Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘But you won’t see anything. It’s all white.’

  ‘Exactly. Stand against the window.’

  ‘You want me in the photo too?’

  Like I said, she never used to take photos of me when we were together, at least not while I was awake. Now she was smiling at me from behind her little silver digital camera, singing ‘White Light White Heat’.

  ‘How do you want me?’

  ‘Just like you are. Hands in the pockets, looking at the camera. Yes.’ She checked the little screen at the back of the camera. ‘Perfect. Now if you want, we can go to a café and you can maybe wash some of the dust off before we go to the exhibition.’

  I stood and gaped. Had I heard her right?

  ‘Wash off the dust?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hang on. Five minutes ago you said it’d be cool for me to go there dirty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you only asked me to come for a walk so you could take that photo, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ She blushed, with embarrassment or annoyance, I didn’t know which.

  ‘All that bollocks about me looking like an artist. It was all . . . bollocks, wasn’t it?’

  Half of me was saying so bloody what. The other half couldn’t resist confronting her.

  ‘No. When I saw the shop window I thought it’d look good. Then I thought, maybe you don’t like to be dirty like that.’

  ‘Honestly, Alexa. You’re just like Florence. Letting me do weird stuff for your amusement.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She was standing there with her hands on her hips, in self-defence attack mode.

  ‘When I was in Corrèze, they dressed me up in stupid clothes, let me cover myself in muck, tried to sell me their fields. I felt like the family clown.’

  ‘Well, if you have problems with your girlfriend, that is not my problem, Paul. I am not your girlfriend, OK? I saw the white shop, you’re covered with white dust, I said to myself, good photo. Et basta.’

  ‘Yeah, well it was just the way you said “now maybe you can wash”.’ I did a cruel impression of a female voice with a slight French accent. ‘It sounded so snobbish. Like, I really ought to clean up a bit so it doesn’t look as though you hang out with homeless people.’

  Now Alexa was the one gaping.

  ‘OK, Paul. Perhaps in place of “maybe you can wash”,’ – she pulled off a damn good imitation of my imitation – ‘I could say “maybe you can bugger off”? That is a new expression I learned in England. Bugger off. Good, isn’t it?’

  And as if to prove it, she buggered off, taking her shapely skirt for an angry walk down the Avenue François Premier.

  The street was named after Frank the First, my old boss Jean-Marie told me, a king who’d tried to make friends with Henry VIII and got told to bugger off. His name clearly did not bode well for Anglo-French relations.

  ‘Alexa.’

  She half-turned. ‘Bugger off!’

  As I watched her get ten, twenty, thirty yards away, I knew I’d never speak to her again. Her walk, which had been tense and staccato, gradually became more relaxed, her footsteps getting shorter and slower, as if her whole body was shaking off my memory.

  Once she turned the corner she’d be gone for ever.

  3

  I DON’T KNOW who was to blame for the accident.

  Morally, it had to be the scooter’s fault. I mean, any accident between a pedestrian and a scooter that takes place on the pavement has to be the scooter’s fault. The fact that in Paris scooters quite often use the pavements instead of the road is irrelevant.

  Though I had to admit he wasn’t actually riding along the pavement. He was just mounting it, to padlock his scooter to the base of one of the large table-tennis-bat-shaped tourist maps you see all over the city. He shouldn’t have been listening to an iPod, though. That was plain dangerous. If he’d had his ears unplugged, he would have been aware of the dusty Englishman sprinting down the hill yelling ‘Stop!’

  Now I was sure Alexa was a hallucination. Or an angel, staring down at me from heaven, backlit by the glare of the sun.

  ‘Paul, are you OK?’

  Her voice sounded real enough, anyway.

  ‘I think so.’ I did a quick finger- and toe-jiggling survey. Everything seemed to be there. And my vision was fine. I could see all four of Alexa’s legs perfectly.

