Join Me

  ‘I’m Danny,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Estelle.’

  She wiped some rain from her face with a tissue from the table, and said, ‘So . . .’

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ I asked. ‘Or a tea? I just had a hot chocolate, but I think I’ll have a tea next.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said, screwing up the tissue and popping it in the ashtray. ‘I can only stay a few minutes.’

  Eh? A few minutes? Was she serious? She certainly didn’t seem to be making any effort to take her jacket off. She was dripping wet, and slightly sniffly – I’d have thought this was the ideal place for her to be.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see. That’s a pity.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘I have to go to meet a friend in a little while. But it was nice to meet you.’

  What? She already seemed to be wrapping this up! She’d only just sat down!

  ‘Er . . . are you sure you don’t want a coffee? I could tell you more about Join Me,’ I tried. She looked impatient and a little testy.

  ‘Maybe I will have a glass of water,’ she said, flatly, before turning to one of the waiters and beckoning him over. She spoke in French, presumably ordering her water, and turned back to me.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So tell me a little about this Join Me.’

  ‘Well, I’m asking people to join me,’ I said. ‘To work for good. At the moment we’re making old men very happy, and—’

  ‘Why not old woman?’

  ‘Er . . . well, there was this bloke called Raymond Price, and—’

  ‘Why not old woman?’ she interrupted, again.

  ‘I’ll tell you . . . there was this bloke called—’

  ‘So you make old man happy, but why not old woman too?’

  There was no stopping her. She was feisty and abrupt. She seemed angry with me, and I’d barely said a word.

  ‘We’re going to get to that,’ I said. To be honest, I hadn’t planned anything along those lines yet, but fair enough. If old women had to be made happy just to keep Estelle from beating me up, we’d do that as well.

  ‘Why do you do these things for old man but not for old woman?’ she persisted. ‘Are they not people too?’

  I had to think quick.

  ‘Well, statistically, old men don’t live as long as old women,’ I tried. ‘We have less time with them. We have to act now, to make these old men happy while we still have them. Only then can we move on to the old women. We’ve got more time with them. The pressure’s off.’

  It seemed to make some kind of sense to her and she stuck her bottom lip out and nodded.

  ‘So you want me to help you to do this? Okay, I will help you.’

  ‘There’s one thing,’ I said. ‘I need a passport photo from you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No. I will not give you my passport photo. Why should I give you my image? Why should I not give you just my word? Is it not enough?’

  ‘It’s just tradition.’

  ‘No. You will have to take my word.’

  She shook her head and picked up another tissue. She dabbed it on her forehead.

  ‘Erm . . . I really do need a passport photo. It shows me you are serious. And all the other joinees have done it.’

  ‘No. I will give you a passport photo. A blank one. I will not give you my passport photo. I will send it to you, okay?’

  The waiter arrived with her glass of water and she took one small sip, and glanced up at the clock above the door.

  ‘I have to go now. I am sorry, Donny.’

  Yes. She called me Donny.

  ‘But you’ve only been here a minute!’ I said. ‘I came all the way from London to meet you!’

  ‘I will send you the photo, okay? Goodbye.’

  ‘Hang on – have you even got the address?’

  She sighed. She was clearly in a hurry but grumpily got a piece of paper out of her bag and took down the PO Box address.

  ‘It’s on the website, in case you lose it, and—’

  ‘Yes, okay, thank you,’ she said. ‘Have a nice stay in Paris, okay?’

  And she was out the door. I watched as she jogged through the rain, holding her hood to her head, and disappeared around the corner. I was deflated. I had come all the way to Paris. Paris! And all for a two-minute meeting with a woman who wouldn’t even join me properly. Sure, she’d said she’d help make old men happy, but would she? I just didn’t know. And now, here I was, sitting in a café in Paris with nothing to do and no one to meet and nowhere to go until that evening when I’d hop back on the Eurostar and travel back to London, empty-handed. I felt stupid, now that I thought about what I’d done. Estelle had sent me an email on a whim. She hadn’t expected for me – a complete stranger – to drop everything and tell her I was going to dash off to a foreign country to visit her. Gareth had been sincere in his advice, but the truth of it was, unless I did a better job of selling Join Me, this meeting-people lark just wasn’t going to work. Estelle and probably hundreds of other potential joinees just didn’t share my enthusiasm for the project. Not yet. No one did. Not really.

  It was all very depressing.

  The waiter asked me if I wanted anything else, and I suddenly didn’t want to be there any more. The Americans had become louder and I didn’t like this café now. So I paid up, put my jacket on, and walked out of the door.

  Across the street was another café, this one called Café Guize, and I decided that maybe all I needed to cheer me up was a cup of tea in a place without the negative memories the previous one had suddenly developed. You’d be surprised at the miracles that tea can pull off.

  So I ran through the rain and into the café. I sat at a table in the middle of the room, ordered my tea, and simply watched the wet world go by. There was hardly anyone else in there. Just a French lady smoking and reading her paper in one comer, and a man on the table next to mine who, in the following minutes, would come to fascinate me.

