I could see it all coming – in the evening, when I was trying to put in an order for plastic spoons on the Internet, Florence would say, ‘Oh, I’m fed up with this. Let’s go out.’
I’d be fed up with working late too, but I’d want to get it done before I relaxed. It was the only way to get to the stage where we could pay someone else to order the spoons.
The honest half of me was saying, you’ve got to accept it. You and Florence were great for a holiday, but it ain’t going to work no more.
The trouble was, though, that there was one major logistical problem with telling her it was all off between us – I was living rent-free in her apartment. If we split up, I’d be homeless. And last time I’d looked for a place of my own in Paris, it had been a total disaster. There was no way I had the time or energy to face up to that humiliation again.
So it seemed that I’d have to grin and bear it, even if that did make me a total hypocrite. I looked at myself in the mirror of my half-finished new toilet and tried out a guilt-free Parisian pout: ‘Hypocrite, moi?’ If I said it fast enough, it sounded like ‘Hit me.’
This inbuilt masochism is the only explanation I can find for why I went to Florence’s apartment, grabbed a few essentials, and came back to kip in the tea-room cellar.
Compared to the luxury of Florence’s orgy-sized double bed, it was uncomfortable dossing down on a concrete floor, but I found that I slept better on an easy conscience than I had on her expensive mattress.
What was more, now that I was free of moral debts to Florence, I could spring the Nicolas trap.
Next morning, Pavel and I went into a huddle and sketched out the details in our ungrammatical but efficient French.
Pavel would call Nicolas and tell him they had an urgent problem with the toilet that they needed him to solve. He’d say I was away – paying a surprise visit to the île de Ré, for example – so they couldn’t ask me. And as soon as Nicolas set foot in the building, I would pounce.
‘Is good plan, is very good plan.’ Pavel’s cruel chuckle summed up our feelings perfectly.
So it was with childlike glee that I sat on the downstairs toilet that same afternoon and waited for Pavel to guide Nicolas to his Paul-in-the-box. I had Nicolas’s contract on my lap, alongside the estimates that Pavel had provided for the job. I read through them again, and yes, the heron-man fully deserved the kick in the tail feathers that he was about to get.
He was, of course, twenty minutes late for his meeting with Pavel, but at last I heard voices on the stairs.
‘Look, boss, look.’ A Polish wheeze.
‘OK.’ An architect’s huff.
‘Oh, bonjour,’ I said, as Nicolas opened the door. His panicked eyes and nostrils flickered down towards my trouser level to check whether I was actually shitting.
‘I though you were in . . .?’ He stopped and frowned. He’d already guessed that this was a trap. And a quick glance over his shoulder told him that there was no point trying to do his usual vanishing trick – Pavel and his mates were sitting on the stairs like the audience at a basement comedy show.
‘No, I decided to stay in Paris and read these.’
I handed him the two documents to compare. He looked puzzled, which wasn’t surprising, because he had to be baffled about how the hell I’d got my hands on one of them.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. He shook his head as if the documents were an assertion that architects were mythical creatures, like abominable snowmen. Actually, part of me wished they were.
‘This is your contract, with the estimate for the calculation of your ten per cent.’ I’d spent a good hour preparing the French sentences I needed for this little interview. The French for estimate is ‘devis’, which seemed to be related to ‘deviner’, meaning to guess. They’re very honest about it. ‘And this second – much smaller – estimate is the one given to you by Pavel for the same work.’
‘He gave you his . . .?’
‘Yes, he says this is not the first time that you’ve done this. You see the difference?’
‘Yes, but I . . .’
‘. . . am a thieving shit,’ I wanted to say, but I hadn’t prepared that bit.
‘I am sorry, Nicolas, but after seeing this, I have offered Pavel to make an accord. I will pay him his estimate, plus more if he finishes on time. To you I will pay your administration charges for finding Pavel, and for drawing the plans, for ordering materials, et cetera, and nothing else.’
‘You—’
I held up a dusty hand near enough to his black jacket to convince him not to interrupt.
‘You said to Florence that you were giving us a prix d’ami, but you are ripping us off.’ This was the verb ‘arnaquer’, a very practical word taught to me by my totally impractical friend, Jake the American poet.
‘I . . . You cannot do this. We have signed a contract.’ Even supercool Nicolas was looking overheated now.
‘Your contract said the work would begin on this date.’ I prodded the relevant page. ‘It did not. Your contract said you would come to see the beginning of work. You did not. And your contract with me has an estimate for the work which is false. Also, this toilet was completely wrong. It was only thanks to Pavel and me that you were able to open the door and find me.’
Nicolas stood there and fumed. I guessed that he would have punched me if the venue for our fight had been less dirty.
‘Here,’ I said, holding out two more sheets of paper for him. ‘One is a new contract between us, with my new conditions. One is a letter that I will send to the Société des Architectes Français if you do not sign the new contract.’
He didn’t even acknowledge their existence.
‘This is jealousy,’ he snorted. ‘You are just jealous that she was with me.’
‘Perhaps. I did not like the idea that you screwed Florence. But I like even less that you want to screw me as well.’
