‘No, but I’ve rotten, ratted, you know, writed …’
‘Written?’
‘Yeah, a posy on their sufferances.’
As soon as I’d worked out what he meant, I began to feel like Californians do when an earth tremor wakes them up in the middle of the night: queasy, but with a sense that things could be about to get much, much worse.
‘This isn’t a poem for the competition?’ I asked.
‘Yes, the first lines are …’
And before I could beg him to stop, he’d recited them:
‘The only good thing about being half-woman, half-man,
Is that if someone tells you to go fuck yourself, you can.’
It took several minutes, and a heated discussion about the artist’s obligation to shock the public into awareness, and similar things that might earn someone a grant from the French government but would have Marsha and Amandine reaching for their sickbags, for me to persuade Jake to go for something less provocative.
‘Less free?’ he asked, defiantly.
‘If you want to drop out of the contest, you’re entirely free to do so, mate,’ I told him. That was how Marsha would view things. And in the end he’d promised to read something softer.
‘But I will probably wear a black armband in honour of my dead principles poétiques,’ he told me.
Whatever else you said about him, and there was a lot to say, Jake was always good entertainment value. He reminded me of a linguistically challenged American I’d once seen at the Gare de l’Est. I was at the ticket office trying to change a reservation when a tall, bewildered tourist came up to the counter next to me.
His train was obviously running very late, and he said something like ‘pourquoi non train à Strasbourg?’ in strongly accented pidgin French. ‘Grève?’ he asked. He must have taken the precaution of looking up the word for strike before coming to France.
‘Non,’ the railway guy told him. ‘Pas de grève. C’est juste un retard’ – it’s only a delay.
‘Pardon?’ The American didn’t understand.
The Frenchman repeated what he’d said before, a bit more slowly and loudly.
‘Pardon?’ the American said.
I saw the railway guy writing something in big letters on a piece of paper. He held it up. It said ‘RETARD’.
At which point I was forced to step in and explain why the American shouldn’t punch the innocent railway worker.
Marsha was also in the mood for some punching when I got to the bookshop. Not for punching me, luckily. It felt as though I hadn’t seen her for ages, but when I walked in the door, she greeted me with a kiss that almost blew my teeth down my throat.
‘Great to see you again,’ I told her.
‘Yes, it will be,’ she said, and pinched my jeans where it hurt. ‘But if that Jean-Marie or your ex turn up, I swear …’
‘They won’t dare,’ I told her, praying that I was right. ‘Oh shit,’ I added. ‘I think that woman from the Ministry of Culture might be dropping by, though.’ I told her that Marie-Dominique had been badgering me via email for the time and place, and I’d eventually had to give in. ‘Sorry,’ I added. ‘I should have warned you earlier.’
‘Bloody hell, Paul, sorry seems to be the easiest word with you, doesn’t it? This frumpy old culture snob, a friend of your mate Jean-Marie, is coming along to pour a bit of French bureaucratic shit on my English bookshop and you forget to tell me?’
‘She’s not that frumpy,’ I said. ‘She told me she actually liked that exhibition we saw at the One Two Two. And if you’ve invited some French poets, she might even give you a grant or something. I’m sure there are bookshops who’d kill to get someone from the Ministry of Culture to come to a reading. Make her feel important, say how much you love some totally obscure poet. The French never get it when you’re taking the piss out of their culture. They don’t see how anyone could.’
Marsha’s mood swung almost instantly back upwards again.
‘You’re right, Paul, I’ll ask one of this lot to find me a good line to quote.’
She nodded towards the customers loafing around in her armchairs. I didn’t know if they were spending much money, but she certainly had a few browsers in. There were four people reading either paper or electronic books, and two chatting over mugs of something steamy.
Just then, Amandine walked in.
‘Is Rain Man coming?’ Marsha asked her. Amandine wasn’t too familiar with Dustin Hoffman’s filmography, so it took a short while for Marsha to explain that she meant Thomas, Amandine’s socially challenged boyfriend. By the time we’d got this clear, and Amandine had told us that he was parking the car, we were upstairs, staring at Greg the soundman’s naked back. He was topless again, wearing only low-cut jeans, and bending over with his backside held aloft while he did his thing with the cables and the duct tape.
