The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  The fourth candidate was, in my opinion, a cheat, but everyone adored him. A hunky Californian with dreadlocks and biceps who plays slap bass guitar is going to win any competition in Paris. He was the American Dream personified. Jean-Marie ought to ride him around Paris, I thought, instead of that old car of his. The guy would get young Parisians drooling.

  This said, I didn’t understand a word of his actual poem. I wasn’t even sure what language it was in, but it didn’t matter. Amandine, Marsha, all the women in the room and a good proportion of the guys looked as though they would have voted for him if he’d done nothing but sweat.

  Marsha broke with her tradition and got up to congratulate the guy – whose name was something like Rock or Rod – with a kiss, but I didn’t mind at all. I could see why he’d have that effect on a woman. Amandine, though, was getting the evil eye from Thomas about her gushing ‘yes’ vote, and I watched the poor girl replying to him with a ‘what do you expect me to do?’ shrug.

  After this, things understandably got a little anticlimactic. A Canadian woman recited a tasteful poem about love in a chambre de bonne, but I couldn’t vote for it because all through, I kept hearing voices in my head yelling ‘enculé!’ and feeling the lumpy skeleton of Jake’s sofa bed digging into my kidneys.

  There were a few totally disposable entrants, including one awful rap by a New York rich kid who imagined himself pelting gendarmes with Parisian cobblestones during the May 1968 riots, and who lost my vote when he rhymed ‘Sorbonne’ with ‘petrol bomb’.

  And then Jake was at the mic.

  He was last on our list. Whether he’d asked to be top of the bill, or Marsha had stuck him there so that she might be able to claim that all the places in the second round were already taken, I didn’t know. Either way, I could see as he stood on the stage and looked out into the crowd that he felt his big moment had come. He looked slightly nervous, although he knew, surely, that he could count on me for the necessary vote. He flicked his long hair out of his eyes and began to speak.

  ‘The French for dildo is godmichet,’ he began. ‘But the French normally, you know, abréger?’

  As godmichet and abréger had rhymed, no one seemed certain whether he’d begun his poem or not, and people frowned at his sudden silence. Oh shit, I thought, he’s screwing it up.

  ‘Shorten,’ he finally said. ‘The French usually shorten their word for dildo. From godmichet to god. So God save the queen means something très sexy to the French, no?’

  Everyone laughed except me.

  ‘And that is the subject of my poem,’ Jake said. ‘It is titled “Waiting for God”.’

  I looked across and saw Marsha shaking her head at me as Jake began to recite in his strange Franco-American accent:

  ‘The girl walked in the bedroom door,

  I seen what she carried, and said merde alors.

  It was long, pink, ribbed and clammy,

  Vibrating at me like a drunk salami …’

  Trying to tune out Jake’s lurid, approximate rhymes, I looked into the audience and saw Jean-Marie staring at me. Still wondering how much I knew, perhaps, and who’d told me? As if to confirm this, he switched his attention to Amandine, and then back to me, like a turret slowly aiming its cannons.

  Abruptly, though, my trance was broken by an unexpected sound. People were actually laughing. A few women had their hands to their faces in shock, but the guys were spluttering with mirth. I couldn’t help hearing Jake’s last two lines:

  ‘Ma moralité is, don’t use this dildo for anal,

  Or you will enter a world of pain, y’all.’

  It was possibly the worst rhyme in the history of poetry, but the audience erupted in a multi-layered mixture of gasps, groans and whoops. The last thing you could accuse Jake of was causing indifference.

  ‘Well,’ Marsha asked when the noise died down, ‘what do we think?’ She, from the look of her, was thinking ‘never again’.

  ‘Sorry, it’s too disgusting,’ Amandine breathed into her microphone, ‘non merci.’

  About half of the audience cheered agreement, including her boyfriend, but a good proportion booed her.

  Marsha called for quiet and then told Jake that listening to him was ‘like being forced to watch a surgical operation – on myself. What about you, Paul?’

  I could feel her trying to hypnotise me into kicking him out. The look in her eyes seemed to be saying: Vote yes and the sexiest thing you’ll be doing tonight is reading one of Jake’s poems.

