The Merde Factor:

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Could I have one of the forms?’ I asked.

  ‘Oui, oui.’ She got up, walked out of her little office and came back a minute later with a small sheaf of papers. ‘Voilà,’ she said, stuffing them under her window. ‘Bonne journée,’ she wished me.

  Journée? I thought. Can it really still be daylight out there?

  IV

  The nearest Métro station was Cité. It’s on line 4, which is only gradually being upgraded. On a bad commuter morning in one of its rattling old carriages, your only chance of getting a seat is to sleep there overnight. Usually you have to stand up and take the elbows in the kidneys and the sneezes in the face. Now, though, in late morning, most Parisians were entrenched in their offices, and things were quiet. Breezy, even. At their worst, Parisian Métro passengers can make a dead salmon look cheerful, but today they’d been hit by the opposite of seasonal affective disorder. They weren’t suffering from SAD. It was more a case of SOD: springtime overdose. Bright T-shirts and serene expressions were the order of the day.

  No one even moaned when the lights went out and the train wrenched to a halt in mid-tunnel. There was a deafening screech from the PA followed by what sounded like a robotic alien announcing that Earth had just been conquered. It was the Métro driver, apparently keen to inform us in his loudest voice that ‘kakashinafak pishiwishi gawakak’.

  ‘Merci, vous aussi,’ a lady passenger quipped, and all the people around her giggled.

  We jerked back into motion a few minutes later and, comfortably settled in a corner seat, I filled in the driving-licence form. Despite its thickness, it wasn’t that difficult. There were no trick questions asking me to name French Grand Prix winners or put Renault car models in chronological order. And I had all the necessary photocopies with me. I’d got off to a false start, but surely now I was on the home straight?

  Coming out of the Métro, I checked the back of my police-recruitment poster for the address of the Police de Proximité – the local cops on the beat. There’d been a big media campaign about this idea of proximity – an attempt to mend the rift between the French police and the public by bringing law-enforcement officers closer to the people, and not just so they could throw stones at them. Strange, then, that the station was shut at eleven thirty in the morning. A metal grille blocked the door, and the barred windows were shuttered. So much for proximity.

  A notice taped to the metal grille said that this station was only manned in the afternoons, and gave the address of the nearest Commissariat, ten minutes’ walk away. Quite a hike, I thought, if you were being chased by muggers or had just found a suitcase full of cocaine. (Yes, Jake’s area wasn’t the kind of Parisian neighbourhood that gets filmed for Hollywood movies about young Americans falling in love while wearing designer clothes.)

  At least the Commissariat was open – though ‘open’ was a relative term. In this neighbourhood, the only entrance, apart from a large gate that rolled sideways to let police cars in and out, was a thick glass door leading to yet another reinforced window. I rang the bell, gazed innocently into the security camera above the buzzer, and the door clicked open.

  I stepped inside, and a policeman appeared on the other side of a glass panel, a thin, pasty-faced guy of about thirty in white shirtsleeves. I didn’t think he was the kind who’d be fond of too much proximité with the locals.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said into the microphone, and he looked surprised, as though people usually came here to insult him.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

  I told him why I’d come, and gave him my forms. Or rather slotted them into a metal drawer that he opened and then shut so he could retrieve the papers without giving me an opportunity to bite off one of his fingers.

  ‘Vous êtes anglais,’ he noted.

  ‘Oui,’ I confessed.

  ‘We don’t get many of you doing this. It’s mainly Eastern Europeans.’

  ‘Perhaps because it’s more difficult for us to drive to France. Under the sea.’

  The policeman frowned at my geological wisecrack.

  ‘How long have you been resident in France?’ he asked, perusing my forms.

  ‘About two years.’

  ‘More than a year?’ Ominously, he stopped flicking through my forms.

  ‘Oh, you mean non-stop?’ I asked. ‘Non-stop, I have only been a resident here for about six months. Before that, I was in America. Sorry, I did not understand. I’m English, you see.’

  He nodded. It’s a lesson you learn early with Parisian officialdom: when in doubt, play the foreign idiot. The policeman opened my form again.