  ‘Can you get up?’ she asked, looking beautifully worried.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I mean, not yet. Can you take a photo?’

  ‘A photo?’

  ‘Yes, of me and the scooter. In case I want to sue this bastard.’

  She described the accident to me as she washed my grazed elbow with warm water out of a teapot. She was dabbing at it with a large cotton napkin.

  We were at a café, where Alexa’s looks had earned us instant grade-A service from the waiter. Two cold beers and a steaming first-aid kit.

  ‘I turned and you were sort of flying. You had bumped the scooter and then you . . .’ She did the sign basketball referees use to show that someone has walked with the ball.

  ‘Somersaulted?’

  ‘Yes. Between the man and the, you know, little window thing.’

  ‘The windscreen.’

  ‘Yes, and you turned over in the air, and boom, you came down on your feet and then you fell back like you were surprised that you were OK.’

  ‘Which I was. Surprised, I mean. Ouch.’

  The graze was painful but clean. I didn’t know where I’d got it. Probably scraping my arm against the little blade of a windscreen. At least I hoped so. A graze from Paris’s summer pavements, with the likelihood of E.coli germs crawling out of the sun-fermented dog merde, did not appeal.

  Alexa took a deep draught of her beer.

  ‘OK, shall we go to the exhibition now?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean you still want to go? With me, I mean?’

  ‘Well, you were running after me to say sorry for being an imbecile, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So let’s go.’

  By all the laws governing the universe, from the creation of a new blood cell to the explosion of a supernova, I should have kissed her.

  The waiter who was watching us from the bar, his empty tray still in his hand, seemed to be willing me to do it. Even the sparrow hopping forlornly about by the wheel of a Smart Car outside seemed to be chirruping ‘Go on, give her one.’

  Alexa was wiping the beer from her lips as if making way for a kiss. Or just spreading out the beer froth so I’d get an all-over tingle.

  But I didn’t kiss her.

  Something told me that if she was really just wiping away the beer froth, and if the sparrow was only complaining that its feathers weren’t air-conditioned, then I’d look a right dickhead when she asked what the hell I thought I was doing. She had a new boyfriend, I was with Florence. So kissing her just wasn’t on.

  Yes, I was being way too logical. It must have been concussion.

  Alexa was looking at me with cruelly kissable concern. ‘The salon de thé is giving you stress, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. The more teacups you have, the more storms you can have in them. And I have to deal with them all by myself.’

  ‘When is she coming back to Paris to help?’

  ‘As soon as the dust settles, I guess. As soon as the place is finished and ready to open.’ It was the only way I could explain things. Florence wasn’t into chaos. She was an accountant, used to clean filing cabinets and neatly tallied figures. Once the tea room was working, and life had become more like one of her filing cabinets, she’d slot back in there. I guessed.

  ‘Let’s look at some paintings. They will take your mind off your problems,’ Alexa said. ‘And now, with your wounded arm, people will think you are a performance artist.’

  The bad news was that there was a real anaconda of a queue snaking across the courtyard of the Grand Palais. Every pair of fore
ign shorts in Paris had decided to come and hang out in front of the museum.

  The city knows all too well the pulling power of its Impressionists, so there’ll always be at least one of them in some kind of show. Renoir’s women, Degas’s horses, Manet’s laundry bills. Any excuse. And there had to be at least two hundred people waiting in line to see Monet and some unknowns who were sharing the bill with him. Tourists of all types were guzzling water, rubbing on sunblock or simply broiling in the airless open courtyard. There were groups of well-equipped Americans with jungle-ready backpacks and hi-tech walking shoes. Trendy young Japanese couples, dressed for the Jean Paul Gaultier catwalk, apparently oblivious to the heat. English families with obese kids speed-licking enormous ice creams before they melted away down their sunburnt arms. And a dozen more tourist subspecies, all in front of Alexa and me.

  It looked like a wasted journey.

