The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  I went over to the receptionist’s desk and told the woman – from memory, at last – why I was there.

  ‘She won’t be back till two,’ the woman told me. ‘Sit down and I’m sure you’ll see her passing through.’

  ‘I don’t know what she looks like.’

  ‘Then she’ll see you.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what I look like,’ I said, battling bravely with all this grammar.

  The receptionist grimaced. ‘I can’t phone and tell her you’re here because there will be no one in her office before two. Everyone’s on lunch break.’ Clearly I was screwing up the historic system of doing nothing except eat between twelve thirty and two. ‘Why don’t you go up to the second floor, where Marie-Dominique’s office is, and wait outside her door till she comes back? Number 212.’

  ‘Merci,’ I said, and she pointed me through a small doorway towards the lifts and the stairs.

  The staircase was in a wide, open hallway, like posh Paris apartment buildings I’d been in. Marble floor, polished stone steps, a swooping brass handrail leading to the upper floors. It struck me as all very bare for a ministry. There were no paintings on the walls, no sculptures leaping out from alcoves. It was chic and stylish but dull – not a great advert for French culture, I thought as I ambled along the corridor past large, open-plan offices equipped with rows of computer screens and identical anglepoise lamps. Again, most of the walls were strangely bare. Only one section of the office was colourful, a corner patch-worked with photos of singers I didn’t recognise, alongside a big poster announcing that it was ‘L’Année de la Culture Francophone en France’ or ‘The year of French-language culture in France’. A slightly bizarre notion, I thought, a bit like a special Pizza Week in Naples. But then I saw what they meant. The illustration was a burger bun filled with a Stars-and-Stripes pat of meat, crossed out by a large tricolour X. It was their old bugbear, the invasion of France by American culture. Alexa had been right – that spiked gate was intended to impale intruders.

  With one hand clasping my passport in case I was accused of being American, I walked on and found a coffee machine surrounded by noticeboards. I bought myself an absurdly cheap espresso and tried to read the notices. On the main corkboard there was an official-looking announcement, entitled ‘Restructuration des industries culturelles et théâtrales’, featuring a photo of a dozen or so grim-looking people in a grandly decorated meeting room. Their names were listed below the picture, each one followed by a long capital letter abbreviation, along the lines of ‘Jean-Paul Le West, ADCAP, BADCAP, MADCAP’. These were their qualifications, I supposed. In any case, thanks to the abbreviations, the list of names was almost as long as the text explaining the budget-restructuring plan. I had a go at reading it, but gave up after the first sentence, which came out as something like, ‘The central question for the working group is this: is culture part of the general economy, or is the economy part of our culture?’ You needed at least a MADCAP to work that one out.

  I had a look at the other official notices. One was an apartment to rent near Montpellier (‘three rooms and barbecue’), another a country house for sale in Corrèze (‘includes small tractor’), and the third an aged-looking card for a local Vietnamese restaurant.

  On either side of the coffee machine were four more noticeboards in locked glass frames. Each one belonged to a trade union, and they all had a single, almost identical notice pinned up: an A4 sheet with each union’s logo and a text opening with one word in red capital letters – ‘NON!’ A pretty clear message, I thought.

  ‘We haven’t given you a job yet.’

  A female voice made me turn round to what appeared at first to be an empty corridor. Then, angling my neck downwards, I saw a tiny woman smiling up at me. Well, I exaggerate slightly, but she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, though she had a booming voice that sounded at least a yard taller.

  ‘Bonjour, pardon?’ I stuttered.

  ‘You are choosing your union already?’ she asked, and laughed deafeningly to show me that it was a joke. ‘Marie-Dominique Maintenon-Dechérizy,’ she introduced herself. ‘Monsieur Wess?’

  We shook hands and she explained to me, still in a voice that made the coffee machine rattle, that the union noticeboards had to be behind glass to prevent rival groups graffitiing each other.

  ‘What are they saying “non” to?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything,’ she boomed. ‘As always. Come to my office.’ It wasn’t a command I would have dared to say ‘non’ to.

