Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  Nathalie spent a couple of minutes burbling about focus and light and intensity, and then settled down to join me in trying to solve the central problem of the whole thing, the real Pompidou Centre of a question, with its innards on the outside and its inner workings hidden away.

  Where the hell was sexy Sacha, the Ukrainian lover boy?

  ‘Two possibilities,’ Nathalie said, pulling me into the centre of the room to stop me circling aimlessly like an eagle with too many rabbits to choose from. ‘One, these are the men in her life, and you are one of them. Two, these were the men in her life, and you are not one of them any more.’

  She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender, a French way of signalling ignorance in the face of life’s mysteries.

  ‘Merde.’ I don’t know why it came out in French, but it summed up pretty accurately how I was feeling.

  ‘Ask her,’ Nathalie said, pointing towards the door.

  I looked around, expecting to see Alexa striding in, having just taken yet another sneak photo of me.

  But no, Nathalie was pointing at the visitors’ book lying open on a small square table.

  ‘I can’t just write “Where’s Sacha, then?”, can I?’ I was standing over the table, pen in hand, in even more anguish than usual when faced with the prospect of having to write something pithy and intelligent.

  ‘No. That would be cruel,’ Nathalie agreed.

  A middle-aged attendant in a white, Centre Pompidou-logo’d T-shirt was sitting behind the visitors’ book watching us as we shared our bout of writer’s block. Her eyebrows rose millimetre by millimetre with each of our groans of frustration, then started to descend at the same speed as she fixed her gaze on my face and recognition dawned.

  Finally I wrote, ‘Thank you so much, Alexa,’ and signed with a kiss.

  The attendant was smiling up at me.

  ‘C’est vous, non?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I confessed, feeling like the actor getting recognized the day after his debut episode in the soap.

  ‘You are one of her father’s lovers,’ the woman added, spoiling it all.

  ‘No, Madame, he is my lover.’ Nathalie gave the woman a lascivious grin and we made a theatrical exit.

  ‘Wait here,’ Nathalie ordered. Dumping her large leather handbag in my arms, she strode across the hallway to a door decorated with the plastic silhouette of a lady with a wide skirt, no breasts and no feet.

  I stood in the middle of the wide corridor, feeling stupid about feeling stupid about having to hold on to a woman’s handbag.

  Of course people wouldn’t think it was mine, I told myself. And even if they did, so what? A man has every right to carry the handbag of his choice.

  I finally worked out a way to hold on to it that implied it wasn’t mine, without revealing that I felt totally ridiculous having to hold it – arms folded, one palm held upwards with the handle of the bag resting on my unclenched hand. A pose that said, ‘See, I’m just waiting for the owner to return from the toilet and reclaim it.’

  Having solved this tricky problem, I let my mind stray back to my more serious worries. Alexa, the photos, Sacha, me. It was a jigsaw with too many pieces.

  ‘Paul?’

  She’d changed and not changed at all. She was paler – after all, it was early November, and summer was a long way behind us. She was wearing her battered old leather jacket, which clung to her like the armour of a Roman gladiator. But the jacket now seemed to be part of a look. Not a formulaic, catalogue style – this was a me-rocker attitude. An extra ear piercing here, a splash of red-gold eye makeup there. The London, I-am-who-I-am-and-fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it look. Anarchically sexy.

  ‘Alexa. What are you doing here?’ Yes, there were a million intelligent questions I could have asked her, and I chose the one at the bottom of the list.

  ‘Guess.’ She nodded towards the exhibition. Same old Paul, she seemed to be thinking.

  ‘No, I mean . . . Oh, dammit, Alexa, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, but what are you doing here, Paul? And where did you get that handbag? It’s very chic. It suits you.’

  There were also a million other questions I’d have preferred her to ask.

  ‘It’s, uh, for my mum,’ I improvised, wishing that someone was there to write me a script. ‘A Christmas present from Paris.’

  ‘A very early Christmas present.’

  ‘Yes, I always do my Christmas shopping early. Saves panic buying on Christmas Eve, I find.’ I really ought to have held the bag up to the camera, TV-shopping style, and waited for the price and phone number to show up on screen.

