A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  Of course, I thought, got to keep paying him for Élodie's apartment.

  The fact that teaching English wasn't in my job description didn't even occur to me. The only objection that sprang into my mind was a picture of me having to be nice to Marianne as she maimed irregular verbs at me. Or, worse, having to make conversation with her.

  "No," I said. "No."

  "Take some time. Think," Jean-Marie said. But the more I thought about it, the more Marianne's grey teeth came into focus.

  I walked the scenic route home from work. Scenic routes in Paris are perfectly suited to existential pondering.

  From the Champs-Elysées to the Marais, you can walk a route that is almost entirely car-free and takes you past some of the city's most beautiful vistas. You can stroll along musing romantically about whether you're just about to meet the love of your life or which bridge you're gouing to throw yourself off.

  I went down to the river at Alma bridge, where the colonial soldier was still keeping his baggy pants dry, then along the banks of the Seine towards Invalides bridge. Just down from street level, along the old cobbled river bank, there are still rusting iron rings from the days when working boats would be tied up along the whole waterway. Now, once I'd passed the bateaux mouches, most of the boats moored by the river were converted barges whose only cargo was garden furniture and large potted plants.

  The sun was at my back, and glinting down into my eyes off the gold leaf on Alexandre III bridge. I could never work out why the gold never got stolen. It was real gold leaf, apparently, and looked as if it'd been trowelled on to Neptune's crown in the middle of the bridge, a mere scalpel-thrust away from theft. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to go and buy a scalpel. When the pharmacies reopened, of course.

  As you walked towards the softly rushing current of the river, you could easily imagine that a boat would pull up and the most beautiful, intelligent, apolitical and sexually well-adjusted girl in the world would invite you for an evening cruise.

  As it was, I saw only a homeless man setting up his cardboard shelter in the damp shadows under a bridge.

  At Concorde, I crossed into the Tuileries and walked through the tree-lined gardens towards the glass pyramid in the middle of the Louvre.

  Here, I stopped for a drink. The cafe overlooking the pyramid (or pyramids) had opened its terrace, and I treated myself to a highly alcoholic cocktail. The tourists at the other tables had their noses in their guidebooks. There is a class of tourists who never seem to see the things they're visiting, I thought. They prefer to look at directions to the next place they're not going to look at. A hot-air balloon piloted by naked can-can dancers could have flown past and no one would have seen it except me.

  But this, I realized, was the rejected male talking. Soon I was going to turn into one of those people who sit in Parisian cafes and type their rantings into a laptop computer, hoping all the while that someone will come up and ask "what are you writing?", when in fact everyone steers clear because they're scared you'll want to explain what you're writing.

  I walked past the pyramid between the "arms" of the Louvre, through the empty, windy Cour Carrée, and out on to the street. After a little jiggle past the Samaritaine department store and across the river, I was right down on the river bank again, walking towards the islands where Asterix's cousins built the first city of Paris. There wasn't a modern building m sight to drag you out of the Middle Ages.

  I found a bench and sat until it got dark, looking upriver towards Notre Dame.

  * * *

  What the hell was I going to do during the war? It sounded a mite melodramatic, but it was a real question. My job had effectively disappeared. Even if the war ended quickly, there was no realistic way Jean-Marie was going to get the tea room project back on track. It would be too far behind schedule. I had nothing to keep me in Paris. No woman, a few friends who were more occasional drinking pals than soulmates, and an apartment for which I was paying the man I least wanted to pay in the whole of humanity right now. I was, frankly, in the merde.

  It was probably that hour sitting by the river that caused my cold. Well, when I say cold, it was more a cross between malaria and tuberculosis. With some of the most painful symptoms of pneumonia thrown in. Overnight I developed a raging temperature and lungs that seemed to have turned into phlegm factories.

  If I'd been in the UK I would have done my patriotic duty and avoided wasting the doctor's time with my trivial sufferings. (What hard-working GP wants to hear about a mild case of malarial TB?) I'd have gone to the chemist's and bought myself something hot and lemony. But the pharmacists were still on strike, of course, so I had to go to a doctor.

