‘You OK?’ I asked her.
‘Ah, salut,’ she said.
‘C’est qui, ce mec?’ the guy hissed, so that it came out as ‘skissmeck’. I’d heard the question before. It’s what French men say when guys like me talk to their girlfriends – who is this bloke?
‘Bonsoir, je suis Paul,’ I said, holding out my hand in greeting.
‘Bonsoir. Thomas,’ he said, more cordially, but still with a touch of skissmeck in his eyes. Apart from this, he seemed a decent enough guy: cool-looking, neatly unshaven, chic designer clothes.
Amandine explained that I was one of the other judges and Thomas was her boyfriend.
‘I just need to have a conversation with Thomas, then I’ll come in to the shop,’ she told me.
‘OK.’ I turned around and walked straight into Gregory’s bare chest. He’d obviously followed me. ‘And this is Gregory,’ I said.
Amandine and Thomas nodded, the skissmeck melting visibly from Thomas’s eyes. He’d decided that this was my boyfriend and that I was no longer a rival. I didn’t bother to put him right.
On the short walk back to the shop, I explained to Gregory about Amandine’s boyfriend not wanting her to be a judge.
‘You not like zat wiz Marsha?’ Gregory said with a fierce French accent.
‘No,’ I said, ‘maybe I’m weird, but I quite like beautiful women to be beautiful in public.’
‘And booty-full men to be booty-full?’ he asked, and laughed when I couldn’t think of a reply. ‘Come, let us find some bad wine,’ he said.
By the time Amandine finally arrived at the shop – alone – I was on the doorstep with Greg, who was telling me funny stories about the hysteria behind the scenes at the fashion shows he’d worked on.
Amandine kissed me hello and I introduced the still shirtless Gregory.
‘You dumped the other guy?’ he asked her in French. ‘If you’re single again, you don’t need to worry about being alone. You’re beautiful. Every guy in Paris will be after you.’
‘I’m not worried about being alone,’ she snapped. ‘I’m much more worried about being with a dickhead.’
She used just about the worst French insult possible – not just con (the word for vagina, but also a male idiot), but petit con. There was something about being an undersized vagina that was horrifically insulting to a Frenchman.
‘Oh, please don’t think I’m trying it on with you,’ Gregory said. ‘Your boyfriend’s more my type. Want me to take him off your hands?’
Amandine laughed and demanded wine, so I took her upstairs to the drinks table.
There, she poured it all out. She’d met her boyfriend at business school. It had been great when they were students, then he had become moody when she went off to New York for her internship, got even worse when she’d confided in him about Jean-Marie’s antics at work, and had lost the plot completely now that she was going to be on stage in front of an audience, especially in this trendy, English-speaking context that he felt excluded from.
‘Sorry to bore you with this, Paul,’ she said. ‘You probably want to know what’s going on with Jean-Marie.’
Instinctively, I looked around to see if he was eavesdropping.
‘So what exactly did you overhear?’ I asked her.
She took a couple of seconds to get it straight in her mind.
‘I heard him on the phone. He didn’t know I was in the next office. Like I told you, I think diners are a cool idea, but he was getting really personal about you. He was saying you’d always been an “emmerdeur”, a pain in the butt, opposing him in everything. He said he wasn’t going to let a “petit con d’Anglais” frustrate his strategy to expand the restaurant side of his business. So he told his low-yah to screw you at all costs.’
Holy merde, I thought. It was even worse than I’d feared.
‘I’ve contacted my lawyer,’ I told her. ‘He reckons we can stop Jean-Marie somehow.’
Alarmingly, Amandine laughed.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing he hates more than opposition to his little plans. We both know that.’
‘Hey!’ Suddenly there was a gust of perfume and Marsha’s arm was draped across my shoulder. She kissed Amandine hello, and gave me one of her ironic eyebrow lifts. ‘Sorry, you two having a private huddle?’
I felt stupidly guilty. ‘Just discussing business,’ I told her.
‘No problem, Paul,’ Marsha said. ‘How’s about we look at the running order for tonight?’
