I printed them all out for future use.
No sooner was Jean-Marie back in town than this English beef business exploded in his face, almost literally. I turned up to work one morning and noticed something vaguely different about the building. Ah yes, that was it, there wasn't usually half a ton of cowdung blocking the main door. And I couldn't remember seeing tractors in this chic part of Paris before, with their angry-looking blue-overalled drivers yelling something about boeuf anglais.
Unfortunately for the company, half of Paris's radio and TV stations had their offices within a kilometre, so the street was also crawling with cameramen and microphone-touting journalists. They were interviewing farmers and filming a couple of beautiful, golden-coloured French cows that had also come along, presumably to protest that English animals were robbing them of their chance to get minced up by Jean-Marie.
Not knowing what to do, I hovered on the pavement opposite with a crowd of passers-by and colleagues. It was still way before nine, so none of my team were there.
This being Paris, the demonstration had been joined by drivers who were hooting at the pile of dung to get out of the way. The dung did not, of course, react and the normally calm street was turned into a cathedral of hooting, chanting and mooing.
Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and dragged into a doorway.
"It's me," Jean-Marie hissed. He was looking a lot less calm than usual, almost ruffled. His remaining hair was slightly out of place, his sea-blue silk tie had drooped a millimetre away from his pink shirt collar. "Come, we must give interviews." Before I could ask what I was supposed to say, he put on a fixed smile and pulled me towards the nearest TV camera.
A peeling blue sticker told us that it belonged to a cable news channel. A young girl in a thick black overcoat was standing by a tractor wheel and talking to camera.
Jean-Marie waited until she'd finished and then, still hanging on to my elbow, went and introduced himself. The girl, sensing an exclusive, pulled him in front of the camera, and told her cameraman to start filming.
The cameraman, whose broad shoulders and battered sheepskin jacket looked as if they'd been carrying filming equipment for quite a few years, told her to change the shot. They had a quick squabble, during which he threatened to leave if she didn't do what he told her, and then Jean-Marie and the girl, with me being tugged along as a sort of afterthought, were set up so that the shot would include the company building and the pile of cow poop.
The girl started to ask questions. As she had almost no idea what was going on, her questions were mainly along the lines of "tell me what's going on", so Jean-Marie was able to do his smoothie act and give an unchallenged view of things.
Not surprisingly, this was a pack of lies. Boeuf anglais? Ho ho, whatever gave them that idea? He'd just got a medal from the Ministry of Agriculture, did the farmers think that the Ministry would give a medal to someone who'd been buying boeuf anglais? How "ridicule"!
He then launched into an impassioned bout of self-defence, which was just as two-faced as what had gone before, but now gave him the chance to look hurt and self-righteous, too. This was where I came in.
I was introduced as the friendly face of England, come to open tea rooms that would provide jobs for hundreds of French people. Hundreds, I thought, was I going to employ one washer-up for every cup?
The reporter pointed the microphone at me for comment.
"Oui," I commented sagely.
Jean-Marie confessed that he had just been in London negotiating a deal with an English food company, but it was for tea, not beef. Wasn't that so, Paul?
"Oui," I confirmed.
It was all a sad misunderstanding, Jean-Marie said. He was proud to buy French beef, and only French beef, but he didn't see anything wrong with importing English tea. What's more, he invited all the farmers here to come and have a free cup of English tea as soon as his tea rooms, called My Tea Is Rich, by the way, opened.
I could just imagine the farmers sitting there in their wellies wondering whether to order Earl Grey or Orange Pekoe.
"My Tea Is Rich? That's very funny," said the girl. Even the cameraman cracked a smile.
"Yes, we think it's a very good name, don't we, Paul?"
"Oui."
What difference did one more lie make?
We went and did more or less the same interview to as many cameras and radio mics as Jean-Marie could hijack, then he led me away from the demo to take refuge in a café on the Champs-Elysées till the trouble blew over.
"Why don't the police come and break it up?" I I asked. "I mean, letting your dog foul the streets is illegal, so surely cows are way outside the law?"
"The police? Just when we need them to defend French cuisine, they are on strike," Jean-Marie huffed.
Personally, I'm not sure the police would have made much difference. The Paris police are the best in the world at one thing - sitting in buses.
You see them all over the city practising their unique skill. You'll walk into a street and find it jammed solid with traffic because the police have decided to double-park two of their buses there. Inside, whole brigades of riot police will be sitting, apparently having got prior warning of a riot about to break out in that very street. They might spend a morning there, getting out occasionally to stretch their legs, nip off to the boulangerie or compare body armour, and then when the riot doesn't materialize (of course not, too many police about), they go and sit in another street.
Apart from this, the only time I saw the police was when they wandered about in gangs of four or five chatting to each other, or when they mountain-hiked around the gay Marais, apparently just to show off their thighs and their cycling shorts.
But then I never saw any crime, either, so they had to be doing something right.
