The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘It is good zat you are interested by ze local production,’ she said. ‘Ze big surfaces, you know, ze supermarket, zey sell too much ze imported production. Ze jambon from Dan Mark, ze sall-mon from Ireland, ze melon from Espagne. But really Bretagne can supply any sing you want. Saucisson!’ she trumpeted, thrusting a catalogue under my nose. It featured a free-range pig that was too busy snuffling about in the grass to realise that its days were numbered. ‘Very many pig in zis Ray John. ’E give you good price.’ I noticed that the producer’s name bore a strong resemblance to Gwen’s. Though it was hard to be sure – with their Guers, Kers and Ecs, all these Breton names looked the same to me.

  ‘You want B.O. or not?’ Gwen asked me.

  ‘They can deodorise pigs?’

  ‘Uh?’ She looked confused, but only as much as I was.

  ‘B.O.?’ I repeated.

  ‘For veggie tables and froo-its,’ she said. ‘B.O. You know, wiz no chemicals?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Bee-o, organic.’ Gwen’s accent was making me forget stuff I already knew. She meant bio, short for biologique. I’d laughed when I first heard this French word for organic – all food is biological, isn’t it? Except some fast food, of course, which is made of flavoured Lycra. ‘I definitely want B.O. vegetables,’ I said. ‘The people eating this food will be artists, very delicate souls, we can’t poison them with chemical fertilisers.’

  ‘Zis is ze best B.O. producter.’ Gwen pulled out a leaflet dotted with grinning potatoes and dancing leeks – veggies raised on strictly organic hallucinogenics. ‘Good, but expensive, off course,’ she said. ‘B.O. is expensive.’

  ‘Right.’ Budget was the least of my problems. I took the leaflet and asked for more information on organic meats.

  ‘You want we visit some of zem?’ she offered.

  ‘Yes, let’s set up some meetings for this afternoon or tomorrow. First I have an appointment with the director of the artists’ residence.’

  ‘Ze what?’ Gwen was frowning at me as though she didn’t realise artists could actually reside anywhere.

  ‘The artists’ residence. You know, the Ministry of Culture building? Just along the seafront here?’ She was still looking lost. ‘Le building du Ministère de la Culture?’

  ‘Ah, oui, you mean Sainte-Vierge-des-Algues. Ze monastère.’

  ‘The ex-monastery,’ I corrected her. The building formerly known as the Holy Virgin of the Seaweed had been sold off by a religious community who had apparently had enough of the Atlantic wind whistling up their cassocks.

  ‘I ’ave meet ze director.’ Gwen fiddled uncomfortably with one of her blonde streaks. ‘’E is …’ She groped for the right word, as she had done when trying to describe Jake. ‘Parisien,’ she finally said, making it sound as if it was a mental illness. Which it can sometimes be – a sort of paranoia that makes you think everyone’s trying to be more snobbish than you. ‘’E play music in ze night. Opéra. Very strong. And ’e sing.’ She let out a piercing squawk that was obviously meant to be an imitation of the director’s taste in serenades, but sounded more like a killer parrot on the hunt for human flesh.

  Just then Jake walked in. There was a sense of urgency about him. Oh God, I groaned to myself, he’s left the handbrake off and let the car roll into the sea.

  ‘Paul,’ he called, before he’d even reached our table.

  ‘What is it?’

  He came over, grimacing, apparently in pain. Shit, I thought, the car must have squashed a fisherman on its way down.

  ‘Can you …?’ he asked.

  ‘Can I what?’

  ‘Can you think of a rhyme for anal?’

  I was so relieved that there had been no loss of life or vehicle that all I could think was: Thank Christ he asked it in English. And the even crazier thing was that I actually gave his question a few seconds’ thought.

  Gwen was smiling patiently, which Jake obviously interpreted as an interest in his poetic problem. He introduced himself and seemed about to ask her for some obscene rhymes, so I leapt in and told Gwen we had to rush if we were going to be on time to see the director.

  ‘I’ll phone you later,’ I promised her as I dragged Jake towards the door.

  III

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Paul, but I’m sensing un peu de stress from you.’

