A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  Another slight problem was that the apartment shared a squattez-vous hole-in-the-floor toilet on the landing with eight other romantic garrets, one of which was apparently inhabited by a blind man with dysentery.

  "Ze concierge, she don't clean yet today," the agent said.

  This might have been true, but even without the techno beats and the disgusting toilet, it could never have been my dream home for one simple reason - the flat was almost literally flat. I couldn't stand up in it. Well, not exactly true. I could stand in the doorway, but if I took a step forward I hit my forehead on the ceiling that sloped down to floor level about three yards away. It was a triangular wedge in which you'd have to walk at 45 degrees to avoid a fractured skull.

  "It is not expon-seeve," the agent said.

  "It is not an apartment," I said. "It is a storage cupboard for Toblerone."

  The second place was a cave. Strictly speaking, in French "cave" means "cellar". But this place really was a cave.

  From the street, we went through an immense wooden door into a cobbled courtyard - very picturesque. The walls around us were high and crumbling, and festooned with ivy - very quaint. In one corner of the courtyard there was an old wooden door, much less immense than the first one, into which the agent inserted a four-inch-long iron key - très exciting. The door creaked open and he reached inside for a light switch. I heard the click but didn't see the light.

  "Is to be re-noved," the agent said, peering into the darkness. "Soon it will av more electricity."

  "Yes, I think it needs a lot more."

  We stepped inside on to an earth floor in which you could have planted potatoes.

  "Soon will have beautiful floor," the agent said. "Window, every-sing."

  In the windowless gloom I could make out bare stone walls and a pile of packing cases that might well have been coffins. Had the last resident been a certain Monsieur Dracula?, I wondered.

  "You sign contract now and when you arrive it will have every-sing in it."

  "I sign contract now and my brain has nothing in it."

  The third apartment already had everything, the agent assured me. A floor, windows, electricity, a very big bathroom.

  He wasn't lying. It did have a very big bathroom. It was a very big bathroom. Equipped with a bed and a gas stove, two wooden chairs stacked in a corner, and a short, wide plank. Not forgetting an immense, seven foot long enamel bathtub that took up almost half of the room. I tried not to laugh or cry.

  "What's the plank for?" I asked.

  The agent put the plank across the bathtub, and placed the chairs either side of it in the bath, facing each other.

  "Dinner table," he said.

  I exhaled slowly and deeply.

  "You see this?" I said, pointing to the label on my shirt. "You see this?" I turned to show the agent the brand tag on my jeans. "You see ..." I broke off from pointing at my feet when I remembered I'd put on one of my pairs of North Korean trainers, which were decorated with a distinctly Asian-looking Harry Potter (or "Hairy Poofter" as the North Korean designer had renamed him).

  "I don't have to live in caves or bathrooms," I told the agent. "I can afford an apartment. You said you were going to show me one with a bedroom, a living room and a bathroom."

  The agent did a guilt-free Parisian shrug. "But you tell me you av no letters of guarantee. Wizout, you must live in a bathroom. You want zis or not?"

  Not. Merci all the same.

  First thing on the Monday, I went to see Jean-Marie, who'd said he might be able to help me out if I was looking for an apartment.

  He wasn't coming in this morning, Christine told me. He was seeing the "ministre de l'agriculture".

  "Why?" No doubt to get a spanking about importing le boeuf anglais.

  "He will get a medal for supporting French agriculture." Christine beamed a smile as if it was her own dad getting the honour.

  "A medal?" I had to work so hard to suppress my snort of disbelief that I could feel the irony dribbling out of my ears.

  Jean-Marie came in that afternoon and showed us his medal. He opened up a blue leather presentation box stamped with a crest and "La Republique Frangaise". Inside, on a bed of white silk, there was a round bronze medal, embossed with a collage of various types of livestock and food plants. A certificate in the lid of the box announced that Monsieur Jean-Marie Martin had been elected a "Chevalier de la culture bovine".

  While Christine cooed over the medal, I asked Jean-Marie what "Chevalier de la culture bovine" meant exactly.