Marsha briefed us.
‘With the new French contestants, there are going to be so many poets that we’ll be allowed to interrupt them this time. Feel free to wade in like you did before, Paul. The wader the better. And I’ve decided it has to be a majority vote, two to one, if we’re going to keep the loony fringe in check.’
Two to one? It sounded bad for Jake. I didn’t know which poem he was planning to recite, but it would have to be something that didn’t send Marsha and Amandine screaming for the door.
Marsha was still talking. ‘And we’ve got to give these French poets a fair hearing, right?’
‘Right,’ I agreed.
‘And then we vote the fuckers off, OK?’
She gave one of her loudest laugh-screams yet, and before I could reply that I didn’t think that would be such a good idea, especially if Marie-Dominique was coming, she announced that she was off downstairs to find the worst line in the whole of French poetry to quote in her opening speech.
It sounded as though the evening was going to be pretty eventful.
While we waited for poets and audience to arrive, I asked Amandine how things were going. There was nothing new on the Jean-Marie front, she told me, but her boyfriend was still getting her down. She glanced nervously at the door. A bad sign, I thought, when a girl looks nervously towards where her boyfriend is about to walk in.
‘I tried to tell him about my idea of going to America and he got mad. He said I just wanted to leave him, and then started saying that I encouraged the men at work because I wear short skirts and tight shirts.’
Tonight she was doing just that, and I had to admit that a man’s eyes were naturally drawn towards her.
‘Yes, it must be a fine balance,’ I said. ‘Wearing what you want without being accused of dressing provocatively. It’s something we blokes don’t have to worry about. I mean Gregory over there – he obviously doesn’t care who ogles him.’
We had a laugh at Gregory’s shamelessly rippling muscles.
‘You know what we call a stomach like that?’ Amandine asked me. ‘Une tablette de chocolat.’ She mimed the hard segments of chocolate running down either side of Gregory’s tight abdomen. He caught us looking at him and shouted across at me to show some muscle.
‘Mine’s more of a half-melted Twix,’ I said, and lifted my shirt a few inches to show off my lack of tablette.
‘Ah, c’est ça!’ A shout from the top of the stairs cut through our laughter.
Thomas the Rain Man was looking furious. Not surprising, really. The jealous guy parks the car and then walks in on his girlfriend judging a six-pack contest.
‘Thomas, on ne faisait que rigoler,’ Amandine said tiredly – we were only having a laugh.
‘Oh, yes, I could see that,’ Thomas replied, barking across the room and injecting enough venomous sarcasm into his reply to kill a French schoolkid.
‘Thomas, s’il te plaît,’ Amandine sighed, looking close to exhaustion.
‘Tu préfères les Anglais, uh?’ he sneered, as if that might be a sin.
‘Arrête,’ Amandine tried to order him, but he didn’t look like ob
eying.
‘Ce n’est pas …’ I began trying to say ‘it’s not how it seems’, but couldn’t work out how to finish my sentence. And I suspected that it’d only make things worse, anyway. So I opted for second best. ‘Va te faire foutre,’ I told him.
‘Toi …’ He pointed at me as if he was about to explain what he was intending to do to me instead of going away and getting himself fucked, but then seemed to think better of it. I thought it probably had less to do with my innate scariness than the fact that topless Gregory had taken a step towards the door.
‘Viens,’ Gregory told him. ‘I love wrestling.’
Thomas opted for the huffy exit strategy, and stomped down the stairs.
‘It’s a pity,’ Gregory said. ‘He’s cute. And I love jealous guys. They’re so passionate.’
‘You think you’d better go after him?’ I asked Amandine.
‘Non,’ she said, but it was more of a groan.
‘Sorry, it was my fault for flashing my stomach. It must have looked like a come-on.’
She smiled and kissed me. Only on the cheek, a quick Parisian bise.
‘Ooh, am I interrupting something?’
