Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  As far as women were concerned, he was now shacked up with a lady from Algeria.

  ‘Are you nuts? An American living in sin with a Muslim woman?’

  He let a philosophical stream of white smoke seep out between his lips.

  ‘Don’t inquiet yourself. She’s a verve.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know. Dammit. Une veuve? Dead husband?’

  ‘Widow.’

  ‘Yeah. Widow. Shit. Anyway, the people in her building are totally cool. They’re not religious. They’re just content that Kalifa is getting some.’ He started sniggering as if the pipe had been bubbling with a less legal type of smoke. ‘You ever try a verve?’

  ‘No, I usually stick to my own generation.’

  ‘Yeah, well she’s only forty, though she looks older ’cause she’s had three petits. Anyway, she sure knows how to take her foot.’

  ‘Take her foot?’ And where does she put it exactly? I wondered.

  ‘Prendre son pied? You understand – enjoy herself. How do we say it?’

  I really didn’t want to know, I told him. I had enough problems with my own perverse forms of masochism without looking into self-abuse from another continent.

  ‘Anyway, comment ça va for you, Paul? Not très bien, uh?’

  ‘No, not very bien at all.’

  He sucked on brass as I talked him through my feelings about Florence’s phone call and Alexa’s hallucinatory body. As I spoke, the city grew darker, the mosquitoes grew bolder, and I had time to sweat out pretty well all of the mint tea I’d ordered.

  ‘OK, if I understand well,’ he finally pronounced, ‘you have broken with a girlfriend who is French, and you are attracted by an ex-girlfriend who is also French. It is evident why you are in the merde. You must enlarge your geographic horizons.’

  I felt like pissing in his hookah to give his tobacco a suitably scornful flavour.

  ‘Yes, well thanks for your advice, Jake. Let me know when you give up poetry and start writing self-help books. What exactiy is this concert, anyway?’

  ‘A Lithuanian jazz singer.’

  ‘Lithuanian jazz? What’s that like?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably like Estonian jazz.’

  Ask a silly question.

  ‘You know the difference?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. The French, they have no taste for music. They don’t know what’s good and what’s merde. So they listen to anything. That’s why France is such a great place for World Music. It’s because they can’t decide.’

  ‘And every type of World Music show attracts different nationalities of women?’

  ‘Exact.’

  ‘But you’ve just said you’re living with an Algerian.’

  ‘Oh, she’s cool with my poésie project as long as I don’t bring the women home. Hey, Mokhtar!’ He waved towards the café and the young waiter came out to collect his money.

  It struck me that Jake was genetically incapable of worrying about anything. If any of the mosquitoes buzzing round us had drunk a drop of his blood, they would have decided that life was too short to bother with all the hassle of biting people, and gone to chill out in a drain. The WHO would only need to send Jake on a tour of the Third World, and he would eradicate malaria.

  The basement club was as well ventilated as the inside of a jet engine. The low, black-painted ceiling and the lights trained towards the stage had raised the temperature from the ambient jungle at street level to something approaching the surface of the sun. The waistband of my jeans was sopping wet before I’d crossed the entrance hall and dripped myself on to a stool at the bar.

  On stage were a lone microphone, a small drum kit and a double bass, all of which I expected to melt at any moment.

  Jake’s eyes weren’t turned towards the stage, though. He was watching the entrance.

  ‘Sure to be some Lithuanian women here, right? Maybe Latvians, also. You got to ask all the women you encounter.’

  So as the place filled up and we combated dehydration with bottles of beer that seemed to evaporate before we had a chance to drink them, I had a fun time asking every woman who came to the bar what nationality she was. Most of them were French, of course, and only three or four of them took offence at my line of questioning.

  The fun ended when the skinny, vodka-slurping singer came on.

  I daresay Lithuania has produced some real divas, but this girl was more of a dive-bomber. She squealed and howled, and even the protection of half a dozen beers and everyone else’s dope smoke didn’t take the pain out of her unprovoked attack on ‘Sommerr-tam’.