  In Paris this does not involve looking for your local health centre. Doctors operate out of normal apartments, and advertise their services on little brass nameplates outside the building, giving their name, speciality and phone number. As soon as you notice these, you realize they're everywhere. Within coughing distance of my apartment I saw name-plates for pediatricians, osteopaths, dermatologists, dentists, gynaecologists, psychiatrists, orthodontists, optometrists, and even radiologists. And those were just the names I understood. Strange to think that in a normal apartment building you could live next to someone who was doing X-rays or staring between women's legs all day long. You'd have to share your lift and staircase with sick or mad people. The communal rubbish bins down in the hall could be full of old teeth and amputated warts. It didn't seem healthy.

  Most of the plaques said that you had to fix up a "rendez-vous", but I finally found a "medecin généraliste" who gave his "consultation" hours, and those hours were now. It was just after ten in the morning, and he went on till twelve, then started again at two.

  He was called Jean-Philippe Diofoirus, and he operated out of a century-old building on the rue de Rivoli.

  I pushed open the heavy, varnished street door, crossed the scruffy entrance hall and climbed the carpeted stairs to the third floor, coughing and wheezing all the way. There was a lift but it looked so small and rickety that I was scared of getting stuck in there and running out of paper tissues before the repair man set me free.

  There was another brass plaque on the apartment door, and a sign telling me to ring and enter. I did so, and found myself in the empty entrance hall of a white-walled apartment. There was no sign of a receptionist. A wooden-floored corridor led off to my left, and a white door in front of me announced itself as the "salle d'attente". I took a step towards the waiting room and the floor creaked loudly. This was the only noise I could hear other than the hum of the traffic outside. I half expected to find a waiting room full of skeletons, patients who'd turned up and sat in the empty apartment until they died.

  But no, when I opened the door to the waiting room, four or five living people turned to examine me for contagious symptoms. They were all sitting in armchairs arranged around the walls to face the dark-grey marble fireplace with its gold-framed mantelpiece mirror. I was in a fairly normal-looking Parisian sitting room. I could have been arriving at a particularly dull party.

  One or two of the people murmured "bonjour" as I walked in, so I did the same. There were two old ladies sitting silently by the wall nearest the fireplace, a teenage girl changing the CD in her Walkman, and a mother with an overdressed baby in its buggy. The baby was bright red in the face, looking as if it was about to explode. Whether this was because it was constipated, feverish or full of explosives I didn't want to know.

  The waiting, I found, was just as boring as in a British doctor's waiting room, except that the magazines were better. Here in France you got fairly recent copies of Elle, with their highly readable photo-reports on maintaining the perfect buttock shape and how to firm up your breasts through self-massage. The girls shaping their buttocks and massaging their breasts really didn't need to worry, but I wasn't going to tell them to stop.

  Once I'd settled in, I noticed that I could hear the faint murmur of the doctor's voice through the wall behind me. He was talking a hell
of a lot. Trying to persuade his patient to get out and let the next patient in, I hoped.

  For the first half-hour I was content to sit and suffer in silence, apart from the occasional sneeze and groan of agony.

  But by this time only the teenage girl had gone in, and I could hear her pouring out all her troubles to the doctor.

  At this rate I was going to be stranded here though the doctor's lunch hour. Or hours. And before that I was going to be splattered in bits of exploding baby. Just take the poor thing out of its Antarctic sleeping bag, I kept willing its mother, but she was as engrossed by Elle as I had been. Probably reading the cookery pages, I decided - baby marinated in its own juice.

  I wondered if the French non-queuing system worked here as it does in most other areas of life. Perhaps, I thought, when the girl comes out, I should barge authoritatively into the surgery as if it was my birthright, like people do when they get on a bus in front of you.

  But when the doctor emerged, he shook hands with the teenage girl and popped his head into the waiting room to call "Madame Bouvier".

