The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  Marsha appealed for calm, and tried to make a French plea for freedom of speech and artistic tolerance, but she might as well have been asking them to sing along to a Lady Gaga song or buy shares in Starbucks. They’d been driven insane with frustration, and wanted everyone else to share it.

  ‘Ça suffit!’

  A voice with the power to knock down buildings made everyone shut up.

  It hadn’t come from any of the microphones, so I looked out into the crowd. The woman in the Marilyn Monroe wig and the studded collar was on her feet and glowering at the troublemakers. She was also, I now saw, wearing a tight leather bodice and a skirt with open stitching at the side that made her look like an over-decorated baseball.

  ‘Ça suffit,’ she repeated, only slightly less deafeningly, and I almost fell off my seat. It was Marie-Dominique. And if I wasn’t mistaken, standing up next to her to lend her moral support was her tall, thin colleague from the Ministry, now in a black wig and studded leather jacket. So this was how they spent their leisure time – as fetishist poetry fans.

  As soon as Marie-Dominique had got everyone’s attention, which wasn’t difficult, she began to lecture the website people about France being a cultural capital precisely because it had always welcomed art and artists from all over the world.

  Or tried to lecture them, anyway. The front rows were all on their feet and shouting her down.

  ‘Ta gueule, vieille peau!’ one of them called out. Shut up, you old bag (literally, old skin, presumably a pun on Marie-Dominique’s leather outfit).

  ‘Rentre chez toi, espèce de Marilyn gonflée!’ Go home, you sort of inflated Marilyn.

  ‘C’est Laurel qui baise Hardy ou le contraire?’ Does Laurel shag Hardy or the other way round?

  So much for the purity of the French language, I thought. Marie-Dominique puffed out her tightly trussed chest and shook her head at them, her blonde wig bobbing from side to side.

  ‘OK, OK!’ Marsha yelled into her microphone, and her sheer volume shut everyone up. ‘Vous avez gagné! You win. Le concours est annulé – the contest is off. Sorry, people, goodnight. Bonsoir et adieu.’ She gave Gregory the throat-cutting sign and he turned off the sound.

  There was a collective cry of no from the back rows and oui! from the front. I looked over to Jake who was standing in mute shock as if someone had just dropped an ice cube down his trousers.

  ‘That’s it?’ I asked Marsha. ‘You’re giving up?’

  ‘Don’t blame me, blame these fuckers,’ she hissed, smiling graciously at a middle-aged couple who’d come wearing French tricolour T-shirts. ‘Now can you help me make sure they all fuck off without trashing anything?’

  IV

  Half an hour or so later, we sat down with a glass of wine to survey the damage.

  We being the three judges, Gregory, Jake, Mitzi and Connie, and Marie-Dominique and her tall friend, whose name, it turned out, was Mathieu. Amandine’s boyfriend Thomas had come up on stage at the end and tried to drag her away with the rest of the crowd, but she’d shaken him off.

  Marie-Dominique was getting all the attention. She was lounging in one of Marsha’s armchairs, looking much more leather-bound than the furniture or any of the books. Mitzi and Connie were cooing over her clothes as though they wanted to eat them. As well as her shiny bodice and skirt, Marie-Dominatrix was wearing viciously pointed stiletto boots and, if I wasn’t mistaken, droopy silver earrings in the shape of coiled whips. Only Gregory had eyes for Mathieu and his leather suit.

  ‘We have always been interested in the fringes of culture,’ Marie-Dominique boomed as if still trying to shout down a rowdy audience. ‘One can dress like this, live like this, and still have a conventional professional existence.’

  ‘Bien sûr,’ we all agreed.

  ‘In a truly free society, we should be able to dress like this at work and be respected like any other colleague.’

  Amandine nodded more emphatically than anyone.

  ‘Well, thank you for trying to defend my competition,’ Marsha told her. ‘Pity it didn’t work.’

