Merde Actually Page 12

Before we’d started drinking, Albert had given me a business card with his mobile number on it in case of emergencies. Ars Taxi, it said. A pretty apt name for the vehicle that was going to get my ass off the island.

  3

  Don’t Get Merde, Get Even

  1

  I ARRIVED BACK in Paris on July 14th, Bastille Day.

  Jet fighters were spinning trails of coloured smoke across the skyline. The whole neighbourhood around the Champs-Elysées was festooned with red, white and blue, and flooded with soldiers, police and flag-waving tourists waiting for the parade. I hung around to see what all the fuss was about, but quickly came away again. To me, a parade of tanks through a city centre isn’t a celebration, it’s a threat.

  Why didn’t they have a parade of wine-makers, footballers and lingerie designers? I wondered. That’s what France should be proud of.

  I was just as disillusioned with what I found at the tea room – four bare walls, showing no sign that a builder had even crossed the threshold while I’d been away.

  I didn’t blame the builders, though. French builders are exactly like their counterparts all over the world. They’re all in the global conspiracy. From Tunbridge Wells to Turkmenistan, they use the same techniques – Taking a Deposit Then Buggering Off for a Month, Leaving the Water Disconnected the Whole Weekend, Making Sure Pipes Are Inaccessible So That the Tiniest Leak Means You Have To Smash Every Tile in Your New Bathroom. The usual stuff.

  So I had no complaints about my builders – they were as unreliable as I’d expected. My beef was with Nicolas. I thought it was his job to disbelieve the builders’ promises and threaten them with bankruptcy until they got the job done. But Florence’s suave ex-shagmate was under the impression that all he had to do was print out some drawings and then pocket a whopping ten per cent of the various workmen’s estimates as his fee.

  I decided to take advantage of the only good thing about having a girlfriend who used to sleep with your architect – namely that if the architect won’t answer your own phone calls, you can get the girl to pass on the message that if said architect isn’t at the site at eight thirty the next morning, then he’s fired.

  It worked like a dream.

  Not a particularly pleasant dream, but a dream, anyway.

  At eight the next morning, I went in and started chiselling at a ridiculous purple-tile mosaic that ran around two of the walls. Strictly speaking, it was the builders’ job, but it was great for getting frustrations out of my system – about Florence’s dad, Florence’s passivity, and of course Florence’s ex-boyfriend. Yes, I was thinking a lot about Florence as I hammered away at that wall.

  It was ten to nine when Nicolas finally poked the tip of his refined nose through the open door. I’d expected him to be late – for people like him, punctuality is a sign of weakness.

  You’d have thought he had never set eyes on a naked brick in his life. When he saw the mess I was making, he recoiled as if he was about to get mugged.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he called out from the doorway.

  ‘Bonjour, Nicolas, nice to see you at last.’

  Despite the humidity, he was wearing a pale linen jacket over his crisp white shirt. He looked as though he never exerted himself enough to feel the heat. Why he’d chosen to associate himself with a business as physical as construction I don’t know. I got the impression he’d have preferred to be an orchestral conductor if it wasn’t for all that tiresome baton-waving they have to do. When he’d shown us his first sketch for the layout of the basement area, he’d swept his hands over the page as if it was a symphony rather than the plans for a toilet. Today, though, he looked more like one of the île de Ré herons I’d seen out on the marshes – long white neck; immense, stick-thin legs; slow, studied movements.

  I didn’t bother holding out my hand to shake. It was obvious that his fingers never touched anything that hadn’t recently been wiped with a moist towelette.

  As he’d done on the phone, he tried to make out that we were social acquaintances meeting up for a chat about the holidays.

  ‘Yes, yes, Florence is very well and she is probably in bed dreaming about me,’ I assured him. ‘But I am not very well. I am not happy. We are two weeks late and nothing is happening. Where are the builders?’

  ‘Ah, builders,’ Nicolas moaned. His expression suggested that his whole life was being made a misery by this incomprehensible ‘builder’ phenomenon that had suddenly struck the nation.

