A Year in the Merde Read online

  Alexa coped very well with the situation. Better than me, in fact. She waited outside my swearing zone for the first couple of minutes then guided me to a gutter where there was a small puddle of water to wash away the dirt. She didn't seem at all put out by this sudden crack in my veneer of cool. And in a way I was glad she'd seen me at my worst. It kind of cleared the air between us, if doggie-do's can be said to clear the air.

  Over freshly squeezed orange juice, fresh figs and scrambled eggs salted with flakes of smoked salmon, she encouraged me to talk about my handicap, and I tried out my theory that it was a psychological condition which had been dormant until it was exposed to Paris's unique pavements.

  "It's a sort of dyslexia. You know dyslexia?"

  "Yes," Alexa nodded, peeling a ripe purple fig with painful symbolism.

  "I'm in some way dyslexic. Or colour-blind. Some people can't make out the meaning in words or the differences between colours - I can't make out dog turds. I'm shitlexic."

  "You are a little obsessed, no?" Alexa folded back the fig's foreskin and bit into it with sharp-toothed relish.

  "Obsessed? Maybe. I never see anyone else wiping their shoes. Dp you ever see anyone else wiping their shoes?"

  "Rarely." Alexa thought about this. She seemed to be taking me seriously, at least. If I'd tried out any of this DIY psychology on my English "girlfriend" Ruth, she'd have accused me of trying to bore her into dumping me. Apart from New-Agers, most of us Brits belong to the "for God's sake stop moaning" school of psychotherapy.

  "You are sure it is not because you English are so snobbish, you walk with your nose in the air?"

  "Turning our noses up at all these foreigners, you mean? Yes, you might be on to something."

  Alexa seemed pleased to have helped me towards awareness. She took another fig and treated it much more gently than the last one.

  "It is a pity for you that you came to Paris at such a bad time," she said, a flash of humour at the corner of her eyes.

  "Bad time?"

  "Yes, because of the strike."

  "The strike?"

  "Yes, the - how do you say? The men who clean the roads."

  "The street cleaners?"

  "Yes. They will be on strike. It will start on Monday."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Yes."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  Alexa was examining me anxiously. How long had I been in catatonic shock?, I wondered.

  "Why are they going on strike?" I choked back the tears as best I could.

  "It is their - you know -" She made sweeping gestures with her arms. "Brushes?"

  "Brooms."

  "Yes, they want more serious brooms."

  It was true that the street cleaners' brooms looked a bit silly. They were modern versions of the witch's broom - a long aluminium pole with a sheaf of green plastic switches in place of the traditional birch twigs.

  Alexa said that the street cleaners now wanted their trademark broom replaced by a less humiliating version, a shoulder-borne automatic contraption like a giant electric toothbrush. The city authorities had refused, the cleaners decided to strike, and while negotiations went on concerning the relative cost of plastic twigs and giant electric toothbrushes, the dirt was going to pile up.

  Soon, I felt sure, it would be my turn to somersault into a French ambulance.

  I looked up to see Alexa giggling madly. "What is it?"

  "You make me laugh, Englishman. You are so ... you know, like Hugh Grant."

  "Hugh Grant?" The phantom of my lust for Christine sprung up before me, its face an amalgam of every English actor who's ever failed to get off with his co-star.

  "Yes, you know, his lost little boy thing. It is very . . . touching."

  "Touching."

  "Yes, like a ... how do you call it? A puppy."

  "Puppy." So now I'd morphed into some kind of stray dog. Best to take me away and give me the lethal injection right now, I thought.

  "What are you doing for the rest of the day?" I asked Alexa when I'd paid the bill.

  "Why?" There was that little twitch of humour in her eyes again. A bit of a tease, our Alexa.

  "I thought we could maybe ..." The time wasn't right to say "go to bed", even I knew that. I tried desperately to think of something non-threatening and non-clichéd to do together. "Look for some photos." I nodded towards her camera. "You know, walk about looking for photogenic things and people. It could be fun."

