She had been to Paris once before with her mother when she was twenty, a few months after she dropped out and it didn’t look like she was going back. She had settled into the rhythms of the joke but her mother knew, instinctively, without having to be told, how disappointed she was. It was a cheap trip; they shared a hotel room. Their room contained a tiny, electric Eiffel Tower.

They were women who knew dirt, country roads, had learned to make conversation in corner shops. Confronted, finally, by glamour, by seriousness, they did everything wrong. They went to the wrong bars, the wrong restaurants, the wrong streets. She wasn’t sure they saw Paris at all, neither of them exactly clear on what a holiday was. They fought on several street corners, made up, and hid their giddy laughter behind their hands. The city was impatient with them. What is so funny, it asked. What could possibly be so funny? Her mother made her go to every museum and when her feet were sore she waited in the cafes. She remembered seeing her across the crowded room, her soles exposed, sitting patiently, waiting for her daughter, looking like an old woman.

‘You will make a great old woman,’ she told her mother that night.

‘I am an old woman,’ her mother said.

Later, in their twin beds, she asked her mother was she hard to raise.

‘You had an answer for everything. Everything.’

‘I don’t anymore. Not at all.’

Then her mother, a shadow on the wall of the hotel room, told her that she regretted some of her life. The usual. She would have liked to do more, although she didn’t really know what: live in European countries, make mistakes. She never had the time to figure out what it was. She felt her life was small, mechanical. She spoke for a while.

‘I shouldn’t have said all that,’ she decided, after a thoughtful pause.

‘It’s okay,’ the woman said, ‘it’s fine.’

‘I had a nice time.’

‘I had a nice time too.’

They fell asleep, after a while, Paris coming through the slats of the hotel blinds.

*