  ‘Yes, the builders. Where are they?’

  Nicolas shrugged.

  ‘Can you call and ask why they are not here?’

  ‘I know why they are not here,’ he said. ‘They are finishing another job.’

  I am not at all the violent type, but I was beginning to wish I wasn’t holding a hammer, because pretty soon there was going to be a large dent in Nicolas’s elegant skull.

  ‘Of course they are finishing another job, Nicolas. Builders are always finishing another job. But it is your job to bring them here to my job. That is why I will pay you.’ I was very careful to use the future tense here, to imply that payment was nowhere near the present. I gave him a second to chew on the implied threat. As soon as he opened his mouth to reply, I interrupted. ‘Call them now. Tell them that if they don’t start tomorrow, they are fired.’

  I might as well have touched Nicolas’s linen jacket with an oil-soaked rag. He almost wet himself.

  ‘I can’t do that! We will never find other builders.’

  ‘I know that, they know that, but we’re in France, Nicolas. If you don’t get angry, nothing happens. So please get angry. It is your job.’

  And to be fair, he gave a good performance. He cajoled, he threatened, and finally settled into a rant about his ‘chiant’ – literally, shittingly annoying – ‘client’ who was saying he’d call the whole job off if it didn’t start tomorrow. As he called me ‘chiant’, he glanced apologetically at me, but I could tell it was the most sincere word in the whole conversation.

  Frankly, I didn’t give a shit. A year of living in Paris was the perfect preparation for this – I no longer gave a damn if people hated me, as long as they did what I wanted.

  And miraculously, at eight the next morning, a large white van drew up and disgorged its load of builders and tools.

  The workmen were a bunch of Poles, four guys called Fred, Pavel, Stan and Stefan, who didn’t have more than fifty words of French between them. But I didn’t care, because their chisel-scarred hands and muscle-bound backs looked as if they possessed all the skills necessary to fit out a tea room.

  They were quite impressed that I was there to meet them – being awake and at a building site at eight on a July morning was about as un-Parisian as you could get. But they were not so keen when they saw that I wasn’t going to bugger off and leave them to it. I knew that the only way to get anything done was to turn up every day and stay there, asking anyone who stepped towards the exit where they thought they were going while the tea room was still unfinished.

  ‘We make much noise, much merde,’ the gang leader, Pavel, warned me in his gruff voice. He was only about thirty-five, but his voice was as croaky as a retired sergeant major’s.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘More noise, more merde, that means more progress. I must open the tea room on the first of September.’

  ‘First September?’ Pavel translated this joke for his friends. The other three men, their skin the same shade of plaster-grey, threw back their heads and laughed.

  ‘I am serious,’ I told them. ‘It is in the contract with Nicolas, the architect.’

  ‘Ha, contract,’ Pavel grunted. ‘I tell you something about contract.’

  He did, too, and as soon as I’d understood the full implications of what he’d told me, I started dialling Nicolas’s number and rehearsing a volley of French insults to yell at him. But then something made me hit the red button and kill the call. No, I decided, much better to work out a way to get even with the bastard. As the French say, revenge is a dish be
st eaten cold.

  Nicolas didn’t put in another appearance until the builders were a week into the job. They had got to the end of the dusty demolition stage, and were now embarking on the filling-every-square-millimetre-of-floor-space-with-crap (and-more-dust) stage.

  The wannabe tea room was littered with heaps of tiles, an igloo of plaster slabs, a half-assembled steel food counter, and a lone toilet that sat invitingly but vulnerably at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement, where the atmosphere was one-third oxygen, one-third brick dust, and the rest Polish swear words.

  I was half dead from the boredom and noise, but quietly content – things were coming on fast, and I’d had time to work out what to do about my scumbag architect.

  It was a typically sweaty July Monday morning. Every weekend, Paris had been getting emptier of Parisians, and now it felt like an end-of-season beach resort. The dowdy clothing store next to the café was trying to sell off its overpriced swimwear before the last posh Parisians left town. The recruitment agency on the other side was advertising nothing but temporary replacements in its window.