  Jake and I were sitting on a seat overlooking the bay. The concrete bench was set beside a rusted cannon pointing at the island where Gwen’s parrot pirates had nested.

  The tide was rushing out, revealing gleaming beds of smelly seaweed on the rocks below us and golden sandbanks beyond. Already, a small army of people were foraging for seafood with spades, nets, picks and rakes. There was a noticeboard on a nearby wall informing them that they could harvest ‘only’ five kilos of mussels each, five kilos of whelks, and three dozen oysters. It was enough to set yourself up as a fishmonger, and all free. Who needed a massive catering budget?

  I wished I could go out there and vent my frustrations on some poor unsuspecting mollusc. I also wondered about burying Jake up to his neck in the sand to wait for the rising tide.

  ‘You want to parley about it?’ he asked, and I felt my irritation with him drift away on the fishy breeze. It wasn’t his fault if he kept inflicting his poetry on me, after all. I was the one who’d dragged him out here as my driver.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I told Jake. ‘Thanks for asking. I feel as if I—’

  But I didn’t get any further with my attempt at a heart-to-heart.

  ‘Or perhaps we both need to be alone for a moment,’ he went on. ‘I mean, I’m very content to be here to aid you, Paul, but I have work to do, you know.’ He held up his notebook. ‘And this is an inspiring place. Do you know the second meaning of the French word for mussel?’

  Not wanting to guess, I decided to have a closer look at the ex-monastery, which was a short stroll away along the sea wall. It was a sober whitewashed stone building, four storeys high and overlooking a lawn that ran down to the beach. On the roof was a blackened wooden spire with a clock that had stopped, presumably when the monks stopped winding it up. It all looked very abandoned.

  When it was time for the meeting, I returned to tell Jake he didn’t have to come along. He could stay and finish his poem.

  ‘Oh, non, man, I’ve finished it. And I want to meet le directeur. The residence might have some space for artists of the written word, right?’

  ‘Like obscene American poets, you mean?’

  ‘Not obscene, man, just honest. And the French appreciate honest art. You see that art expo at the One Two Two? A bit tame, but très honest.’

  I led the way to the monastery, a sense of impending doom settling on me like the pungent odour of rotting seaweed.

  IV

  There was a time, or so the legend goes, when the directors of France’s museums, theatres, artists’ residences and similar temples of culture used to roam the country like King Arthur’s knights. They would arrive in a town, unhitch their cultural baggage, slay or tame the local dragons, ‘save’ a few damsels, and then move on after a couple of years, with tales of their grandeur echoing in their wake.

  That was in the old days, though, before France began to realise that its coffers weren’t bottomless. Now, it seemed, some of these directors were more like beached whales – lost and stranded, with no hope of returning to the Parisian feeding grounds.

  Gérard Macabé was one of these. He wasn’t exactly stranded – he was living only a ten-minute walk from a railway station. But I’d rarely seen anyone more washed up. Judging from the empty bottles decorating his office, he was probably on a full-time liquid diet.

  He was about fifty, bald on top, with a crown of long grey-black hair and whitish whiskers that looked like the result of a week not shaving rather than an attempt at a real beard. His clothes, also off-white, were loose and flowing: a collarless shirt and a beaten-up suit. He was trying to project a bohemian image, but, I wondered, who to? He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Divorce
d, I guessed, no doubt messily so.

  His office was dominated by a Gothic wooden desk and ancient bookshelves that probably used to sag under the weight of leather-bound volumes, but were now a combination of filing cabinet and bottle bank. Even so, it was an enviable place to work from. The open bay window looked out at a sublime Breton coastal landscape: a white-sand beach, tidal rock pools, and, to the right, the graceful arc of the stone harbour wall dividing the calm turquoise of the bay from the choppy cobalt ocean beyond.

  Apparently giving her blessing to the whole scene was a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary standing in one corner of the room. She appeared to be floating on a bed of seaweed while deep in conversation with a fish, and Gérard had heightened the surreal mood by hanging a chain of pierced bottle tops around Mary’s neck and balancing a cigarette between her fingers. Not very respectful to the previous owners of the building, I thought, but presumably the Virgin was living on borrowed time, anyway – ripping out the religious symbols was going to be part of the atheist French State’s conversion of the monastery into an artists’ residence.