  ‘And are you also buying her a half-empty bottle of Evian?’ Alexa asked. Nathalie always lugged around her own water supply in case she accidentally wandered across the Mediterranean into the Sahara.

  ‘No, no. She’s here, now. In the ladies’.’ I glanced over at the toilet door and sent out a silent prayer to all the gods of public-toilet facilities that Nathalie should not emerge at that moment, to reveal that either I was a hopeless liar or my mother was not only Parisian but had been a miraculously precocious parent.

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  My prayer had been heeded and Alexa actually started to believe me. Though of course in a couple of minutes, when Nathalie did come back, she was going to disbelieve me very seriously indeed.

  Shit, I thought, why hadn’t I just told her that I’d brought a TV reporter along to see her show? Here I was, digging myself into a pit of lies when I could have been the hero standing atop a sandcastle of efficient networking. Or something like that.

  There was only one thing for it.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told Alexa and sprinted towards the toilets, my handbag almost taking the ear off a passing art-lover.

  I burst into the ladies’ toilet and found that the gods had not only answered my first prayer, they’d also set things up to keep my humiliation to a minimum.

  Several women gave me shocked looks as I let the door slam behind me, so I quickly wished them ‘Bonjour, mesdames,’ a greeting that disarms most potential conflicts in French life.

  One of the women was Nathalie, frustrated by that great injustice which proves that the gods of public-toilet facilities are all male, namely that there are never enough loos for the ladies. She was third in line for one of the two cubicles.

  ‘Nathalie, sorry, got to go.’ I thrust her handbag at her.

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Yes. Business. Jean-Marie. He just called me. Very urgent. Sorry.’

  I got the hell out of there before she could think of a reply.

  Another miracle – Alexa was still waiting for me. I held my hands out as if they were magnets that could pull her up the stairs, and told her that we really, really, needed to go and talk somewhere more peaceful. Now.

  ‘But I was going to my—’

  ‘Please, Alexa.’ This time my prayer was accompanied by the appropriate joined-hand gesture.

  ‘But your mother? Don’t you want to wait?’

  ‘Mum? Oh, no. No, she suffers from terrible constipation. She’ll be hours.’

  6

  WE WENT TO a trendy café with a full-face view of the Centre Pompidou. It had some of the snootiest waiters I’ve ever been snooted by in my life, but upstairs on the mezzanine the lighting was dim and the Philippe Starck chairs were so hard and metallic that you were almost propelled forwards across the table into the arms of the person sitting opposite you. So if you were going to have a conversation with your ex about why it was absolutely essential that you both stop farting about and admit that you are meant for each other, this was as good a place as any to do it.

  And my priority numéro un, I kept telling myself, was simple – just try and stick to the truth for once.

  ‘My mum’ll come here when she’s finished,’ I told Alexa.

  Yes, bad start. Not only was I bullshitting again, I also felt that it really would be wise to steer the conversation away from the subject of my mother’s alle
ged bowel problems.

  ‘But if she can’t find us?’

  ‘It’s OK, we can see the exit from here.’

  ‘What does she look like?’ I wondered whether Alexa was taking the pee, but there was a look of real concern on her face that made me want to leap across the table and kiss her to death.

  ‘She’s like me but with tits. But listen, Alexa, about the exhibition . . .’ It worked. At the mention of her photos, Alexa stopped staring out the window. ‘It was fantastic. And I don’t just mean because I was in it,’ I added quickly. ‘The photos are all great. And in Beaubourg, too. You must be so proud. Though I think I can understand why you didn’t want me to see it.’

  ‘You can?’

  This one short sentence sparked something off. Silence fell over us like a blanket of snow. We were speechless but speaking volumes. It felt as if words and pictures were flying across the table between us as fast as bytes down a phone line. Memories, misunderstandings, anger, affection, and in my case at least, several megabytes of hope.

  I don’t think I’ve ever looked into someone’s eyes for so long without blinking. At least, not since I used to stare at my Kylie Minogue poster and ask her if she liked young English boys.

