A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  Madame took it all in for gossip's sake and then announced that we'd better get carrying.

  "But I don't leave," I objected. "I change the door again, and stay here."

  "Non. You do not see big man. Bodyguard," she reminded me, doing her chest-puffing thing again.

  Monsieur, who hardly spoke any French, nodded in support of his wife and said something to her in their usual guttural tones.

  "He say they are angry at four o'clock. You must go."

  "Go where?"

  They had a quick conference and Madame patted me on the arm.

  "We find you apartment. Bodyguard don't find you."

  Monsieur went to get some boxes for my books and CDs, and I began packing my suitcases. Madame stayed to watch.

  "It is that girl, that Élodie," she said, spitting out the name and crossing herself against the she-devil who used to dirty her landings.

  "No, she is in America. It is her father." This seemed the most likely explanation. There was something about the smoothness of the whole lock-changing and telephoning operation that had Jean-Marie's name stamped all over it. Someone had waited till I went out, sabotaged my door, then waited till I came back again so that they could phone me at the opportune moment. The planning was as tight as one of Jean-Marie's collars. The only thing I couldn't work out was why he'd bothered. Surely with the elections coming up he had more pressing things to think about.

  "But it is not his apartment! I report him to the municipalité!" Madame Da Costa was outraged.

  "No." I broke off from scooping up dirty socks and warned her against trying to take on Jean-Marie. "You will lose your job and he will not lose the apartment. This is my victory," I told her. "We break the door, I take my things. It is enough."

  I didn't have many possessions, but by the time they were all stacked in the concierge's loge there was almost no room left in there for oxygen.

  I perched on a suitcase, a binbag full of clothes on my lap, a mug of coffee in my hand, and mused on how low I'd sunk. From my peak as a country-house-owning, boss's daughter-shagging marketing director to a homeless dropout with nothing to hug except a bag of my dirty boxer shorts. Not exactly one for the Forbes list of business success stories. Every bloody thing I'd attempted in Paris was a total screw-up, mainly thanks to Jean-Marie. Oh, and the war of course. What did you do in the war, daddy? Got locked out of my apartment. April Fool was right. April twathead.

  "Don't you have to work today?" I asked Madame who was watching me anxiously, sharing my gloom.

  "No, we work at night."

  "Don't you want to sleep?"

  "We finish four o'clock, sleep before the boys go to school. Sleep in the afternoon maybe."

  "Where is Monsieur?"

  "He gets the car. He takes you to new apartment. With friends."

  "Friends?"

  When Monsieur returned, we quickly filled up a new-looking Renault estate, not that much different from Jean-Marie's bossmobile. The concierges and their families don't spend much on accommodation but they know how to invest in French consumer goods.

  He drove me two or three streets across the Marais and pulled up in the large, cobbled courtyard of a slightly down-at-heel medieval building. The entrance was a peeling old horse gate, and the loge was up a small stone staircase leading into one side of the arch. A frosted-glass door led into a chilly kitchen. This was filled by an immense fridge and a long dining table with a small TV at one end. The TV had at some point in its life been splattered with white paint. Only the screen had been cleaned. The second room was a dark bedroom with double bunk beds along either wall. The curtain was closed and the room smelled of body heat and male armpit.

  Monsieur Da Costa motioned me to be quiet. I could see dark lumps in two of the beds. One of the lumps was snuffling softly as if chewing a piece of gristle in his sleep.

  We unloaded the car and quietly slid my things in amongst the suitcases and packing cases that were already taking up half of the bedroom floor. The place looked like a bolthole for evicted men.

  It took two trips with the car to fetch all my stuff, and then Monsieur said his farewells.

  "You are good here. Here key. Au revoir."

  I thanked him, shook his hand, and I was on my own in the kitchen with only four plastic folding chairs and a kitsch Virgin Mary wall clock for company.

