The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  I was browsing through the list of ministerial emails when I noticed that Amandine had sent me something. It was from her personal address, and the subject field was bare. Oh merde, I thought, here was another woman I owed an apology to. I’d tried to say sorry the night before, but she’d dashed off immediately after Jean-Marie and Alexa had left, waving everyone, including her boyfriend Thomas, away. I opened up her message, hoping it wasn’t going to be a ‘you dropped me in it you bastard’ rant.

  ‘Lmook at thjis, I saqw it on JM’s screeb,’ it said, and ended with a link.

  It led to a website called ‘Non à l’anglais’ – ‘No to English’. Under the title on the home page was a quotation in French from King Louis XV, which translated something like: ‘The English have corrupted the mind of my kingdom. We must not expose a new generation to the risk of being perverted by their language.’ And beneath this was a promise to do ‘everything in our power to boot all Anglo-Saxon culture out of France’. Overseeing the whole thing was an angelic portrait of Saint Joan of Arc, in full armour, holding a sword in one hand and a crumpled Union Jack in the other, as if she was about to use it to blow her nose.

  It was extreme stuff, but not lacking in humour. They had a competition, the ‘Shit de la Semaine’ (which could, I suppose, be translated as ‘Merde of the Week’), in which they awarded a Union Jack-or Stars and Stripes-patterned turd to a person who had used gratuitous English in the French media. This week’s winner was a politician who had referred to ‘le credit crunch’ in a press conference. The week before, some washed-out French singer had tried to create a buzz by lighting up a joint during a live TV interview and, when asked by the presenter to put it out, had responded with, ‘I yam too rrrock and rrroll for ze French taylayvision.’

  More worrying, and less humorous, was the section called ‘L’Occupation Linguistique’, and its list of collaborateurs – people and places promoting the use of English in France. Collaborators? I mean, the French may still have a hang-up about what many of them did during the Second World War, but it was a bit much equating English-language magazines with Nazi occupiers.

  The bad news was that there were links to My Tea Is Rich and to Marsha’s bookshop. The tea room was apparently ‘promoting the usurpation of French cuisine, which has, after all, been added to the UNESCO World Heritage list of cultural treasures, and in its place serving Anglo-American merde’. Which wasn’t a very friendly way of describing our tasty salads and sandwiches. And my menu naturally came under attack for being ‘a veritable Anglo-American pizza of English words and tasteless ingredients, many of them not translated into French’. Which was untrue – these days, there were French translations cluttering up half the menu, even when they were pointless. What kind of idiot needed to be told that ‘soup’ meant ‘soupe’?

  And there, at the top of the list of bookshops ‘attacking the rightful domination of the French language in its own homeland’, was Marsha’s new store with its ‘foreign poetry’ competition. The website said that the contest ‘excluded Francophone creators from gaining public recognition in the very city that was home to Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire’.

  I read that sentence again. Wasn’t it almost word for word what Jean-Marie had said when he grabbed the microphone?

  Bloody hell, I thought, or should it have been enfer en sang. It looked as though Jean-Marie was in bed with these ethnic cleansers. He was working for the enemy, for the same people who were attacking the tea room he co-owned. Undermining My Tea Is Rich had to be part of his plan to buy me out on the cheap. Who was the collaborateur now?

  Incredibly, though, this wasn’t the worst thing about the website. Because there was another collaborator in there. Or collaboratrice. All the photos in the ‘Occupation Linguistique’ section were quite obviously by Alexa. They weren’t as arty as her usual stuff, but the little vignettes of, for example, my menu lying on a table alongside a plate of half-eaten fruit cake, or the poster in Marsha’s window reflecting a couple of trendy girls passing by and apparently smiling at the idea of the poetry competition – they were pure Alexa. It was just sad that such classy pictures were set alongside racist rants about supposed linguistic genocide.

  She was still not taking my calls, but I left a rant of my own on her voicemail, and this time I didn’t care about going over the minute mark.