  ‘Come,’ Alexa said, and pulled me towards the entrance. ‘I am a friend of the museum.’ She held up some kind of pass.

  ‘But I’m not.’

  ‘No, you are an artist. Come.’

  It worked, too. She gave the security guy at the entrance some blah, and he was too cool, and too fascinated by her body, to bother stopping us.

  At the reception counter inside, things didn’t go quite so smoothly.

  ‘If he does not have a card from the Maison des Artistes or from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he cannot enter without paying,’ the woman behind this particular counter said. She had straight black hair, square black glasses and a cold black soul. Or an air-conditioned one, anyway. She had her own private little air-cooler on the floor behind her, blowing a pleasant breeze up her skirt.

  ‘But he is an artist. He does not have cards on him. He is working,’ Alexa said.

  I held up my elbow as proof that I suffered for my art.

  The woman did a Parisian shrug of indifference, comfortably aware that all her job description called for was for her to perch on her stool getting her bum chilled until the museum closed.

  ‘Can’t you let him in? He is an English artist and I want to show him some French art.’

  ‘No. I need some identification.’ The woman was not going to budge.

  Alexa gave a little squeak of despair. ‘But we will have to queue up for hours.’

  ‘Why?’ the woman asked. ‘Just go and pay’

  We looked over towards the windows where the visitors were paying. They were being let into the hall from the courtyard in small groups of three or four, and then going to stand in line at one of the ticket windows.

  The black-haired woman was a genius. We simply crossed the hall, joined the shortest queue, and three minutes later I had my ticket. In a nation where queue-jumping is a sport, we’d just won Olympic gold.

  The show itself was disappointing. One huge canvas on which the half-blind old Monet had splodged what could have been lilies, bullet wounds or the results of an Impressionists’ pie-throwing contest, plus a series of views of nineteenth-century France painted by people who thought that trees looked like cabbages.

  The commentary explained that these were all ‘artists – gifted and less so – liberating themselves from the confines of the studio’. It was a shame, I thought, that some of them hadn’t liberated themselves from the confines of painting altogether.

  As we walked around the exhibition, people stared at me, and then, seeing the girl I was with, smiled to themselves. It seemed that Alexa was right. Here, everyone assumed, was an artist and his muse. I did my best to look intellectual, sculpting the air from time to time as if I’d been inspired by one of the paintings. I got a few laughs from Alexa, and even got myself photographed by a complete stranger. An artist’s life was fun, I decided.

  By the time we reached the exit sign, I’d had enough artistic fun for one day, but Alexa dragged me back to the beginning of the exhibition again and flopped down on a bench in front of the Monet.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked me.

  Oh dear, time for intelligent comment.

  ‘Well, I like Impressionist paintings. The cafés, the picnics. It’s happy art, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alexa smiled. Seemed I’d hit the right note. She turned back to the Monet and nodded. ‘It is joyful,’ she said.

  ‘Right. It’s so French.’

  ‘So you think we are all joyful?’

  ‘No, I mean, it’s all about lifestyle, isn’t it?’

  ‘Lifestyle?’ Alexa broke off from her contemplation of the lilies or raspberry flans or whatever they were.

  ‘Well yes. I remember when I was at school we went up to London to see a big Impressionist exhibition. And apart from all the fleshy ladies, what I liked about it was, well, they had fun. They invented this way of getting paintings done quickly so they could spend more time knocking back absinthe.’

  ‘What?’ This didn’t seem to be exactly what Alexa had studied during her art course.

  ‘Yes. I mean, who was the guy who did all the paintings of can-can dancers?’

  ‘Toulouse Lautrec?’

  ‘Right. What a great excuse for hanging around in bars looking up women’s skirts. And the guy who went to Tahiti . . .’

  ‘Gauguin.’

  ‘Yes. He took it to the limit, didn’t he? He just wanted to go and shag a lot of exotic women.’