  He looked every inch the struggling French artist. He was wearing a smart, black beret for one thing, and around his neck was a long, flowing scarf, tied in a loop at the neck to make it look like a tie. His face had the pained expression of a man trying to remember a word forever just on the tip of his tongue, and he scribbled feverishly with a biro into a battered blue notepad. Words filled each page at pace, and his was a hurried handwriting, as if he just couldn’t get all his thoughts out fast enough. Then every so often he would stop, gaze into space, consider something, and carry on. His hair was long and unruly, and the plastic casing on his Bic biro had split from the top down, with shards of clear plastic jutting out to make it look like an ancient quill. He looked like he was writing a novel, or film, or a passionate, poetic play about love and the injustice of the world. And I just watched him. This was undoubtedly the most French man I had ever seen in my life. And yet it was almost like he didn’t belong here. He belonged to a different France; a black-and-white France. He belonged to a scene from a 40s French arthouse film, filled with cigarette smoke and light jazz, and moody French glances. This was a Frenchman born out of his time.

  I had to speak to him. I had to see if he was real.

  ‘Excusez-moi . . . parlez-vous anglais?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Oui?’ he said.

  Good start. Except I didn’t know what else to say. I’d established he was real. If it had turned out that he wasn’t, I would’ve probably ended the conversation there and then.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Great. I was just watching you, and was wondering what kind of thing you’re writing?’

  ‘It’s a novel,’ he said. ‘I am going to write a series of novels.’

  His voice was deep and thoughtful. And – to my complete and utter surprise – English. This was a Frenchman born not only out of his time, but out of his country.

  ‘You’re English?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m from Norfolk,’ he said.

  This wasn’t right. He had a ber
et on. What was he playing at?

  ‘What are you doing in Paris?’ I said, almost offended that he wasn’t being more French for me.

  ‘I’m an artist. I write, and paint, and I sing. I play the guitar too, but I hurt my arm recently, so I can’t busk any more. I really hurt it, actually.’

  He certainly had. His name, it turned out, was Paul Francis, and the sorry reason his arm hurt so much was that two days previously he’d wanted to check whether his mobile phone was working. So he went to a phone box to give himself a ring. However, when he dialled his own number and his mobile had gone off in his pocket it gave him such a fright that his arm involuntarily flew up and he smashed his elbow against the phonebox window. He hadn’t been expecting any calls, you see. Not even from himself.

  I immediately liked Paul. There was a kindness in his eyes and he spoke slowly and with great care and grace. I moved to his table and we talked about his past. I was amazed at what I learnt.

  He’d begun a long musical career in 1976, in Norwich, by forming a punk band called The Toads, but had eventually been thrown out of his own band, because ‘the others didn’t understand me. They said “You’re too strange and we don’t understand your lyrics, get out.” They wanted to go commercial. I wanted to remain an artist.’

  He then went through what he describes as a ‘musical evolution’, and formed The Ebonyset, a new romantic gothic band. They enjoyed some degree of local success but then split up, so Paul formed The Blue Warthogs – a psychedelic rock guitar band who played mainly in Norfolk, apart from when they did a short tour of Holland. They split up in 1985.

  He then formed The Ruskinsons, ‘which is best described as a kind of psychedelic–jazz–rock–country–fusion band.’ But they split up too. So Paul went solo, becoming known on the London scene as The Troubadour, but then forming The Time Machine when he got bored. They split up, and he reinvented himself as Doctor Spacetoad. He formed another band, The Doctor Spacetoad Experience, and toured both England and Belgium. In 1996, they released an ‘intergalactic concept album’ called Time Machine, which you can still buy on the Internet.

  I was enthralled and amazed. I was with a man otherwise known as Doctor Spacetoad.

  ‘But I’ve gone back to my Troubadour roots now,’ he said. ‘And I feel that France is the one place in the world that really appreciates my artistry, so that’s why I now live in Paris. And as soon as my arm is better I’ll be back out there, on the streets. But for the moment I’m consigned to cafés, and writing. Anyway. Enough about me. What are you doing here? Holiday?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, taking a hit of my tea. ‘I was here to meet someone but she could only see me for two minutes.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘A friend?’

  ‘No. Not really. I’d hoped we’d become friends, but there wasn’t really time.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  Ordinarily, I would have been a bit cagey about explaining this. But I felt that I could trust Paul not to find it too odd. Particularly as his other name was Doctor Spacetoad.

  ‘I’m asking people to join me,’ I said. ‘I’m forming a collective of 1000 good-hearted people. We do good deeds towards old men, but I’m going to extend that. Estelle was my first foreign joinee, and I was hoping that she’d help me spread the word internationally. But I’m not even sure if she’ll join me, now.’

  ‘Hmm. What does joining involve?’

  ‘I just ask people to give me a passport photo. Then they’re in. That’s their initiation.’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘Like a cult,’ he said.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Like a collective.’

  ‘This reminds me of something I got into once,’ said Paul. ‘Years and years ago, I was really very depressed. It was just after The Toads split up, and a friend of mine wanted to cheer me up. He believed in – and still believes in – this Indian guru who’s come to the West and made a lot of money and gained lots of followers by giving them a few meditation techniques. He conveys this sense to them, that he knows something that they don’t, but he never says what it is.’