  ‘How can you do this to me, Alexa? You’re actually working for these loonies who want to get the tea room and the bookshop closed down? And collaborating with Jean-Marie? Are you also doing photo shoots for the Front National? Putting together a nice Facebook page for them – illegal immigrant of the month, with his name and address so the loonies can go and firebomb his apartment? Fucking hell, Alexa.’

  OK, that last allegation was over the top, but she deserved it. I was tempted to go round to her apartment – she was almost certainly still living at her dad’s place near Bastille – for a showdown.

  As I hung up, I noticed that the other people on the café terrace were staring at me. A pair of the dyed-blonde ladies had lifted their glitzy sunglasses on to their foreheads to get a better view of the crazy Anglais. We were a long way from the Latin Quarter, so they probably didn’t hear long, loud outbursts of English very often.

  ‘Désolé,’ I told them. ‘C’est la merde.’

  They nodded sympathetically. You can’t go wrong with merde.

  II

  I was standing in the main hall of the One Two Two, the arts centre where I’d seen the pornographic exhibition with Marsha. The show was still running, but I was all alone, because the public was obviously staying away in droves. With the sound stage dismantled and the vernissage crowd gone, the arts centre was a vast, empty, glass-roofed hangar that was being used by the prevailing wind as a shortcut across the neighbourhood.

  I was there to see Marie-Dominique, who had summoned me to a ‘réunion très urgente’.

  ‘We have some meeting rooms at the One Two Two,’ she bawled down the phone at me. ‘We have to use them because the Minister wants his new Parisian arts centre to be an integral part of daily cultural life. It’s really very inconvenient. We will come from Palais-Royal by taxi, so we might be a little late.’ As if she had been on time at our last meeting.

  Here I was, then, waiting underneath a huge close-up portrait of a naked woman, in a neighbourhood where half of the female population walked about in headscarves for religious reasons. So much for bringing art to the people.

  I decided to give Amandine a call to thank her for passing on the link to the loony website, and maybe do a bit more apologising.

  To my surprise, she didn’t sound angry at all, and even asked me if I was free for lunch.

  ‘Have you spoken to Jean-Marie this morning?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not really, but I can’t talk for long on the phone.’ We arranged to meet in the Marais and said a hurried goodbye.

  A few minutes later Marie-Dominique was marching towards me, two strides ahead of a small flock of her colleagues. I shook hands with her and her three disciples, and realised that I’d forgotten all of their names.

  There was the tall thin guy with the shock of white hair, looking slightly sporty in a polo shirt tucked into smart trousers; the small guy all in grey, his suit today combined with a matching grey shirt; and the small tubby guy who’d worn a black rollneck, and was now in a black jacket.

  ‘Voilà a building that the Ministry has converted into something very special,’ Marie-Dominique boomed, causing the arts centre’s metal beams to shudder. ‘Not many visitors …’ She looked about in a vain search for any sign of human life. ‘But important work is being done here.’ She raised her head towards the giant female nude. Her male colleagues all cowered, as I’d done.

  She led us up a staircase into a gleamingly new corridor of offices: a double row of eight coloured doors, pale blue, milky orange, pistachio and more, on either side of a wood-panelled floor that looked as though no one had ever set foot on it. We trod along it tentatively
, as though we were visiting a deserted spaceship.

  ‘Here,’ Marie-Dominique said, opening the pale blue door and releasing a puff of stale, enclosed air. Someone flicked a wall switch and the overhead lighting pinged on, reflecting starkly off two rows of high-backed office chairs and a long, cigar-shaped meeting table made out of a single length of wood. On one wall there hung a large white screen, connected to a projector waiting for a computer to bring it to life. It looked like a fiendishly expensive meeting room that had never been used.

  ‘Hm,’ Marie-Dominique grunted. ‘No coffee.’

  The next five minutes were given over to deciding whether we should find someone in charge and enquire about state-funded coffee provisions for meetings, or go and buy some from the café hidden away somewhere in the public area of the building. Once it had been established that Marie-Dominique was managing the budget for meetings on this project, and that coffees could be billed to it, all that remained to be done was for her to borrow some cash from the tubby guy, make a note of who wanted what with how many sugars, and decree that the tubby guy should go and fetch the drinks because it still hadn’t been established beyond all doubt that he was actually meant to be attending these meetings.