  ‘Yes, if you have another one, please contact me,’ Marie-Dominique said, pulling a Ministry of Culture card out of a pouch on her studded belt. She and Mathieu said their goodbyes, and as I shook Marie-Dominique’s gloved hand, she told me she’d be in touch in the morning.

  When they’d gone, we all sat back, deflated.

  ‘I can do a reading quand tu veux,’ Jake offered, holding up the printout of his poem. In reply, Marsha just squinted. ‘But this doesn’t mean that posy at the shop must end, right?’ he said.

  Poor bloke, I thought. The fat lady has stopped singing, taken off her girdle, gone home and fed the cat, and still he doesn’t get it. Well, in fact she was probably trying to hail a taxi in the rue de Bretagne, but the principle was the same. The competition was dead.

  ‘You must not abandon hope,’ Mitzi told him, stroking his hand. ‘If you believe in your work, others will, too.’

  But that was the trouble with Jake’s poems, I thought. As soon as you believed in them, you wished you didn’t.

  ‘How are we going to fight back?’ Amandine asked.

  Marsha took a slug of her cheap wine and gazed into the distance, imagining, I hoped, some kind of triumphant revenge: an English poetry contest on the steps of the Panthéon, perhaps, where the French bury their staunchest establishment figures. Or a festival of bilingual fetishist verse, hosted by Marie-Dominique, brandishing a whip to keep the crowd under control.

  ‘We’re not,’ Marsha finally said.

  ‘What?’ and ‘Quoi?’ we all asked at once.

  ‘No. There were a few journalists in the crowd, and when they write this up it’ll be great publicity. I had a couple of people filming it, so I can post some footage on YouTube. If I can get Marie-Dominique’s permission to show her speech, it’ll be even better. All in all, it’s not a bad result.’ She looked almost pleased.

  ‘But you’re still going to publish a collection of poetry, right?’ I asked. Jake leant forward, offering himself up as possible material.

  ‘Maybe, but now I get to choose what goes in it.’ She gave Jake a look that punctured even his ever-buoyant optimism. ‘You’re too late,’ she added. ‘Your friends have gone, so you can fuck off, too.’

  I turned to see who she was insulting.

  Alexa was standing in the shop doorway.

  V

  Alexa ignored Marsha, and looked at me.

  ‘A friend texted me and told me what was going on. I think I need to explain something to you, Paul.’

  ‘I think you need to explain to all of us,’ Marsha said.

  ‘No, I don’t explain things to people who tell me to fuck off,’ Alexa replied calmly. ‘I’ll wait for you at the café on the corner, Paul,’ she said, and left.

  There was an awkward silence. I wanted to go, of course. There was so much I needed to know. But Marsha was arching her left eyebrow at me as if it was a bow, about to unleash a hail of arrows if I dared to leave.

  ‘I think you should go,’ Amandine said, nodding to me. She wanted to know what Alexa and Jean-Marie were up to as much as I did.

  ‘Who was that?’ Mitzi whispered to Jake.

  ‘Paul’s ex-girlfriend,’ Jake replied, loudly. ‘French. They’re all totally hysterical, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Marsha said, still in arrow-firing mode. She was glowering at Amandine. ‘That’s the woman who set the French-language fuckers on me and screwed up my competition. And now you reckon Paul should go and have a cosy chat with her, do you?’

  ‘She’s also trying to screw up Paul’s business,’ Amandine retorted, blushing with anger. ‘So yes, he does need to hear what she says.’

  ‘Well, you can send him chasing after his ex if you want to, but I don’t fancy your chances with him if he goes. She hangs around him all the fucking time.’

  ‘But I’m not—’ Amandine’s denial ended in a choked laugh of disbelief.

  It was all v
ery flattering watching two beautiful women fight over me, if that’s what they were doing, but I felt obliged to step in.

  ‘Listen, Marsha, all I’m going to do is ask her why she’s been hanging round your shop.’

  ‘No, you listen, Paul,’ Marsha said, putting her wine glass down so she could point a pistol-like finger at me. ‘You know one of the main reasons why I live in Paris?’

