The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘But the words that rhyme with Kyrgyzstani,

  Are in a totalement différente catégorie,

  They’re things like youpi, which is French for yippee.

  Or as the Français and the Anglos say – hurrah,

  That you came to Paris from Central Asia.

  Because since you arrived from the city of Bishkek,

  The only sounds that I want to make,

  Are ones like wow – nothing to do with Cracow,

  And aah – way sweeter than any señorita,

  And most of all, pleasure’s hum,

  A softly murmured bilingual mmmm.

  A sound that’s used in French and anglais too,

  The only sound I’ve made since meeting you.

  Mmmmmmitzi.’

  He mimed smooching Mitzi, who turned beetroot-red while her semi-identical twin Connie grabbed her for a python-like hug.

  I was struck totally dumb. This was Jake, for God’s sake. He didn’t do romanticism. Coming from him, this beat ‘a rose by any other name’ into a hat. It was like stumbling across a long-lost Amazonian tribe quoting Keats, Byron and Barbara Cartland.

  Everyone in the room was chanting, ‘Kiss, kiss, kiss!’ Jake obliged them, and Mitzi emerged from the clinch even more crimson than before.

  I had to interrupt the love-in and ask people to start voting with their little bits of paper and the pens kindly provided by Prévisions Funéraires, the specialists in prepaid burials.

  As ballpoints started to scratch on paper, I went to say a proper hello to Amandine.

  ‘I’m really glad you got here,’ I said. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t.’ I was definitely turning on the wit tonight.

  ‘Merci, Paul. Are you going to give me a bise? It is traditional, you know.’ She offered up her cheek for me to kiss.

  ‘So is a glass of champagne,’ I told her, when I’d bised her on both cheeks. I went into the kitchen, where there were limited supplies of bubbly for VIPs only. Here, like elsewhere in France, the voting was democratic but the drinks weren’t.

  Jake was already in there, hovering by the fridge.

  ‘Well, you really are a man of surprises,’ I told him, shaking his hand. ‘And I don’t just mean when you hire building-site vehicles instead of cars. Congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah, merci, man. Voilà the ring,’ he said, crushing it nervously into my palm.

  ‘Let’s do it anyway. It doesn’t matter if you don’t win.’

  ‘No, man. Only if I win. And I’m going to, I can feel it.’

  Right, I thought. Every time I buy a lottery ticket I can feel myself winning millions, but it hasn’t happened yet. I pocketed the ring and went out to give Amandine her champagne. We spent a few minutes chatting about her family get-together. Her mum had given her a French bestseller on how to be lazy at work, she said – a great start to her career.

  ‘That reminds me, I’ve got you a present,’ I told her. ‘I’ll give it to you after we’ve finished the voting.’

  ‘Ah, c’est gentil,’ she said, and gave my hand a squeeze.

  ‘Careful, I might be filming you,’ I said. Exactly the wrong thing to say. A mind-blowingly stupid thing to say. And she looked shocked, as well she might.

  Fortunately, I had an excuse to get out before I said any more stupidities. I went round collecting up the votes, and withdrew to the kitchen to do the count. To ensure total openness, all the poets were gathered around me as, one by one, I stacked their handwritten names on little piles between the bottles of ketchup and boxes of tea.

  At first, it was skewed, because gangs of people had voted for their friend, but then things began to even out. The names came in random order, and it got much too tight to tell who had won. I took an order pad down from a peg and wrote out the names, then counted up each poet’s votes.

  ‘If there’s only one or two votes’ difference, we’ll do a recount,’ I told them.

  But in the event, it was worse than that. After two recounts, it turned out that three poets all had the same number of votes: seventeen. They were punky Suzie, the girl who wrote about the banlieue policeman, Laurie the unrhyming rapper, and Jake.

  ‘You get the deciding vote, Paul,’ Laurie said. ‘And we know who you’re going to vote for.’ He gave Jake a withering look.

  ‘No,’ Jake blurted out. ‘I told Paul not to vote for me. We have to ask the public. Maybe someone hasn’t voted.’

  This sounded like a dodgy plan, but I couldn’t think of a better one, so I went out and asked if there was anyone who hadn’t voted yet.

