Monsieur Laval was as twinkly and weathered as a farmer in a children’s book, with bright blue wrinkles for eyes. He lived on a few acres not far from Montpellier, he informed me, and he asked where I was from. That was a question that made me tense up. Seven years earlier, my family had immigrated to Australia from Asia. Where was I from? Monsieur Laval’s tiny eyes widened when I said Australia. ‘C’est loin!’ he exclaimed. It was what every French person said at the mention of Australia. I agreed that it was indeed far away. I didn’t tell him that the distance made it easier to say I came from Australia. As for ‘I’m Australian’, the span of the planet wasn’t great enough for me to claim that.

The apartment cost seven hundred francs a month, more than I’d hoped to pay, but Monsieur Laval explained that the cost of utilities was included in the rent. He said, ‘C’est intéressant.’ He repeated this at intervals in his singing Midi accent – c’est ang-ter-es-sung – as he showed me around. Intéressant was a word that I didn’t fully understand at first. It could mean ‘interesting’, as I’d been taught, but it also carried the shrewd French sense of ‘in one’s interest’. Monsieur Laval was telling me that here was a bargain, while I thought that he was referring to the romance of the place. Two days later, I propped the Ronis postcard beside the deep porcelain sink in the kitchen. The fridge ground its teeth in welcome. The key to the front door was cold and heavy and the length of my hand.

My favourite stallholder at the open-air food market always dressed in a cracked leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Sandrine dyed her hair a frank, hard black and wore it in a long ponytail to one side. She liked me and expressed it by drawing my attention to this or that vegetable: ‘C’est ang-ter-es-sung.’ What was interesting about potatoes, about cabbages? This small opacity held my attention like a dark figure in a snowy field. There was something brutal about being flung into a foreign language – something thrilling, too. In those early weeks, I sometimes stood aside from myself, watching my progress as if following a character in a novel. Asking the way or opening a bank account, I’d listen to myself reproducing sentences from grammar books. I relished the strangeness of it as I relished the square-ruled notebook I bought and the chalky ring deposited in saucepans by the hard water. Everything was proof that I was living a different life.