Now there was another silhouette in the doorway. This time it was Marsha, her eyebrows raised and her eyes pointing straight at my damp cheek.
Here we go again, I thought. Will Greg’s six-pack get me out of this one?
In fact, though, Marsha didn’t care at all. She was a sort of anti-Thomas. And just to prove it she came and gave both Amandine and myself huge kisses. And then planted one for good measure on Gregory’s naked chest. Oh well, I thought, at least it was preferable to Thomas’s hissy fit, even if it was slightly more confusing.
‘Time to come and hide,’ Marsha told Amandine and me. ‘People are starting to line up outside. We don’t want them to see you two canoodling here. The judges have all got to make a big entrance when the room’s buzzing.’
So down we went to be shut into what was little more than a cupboard under the stairs. Marsha was outside marshalling things, leaving Amandine and me sitting toe to toe amongst a collection of boxes: tea bags, coffee capsules, printer paper. The air was a mixture of Amandine’s perfume, my deodorant and embarrassment.
‘Just think what Thomas would say if he could see us now,’ I said to lighten the atmosphere. ‘If I leant forward half an inch, I’d be nibbling your nose.’
She let out a loud French ‘pff’. ‘How can you go from saying such nice things just now to something so stupid?’
‘Yes, sorry. Saying exactly the wrong thing is a knack I have. Just ignore me.’
‘Honestly, Paul, you’re one of the only guys I’ve met recently who didn’t put his hand on my knee or make a sexual remark. And even lifting your shirt didn’t seem that sexual.’
I gathered she meant this as a compliment.
‘Maybe it’s because you’re English. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine an Englishman being sexual,’ she went on, and I relaxed. I’d heard that old chestnut a thousand times before. ‘Except Daniel Craig maybe,’ she said. ‘And even then, as a Frenchwoman, I imagine that I would have to do a striptease and jump on him to make him react.’
‘Please don’t start stripping now,’ I said, and she laughed.
Marsha opened the cupboard door.
‘Still dressed, you two? What’s wrong with you?’ she said. ‘Come on – showtime.’
III
It was easy to spot the language loonies in the room. For a start, they were sitting at the front, whereas for the first round, people had come in more shyly, and begun filling the room in the middle rows. The anti-Anglos were also sitting in relative silence, as though waiting for a funeral to begin.
‘Has your frumpy friend turned up?’ Marsha whispered to me as we three judges filed to the front, causing a babble of anticipation.
I scanned the crowd and saw no sign of Marie-Dominique’s nondescript hairdo or drab, fashion-free clothes.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ I told her.
‘Good omen,’ Marsha said, and went to speak into the poets’ microphone.
‘Bonsoir,’ she announced. ‘Or good evening for those of you who don’t understand French. We don’t want anyone to feel left out.’ She gave the front rows her most charming smile. ‘Bienvenue and welcome to our poetry competition, notre concours de poésie, round two, deuxième tour.’
It was impressive. Even Jake couldn’t mix the two languages like that and still be understandable.
‘As the little-known French poet, le poète français peu connu, Marc Destrophes said, Paris est un fruit mûr – Paris is a ripe fruit – à cueillir et à savourer – there to be plucked and savoured. Il faut juste faire attention de ne pas tomber de l’arbre – you just have to be careful not to fall out of the tree.’
So she’d found her obscure poet. An unjustly obscure one, though, by the sound of it.
Marsha explained the rules, saying that she was ravie – delighted – to have French poets along tonight, and that she had one French judge – Amandine, one Brit – moi, and one totally bilingual – herself, so everything would be completely balanced and fair.
All this seemed to disarm the website people a little. They’d come looking for conflict and pollution linguistique and found only bilingual harmony.
I must point out that the people in the front rows weren’t a cross-section of the Parisian population. They were all white, and, if the opinions on their website were anything to go by, probably voted for the kind of political party that thinks immigration should have stopped in about 1789. So it was a pure joy to see the look on their collective faces when Marsha announced that first up was a young French-language poet called Fatima Al Saïd.