  If the conversion ever happened, that is …

  ‘Résidence?’ Gérard’s monastic-looking throne creaked as he turned to stare out of his bay window at the sea. He seemed to be looking for inspiration as to what a résidence might be. ‘Is that what it’s going to be now?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes. And I am here to discuss the food budget.’

  ‘Really?’ He sighed philosophically and, noticing that his glass was empty, began to look around for a bottle. There was one right where I was sitting, on the other side of his immense desk, but it was hidden from his view by a pile of papers, and I wasn’t going to help him find it.

  ‘Voici!’ Helpful as ever, Jake reached across from his seat, next to mine, and lifted up the bottle.

  ‘Holy Virgin be praised!’ Gérard blew a kiss at her statue and twisted off the cap. ‘Get some glasses, have a drink.’

  ‘No thanks, we’d better—’ I began my standard no-drinking-this-early speech, but Jake beat me to it.

  ‘Merci,’ he said, and headed off towards a stretch of bookshelf that held some glass tumblers.

  ‘Surely Marie-Dominique Maintenon-Dechérizy told you about my visit?’ I said, proud not only of my French sentence but also of remembering her full name.

  ‘Probably,’ Gérard said, more interested in Jake’s progress than my question about his job. ‘The name rings a bell. I’ve been here six months, and at the last count I had received twenty-seven mission statements from as many different departments about what I’m supposed to be doing here. That’s one every …’

  He trailed off, and both of us set about trying to calculate.

  Jake saved me from mathematical embarrassment by coming back with two dusty glasses.

  Gérard poured out three over-generous measures of clear amber liquid. I hadn’t looked at the label but I guessed it was some kind of French hooch, like Calvados, the Norman apple-based alcohol that can sear a hole in your palate and do similar things to your brain.

  ‘Allez!’ Gérard motioned to Jake to take the other two glasses, and drained his own in one, as if it was mineral water.

  ‘Chin,’ I said, the French word for cheers, and took a sip of an oily liquid that instantly numbed the tip of my tongue.

  ‘Chin!’ Jake called out heartily, and, still on his feet, leant over to clink glasses with Gérard.

  ‘Merci,’ Gérard said, taking Jake’s glass and draining that, too.

  ‘So you’ve had twenty-seven mission statements,’ I said. ‘But Marie-Dominique’s, about the résidence d’artiste, that was the last?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gérard agreed. ‘Probably. Though there will probably be more mission statements, from the Ministry of Culture or elsewhere. Holiday camp, museum, research institute. If you ask me, it’ll end up as a dogs’ home for the pets of train drivers.’

  ‘But they will all need catering, n’est-ce pas?’ I ventured.

  ‘Who, the dogs?’ Gérard spluttered a laugh into his empty glass.

  ‘Could it be a résidence de poètes?’ Jake butted in.

  ‘Why not?’ Gérard said, giving a poetic sweep of his arm and accidentally throwing his glass out of the open window. I was relieved to hear it land with a tinkle of broken glass rather than a shout of pain from some innocent passer-by.

  ‘For foreign poets, too?’ Jake added.

  ‘Mais oui! Qu’est-ce qu’un poète, si ce n’est un traducteur?’ Gérard was obviously quoting something about a poet being a translator.

  ‘Baudelaire!’ Jake trumpeted, grabbing my full glass and holding it up in a toast. This time he made sure it was out of Gérard’s reach.

  Gérard filled his remaining glass and joined in the toast.

  ‘You know Baudelaire?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Jake said, and put on a poetic frown that made it obvious he was about to do some quoting of his own. ‘Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d’ivresse dans ce noir océan …’ he intoned, meaning, if I understood correctly, that he was going to plunge his love-drunk head into a black ocean. Which, so I’ve heard, was the kind of thing French poets used to do.

  ‘Perhaps we could visit the kitchens?’ I said.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ Gérard agreed, glugging back the rest of his glass of hooch. ‘I need another bottle, anyway.’

