Paris seemed colder and older.

    Sarah walked up familiar streets filled with familiar sights. She’d always loved the Rue Mouffetard, the world’s best open-air market, a swirling, seething, dizzying press of people and things and sensations. But in the November drizzle the awnings seemed faded and shabby, the square itself darker.

    She walked along streets she’d known years ago. She remembered the shops, and the people in them. She’d worked at a little bistro on the Rue de Bazailles, and for M. Bonnet at a street café off the Square St-Médard, and in a grotty little hole on Rue Larrey. None of the people she’d known were still there. M. Bonnet’s shop was part of a national chain now. It might as well have been Starbucks.

    Sarah had been happy here. She’d arrived on a big truck on her nineteenth birthday, having hitched her way up from Greece by roundabout routes, and she’d fallen in love. Not, for once, with some fast-talking bastard with a winning smile and a tight bottom but with a whole city. She’d spoken hardly any French (some would say she still didn’t) but she was a young brunette in Paris and language never seemed to be a problem.

    She’d meant to stay three weeks and she stayed for fifteen months. And there were fast-talking bastards with winning smiles and tight bottoms, and there were fascinating places to explore, and exciting people to meet, and the city wooed her and taught her and made her laugh. She lived in La Rive Gauche, the left bank, the Latin Quarter, the student quarter, that still echoed with Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and Matisse and Satre and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She kept a tiny flat in the fifth arrondissement and she danced.

    Coming back was a mistake.

    She was there with the show, of course. Dancer was really Sarah Shepherdson, and after all those years of struggling to make it as a professional terp she’d finally got a part in a stage musical tour. She was in France with Lair Legion: The Musical, and through she was really just part of the chorus she did get her own number at the start of Act Two. It was a start. It was a break.

    It was damned hard.

    Sarah had auditioned for the role of the Probability Dancer, one of the Lair Legion that had saved the planet during the recent Parody War. She’d thought it would be fairly easy. After all, she secretly was the Probability Dancer.

    She remembered those old stories about how Charlie Chaplain had once entered a Chaplain lookalike competition and come second.
    Sarah hadn’t got the role of Dancer. Annette Lewis looked more like Dancer than she did. But she’d managed to snag a minor role as Sorceress, and the blonde wig didn’t itch that badly now she’d got used to it.

    Sarah walked up through the Jardin de Plantes behind the Natural History Museum and wondered if there’d always been this much litter on the paths. Had Paris lost its magic, or had she?

    In one sense, Sarah wasn’t the Probability Dancer any more. She’d lost her powers – perhaps forever – when she’d maxxed them to save Danny Lyle in the final moments of the Parody War. She thought it was a fair exchange, some temporary gifts from an alien planet-eater for her sister’s happiness. But now she was realising that she couldn’t go back to being who she’d been before. That life didn’t fit any more.

    The city didn’t fit any more.

    Sarah’s strides were getting longer and faster. She was getting angry again. She cut up the Rue Jusseiu, lined with cars and skips, heading towards her favourite place, dreading that it might turn out to mean nothing to her now.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did you say?” Annette Lewis had shrieked at her in rehearsal today.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I said, ‘I don’t think you’ve got that right’,” Sarah had replied. It had been a long morning, repeating the same routine over and over until Madame Geary was satisfied with the choreography, and tempers were short. Sarah was in no mood for a diva strop from Annette. “There’s no way that Dancer would do that. Dancer would never step over somebody who was hurt so she could go to hit the villain. Never. That’s not what she’s about.”

    Annette looked good in the leotard, damn her. “Well thank you for your opinion, Shepherdson, but I think I know my character best. Dancer, she’s all pent up energy. Personified woman-power. She’s not going to go all girly and feminine because some old man’s got knocked down. She’s a modern woman in control of her destiny, and she’s taking the fight right up to Louis, um, to the Parody Master. That’s what she’d do and that’s what we need to choreograph.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That is not what she would do,” Shep insisted. “And there’s nothing girly or feminine about helping people in need, and there’s nothing wrong with being girly or feminine anyway. And that includes you, Louis.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Thank you,” said the Parody Master.

    Annette jabbed a finger into the back-row casting. “Listen, Shepherdson, I’ve had it up to here with your preaching about Dancer. I don’t care if you met her a few times. I don’t care if she came and drank coffee in your miserable little shoebox of a coffee shop. I’m the star here, and I know what the public wants, and I know how to give it to them. You, on the other hand, are hanging by a thread. So why don’t you just shut up and go back to being nobody and leave the serious acting to the people with talent?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“If you had talent you wouldn’t need me preaching to you,” Sarah shot back, “And frankly the entire company wouldn’t have had to spend all bloody morning backing you up as you try to work out which is your left foot to get that Caphan extravaganza dance number running. Do you need me to show you how it’s done?”

    Annette’s face was red with fury. “That’s it! That’s just enough! Albert, I don’t care who she slept with to get on the cast, I want this no-name busybody out of this company. Out! I mean it! Just put her back on the street where she came from.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay everybody,” the director called. “I think maybe we’d better take ten.”