  "Knight of beef culture."

  "Beef culture?" So he'd been knighted for services to cow cinema?

  "I see you are confused." He broke off from looking pleased with himself for a second. "This word culture has two senses. We say 'la culture du the', tea-growing. In French it can mean culture, like art and fiction, or agriculture."

  Of course. Anyone who examines France's claims for European Union subsidies can see all too clearly the confusion in French minds between fiction and agriculture.

  "OK, I see. You've been made a sir for services to the French beef industry."

  "Yes, I suppose I am now Sir Jean-Marie." He laughed and went back to looking pleased with himself.

  The man was amazing. No blushes here, no hint of hypocrisy. I had to admit it was a class act.

  When Christine had returned to her own office, I told Jean-Marie about my housing problem. He had no time to discuss it now, he said, but he wanted me to come over to his apartment for dinner the following Saturday.

  "My wife said I am neglecting you. You are here more than a month and I didn't invite you to dinner? She is right. I am a bad host. I am sorry."

  He put his hand on my shoulder and begged me to allow him to repair the damage.

  I suppose it was logical, really. In France, treason is a far less heinous crime than a breach of dinner etiquette.

  It was lucky for me that Jean-Marie had put me in a hotel so close to his apartment, because that Saturday, the Paris transport workers went on strike.

  And what was this strike about? Job cuts? Safety standards? No.

  The unions were furious that the government had been rumoured to be thinking about considering the possibility of maybe looking into the purely theoretical concept that it might one day (not now but in, say, 80 years' time) be less able to pay for transport workers to retire at 50.

  Wow, I told myself, let's go to the transport company HQ this very instant to get a job application form.

  Dammit, though, I couldn't get there - there was a transport strike.

  Anyway, on that Saturday night I wasn't too inconvenienced by the transport strike. It was a 15-minute stroll to Sir John's place. The only obstacle was Big Army Avenue.

  Both the metro line and the parallel suburban line were closed, so the main road into Paris from the west was totally jammed.

  Eight lanes of gridlocked cars - four in either direction. They were hooting plaintively, like whales in a pod calling out to reassure the others that they're not alone in this vast ocean of tarmac.

  But as soon as I'd crossed the road and coughed the pollution out of my lungs, I was in a different world. Behind the row of café's, shops and offices that ran along the highway there were silent, leafy streets that were almost totally free of traffic. In place of the uniform Parisian lines of six-floor apartment buildings, these streets were interspersed with large town houses and private gardens.

  After about 300 yards I came to a wide avenue, overlooked by a line of chic apartment buildings. Not all of them in great taste - there were some tacky 70s constructions with long, coloured balcony rails. But there were also the type of supersmart 19th-century blocks that you could imagine King Edward VII buying as a pied-a-terre for his racy racing weekends at the nearby Longchamps course.

  I'd have to sell a few zillion cups of tea to be able to live here.

  But burgers were obviously profitable enough, thank you. This was chez Jean-Marie.

  His building was al
most the exact opposite of the ones I had visited with the estate agent. There was no peeling plaster and rotting wood. It was probably cleaner and in better repair than the day it was finished. The cream stone looked as if the concierge scaled the walls every morning with a bucket of water strapped to her apron.

  It overlooked the Bois de Boulogne, the immense wooded park where toffs go riding and Brazilians earn the cash for their sex-change operations. About as exclusive a Paris address as you can get.

  There was a six-digit code to get into the entrance hall, which had a carpeted marble floor and spotless white walls with ornate plaster mouldings running around the ceiling cornice. Everything smelt of money and wax polish. At the end of the entrance hall there was a thick glass door with an entry-phone. Only ten names - the apartments had to be enormous. Unless some of the residents were so exclusive that they didn't even want their names on the bell-push.

  I rang and announced my arrival to the video camera above the glass door.

  "Montez, c'est au cinquieme," said a smooth female voice. Madame, presumably.

  The lift's outer door was a heavy iron gate, the inner doors were varnished walnut, with engraved glass. The lift rose slowly, creakingly, up into the heart of the building. It felt like riding through an antique shop in a Louis XV wardrobe.