  A mere twenty minutes or so later, we started to talk about the artists’ residence.

  ‘The reason I called this exceptional meeting,’ Marie-Dominique roared at me, ‘is so that you can give us a short verbal briefing before submitting your written report.’

  ‘I’ve brought along a short rapport préliminaire,’ I said. I’d found the term in an online dictionary.

  I pulled a small sheaf of papers out of a folder, and all their hands went up as though I’d produced a gun.

  ‘No, no, it’s much too early for a written report, even a preliminary one,’ Marie-Dominique foghorned. ‘Why don’t you just tell us everything now, informally, verbally?’

  This sounded fishy, like an excuse to put off paying me for a written report, but I didn’t dare say so.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So I went to look at Projet Bretagne,’ I began, but I was cut off immediately by the tall thin guy.

  ‘Sorry but it’s Projet Bretagne Deux.’

  ‘Deux?’

  ‘Ah oui,’ Marie-Dominique mooed. ‘There’s another project in Brittany now, and we don’t want any confusion, so you must refer to this as Bretagne Deux.’

  ‘What’s Bretagne Une?’ I asked.

  ‘Bretagne Un,’ the all-grey guy corrected me. ‘The un refers to le projet, which is masculine, not to la Bretagne, which is feminine.’

  I thanked him and asked what le projet un was.

  ‘It’s an orchestral concert hall,’ the tubby guy said.

  ‘Brittany lacks concert halls,’ Marie-Dominique told me.

  ‘Two thousand seats,’ tubby guy said.

  ‘Brittany is a very large region.’

  ‘In the village nearest to the Minister’s holiday home.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t meant to be speaking at these meetings,’ Marie-Dominique snapped at him. ‘Now, Paul, please continue. You saw our good friend Gérard Macabé, I presume? Was he dead or just dead drunk?’

  They all laughed, as if this was a great private joke.

  ‘You know about him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, how was the poor man?’ Marie-Dominique asked, an indulgent smile on her face.

  I used my DIY French to paint them as clear a picture as I could of Gérard Macabé’s talent for bumping into walls and throwing glasses out of windows. I also mentioned the amount of contradictory mission statements piled on his desk.

  ‘Look, Paul,’ Marie-Dominique sighed, reducing the volume of her voice to almost normal for once. ‘What you have to understand is that the director of a project like this never lasts more than a year. They are put in charge of an empty building while various departments fight about what is to be done with it, or until there is an election and a new Minister scraps all ongoing projects. This is why someone like poor Gérard gets the job. It is his life. You mustn’t worry about him. We just need to go ahead and prepare everything so that the artists’ – er, Projet Bretagne—’

  ‘Deux,’ the tall thin guy chipped in.

  ‘—can go ahead as planned,’ Marie-Dominique concluded. ‘Now, how soon could you start serving meals there?’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘I thought I was just—’

  Marie-Dominique held up her hands to cut me off. ‘Someone, anyone?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘There’s a kitchen. It’s old, but—’

  ‘And have you prepared some local food menus?’ the all-grey guy asked.

  But this was one step too far. They wanted me to give away everything? Next they’d be telling me I didn’t have to write my report, and the payment I was expecting would be out of the window as fast as one of Gérard Macabé’s glasses.

  ‘I am in the process of writing the menus,’ I said. ‘I’ll send them.’

  ‘Yes, send those to me before the rest of your report,’ Marie-Dominique said, back to full volume again. ‘As soon as you can. Tomorrow?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can I also send you my expenses bill for the trip to Brittany?’ I’d looked up that key French phrase, too – note de frais, pronounced ‘fray’, not ‘frays’. Fraises were strawberries.

  ‘Yes, and you can include our meetings, of course. Including this one.’

  ‘Excellent, merci.’ I could almost feel the euros flowing towards me like the incoming Breton tide.

