard skin, inured to everything, impervious. The new stuff – bars, photography shows, people – seemed like pale versions of the old, and the old stuff was gone.

But as I stepped out of the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord, my belly warm with croissants and good coffee from the train buffet, I felt it again – that stab of excitement that I hadn’t experienced in so long, like a wash of pure alcohol through my veins.

I decided to walk to Rochelle’s studio apartment on the rue Chaptal. It was only about fifteen minutes away and, despite the length of my stay, I’d brought little luggage – just my camera and lenses, plus a medium-sized rucksack with some essential clothes. I figured I could wash them often, and buy some cheap stuff if they didn’t suffice. The stroll would give me the chance to acclimatise myself to Paris as well as get my bearings in my new neighbourhood.

I walked along rue de Mauberge and then rue Condorcet, looking up at the apartment buildings with their wrought-iron decorative balconies, noting the smart vintage clothes and accessories shops and the children’s outfitters. It was the kind of bohemian you pay a lot for. When the street feeds into rue Victor Massé, it becomes even more classically ‘Parisian’, with pretty stonework on its 18 th- and 19 th-century buildings, lots of unpretentious bread and cheese and wine shops and untouristy bistros, some music shops and several two-star hotels.

At number thirty-seven I stopped and looked up at the fourth floor, to pay homage to the painter and sculptor Edgar Degas. Or rather to the photographer Edgar Degas – the man famous for his artistic glimpses of ballerinas and washerwomen and folk in cafés in Montmartre also created some little-known, highly ambiguous photographic images that make their sitters look phantom-like, supernatural, unreal. Impressionistic photographs, almost, from the artist who disdained the label Impressionism.

On this street, too – I knew because I’d been reading up on the area in the week since Rochelle and I had set up our ‘life-swap’ – has stood the legendary café Le Chat Noir, in its second incarnation. This was a place that became so wildly popular for its bohemian and rowdy poetry readings, music-hall sketches and satire that it spawned cabaret all over Europe. At the end of the street, I turned and hazarded a short detour to Place Pigalle itself, the epicentre of the area’s strip clubs, sex shops and erotic cabarets, dubbed Pig Alley by the US soldiers who came here during the Second World War. Just up the road, on the boulevard de Clichy, was the legendary Moulin Rouge itself, as well as the Museum of Eroticism.

I stood still for a moment and let it all wash over me: the sights, sounds, smells. It was as seedy as I imagined but exciting too, holding a strange allure, a promise of adventure. Some parts of Paris, in spite of their beauty, or perhaps because of it, can seem pickled in aspic, museum pieces. Pigalle was very definitely alive. I resolved to take a stroll up here later, take a few shots as the natural light died and the neon hoardings fizzled into life. For now, it was time to find Rochelle’s apartment, kick off my shoes and take a nap.

***

I dozed briefly; though I had been up at the crack of dawn for one of the cheapest pre-rush-hour Eurostars, and though I was awake until the small hours packing and checking and fretting, I was just too excited to be in Paris to be able to catch up on my lost sleep.

I stood up, went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, then padded around the flat, getting a feel for my new home – and for its usual inhabitant. It wasn’t really a flat, in fact – it was a studio, with a big old-fashioned wrought-iron bed plumped right in the centre, away from any wall. It reminded me of a bed on stage, for some reason. On each side of it were shop mannequins, both naked but draped at their neck and wrists with accessories that must have belonged to Rochelle – colourful scarves, furry stoles, berets and other hats, acrylic bangles and endlessly long strings of necklaces in jewel-bright hues. Around the bed, on the floor, were teetering stacks of glossy mags and books. Closer inspection of the latter revealed everything from correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller to art books on the likes of Gustav Klimt, Hans Bellmer and the female Surrealists. I was interested to note among them several photography books: Lee Miller, Francesca Woodman, Bill Brandt.

Looking around the mess of Rochelle’s room I was a little taken aback, and I found myself wondering, for the first time, if I’d done a really stupid thing. I knew next to nothing about Rochelle and her life, and now here I was surrounded by all her junk, by her bohemian squalor, and I asked myself if I was going to be able to do this.

As I pondered, I kept circling this magpie’s nest of a room. It wasn’t dirty, but otherwise it was about as far from my own flat as it could possibly be. Two wardrobes on either side of the room bulged with shimmering, spangled fabrics, while cacti and other pot plants covered just about every free surface. Peeking into the tiny bathroom, I was unsurprised to find it almost bursting with cosmetic products. I didn’t have the heart to inspect the tiny kitchenette.