The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Sorry, Pool,’ Jean-Marie said, looking as unapologetic as a kid who’s just stolen your last chocolate biscuit, ‘but there is space for only two people. Amandine will send you a document with my proposition for the diner – or diners.’ And from the look in his eye, it wasn’t the only proposition he had in mind.

  II

  That afternoon, I threaded my way through the forest of fossilised toothpaste in the Palais-Royal gardens and gave my name to the receptionist at the Ministry.

  When I’d called Marie-Dominique, she’d told me to go straight to a meeting room, number ‘zéro zéro sept’, or 007. With the phone held as far away from my ear as possible, I’d listened to her explaining that everyone found this hilarious because French civil servants are known as agents, like James Bond. I agreed that it was hilarious and asked whether I was going to be an agent, too, if I took on the job. I thought perhaps it might speed up the process of getting a French driving licence.

  ‘Oh no!’ she boomed, as if I’d asked for a fast-track sainthood. ‘You’d be a contractuel, a fournisseur.’ I asked her what this was, and she told me the Ministry used lots of them. ‘They are our security men, the people who provide our water fountains and toilet paper …’

  Great, so I’d be on the same level as the loo-roll delivery men, I thought as I asked the receptionist, a man this time, to point me towards the James Bond suite, where I had a groupe de travail meeting.

  ‘Which groupe de travail?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know the name,’ I apologised.

  He shrugged. This had to be a common problem. ‘Room 007 is behind the stairs,’ he said.

  ‘Which floor is it on?’

  He was a thirty-something man who looked as grumpy as if he had been demoted to entrance-hall duties after managing an opera house in Saint-Tropez. He squinted at me and replied, ‘Ground floor, of course. That’s why it starts with a zero. Who are you?’

  ‘I am, or will be, a contractuel.’

  ‘You have a badge?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’re going to be a contractuel, you must get a badge.’

  ‘Where can I get one?’

  ‘Room 666.’

  ‘Ah.’ Sounded as though I was in for some more bureaucratic hell. Maybe I wouldn’t bother with a badge just yet. I thanked the guy for the information and went to find 007, which turned out to be one of the rooms with barred windows, the scene of Alexa’s attempt to break into the cultural establishment. So I’d made it before her.

  Stupidly, I’d arrived on time, so there was no one else in the room, a bare, white-walled rectangle with an oval table, a dozen or so chairs and a whiteboard. Two of the walls were decorated with what had to be paintings daubed by a close friend of the Minister. I couldn’t see why else anyone would choose to hang canvases depicting what looked like close-ups of accidents involving tablecloths and spaghetti bolognese.

  I was just musing on the washing-up problems that these might cause when I heard voices, and people began to stream into the room, all deep in conversation – but not about the fact that they were fifteen minutes late.

  ‘Can’t we get a printout of the hierarchy?’ Marie-Dominique boomed at a small guy in a grey suit, grey shirt and grey tie.

  ‘Not until it’s been approved,’ he replied quietly, apparently used to her habit of shouting every word she said as if hailing a distant ship.

  ‘When will it be approved?’ asked a tall, thin guy with a swept-back shock of grey-white hair, like some nineteenth-century writer.

  ‘As soon as we know who can approve it,’ answered a small bald guy in a white polo shirt.

  ‘Isn’t it the Minister?’ Marie-Dominique foghorned.

  ‘Yes, but we won’t know who can pre-approve it until the hierarchy has been decided,’ concluded a slightly tubby guy in an unseasonable black rollneck sweater and black jacket.

  ‘Well, have you brought a printout of the old hierarchy?’ Marie-Dominique barked at the guy all in grey.

  ‘I couldn’t print it out because my secretary is printing out copies of the minutes from the meeting about the need to buy another printer.’

  ‘OK,’ Marie-Dominique shouted grimly, ‘we’ll just have to improvise. Ah, Pol!’ She almost blew me off my feet, but I managed to walk towards the group and introduce myself.

  The trouble with this was that they all spoke like the list of names and abbreviations I’d seen on the noticeboard, reeling off introductions that I didn’t have a hope of remembering, especially as some of them couldn’t even decide who they were.