She talked us through the programme. It was simple stuff. She would introduce the evening, talk about the launch, and then the poets would do their thing. After vetting out the wackos, she had signed up sixteen contestants. They each had five minutes to perform, and, unlike TV talent shows, we couldn’t buzz to shut a performer up. That, she said, was dictatorial and rude, and I had to agree. After each poem, we’d vote, and in this, the first round of three, a poet needed only one vote to go through to round two.
Only one vote? I breathed what I hoped was an invisible sigh of relief.
‘But I want you to promise me that you won’t show any favouritism, OK, Paul?’ Marsha said.
‘If Jake’s crap, I’ll vote against him. Promise.’
‘Promise accepted. And, to add a bit of audience participation, we’ll have a vote at the end, and they get to kick one person out.’
Bloody hell, I thought, she’s worried about me being biased towards my friend, and here she is stacking as many odds as possible against him.
‘But that’s even more dictatorial and rude,’ I objected. ‘Someone gets voted through, then their hopes are dashed when they get humiliated by a public vote of disapproval? It’s awful.’
She had no time to reply, because the sound of angry shouting suddenly burst in the window from below. We looked down to see a huge, open-topped car parked outside the shop, and a furious van driver yelling that he couldn’t get past. The owner of the convertible, meanwhile, was simply shrugging as if to say: What do you expect me to do, widen the street?
I leant out and added my own contribution to the scene.
‘Bonsoir, Jean-Marie,’ I said cheerily, as though I had no idea he was trying to stab me in the back.
He looked up and saw me. Ignoring the van driver’s insults, which were now being accompanied by frantic hoots, he returned my greeting with equal hypocrisy, and asked why we hadn’t asked the police to block off the street for our event.
‘Block off the street?’
He shook his head in despair and reached inside his jacket pocket for his phone, no doubt to have a word in a highly placed ear. Typical Jean-Marie. He’d only been there ten seconds, and already he’d taken over.
‘I thought you’d bought the Jag,’ I said when I got down into the street. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the American convertible we’d seen at the garage in Boulogne. He’d got rid of the van driver somehow, and was now looking smug, though classily so, in another of his trendy English suits.
‘Yes, I have bought the Jaguar. I have rented this car for a short time. It is, let’s say, a subliminal campaign.’
‘Subliminal?’
‘Yes, people see this in the streets of Paris, and they think: Hmm, America, I want to go to a diner.’
I forced a laugh. He was clearly a man on a mission. But at the same time I saw the unpleasant logic of the idea. To Parisians, used to their cramped streets and endless traffic lights, this car did represent a kind of freedom, and a similar one to the release they’d get from picking up a hamburger in both hands and jamming it into their mouths rather than fiddling about with a knife and fork, trying to eat asparagus without looking obscene.
‘That doesn’t mean to say they don’t want a tea room,’ I told him. ‘People like the London taxi experience, too. A fun English lunch then back to their computers.’
Jean-Marie shook his head. ‘We will have a meeting,’ he said, as he did when he wanted to avoid any subject. ‘Is Amandine here
?’
‘Yes, and I’ve just met her boyfriend. He’s the insanely jealous kind.’
Jean-Marie beamed.
‘Jealous boyfriends are signposts on the road to success, my dear Pool,’ he said.
‘Why is that?’ I asked.
‘If a boyfriend is jealous, it means that the girl, or woman, is already … conquise?’
‘Conquered?’
‘Yes. It is just like in business. When your rivals realise they must counter-attack you, it is too late. They have already lost.’ He gave his smuggest smile yet.
‘But what if the rival smashes a bottle of wine over your head?’ I asked, longing to do just that. ‘And I’m not sure that Amandine is conquered anyway.’
‘Ah?’ Jean-Marie stopped grinning and looked me up and down. ‘So there is a second jealous rival?’
