I think the word is puerile, Sandrine. We’re just friends, like I said, and Chantal and Sandrine and Suze and the others can just fuck off – we’re fabulous.

Today after school we went to the cemetery together. It’s one of my favourite places in Paris, and Jean-Loup says it’s one of his, too. Montmartre cemetery, with all its little houses and monuments and pointy-roofed chapels and skinny obelisks and streets and squares and alleys and flatblocks for the dead.

There’s a word for it – necropolis. City of the dead. And it is a city; those tombs could almost be houses, I think, lined up side-by-side with their little gates neatly closed, and their gravel neatly raked, and flower-boxes in their mullioned windows. Neat little houses all the same, like a mini-suburbia for the dead. The thought made me shiver and laugh at the same time, and Jean-Loup looked up from his camera and asked me why.

‘You could almost live down here,’ I said. ‘A sleeping bag and a pillow – a fire – some food. You could hide away in one of these monuments. No one would know. The doors all shut. Warmer than sleeping under a bridge.’

He grinned. ‘You ever slept under a bridge?’

Well, of course I had – once or twice – but I didn’t want to tell him that. ‘No, but I’ve got a good imagination.’

‘You wouldn’t be scared?’

‘Why should I?’ I said.

‘The ghosts . . .’

I shrugged. ‘They’re only ghosts.’

A feral cat strolled out from one of the narrow stone lanes. Jean-Loup snapped it with his camera. The cat hissed and went skittering off between the tombs. Probably saw Pantoufle, I thought; cats and dogs are sometimes afraid of him, as if they know he shouldn’t be there.

‘One day I’m going to see a ghost. That’s why I bring my camera here.’

I looked at him. His eyes were bright. He really believes – and he cares, too, which is what I like so much about him. I hate it when people don’t care; when they move through life without caring or believing in anything.

‘You’re really not scared of ghosts?’ he said.

Well, when you’ve seen them as often as I have, you tend not to worry about that kind of thing – but I wasn’t going to tell Jean-Loup that, either. His mother’s quite the Catholic. She believes in the Holy Ghost. And exorcisms. And communion wine turning into blood – I mean, how gross is that? And always having fish on Friday. Oh, boy. Sometimes I think I’m a ghost myself. A walking, talking, breathing ghost.

‘The dead don’t do anything. That’s why they’re here. That’s why the little doors in these chapel-of-rest places don’t have handles on the inside.’

‘And dying?’ he said. ‘Are you scared of that?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess. Isn’t everyone?’