  The tall thin one with long hair said he was something like Bernard Dupont, DG of the DEDADA, but that he might soon be SG of the DECACA. The all-grey guy and white polo man couldn’t decide if they were from the BUDEC or the BEBOP.

  ‘Anyway, the BEBOP is going to be merged soon,’ white polo man told me helpfully.

  ‘With the ALULA?’ I tried to joke, but they just frowned. I saw now that the abbreviations weren’t qualifications, they were all departments at the Ministry. Not that this helped me understand what they stood for.

  We sat down around the table, everyone except me behind a tricolour Ministry folder, and Marie-Dominique reminded us all why she’d called the meeting: to discuss the artists’ residence.

  ‘Are we allowed to call it that yet?’ objected the tall thin guy.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she conceded. ‘To discuss the Brittany Project.’

  It really did sound like a James Bond meeting – to prepare an attack on a Communist sardine fishery, perhaps.

  ‘More exactly,’ she went on, ‘to decide what we can decide. We already know what we can’t decide. Our task is not to think of the public, that is a job for the SS.’

  ‘The SS?’ I couldn’t help asking. I thought they moved out in 1944.

  ‘Le Service des Spectacles,’ she explained.

  ‘But I’m with the S-DAP,’ the black rollneck man seemed to say.

  ‘Sous-direction des Arts Plastiques,’ Marie-Dominique translated for me.

  ‘Isn’t the S-DAP part of the SS?’ black rollneck went on. ‘Should I be here?’

  ‘We’d know if we had the printout of the new hierarchy, wouldn’t we?’ Marie-Dominique hooted. ‘Why don’t you stay here for now, but without taking any new notes?’

  Everyone nodded their satisfaction, and Marie-Dominique got back to her speech about decisions, the gist of which, if I understood correctly, was that they couldn’t actually do anything. This was because they were a groupe de travail – a working party – rather than a comité, and hadn’t received a specific mission. They’d only been given a projet. Their job was to report, not propose action.

  I was beginning to get a tingling at the base of my skull, the first sign that my brain wanted to crawl out of the back of my head and escape.

  ‘One question,’ I managed to say before I suffered a self-induced lobotomy.

  ‘Yes?’ Marie-Dominique seemed surprised that it wasn’t all crystal clear.

  ‘What do you want me to do, exactly?’

  ‘Didn’t you read the file I gave you?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ How did you say it was just a collection of long, apparently meaningless sentences, like almost everything that had been said at this meeting?

  ‘Read the file again,’ Marie-Dominique interrupted me. ‘We are a groupe de travail, so what we need is a consultative document offering us propositions.’

  ‘What sort of propositions exactly?’ I pleaded.

  ‘Your propositions,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ At last I understood. Their thinking was as woolly as a koala bear’s ear. I could do what the hell I wanted.

  ‘So it is clear now?’ Marie-Dominique asked, and I nodded decisively, earning myself a round of satisfied bureaucratic smiles.

  We discussed deadlines (no stress) and payment (maybe, just maybe, enough to convince a bank to lend me the cash to get Jean-Marie off my back), and then Marie-Dominique declared that everyth
ing was ‘parfait’.

  ‘Now, which department is responsible for defining our theoretical objectives?’ she asked everyone within a kilometre.

  As a man, the four guys reached into their folders and whipped out sheets of paper. They held them up, staring at each other as if they’d all produced the ace of spades in a poker match. Only one could be genuine, and it was their own.

  ‘You don’t really need to be here for this part of the meeting, Paul,’ Marie-Dominique told me, and I was out of there as fast as my grateful legs could carry me.

  Perhaps I was still in shock, because as I passed the electronic numbers above the lift door, I thought: Why not go up to the sixth floor and get a badge? I’d already been through purgatory. I might as well go all the way.

  I emerged from the lift in a very different part of the Ministry. No wide, airy corridors here. I was in the attic, in what had probably been the servants’ quarters when this was a palace. There were no men in suits here, no chirpy young girls, just unsexy, unhappy people apparently padlocked to their computers, who watched me walk past as if I was an alien on a fact-finding tour of France. Not many visitors to this floor, I guessed.