In fact it turned out that the police were on strike because of events outside Paris, where things weren't so quiet. The city is almost surrounded by poor suburbs - basically it is hemmed in by a ring of young and furious unemployed kids. And out there, where Parisians never venture, there were no-go zones, firebomb attacks on police stations, kids getting shot for driving through roadblocks, and the policemen's union was suggesting that the politicians might be more in a hurry to improve the social situation if they were the ones taking the brunt of the fury. President Chirac was suing for peace in Iraq, but he was making his cops fight a guerrilla war. Well, now the police were refusing to fight.
If Jean-Marie was annoyed about the police strike, it was only natural that his daughter felt the complete opposite.
One evening I'd been due to stay over at Alexa's, and we'd gone out for dinner, then to a bar. Suddenly Alexa got into a mood about how much beer I was drinking.
"In England, you can't have a good night out if you don't get pissed. You just want to get pissed then take a woman home and screw her before you fall asleep. This is so English!"
I thought it was only polite to drink beer when sitting in a bar - the owner might get annoyed if you sat there and chewed your nails for two hours. And Alexa herself had chosen this Irish pub, one of about five million Irish pubs in Paris, which seem to employ the entire under-25 population of Ireland as their bar staff.
"That's not fair, Alexa. I'm not drunk. I thought we were having a pleasant night out."
"But you are drinking that beer as if it was water. I You don't even taste it."
I was on my second pint of Guinness, which was positively teetotal compared to how much most of my compatriots would have downed by that time of night. And I had the distinct impression that I was enjoying the taste.
"You wouldn't say that if I'd had two glasses of wine."
"It is not the same thing."
"Isn't it? Beer is just as noble a drink as wine, you know. France's brewing tradition involves grapes, ours involves hops. Both have tastes. It's like saying you're a philistine because you eat goat's cheese instead of cow's cheese."
"There is farmer's cheese and there is industrial cheese."
&
nbsp; "Yeah, well when it comes to drinks, we know all about quality. And not just about beer, either, in one of my reports it said that Britain is the second-highest consumer of champagne in the world after France. And most of the best French wines are exported to the UK. The French are just miffed because we put wines from South Africa, Australia and California on the same level as French wines. We're less snobbish, that's all. A good beer is as good as a good wine, from anywhere in the world."
"Yes, and you drink so much of it that you fall over. That's why English men stand up in pubs. When they fall over they know it is time to go home."
"While the French just get politely tipsy then drive off and kill someone. You have the highest drink-drive fatalities in Europe."
I drained off my Guinness triumphantly, and my stomach, maybe still suffering from an overdose of Christinas pudding, blew most of the gas back out of my nose.
Bad timing.
"If you think I am letting you in my bed tonight, you have another - what do you say?"
"Another think coming," said a helpful young Irish lad in a tight Guinness t-shirt who was clearing empties away.
"Thank you," Alexa said, smiling a tad too warmly at the muscular Irishman.
"Yeah, thanks a bunch," I told him.
When I got home, the apartment was empty, Élodie's door was open.
I stood on the threshold and looked into her bed-room. It was its usual self - a laptop open on an old formica-covered desk, a black bra draped across the stereo, half a million CDs stacked or dumped on the bare floorboards, and an empty champagne bottle and two glasses standing like an altar at the foot of her enormous bed.
The floorboards creaked loudly as I headed for the "dressing", but there was no one to wake up.
I bent down to look through the keyhole, and it felt as if I was getting a facial. The lock and handle were warm. I couldn't smell burning, but the whole door was as warm to the touch as a radiator. Perhaps, unlike Marilyn Monroe, Élodie liked to keep her undies at blood temperature? I couldn't see I anything - the keyhole was blocked up on the other side.
I'd just got down on to my stomach to try and look under the door when I heard her voice out on the landing. A key scrabbled into the front-door lock.
No time to get out of her room - I'd bump straight into her.
And no point trying to crawl under the bed - it was barely two inches off the floor, so I'd have needed to iron myself flat first.
Should I bury myself in CDs and hope she didn't notice the strangely man-shaped heap?
No, only one thing for it. I undid my trousers and lay down on the bed.
"Paul." She strode in, a long black leather coat covering her from chin to knee. She looked confused more than anything. She gestured over her shoulder. "I think you know Marc."
Marc? My Marc from work? I grabbed at my fly buttons and tried to hide my boxers before total embarrassment walked into the room.
But no, the Marc who came in behind Élodie was short and punk-haired, dressed in a camouflage combat jacket and jeans twelve sizes too baggy for him. I'd never seen him before. His sunglasses were so black that I don't think he even saw me.
"Marc le Dark? He's a famous DJ," Élodie explained apologetically. "Why are you in my bed?"
"Ah, yes. I was hoping . . . but as you've already got .. . I'll go." I stood up, sportingly offering my place to the new pretender.
"Have you and Alexa, you know?" She made a tearing-paper motion with her hands.
"No, it's just that I was here alone, and feeling, you know, but no, you're right, I'll..."
Élodie was staring suspiciously at me, her gaze wandering from my half-buttoned jeans to her dressing-room door. I hoped she wasn't going to go and brush the keyhole for eyeprints because I'd be caught red-eyebrowed.
"No, Paul, you can stay and help us."
"Help you?" I backed away from the bed.
"Not with sex. I haven't brought Marc home to fuck him. Come."