  ‘Got one,’ I told Jake, who was deep in conversation with a Slavic-looking girl.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘A poem for you. There was a chanteuse from Tbilissi, who sang that the leebing was ee-see . . .’

  He stopped me before I could do any more damage to world literature. ‘That is a merde, man. Tbilissi’s not in Lithuania at all. You know nothing in geography.’

  This, I realized, was true. I could only vaguely remember where I was living, which is always a sign that you should go home.

  Besides, the whole Eastern Europe theme was getting me down. I suspected the singer of slipping in a bit of Ukrainian jazz just to spite me.

  One taxi ride later, I was back at the tea room, where I flopped full-length on to my inflatable mattress, remembering just too late that I hadn’t blown it up before I went out.

  Once a masochist always a masochist.

  7

  THE BIG QUESTION was whether to complicate Alexa’s life by telling her my news: like a Picasso painting that’s been locked away in the vault of a private collector for fifty years, Paul West was back on the market. She didn’t need to worry about giving me a bad conscience if she felt like kissing me again.

  Before I could come to a decision, though, she phoned to give me some news of her own. She was in Paris.

  ‘Why don’t you come to see me?’ she said. ‘I’m at the film shoot. There are some real French movie stars.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘At the Bastille. Will you come?’

  ‘Yeah. Great.’

  ‘And bring your business card, maybe you can get a deal to supply food and drink to the technicians. The coffee is horrible here.’

  I came out of the métro, and turned my back on the new Bastille Opera – well, newish, because it was already looking older and shabbier than the original nineteenth-century one in the Ninth. Several of the entrances had become homeless people’s urinals, a large staircase was being used as a tourists’ picnic zone, and one whole side of the building was swathed in netting to prevent the blocks of cladding from falling off and killing passers-by. It must have been designed by the guy who trained Nicolas, I thought maliciously.

  I walked past a shop selling white-leather sofas, life-size porcelain cheetahs and glitzy chandeliers that would have looked over the top at a transvestites’ Abba revival party. This was one of the last vestiges of the days when the neighbourhood had been full of furniture-makers. I’d come along here with Florence once on the way to a Latin club, and she’d lamented the disappearance of the craftsmen, all the time cringing at what she called the ‘horreurs’ in the remaining furniture shops.

  Now the street was lined with international shopping chains, plus a smattering of local talent including a gothic Jean Paul Gaultier building where a wild homeless guy had taken up residence. Perhaps, after his campaigns using smooth sailor-boy models, Jean Paul was going for more of a shaggy, skin-infection look?

  I turned up a side road, where the big chains disappeared and things got more café- and designer-oriented.

  The sun was shining straight along the narrow street, filling it with hot, stagnant air. It felt like walking into a hairdryer. But a hundred metres up the road, on the other side of an unprepossessing door into the ‘passage’ where the shoot was being held, the hairdryer was suddenly switched off.

  I was in a hidden private street, with crumbling ap
artment buildings lining a cobbled road that led to a shady, tree-filled garden at the other end. The grapevine growing up the white-painted building on my left seemed to be puffing out breaths of pure oxygen. There were traditional craftsmen’s workshops here – I could see lengths of brightly coloured leather hanging up in a bookbinder’s studio, and hunks of carved wood waiting to be varnished and assembled in a low building full of half-finished chairs.

  Where was the film crew, though?

  I went to ask a cute, round-faced girl who was loafing on an old cart halfway down the passage. As I got closer, I saw that as well as long bare legs and tight shorts, she possessed a walkie-talkie. A good sign.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said. ‘The film, is it here?’ My question sounded a bit weird. Like a guy who’s come to collect the ‘special interest’ DVD he’s ordered from the sex shop.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered huskily.

  ‘I came for Alexa.’ Which sounded a pretty good name for the dirty DVD.

  ‘Ah, oui, Alexa.’ Which would have been my best line in the film.