    Sarah fumed as she replayed the incident again and again. She could think of all the things she should have said now. She could see where she’d gone wrong.

    She wondered if she’d have a job to go back to. It was a long hitch from here to Parodiopolis.

    Dancer reached the Pont De Sully and crossed the Seine to the little spur of ÃŽle Saint-Louis. There was a park there, right at the Southern tip of the island. Sarah had never known what it was called, but on a warm summers day it was a wonderful place to sit and read and watch the boats go by. She’d laughed there with friends and dreamed there alone. And when her heart was broken (and nobody can really experience Paris without that) she’d cried there too, and the city had comforted her.

    She vaulted the fence and dropped onto the path and made her way to the big tree in the middle of the open clearing where she always sat. It was too damp to flop down beside the big bole so she sheltered under the canopy and brooded.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Annette Lewis is really looking for a costume malfunction,” Sarah Shepherdson said out loud.

    She heard a match strike behind her, smelled the tobacco and sour scotch and Old Spice and brimstone, and she knew who it was even before he said, “Tell me which night you plan to arrange it and I’ll buy a ticket.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Con,” Sarah sighed, turning round to look at the rumpled man in the rumpled trenchcoat. “This is not a good time.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Which is why I’m here,” Con Johnstantine replied. “I was on the hemisphere and I thought I’d pop in and check up on you.”

    Dancer shook her head. “I mean it, Con. This is really not a good time. And I meant what I said before, that night before the big battle.”

    Con nodded in acknowledgement. “I know that, Shep. It was bloody stupid of me. I should have known that if we let it get serious we’d kill it. I’d kill it. I should never have asked what I asked.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Con, I was flattered. Most people who propose to me just want a passport, or to borrow money. But you are perhaps the least healthy person on the planet for me to date, with the possible exception of the Bloodreaper, so the idea of us settling down and raising little Johnstantines…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, I know. I was overcome with uncharacteristic sentimentality. Normal bastardy will be resumed as soon as possible.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’re not here to try and talk me into bed again?” Sarah checked. “Because honestly, Con, that’s a joke that’s all played out now.” She crossed her arms across her body and turned away. “I’m wondering if all my jokes are all played out now,” she admitted.

    Con reached out a hand to her then pulled it back and stuck it firmly in his pocket. “I heard about the Science Hero,” he admitted. “Sorry.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Victor died doing what he lived his life for,” Dancer answered, blinking back tears. “You can’t do better than that. I don’t think I was cut out to be Lois Lane anyhow.”

    Con nodded. “So here we are. In Paris.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Here we are,” Sarah agreed.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But…?” Con prompted.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But I don’t think this is my Paris,” Sarah confessed. “My Paris wasn’t this cold.”

    Con knew she wasn’t talking about the December rain.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I went to see M. Berthillon,” Dancer told him. “M. Berthillon always made the most wonderful toys. But his shop was closed. M. Berthillon got old and he died. It was a stroke. And I tracked down Trevor. Trevor ran an indy record shop, mostly Rastafarian stuff, down under the bridge by the Cour des Arivées. Trevor went bankrupt. He loved his little shop. Now he lives with his mother and delivers newspapers.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Things change, Shep. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing and no-one.”

    Dancer shuddered. “I’m learning that these days, Con. This isn’t my Paris.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It wasn’t your Paris before,” Con argued. “You just made it yours. You made it fall in love with you.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Con, I’m not nineteen any more. And I’m not…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not the Probabiluty Dancer?” the rumpled man challenged her. “Bollocks.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t have my powers any more. I’ve tried.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that was what made you Dancer was it? The powers?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, yes. I got them delivered in a box, and then… I grew into them. Now they’re gone again.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And you’ve grown, so you can’t fit back into the life you had before,” Con pointed out.

    Dancer looked down at her hips in alarm.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know what?” Con said, “Maybe you have got smaller. I mean, you don’t know the name of that bloke over there, do you?”

    Sarah followed his gaze to where a middle-aged man was sitting on a bench, watching the pigeons scrabble over some crumbs on the pathway. “No, I don’t,” she answered. “Should I?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I dunno,” Johnstantine replied. “Being nice to people isn’t really my thing. But he’s been sat there all the time we’ve been talking, just staring at the pigeons.” He glanced at Sarah. “You didn’t know M. Berthillion once. You didn’t know Trevor.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“That was before,” Sarah protested. “Now I’m just hemmed in, worn down, left over. I’ve probably just blown the only chance I’ll ever get at my life’s ambition. I don’t think I can…” She turned to her old lover. “Con?”

    He was gone. He did that sometimes.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Damn.” Sarah glared round the park but there was no sign of a sinister crumpled Englishman.

    Instead Dancer’s eyes fell on the old man with the pigeons. He wasn’t following the birds movements. He was staring through them.

    There were tears on his cheeks.

    He looked up in surprise as the young woman sat next to him. “You’re doing it wrong,” she advised him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What?” He was puzzled at the sudden intrusion – and perhaps the somehat mangled French.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The pigeons. That’s not how to feed them. Usually bread is involved. And throwing it. In little bits. Otherwise you get concussed pigeons.”