  ‘Give me your English licence,’ he said, and the metal drawer clanged open. I dropped it inside, and the metal clanged shut, almost taking off my arm. ‘We’ll keep it while your application is processed.’

  ‘What? How long?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It depends. Three weeks?’

  I groaned. ‘Why can’t I keep it? You have the photocopies.’

  The only reply was another shrug.

  ‘We will phone you when your licence is ready,’ he informed me, with a tiny grin of amusement at my distress about being separated from my beloved English document. ‘Bonne journée, monsieur.’

  V

  ‘Merde,’ I told the pigeons as I walked back to Jake’s flat. Instead of fluttering away, they only cooed at me, making me feel guilty about not joining in with the seasonal mood of hysterical happiness.

  But I had good reason to be sulking, and not just because my driving licence had been taken into police custody. I’d been back in Paris for a few weeks now, watching all my plans get blown away like so much pollen. The mobile catering business I’d hoped to set up had never recovered from the fiasco of Jean-Marie’s daughter’s wedding reception down in the south of France. Though it was hardly my fault if the dinner was late. Proceedings in the kitchen had been disrupted just a tad by the attempted assassination of the star wedding guest, le Président de la République. And I couldn’t really be held responsible for the subsequent outbreak of food poisoning, either – as any caterer will tell you, it is difficult to maintain food hygiene when the kitchen has been invaded by French secret servicemen demanding to test the sea bream for booby traps.

  So I was cashless, which was why I’d gratefully accepted Jake’s offer to squat at his place. It was a double-edged sword of an offer. Jake was a great friend of mine, and had helped me out of various catastrophes, but a homemaker he was not. Living in his apartment was a bit like having to borrow someone else’s unwashed underpants. No, that’s unfair. He wasn’t dirty, he was just unaware of his surroundings, so that he probably didn’t even notice that the saucepan on one of his two electric rings was half full of cigarette ends, floating in stagnant black water. He must have stubbed one out in the saucepan, and then subconsciously decided that that was where his half-smoked roll-ups belonged. All of which explains why it took me a whole day of scrubbing to get the place fit for someone with all five senses functioning to sleep in.

  The good thing about the apartment was that it was high up, so the racket made before dawn by the binmen and street cleaners on the wide boulevard rarely woke me up. I was usually able to snooze on until the first insane drivers began hooting and revving their way to work.

  I was on the top floor, the sixth, in a converted maid’s room, or chambre de bonne. Well, I say converted, but all that had happened was that some thoughtful property speculator had slotted a dwarf shower cubicle in one corner, a toilet of sorts in another and a sink against the wall, making the remaining floor area just about big enough for a maid to curl up in. This was where the landlord had jammed an antique fold-out sofa bed that rightfully belonged in an orthopaedic torture museum. As soon as I had enough money to bribe a Parisian estate agent to consider my request to rent a decent-sized apartment, I was out of there.

  After climbing the stairs, I flung open the single window in my ongoing campaign to get a few particles of oxygen into the studio to dilute Jake’s Old Tob
acco air freshener. Down in the street, a car driver was alternatively hooting and shouting at the whole neighbourhood in the vain hope that the guy who’d blocked him in by double parking would come back and free him. Meanwhile, undeterred by the noise, the two ladies on the second and fourth floors were tending their plants.

  They were in the apartments known as deuxième droite and quatrième droite, meaning that their doors were on the right as you arrived on the second and fourth-floor landings.

  Both of them had typically Parisian fake balconies – the cruel architectural trick of putting elaborate ironwork railings outside a window to give the impression that the building has balcons. The two middle-aged ladies had both hung their ironwork with plant pots, and today they were working away at the soil as if they were tilling a rice paddy, even though their only crop was red geraniums, the ever-present Parisian flower. A harmonious spring scene. Until, that is, the woman on the fourth floor produced a plastic watering can and began drowning her pots, sending a monsoon down on to the second-floor lady’s plants (and, on this occasion, her head).

