A Year in the Merde Read online

  The apartment building itself was fairly modern - 1930s, I guessed, made of pale orange brick, in better repair than any brickwork I'd ever seen, with every bit of grunting or groping or whatever they do around bricks in perfect condition. The windows were tall, with glossily painted white metal shutters and small balconies. The art-deco ironwork on the balcony railings was decorated with what looked like giant sperm but were probably meant to be flowers. Real red flowers were tumbling from windowboxes in front of several of the windows.

  "These can't really be council flats," I said.

  "Oh yes, they are." Élodie was enjoying my stupefaction (and relief) that she wasn't inviting me to doss down with a bunch of dealers and social outcasts. "They're ashlem," she announced.

  "They're what?" It sounded like some kind of oriental commune. Oh no, I thought, not compulsory yoga at six every morning.

  "H.L.M." She spelled it out in English. "It means habitation à loyer modéré or something like that. Low-cost apartments." She giggled. "Although all the residents are lawyers, doctors, etc. Or the sons and daughters and friends of politicians. Papa got me this apartment from a friend at the Hôtel de Ville. You know, the city hall?"

  "Cheap housing set aside for the chronically overprivileged?"

  "If you prefer, you can live in that cave."

  "No, no, my goal in life is to become chronically overprivileged."

  We entered an astoundingly clean-smelling concrete courtyard, and were promptly attacked by a dustbin.

  A small, round, dark-haired woman emerged from behind the green wheelie bin and barked at Élodie in a language that sounded like Spanish being spoken by a Dutchman. She then sulked away through the lace-curtained door marked "concierge".

  "She wasn't telling you that you're not allowed to have male guests, was she?" I asked.

  Élodie almost wet herself laughing at this suggestion. I took it as a no.

  If the concierge did object to Élodie inviting men home, she probably had a very busy, and totally pointless, time of it, because no sooner had we stepped inside the apartment than Élodie was clamped to my mouth like some kind of oversized lip gloss.

  She really had taken her MBA course to heart. Sex for her was like a business model.

  We did some swift, efficient asset-stripping, carried out the required amount of research and development, then I was invited to position my product in her niche market. I did my best to satisfy her high demand with as much supply as I could muster. After a period of violently fluctuating market penetration, the bubble finally burst and we sank back, our sales forces completely spent.

  "I'll show you your room," she said about ten seconds after the market had collapsed.

  How to take the shine off a guy's post-orgasmic glow. Mind you, I had to admit she was much more welcoming than the last estate agent I'd met.

  So there I was, in clover. I had a cheap, sunlit room in the heart of the city. No housework because part of Jean-Marie's deal with his daughter was that she got hot and cold running cleaning lady. And I had a kitchen again, which would be fun - it'd been a long time since anyone had tasted my pasta surprise (surprise -I forgot to put salt in the water).

  And on top of all this, whenever Élodie got bored with business theory, she invited me to her room to give her spreadsheets a going-over.

  La belle vie à Paris or what?

  Even the concierge was doing her bit to make my life easy. The language she had spat at Élodie was Portuguese. The old French concierges from Maigret stories are gone these days, replaced by cleaning sub-contractors or Portuguese families with second jobs, working in France to finance the construction of big houses back home.

  Madame Da Costa had given up on talking French to Élodie, because like all the other posh tenants in the building, Élodie never took any notice. Élodie's bad habit, it seemed, was to leave her rubbish bags out on the landing overnight. When they leaked, it was the concierge who had to clean up.

  Madame Da Costa was a brutally efficient concierge - she got toxic chemicals free from her second job as an office cleaner and every Sunday night she and her husband and son attacked the hallway and staircase, taking lumps out of the plaster with their broom and leaving the place smelling like a lemon-juice factory.

  However, this didn't stop her stinking everyone out most evenings with a glutinous cloud of frying-fish odour that crept under doors and through any chinks in the brickwork. You'd be sitting in your living room watching TV when suddenly you felt as if your head was being slowly jammed into a bucket of tepid cod-liver oil.