  Still whispering, she explained that she’d have to wait until she got the all-clear on the walkie-talkie before she could send Alexa a message. They were getting ready to shoot a scene. I could only assume ‘they’ were underground because there was no sign of life anywhere. There wasn’t even an unusually bright light coming out of any of the buildings.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You can sit here with me if you want.’

  I wondered what her job description would be on the credits of this movie. Chief cart-sitter?

  Or shorts-expander. Those shorts were being stretched to the limit by her smooth yet rounded thighs, which she was scratching thoughtfully with her walkie-talkie aerial.

  ‘Are you her boyfriend?’ She looked me up and down, her eyes lingering on what I hoped was an adequate bump in my surfer shorts.

  ‘No.’ I returned the compliment and enjoyed a few moments admiring the triangle of cleavage poking out above her clingy orange top. She was wearing a small jewelled cross on a chain around her neck, and Jesus was peeking in a decidedly un-Christian way down between her breasts.

  ‘No, you don’t look Ukrainian,’ she said. I wondered how huge my bump would have had to be to qualify for that honour. ‘You’re not French, are you?’

  ‘No, English.’

  ‘Ah oui? Can you teach me?’ The way she said that was straight out of a dirty DVD, too. The doe-eyed girl asking for instruction in the ways of love.

  ‘Teach me English’ is something you frequently get asked as a Brit in France. If it’s a woman who wants lessons, it’s often a kind of code, and the correct reply is to ask, with an ironic glint in your eye, what she’s going to teach you in exchange. I wished it had been Alexa asking me, but these days she was studying Central European vowel sounds by licking the inside of a Ukrainian’s throat.

  ‘Do you really have time to teach English, Paul?’ Alexa had come up silently behind me and saved me from getting myself into more merde by answering.

  She was dressed in men’s khaki shorts and what would have been a green bikini top if it had had a clip at the back instead of a band of material. She exuded that terrifying sexiness that comes from getting shagged well and regularly by someone else.

  We kissed each other’s cheeks hello, and Alexa introduced me to Virginie, who had obviously grown out of her name a long time ago.

  ‘See you letter,’ Virginie said in English as Alexa dragged me further down the passage.

  ‘Where are you filming?’ I asked.

  Alexa hushed me. ‘The assistant director will get angry if we make a noise, even when they’re not shooting. She’s a bitch. She told one of us to go and stop the talking in the passage. I guessed it was you.’

  She pulled me through yet another unprepossessing doorway into yet another shady haven. It was a row of three glass-fronted houses set in a small, silent courtyard. The cobbled yard was crammed full of young half-dressed people sitting about on metal equipment boxes. A torrent of thick cables poured out of one of the houses and into a corner of the courtyard, where a stone staircase went down into some kind of sunken studio. I could make out the tops of metal sculptures poking up out of a pool of white light.

  ‘That’s where the stars are. We must be very quiet.’ Alexa was clutching my arm, holding me back at the doorway, as if there was a real danger of me charging into the centre of the courtyard and performing my off-key karaoke version of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’.

  ‘What are you doing in the film?’ I asked.

  ‘Assistant.’

  ‘Assistant what?’

  ‘Assistant anything. Like the others. It is work experience.’

  So that was what they were doing. The courtyard was full of unpaid gophers getting work experience in nothing more useful than wearing out their backsides, but dreaming of doing it professionally for the required number of hours a year.

  Alexa lowered her voice even further, and pressed her mouth against my ear. ‘It gets very boring sometimes.’

  ‘Taisez-vous, bordel!’

  A long-haired woman with an earpiece had poked her head out of the stairway and told us to ‘shut up, brothel’. A common French request. Perhaps their brothels are particularly noisy.

  The woman glowered at both of us with equal ferocity. She didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t one of the gophers.

  ‘Can’t we go and talk somewhere?’ I whispered. I didn’t fancy sitting on a metal box all afternoon.