  Room 666 had a solid wooden door with a tiny hatch and a bell marked ‘Sonnez’ – ‘Ring’, as if there was anything else you could do with a bell.

  I obeyed the curt instruction, and after several seconds, the hatch opened and a large, closely shaven head appeared, still in conversation with someone else in the room. Finally, the guy laughed and turned to me as though I was part of the joke.

  ‘Bonjour, I’ve come for a badge,’ I said.

  ‘No badges here,’ he said and closed the hatch, only to open it a second later, laughing again. ‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘Have you got your contract?’

  ‘No,’ I confessed.

  ‘Oh, pff,’ he said, as if blowing a fly off my lapel. ‘They rarely do.’

  He opened the door to reveal a little security den stocked wall-to-ceiling with screens: a bank of CCTV monitors, two computers and an ordinary TV. A small man in a shiny blue suit was lounging in a high-backed office chair watching a dubbed American doctor series. A famous Hollywood actor was speaking perfect French in a strange voice, out of synch with his own lips.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the big security man asked me as he sat down at a computer.

  I told him and he laughed as though I’d told a ridiculous lie. Napoleon Bumface, for example, or Jean-Paul Merde.

  ‘It’s English,’ I said, and spelt it out for him, very slowly.

  ‘You’re already in the system,’ he eventually said, and both of us stared at the computer in astonishment at this miracle of efficiency. ‘Contractuel – green badge, not blue. Dommage.’

  ‘Pourquoi dommage?’ I asked. Why was it such a shame?

  ‘Blue, you get cheap coffee from the machines, and free cinema tickets.’

  ‘Any film, any time,’ the small guy said over his shoulder.

  ‘Wow. And green?’ I asked.

  ‘Pff,’ the big guy puffed. ‘Rien.’ Nothing.

  ‘Dommage,’ I agreed.

  ‘You’re just a contractuel?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But do you come in for meetings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With different agents?’

  ‘Yes, five today,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you should have a blue badge. What do you think, Momo? Blue badge for the monsieur?’

  ‘Yes, it’s nearly the weekend,’ the guy in front of the TV said, and they both laughed. It was Wednesday.

  So I posed for a camera, signed on a screen with a plastic pointer, and came out of there grinning like a koala who’s just been winched to the top of a virgin eucalyptus tree. A blue plastic badge with my photo and signature on it. Cheap coffee and unlimited cinema tickets. What more could a Parisian worker ask for?

  III

  ‘Vernissage means varnishing,’ Marsha told me when we met up that evening. ‘It comes from the time when artists would put the finishing touches to their pictures at a preview.’

  ‘I never knew varnish could be so noisy,’ I said, battling against a shockwave of electronic music coming from inside the exhibition hall. We were half a street away and it was deafening.

  The private views I’d been to before had all been refined gatherings where culture fans frowned knowingly at picture frames while keeping one eye on the drinks table. At most of them, the main source of noise was chatter. Now, though, my whole skeleton was vibrating in time to the pounding bass notes coming from the large stone building marked ‘IZZ’.

  It seemed to be the sole survivor of mass demolitions in the area. Every other building was a modern high-rise, most of them typical examples of French Stalinist architecture: grim towers like the barrel of a giant machine gun, or stark floodlit rectangles of concrete slicing into the night sky. We were high up in the 19th arrondissement, almost at the Périphérique, way beyond my usual Parisian stamping grounds.

  ‘Why IZZ?’ I asked as we walked past a group of black teenagers who were looking hungrily towards the bass rhythms.

  ‘Why IZZ what?’ Marsha said.

  ‘What?’ I tried again. ‘Why is the place called IZZ?’

  Marsha gave a laugh-scream that made the teenagers jump.

  ‘It’s not. Haven’t you heard about it? It’s called the One Two Two. It’s the street number. A hundred and twenty-two.’

  In my ignorance of all things artistic, I’d misread the writing on the wall. We stopped in front of the building so that she could explain.