  Jean-Marie was waiting to open the lift door, a huge welcoming grin on his face.

  "Come in, come in," he gushed. "Ah, flowers! My wife will be instantly in love with you." He pointed to the tiny bouquet that I had bought for a small fortune at the florist's near my hotel. At that price I hoped they were an endangered species.

  Jean-Marie showed me into a lounge the size of a football pitch. It was decorated with a mixture of antique exuberance and modern restraint. Gold-lacquered, embroidered armchairs alongside a black leather sofa. Black and grey abstract print next to a medieval-looking oil of a cow.

  Set in the middle of this was a woman who epitomized the posh de la posh. Blonde, shoulder-length hair, immense pearls, Dior-style cardigan over an impeccably simple linen dress and a figure that had been bolstered against aging by the best surgeon in Europe. She walked to meet me, holding her hand out at what was almost certainly the Academie de France's prescribed wrist angle.

  She shook (or rather pressed) hands, said she was "enchantée", and accepted my micro-bouquet with almost no hint that she thought it a soupçon less than spectacular.

  She begged me to sit down on the sofa while she went to get a vase, and ordered Jean-Marie to offer their guest a drink immediately.

  Behind the socially charming exterior, you sensed the steeliness of a lady who would protect her public reputation with a Louis Vuitton baseball bat.

  She returned with an art-deco porcelain creation that would sell for the price of a car in the Portobello Road, and what I assumed were her two children.

  The male was a student, that much was clear. Faded jeans, baggy but expensively logoed t-shirt, black hair trying to get up the courage to grow into dreadlocks, bare feet.

  He shook my hand limply and Jean-Marie introduced him as Benoît.

  The girl he introduced as Élodie was altogether more interesting. Blonde like her mum, but with none of the baseball bat. From the look of her clothes, she shared her mum's credit card but not her classic tastes, Élodie was all skin-tight designer labels and visible lingerie - intricately lacy black bra straps and, I later saw, proudly displayed thong waistband. The kind of woman my friend Chris had warned me about. Yum. She crushed my hand almost numb.

  "Élodie is studying at Ashersay," Jean-Marie said. Sounded like some obscure English university, and when I didn't look sufficiently impressed, it was explained to me that this was "HEC", France's most expensive business school. I raised the necessary eyebrow in Élodie's direction and was rewarded with a very pleasant smile.

  "And Benoît is studying medicine." Jean-Marie made it sound like a punishment.

  "Non, Papa." Benoît grinned and informed his dad that he'd just changed over to biology.

  "Biology!"

  This was something of a surprise to Jean-Marie, so, as we all sipped champagne and nibbled on petits fours, they had a family row about when the son (who was 24, apparently) would get round to deciding what to do with his life, with Jean-Marie occasionally breaking off into English and asking me things like "what were you doing when you were 24?" before returning to harangue his offspring again.

  The daughter seemed to think this was all very humorous, and kept giving me "don't worry, it's like this all the time" smiles. She had a very cute way of eating petits fours, I noticed. Dainty but greedy.

  I think I used all the right cutlery at dinner. Well, I didn't need any for the oysters. I just followed the others' example and squeezed some lemon juice into the open shells (the oysters were still alive, and flinched) before tipping the contents down my throat.

  It was not unpleasant. A bit like swallowing lemony, salty bronchial mucus.

  I had a serrated knife for the almost-raw beef - bought, the mum assured me, from her "divine" local butcher. I just hoped Jean-Marie wasn't his supplier.

  When I'd finished this and wiped the blood off my lips, I was given vegetables. A gratin dauphinois - that is, potatoes cooked in a nutmeggy milk sauce under a cheese crust - and some green beans that were almost drowning in butter.

  I avoided committing the social gaffe of cutting the points off the dribbling wedges of Camembert and Brie with my small rounded knife, and went for a beautifully pungent cheese called Cantal. It tasted like a soft Cheddar, with just a hint of athlete's foot.