He misinterpreted my grin. I was just pleased with myself for getting my French sentence right, but he must have thought I was gleefully imagining a threesome, because he raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘In your dreams, dustboy.’
‘You will pay me everything or you will have problems,’ he threatened, and stomped up the stairs past the grinning builders, his buttocks clenched defiantly in the pose of a man who knows his retreat is being watched by four Polish workmen.
They clenched even tighter when his audience burst into raucous laughter.
5
THE BEST TIME to invade France is at noon on the first Wednesday of any month. At midday on the dot, the air-raid sirens all start howling, and the French totally ignore them. An invading air force would have several minutes of unchallenged invasion time before anyone realized it wasn’t the monthly test run and there really were bombers buzzing the Eiffel Tower.
The first Wednesday in August would be ideal. By then, Paris’s ruling classes have left the city. This includes government ministers, who are ensconced in their holiday homes and have all forgotten what politics is. One summer recently, France had a killer heatwave that had old people dropping like flies – especially those who’d been left alone in Paris by families going away – and the few Parisian doctors and nurses who hadn’t gone on holiday were begging the Minister of Health to declare an emergency. His reply was basically, well there’s a nice breeze here at the seaside, what are you moaning about?
Over two hundred years after the French Revolution, ‘Let them eat cake’ lives on. Let them buy Evian facial sprays.
On this first Wednesday in August, I felt as if the alarms were sounding for me, too.
Not only was I bedding down on an inflatable mattress in a building site, I had less than four weeks before I was supposed to open. I still had no staff, no furniture and no menus – the French printer kept sending back proofs with new spelling mistakes. Where did he get ‘hand sandwich’ and ‘hot buttered stones’ from?
What’s more, after heroically bringing the tea room within sight of being finished, Pa
vel and his mates had buggered off. It seemed that our bonding over Nicolas hadn’t been meaningful enough to stop them adopting the old builders’ tactic of Leaving Everything Half-Finished So the Customer Is So Grateful When You Turn Up Again That He Doesn’t Care If You Botch the Finishings.
It was a cruel example of completus interruptus.
The air in the streets could have steamed asparagus. And inside the goldfish bowl of the not-yet-air-conditioned tea room it was just as bad. The guys had finished the wiring downstairs but had left upstairs decorated with garlands of hanging cables, so I couldn’t even plug in a fan in the main part of the shop, where I was working.
Then in walked Michel, Florence’s brother, as carefree as ever, perfectly equipped for the heat with his baggy Indian shirt and loose drawstring trousers. He looked around and nodded his admiration.
‘You have made big progress, Paul. Congratulations.’
‘Yes, but now it stops,’ I replied in French. ‘I am like a Jeep in the merde. I am blocked but I can’t get out to push myself.’
Michel pulled at loose wires, one electrician admiring the capacity of another to leave things unfinished.
‘No, I like the floor tiles, very clean. And the counter. Lots of room. It will be a good café.’
‘Thanks.’
He hadn’t come just to admire my new flooring, though. He was worried, he said. He switched to English to explain. He’d turned up at the apartment, found lots of my stuff, but no sign of me.
‘I knew you weren’t in Re, so I wondered where you were. I have been in the apartment for two days and you never return. I wondered, I mean . . .’
He cocked his head at me like a spaniel waiting for someone to say walkies, and I saw what was going on. He’d asked Florence if she knew where I was, got a surprised ‘No’ as an answer, and they’d assumed I was shacked up with a woman.
‘I’m sleeping here, downstairs.’
‘Here?’ He grimaced at the sheer non-residential bareness of the place.
‘Yes. There’s a gym on the other side of the Champs-Elysées. I take my shower there every morning. I’ve bought myself an inflatable mattress. I have some clothes, a sleeping bag, the essentials. It’s OK.’
‘Ah.’
I could see that it pissed him off to ask the key questions. Would I be returning to the apartment? Were things on or off with me and Florence?
He started feeling wires again, twisting the three cables sticking out of a hole in the wall into a spindly coral. It struck me that they might be connected to the mains, in which case very soon he was going to be filling the place with an unpleasant burnt-flesh smell that would put off prospective customers. But presumably he knew his business.
‘If you want any help . . .’ he suggested.
‘Help?’
‘With the electricity. I am here in Paris to wait for a job. A new film is starting, but I have no money at the moment because I don’t have my hours.’
‘Your hours?’
‘Yes, as a film-worker, if you work for enough hours in one year, you receive unemployment money for the rest of the time. Very good money. But if you don’t have your hours you get nothing.’
He obviously preferred discussing the nuts and bolts (and wires) of the film industry more than the gory details of my relationship with his sister, because he sat down and explained the incredible French-movie-star-unemployment system. Many big-name actors, he said, are paid the rate they got for their last film as unemployment money from the State when they’re not working. So they get the same rate day in, day out, whether they’re working or sitting on their yacht in Saint Tropez.
‘Same for directors, writers, everyone. That’s why we all want to work in the cinema. But only if we can get our hours.’ The poor guy had the forlorn look of someone who can’t find the key to the mini-bar door.
‘Well, as you can see, I do need an electrician,’ I said.
‘How much will you pay me?’