  "I don't usually try to make photos happen. They happen."

  "Ah." None had happened during our morning together.

  "No, anyway I must visit my father."

  "Oh, right." In a hit parade of crap excuses, I reckoned that was only just below "I have to stay in and pluck my nipple hairs."

  "We can meet up again soon, can't we?"

  "If you want."

  "Great. Like, tonight? We can do something a bit livelier."

  She laughed. "No, sorry. I can't tonight." And that was it. A quick mutual cheek rub, and "ciao". I didn't even get an "au revoir". I didn't blame her. How could a self-respecting Parisienne fancy someone whose only topic of conversation was the rear end of dogs?

  Next morning I woke up at five, listening to the silence. Well, the relative silence. I could still hear the background rumble of traffic on the eight-lane highway at the end of the road. What I couldn't hear was the dawn chorus of swishing brooms and humming clean-up machines.

  Paris has a whole army of green machines - spray trucks, buggies with brooms or nozzles at the front, reservoirs on wheels with a power hose that could sweep away a riot in Tiananmen Square. And the broom men have a secret weapon, too, a key to open valves on street corners. These valves gush out water that flows along the gutters, carrying away

  the night's crop of beer cans, emptied cafe ashtrays, fast-food bags and drunks towards the drain on the next corner of the street. At lots of street corners you see rolled-up lengths of carpet in the gutter. At first I thought these were improvised pillows belonging to the tramps, but in fact they're an ingenious system dreamt up by the street cleaners to direct the flow of water. And now the carpets were going to dry up.

  I left for work and ballet-danced my way down the street, my shoes wrapped in a double layer of black plastic bags.

  It looked as if the dustmen had come out in sympathy with the cleaners. The pavements were jammed with overflowing bins that the concierges had optimistically put out for emptying. There were also various bits of rubbish I never normally saw. A three-legged chair in front of a restaurant, a small sheaf of stale baguettes outside a boulangerie.

  I stopped off at the cash dispenser and the machine spat my card out again as if it tasted of stale baguette. Request rejected, the machine informed me. I asked for a balance and understood why. My salary hadn't been paid in.

  Someone was trying to shit-stir, and if they wanted their shit stirred then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be. As soon as I got to the office, I challenged Marianne.

  "Not paid?" she said. "Oh. Come and see me in my office at eleven o'clock."

  She was on receptionist duty. Urgent things like not being paid apparently had to wait until she put on her HR cap.

  "Is possible I see someone in ... ?" I didn't know the French word for "accounts". I needed cash, not counselling.

  "In...?"

  "Finance?"

  "Come and see me in my office at eleven o'clock," she repeated in her special French-for-retards voice. "Bonne journée."

  As in, get lost.

  She turned up at 11.15, a coffee in her hand. We went into her office and, as soon as she'd found a mat for her coffee cup, arranged her cardigan across the back of her chair, opened the window a notch to let some air in, and managed to remember how you turn on computers, she finally sat down and began clicking her mouse with a nail-bitten forefinger.

  "Ah, I see." She smiled - or widened her mouth to show her grey teeth, anyway - at me. I was standing, threateningly I hoped, over Marian
ne's poisonous-looking desk plant. "You don't have a carte de séjour" she said, and smiled again as if she expected me to be grateful to her for coming up with this annoyingly meaningless answer.

  "Carte de séjour?"

  "Yes."

  "What is?" I asked, screwing up the grammar in this short question so badly that I saw Marianne consciously resist raising her eyes towards the ceiling.

  "I don't know exactly. We never had a foreign worker before."

  Carte, I knew, meant card. "Is identity card?"

  "I suppose so." Marianne gave a good impression of someone not giving a toss about the unfathomable mysteries of the universe.

  "Where I, er, find a carte de sejour?"

  "I don't know." Marianne performed a full-body shrug with accompanying pout of indifference. "I only know that accounts couldn't pay you because you haven't got one."

  "And you not say me?" The worst thing was, we were calling each other "tu", as if we were best pals swapping makeup hints in the ladies' toilet.