She opened her coat, took a key from the pocket of her jeans and marched towards the dressing-room door.
The warm wood swung open to reveal its secret and I almost fell back on the bed.
"Holy shit."
She laughed at my open-mouthed shock. Her friend Marc regained his vision and walked over, whistling in admiration at the small tropical garden growing alongside Élodie's clothes rack.
One wall of the closet was given over to clothes. The rest, about six feet by three, was filled from floor to ceiling with arc lamps and marijuana plants.
"Yes, you are right, Paul. Perfectly holy shit."
So this was what Jean-Marie had been so angry about. Not surprising. Even in France, where smoking is more or less ignored by the police, there was enough here to send her to prison.
"Is this your marketing project for business school?" I asked.
"No, I don't sell it. It is for my friends." She stopped looking amused and became business-like. "Marc has his Jeep in the street and you are going to help him carry all the plants to the car."
"What? No way."
"If you don't, I'll tell Alexa you were in my bed, and my father that you fucked me."
How could an English gentleman refuse a mademoiselle in distress?
There were 20 pots in all, each weighing several metric tonnes. We couldn't use the lift in case it broke down and left us stranded with our booty till one of the other residents - a judge, maybe - let us out next morning. So that meant ten trips down four flights of stairs for Marc and me, with Élodie following on to pick up any stray leaves that we knocked off against the walls or the stair rail.
Down in the street, Marc's triple-parked Jeep gradually filled up with illegal plants. It had tinted windows, of course, but you could see the characteristic leaves pretty clearly in silhouette.
"Is no problem," he reassured me. "No cops."
Of course, Élodie was taking advantage of the strike to get her dad off her back.
"You know the funny thing?" she asked me as I was sweating my way down the stairs for the last time.
'No." I didn't think multiple hernias were funny at all.
"In French we call grass 'l’herbe' or 'le thé'. Tea. Very appropriate, don't you think? You are going to open tea rooms for my father. And now you are carrying tea for his daughter."
She laughed happily. I didn't. Now both father and daughter were using me as cover for their criminal doings.
A couple of days later, I got a call from Jake the swamp poet. I must have given him my phone number at an unguarded moment.
"Hi, Paul, I'm, like, really sorry, for, you know ..."
"Telling me to fuck off?"
"Yeah, well, I confess, but you can't, like, mock a guy's poetry, without..."
"Getting told to fuck off?"
"Like I said, I'm really desolated."
"Sorry, you mean."
"Hell, yeah. Sorry."
"Did you get an Albanian?"
"Yeah."
"Without paying?"
"Naturally. Well, almost. She was one of those beggars in the metro. You know, with all the skirts? Well, she said she was Albanian but I think maybe she was Romanian."
"Screwed up your poem then?"
"Well, yeah. I'm not sure what to write."
"There was a young girl from Romania, who said that she came from Albania?"
"Listen, OK, I'm not going to talk about poetry with you any more, man. You don't peej."
"Peej?"
"Yeah, you know, understand. No, I only called because I wanted to excuse myself by proposing you some help."
"Help?"
"Yeah. Tell me - what do you say to the waiter when you order a coffee with milk?"
"Un café au lait, s'il vous plaît."
"You need help, man. Meet me at the usual café tomorrow, eleven o'clock."
Against my better judgement, I went. When I got there at 11.15 (I was getting more into French-style punctuality by now), he was already sitting at a table by the window, scribbli
ng in a notebook. Same shiny suit, same shiny hair, but he'd exchanged his university sweatshirt for a more seasonal, though even less attractive, black roll-necked pullover that he'd presumably stolen off a giant squid to judge by the way it had lost all semblance of shape.
A self-rolled cigarette was smouldering in an ashtray on his table, adding a few final milligrams of smoke to the blue haze in the busy café before it went out.
"Don't say a word," he said after shaking my hand. "Just watch and listen."
He raised his chin a few degrees, turned his head until he made eye contact with the waiter, and called out, "Un crème, s'il vous plaît."
"Un crème, un!" the waiter barked towards the bar.
Jake turned back to me, a smug look on his unshaven face.
"Crème - doesn't that mean cream?" I asked.
"Yeah, but it's the name the waiters use for a 'café au lait'. You've got to use their language. Hasn't anyone told you this yet?"
"No."
"Merde. You are so going to get ripped off. An espresso is 'un express', OK? An espresso with a bit of milk in it is 'une noisette'. A weak black coffee is 'un allonge'. And so on. You use their words and they know you're not a tourist." He took an authoritative sip of his "crème".
I got Jake to repeat the various coffee names and wrote them down on a page he'd torn out of his notebook.
"It's the same thing for beer," Jake said. "Haven't you seen these tourists sat outside cafes with, like, a two-litre flagon of beer?"
"Yeah," I confessed sheepishly. A few weeks earlier, I'd felt like a quick drink on the Champs-Elysées and ended up spending an hour emptying a glass the size of a skyscraper.
"It's because they've asked for 'une bière'. You've got to order 'un demi'. That means a normal, 25-centilitre glass. Kind of like a half-pint. You say that and they know you're not a tourist."
A Year in the Merde Page 11