  As usual, Nicolas didn’t think it necessary to cross the threshold of the building site he was supposed to be supervising. So my architect and I went and stood outside the recruitment agency, beneath a sickly poplar tree. Even in the shade it was hot and humid, and the car pollution drifting over from the ever-busy Champs-Elysées hung in the air like cheap perfume.

  I gave Nicolas the good news first, congratulating him on his choice of workmen. This, at least, he’d got exactly right. Not only were they skilled at demolition, they’d even done a refresher course in how to answer a mobile phone while pushing a wheelbarrowload of cement bags across a crowded pavement. I didn’t want to alienate any of my future clièntele by crippling them in an industrial accident before they’d had a chance to sample their first cup of real English tea.

  ‘C’est bien, c’est bien.’ Nicolas shot a paternal look at an approaching Pole, which morphed into a micro-grimace of distaste when Pavel got within sweat-smelling distance.

  ‘But there’s something I need to discuss with you, Nicolas,’ I said.

  ‘Oui?’ He frowned seductively, showing off the crease in his noble forehead to a passing tourist woman.

  ‘It’s our contract.’

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘I think there is an error.’

  ‘Error? Ho!’ This seemed to him to be as credible as a Frenchman agreeing to drink Californian wine.

  ‘Come in and I’ll show you.’ I’d brought most of the tea room’s paperwork along with me, safely stashed in a thick plastic bag. A rubbish bag, actually, one of the last batch I’d bought to protect my shoes before I learned how to avoid stepping in Paris’s dog merde every day.

  ‘Why don’t you bring it out?’ Nicolas tucked his long clean hair behind his ears and waited for me to obey.

  When I returned with my plastic bag, he was on the phone. He said an earnest ‘oui, oui, OK’ before folding his sleek little Nokia away.

  ‘I am sorry, Paul, I must go to an urgent site,’ he said.

  Oh, you are so crap, I thought. Even builders rarely use that one any more. The riposte is so obvious.

  ‘This is an urgent site, Nicolas.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really must go. Ciao.’

  And suddenly his legs were the fastest-moving things in the neighbourhood.

  I let him go – he was only postponing the inevitable.

  ‘You not tell him, no?’ Pavel said. He had been standing in the doorway to watch our exchange.

  ‘No, not yet’

  ‘When you tell him?’

  ‘Next time. If he doesn’t run away again.’

  We turned to laugh at the spider-like figure disappearing over the Tarmac horizon.

  ‘OK, boss. Now we go to buy some things,’ Pavel said.

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not all of you?’

  ‘Yes. We buy heavy things. Then is lunch. We return two o’clock. OK, boss?’

  They were in their van before I could object. Oh well, I thought. It’ll give me a chance to do some dusting.

  My phone rang about an hour later.

  It was Florence. We had been speaking most days since I left Re, though I got the impression that my news didn’t exactly enthral her. I understood why – when you’re lounging in a garden by the Atlantic, it must be difficult to identify with someone who’s excited because four Poles have just delivered a stainless-steel sink unit.

  Today, though, there was one thing about the job that interested her a lot: the contract with Nicolas. Was there something wrong with it, she wanted to know. Notre ami l’architecte had obviously been trying to sound her out.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a problem with the dates,’ I lied. ‘You know we’re very late.’ Something told me it was best not to reveal the truth.

  ‘Yes, well, there is no need to be aggressive to him. It will all be OK. I know Nicolas very well.’

  Exactly, I thought, that’s the bloody problem.

  2

  A MIRAGE ISN’T a hallucination, is it? It’s when something real that is far away looks as if it’s a lot nearer. The image of the oasis is projected over the horizon towards you by the hot, buckled atmosphere.

  In my case I assumed that the fume-laden vapours hanging over the zinc rooftops of Paris were sending me visions. The oasis had been catapulted right to my doorway.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  She blushed.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, leaning forward for a kiss, seeing how dirty I was, backing away, and then finally thinking what the hell and pressing her cheek to mine.