  Amandine raised her hand, naturally enough, but then she’d missed all the poems except Jake’s. No one else reacted except to shake their heads, until a shy hand went up just along the row from Amandine. It was Mitzi. Presumably Jake had ordered her not to vote for him, either.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Laurie groaned. ‘His girlfriend.’

  Shit, I thought, I am going to have to vote. Then a movement by the door caught my eye. Of course, I thought, and picked up the microphone again.

  ‘Benoît?’ He looked slightly startled as everyone turned to stare at him. ‘You didn’t vote, did you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Non,’ he replied.

  ‘So who would you vote for?’ I gestured towards the row of poets standing beside me along the counter, who also included all those not in the tie-break. Merde, I thought, one more vote for Brick or Bat, or whatever Marsha’s bloke’s name was, would bring him up to the same score, too.

  ‘Oh …’ Benoît looked along the line of expectant poets, apparently not realising the full importance of his choice. He shrugged. ‘Him,’ he finally said, pointing towards the counter.

  ‘Moi?’ Laurie said, thrusting himself forward.

  ‘Non, the next one, him, yes, you, the mmm guy.’

  Jake.

  To look at him, you’d have thought he was about to explode, or at the very least lift off and smash through the ceiling on his way into orbit. Le public had voted, and they’d voted for him. Baudelaire’s home town thought he was the best poet it had ever heard. Tonight, anyway. Everyone in the room except Laurie and too-cool Jean-Marie was howling at him. Jake seemed to be almost in pain with the pleasure. Then suddenly his arms shot up and he double-punched the air. This also caused him to punch the ceiling above the serving counter, but luckily it was a false one, and buckled rather than pulping his knuckles.

  As the cheering went on, I listed his prizes: not only was there the gold-plated funeral-fund pen to help him write more poetry, there was also a publishing contract with one of Mitzi’s business associates. It was a company mainly used to publishing books on women’s issues, but Jake didn’t seem to mind. And after all, he was a bit of a women’s issue himself.

  I shook his hand and gave him the microphone so he could make his acceptance speech, but he lowered it and mouthed at me: ‘The ring.’

  ‘Right, yes.’ I went back into the kitchen while Jake thanked everyone who’d ever helped him, fortunately without listing all the women who’d inspired his poems.

  My job was a tried-and-tested one. Jake had gone the whole hog in his conversion to homo romanticus and his surprise for Mitzi was to be the old ring-in-the-glass-of-champagne trick. So I filled two flûtes, dropped the ring into one of them, and went back out to join Jake.

  ‘Ah!’ He welcomed me with a huge grin. ‘Mitzi, one of these is for you.’ He took the glass with the ring in it and beckoned to her. ‘Drink it, avec prudence,’ he warned as he handed it over. They clinked glasses. Mitzi saw what was inside hers and gasped.

  ‘It is a bag,’ Jake announced to the confused audience. In the excitement, he’d reverted to French and called the ring a bague. ‘When she has finished the champagne, I will pose her a certain question.’

  There were whoops of encouragement as Mitzi drank with pursed lips, doing her best not to swallow the ring at the bottom of the glass. Finally, she tipped it into her hand. At which point it was her turn to look confused – the diamond
s had disappeared, leaving three gaping holes at the top of the ring.

  Mitzi clutched her throat, afraid that she’d swallowed them. Ominously, the ring was also looking much less golden than when I’d put it in the glass. Now it was more of a dark grey.

  ‘How cheap was it exactly?’ I whispered to Jake.

  But he was holding Mitzi up as she staggered around holding her windpipe.

  ‘Ça va, ma chérie?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she croaked.

  ‘Will you e-pooz me?’

  ‘If I survive,’ she wheezed.

  ‘You’d better get her to hospital for an X-ray,’ I told him. I wanted to add that he might want to take the precaution of having her tested for toxic metal colourings and soluble crystals, but it didn’t seem like the right time.

  Marie-Dominique’s leather-bound form appeared by my side, trailing Jean-Marie in her wake like a plain-clothes bodyguard.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Our taxi is waiting outside. It will take you to hospital.’

  She led Jake and Mitzi away, all the while saying how much she had loved the ‘naked sensuality’ of Jake’s poem.