  The respectable-looking woman yelled up an accusation about deliberately causing a waterfall, and got no answer, which prompted her to embark on a series of insults every bit as colourful as her geraniums. On previous days, I’d begun making a list of her favourite swear words, and today she sent me hunting for a pen with a new one: pisseuse de chiottes de merde, which, if I’d heard it correctly above the hooting car, meant something like shitty toilet pisser. Impressively graphic.

  This barrage of insults had its usual effect of rousing the old guy below me on the fifth floor (cinquième gauche) from his lair. He was a recluse whose only activities in life seemed to be yelling out of his window and feeding pigeons, which regularly gathered around his window like an over-excited, feather-moulting fan club.

  Sure enough, I saw his tousled grey head pop out at the fifth-floor window.

  ‘Enculé!’ he shouted, a crude French term for a recipient of sodomy. ‘Pétasse!’, which could be translated as farting woman. ‘Va chier!’ Literally, go and shit – a more solid version of the English ‘piss off’.

  Luckily, Jake had told me how to curtail his outbursts.

  As ‘Enculé!’, ‘Pétasse!’ and ‘Va chier!’ continued to ring out from below, I leant over my window ledge and shouted, ‘Connard!’, a word meaning something like male vaginal idiot.

  And miraculously, it always put a stop to the enculés, although on this occasion it also seemed to convince the driver doing the hooting down in the street to give up and find an alternative solution to his double-parking problem.

  All of which made me feel a twinge of conscience about not taking the call from the Ministry of Culture woman earlier. So much abuse was being hurled about, and I’d refused a polite conversation about finding me work.

  I dug out my phone and hit callback.

  ‘Allô?’ The reply was instant, female and very loud.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said. ‘J’aimerais parler avec …’ Damn, what was the woman’s name? Anne-Valérie something, or Jeanne-Bernadette maybe.

  ‘Avec qui?’ the voice barked at me.

  I would have loved to answer but I had my jacket between my teeth and was tugging at the pocket in an attempt to extract her business card.

  ‘C’est Pol Wess?’ It sounded like an accusation.

  I spat out the jacket and said yes. My accent must have given me away.

  ‘Bonjour, c’est Marie-Dominique Maintenon-Dechérizy.’ Of course, I thought. How could I have forgotten that?

  ‘Bonjour, you called me?’ I said in my shaky French. ‘Je n’ai pas …’ But I didn’t know how to lie and say I’d missed her call. ‘Er, you called and I didn’t answer.’ A bit blunt, but at least it had the merit of being true.

  She asked me very slowly whether I had a few minutes to talk.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ I assured her, my French improving with every sentence.

  ‘Excellent. What has Jean-Marie already told you about me?’ she asked.

  I was just preparing a speech about her being someone important at the Ministère de la Culture when the old guy on the fifth floor beat me to it.

  ‘Pétasse!’ he yelled.

  ‘Pardon?’ Marie-Dominique sounded surprised.

  ‘Sorry,’ I apologised, trying to work out how to explain that my neighbours were suffering from a sort of communal Tourette’s.

  ‘Enculé!’ came the voice from outside.

  ‘Monsieur Wess?’

  ‘Va chier!’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘One moment,’ I told Marie-Dominique, and leant outside. ‘Connard!’ I shouted, and was relieved to see the tortoise-like head disappear indoors.

  ‘Tout va bien?’ Marie-Dominique asked me, clearly regretting that I’d returned her call.

  ‘C’est pas moi,’ I improvised. ‘Well, the connard, c’est moi, but the enculé and the pétasse, c’est pas moi.’

  ‘Who was it, then?’ she demanded.

  ‘L’homme au cinquième. Il est crazy.’

  Fortunately for me, mad-neighbour syndrome was common enough in Paris for her to forgive me and suggest that we might be able to have a more satisfactory conversation if I came to her office.

  ‘Très bien,’ I said. With any luck, face to face she wouldn’t need to yell quite so loudly. We agreed to meet the next day, and, just out of curiosity, I had a go at asking what kind of work she had on offer.

