Like most French queues, this one was two or three people thick. You inched ahead in millimetres, if that's possible, keeping your nose and your toes just in front of the person who arrived after you but stood beside you. In a way, this did give the queue a forward momentum because as soon as you had a molecule of air between you and the person in front, you closed the gap.
The man behind me, a tall, athletic type in jeans and a sports anorak, started a conversation of sorts.
"You have a prescription?" he asked me with the suspicion of someone who can't see all the items in your basket in the five-items-and-under checkout queue.
"Yes." I pulled it out of my pocket.
"Ah. What have you got?"
I snuffled. "A cold," I said, regretting instantly my attempt at bravery. I should have said "cholera" and cleared my way to the front of the line. "You?" I asked.
"Fonkle."
I waited, thinking that he had just cleared his nose before replying. But no more information came.
"Fonkle?" I repeated as best I could.
"Yes."
After much description, some eloquent hand movements and an even more eloquent wince, I deduced that he had a boil, a "furoncle", in his crotch.
"Ooh," I sympathized. "Is good that God invented boxer shorts, eh?"
Thus ended our conversation.
The next person to talk to me was a well-to-do middle-aged career woman who asked if, when I got to the front of the queue, I wouldn't mind trying to get some medication for her. I could phone her when I got within a few metres of the pharmacy, she said.
"You have no prescription?" I asked.
"Yes, but I can't wait."
"Why not? You are very urgent?"
"Why not? This queue, it is so long," she said, looking ill at the mere notion of getting in line.
"Eh, you must wait, this is a queue," said the man beside/behind me.
"I will pay ten euros," the woman said.
"Show me your prescription," the man said, and dropped back half a millimetre to cut the deal.
As far as I could see there were several such deals going on, and just as many irate people raising their voices to heckle the culprits. To no avail. The paying pushers-in pushed in, the hecklers heckled and the self-pitying queue edged slowly forward, blaming God, the state, the weather and everyone else for their misfortune. If you wanted to be very cruel indeed, you could have said it was a microcosm of French society.
It was around two in the afternoon when I finally got to the pharmacy.
Stooping down to a hatch in the iron shutters was a white-coated pharmacienne. She was a very posh and beautiful blonde girl in pearls and a crisp blouse with the top two or three buttons open. A tonic to a suffering man. She was wearing a badge that told me she was on strike.
She was very friendly, and not at all rushed, which may have partly explained the length of the queue. She disappeared for several minutes to assemble my mountain of coloured medicine boxes.
"All this I must take?" I said when she finally reappeared. I didn't know if I even had the strength to carry it home.
She explained that she had to give me two boxes of six tablets of antibiotics because the prescription was for eight tablets - I was going to throw away almost half the treatment. Not to worry, she said, it's all refunded by the social security.
"Or my mutual?" I asked, looking in-the-know.
"Yes."
Massive waste was, it seemed, budgeted into the system.
Did I know what to do with them all, she asked me, her finger hovering over the suppository box. I'd work it out, I assured her. I just wished I knew enough French to tell her that we Brits know our arse from our elbow and our mouth.
When I finally got home, it took me the rest of the afternoon to read the instructions on all the boxes. It was dark by the time I finished all my rubbing, snorting, gulping and inhaling. I did, I must admit, also do a little thrusting. I tried a suppository for size, just for the hell of it. The instructions were translated into English, and promised me that "the suppository's actions purify the tracheal conduit without aggressing the digestive system", but all I noticed was a rather unpleasant sensation as if I was about to mess my pants, then a warm, melting feeling as the vapours travelled towards my lungs via the service escalator. And next morning, a greasy explosion when I went to the toilet. I could see that some people of an anal disposition could find it appealing, but it was nothing to write home about.
* * *
When I arrived back at work (or at the office at least), Marianne, who was wearing a neck brace for some reason, smiled at me. So she'd heard. I plonked my sick note down on the reception desk and ignored her speech about being on human resources duty only between such and such a time.
"Bonne journée," I wished her, and headed to the lift.
While I'd been away, I'd had time to read my work contract and consult the internet about French employment law. It turned out that there were healthy compensation packages for having your fixed-term contract terminated before it was up, and lots of rules about only having to do what your job description said.
There would be no English-teaching for me. I was going to negotiate my way out of there with enough cash to be able to loaf around in Paris until I decided to do anything more than loaf.
I’d made an appointment to see Jean-Marie, and he was sitting in his office, with the door open, when I arrived. He was looking positively festive in a white silk shirt and red tie.
"Ah, Paul," he called out when he saw me. Suddenly he was grave. His captain-of-industry expression, I supposed.
I went into his office.
"You are cured, I hope," he said, still grave.
"Yes, thank you. You too?"
"Yes. Sit down."
"I'll just go and put my coat-" I gestured towards my office.
"No, no. Just sit down, please."
I sat, wondering why the hurry. Had Britain and America invaded France? I hadn't listened to the news that morning. Maybe I was to be sent to an internment camp?