  ‘You don’t have any about SM, do you?’ she asked.

  Once the excitement had died down, it was time for me to make a final announcement.

  ‘Excuse me, but you have to listen to one more poem,’ I told everyone. ‘It’s for my good friend Amandine, here. On Monday it will be her twenty-fifth birthday, but she’s celebrating it tonight.’ There were cheers and a short burst of the usual song. ‘It’s also thanks to Amandine that we could all be here this evening, because she was the one who called my other good friend Alexa’ – I held out a hand towards my sardonically smiling business partner – ‘and told her that it was possible to save this tea room from being turned into an American fast-food place.’ This earned a satisfying round of anti-fast-food hissing. ‘My present to Amandine,’ I went on, ‘is a little poem of my own. I know it’s too late to vote, but anyway, only one vote counts.’ I smiled over at Amandine who was blushing and getting a rather over-hearty birthday kiss on the cheek from Hunk or Lunk or whatever, much to Marsha’s obvious irritation.

  ‘Happy twenty-fifth, Amandine,

  You’re new on the scene,

  Looking like you’re sixteen.

  The thing is to stay keen,

  Don’t get blasé like a has-been,

  Don’t give in to French spleen,

  Just keep living the drean.

  I ran out of rhymes, but you know what I mean.’

  The last two lines earned me huge groans from the audience. As had, to be honest, several of the other lines. But Amandine was giving me the kind of look that you’d receive if you went to the desert during a drought and offered to build a brand-new oasis.

  She walked over to the serving counter, and turned her face up towards mine to give me the traditional French thank-you kiss. But as she brushed her hot cheeks against mine, and hugged me, I saw Alexa zigzagging her way through the crowd, her bloke following in her wake.

  ‘That was one of the worst poems I’ve ever heard in my life, Paul,’ she announced. ‘But a nice gesture. I’m just glad you never tried to write one for me. Nothing rhymes with Alexa.’

  ‘Sexer?’ said her bloke, who was hovering at her shoulder.

  ‘That’s not a word, is it? By the way, this is Simon,’ Alexa told me. ‘He’s the guy I was telling you about.’

  ‘Telling me about?’ She hadn’t mentioned any boyfriend to me.

  ‘Yes, the one who’ – she lowered her voice – ‘is going to hack the anti-English website.’

  ‘Oh, the nerd?’ I said, much more bitchily than I’d intended.

  ‘Well, he’s not my boyfriend, Paul. I can talk to men without sleeping with them, you know. You, for example.’

  She gave a laugh that was probably meant to be gently teasing, but to me it sounded as though she was shattering all the illusions that had been trying to crystallise in my head. She was right, I realised, we weren’t going anywhere romantic together. The idea that an ex-girlfriend being friendly meant that she wanted to start up again was a male fantasy, and I’d been wallowing in it right up to my neck. Pointlessly, too, because when I thought about it, I saw that I wasn’t really interested in going back in time. The future looked much more promising. Suddenly I found myself laughing along with Alexa.

  ‘Drinks, everyone?’ I asked.

  So while Benoît sold glasses of beer and wine to the remaining members of the audience, a select group jammed themselves into the kitchen. Select, that is, but large enough to make it hard to breathe in that confined space: all the poets who weren’t at the hospital, plus Marsha, Amandine, Gregory, Alexa and her friend Simon. We toasted the evening, the continued existence of the tea room, and our absent friends who were probably queuing up in A&E, with the loud dominatrix harrying the nurses into hurrying things along.

  I did my best to play host and chat to everyone, but this only made me increasingly aware that my poetry moment with Amandine was slipping into the past. It was being crowded out by the sheer number of people in the room with us. Whether we’d have been canoodling together if we’d been alone, I really didn’t know, but how could you canoodle when every word you said emerged from your mouth at a maximum distance of six inches from three other people’s ears? And when two of your exes – one recent and fleeting, the other more distant but now your business partner – grinned half mockingly at you every time you looked in their direction?

  At one point I tried to twist my way through the crush towards Amandine, but I was hijacked by Laurie.

  ‘OK, Paul, so just admit one thing,’ he said, sweating at me. ‘You fixed it so Jake could go last, right?’