  "Didn't accounts tell you?" Marianne asked, outraged at such gross inefficiency on somebody else's part.

  "No, nobody say me. J'ai besoin argent," I said, ungrammatically but understandably. "Maintenant."

  "Tu veux une avance?"

  An advance? How could it be an advance if it was last month's salary? But this was no time for French-style logical debate. "Oui, une avance," I said.

  "I can arrange that now by phone." As she dialled, Marianne seemed to brighten with the sudden realization that the problem was going away. Even if it wasn't really her problem, it had been in her office, and was therefore almost as annoying as if it was her problem, but now it was going to leave her in peace.

  "They will bring the cheque to your office this morning," she said after a brief conversation with accounts. "Haifa month's salary."

  "OK. Thanks."

  Marianne was looking almost radiant.

  "You will have to sign for the cheque," she said. "You have some identity? Your passport? A carte de ..."

  My mind was suddenly flooded with deliciously violent images of human resources people choking to death on soil and fragments of plant pot.

  Christine phoned around to find out about getting me a carte de séjour.

  I sat there happily in her office for half an hour, gradually becoming drunk on the aromatic scent of her hair as she waded through bureaucratic switchboards.

  She explained the list of addresses and documents she'd written out.

  It seemed that, as an EU citizen, I had to go to the "préfecture" - the central police station - which was next to the flower market on the Île de la Cité, just along the river from Notre Dame. Sounded very picturesque.

  All I had to do was take my passport, work contract, three passport photos, a recent electricity bill and the marriage certificates of any hamsters I'd owned since 1995, all photocopied on to medieval parchment. No problème.

  The good news was, Christine told me, I was allowed to take a day off work to deal with this boring red tape. How civilized, I thought.

  "Stop looking at me like that (comme ça)," Christine said, picking up the gratitude in my eyes and assuming it was lust. Which it partly was.

  "Comme quoi?"

  "Comme ça!" Christine laughed and shooshed me away. "Va travailler!"

  How was it that French women managed to shrug off sexual advances while still remaining flirtatious? God, even telling you to get lost they were sexy.

  A new day, a new lesson in French life: the reason they give you a day off is that you need at least three.

  I went down to the préfecture the next morning, picking my way through a drift of long, empty flower boxes that had spread across the square from the unswept market.

  I and my bag were X-rayed, metal-detected and sent to wait our turn to be humiliated by a woman in a bomb-proof booth who, after half an hour of dealing with the queue of people in front of me, sniffed at the documents I'd brought and explained to me that I ought to have photocopied more pages of my passport, and that I shouldn't have smiled in my photos. Back to square one.

  Second morning, she discovered that I didn't have an electricity bill as proof of address. That was because I was living in a hotel, I told her. Therefore I needed a letter from my employer explaining that I was living in a hotel. No, a fax sent through while I was in the waiting room wouldn't do. She needed the original, signed in ink, and anyway I wasn't allowed access to the waiting room without the necessary documents. Couldn't the woman possibly have mentioned this the day before? No, shrug, apparently not.

  Finally, on the third morning, after mountaineering over an Alpine heap of soggy flower boxes and crushed bulbs, and tiptoeing round rolling drink cans and fluttering newspapers, I experienced a fierce glow of pride at being congratulated on the quality and quantity of my paperwork. I was allowed to pass through the forbidden door, and entered a typically drab official waiting room with a kind of open snail pattern of low booths running around three walls.

  Facing the curved line of booths were rows of chairs, about a quarter of which were taken by exhausted-looking carte de séjour candidates. Some of them looked just like me - suited up for the office. Others were versions of me with skirts. I wondered how much our collective days off were costing our employers.

  There was also a group of no-hopers. They looked as if they were here to try and convince someone that the EU had already admitted 15 new member countries. This sounds racist on my part, but judging by the argument coming from booth six, I wasn't far wrong.

  "C'est 1'Europe, non?" a black-moustached man shouted. "Je suis européen, moi!"