    The old man blinked tired teary eyes. “Do I know you?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m Sarah Shepherdson. From Bogall, Ireland. Hi.”

    The old man took the offered hand by instinct. “Charles Soufflot,” he admitted. “You are a tourist?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m here with a show,” Sarah explained. “Well, not here here. Down the road here. I’m here because this is where I come in Paris when I want to think. Or sulk. Or stun pigeons.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I come here too,” the old man answered. “This is where I met my wife.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then this is a good place.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It was better when she was here to sit next to me. She fed the birds.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“And she’s not with you now to do pigeon duty.”

    Charles sighed. “Not these five years, Sarah. Now everything is grey and sad.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It hurts to lose someone,” Dancer agreed. “But you know what you should do, Charles? You should feed the pigeons.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I should?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure. Don’t you think your wife would want you to look after her birds?” Dancer gave him a tentative little smile. “Don’t you think she’d be close to you if you did that sometimes?”

    The old man considered it. “I have no bread,” he protested.

    Sarah tossed him her lunch packet. “I’ve just decided on a new diet,” she told him. “Give my love to the pigeons. And to your wife. It’s lovely to meet you, Charles.”

    The old man looked up as his strange visitor leaped from the seat. “Where are you going, then?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh, you know,” she told him with a little grin. “Fighting for truth and justice, that kind of thing.” She leaned in confidentially and explained to him, “I have a city to seduce.”

    Rehearsals were still running later when Sarah got back to the theatre. She didn’t use the stage door though. Instead she slipped into an alley and emerged by the ticket office in her Dancer costume.

    Showtime.

    The director was trying to get things back on track again after another halt, and Annette Lewis was hoofing her way down the big staircase upstage and complaining about the steps the routine demanded. “It’s not possible to do this on a staircase, Willard. I’m going to break an ankle.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“We can only hope,” Dancer said, stalking down the aisle from the rear of the auditorium. “Don’t mind me, folks. I was just passing and I thought I’d see how the show was coming on.”

    Louis looked at Dancer in confusion. “Sarah?” he asked tentatively. The visitor looked a little like the chorus girl but she had an energy, a charisma that almost crackled. She filled the theatre.

    Dancer looked around. “Sarah? Is my old friend here?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“D-dancer?” Willard the director and the rest of the production staff were on their feet now. “Welcome!”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well thanks,” beamed Shep with a twinkle in her eye. “I was in the neighbourhood doing some pigeon rescue work so I dropped by to take a look at the production.” She glanced up at Annette on the stage. “Is there some problem?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There is,” the star fawned. “They’re trying to sabotage the whole thing, to make me look bad – to make you look bad – doing impossible routines.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Really?” Dancer tutted. “Well, we can’t have that, can we Jeanette?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s Ann…”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Step aside. I’ll run through the routine myself and see just how bad it is.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Run through…”

    Dancer nudged the woman out of the way. “Take it from the top, please,” she said, turning her smile on the long-suffering choreographer. “Let’s just see how this should work.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You… want to try the routine?” Willard stuttered. “But you don’t know the routine.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Probability Dancer,” Sarah shrugged. “What are the chances I’ll get it right?”

    The whole cast and crew had gathered round, watching in fascination.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right,” Willard agreed. “Hit it.”

    Dancer amped up her stage presence by about a thousand percent, taking her audience and making it hers. And she danced.

    About half a minute after she’d stopped people closed their mouths and started clapping.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So which was the bit that wasn’t working?” she asked innocently.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can change probabilities,” Annette argued.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But I didn’t,” Sarah told her sweetly. “That was just talent, Anita.” She glanced over at the director. “Oh, I want you to work in that bit where I help the old man up after the Parody Master’s attack. I’d never just leave him behind and go fight the baddie. That’s what we have Mr Epitome for. I’m all about helping people.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But…” objected Annette.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You know Annette,” Dancer told the actress confidentially, “I don’t know if this is the right part for you. I really want to be portrayed on stage as somebody who can, y’know, dance. And someone who has heart. Soul. You’re just not that good an actor.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“How dare you!” Annette shrieked. “Do you know who I am?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ooh,” Sarah chuckled wickledly. “I was so hoping you would ask…”

    When Annete Lewis flounced out of the thatre screaming that her manager was going to sue the production out of existence she didn’t notice the smirking Cockney that held the door open for her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What now?” Willard worried after Dancer had departed too. “Annette couldn’t cut it. Nobody could perform Dancer like Dancer did. So what do we do?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well,” ventured Louis, “there’s always Sarah. We might at least give her a try-out?”

    At that moment Sarah Shepherdson ambled into the auditorium carrying a pair of trays with coffee for the crew. “Hey, guys!” she called. “Did I miss anything?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“A bit,” Willard answered exasperatedly. “Where were you?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I was renewing my friendship with an old lover,” Dancer told them. “Now I think I’m ready for a new romance.” She jumped up onto the stage still balancing the trays. “What have you got?”