  She said I’d see, but that from what Jean-Marie had told her about me, it was ‘parfait pour vous’. She hooted a laugh.

  ‘Ah, did Jean-Marie say that I am un peu excentrique?’ I asked. It’s an English stereotype that reassures the French. ‘Is that how you recognised me?’

  ‘No. Your number showed up on my phone.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ What a dickhead. How to screw up a job interview in one easy lesson. We said ‘au revoir’ and I went over to the window.

  ‘Connard!’ I shouted at myself. ‘Enculé!’

  It felt surprisingly good.

  Deux

  ‘Mon père était fonctionnaire et ma mère ne travaillait pas non plus.’

  My father was a civil servant, and my mother didn’t work, either.

  Coluche, French comedian, who died in 1986 in a motorbike accident. Or so they say …

  I

  NEXT MORNING, I got a call from Jake. He told me that he’d had no luck declaiming his birthday poem into the agent’s intercom the previous day. Apparently, it had gone dead after only two or three lines – no doubt, I thought, when she ripped her receiver out of the wall socket.

  Jake had decided to ‘take his day’, he told me, meaning he was bunking off work. He earned his baguette crust teaching English of sorts to French adults, which I couldn’t help thinking was a bit like taking lessons from a drunk in walking straight.

  ‘I think I’ve found what you’re researching,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not doing any research,’ I replied.

  ‘No,’ Jake said, ‘I mean, what you’re – you know – looking after, for, at.’ He often thought it best to hedge his bets with English verbs.

  ‘You’ve found what I’m looking for?’ Did he mean a job, a decent apartment, a life?

  ‘Yeah, man, I’m in le Marais taking a coffee with some belles filles.’

  ‘But I thought you were living with that girl, what is she, Libyan? Syrian?’ His latest girlfriend belonged to a new motherlode of female company that Jake had recently stumbled upon: refugees arriving in Paris from troubled Middle Eastern and North African countries.

  ‘Yemeni,’ he said.

  ‘You told me just the other day you were crazy about her.’

  ‘I’m not seeing her any more,’ he said.

  ‘You’re moving out of her apartment? You mean I have to find somewhere else to live?’ Against all expectations, my life had just got even more complicated.

  ‘No, not yet. It’s her quitting the apartment.’

  �
��She’s leaving her own apartment? Why?’

  ‘She received a letter. She is in danger to be deportée. She is an exile but they say she’s an illegal immigrant. France is the merde for them, man. Luckily for me, she paid six months’ rent en avance. Anyway, I’m with some belles filles now, and one of them would be perfect for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s got a massive apartment. Paid by her parents, man. No rent.’ For Jake, those two syllables – no rent – were the equivalent of most people’s je t’aime. They were the keys (literally) to a meaningful relationship with him.

  ‘So why don’t you go after her?’ I asked. ‘For when your Yemeni lease runs out.’

  ‘I did, man. I even wroten her a poem. A sexy one.’

  ‘And she didn’t like it?’ I tried to conjure up some disbelief.

  ‘She told me it was too powerful for her. But you, Paul,’ he went on, ‘you like these sexually repressed girls, n’est-ce pas? Anyway, she’s from Nouvelle Zealand and she’s got this totalement fascinating project – you must come and check it out. Like, maintenant.’

  With a growing sense that the day was getting way too exhausting for me already, I agreed to let him text me the address.

  II

  You have to love the Marais. Not necessarily the heart of it, which is overrun by tourists dashing from the BHV department store to the place des Vosges, but the northern part, where the Marais’s narrow medieval streets become dark and peaceful, occasionally almost shabby. There are plenty of art galleries and boutiques to remind you that you’re not in a deprived area, but no crowds or frustrated drivers to stop you ambling around, wishing you could afford to live in that chateau-like hôtel particulier, this cobbled courtyard or that rooftop medieval penthouse.

  There’s even a cool shopping street that pretends to be part of old Paris, and succeeds. The rue de Bretagne has real boulangeries, a charcuterie and even a cheese shop – alongside the inevitable estate agents, of course.