Sophie morphed like the land. Since she had arrived in Wales, her French had eroded from lack of use, making room for a much-depleted version of herself, presenting to the world in imprecise English words that never quite defined anything with enough accuracy. It made her feel blurry around the edges, seeking new definition, lest she simply fade away. This was why she had bought the first notebook. The journal she had been keeping as a child had been entrusted to her like an inheritance, but when she had come to Wales, she had somehow left it behind.
Looking for shelter from the persistent rain, she stumbled into the Royal Arcade, part of a network of Edwardian and Victorian galleries below the imposing David Morgan department store. The place was at odds with the standardised street names she had come to associate with Cardiff. In there, she felt as if she had suddenly stepped back in time, marvelling at the succession of distinctive independent shops, until she reached a stationery shop, appropriately named The Pen and Paper. There, amongst shelves of colourful sketchbooks, lined notepads and multi-purpose cahiers, Sophie picked up a black Moleskine. Leather-bound and weighty, 193 pages of acid free paper, with a hard cover and an expandable inner pocket, it came complemented with its own history as a nameless object with a spare perfection all of its own, produced for over a century by a small French bookbinder who supplied the stationery shops in Paris, where artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Hemingway bought them. A serious item, she thought, impressed, whilst wondering what the man who bent over the first cover as he pressed blank pages together would have made of such a description. She pocketed the notebook, placed £6 on the counter, and stepped out towards the bus station to catch a ride home.
Ten years later, the same notebook would come in many sizes and colours and cost £18. A new paragraph would be added to the little history, claiming the notebook to be synonymous with culture, imagination, memory, travel, and personal identity – in both the real and virtual world. A brand that identifies a family of nomadic objects, tools for writing and reading, designed for the modern people on the go, around the world, at every latitude, a symbol of contemporary nomadism, closely connected with the digital world. A lot to expect from a notebook.
Sophie walked straight home from the bus stop, ignoring detours, traffic lights, passers-by, as if she were carrying a priceless treasure. Entering the house, she moved from room to room, exiting through the backdoor of the rented accommodation. In the enclosed safety of the back garden, she took a deep breath, absorbing the late spring sunshine. She had been living on Maindy Road for a few years now, sharing with Tom and Stu, two architecture students who filled the house with a multitude of little tubes of glue. Glue for paper. Glue for cardboard. Glue for wood. Glue to seal ceramic to walls, to merge wood with metal into the shape of stairs, to place little tufts of green wool onto matchsticks to mimic trees. Tubes of glues, like potions, to magic cardboard cut-out lives which they hoped would lead them to fame, one day. The boys were nocturnal, spending all their time in the Studio, a mythical space on campus where architecture students disappeared from time-to-time, a hub of creative activity for a community of aspiring experts amped up on life-and-death competition.
Sophie enjoyed their absence. It gave her space to play-act a life unlike the one she had left behind. The garden was a novelty for someone who had grown up in a city apartment. She had made it her mission to transform the bare patch of land and gravel into a lush lawn surrounded by tiger lilies guarding a small pond, their speckled orange flowers contrasting with dangling fuchsias and the vivid blue of campanula muralis, clustered along the partition-wall with the old, retired neighbour who liked to sunbathe in his underpants. In those days, Maindy Road was still an industrial zone. Across the road from the row of houses were a succession of rectangular red brick buildings where exceptional load trucks brought train coaches for repair, mostly at night. Sophie was amazed that one side of the house could overlook industrial workshops, whilst on the other she could step into nature and observe blue tits and red robins perched on the magnolia tree in bloom at the back of the garden.
Sitting on a pile of wood delineating the garden path, she opened the first page of the Moleskine, clutched at her biro and paused. Her old journal had contained stories from her childhood, anecdotes from her mother's and her grandmother's lives told and retold at bedtime, amplified by her imagination into family myths. What did she have to tell?
Eventually, she traced a few words on the lined page, in English. It was the spring of 2003. By then what had started as a gap year had turned into the sketch of a new life, one where she had an English boyfriend, a job in the university, and a house with a garden. Without her noticing, her existence had gradually solidified into a (translated) version of herself, filling invisible cracks.
That other self was like a sponge, or maybe more accurately a parasite; feeding from every experience, every word, every person she met, every place she visited. After just a few more years, she would make new friends, move to a flat in Cardiff Bay, get married. Every day she leant forward into this new life, stepping further away from her old one. She congratulated herself on how quickly she had assimilated, making a conscious effort to stay away from the diaspora of French expats on campus, to immerse herself in this Cardiff experience.
But then she started to dream she was living in one of those architecture maquettes with the glued-on stairs and the matchstick trees. She would wake drenched in sweat, feeling destabilised on an almost atomic level. So much had changed in so little time, it was as if her appetite for novelty had waned from over-exposure. Without the elation, everything around her suddenly felt staged.