  ‘That’s like what I do!’ I said brightly. Maybe I’d been unwittingly doing things right all along. ‘I’ve kind of been acting all mysterious, and people have started to really believe in me. They call me the Leader!’

  ‘Well, exactly. I went along to this meeting, and there were all these people getting up and telling each other how fantastic this thing was, but that you had to join before you could find out what it is.’

  ‘That’s what I do too! Did you join?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I started to sense that all wasn’t lost; maybe I could get Doctor Spacetoad to join me. But at the same time, I could learn a lot from him. Far more than he could learn from me. I was a mere amateur at this. He had years of experience. It is amazing, I thought, who you can meet in a Parisian café on a rainy day. It was as if fate had brought us together. And before he continued with his story, I had to tell him that.

  ‘Well,’ he said, wisely. ‘Today was a good day for us to meet.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Yesterday I checked the stars. Today is a fortunate day for meetings.’

  ‘You’re an astrologer, as well as all that other stuff?’

  ‘Yes. And a tarot card reader.’

  It just got better and better.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I went to this meeting, and I said I would join. They sent someone round to where I was living and he initiated me. As I say, I was depressed at the time and in need of something, and I’m naturally very curious as a person. They taught me the meditation they said I needed, and they said that once I’d done it I would be given “The Wisdom”. They told me I had it, but to be honest, I didn’t really feel any different.’

  I considered this. What wisdom could I bestow upon my joinees? Virtually none. Not unless it was facts about helicopters and lions they were after, and very few people are, these days. A waiter appeared and we ordered more tea. I continued to listen, intrigued.

  ‘I kept up with the meditations, but they started to make me crazy. I had some quite bizarre out-of-body experiences. At one point, I saw myself from above. My soul had left my body, and it was just hanging there, about three feet above me. I panicked, and eventually I got it back in, but I never felt quite right after that.’

  ‘Maybe you put it in upside down?’ I tried.

  Paul smiled.

  ‘No. Anyway. I became a recluse after that. I was going deeper and deeper into some strange state completely away from normal reality. Most likely I was in some other dimension. And in the end I decided to stop, because I was on the edge of going insane. I went to the pub with a friend and had about ten pints of beer and felt much better for it.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I said. If ever there was a time for a ‘blimey’, it was now.

  ‘I’d joined this other sect as well, and it made me realise in the end that the vast majority of people are sheep. It’s depressing.’

  Paul took a sip of his tea.

  ‘So when I was out of it all I decided to start my own religion.’

  My eyes widened. This man had just told me he had started his own religion. His own religion! And all it took was joining two sects and drinking ten pints of beer. Amazing what you can do in an afternoon.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said. ‘How do you mean, you started your own religion?’

  ‘It started out jokily, but it soon got out of hand. Have you ever heard of coypu?’

  ‘No,’ I said, figuring it was probably some kind of term for a higher consciousness, or philosophy on life.

  ‘It’s a small hairy rat-like thing that lives in the Norfolk Broads.’

  ‘That could be anyone,’ I said.

  ‘But this was something that was brought over from South America, and then ran riot in the Norfolk area. The council tried to kill them all, and I felt sorry for them, so I started Coypu Consciousness.’

  ‘What . . . like an ani
mal welfare thing?’

  ‘No. I started telling people I’d met a coypu called Guru Ma Coypu, who was still living there and had been sent to save the human race. But he couldn’t speak the human language and he was communicating telepathically with me. I told them I’d written this book of his wisdom and it was up to me to spread the word. His philosophies were simple – like ‘Love Everybody Except Those You Do Not Like’ – and it seemed to strike a chord with people. Coypu Consciousness spread like wildfire, right across the Norfolk area. And then it started to get out of hand because people started to really believe in it, and were asking to meet Guru Ma Coypu, and so I had to stop it.’

  Paul looked at me, deadly serious.

  ‘I actually wrote a song about him. It went like this . . .’

  He put one finger in his ear, and closed his eyes, looking every inch the seasoned folk singer.

  He lives down by the river

  That’s where he’s got his house

  He’s smaller than an elephant

  But bigger than a mouse

  He wears a paisley waistcoat

  And psychedelic beads

  He built himself a guitar

  Out of bullrushes and reeds

  My old mate the coypu

  They say that he’s a pest

  But out of all the rodents

  He’s the one I love the best

  The French lady in the corner had put down her newspaper and was staring at us, with deep concern in her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t mention the fact that he was a guru, this coypu, because I didn’t want to bring the song down and make it too heavy. Better to get people interested in the coypu and then hit them with the philosophies. But the coypu is just a tool to get people involved. He doesn’t really exist. I made him up.’

  I nodded to show I understood, and that I didn’t really think he’d met a coypu in a paisley waistcoat.

  ‘And it caught on?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. I could have cashed in. I could have made a lot of money from Coypu Consciousness. Especially if I’d taken it to America. I would say I would have been a millionaire within the year. But I didn’t want to take on the karmic consequences.’