  Yes, cheek, not lips. It was Alexa. And when she appeared in the doorway of the building site a couple of days after my meeting with Nicolas, it instantly struck me that she was number one on the list of people I’d have wanted to appear there. Except maybe a reincarnation of John Lennon so he could sing me a few songs to make the days seem shorter. And sign a guitar for me to sell on eBay.

  I came out of the tea room to get a good look at her. And good it certainly was.

  She’d changed in the months since I’d last seen her. Her hair was a bit punkier – the English influence, I guessed. English women can never leave their hair alone like French women do. It has to be ‘styled’. It was cutely styled, though, with a hint of scarlet in there with the blond.

  Her figure was still gorgeous, as was her apparent ignorance of its gorgeousness. Did she really not notice that the strap of her shoulder bag was thrusting her breasts out like the carseat headrest of my dreams?

  And I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’d seen her wearing a skirt without tights. Now her legs were on public display, and they were a wonderful shade of . . . well, beige. People say that beige is a boring colour, but it was pretty damn interesting when applied to those legs. She could have been the cover girl on Beige Is Beautiful magazine.

  ‘You’ve got legs,’ I told her.

  She blushed again.

  ‘You’ve seen them before, Paul. Or have you forgotten?’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. I often dream . . . I mean . . .’

  Thank Christ this conversation is in English, I thought, so no one else can understand it. Stan and Pavel were hovering near the door, pretending to be in deep discussion about a tub of tile cement.

  ‘Your girlfriend, she isn’t here?’ Alexa asked, peering into the dust.

  ‘No, she’s not exactly the building-site type.’

  She looked me up and down. ‘And you are?’

  And there was me thinking I looked rugged.

  ‘Well, yeah, but I’m also the taking-you-for-a-cup-of-coffee type if you want.’

  ‘I have a better idea. I’m going to an exhibition. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘Is it your photos?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘The new Monet show. At the Grand Palais. Haven’t you been to see i
t?’ The tone of her question implied that all species more highly evolved than shrimps had been to the exhibition, which made me some kind of whelk.

  ‘No, I’ve been a little too busy to go to art shows.’

  ‘Well come with me now.’

  ‘What? Like this?’ I slapped at the leg of my jeans and sent up a small geyser of plaster dust.

  ‘Yes, everyone will think you are an artist. It is very chic to go to an exhibition in dirty clothes.’

  ‘I can’t. The builders will all disappear.’

  She turned towards Stan and Pavel, and granted them a huge smile before addressing them in French through the cloud of their airborne lust. ‘Bonjour, Messieurs. Can I borrow Paul for a while?’

  ‘Ah, oui,’ Pavel wheezed, already reaching for his van keys.

  ‘We will be back in, say, an hour. Around four o’clock. You will still be here, won’t you?’ Her tone was totally innocent, which ironically made it sound as if she was just off to slip into lingerie and high heels.

  ‘Oui,’ Pavel said. ‘We are here.’

  ‘Super.’ She turned back to me. ‘Et voilà.’

  Such a trusting girl.

  We were only five minutes’ walk from the Grand Palais, which is down near the bottom of the Champs-Elysées. As we strolled along the frying-pan-hot pavement I thought how different it was to parading through Ars with Florence. That had been an exhibition in itself. It was a show. With Alexa it just felt like two people chatting, one of whom had recently survived an accident at a flour mill.

  ‘So you’re living in Newcastle now, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha, no. I’m staying in London at the moment. My mum’s partner, Yuri, manages his business from there. From his house in Notting Hill.’

  ‘Notting Hill, eh? Posh. And your Sacha bloke, he lives there too, does he?’ Sacha was the grinning hunk in the photo she’d emailed me.

  ‘Yes.’ She gazed evasively at the window of the Courrèges shop, a sixties retro-fest of white dresses displayed against a white wall under white neon. It was like looking into a cloud. ‘I want to take a photo,’ Alexa said, rummaging down into her bag and making her breasts wobble out of control. I felt that I ought to grab them and stabilize her body for her own good.