In the pub after work, she would watch customers executing a sort of ballet. She noticed the costumes they wore, men in 'smart jeans' with leather loafers, freshly ironed shirts and the smell of cheap body spray and hair gel; women in high heels, tight jeans and low-cut tops, hair dyed blonde and ironed flat. She noticed the dialogues they exchanged, men commenting on rugby, football, and the price of lager; women gossiping about office romance, holiday packages in Spain, and the latest bargain purchased off the rack. They moved around each other, seldom touching, as if steered by an indiscernible script; a highly gendered society where everyone understood their role. She had ignored those differences at first. Now they made her feel like an alien. She acted like one too she realised, eliciting suspicion when she declined a drink; failed to provide the correct response amongst conversations made inaudible to her foreign ear by the hubbub of rugby supporters and shrill hen night laughter.
‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?’ her drunken colleague mouthed into her ear, grinning with self-satisfaction at his clever usage of the Lady Marmalade lyric.
They were colleagues; did he really think this was appropriate? she asked. He had sniggered then, raising his hands in a defensive gesture, and calling it a bit of harmless banter.
‘Loosen up, love.’ As if she was being unreasonable.
As she stood up to leave that night, he grabbed her by the wrist. ‘You know, Love, however long you stay, you'll always be the French girl. Get used to it.’
She felt threatened. Sentenced to perpetual foreignness.
Not long after, she married an Englishman whom she had met at martial arts classes that first year. He was exotic with his mop of ginger hair. He made her feel safe. Above all, he provided her with a British name, like a shield behind which to hide. Naively, she thought it would help her blend in. She willed herself into this new world of Sunday dinners and village greens where children of working-class parents went to university to better their prospects. A world of possibilities. Try it for size. But then, her course came to an end, and she started to look for work outside of academia, where the presence of foreigners had been artificially normalised by the constraints of research life.
She recorded her first job interview in the notebook. The panel had dismissed her after three minutes. As she left, the chair had advised her to clearly state her nationality on the CV in the future. Since she had taken her husband's name, they hadn't known she was foreign, he had said, the omission a sign of her deceitful nature.
She didn't utter a word to her husband that night, as if his name had somehow betrayed her. They sat side-by-side on the blue sofa in the freshly white painted lounge, overlooking a lush park, and watched DVD boxsets to fill the silent gap between them. The next day, walking the length of Lloyd George Avenue on her way to town, she wondered whether some invisible hand had placed her on the wrong side of the track, a flat in the modern build of Cardiff Bay, the young professionals' route to a successful life. Across the avenue was a rail track, the Cardiff Central to Cardiff Bay line. One stop. Beyond was Butetown, the old Tiger Bay, built in the early 19th century by Lord Bute to accommodate migrants working the Docks. One of Britain's first multicultural communities. There, more than fifty nationalities had settled, Somalis rubbing shoulders with Greeks, Yemenis with Italians. There, maybe, she would have belonged.
Ten years later, the same notebook would come in many sizes and colours and cost £18. A new paragraph would be added to the little history, claiming the notebook to be synonymous with culture, imagination, memory, travel, and personal identity – in both the real and virtual world. A brand that identifies a family of nomadic objects, tools for writing and reading, designed for the modern people on the go, around the world, at every latitude, a symbol of contemporary nomadism, closely connected with the digital world. A lot to expect from a notebook.
Sophie walked straight home from the bus stop, ignoring detours, traffic lights, passers-by, as if she were carrying a priceless treasure. Entering the house, she moved from room to room, exiting through the backdoor of the rented accommodation. In the enclosed safety of the back garden, she took a deep breath, absorbing the late spring sunshine. She had been living on Maindy Road for a few years now, sharing with Tom and Stu, two architecture students who filled the house with a multitude of little tubes of glue. Glue for paper. Glue for cardboard. Glue for wood. Glue to seal ceramic to walls, to merge wood with metal into the shape of stairs, to place little tufts of green wool onto matchsticks to mimic trees. Tubes of glues, like potions, to magic cardboard cut-out lives which they hoped would lead them to fame, one day. The boys were nocturnal, spending all their time in the Studio, a mythical space on campus where architecture students disappeared from time-to-time, a hub of creative activity for a community of aspiring experts amped up on life-and-death competition.
Sophie enjoyed their absence. It gave her space to play-act a life unlike the one she had left behind. The garden was a novelty for someone who had grown up in a city apartment. She had made it her mission to transform the bare patch of land and gravel into a lush lawn surrounded by tiger lilies guarding a small pond, their speckled orange flowers contrasting with dangling fuchsias and the vivid blue of campanula muralis, clustered along the partition-wall with the old, retired neighbour who liked to sunbathe in his underpants. In those days, Maindy Road was still an industrial zone. Across the road from the row of houses were a succession of rectangular red brick buildings where exceptional load trucks brought train coaches for repair, mostly at night. Sophie was amazed that one side of the house could overlook industrial workshops, whilst on the other she could step into nature and observe blue tits and red robins perched on the magnolia tree in bloom at the back of the garden.