  I grasped for words that wouldn’t hurt my friend too much.

  ‘Unforgettable,’ I said. This, sadly, was true of all of Jake’s poems.

  ‘So how do you vote, Paul?’

  Marsha’s eyes were drilling holes in my skull. People in the audience were shouting out suggestions, with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ getting an equal share. I shook my head in resignation. Anal, pain y’all? Who could possibly vote in favour of that?

  Then I caught Jean-Marie’s eye again, and saw him smirking at me, obviously relishing my discomfort. And it struck me that for all Jake’s faults, there was one thing about him that you had to admire. He was honest. Often horrifically, unwisely so, but at least there was no hidden dark side to him. With Jean-Marie, you could have a map, Satnav and a native guide and you still couldn’t be certain where you stood with him.

  ‘I have to … give you my vote,’ I told Jake.

  The audience erupted with howls of disapproval and cheers of laughter. Jake punched the air, while Marsha glowered at me and Amandine grimaced as if she’d just bitten into a rotten orange.

  I was watching Jake pick his way through the crowd, getting high fives and wry grins in equal measure, when I noticed a camera pointing at me.

  People had been holding up phones throughout the whole evening, of course. But this was different. It was a large black camera, pressed to an eye rather than being held at arm’s length. And the partially hidden face behind it was one that I recognised. She must have seen me staring straight into her lens, because she pulled the camera away and gave me an embarrassed smile.

  Alexa, damn her. I looked across at Marsha, who, luckily, was too engrossed in a conversation with Gregory the sound guy to have noticed. I was on the point of getting up and going to ask Alexa what she thought she was doing here, when I saw Jean-Marie weaving his way to the poets’ stage.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said into the mic. ‘Excusez-moi.’

  Everyone looked up at the middle-aged chic guy smiling at them from the front of the room. Another poet, they seemed to think.

  Marsha said something to Gregory, who went to try and disarm Jean-Marie.

  Jean-Marie was a politician, though, and no one grabs a microphone from a politician without shooting him first.

  ‘I have an objection,’ Jean-Marie said.

  ‘An objection?’ Marsha asked into her own mic.

  ‘Yes. The poets were all Anglophone. This is France. Do we have no French poets in Paris?’

  Marsha tutted. ‘We decided to have only English poems, because you can’t really compare poetry in two languages. It would be like having beer and wine in the same competition.’

  ‘Excuse me, but you can’t have a poetry competition in the city of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire without French poets.’

  By now, I could see that Marsha was in a bit of a panic. She was itching to tell the interfering bastard to let her get on with her competition, in her shop, but there were too many people watching, and – more to the point – filming with their all-seeing phones.

  Jean-Marie must have seen her weakening, because he got in a low punch.

  ‘And frankly,’ he said, ‘the poems we have heard this evening were less like wine and beer than some other fluids that it would not be gallant to mention.’ He shook his head at Jake, and then at me.

  It was something about that shake of his smooth, arrogant head that made me snap.

  ‘So you’re against the invasion of what you call Anglo-Saxon culture?�
� I asked, making sure that my microphone picked up every syllable. ‘Does that include food?’ I saw Jean-Marie’s expression morphing from suave self-assurance to something far more murderous, but it was too late to stop now. ‘Because this, ladies and gentlemen, messieurs, mesdames, is a man who wants to open a chain of American diners in Paris, and whose American car is currently blocking the street outside.’

  Any support that Jean-Marie had earned had just dematerialised into French mist, and I couldn’t resist going for his throbbing jugular.

  ‘And he’s only disrupting this competition because he knows that I’m going out with Marsha, whose bookshop this is, and he wants to piss me off. He’s also trying to screw me out of the café that he and I own. An English tea room, by the way, which proves how big an opponent of Anglo culture he is …’

  The jeers and laughter were almost drowning me out by now, but I’d come to the end of my speech anyway, mainly because I realised that, for the second time that evening, I’d gone too far.