  She took a shine to me because I said "bonjour" and meant it. Also because I, like her, was foreign. She was very careful to make sure that I got my foreign mail. Plus the foreign mail addressed to all the other residents of the building. If it had a foreign stamp or a foreign name on the envelope, it must be for me. Of course I wasn't going to contradict her. I just used to creep out of the door at night and discreetly redistribute the mail that wasn't for me. It was worth the trouble to keep in her good books.

  I wasn't the only guy getting samples of Élodie's merchandise, but that didn't bother me overmuch, even when my attempts at sleep were disturbed by her rhythmic yelping through the dividing wall.

  And it was lucky I didn't have an exclusivity deal, because one Saturday morning, as I sat in the kitchen willing my espresso to hurry up and finish pouring itself, who should walk in but Jean-Marie.

  I wasn't naked, but I'd only pulled on a pair of jeans, which were unbuttoned and showing hair.

  I could see the question framing in Jean-Marie's mind: where and with whom had I slept?

  Then in came Élodie, wearing nothing but smeared lipstick and a man's shirt. Bad timing.

  "Bonjour, Papa." She kissed him.

  "Morning, Paul." She kissed me, which she didn't usually do in the mornings. Jean-Marie narrowed his eyes at me.

  "Oh, Papa, Paul, this is Chico."

  In wandered my salvation in the form of a towering angel. A seven-foot-tall Latino supermodel type, all hairgel and cheekbones, totally naked, circumcised and proud of it.

  It was pretty clear who'd been shagging whom.

  "Chico, cheri, this is my father. Why don't you go and put on some clothes?"

  Chico made sure we'd seen his all-over suntan then ambled out again. I could have sworn he had shaven buttocks.

  "I hope Chico and I didn't keep you awake last night, Paul."

  "Doing what?" I raised my eyes towards Jean-Marie, making it clear that I was suffering as much as him here. We're in this together, boss.

  "Can I... ?" Jean-Marie's voice trailed off. He switched to French. "I have to speak to you, Élodie."

  My ten-litre mug of espresso was ready now, so I sugared it up and sucked some life into my system while father and daughter went and had a hissing match in the corridor. Chico didn't return. Probably didn't know how to dress himself.

  I tried to listen in on the row, expecting to pick up some new French words for paternal humiliation, but they seemed to be arguing about "le dressing".

  Was this a French euphemism? I wondered. You're letting too many boys into your walk-in closet?

  She told him to keep out of her closet, that much I understood. She'd probably been punishing the credit card and he wanted to get a refund on one of her five new pairs of gold-soled Gaultier trainers.

  "I have the key," he said. So maybe he just wanted permission to come over occasionally and try on some frocks.

  In any case, after a swift exchange of threats and rebuttals, Jean-Marie left and Élodie came back in the kitchen, flushed and mumbling Gallic insults.

  I had noticed her "dressing" before. I woke up in the middle of the night in her bed once, and there was a light glowing under the closet door. I went to switch it off but the door was locked.

  Weird, I thought. Did she think I was going to steal her underwear?

  Still, I wasn't going to criticize my landlady. I'm sure I was getting a much better deal than most Parisia
n tenants.

  * * *

  I couldn't resist going to Jake's cafe and bragging about my success at finding a Paris apartment.

  He was impressed. Not so much because I was moving in with a woman, but because I was subletting in an HLM, getting one over on the Parisian establishment.

  Jake was finishing work early that Saturday morning and offered to take me to "the best store in Paris". Why not, I thought, envisaging maybe a cut-price record shop with free beer and topless counter assistants.

  Turned out, though, to be a bloody second-hand bookshop.

  It was cute enough, housed in a timber-framed medieval building just opposite Notre Dame. Inside, it was pleasantly stuffy, and smelt mustily of the books that thrust themselves at you from all angles. They covered most of the floor, climbed tip the walls, and hung from the ceiling like dead, dusty bats. All of them were in English.