  I followed her short, striding frame along the corridor, and wondered how old she was. Her hair was boyish and black, but could have been dyed, her face was Mediterranean and ageless, and her stocky body was encased in a beige dress and black cardigan that could have been designed anytime since about 1965. So she was somewhere between thirty and sixty, then.

  ‘Sit down.’

  I sat, in one of four battered but tastefully designed chairs ringing a circular table. Marie-Dominique was obviously a lady of influence, because amidst all these open spaces, she had a glass-walled office of her own with a small meeting area.

  ‘As you probably know,’ she said in a voice that made me wonder whether she hadn’t been walled in for the good of her colleagues, ‘I direct the Bureau of Cultural Interventions within the Department of Artistic Development, which is of course attached to the Direction of Artistic Creation.’

  I nodded, as if I probably did know.

  ‘Jean-Marie tells me that you did the catering for his daughter’s wedding. In fact it was also my cousin’s son’s wedding. He was the groom,’ she added, in case I wasn’t following. ‘I thought the dinner was excellent, under the circumstances. I personally got food poisoning and spent two days in bed, but I realise that wasn’t entirely your fault.’

  I opened my mouth to agree, but she was off again.

  ‘What I liked was your sensibility in choosing the ingredients. You are clearly a locavore.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘It means a person who eats things that are produced in the region. Local, locavore,’ she stressed.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘I am very interested in—’

  ‘That is the philosophy we want for our new project. Look.’

  She thrust a folder at me, entitled ‘Résidence d’Artistes Guy Étalon’. It featured a computer mock-up of a gleaming white building that looked like a renovated monastery. There was also a densely typed report, ten or more pages long. All I could make of the text was a blur of grey.

  ‘You know Étalon?’ she asked me. ‘No? A French performance artist, very avant-garde. Difficult but great. He was murdered by the Americans. Now, our project,’ she went on matter-of-factly, ‘is a residence in Brittany for up to forty artists, with studios, apartments and, of course, a restaurant where they can meet to exchange ideas. With a set menu five days a week. They will go home or eat elsewhere at the weekend. What do you think?’

  ‘Well …’ I was still a little shell-shocked, and not only because of the volume of her voice.

  ‘Jean-Marie says that you are capable of visiting the local producers and negotiating prices.’

  This was all very sudden, I thought. Why hadn’t he warned me?

  ‘If you think it is feasible, we can add your name to the working group,’ she said.

  She motioned to me to turn to a long list of names like the one I’d seen on the noticeboard. It was headed up by Marie-Dominique and her slab of initials, which included a BIC, a DADA and a DICA, whatever they were. She was presiding over a veritable printer’s catalogue of her colleagues’ capital letters. My own humble BA was going to look pretty pathetic down at the bottom.

  ‘What I suggest is that you come to our next working-group meeting, and then visit the site in Brittany. What do you think?’

  ‘Well …’ I did have some questions about maybe getting paid for this, and what she might want me to do when I visited the ‘site’, but I didn’t get a chance to ask them, because Marie
-Dominique stood up and smiled as if she was going to bite my legs if I stayed any longer.

  ‘Call me tomorrow to confirm that you’re interested?’ she commanded, shaking my hand. ‘Or maybe it’s best to email. In case your mad neighbours decide to join in the conversation.’ She boomed a laugh at me and almost shoved me down the stairs. Meeting over.

  As I went down, in something of a daze, I met several of her colleagues, all of them slightly posher versions of the people I used to work with in Jean-Marie’s offices – a proliferation of light jumpers, pastel shirts and comfortable trousers. The women’s necklaces were a bit heavier, there were more designer glasses, and a few of the men were wearing smooth suits and heeltap shoes. Not what I expected from civil servants, but these Ministry workers were obviously upper-crust koalas, at the top of the tree. All of them gave me a friendly ‘bonjour’ as though I was already one of the team or a colleague they couldn’t remember meeting.