Sitting on a pile of wood delineating the garden path, she opened the first page of the Moleskine, clutched at her biro and paused. Her old journal had contained stories from her childhood, anecdotes from her mother's and her grandmother's lives told and retold at bedtime, amplified by her imagination into family myths. What did she have to tell?
Eventually, she traced a few words on the lined page, in English. It was the spring of 2003. By then what had started as a gap year had turned into the sketch of a new life, one where she had an English boyfriend, a job in the university, and a house with a garden. Without her noticing, her existence had gradually solidified into a (translated) version of herself, filling invisible cracks.
That other self was like a sponge, or maybe more accurately a parasite; feeding from every experience, every word, every person she met, every place she visited. After just a few more years, she would make new friends, move to a flat in Cardiff Bay, get married. Every day she leant forward into this new life, stepping further away from her old one. She congratulated herself on how quickly she had assimilated, making a conscious effort to stay away from the diaspora of French expats on campus, to immerse herself in this Cardiff experience.
But then she started to dream she was living in one of those architecture maquettes with the glued-on stairs and the matchstick trees. She would wake drenched in sweat, feeling destabilised on an almost atomic level. So much had changed in so little time, it was as if her appetite for novelty had waned from over-exposure. Without the elation, everything around her suddenly felt staged.
In the pub after work, she would watch customers executing a sort of ballet. She noticed the costumes they wore, men in 'smart jeans' with leather loafers, freshly ironed shirts and the smell of cheap body spray and hair gel; women in high heels, tight jeans and low-cut tops, hair dyed blonde and ironed flat. She noticed the dialogues they exchanged, men commenting on rugby, football, and the price of lager; women gossiping about office romance, holiday packages in Spain, and the latest bargain purchased off the rack. They moved around each other, seldom touching, as if steered by an indiscernible script; a highly gendered society where everyone understood their role. She had ignored those differences at first. Now they made her feel like an alien. She acted like one too she realised, eliciting suspicion when she declined a drink; failed to provide the correct response amongst conversations made inaudible to her foreign ear by the hubbub of rugby supporters and shrill hen night laughter.
‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?’ her drunken colleague mouthed into her ear, grinning with self-satisfaction at his clever usage of the Lady Marmalade lyric.
They were colleagues; did he really think this was appropriate? she asked. He had sniggered then, raising his hands in a defensive gesture, and calling it a bit of harmless banter.
‘Loosen up, love.’ As if she was being unreasonable.
As she stood up to leave that night, he grabbed her by the wrist. ‘You know, Love, however long you stay, you'll always be the French girl. Get used to it.’
She felt threatened. Sentenced to perpetual foreignness.
Not long after, she married an Englishman whom she had met at martial arts classes that first year. He was exotic with his mop of ginger hair. He made her feel safe. Above all, he provided her with a British name, like a shield behind which to hide. Naively, she thought it would help her blend in. She willed herself into this new world of Sunday dinners and village greens where children of working-class parents went to university to better their prospects. A world of possibilities. Try it for size. But then, her course came to an end, and she started to look for work outside of academia, where the presence of foreigners had been artificially normalised by the constraints of research life.
She recorded her first job interview in the notebook. The panel had dismissed her after three minutes. As she left, the chair had advised her to clearly state her nationality on the CV in the future. Since she had taken her husband's name, they hadn't known she was foreign, he had said, the omission a sign of her deceitful nature.
She didn't utter a word to her husband that night, as if his name had somehow betrayed her. They sat side-by-side on the blue sofa in the freshly white painted lounge, overlooking a lush park, and watched DVD boxsets to fill the silent gap between them. The next day, walking the length of Lloyd George Avenue on her way to town, she wondered whether some invisible hand had placed her on the wrong side of the track, a flat in the modern build of Cardiff Bay, the young professionals' route to a successful life. Across the avenue was a rail track, the Cardiff Central to Cardiff Bay line. One stop. Beyond was Butetown, the old Tiger Bay, built in the early 19th century by Lord Bute to accommodate migrants working the Docks. One of Britain's first multicultural communities. There, more than fifty nationalities had settled, Somalis rubbing shoulders with Greeks, Yemenis with Italians. There, maybe, she would have belonged.
Sophie Buchaillard is a Franco-British author who has been living in the UK for twenty years. She writes on the theme of identity and belonging and is currently a PhD candidate looking at migrant literature in a francophone postcolonial context. She has been published in Wales Arts Review and Murmurations Magazine. Square Wheel Press included two of her pieces in their anthology Together and Apart (2020). Her debut novel This Is Not Who We Are (Seren Books) is out in June 2022. Twitter: @growriter Website: www.sophiebuchaillard.com
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