  So there was a queue, I concluded, and he knew some people's names. Not because they'd made an appointment, I hoped.

  Madame Bouvier was the mother, and had apparently come just to check whether the baby was cooked, because she was in and out in ten minutes. The old dears went in together, still silent, as if trying to remember what was wrong with them.

  I put down my magazine and concentrated on the doctor's voice, listening for farewell sounds. By now I was at the head of a queue of three people, and one of them, a late middle-aged man with a flat cap, darting eyes, and good-quality but slightly frayed clothes, looked like an arch queue-jumper. He was sitting forward on his seat, hands on his knees, ready to spring into action. Or maybe just suffering from acute piles. When he'd come into the waiting room he'd called out "messieurs dames" (a way of saying hello to a room full of people) as if he was announcing his presence rather than wishing us good day. And he didn't even glance at the magazines. The sort, I suspected, who would have no scruples about pushing in front of a dying Englishman on the grounds that his piles are more important than my near-fatal respiratory disease.

  The doctor walked the old ladies to the door, and turned towards the waiting room. Monsieur Queue-Jumpeur called out "bonjour, docteur" and the doctor nodded hello. This was it, I thought, I was being consigned to the lunch hour. I took a deep breath and lunged upwards out of my chair, startling the doctor into saying a curious "monsieur?"

  This was another time when I should have prepared a short speech. How, I wondered, did I say "you don't know me but I need you to save my life"?

  I finally settled on "bonjour" and he smiled and ushered me towards his office, clearly not too put out by seeing strange people in his waiting room.

  "I am cold," I explained in French. "No," I corrected myself. In fact I had done my best to memorize some key vocabulary like cough (tousser), lungs on fire (poumons en feu), and atchoo (atchoum).

  The doctor turned to a brand-new flat-screen Macintosh and interrupted me to ask for my name, address, date of birth, social security number, etc.

  I'd forgotten: in France, admin comes before health.

  I'd learned from experience to carry all my ID with me at all times, so it only took ten minutes or so to start up a file on me, by which time I'd all but finished my supply of paper tissues. As he typed, I decided that he didn't look like a doctor at all. He was much less terrifying than an English doctor. With his jeans, tweed jacket, healthy outdoor look and unkempt hair, he seemed approachable rather than weighed down beneath the collapsing structure of the British health system. He was a youth hostel manager.

  I described, or displayed, my symptoms, he weighed me, listened to the paper-tearing sounds in my chest, stuck a lolly stick down my mouth until I was nearly sick, and announced that he was going to take my temperature. He picked up a thermometer attached to what looked like a staple gun.

  Now, I'd heard about where French doctors stick thermometers. Marie had told me a Marquis De Sade story in which some poor guy is raped using a pistol. It had failed to turn me on then, and now I was even less excited to see that De Sade's sick fantasies had infected the French medical profession.

  "No, no," I said, pressing my buttocks deeper into the cushioned top of the examination table. "I am not hot."

  "We must see if you have a fever," said the doctor, pointing his pistol up at the ceiling like some duellist eager to get the bloodshed over with.

  "Is it fast?" I asked.

  "Yes, I click it and it shows me the temperature." He smiled reassuringly. And the barrel of his thermometer pistol didn't look very long at all.

  "Oh, OK, if it is fast." I shifted my weight to be able to pull my underpants down, but before I'd had a chance to tug on the elastic, he'd stuck the gun in my ear and clicked.

  "Hm, thirty-eight point nine. Hot."

  I laughed with relief.

  "No, you have a fever," he said, wondering why I looked so pleased to receive the bad news. The days of the rectal thermometer were long gone, it seemed.

  The doctor returned to his computer to type out my prescription.

  The prescription was something of a surprise. Like I said, I didn't usually bother a doctor with a cold until I completely lost my voice and was unable to swallow without a general anaesthetic. Even then, I’d only expect the doctor to give me a prescription for tea and aspirin.

  This French doctor was slightly different. First he asked me what I already had at home. "Nothing. Some aspirin," I replied.