  Outside the revolving door, four slightly less chic men were distributing leaflets to the post-lunch rush. When I emerged, going in the opposite direction to the returning workers, one of the men handed me a sheet of paper. It bore the four logos of the unions and their big red ‘Non!’ I wondered if it wasn’t a message directed at me.

  IV

  Walking back through the Palais-Royal gardens reminded me yet again of Alexa, and I put in a call to Benoît, Jean-Marie’s son, who’d supposedly seen her taking photos of the tea room.

  The midday lunch rush was over, he told me, though I could still hear plenty of voices in the background. So business was still healthy, which was good news. That is, 50 per cent of it was good news for me personally, after salary bills, taxes, rent and various other outgoings. Not that I was raiding the tea room’s bank account. It was my rainy-day fund. And if we were going to open another tea room, the rainy day would be coming pretty soon. All of which explained why I needed a job to have a chance of living anywhere decent.

  ‘Yes, Alexa was photographing the façade,’ Benoît said. ‘First from across the road, then she came over and took some shots of the menu hanging up outside. That’s when I went to say hello.’

  ‘She was taking photos of the menu? What for?’

  ‘For a website, she said.’

  ‘What sort of website?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said. Or rather, ‘shaypa’, the French way of pronouncing ‘je ne sais pas’ when they really don’t care. This was typical Benoît. He was a bright guy when it came to managing the tea room, but he had the investigative instincts of a smoked haddock.

  ‘What do you think of Papa’s idea for this place?’ he asked me.

  I flinched. ‘What idea?’ Most of Jean-Marie’s ideas made my head feel as though it had been set in concrete.

  ‘My Diner is Rich,’ Benoît said. ‘Uh?’

  ‘You know, turning the tea room into an American diner. Do you think it’s a good idea?’

  So that was it. The meeting to eat bacon and pancakes. The speech about thinking radically and getting rid of more than the olives. I’d literally crawled through wet paint and plaster to set up the tea room, and now he wanted to undo all my hard work? It occurred to me that maybe he was the one who had asked Alexa to take the photos and record the tea room for posterity. That bastard Jean-Marie – did he never stop trying to screw people, literally and metaphorically?

  ‘Where is he, do you know?’ I demanded.

  ‘Pff.’ This was another French sound indicating ignorance.

  I rang off and called Jean-Marie, thinking how absurd it was for this merde to be happening in such a glorious garden. The Palais-Royal fountain was spurting out shafts of glinting sunlight, the birds were twittering, and tourists were trying to cram the whole scene into one perfect photo of Paris.

  ‘Bonjour,’ Jean-Marie said, before asking me to call him back ‘après le bip’.

  I speed-dialled his office.

  ‘Le bureau de Jean-Marie Martin,’ a croaky voice announced. Damn, I thought, he’s got a new PA. His old secretary, Christine, had been a chum of mine. But now she had been replaced by someone older and more scary-sounding. Jean-Marie’s wife had probably helped with the recruiting.

  ‘Is Jean-Marie there?’ I asked.

  ‘Monsieur Martin is absent,’ the PA replied, an iceberg sinking my over-familiar approach.

  ‘I’m his associé, Paul West,’ I told her. Associé is a nice French word for business partner, vague enough to suggest dealings that PAs might do better not to ask about.

  ‘Do you want me to pass on a message?’ she offered, unimpressed.

  ‘Yes, could you tell him he’s a double-dealing shit and that he can blow his olives out of his arse and into his free refill of diner coffee,’ was what I’d like to have said, but my French just wasn’t good enough.

  ‘Non, merci,’ I told her.

  Perhaps it was best to come at him when he least expected it.

  V

  Back in Jake’s building, I found my mad neighbour loitering outside the door to his apartment. He was quivering with anger.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said, but he wouldn’t let me past.

  ‘You piss on my head,’ he said. Vous me pissez sur la tête. That was a new one, I thought, I’d have to write it down.