  Alexa waved to a guy who was busy reading the blurb on a can of Coke. She made it clear to him that she was going out for a break. He nodded as if he didn’t give a shit.

  Virginie waved goodbye, but I didn’t get a chance to reply because Alexa was tugging me at a trot towards the street.

  ‘At last, freedom,’ she said, as we hit the wall of hot air on the other side of the passage doorway. ‘It’s like being a nun.’

  ‘Why do you do it, then?’

  ‘Oh, it is good for contacts, and the director is really superb. It is wonderful to see him at work.’

  ‘But you can’t see anything. He’s in the cellar.’

  ‘We see him prepare, we hear him explain. Oh, did you bring your business card?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I gave it to her.

  ‘I’ll give it to the assistant director.’

  ‘But she just yelled at me, she’ll hate me.’

  ‘No, she yells at everyone. And she saw you. That is the important thing. That is why we are there.’

  We went and sat at a café that had annexed a huge area of pavement for its terrace, marking off its territory with potted bamboo plants as if to tell the locals that they’d lost access for ever.

  Alexa ordered two amazingly thick pink fruit juices for us – ‘pêche de vigne’, or vine peach, whatever that was. The juice came in a bottle, but tasted as if it had been inside the fruit just seconds before.

  She sat back and ran a hand down her aching neck. I had to look away. I was thinking that it could have been my hand. And wondering if she wished it was another guy’s. But before I could ask whether she’d like some help with the massage, she started going on about hunky Sacha’s birthday party.

  There had been rivers of caviar, lakes of vodka and champagne, and the street outside had looked like a jam at a Formula One drivers’ car park. Armed bodyguards had set up camp on half a dozen rooftops. Sacha’s presents had included a Ferrari and a recording studio. And no, not just a large tape recorder for his bedroom, this was a whole building equipped with recording equipment, musical instruments and sound engineers. He was now the boss of Sacha’s Studios in Soho.

  And if all that wasn’t excitement enough, Sacha’s dad, Yuri the DVD pirate, had promised to finance Alexa’s new documentary.

  I didn’t dare ask if he’d promised not to bring out a pirate version of it. It might have smacked of sour grapes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.


  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the idea.’ She held up her juice and we clinked bottles. I made sure I was looking into her eyes. ‘Na zdorove!’ she toasted, and took a swig.

  Oh no, I thought, he’s turning her into a Red Army tank driver.

  ‘Where we’re living in Notting Hill, it is a bit like that passage where they are shooting the film,’ Alexa said. ‘More chic, though.’ She seemed to have no idea that I might want to talk about us. Or ‘us’.

  I listened helplessly as she launched into an explanation of the movie’s plot. It was the story of an artist who was going through a midlife crisis and couldn’t work out if he wanted to run off with his young model or stay with his writer wife, who knew about the affair and was encouraging him to get it out of his system. Very French.

  ‘In the end, the model kills herself.’

  ‘Oh yeah, comedy, is it?’

  ‘You English, you think everything must be a comedy.’

  ‘Yes, well you French think that everything has to be about love. And that love is so serious that you’re not allowed to laugh. Don’t laugh, I’m in love. That’s a typical French film.’ Ironically, it was also exactly how I was feeling. Maybe I was turning French.

  ‘So what’s an English film? “Is this good enough to get me a deal to make an action movie in Hollywood?” That’s all your directors want to know.’

  ‘At least it’s more interesting than your director guy working out his hang-ups about his marriage. If they invited him to do a Hollywood action movie, it’d be: when the nation is threatened by nuclear terrorists and a plague of man-eating locusts, the president begins to wonder whether his wife is cheating on him.’

  Alexa suddenly screamed with laughter.

  ‘I was going to kill you, but you are right,’ she said. ‘The bitch assistant director is the director’s mistress. And you know who wrote the script? The director’s wife.’ She clapped. ‘It should be a comedy. The director’s mistress helps the director to make a film written by his wife that ends with the mistress killing herself. It is beautiful. This is why I love talking to you, Paul.’