  Jean-Marie’s look of hatred was pretty satisfying, but Amandine’s mask of pure shock much less so. Oh shit, I thought, I’ve really dropped her in it now. First the revelation that I knew about the Paul-poule business, and now this.

  Jean-Marie took a deep breath and handed the microphone to Gregory.

  ‘That was not a good idea, Pool,’ he told me. He turned to Amandine. ‘Not a good idea at all,’ he repeated, in French.

  With this, he made his way slowly to the door. It was actually a pretty dignified exit. Unlike Amandine’s – she stumbled out of her judge’s chair, tripped over her microphone lead and practically bounced from audience member to audience member in an attempt to catch up with Jean-Marie.

  I felt I ought to follow.

  I got out into the street just as Jean-Marie was starting his car engine. Amandine was clutching a door handle, talking to Jean-Marie in urgent French.

  I went over to interrupt. ‘I got a call from my lawyer today warning me that someone wanted to revoke our contract together,’ I told him. ‘It didn’t take me long to guess who that was.’ Not very convincing, but I hoped it might take some of the spotlight off Amandine.

  Jean-Marie took no notice.

  ‘You want to keep your job?’ he asked Amandine.

  Before she could answer, there was a loud shout from the other side of the car.

  ‘Casse-toi, vieux con!’ It was Amandine’s boyfriend, Thomas.

  ‘Not now, Thomas,’ Amandine begged, but he repeated his catchphrase and looked as though he was wondering which to damage first, the car or its driver.

  Jean-Marie swivelled his head slowly towards Thomas like some kind of Terminator.

  ‘Non, c’est toi qui va te casser, petit con,’ he told Thomas.

  Thomas tried to throw a punch, but someone came and grabbed his arms from behind. It was Gregory.

  ‘Don’t. The vieux con will only have you arrested,’ he told Thomas.

  ‘So, are you getting in?’ Jean-Marie asked Amandine.

  ‘No, I am,’ came a female voice from behind me.

  I turned to see Alexa standing at my shoulder. Everyone looked at her in astonishment as she slipped past me and gripped the door handle.

  ‘May I?’ she asked Jean-Marie.

  He did a quick double-take before replying, ‘Bien sûr.’

  The smugness had returned to Jean-Marie’s face as he put the car in gear and began to edge forwards, his new passenger busy doing up her seatbelt.

  ‘A très bientôt, Pool,’ he told me, and drove slowly, victoriously away, watched by a silently shell-shocked Amandine, a vocal Thomas and a straining Gregory, who was using all his roadie’s upper body strength to hang on to his loudly struggling prisoner.

  As for me, I wasn’t sure how to feel, except that something about the poetry evening had gone very, very wrong.

  ‘Hey, guys, coming to celebrate?’ Jake tumbled into the street, wedged as usual between his miniature twins. ‘Great soirée, huh? Brilliant result!’

  He didn’t seem to understand why no one shared his enthusiasm.

  Huit

  ‘Qui s’excuse s’accuse.’

  He who apologises, accuses himself.

  Stendhal, 19th-century French writer, who sounds as though he never warned anyone he was suffering from syphilis

  I

  WOMEN WITH FORCEFUL characters are fun as long as they’re not using their force against you. With them, I usually find that the safest thing to do is say sorry and let them decide exactly what I should be apologising for. They always have a few ideas, and are at least partly satisfied to see a bit of grovelling. With Marsha, though, saying sorry didn’t quite go to plan.

  ‘What for?’ she asked, which stumped me for a second. There was so much to choose from. ‘For voting through your obscene friend Jake?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though that hadn’t been on my list.

  ‘Or for letting your business partner screw up my whole poetry evening?’

  ‘Yes,’ though I couldn’t claim any credit for that, either. Jean-Marie was his own man, and probably wouldn’t be my business partner for much longer.

  ‘Or for not telling your ex to stay away from my bloody shop?’