  ‘To learn about French poetry?’ But she brushed aside my attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘Back home,’ she went on, ‘there are people who see Darwin as the devil incarnate. Here in Paris, people think of him as the guy who said that nature has to screw around till it gets things right.’

  ‘Hey, that’s good, can I use it?’ Jake said, reaching for his notebook.

  Marsha ignored him. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I’m anonymous. There are none of my parents’ friends watching me, no stay-a-virgin-till-you-get-married nutcases peeping through my keyhole. I’m free. So I don’t care if you want to screw your ex-girlfriend, or Amandine, or anyone.’

  Amandine and I both raised a hand in our defence, but she stormed on.

  ‘This is Paris, Paul, people don’t care who fucks who.’

  I had to answer that.

  ‘You really think Parisians are that cool?’ I asked. ‘You tell a man or a woman here that their partner is shagging someone else and they’ll get as mad as anyone in London or New York or wherever.’

  ‘OK,’ Marsha conceded, ‘but I really am that cool. You screw who you want when you want. I do.’

  This sank in slowly but very surely, like a large slab of rock dropped on to quicksand.

  ‘You do?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. We’re not exactly married, are we?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘And I mean, Paris is heaving with cute guys.’

  ‘Right, and cute girls. Though recently I’ve been confining my attentions to just one of them.’

  ‘Oh, don’t come over all moral on me, Paul.’

  ‘Moral? Look, I appreciate your honesty. It’s very …’

  ‘Refreshing?’

  ‘Well, I was going to say something more like brutal.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And surprising. I’m amazed you’ve been able to find the time. Though I suppose we haven’t exactly seen each other very often.’

  ‘No, well …’ Marsha picked up her wine glass and took a long swig.

  ‘I think I’ll go and talk to Alexa,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Bonne soirée, everyone.’

  I avoided the bises ceremony and made a quick exit, with Jake’s voice accompanying me to the door.

  ‘Attention, Paul, she’s French. She’ll be even more hysterical than Marsha.’

  VI

  As I walked in the café and saw Alexa sitting over a glass of deep red wine, I felt a momentary stab of regret. Not for coming to meet her and provoking the fight with Marsha, but that we’d broken up in the first place. There was something so free about her as she sat there alone, looking around at the party people in the café as if she was wondering whether any of them were worth photographing. It was her sexy hippie-punk look, the stylishly unstyled way her blonde hair was cut, accompanied by the kind of figure that teenage boys dream about when they’re inventing their ideal woman.

  But then she saw me approaching, and the mocking look in her eye reminded me how often the sparks had flown. She’d been fun and challenging, but in the same way skiing down a black-flagged slope was – you could get a real battering during the ride.

  ‘So you escaped from the prison guard?’ she asked me as soon as we’d kissed each other’s cheeks hello.

  ‘She’s a bit scary, isn’t she?’ I agreed.

  ‘Yes, you prefer your women soft and submissive, don’t you, Paul?’

  ‘You mean like you?’

  We shared a laugh about the good old days of blazing rows and walkouts.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ Alexa asked me once I’d settled down into a seat opposite her.

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘You look so trendy.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ It was the Marsha effect. I’d gone to a gay shop in the Marais and bought myself some ridiculously expensive jeans and a pair of slightly absurd pointed shoes. If my clothes were trendy enough, I hoped she’d forget about the nipple wax.

  ‘You look great,’ I said. Alexa hadn’t changed a bit, which was the best thing that could happen to her. Although, of course, there was one major change to her character: her new racist leanings. All this cosy chit-chat had distracted me from what I really wanted to talk about.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you came to explain?’

  ‘Yes, I was pretty mad at you when you made all those accusations over the phone, but when I heard what was happening at the bookshop, I sort of understood why you made them. But it’s not what you think, OK?’

  ‘That phrase rings a bell,’ I said, and she laughed. It was the plea of innocence I’d used every time I’d done something stupid that was about to send her into a raging fury.