  What the hell should I do? I wondered. Wait until one of the sleeping beauties woke up, and introduce myself as the surprise new lodger? Go back to Madame Da Costa and ask what the arrangements were in terms of rent and how long I could stay? Or head straight to the railway station and get the hell out of France?

  I'm not a quitter, so I decided to head straight to the railway station and book myself a ticket for two weeks later. I figured it'd take me that iong to fumigate my dirty washing and throw out or give away the stuff I didn't want to ship home.

  But where was home? Not with my folks, 1 thought. Anything but that.

  "You bastard, Jean-Marie," I moaned at the innocent Virgin. That would be his real victory - sending me scurrying back to Mummy.

  I hoped that in the fortnight I had left, I would be able to send some farewell merde his way. It would be good to leave my mark on him.

  I was between lessons that afternoon, sitting in a smoky, lonely corner of a cafe, when my phone rang. I recognized the lock-breaker's number.

  It was just after quarter past four. Of course, they'd turned up late. Make the Englishman wait.

  "Oui?" I answered in the macho voice of someone who now has a friend with a sledgehammer.

  "You broke the door?"

  "Which door?"

  "Your door."

  "I don't have a door."

  "You will have to pay for the lock."

  "Which lock?" I thought it was a shame my students weren't listening to me. This was a good example of how to ask open questions. We could have carried on for hours. Which lock? Which apartment? Which shampoo? Which Belgian philosopher?

  The caller, who was presumably the bodyguard guy, finally lost his cool and gave my old address.

  "Ah, yes, I know that address. I suggest that you send the bill to the occupant, Monsieur Jean-Marie Martin. That's M-A-R"

  "Petit merdeux," the voice interrupted, recalling Jean-Marie's favourite description of me last time I saw him. They'd obviously been discussing me.

  The voice was still growling on threateningly, so I hung up and made a note to myself to change my phone number. Only another fortnight and I'd be out of their reach for good.

  My three new room-mates were a friendly enough bunch. Two of them, Pedro and Luis, worked nights cleaning with Monsieur Da Costa. The other, Vasco, I finally worked out, after he seemed to explain to me that he was some kind of pole-vaulting percussionist, worked days for a scaffolding company. They were all unreconstructed workmen of the testicle-scratching, freestyle burping variety, but they didn't look down on soft-handed types like myself. They were my age or a little bit older, roughing it for a few months at a time, sending all their money home to their families, and they accepted me into the fellowship of exiles.

  When I got back chez nous that first evening with a couple of bottles of wine, they were just cooking up what was probably lunch for two of them, dinner for the other. It was basically fish and chips. From what I saw subsequently, they ate this at almost every mealtime except their respective breakfasts.

  They offered me a share of that first lunch/dinner, and I had to bite back the urge to refuse. The frying pan was so fatencrusted, inside and out, that you couldn't tell what colour it had been. The chip fryer, an enclosed bubble-like contraption that hid your chips from view while cooking them, was open and seemed to be full of the same engine oil that had been in it when it was sold ten years earlier.

  The food itself tasted fine, especially washed down with my wine, and though we hardly shared any words of a common language except "ça va" and the names of a few footballers, we bonded over clinking glasses and an old episode of B
aywatch on Portuguese cable. Pamela Anderson's lips were totally out of synch with her voice, but then as far as I knew they had been out of synch on the original too. I hadn't paid that much attention to the dialogue.

  I slept opposite Vasco, on the bottom-left bunk, which I seemed to have inherited from a pot-bellied grizzly bear, to judge by the bulging dip in the springs. I realized that I hadn't slept in the same room as another guy, apart from the odd post-drink crashout on a bedroom floor, since my school's last geography field trip, when we used to have nightly farting competitions in the boys' dorm. Vasco could nave farted at international competition level, and I didn't want to give him any complexes, so I always did my best to force out a sympathetic goodnight fart before dropping (or drooping) off to sleep.