  ‘Paul?’

  A huge fist of nerves grabbed me by the throat. What if Alexa was about to say, Sorry, mate, I married whatisname yesterday and I’m three months pregnant?

  No. No wedding ring. What a beautiful thing a bare ring finger is.

  And pregnant? No. Well, not three months, anyway. Way too slim.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you want to say to me that was so urgent?’ She seemed almost breathless.

  ‘Just one thing, really.’ Except that now I couldn’t work out how to phrase it. I was the new recruit who pulls the pin out of the grenade and then forgets how to throw it. Not that I wanted to throw hand grenades at Alexa. Far from it.

  ‘Yes?’

  I stretched my fingers out a millimetre closer to hers on the table. If they so much as twitched I wasn’t going to say it. Only trouble was, I was still looking into her eyes so I couldn’t see whether she pulled away or not.

  ‘It’s. Oh, shit.’ Where should I start?

  ‘It’s so shit?’

  ‘No, no. It’s not shit at all. Well, yes it is. That’s the thing, you see, Alexa. Without you, it is so shit.’

  She laughed, but I thought – hoped – I saw the tiniest prickle of a tear in the corner of one eye. Of course it might have been an allergic reaction to the cigarette smoke in the room. But a hint of a tear was all I needed to give me the courage to go on.

  ‘Yes, Alexa. That’s it. That’s what I’ve realized. I’ve been dashing about setting up the tea room and stuff, and it’s soaked up most of my energy for the last three months or more, and I broke up with my new girlfriend because of it, and through it all, what I’ve realized is, without you, if you’re not there somewhere, it’s all . . .’ I waved my hands above the table, trying to express the whole gassy emptiness of things that take up space in your life but don’t necessarily have much substance. ‘It’s all just . . .’

  ‘Shit?’ The tear hadn’t grown or receded, but now she was smiling.

  So was I. God, it’s so much easier when you just tell someone what you feel, I thought. Why the hell do we waste so much time not telling them? What self-defence mechanism is it that makes us inflict so much pain on ourselves?

  ‘Well, not totally shit, of course, because the tea room is working out, it’s fun.’

  ‘And screwing Virginie was nice, too, I expect?’

  ‘Yes, maybe almost as nice as screwing big blond Ukrainians. I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. But that doesn’t matter. It’s all meaningless. It’s you I want. Need. You know. Love.’

  Wow, that word hurt a lot, but it was better out than in.

  We Brits have it much harder than the French. They’ve got their word ‘aimer’, which means to love, sure, but it also means to like. So you can get away with telling someone you love them without nearly so much risk and commitment.

  I’d had it done to me. A woman says ‘je t’aime’ and then quickly adds ‘bien’ on the end, and suddenly it’s just, ‘je t’aime bien’ – ‘I like you a lot.’

  I guess we could achieve the same deflating effect in English by saying ‘I love you’ and then tacking on ‘in that wig’. But generally, when we use The Word, even as ham-fistedly as I’d just done, it actually means something.

  ‘You are sure you’re not just feeling flattered because of the photos?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘No. Well, yes. Incredibly flattered. Why didn’t you tell me you’d taken so many?’

  She shrugged. Not an annoying Parisian shrug of indifference. This was a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘When I was taking the photos, I couldn’t tell you that I was taking photos of you because that was the charm of it. You didn’t know what I was doing. And then, when I thought I could tell you, because we were really finished, then . . .’

  ‘Then I pissed you off with my stupid phone calls so you didn’t want me to see them. I know, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. It’s so complicated. I’m with someone now.’

  I know, I wanted to say, and he’s a rich blond hunk, but so what? Rich blond hunks tend to get over break-ups quicker than other people. It’s in the very nature of rich blond hunkdom that they’re never alone for long.

  ‘And, oh.’ She pressed her fingers against her eyebrows as if she was trying to clear her sinuses. ‘It will sound terrible, but Yuri, Sacha’s dad, you know he will finance my film.’

  This was what you might call a bucket-of-icy-water-down-the-boxer-shorts moment. Not only was Sacha a rich blond hunk, he was a rich blond career move, too.