"There is a problem," Jean-Marie said. He certainly looked as if he was rehearsing to make a presidential TV speech about the need for courage in the face of the Anglo-Saxon enemy. Especially sitting as he was below his medal for bovine bravery.
"Yes, that is what we are here to talk about, Jean-Marie."
"But this is a new problem."
"Ah?"
"Yes, I am afraid we must fire you."
"Fire me? But you're the one who's stopping the project."
"We must fire you for serious fault."
"Serious fault?"
"Yes, faute grave, we say."
"What faute grave? I've just given my sick note to Marianne. I wasn't-"
"No, no, it is not your absence. It is this."
He pushed a sheaf of papers across his desk at me. I looked at the top sheet and understood.
"You've been snooping in my email," I said. The papers were printouts of all the anti-French jokes I'd received and carefully not printed out.
"Snooping? No. Your email messages are stocked in our company's computer system."
So it was Marc who'd been snooping.
"But you can't fire someone for receiving a few jokes."
"A few jokes?" He held his finger and thumb apart to show how thick the pile was.
"Just because someone makes jokes about France you can fire me? But that's totalitarianism."
"Oh no," Jean-Marie laughed bitterly. "It is not because they are about France. Not at all. No, it is the time. The time you took to read them. Hours! The email is not for private fun, it is for work."
This was total hypocrisy, of course. Everyone in the company, including Jean-Marie, wasted hours a day on coffee breaks, smoking breaks, long lunch breaks, calling the babysitter breaks, reserving train or plane tickets for upcoming weekend breaks and, more recently, trading in second-hand aspirin breaks. But, as with all the best hypocrisy, the truth didn't matter. He'd got me. I knew it,
he knew it. All that remained to be discussed was the price.
"I can contest this with the inspecteur de travail," I said.
"If you stay in Paris long enough to wait for the decision."
"Mine isn't the only interesting mailbox in the company."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I just happened to be in Stéphanie's office one day and she'd left her email open."
"Ah." He gave this some thought. "I'm sure she has threw her old messages in the, how you say, corbeille?" His English slipped but he kept his cool.
"Maybe she printed them out and left them lying around for people to find."
At this, Jean-Marie glanced across towards Christine's door. Through the glass we could see that she was on the phone.
He spoke softly.
"Who might be interested in these messages?"
Meaning, I suppose, his wife or the Ministry of Agriculture? Or other people. For all I knew, there may well have been even more going on between him and Stéphanie than sex and illegal beef imports.
I did a Parisian shrug. Not for me to say, not my problem. As always, the shrug worked.
"Very well," Jean-Marie said. "I will forget these jokes. You have done your best for the company, so we will give you the entire, how you say, dédommagement?"
"Compensation."
"Compensation and terminate your contract prematurely for economic reasons. OK?"
"And let me stay for free in Élodie's apartment."
"Ah, merde, là tu exagères!"
If he hadn't looked so murderously furious, it would have been funny. I'd tried to dip into his personal pocket and he'd reacted as if I'd stuck a suppository up his backside without asking permission. Suddenly he was as red as his tie, and his temples were almost visibly throbbing.
"I tell you what, Jean-Marie, you give me a little end-of-contract bonus and I'll pay it to you as rent."
He leant forward across his desk at me, grumbling obscenities. "Petit merdeux" seemed to be the most frequent.
He told me, still in French, to "fuck the camp", as they say, out of his apartment by the end of the month.
"Why, or you'll report me to the housing department?"
This provoked more temple-throbbing and a deep, inarticulate, animal growl.
I got out my phone, where I'd keyed in the numbers of all those specialists. It looked as if Jean-Marie was going to be in urgent need of a cardiologist.
AVRIL
Liberté, égalité, get out of my way
On April the first, you understand why the French admire the British sense of humour: we have one.
No, that's unfair to some very funny French guys, including one comedian called Coluche who drove his motorbike into an articulated lorry. Not as a joke. It killed him, and I now wished it hadn't. I could just about understand enough French to follow some of his old sketches on video, and I thought this is what France needs now - someone who really takes the piss out of politicians. Not just the ruling party, not with clever irony, but a real below-the-belt debunking of the whole cushy lot of them. He actually stood for President in 1981, as "le candidat bleu-blanc-merde", and rumour has it he withdrew because the secret services made it clear that he wouldn't survive very long if he stayed in the running.
He would have thought of a good spoof for my first April Fool's Day in France. All the French do is stick fish on each other's backs. Not live fish - that might actually be funny. A large turbot flapping between someone's shoulder blades could be amusing, I imagine.
As I sat in the window of my local gay café (in the mornings it was no different to any straight Parisian café except that the waiters bore traces of last night's makeup), I watched a group of schoolkids jostling each other and trying to pin crudely drawn paper fish on each other's anoraks.
"Why a fish?" I asked the waiter as he brought me the newspaper I'd asked for.