  Finally, I used an expensive silver fork and spoon on my gateau mi-cuit au chocolat - a chocolate sponge pudding that, like the beef, was uncooked in the middle. It was like oral sex with extra cocoa butter.

  In between groans of pleasure, I fielded the usual questions about England.

  "Does your mother really make your Christmas pudding six months in advance?" From Madame.

  "Do all English pubs have stripteasers?" From Benoit.

  "Is it very easy for a young man to get a job in London if he is too lazy to finish a university diploma?" From the provocative Jean-Marie.

  "Are Englishmen scared of women?" From the even more provocative Élodie.

  We sat on the sofa and talked about my accommodation problems.

  Élodie giggled at my adventures with the estate agent and immediately leapt in with a solution.

  "He can sleep with me!"

  I almost tipped my coffee over my groin. Madame looked tempted to empty her cup down there, too.

  Élodie was just being provocative, of course. "I have a room in my apartment. Paul can have that." She spoke excellent English.

  "But your apartment isn't at all expensive, you don't need anyone to help you pay for it," Madame objected in French. I was OK as a dinner guest, it seemed, but she didn't trust me to be satisfied with sharing just a fridge with her daughter.

  "Yes, Maman, it costs almost nothing, so it will cost Paul only half of nothing."

  "Is it your apartment?" I asked Jean-Marie, giving him the chance to veto the idea.

  "No, it is Paris's apartment," Élodie interrupted. "I am a poor, underprivileged student, so I live in a poor, underprivileged apartment. It is like - what do they call them in the Bronx? You know, the projects."

  Ah, the princess slumming it. I could picture the place - no roof, a smelly hole for a toilet, a mud floor. No thanks, I'd been there, done that.

  "Well, I'm very grateful, Élodie, but.. ."

  "I will take you there. When do you want to come? What's your phone number?" Élodie's business school seemed to give a lot of weight to assertiveness classes.

  I refused her offer of a lift home. Call me old-fashioned but I don't bed the boss's daughter on the first date. Not in the middle of a traffic jam, anyway. But when she called me next morning, I agreed to come and visit her apartment as soon as the metro strike was over.

  Meanwhile, it was a waste of time trying to g
et anywhere around the city centre outside walking distance, unless you had the patience of a hunger striker or the aggression of an American football player who's just been called a pussy.

  Driving - forget it. Jean-Marie offered to run me to the office, but he was leaving at six in the morning to beat the jams.

  Biking and Rollerblading - not bad, as long as you stuck to the pavements and were willing to kill pedestrians.

  Bus and metro - for gladiators only. This was the subtly sadistic thing about the strike. It wasn't a total lockdown. The members of some unions kept working, so you had a skeleton service on some routes, which attracted huge masses of desperate commuters and were very soon in real danger of being littered with skeletons.

  Parisian commuters take their fast, efficient transport service for granted. So if the bus and metro go slower than usual, they get irritated. And if said bus or metro has to wait at every stop for ten minutes while people wanting to get off, get on or stay on gouge each other's eyes out with briefcases, the atmosphere is a lot less sedate than usual.

  So I made sure my Walkman had a fresh supply of batteries, picked a quiet route away from the pollution-spitting jams, and went for a long morning walk to work. As I strode briskly through the Bois de Boulogne, I even exchanged nods and hellos with my fellow foot-sloggers, and they responded instead of staring at the middle distance. It was getting to be fun.

  At which time, of course, the strike ended. The last thing the transport workers wanted was for people to start getting by without them.

  So one morning we all turned back into mute commuters.

  This was my cue to go and check out Élodie's place.

  Her building was as much like social housing as Chanel number 5 is like the emanations from a marathon runner's socks.

  For a start, it was slap bang in the middle of the Marais, which was not the bog that my dictionary had told me about, but the hyper-trendy medieval centre of the city, awash with cafes, clothes shops, and stores selling decor accessories that only gay men understand what to do with. There was also one estate agent per square metre, all with slavering clients window-shopping. And here I was, waltzing in effortlessly.