  Jake said hi to the dopey-looking young bloke sitting at the cashdesk and beckoned me through to the back of the shop. We went up a narrow staircase, also carpeted and wallpapered with books that threatened to take your eye out if you didn't watch where you were going.

  "Not many people come up here," Jake said. I could see why. Unless they were really determined to get their skull fractured by a dusty copy of Beyond History: A Metaphilosophical View of American Empire-Building (volume four).

  We climbed to the second floor, still with no sign of the book infestation abating, and arrived in a low, beamed room where five people were squatting at window seats or on piles of encyclopedias.

  This, Jake told me, was his writing group. Three Americans, a Brit and an Australian were there today - two men and three women, a mix of arty Jake clones and preppier types, age range about 20-35. I was the only one who didn't have a folder of writing with me. They all registered this fact as I was introduced.

  I sat on Beelzebub-Cretinism and listened to a woman explaining her novel in progress. Something about two girls finding themselves through masturbation. I wouldn't have minded seeing the film but the book was hard going. She read us a couple of pages that almost put me off sex for life. We all had to give a verdict, too.

  "Great idea," I said when it was my turn. "Chick lit's all the rage, isn't it?"

  The writer let her head slump in despair.

  "It's not chick lit, it's a women's novel. Chick lit is just a meaningless phrase dreamt up by marketing people." She pronounced "marketing" the way Saddam Hussein probably said "George W. Bush".

  "Good move, though," I said. "Women read a lot more than men. Bigger market."

  The room was filled with groaning and head-slumping.

  Next up, Jake got his folder out of his bag and read us some poems about vaginas he had known. They were all really into telling us about their sexual habits, these writers, who (in my humble opinion) were some of the least sexy people I'd seen in Paris outside of the queues for a bed at the Salvation Army night shelter.

  Jake's writing project was a cycle of poems about shagging every nationality of woman living in Paris, His latest offering was a 50-line ode to the difficulties of getting it on with an Albanian - all under the thumb of vicious pimps, it seemed.

  "Why not just pay the poor girl and get it over with?" I pleaded.

  "No, man, I never pay. Where's the poetry in that?"

  "How about: it cost only a nickel, for slap and tickle?"

  "Yeah. Right."

  "Or: to pay for her tummy tuck, she charged me to -"

  "You seem to be doing enough travel-screwing yourself, Paul. I don't know why you're giving me this shit."

  He explained my living circumstances to everyone. The rent, the location, the compulsory sex.

  The masturbator woman was shocked. Or envious. "That's profiteering. You know who those apartments are supposed to be for?"

  They all went into a frenzy of one-upmanship, comparing their leaky roofs, pissed-in staircases, cockroaches, burglaries and shitty salaries, if they had any salary at all.

  "I bet heating's included in the rent, isn't it?" an Australian woman asked.

  "Dunno," I confessed, with a Parisian shrug.

  It was the shrug that got them. I knew as I did it that it was infinitely more annoying than my ham-fisted attempts at literary criticism.

  I was politely asked to leave. Then told to fuck off.

  I got down the stairs without fracturing my skull and almost bodycharged Alexa out of the door.

  "Alexa."

  She was looking as secretly gorgeous as ever. She blushed and kissed me chastely on the cheek.

  "Paul. How are you?"

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I can read, you know."

  I nodded. I didn't know what to say. Or rather I did, but didn't dare say it.

  We went to the café next door - a bit of a tourist rip-off place, but I didn't care for once - and talked.

  She was well, she assured me each of the ten times I asked her.

  Her dad?

  Her dad was still gay and heartbroken, thank you.

  "Right. God, Alexa. That night -"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "It does to me. Look. I don't think 'I was drunk at the time' is ever a really convincing excuse. But how about 'I was comatose at the time'?" She accorded me a smile. "That woman must have carried me home under her arm. I don't know who she was. I haven't seen her since. I don't know what we did. I only know that I woke up with a condom hanging from the end of my-"

  "A condom? So you-?"