‘How much do you charge?’
He told me his daily rate as a film electrician, and when I’d got up again after my heart attack he said he’d finish the electrics in two days for the price of one, cash.
Which meant that when my first interview candidate arrived that afternoon, there was an electrician in the background busily proving that My Tea Is Rich was a dynamic, waste-no-time business. Staff were being recruited while the tea room was taking shape before their eyes. Michel might have given them the impression that it was OK for some of my employees to work topless and sing out of tune, but I was too pleased to be back on track to worry about that.
By the end of the day, both Michel and I were feeling a sense of achievement.
I’d interviewed seven job applicants, and scared away only two with my bad French and my non-smoking staff policy. Michel had done all my light fittings and even connected up the air conditioning. We decided to go out for a meal together to celebrate.
It was at this point that Florence chose to call him for a report.
Michel told her where I was living, and added ‘Yes, on his own,’ and ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
Then, however, he let slip that he was at the tea room, and, worse still, that he had been working here. He mouthed ‘Sorry’ and handed me his phone.
‘Hi, Florence, how are you?’ I asked, very chummily, I thought.
‘You have Michel working at the salon de thé?’
‘Yes. The builders hadn’t—’
‘So you got rid of my ex-boyfriend and now you use my brother?’
‘Use him? I’m paying him.’
‘I didn’t think you were like this, exploiting people.’
‘Exploiting?’ I shot a look of incredulity at Michel, who shook his head as if to say, ‘Sisters, huh.’
‘Yes, Nicolas works hard for you and all you do is try to get out of paying him.’
‘I’ll pay him what he’s earned, but not what he tried to rip me off for.’
‘He will sue you if you don’t pay him the full ten per cent.’ It seemed that Nicolas had done some very detailed crying on his ex-girlfriend’s shoulder.
‘If he sues, he’ll only lose even more money. I have the proof that he was trying to defraud me.’
‘Honestly, Paul, all you think about is money and business.’
It hardly seemed worth arguing, but I did anyway.
‘It’s true that my mind is kind of focussed on trying not to throw all the money I borrowed down the toilet, yes. Down a toilet that your friend Nicolas couldn’t even draw straight, by the way.’
If our relationship wasn’t dead already, it got a fatal kick in the balls as she rang off.
6
DO PEOPLE STILL play Snakes and Ladders? I guess not – it’s much too simple to be made into a computer game.
But here I was, feeling like I used to as a kid when I slid down one of those long, grinning pythons. Back at square one. No, before square one, because at least when I’d arrived in Paris the previous September, I’d had a job and a decent place to sleep. Now I had no home, and no job except spending the money I’d borrowed. The only constant was that, as usual, I was in major woman merde.
And the worst person in the world I could have turned to for advice about women, except perhaps Florence’s mum, was Jake the grunge poet. But in my present masochistic state, I suppose it was only natural to call him up. We arranged to see a show together that same night at what he called ‘this, like, complètement génial club’ in Belleville.
He was waiting for me at a Tunisian café on the corner of an old shopping arcade that had seen better days – days when there were actually shops in it, that is. The club, he said, was at the back of the arcade.
This lower part of Belleville, between the big-brand shopping zone at République and the prosperity of the Chinese restaurant area higher up, was lined with budget import shops and hole-in-the-wall food outlets. The cloying humidity and bare neon light really made me feel that I was in the kasbah in Marrakech rather than a c
ouple of miles north of the Seine. There were veiled women in the streets, and groups of North African men were talking earnestly at regular intervals along the narrow pavements. The streets were much busier in the ethnic areas of the city – probably because if some of these people left the neighbourhood, the immigration officials would never allow them back in.
Jake was living up here now, he had told me, with the latest in his atlas of women.
‘Hey Paul!’ he called out as soon as he saw me walking down from the métro station. I felt as if everyone in the whole street stopped to see who was being shouted at.
He was the only non-Arab outside the café, although he was dressed in the most Oriental style. He had on a long, loose round-necked shirt with an embroidered collar, whereas the Arab men were all in Western gear. As some kind of concession to the heat, he had cut his straight hair shorter, into a sort of shaggy blond shower cap. He certainly looked at ease, slumped back on a white cane chair, an immense Moroccan hookah pipe between his outstretched legs.
‘Are those things legal?’ I asked as I sat down next to him.
‘It is tabac only, man. Try.’
He held out the brass mouthpiece on its long tube, but my lungs were already burning from the hot atmosphere. I waved it away.
‘Allez, be cool, integrate yourself.’
‘If you insist.’ I took the mouthpiece and blew. This caused a satisfying eruption of bubbles in the water bottle and a snarl from Jake.
‘You take nothing at serious, man.’ He took a long puff, as if he needed to prove to the Arabs around us that he for one did not take sucking smoke through a long straw lightly.
‘What are you up to these days, Jake?’
He explained in his usual garbled fashion. He was still teaching English, though he didn’t have many classes because his business students were all away for the summer. Besides, he had a plan to get out of teaching, he said. This involved ‘going backwards to go forwards’. I could only assume that this actually meant something in the weird non-language he spoke, because he refused ‘for the instant’ to explain.
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