  I wasn’t going to confess to that one. I’d begged Alexa to stay away, and for some reason she’d ignored me. I intended to find out why, and to ask her what she thought she was doing by going off with Jean-Marie in his car. I couldn’t believe there was anything sexual in it (not from her point of view, anyway), but there was clearly something going on between them. Why else would she be lurking around the tea room and Marsha’s shop at exactly the same time Jean-Marie was plotting to deprive me of the first and screw things up for me at the second?

  But in my experience, with a strong-minded woman like Marsha, there’s little point defending yourself – it only makes them madder. So all I could do was opt for some minor plea bargaining.

  ‘I told her to stay away,’ I said, ‘but obviously not persuasively enough.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you tell her from me that I have ways of persuading people to do things. Men and women.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Now sorry, Paul, but I need to be alone to work out a damage-limitation plan.’

  We said goodbye and hung up. Yes, the conversation wasn’t taking place over a nightcap in her apartment. It was the morning after the competition, and I’d spent the night at Jake’s place. When I’d tried to apologise the night before, she hadn’t even wanted to listen – which quite frankly had come as a relief. I wasn’t too bothered about spending the night alone. It had been an intense day, cluttered with voices. My brain needed some quality time with itself. Now, though, sitting on Jake’s cranky sofa bed and listening to the sounds of the street below, it was time to get down to business.

  So I took a deep breath and put in the inevitable call to Alexa. It wasn’t going to be an easy conversation.

  Once you got to know her really well, you realised that she had four distinct phone voices.

  The first was a no-nonsense business tone that said, ‘Yes, I may sound like a sexy young woman but that doesn’t mean you can pull any merde on me.’ Perfect for calling the electricity people or her building managers.

  The second she used when she was being cool and trendy, like when she was dealing with someone in the photography business. It was chummy yet aloof, and while using it she usually called the person tu rather than vous. She would also add syllables to words – ‘oui-er, c’est vrai-er’ – and laugh a lot. It meant: ‘We’re all in business together, so we’re all equally trendy and worldly-wise,’ while at the same time reminding them: ‘Don’t get any silly ideas, mon ami.’ You can never be too careful.

  The third voice was for when she was talking to her friends. It was much more relaxed and warm – a purr that could sound almost motherly. While we were an item, she used this voice to talk to me, with a few pet names and terms of endearment thrown in on top.

  The fourth voi
ce, though, seemed to be entirely dedicated to being mad at me, and it was scary. It was cold and clipped, and punctuated with long silences. ‘Oui?’ she would say when she took my call, pretending she didn’t know who was on the line. And if I asked whether everything was OK, she’d reply, ‘Oui, oui,’ distractedly, as if she was simultaneously checking her nails for chipped varnish. This was the voice I was expecting now. Even though I was the one who had every right to be mad at her, I knew that getting mad at her would only make her mad at me.

  Surely, I thought, after last night, she would actually pick up the phone? She had some serious explaining to do.

  The answer was no.

  ‘We really need to talk,’ I told her inbox. ‘I’m assuming that you and Jean-Marie weren’t only comparing notes on models of camera and vintage car?’

  It had to be a record. I was pretty sure I’d got in under the ten-second barrier.

  By now, Jake’s garret was starting to do its microwave-oven act, so I had a quick shower and went down to the corner café, where I grabbed the last free table on the terrace and hooked up to their Wi-Fi.

  Getting a Ministry of Culture badge had clearly put me on some kind of mailing list, because I had received a crop of circulars, ranging from the plain irrelevant – the third-floor water fountain in the Montparnasse annexe was for the use of third-floor offices only, unless those on the fourth floor were also willing to change the bottle when it ran out – to the totally wacky. A man in the Ministry’s Palais-Royal HQ had found a woman’s skirt under his desk and was wondering whose it was because, he said, ‘My backside is too big for it.’ Almost immediately someone at government email central had posted a terse reminder that personal communications were not to be sent on this network and, according to regulation B1998.3, finding ‘non-work clothing’ in the workplace was a personal incident. Humour was also forbidden, this time according to an amendment of rule C4423.5 that banned any criticism of the State.

  In short, anyone in the French civil service who actually read all this bumf hardly had a spare minute for a cigarette break before it was time to knock off for lunch.