  Alexa laughed dismissively. ‘Well, thank you, Paul, for this new interpretation of our art history. Monet invented Impressionism so he could go on more picnics.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong: respect where respect is due. Britain’s greatest contribution to art recently has been sawing cows in half. If I really was an artist’ (I lowered my voice so as not to disappoint my public) ‘I know why I’d go out into the country. A painting picnic would be much more fun than chainsawing the livestock. Don’t you think?’

  I hoped she did.

  She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn’t decide if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ she finally said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, Monet didn’t go so far that he could sell his old bed as art, but he took the first step.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Yes, lifestyle. It’s all about lifestyle. You have given me a brilliant idea.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes, for a series of photos. No!’ She shouted the word, and people turned to see who was trying to rape her. ‘A film. A documentary. Yes!’ She shouted the yes too, and the people looked over again to watch me take advantage of her sudden consent.

  ‘A film?’

  ‘Yes. It is brilliant.’

  And then she kissed me.

  There is, apparently, a particular kind of kiss that a girl gives to a guy who’s just inspired a documentary.

  It lands smack on your lips. It’s wet and passionate, as if you’ve just told her you love her. But it’s non-sexual. For the girl, at least.

  And it only lasts a second before life returns to normal.

  Outside, the heat of the day was abating a degree or two as the streets sank into shade. We strolled up the bill, keeping a respectful six inches between us.

  When we got back to the tea room, Alexa was genuinely surprised to see that the builders had not hung around.

  ‘Oh, they are not here,’ she said.

  ‘No, they often aren’t. I’ll have to call them and shout a bit so they turn up early tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, well . . .’ She stood in front of me wondering how to say goodbye.

  I put a hand chastely on her upper arm and pressed my cheeks to hers. ‘We’ll have to meet up again so you can explain what this documentary is going to be about.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But I must go back to London tomorrow. It is Sacha’s birthday. There will be a big party.’

  ‘Oh yeah? He’s going to be eighteen, is he?’ Miaow, I know.

  ‘Ha, no. Twenty-one.’

  ‘Right.’
She was only twenty-three and already into toy boys. Brilliant.

  ‘I will call you when I come back to Paris.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Well . . .’ She did that nodding-with-raised-eyebrows thing American actors do when they’ve run out of lines and the scene isn’t over yet.

  I put her out of her misery.

  ‘It was good to see you, Alexa. Thanks for coming and taking my mind off my problems.’

  And filling it with new ones, I wanted to say.

  4

  THE GOOD THING about being in work merde is that it doesn’t give you time to think about all the other types of merde you might be tempted to get into.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I was forced to concentrate all my energies on getting the tea room fitted out.

  There were a few crises, like when Pavel and Co. realized that Nicolas’s plans for the toilet would have meant customers having to stand on the bowl to shut the door, but we sorted them out with common sense, which came a lot cheaper than Nicolas’s expertise.

  At the end of every day I got out the mop and cleaned up so my craftsmen could start with a fresh canvas the next morning. One evening, I noticed a weird smell in amongst the kitchen units behind my new stainless-steel counter. It took me half an hour of crawling around on the floor and jamming my whole upper body into the cupboards to locate the cause. And believe me, there’s something about scooping up the remains of two-week-old builder’s lunch with your bare fingers that reminds you why you used to enjoy having a cosy office job.

  Like the one that Florence was giving up to come in on the tea room with me.

  As the days went by, it became clearer and clearer to me that she didn’t realize what she was letting herself in for. She was doing her usual thing of closing her eyes to problems.

  I, on the other hand, before I’d served a single cup of tea, had come to realize all too well that I wanted a business partner – if I wanted one at all – who had their eyes wide open.

  What you needed to make a small business survive, I now saw, was a desire to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the ability to cram every detail of the business into your throbbing head. Managing the tea room was going to be like running a marathon while juggling ten plates of spaghetti. And what you really don’t want when you’re doing that is someone tweaking continually at your armpit hairs.