  The eyes of the woman civil servant behind the reinforced glass glazed over. The women in booths five and seven broke off from processing the people in front of them and leaned round the partitions to back up their colleague. A flurry of monosyllables wafted through the glass.

  "Eh oh!"

  "Ho la. Eh!"

  "Non, mais je suis européen, moi! Merde!" The fateful word had a magically powerful effect.

  "Oh!" The woman who'd been annoying him shoved his file back under the glass and told him to take it away.

  The moustachioed man blathered on about human rights, and other similarly irrelevant stuff, but his tormentor retained a stony indifference. The women from booths five and seven leaned round again and fired off some more monosyllables. The man refused to leave. Finally a cop came in and gestured tiredly for the rejected candidate to go. The man looked around for support, but we all avoided eye contact. There's no room for human rights in a government waiting room.

  A mere 24 hours or so later, it was my turn. Booth six, too. The booth of death. I said a cheery (but not too smiley) "bonjour", tried my best to look European, and pushed my pile of papers forward with a silent prayer.

  The woman ticked off each of my documents in a row of boxes on the inside of a pink file. Then she came to my sheet of photos and pursed her lips.

  "You should have cut the photos," she told me.

  "Ah," I said. (Thinking: "aaaaggghhh!") "I didn't know." My voice suggested I'd be sickeningly grateful for the chance not only to cut my photos to regulation size but also to massage her feet with the aromatherapy oil of her choice if only she'd allow me to kneel under the table for her.

  "That's OK." She produced a pair of scissors and expertly snipped the sheet of four into individual photos. She slid one back to me. "We need three, not four."

  "Ah. You not want it?"

  This was meant to be a tension-easing joke, but she froze and glared at me.

  I could see the headlines: Englishman deported for mild sexual harassment of French civil servant. "Britain must leave the European Union," demands President Chirac, "we French are the ones who sexually harass people, not you."

  As I looked into her eyes - dark and deadened by too many years dealing with people who despised her for making them waste their time - I knew that this was a key moment. The moustachioed bloke had got it wrong. I had to
get it right.

  I picked up the photo. "I am very triste (sad)," I said. "This photo is not beautiful." I scowled at my mugshot and hid it away in my bag. She nodded and almost, almost smiled. "Smile is interdit in the photos," I said. "Dommage. Everyone can be less triste."

  "Yes, it would be nice to see some smiles." She gave a microscopic laugh and brutally stapled one of my photos to a pink card. "This is your provisional carte de séjour. You will receive a letter telling you when you can get your definitive carte de séjour."

  "Merci beaucoup."

  "Bonne journée."

  "Bonne journée."

  I bounced out of there kissing my pristine pink card. France 0, Me 1. This morning at least.

  The afternoon scoreline was up to Alexa. Yes, Alexa. I'd phoned her up and we'd had a really good chat. She'd laughed at my red-tape stories and even let slip that Hugh Grant was actually "très sexy" in Notting Hill. I tried desperately to remember - does

  Hugh get Julia in the end or not? It didn't seem polite to ask Alexa over the phone, so I fixed up a lunch date and hoped for the best.

  She surprised me. She wanted us to have lunch on a bateau mouche - one of the incredibly touristy boats that shuttle visitors up and down the Seine, from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame and back again. She was the one who'd gone on about visual clichés. Maybe this was some kind of concession. Or a sign that she thought clichés were all I was good for.

  I got out of the metro at Pont de l’Alma, near the road tunnel where Princess Di was killed. A few tourists, most of them young twenty-somethings, were standing in the middle of the roundabout above the tunnel, gazing at the golden flame statue, a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty flame, which has been adopted as an unofficial symbol of the lost princess. Two white-clad nuns were crossing to the roundabout, dithering in the middle of the road and running the risk of dying a very similar death to Diana.

  The river was flowing deep and green, but the water was not even touching the toes on the statue of the old soldier carved into the Alma Bridge. During an especially rainy period the water starts lapping round his boots. If it gets anywhere near his genitals, Parisians have to start filling sandbags.