  ‘Quite honestly,’ I told him, ‘I was expecting his poem to be dire, so going first or last really wouldn’t have changed a thing.’ As always, when a person starts their sentence with ‘quite honestly’, I wasn’t being quite honest. I’d calculated that if Jake’s poem was half-decent, it had to be an advantage for him to go last. But was that really so wrong? After all, this was a French competition, meaning that even if you didn’t break or bend the rules, you could still massage them until they relaxed a little.

  ‘Hm,’ Laurie conceded. ‘And what did you think of my poem?’

  ‘Quite honestly, I thought it was very funny.’

  Eventually Amandine squeezed her way towards me and said she was going to leave.

  ‘Thank you so much for the poem, Paul,’ she said. ‘Will you give me a copy?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll have it framed. If you don’t think that’s too arrogant. It’s not really a work of art, just a present. And an amateurish one at that. I mean, DIY poetry …’ I realised I was starting to talk rubbish and stopped.

  ‘That’d be great,’ she said. ‘Bring it on Monday to my canal party. You are coming?’

  ‘Yes, tell me where and when and I’ll rustle up some cocktail ingredients.’

  ‘Great. And I’m not inviting everyone,’ she said, shifting her eyes right and left to indicate the other people in the room. Particularly, I guessed, Alexa and Marsha.

  ‘Very wise,’ I said. ‘Are you taking a taxi home or getting the Métro? I’ll walk you.’

  ‘No, you’re the host, I don’t want to make you leave your own party.’

  I wondered if she was applying the théorie de l’élastique. Was I meant to say: Balls to convention, I’ll walk you to the taxi rank? Or would she really think it was impolite to leave my guests? She was a well brought-up Parisienne, after all. This could be a test of my politeness or my manliness.

  I felt a tickling sensation in my groin, and realised it was my phone.

  It was Jake. I could hardly tell what he was saying, but gathered that Marie-Dominique had blitzed them through A&E, and that Mitzi was fine. The ‘diamonds’ had been non-toxic. More to the point, she’d accepted the offer to wear a better-quality ring.

  ‘On arrive!’ Jake shouted abo
ve the background noise. They were on their way to the party.

  ‘I’ll walk with you to the Métro,’ I told Amandine. ‘I’ve got time before Jake and the others arrive.’

  ‘No, you must stay. See you on Monday night.’

  And she bised me goodbye.

  V

  So there I was, on the Monday evening, walking along the canal path from Stalingrad, possibly the least romantic Métro station name in Paris, on my way to Amandine’s party.

  I had no idea what sort of cocktail I was going to receive when I got there. Almost certainly not a Sex on the Beach – there was no beach for a start, and Sex on the Canal Bank sounds just plain creepy. Knowing my luck, it was probably going to be a few random English and French ingredients sloshed together in a frantic Parisian shaker, and it was anyone’s guess what would come out – sweet or sour, fizzy or flat.

  These thoughts were mixed up in my head as I walked past groups of trendy Parisians playing pétanque in the evening sun. And they weren’t negative thoughts. It was like I’d told Jake. The exciting thing about life is not knowing. Not being sure what would happen in an hour or two, or three, when – if – I finally managed to manoeuvre Amandine away from everyone else for a private tête-à-tête. Having no idea what she’d say, or what I’d say, or where I’d end the night. Alone on a sofa bed, à deux somewhere more comfortable, or alone but still hoping that the à deux might happen? I hadn’t a clue. The only thing that really mattered was that my glass would be full. Merde to the choice between half full and half empty – I was looking for a whole slice of life, not a demi-portion.

  Of course I was worried that I’d get the cold shoulder, all the more so because at that moment I was literally suffering from one. I was carrying a ten-kilo bag of ice cubes like a pillow jammed against my right ear. In my free hand I held two carrier bags. One contained Amandine’s poem, which I’d framed with the help of the local DIY shop. The other, some ingredients to tip the balance of fate in my favour: a bottle of chilled bubbly, a miniature of raspberry liqueur and a punnet of long, scarlet Gariguette strawberries. I’ve always found that with a drop of liqueur in a flûte of champagne and a slice of strawberry to make the pink liquid fizz, the world can usually be relied upon to look a little brighter.