  ‘Merci,’ I told him. ‘Bonne journée.’

  ‘You think I’m mad?’ he hissed.

  Yes, as a schizophrenic hatter on acid, would have been the sincere answer, but I assured him that of course I didn’t.

  ‘Do you water your plants through my ceiling?’ he demanded, pointing to his head, which was, I now noticed, looking rather damp.

  ‘No, I don’t have any plants,’ I said.

  ‘So why is water coming through my ceiling? From your apartment?’

  ‘Oh merde.’ I ran up the stairs and saw a small lake forming outside Jake’s door, slowly darkening the tiles of the corridor like the incoming tide on a Brittany beach.

  ‘Chiottes de merde,’ my neighbour said. ‘Putain de chiottes de merde.’

  I thought he was just having another outbreak of Tourette’s but when I got indoors I saw that he was right. It was the chiotte – the toilet – that was leaking. It wasn’t a real toilet. It was a horrific contraption that I’d never seen before I came to live in France: a sani-broyeur, a toilet bowl attached to a grinder that you can hook up to the smallest outflow pipe, so that (in theory) anyone can fit a loo in their converted attic, several metres away from the nearest toilet downpipe. It was an unnerving machine at the best of times. Every time I flushed, the wheels inside the white grinding box whirred, and the tiny waste-water pipe, originally designed to carry off the dainty trickles from a maid’s sink, whistled like a whale’s blowhole. At the best of times, it seemed about to explode. Now it had decided to spring a spontaneous leak.

  ‘Shut the water off,’ my neighbour barked, the first rational words he’d ever spoken in my presence.

  I found a tap just inside the front door and twisted it until the flood began to ease.

  For the first time I understood the only sign of organisation in Jake’s life – the Urgences Plomberie card pinned to the wall above the toilet.

  I called the number, signalling to my neighbour that he wasn’t really needed any more, especially as all he seemed to be doing was tread the water around the apartment into all the corners it hadn’t reached under its own power.

  ‘Bonjour,’ a jolly voice said, and went on to explain why it was so pleased with life – this call was costing me thirty-four cents a minute, or even more if I was calling from a mobile, which I was. I hit the hash key to agree to get fleeced still further.

  ‘Bonjour,’ an even jollier female voice said, and went on to inform me that a callout was going to cost me a minimum of a hundred euros, payable in advance by credit card.

  ‘But you don’t know my problem,’ I protested.

  ‘Is it a plumbing problem?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s why I’m calling Urgences Plomberi
e.’

  The subsequent silence cost me at least ten cents.

  ‘And you want a plumber to come to your domicile?’

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Then it’s a hundred euros, payable in advance by credit card.’

  I got out my plastic and paid.

  ‘Merci,’ she thanked me. ‘Now what sort of problem is it?’

  ‘Sani-broyeur,’ I said, and I heard her wince.

  ‘Blockage or leakage?’ She sounded like a doctor with no bedside manner.

  ‘Leakage,’ I said.

  She took the address and the door codes.

  ‘When will he come?’ I asked, looking at my watch. It was just after four.

  ‘Between six and ten,’ she said. ‘Please stay at the address. If we have to reschedule an appointment, you pay the hundred euros again.’

  What kind of ‘urgency’ was a six-hour wait? I wondered as I used a couple of towels to slop away the flood. Certainly not a hundred euros’ worth.

  In fact, if you took into account a pizza delivery and three phone calls to ask where the hell the plumber had got to, it must have cost me about 50 per cent extra by the time he arrived, ten seconds after my pizza, at half past ten.

  He was North African, a businesslike family-man type who explained that he’d just spent more than an hour unblocking a woman’s pipes. He said this with no double entendre at all, shaking his head and repeating ‘coffee and hair, coffee and hair’ as he shone a torch at my sani-broyeur.

  ‘Blockage or leakage?’ he asked.

  ‘Leakage,’ I said, not bothering to ask why I’d had to explain this to the operator at thirty-four cents a minute if she hadn’t passed on the information.