  The apartment was as cramped to live in as a long-distance train compartment. You were always stepping around somebody or their luggage. A couple of months earlier it would have been deeply depressing. But now, just a few days before throwing in my cards with Paris, it felt no more inconvenient than a transit-lounge stopover on a flight back from Asia. I just had to accept that there seemed to be little chance of me picking up any more Parisian babes before I left the city. Bringing one back to my shared bunkhouse would have cooled down the fieriest female erogenous zones.

  In my last full week before leaving Paris, my boss Andrea sent me to teach a five-day course in a large computer hardware company. There were two of us teaching different groups. The young sales execs were being taught by a Floridan gal called Carla, whose main teaching qualifications were suntanned thighs and an utterly captivating technique for perching on the edge of a desk. Her presence forms were always overflowing with signatures and telephone numbers. She was no fool. She'd negotiated a pay rise from the pragmatic Andrea on the basis of those legs, and spent half of her time doing marketing for the school whenever Andrea thought that a short skirt was necessary to clinch a deal, which, this being Paris, it often was.

  My group consisted of the ones who didn't care about getting into Carla's group or hadn't been pushy enough to get in there, plus a few who really wanted to learn business English from a real English businessman (or ex-businessman, anyway). This would have meant more work for me, but I dug out some of my reports on tea rooms and taught them the key vocabulary from those.

  They all thought the tea rooms were a great idea, of course, which would have been infuriating if I hadn't been so exhausted by having to concentrate for seven whole hours in a day. I was like the Portuguese guys, slaving for cash to take home. You really earned your money on these all-day courses. It was much tougher than working in an office. You can't email your mates while standing in front of a class of ten students. Well, not discreetly, anyway.

  Carla and I went to the canteen together, usually without our students. The students almost always used lunch with teachers as an excuse to practise excruciating small talk.

  It was one lunchtime while Carla and I were at the canteen that our chat was timidly interrupted.

  "Pol? C'est toi?"

  I looked up to see a pleasant female face smiling at me. I knew the face but couldn't get the name quickly enough.

  "Florence, Marie's friend," she told me in French.

  It was the half-Indian girl Marie had tried to fix me up with, and whom I'd never phoned. She looked good but very different. In the bar her long black hair had been loose, and she'd been in tight low-cut jeans. Now she had a pony tail and was wearing a sober khaki shirt and denim skirt.

  "Oh, yes, hi. Do you work here?" I asked.

  "Oui." She looked across at Carla. I did the introductions. Florence and Carla gave each other that look that says, has she slept with him? Not in a competitive way (unfortunately), just to try and get the situation straight in their heads.

  "Won't you join us?" Carla suggested, and Florence sat down next to her, opposite me, at our canteen table.

  "We're both teaching English here for the week," I explained. "We work for the same language school."

  "Ah, you are an English teacher now? Why did you leave your other job?"

  "Oh, it's a long story." Which I didn't particularly want to tell.

  "So the Englishman and the American woman come to distribute propaganda for Monsieur Blair and Monsieur Bouche?"

  Carla laughed. "Yeah, right. All these guys hate me because they see me as a symbol of the great American imperialist power." She gave a fierce imperialist growl that would have had all the men in the company signing up for ten years' worth of English lessons.

  "And Paul looks like James Bond," Florence said.

  "Well, I do feel as old as Sean Connery if that's what you mean."

  "Hey, you guys want some coffee?" Carla asked, gesturing over her shoulder towards the cafe-style bar in the corner of the canteen. There was always a throng of people waiting to get served there after lunch, but Carla usually managed to get herself invited to the front of the queue.

  "Yes, good idea. You coming with us?" I asked Florence.

  "No, you two stay there, I'll bring them over," Carla said.

  While Carla was fetching the coffees, Florence talked about her job at the computer company. She was working in the accounts office. It wasn't interesting, she said, but she didn't feel like looking for anything else at the moment. A very typical attitude amongst highly qualified French people, I'd found. If your company was doing OK, you had practically zero chance of getting fired, so you just hung in there, bored and static but safe, like someone stranded on a desert island with a plentiful supply of dehydrated chicken soup.

