Secrets Heard in Paris

First published on Ripple Effect Radio, DDR (2025)

Secret One:

You are talking to a friend in Bouillon Pigalle, over visiting from Galway city, who tells you, far too loudly, your shoulders practically rubbing against those on either side of you, a secret about her boyfriend. He is still in jail for all that drug dealing. No one at her work knows the boyfriend is in jail, and so far she has kept up the charade that he just travels a lot. She then tells you something else but beforehand she makes you promise you won’t put it into a story no matter how good it is. You nod your head and listen to her story over your poireaux vinaigrette. 

Secret Two:

Walking past the Bourse de Commerce, you see a young woman with a middle-aged couple. They are sitting at the terrace of Au Pied de Cochon, sipping breathtakingly expensive cocktails. You too have, in the past, paid exorbitant amounts of money for the same experience. The older woman flashes a diamond ring the size of Poland at the younger woman. Don’t tell your father, the elder man says jovially. The younger woman looks perplexed, like she has just been brought into a secret she had no desire to know. You wonder who the young woman is to this couple. Who her father is. The man slides his spare arm around his soon-to-be-bride. You decide it is his third bride, and then you wonder why it is that you think this. 

Secret Three:

Sitting in the Irish Cultural Centre in the 5eme, in a deconsecrated church. You sit in the uncomfortable wooden church pews and think of your childhood. A reasonably famous Irish actor is reading a book by Claire Keegan, and a woman plays different instruments behind him. The piano, the keyboard, the fiddle. She goes between them, depending on what’s happening in the book. A girl from the North next to you asks what the cushions at your feet are for. You tell her they’re for kneeling down, and she goes beetroot, because she’s outed herself. Protestants don’t kneel at mass, you surmise. She says she was going to keep it a secret. You say you don’t mind one way or the other. She says her grandad was friends with Ian Paisley, and she thinks it’s a worse situation for Protestants than Catholics when you think about it, because people have sympathy for the Catholics. You disagree and would rather just listen to Claire Keegan, but are unsure how to tell her this without starting an argument. You nod. 

Secret Four:

You stand in the darkness of an alley and hear words you have no right to overhear. You are around the corner, peeing behind a bin on the Rue Des Martyrs. 

A woman is debating who she is in love with. You hear her say candidly, like she is talking about a bus schedule, that perhaps her fiancee isn’t who she is in love with, after all. Perhaps she is in love with this man in front of her. He is too far around the corner for you to see him. The woman looks vaguely familiar, but you think that about everyone. You wish you didn’t have your penis in your hands whilst eavesdropping this very intimate conversation. You can’t seem to stop peeing.

Under the light of the lamppost then, she has to decide if she will move continents and get married, or stay here with this man in the shadows. You find it an enormously important decision; it will impact the entirety of the rest of three peoples’ lives. She uses the word ‘soulmate’. The fiancee is her ‘soulmate’. She may love this man too, but he is not, she has decided, her soulmate. Thus, the man in the shadows is left on the street. The woman walks past the alley but doesn’t see you.

Soulmate is one word, not two, which you find both beautiful and heartbreaking. You notice the man in the shadows said little. Certainly no professions of love. It must have been a conversation of the eyes. What was not said. Being turned down for a proposal you didn’t make must be an unusual experience. 

https://www.mixcloud.com/DublinDigitalRadio/marve-shmarve-ripple-effect-ep-2_23nov25/