  He looked a little put out and reeled off a list of names of medicines that he thought I really ought to have in my medicine cabinet. I shook my head at each one.

  "I see," he said, and made up for my years of self-neglect with a shopping list of antibiotics, painkillers, sprays, menthol rubs and inhalants that would have cured a herd of asthmatic giraffes. "Will you take suppositories?"

  "Suppositories? I don't know. They are big?" Though I wasn't sure what a "big" suppository was, or if they even came in different sizes. Until then I'd lived such a sheltered life that I'd never shoved anything inanimate into my own back passage.

  The doctor held up his right index finger and measured off the top knuckle joint.

  "I will try maybe," I said. Try to put them in the bin at the first opportunity, I meant.

  He added them to my prescription and printed it out for me.

  Looking down the long list, I understood why there was a despairing mob outside of every pharmacist's in town. If you multiplied my experience by the number of diseases known to medical science and the number of French people, and then factored in the relative seriousness of the ailments, you were looking at a nation hooked on medication.

  "Where can I buy this?" I asked.

  "You will have to go to the emergency pharmacy. There are one or two pharmacies open only for the distribution of emergency medication."

  "I am emergency?" I asked hopefully.

  "Yes, you have a prescription." Gratitude surged through my veins like a dose of paracetamol. The doctor gave me a sheet of paper with three addresses on it. "Go to one of these. They are the only places open. You will have to wait a long time. You may be cured before you receive the medication." He laughed at his sick joke, the healthy so-and-so.

  "You are working in Paris?"

  "Yes," I lied.

  "Do you want an arrêt maladie?"

  This, he explained, was a sick note. I said yes, please. Any excuse to get away from the threat of teaching English.

  I stood up to go and suddenly it was the doctor who was looking ill.

  "It is necessary to, er, pay," he said, blushing. He didn't use the word "payer" but the more formal "régler", meaning "settle a bill".

  "Ah, yes." I sat down again. "How much?"

  He flinched as if it was indecent to be so direct, and leaned forward across his desk to unfold the treatment form he'd given me, where he'd written the fee for t
he consultation. It was about the same as five or six beers in a normal cafe.

  "Most of it is, of course, reimbursed by the social security. Do you have a mutual?"

  "A mutual what?"

  "Company health insurance."

  "Oh, probably, yes."

  "Well then, they will pay the rest, and you will receive a one hundred per cent reimbursement."

  A slightly complicated, but pretty good system, I thought. It was just a shame they didn't introduce the same scheme for beer.

  I walked (or dragged my aching, shuddering body) across the Seine towards the nearest emergency pharmacy. This took me past the hospital called Hôtel Dieu, the "God hotel". Not a promising name for a hospital. It sounded like a stopping-off place on your way to the afterlife. This was borne out by its location - it overlooks Notre Dame cathedral.

  But outside the hospital was something much more promising. The noticeboards by the main entrance suggested that you could phone and make appointments with every kind of specialist imaginable. To a Brit brought up on six-month waiting lists to see any hospital staff more specialized than toilet cleaners, this was like seeing a list of the home numbers of the world's top ten supermodels. I got out my phone and keyed in the numbers of the lung specialist, the ear, nose and throat specialist, and, just in case, the lab where I'd need to go for a brain scan. You can't be too careful.

  I trudged on across the second branch of the Seine to a large pharmacy on the boulevard St Germain - near the medical school. I could tell when I was getting close because even above the grind of tbe heavy traffic I could hear the wailing of the sick.

  Well, that might be a slight exaggeration, or an echo of the wail I felt like making when I saw the queue. At least a hundred people, old and young, standing and on crutches, were queuing along the pavement towards the boulevard St Michel. With invalids like me trotting along the pavement or hobbling across the road to join the line. I put on a burst of speed and took my place. As I got my breath back, I tried to work out how many hours I would be standing here. There were only about five hours till nightfall, I calculated, I really ought to have brought a mattress or a tent.