  "I suppose so. I have no idea. I went to a hypnotist but he said there weren't even any subconscious memories to dredge up."

  I earned another smile.

  "It was a non-event, Alexa. A horrific accident."

  "Hmm." She changed the subject, asked where I was living these days. I explained my good fortune. Though I may have omitted to mention Élodie.

  "You got an HLM from your corrupt boss?" She laughed wholeheartedly. "Since you stopped walking in merde, you have become a real Parisian."

  The teasing look was back in her eyes.

  One coffee and one taxi ride later, we were in her loft, which took up the whole top floor of a superb converted industrial building in a leafy courtyard. The sunlight was streaming in through a wall of windows.

  "My parents lived here before they divorced. It was my father's first photographic studio." "Holy shit, what did he use to photograph in here - cruise ships?"

  However, we didn't hang around to compare our apartments' surface areas. We climbed a metal spiral staircase up to her bedroom and there I finally saw all of her. From every angle at once - the walls were covered with artistic nude self-portraits.

  She undressed and I saw the 3-D version, too. She was everything my imagination had promised me, but with smells and tastes and softness and - at last - a bit of emotion.

  We got to know each other's every curve and blemish, and spent as much time kissing as doing anything else, breathing our breathlessness into each other.

  She was a girl who shared her body rather than insisting I give it an overhaul. She whispered to me in French whereas Élodie barked orders in perfect English.

  "La, la, la." It was as if she was singing me towards her most sensitive spots.

  "Aaaaaah," I sighed, auditioning for an ad for automatic foot massagers.

  I usually feel the need to make a fond little joke after coming, but this time I couldn't utter a word.

  We lay silently sweating on top of her duvet, which was not blinding white but bright orange, and I felt as if I'd finally come home.

  "Paul?" She broke the silence a full two or three I minutes later. "What do you think ...?"

  Yes. She was going to ask me to move in. I wouldn't hesitate for a second. I'd even agree to do some housework.

  Hey, I thought, maybe I could sublet my room at Élodie's place? Turn it into a sublet sublet.

  Wanted, one male lodger to share apartment and landlady's vagina. Centrally heated, great location. (Apartment's not bad,
either. Ho ho ho.)

  Now all I had to do was work out the French abbreviations for the ad.

  DÉCEMBRE

  God save the cuisine

  In French, the word "self" means self-service restaurant. Ironic, really - the ego as cheap cafeteria, when France sees itself as one huge gourmet restaurant.

  It's a pretty apt description, though, because, contrary to what they'd like us to think, the French love fast food. They tell the world that they eat only foie gras and truffles, but a huge percentage of them spend their lunchtimes and weekends with their face in a hamburger.

  This is because fast-food restaurants do things to food that the French love. Staff in uniform, repeating little set phrases, arranging your napkin just so on your tray. It all appeals to the French sense of ceremony. Like it or not, a trip to a fast-food place is a culinary event.

  This French love of food events is so great that it sends them completely insane when they go to the boulangerie to buy bread. The boulangerie is the only place in the world where the French will stand patiently in line. No, not true - they do it in the queue to buy cigarettes at the tabac, but that's only out of fear of getting ripped to bits by someone on nicotine cold turkey.

  A visit to my local boulangerie was a real event. There were usually three or four women serving, or rather jostling each other, behind the cramped counter. They would dash around putting together my order, then had to queue themselves to tell the one woman on the till, the owner, how much I owed. Whenever I bought a baguette, the person who served me, and the owner too, had the right to squeeze it in the middle, as if they were addicted to the cracking sound the crust made. If I bought a cake, I could expect to wait a full five minutes while it was lovingly gift-wrapped and decorated with a ribbon. Occasionally a floury baker would emerge to watch the proceedings, and be shooed away by his wife in case he got flour in the till. Amid the chaos, the queue shuffled respectfully forward, even though it often stretched for yards outside the shop. People seemed to respect the queuing system here simply because it was part of a food ritual.