  Though it seemed to me that there was one essential point she was missing.

  Surely, no matter how important the film was to her, she wasn’t going to stay with Sacha just because his dad had promised to finance her? What would she do after the film was made – say she was going to leave him if daddy didn’t back the sequel?

  ‘Alexa, let’s have dinner together. We’ve got to keep talking. This is important.’

  ‘I can’t, Sacha’s waiting at my father’s apartment.’

  ‘Call him and say you’ll be home late. You’ve got to go out with the director of Beaubourg, anything. Please.’

  She took a deep breath. She was going to have to give one of us a punch in the mouth. Which one was it going to be?

  ‘OK.’ She reached into her jacket pocket for her phone. ‘And you call your mother and say sorry for leaving her.’

  A fair compromise, I thought. A punch for him, a slap for me.

  7

  THE FIRST TIME I ever kissed Alexa, she tasted of French agriculture. She’d just eaten Reblochon, a runny cheese that gives off an aroma somewhere between old sock and cow dung. But I didn’t mind – I’d just eaten andouille de Vire, a sausage that smells even more pungent.

  This time, a year later, both our mouths were like empty jars of caviar, so we had definitely come on in the world.

  We were standing on the Pont des Arts, a spindly, wind-blown pedestrian bridge from where you can look along the Seine towards Notre Dame, which, from a distance, seemed to be a horned animal waiting in the undergrowth to pounce on one of the many bateaux mouche heading up the river towards it.

  Closer to us, almost immediately below the bridge, was an arrow-shaped garden on the prow of the île de la Cité. This, Alexa told me, was where King Henri IV used to seduce his lovers.

  ‘I expect there weren’t as many tourists and homeless people back then,’ I suggested.

  ‘You’re really not romantic, are you, Paul?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said, kissing her.

  ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘I like Sacha a lot, I really do.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ And I meant it, too. There it was. Proof. Poor old Sacha had been relegated to the ‘like’ division. He wa
sn’t in the ‘love’ league. ‘But I love you, Alexa, and I want to be with you. And I’m old enough to know what I want.’

  First time I’d ever used my age as an argument with a woman. Bloody hell, I thought, was this maturity finally arriving? Or old age?

  Back in the Russian restaurant Alexa had taken me to, I’d tiptoed into the potential minefield of why she shouldn’t stay with someone because his dad’s rich, and I’d come out of it pretty well unscathed. It was a dilemma that had been bothering her, too.

  However, she’d hit back at me with a real heat-seeking missile of a question.

  OK, she asked, what if she did drop everything, move out of Yuri’s house in London and find alternative funding for her film? Would I still be there for her?

  She’d taken a slug of ice-cold vodka and breathed her worries at me in all their chilling detail.

  ‘The first time we were together, you slept with another woman,’ she said.

  ‘I was unconscious at the time.’

  ‘OK, we have discussed this. Then you slept with Virginie.’

  ‘I thought she was your way of telling me to forget you and find someone else.’

  ‘Another girl as a goodbye present? I am not so generous. But OK, we have discussed this, too. But do you see what I mean? I am not ready to leave London yet. I am trying to organize this same exhibition there. Will I call you in Paris and get a woman who has picked up the phone from the side of your bed?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I was going to add that I never let anyone else answer my phone, but it wasn’t the right time for a joke like that. The air was too full of vodka and heat-seeking missiles. ‘I know what I want now, Alexa, and it’s you. And only you. I’d never have slept with Virginie or any of the others if I’d been with you.’

  ‘Others?’

  Whoops.

  ‘Yes, you know, Florence, my ex-girlfriend, the one I just broke up with.’ No need to confuse tilings by mentioning Nathalie. Besides, I was serious. If someone had suddenly burst into the restaurant and told me I’d won the Shag Anyone In The World lottery, I’d have chosen Alexa, thank you very much. Unless, of course, there’d been a massive cash prize attached if I agreed to shag a reality-TV star, in which case I’d have put on a dozen condoms and donated the money to the Alexa film fund. But only if Alexa agreed.