  ‘Send the expenses to my assistant Monique,’ Marie-Dominique said, and I felt the tide rushing out again. ‘By the way,’ she went on, ‘I hear that you are involved in French culture yourself?’

  I frowned incomprehension.

  ‘Yes, our mutual friend Jean-Marie told me that you were judging a poetry competition?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted cautiously, wondering why he would have told Marie-Dominique this.

  ‘When is the next round? I would love to attend. I adore poetry.’

  So that was it, I thought. Obviously, Jean-Marie’s main goal in life at the moment was to cause me merde, so why not send this emmerdeuse along to the shop so that the Ministère de la Culture would find out about Marsha’s Anglo-only poetry competition and ban it? Anything to distract me from trying to save my tea room.

  ‘I’ll email you the date and place,’ I promised, deciding that I might just forget.

  III

  Walking from République Métro to the Marais, I tried yet again to get through to Alexa. Still no reply. If she didn’t answer soon, I was definitely going to show up at her apartment. It was only a ten-minute stroll from where I was due to meet Amandine.

  The neighbourhood just north of the rue de Bretagne is very laid-back, but today, for some reason, I couldn’t help thinking about the gruesome things that went on there during the Revolution. Alexa (yes, her again) had told me the story. Temple was the site of the prison where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were held before their execution, and where their ten-year-old son, also inevitably called Louis, died of tuberculosis. And, apparently, in September 1792, a rioting mob had paraded the head of one of Marie-Antoinette’s ladies around on a pike for several hours, having previously raped and hacked the poor woman to death, before trying to break into Temple prison so that they could commit similar outrages on the royal captives there.

  Not that I saw myself as another Louis XVI, with Jean-Marie’s Parisian rabble trying to slice my head off. Well, not exactly. Not yet.

  Entering the rue Dupetit-Thouars, I saw that I was in a high-density lunching spot, with a wide, south-facing pavement that was perfect for café terraces.

  On the corner of the main road was an upgraded Parisian café. Not a trendy one – it had fake Louis XVI-type chairs (a homage to the neighbourhood’s former resident, no doubt), and a board in the window advertising touristy stuff like crêpes, sandwiches, omelettes and even cappuccinos.

  Next up was a juice bar, a bar à jus, with a toasted-s
andwich menu and a few sunny tables on the pavement, all of them occupied. You see, Jean-Marie, I thought, the healthy option does bring in the lunchers.

  Then came a small Asian takeaway and a focaccia/pizza place, the latter a sort of cramped, elbow-to-elbow wine bar that was also doing good business. Their menu in the window featured translations that were just as pointless as mine: a pizza rossa was, a footnote informed the linguistically challenged, red.

  And just a few metres further on came an eatery that made me stop and stare. On a sunny street corner stood a salad-and-sandwich bar so full of tropical foliage that it looked as though people were queuing up to buy palm trees. It was, a big notice promised, bio, and was startlingly like My Tea Is Rich, offering soup/sandwich/drink deals, with the soup of the day a fresh courgette-and-mint velouté – a chic word implying that it would be much more appetising than your basic soupe. And the place was heaving with trendy locals wanting to spend their cash on something seasonal and healthy-sounding.

  It made me think how insane Jean-Marie was to want to change the tea room into a stodge factory – even if the stodge was tasty.

  And, as if to confirm my doubts, the large café on the next corner was a trendy upgrade of the traditional Parisian bistrot. Unlike the new boutiquey lounge on Jake’s street corner, which was a break from tradition, this place was an evolution, like the son of a faded sixties film diva popping up on screen as a fresh, unwrinkled version of his mum. It still looked like a bistrot, with round-topped tables, a zinc bar and old, overpainted fixtures, but the menu and the staff had been updated: the waiter was sporting an out-of-work-actor look while the waitress went for underplayed, businesslike sexiness, and the menu was overflowing with marinated vegetables and seafood, most of them accompanying salads. To be fair to Jean-Marie, there was also a beef-only section on the menu – heavy on burgers and different sorts of steak like bavette, entrecôte and tartare – but overall the emphasis was on staying hip and healthy.