  He led us down a magnificent wooden staircase, past dark patches on the white walls where picture frames had once hung. It was a slow process, because Gérard seemed to have taken enough tumbles to learn that stairs could be deceptively mobile things, apt to duck out of the way of his feet. It took five full minutes for him to edge his way down to the ground floor clinging on to the banister.

  At the foot of the stairs, in a wide, wood-panelled hall, he let go of the banister and launched himself in the direction of a double door. After only one or two adjustments of his trajectory, he gripped the door handle and opened up, almost falling to his knees as the door swung away from him.

  ‘Voilà le réfectoire,’ he announced, his voice echoing in a long, empty room that must once have held a table for fifteen or twenty people. It had excellent potential. It opened out on to the lawns, where there was room for a large patio beneath some mature, leaning pine trees. If I were an artist being entertained at France’s pleasure, I wouldn’t say no to having dinner here – in summer, at least. In winter, the long French windows probably rattled like Gérard’s glass as his trembling hand poured out the first shot of the day.

  ‘Et par ici, la cuisine,’ he said, pointing in one direction and walking in another. Those three full glasses of high-octane alcohol were beginning to take serious effect.

  Jake and I beat Gérard to the door at the end of the refectory and opened it, guiding the director into a musty room lined with vintage, and much-used, kitchen equipment: a range of six gas rings, a pair of deep metal sinks, fitted cold cabinets, and a long stainless-steel preparation surface. All of it would probably get torn out and replaced when the building was renovated, but there was certainly enough room for a decent catering kitchen, or for artists to prepare their own food if they felt creative at mealtimes.

  ‘Et par ici, la cave à vin,’ Gérard slurred, his last dregs of consciousness sending him towards a metal door in a corner of the room. He slammed nose-first against it and clung on. ‘They left some bottles,’ he added. ‘Very Christian of them, n’est-ce pas?’ His knees gave out and he began to sink slowly towards the floor.

  ‘Don’t let him get through there,’ I ordered Jake, and started dialling Gwen.

  ‘Qu’est-ce tu fais, Baudelaire?’ Gérard asked Jake, who was trying to steer him back towards the refectory.

  ‘Allô?’ Gwen answered.

  I told her about Gérard’s semi-consciousness, in English out of courtesy.

  ‘Drink?’ she asked me.

  ‘Drunk,’ I said, more clearly.

  ‘Dronk?’

  ‘Il est ivre mort,’ I told her. �
��Il faut appeler un médecin.’

  As if to make my French even clearer, Gérard began to roar his opposition to being ushered away from the wine cellar.

  ‘We need to get you some coffee,’ Jake told him.

  ‘Bad for the heart!’ Gérard objected. ‘Too much adrenalin!’

  ‘I’ll send a doctor,’ Gwen told me, in French. ‘But you see what I meant – he has a very strong voice, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘he should be an opera singer.’

  ‘Opera singer, moi?’ Gérard had overheard me. ‘No, I’m the director of a future car park. The director of a wasteland. The director of nothing.’

  Here, at last, he was talking sense. And I was going to have to break the news to Marie-Dominique.

  V

  First, though, I went through the motions of visiting some food producers with Gwen.

  I admired a field of swaying potato leaves, comforted by the knowledge that only organic poop had been dumped on them. I visited some goats that smelled worse than the homeless men who sleep in Saint-Michel Métro station, but whose cheese melted so deliciously on the tongue that I bought half a dozen pats to bring home with me.

  But even as I was picturing the hot goat’s cheese salads I was going to make myself, I couldn’t help thinking that all this might be a waste of time. If half of what Gérard had said was accurate, there was no point in my writing a report.

  Still, consolation for these negative thoughts was provided by the sausage-making machine. We were at a pig farm, watching a hair-netted butcher do his party trick. He slipped a length of transparent pig entrail over the nozzle of the machine, held the condom-like sheath in place, pressed a button, and boing, the machine whipped out an instant ten-inch stiffy that would have made the best-hung porn actor blush with envy. The sausage-maker did this a few times, and then started to play to his audience, producing misshapen benders in all directions, like a catalogue of erectile dysfunctions.

  Gwen was screeching with laughter, while Jake got his pad out and started making notes, although I for one couldn’t think of a rhyme for sausage.