  I began to wish that Carla would come back and save me from this sad story, versions of which I'd heard in so many of my English lessons.

  As if reading my mind, Florence suddenly turned on a flirtatious smile.

  "Why didn't you call me?" she asked.

  "Oh, you know ..."

  "You found someone else?" She looked over to Caila, who was at the bar chatting to, or being chatted up by, a gaggle of young men whose tongues were hanging down the front of their suits.

  "Carla? Oh no, she's just a colleague. She's got a boyfriend."

  "Someone else, then?"

  "No, no. There's been no one else," I confessed, more glumly than I'd intended.

  It was true. I hadn't even tried it on with Nicole. Instead of offering her private tuition in 1'anglais de 1'amour, I'd asked her if she was interested in getting VianDiffusion to pay for English lessons with my school - Andrea had promised me a 10% commission on any business I brought in. Nicole took it as a clumsy hint that I wanted paying for talking to her in English, and got a bit upset. I gathered from what she said that a suggestion on my part to switch our weekly conversations from the restaurant to her bedroom would have been less upsetting, but by this time it was too late. She was too sad and vulnerable to be used as a stopgap. I can be an annoyingly moral bastard sometimes, I told myself later, alone in bed with a magazine. That was when I still had a room of my own.

  Something in what I'd said, or the way I was looking, made Florence laugh. It was a loud, happy laugh.

  "What's so funny?"

  She had beautiful teeth, I noticed, no fillings.

  "Nothing," she said, still laughing.

  "Hey, have you noticed anything?" I asked her.

  She looked around at the other tables, which were emptying as people returned to work. She turned to see if Carla was coming back, which she wasn't.

  "No?"

  "You're speaking in French and I'm speaking in English. Isn't that weird?"

  "I had noticed." She smiled.

  "I've never done that with anyone before. Either I speak in English, and have to put up with someone's awful accent."

  "Like Marie?"

  "Yes, like Marie." We laughed together. "Or I try to speak in French and can't say half of what I want to say."

  "And what do you want to say?" Florence asked. A typical woman's question, I thought to myself, especially when accompanied by that teasing look in the eyes. Dark,
attractive eyes, too, it occurred to me. Suddenly I wasn't so keen for Carla to come back after all.

  "This is going to sound incredibly clichéd," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "But you are so silky."

  "Why is that clichéd?"

  "Oh, you know, like, oriental silk."

  "Ah, yes. That is clichéd." Florence laughed and kissed my hand, which was draped down over her naked shoulder and on to her equally naked left breast. "But it is not silk. It is the result of the thousands of litres of cream and lotion that I use every week on my body."

  "Hmm. It's true, you do smell lotiony." Her back smelt of coconut. I had been washed ashore on the desert island, I thought, but without the boring chicken soup.

  She turned to face me in her large bed.

  "I don't usually bring men back here on the first day," she said. "You do realize that?"

  I nodded and looked around at where she'd brought me. I hadn't had much time to admire it before we'd leapt into bed. The room would have been as overdone as an ethnic decorator's showroom if it weren't for the fact that Florence herself was the real thing. The bright-red wall hangings and the Kashmir curtains had been sent over by relatives in Pondicherry, an old French dependency in south India.

  "Well, I suppose usually you at least get the men to buy you dinner beforehand." We'd met up straight after work and come back to her apartment in the 20th, near the Père-Lachaise cemetery. We were in bed by half past six.

  She tried to hit me in protest at this slur, but I grabbed her and pulled her close to prevent her from getting in any punches. Which was, I suppose, the idea.

  "When's your boyfriend coming back from Iraq?" I asked, only half jokingly.

  "Imbecile. I have no boyfriend. And me, I'm not just a toy, am I? Just someone to fuck because you haven't got anyone else?"

  "You should have asked me that before you took your clothes off."

  This provoked more outraged struggling, more hugging, and then a frantic search on the floor for another condom from the packet we'd bought in her local pharmacy on the way over.