"Why not?" he replied, which was a fair point. After all, everything else in France is centralized - why not April Fool's jokes?
French newspapers do print spoof articles, but they're often fish-based. So when I read on the front page of my newspaper that journalists were going on strike, I was almost sure it wasn't an April Fool's joke.
The journalists were downing tools because, they said, the campaign for the upcoming local elections was boring. I could relate to that. Now that the Iraq war was all but over and forgotten, it must have come as a shock to reporters to have to write about who was going to win power in Camembertville-sur-Merde, population three goats and a hairy old lady.
But at least these local elections had more at stake than your usual round of arguments about which party will devote the most money to building playgrounds for goats. It was a year after the presidential elections when a far-right fascist candidate had nearly got elected. There was a real prospect of an embarrassingly high number of regions voting in fascist local representatives.
The reporters didn't exactly phrase their protest as "the election campaign is too boring". The newspaper quoted a journalists' union official that they were striking "in protest at the various political parties' failing to address the important issues facing the country - the recession, welfare reform, unemployment and the French role in international affairs post-Iraq."
But I'd heard for myself how mind-numbingly boring the campaign could get. It was a radio interview with a politician, and the gist of the interview, as far as I could gather, was "thank you for coming on to the programme, Mr Politician" and "those are fascinating policies", with a subtext of "hey, millions of people are listening to us, let's talk as pompously as possible and they'll think we're intelligent".
In this last newspaper before the presses fell silent, I read a breakdown of the various parties' programmes. It was true that they didn't address what I saw as important issues.
The Communists were promising retirement for all state employees at age 35. The Socialists were proposing absolutely nothing because they couldn't elect a leader who would propose things. The centre-right parties (of which there were about ten) were all promising employers that they would no longer have to pay workers and would be exempt from prosecution for any industrial pollution that killed fewer than 100,000 people. The far right was proposing, less realistically, to have immigrants barbecued in every place du marché on Friday nights. And in a similar vein, the rural party promised to change the law on endangered species so that hunters could now shoot dodos, unicorns, mermaids and American tourists.
It was, as Coluche would probably have put it, liberté, égalité, merde. And I half wished the reporters would stay on the job to write about it, because I had plenty of reading time now that I was banned from working.
I had quickly settled into a not unpleasant time-wasting routine. I really don't know why farniente is an Italian expression, because Paris is the perfect place for it. Breakfast at a café (stare longingly at passing women). Wander to an art exhibition (stare longingly at young female tourists and the art students with part-time jobs as security staff). Lunch at a café (see "breakfast" above), take in a movie (drool at the heroine), go to the pub with English mates (talk so loudly about women that you scare them all off).
The only thing that sometimes disturbed my routine was the weather, which was playing frustrating games. A day might start off bright and warm, and you could see that the girls had light, revealing summer clothes under their coats. But then, come lunchtime, it would cloud over or rain, and the revealing clothes would stay unrevealed.
I was cured of my cold but I was still suffering. It was officially springtime in Paris, and I was finding that the relief at not being forced to have sex four times every night does not last very long.
I met up with my old friend Jake the American to discuss my predicament. He was still carrying on with his international sex project. And not only had we forgiven each other for the "fuck off out of the bookshop" incident, he was now positively grateful to me. At a recent writers' group meeting, he'd been able to express so
much politically correct outrage at my lack of respect for women's literature that one of the budding authoresses slept with him. Which gave him yet another poem (she was from New Zealand). Luckily, he didn't offer to read it to me.
Now we met up at the Luxembourg gardens, a large public park in a rich area just south of the Latin quarter. The park has a circular boating lake where at weekends kids can hire toy yachts. It also has one of the few public lawns where you are actually allowed to walk. This morning, a weekday, it was covered with a light sprinkling of toddlers and their attendant mothers and babysitters.
Jake and I were sitting outside the park's small cafe. This is housed in a small pavilion, with a terrace of light-green metal chairs laid out under a stand of towering horse chestnuts. Today the leaves were young, almost yellow, and twisting in the breeze. We were comfortably away from the traffic but in danger of being pooped on by pigeons. This wouldn't have mattered to Jake. He was almost superhumanly scruffy. His eyes were totally hidden by droopy, unwashed hair, and his old suit jacket now looked as if it had been chewed up by a French pig and excreted all over him. He probably wouldn't have got served at the cafe without my relatively chic presence.
We dispensed with the war ("it's always the civilians who suffer", "why do so many people swallow the line that politicians feed them?" etc) and then got down to the meat of the matter.
I brought him up to date on my Jean-Marie and Marie situation and asked him, as a man who was apparently willing, no, anxious, to sleep with any testicle-free human being over the age of consent, what to do.
Jake laughed and swung his leg at a pair of pigeons with malformed feet who had hobbled over to see if they could beg a crumb of food. Or had wanted to try a bit of pig excreta.
A Year in the Merde Page 21