  ‘It’s true, though. I have nothing to do with those website idiots,’ she told me. ‘They stole my pictures without my permission. I’ve told them that if they don’t erase the photos immediately, I’m going to take legal action and close them down. Well, in fact I’m going to talk to a hacker friend of mine to see if he can’t close them down, anyway. Racist imbeciles.’

  ‘Yes, but why—?’ I began.

  ‘Did I take photos of the tea room and the bookshop?’ she said. ‘Well, believe it or not, Paul, I do have a life, and that life sometimes sends me to the same places as you in this little city.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, though.’

  ‘The coincidence is in the other direction,’ she said. ‘I was there first. Or my family was. My grandfather was a photographer, and he died a few months ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘He was ninety and happy and he died in his sleep. Nothing to be sorry about, really. Anyway, he left me his collection of photos of Paris that he took in the nineteen fifties and sixties. My latest project is to go to the same places and reproduce his photos today. And yes, it happens that he went to the street where your tea room is, and the street where the bookshop is. And about two hundred other streets. Not such a big coincidence, Paul.’

  It all sounded very credible, but there was of course one major problem with her mea culpa (which was, incidentally, another phrase she’d originally taught me how to use).

  ‘So how come you leapt in the car with Jean-Marie and drove off into the sunset?’

  ‘When I found out that he was involved with the website, I wanted to know if he was the one who’d told them to use my photos. And I’ve met him before, remember? I know that the only way to get any information out of a lech like him is to play the seduction game. So I jumped in his car and flattered him a bit, and when I found out what I wanted to know – that he had no idea where the website got its photos – I jumped out of the car again.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And the one thing I did not do was presuppose that you and he had joined together to try and steal my work. Or call you and start making crazy accusations.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning the S-word even more than I had during all of its recent cameo appearances in my conversations.

  ‘But from what I could tell from the stupid grin on Jean-Marie’s face, and from some things he said, now he’s trying to do to you what he tries to do to any woman he meets?’

  ‘Yes.’ I explained Jean-Marie’s plans to screw me out of the tea room. Alexa looked shocked. She’d been there when I was setting it up. She’d seen me covered in plaster dust and paint. She’d heard me grinding my teeth in frustration as I tried to stop myself suffocating my useless architect with his wrongly drawn plans. She even had it all on film.

  I also told her why I thought Jean-Marie had got things so very wrong. The proof of what I was saying was all around us. At that very mom
ent, we were sitting in one of the trendy updated Parisian bistrots, and I could see three people tucking into a mountainous burger, accompanied by a friend or lover eating a salad or something lighter.

  ‘Il est con,’ Alexa said, and I agreed with her.

  There was an embarrassed silence. A waiter came over, but I couldn’t decide what to order, or whether to order, and he went away again, saying he’d give me ‘some moments to reflect’.

  ‘Well, thanks for coming to explain,’ I told Alexa. ‘And sorry I got things wrong about you and the website.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Sounds like a fascinating project, revisiting your grandad’s photos.’

  ‘Yes, it’s going to take me a year at least.’

  ‘Well, if you have an exhibition, let me know.’

  ‘Of course. You must come.’

  ‘To the vernissage maybe?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll send you an invitation.’

  We were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel as far as pleasantries went. Soon she’d be asking me what films I’d seen recently and where I planned to spend my summer holidays.

  ‘You know, I’d like to talk but I ought to go,’ I finally said. She didn’t object. ‘It’s been a long day and tomorrow I’m going to confront Jean-Marie and his lawyers.’

  ‘Confront them?’

  ‘Yes. They’re going to have a meeting about our business contract. I think they’re going to invoke some get-out clause and freeze all our profits to avoid paying me off. So either I confront him before he can do it, or I go totally bankrupt.’

  ‘Wow.’ She looked genuinely concerned.

  We both stood up and did a bise, the fingertips of our right hands barely brushing each other’s left shoulder in a politely choreographed Parisian goodbye. But even as we performed our sexless dance, I was acutely aware of one of her breasts pressing against my heart, and of the perfume on her neck, where I used to bury my head and breathe in whole lungfuls of the hypnotic, exotic scent.