  It was all very ‘serendipitous’, she said. Back in the days when brothels were legal in France, this was where prostitutes were brought to get a medical certificate. It closed after the Second World War and was used as a truck depot before its roof started leaking too badly. Then it got forgotten until the city decided it needed an arts centre to liven up the neighbourhood, at which point they saw the serendipity. There had once been a posh brothel called the One Two Two (an English name to attract tourist toffs) at 122 rue de Provence near Pigalle, and this new arts centre was at 122 rue de Sousvilliers, so they called the new arts centre the One Two Two. Or IZZ, as I’d just renamed it.

  ‘You’re very well documented,’ I told her.

  ‘Yes, art and sex are two of my passions,’ she said, swaying her jeans towards the entrance, with me following in their gravitational pull.

  We joined the throng of trendies waiting to get through the entrance arch. Not one of them, I guessed, lived within five Métro stops of this ‘local’ arts centre. They weren’t all young – some were grey-haired – but they all looked exactly the same. Impeccably ‘un-styled’ hairdos, white faces, the men unshaven, the women natural except for lipstick and eye shadow. And everyone’s outfit was dominated by black. If one of them died, we’d be able to hold the funeral there and then. As long as jeans ere acceptable dress code, no one would need to go home and change. Except me, that is. I was in one of my sunglasses-obligatory summer shirts, dressed to clash with any paintings.

  Once you got through the crush at the entrance, the building opened out into a wide courtyard of scrubbed brick and narrow windows, a bit like a Victorian lunatic asylum.

  The main exhibition space was a huge glass-roofed hall framed with iron girders, presumably where the carriages used to park when the prostitutes were transported in. Now it was shaking to the beat of frantic techno as a mass of Parisians talked and boozed in a bath of pulsing fluorescent light.

  ‘Let’s try and find the art,’ Marsha yelled into my ear.

  ‘After we’ve found the drinks,’ I suggested.

  Armed with a plastic beaker each of red vinegar, we shoved our way to the wing of the building where Marsha said the studios were. At the top of a wide stone staircase, now blocked by sprawling legs, we reached a corridor of glass-fronted rooms.

  ‘This was where they used to do the medicals on the street girls,’ Marsha told me. ‘Now the rooms are studi
os, attributed to the artists in residence. And some of them are even bigger intellectual whores than the working girls ever were.’

  We were given a fold-out brochure by a smiling, slightly plump girl who was sporting a deep cleavage, tiny miniskirt and fishnet stockings. Her leaflet featured a black-and-white photo of a nineteenth-century female nude (long hair in a bun, plump thighs, blurred crotch) and was headed by two logos: ‘IZZ’ (or ‘122’) and the Ministry of Culture’s tricolour Marianne. Wow, I thought, if this was the kind of event my new employers put on, I was going to enjoy working for them.

  I asked Marsha to explain the title of the show: ‘Ouverture des maisons closes’, or ‘Opening of the Closed Houses’. It was, she told me, a French pun. What a surprise. Maison close was an old word for brothel, dating from the time when they had to keep their windows shuttered to protect public decency, and this exhibition was to celebrate the opening of the arts centre. Not only that, there was also a debate raging in France about whether to relegalise brothels, and the theme of the show was what would go on inside them. All that in one title. My head was aching before I saw any of the art.

  The ache was cranked up to migraine level as soon as we stepped into the first studio. It was jammed with people, but not enough to hide the film being projected on to the far wall. This consisted of a loop, lasting about twenty seconds, of a woman in a dressing gown, a prostitute presumably, walking up a staircase followed by a man. Nothing else happened, apart from the man’s feet going briefly out of focus. The two people appeared, walked upstairs, appeared, walked upstairs, over and over again, like some lift manufacturer’s nightmare.

  ‘It represents the dehumanising everyday existence of a prostitute,’ Marsha translated from the brochure. I knew how the hooker felt, and I’d only experienced it for a minute.

  The next room was even worse. Its walls were lined with dozens of small, square photos, each one of them of a penis in the process of ejaculating. They were all entitled ‘Portrait de l’artiste’, and were being stared at by fascinated viewers, including a small, leather-clad dominatrix whom I recognised from somewhere. She saw me staring at her and turned away sharply.