A tall girl sporting a bouncy henna-coloured Afro, jeans and an Algerian football shirt, whose ancestors obviously came from several different parts of Northern and Southern Africa, strode confidently up to the stage to a rousing cheer from all the audience, except the front rows, who gaped and consulted each other about what to do.
It was as I was looking out into the audience that I noticed some late arrivals: a wildly mismatched couple getting settled at the back of the room. He was tall, a head higher than most people around him, and she was the same amount shorter. They both seemed to be wearing wigs – his a sort of floppy black early-Beatles mop and hers a blonde Marilyn Monroe – as well as matching punk collars, black with little metal studs. I didn’t know any fancy-dress addicts, but they were waving and nodding as if to say ‘yes, it’s us’. I smiled back, trying not to show that I had no idea who the hell they were.
Fatima had what even I recognised to be a strong North African accent, the kind that I’d heard French rappers use on the radio. ‘Oui’ becomes ‘way’, syllables are heavy, the voice is deep and strident. Quite honestly, I hardly understood a word of what she recited. She was chanting with the microphone practically inside her mouth, punctuating her stream of words with a thrusting arm. Her delivery was as fast as a Renault racing through a red light, and there was lots of slang. The chorus of her rap, or slam, went something like ‘j’ai pésho, j’ai pésho’, which was a new one on me.
I asked Amandine what it meant and she had to shout into my ear that it was verlan, backslang, for ‘j’ai chopé’, which didn’t help me much.
‘It means she picked a guy up, she scored.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. She was very sexy and didn’t look the kind of girl who’d take no for an answer – if you could get a word in edgeways to say anything at all.
She got a huge cheer at the end, from the rear half of the room at least, and Marsha went out to thank her and say how wonderful it was to welcome French poets. Cue another syrupy grin at the language bigots.
I voted for Fatima. The girls did, too, even Marsha, in defiance of her earlier ‘vote the French fuckers off’ stance. I leant across and congratulated her on her spoiler tactics.
The only trouble was that the next two poets were also French rappers.
How do you vote for poems you can’t understand? I had to abstain and let Amandine and Marsha decide, which they did, voting one out and one in.
By now, the people in the front rows were grumbling loudly, obviously suspecting that someone here was taking the pisse. Rap, especially when performed by someone in an Algerian football shirt, did not correspond to their ideal of French poetry. The English-language spectators were growing restless, too. If they were like me, they hadn’t understood more than ten words that had been recited in the last quarter of an hour.
The weird-looking couple were still smiling at me, and apparently whispering about some private joke. And as the woman turned to her partner, I remembered where I’d seen her before – she was the dominatrix I’d spotted at the vernissage. She was certainly being friendlier tonight than she had been then.
The next competitor, Marsha now announced, would be performing a poem called ‘English City, Saturday Night’, or ‘Ville anglaise, samedi soir’. She told us his name was ‘Mark’, or ‘Marc’, giving the second alternative a rolled French R. This got him a confused, half-hearted round of applause.
As he walked forward, nervously holding a printout of his poem, I tried to guess which language group he belonged to. It was hard to tell. A nondescript white guy in jeans and a stripy shirt, he could have come from New Zealand, Newcastle or Nice.
It was only when he opened his mouth that everything became starkly clear. A little too starkly for my liking.
‘Ze girls in ze street in Leever-pool,
I was thinking, Zey are beauty-fool.
Zey ’ad a miniskirt and false blonde ’air,
Naked legs, and eet was Decemb-air.’
If he’s joking, I thought, it’s genius. If he’s serious, it’s tragic.
The Anglos started to laugh loudly, but the reaction down the front was completely the opposite. The sound of a French mouth (if that’s what it was) speaking English words was too much for the ‘Non à l’anglais’ crowd. With their backs against the wall after the onslaught of Franco-Algerian rap, they now came out fighting, howling down poor, bemused Mark or Marc with shouts of ‘en français, en français!’ Some of them stood up and started to clap along with their own chant, and only a swift intervention by Greg stopped one of them grabbing the microphone.