‘No, just because I say you haven’t conquered her doesn’t mean I’m trying to do so. I honestly think she just wants a job, Jean-Mary.’ I pronounced it as two women’s names – making Jean rhyme with bean – and he did a double-take. ‘It’s tough in France at the moment,’ I went on, ‘even for business-school graduates like Amandine. She just wants to work, not to get chased around Paris by her boss in a vintage car.’
Voilà. I’d gone a bit further than I’d meant to, but at least I’d said it. Jean-Marie was eyeing me coolly, deciding how to react.
‘I think, Pool, that you are confusing business and pleasure,’ he finally said, which was a classic case of pot and kettle if ever I heard one. ‘Perhaps it is better if I choose a different person to work with you for our joint project? Have you met my new assistant? She is perhaps less … distracting than Amandine?’
This had to be the gorgon I’d spoken to on the phone, the one chosen by his wife to discourage any thoughts of ‘working late at the office’ or ‘dinner with a client’.
‘Whatever helps us both to focus on business, Jean-Mary. I just want to work, too,’ I told him. ‘Doing this Ministry report has really focused my mind on the food business again. I think that with a little updating of its menu, the tea room could do even better than it is now.’
I saw Jean-Marie struggling to keep the carefree expression on his face. I was sure he would have loved to demolish my idea there and then, but he had to resist the temptation if he wanted to keep his machinations secret.
‘Très bien,’ he finally said. ‘Now can you ask Amandine to come here? You may not know it, but I gave her permission to leave the office early today. And now I need to talk to her.’
‘She’s upstairs,’ I said, and turning to look up at the window, I saw Amandine leaning out, staring straight down at us.
Sept
‘La poésie doit réfléchir, par les couleurs, les sons et les rythmes, toutes les beautés de l’univers.’
In its colours, sounds and rhythms, poetry must reflect all the beauty of the universe.
Madame de Staël, 18th-century French writer, who’d obviously never heard any of Jake’s poems
I
THE ROOM WAS loud and getting sweaty. All the chairs were taken, and people were leaning against every square centimetre of wall space. But, unlike the bus crowds, the mood amongst Marsha’s audience was friendly. The roar of chatter was deafening but happy.
Jean-Marie had had his confab with Amandine and was now sitting by the stairs, looking chilled in his cool suit despite being about twenty years older than almost everyone else in the room. He was obviously unaware that Amandine’s boyfriend, Thomas, was glowering at him from a few rows back, in between shooting shy, apparently apologetic glances at Amandine herself.
She was with me, sitting close to the open window, on the judges’ stage.
‘Thanks for defending me against Jean-Marie,’ she said. ‘You know, you are worrying him. He wanted to ask me why you called him Jean-Mary.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That you probably couldn’t pronounce French names very well.’
‘Did he accuse you of telling me about his Pool thing?’
She was going to answer, but Marsha, who was standing at the poets’ mic, called for hush.
‘This evening is all about words, and the love of words,’ she announced. ‘Someone once said that a picture paints a thousand words. But a few words can paint a million pictures. Any one word can mean a million different things to a million different people. That’s why we have psychiatrists to analyse the hell out of everything we say. And tonight, the word we’re interested in is talent. Literary talent. I want to know if you lot have got it. I bloody hope so. So let’s see. The rules are simple. One poem per person, five minutes maximum, and if one of the judges likes you, you’re through. All you need is one vote. And first up, all the way from San Francisco, is a guy called Laurie Shoreman!’
While the mercifully white-shirted Gregory played a blast of the old ‘flowers in your hair’ song over the sound system, Marsha came to sit at the central microphone on the judges’ table, and a tubby guy with curly black hair and baggy I’m-not-fat-really clothes picked his way between the chairs.
Acknowledging the applause, Laurie said hi to everyone and launched straight into a polished spiel.
‘A friend wrote to me recently that tweeting is just pithing in the wind.’ He paused for laughter, and got it. ‘But I think he was wrong. I’m pretty sure that soon, there will be no written works over 140 characters long. That’s all our attention spans will take. We’ll express everything in short, sharp bursts. Haikus will be epics. Even a sonnet will feel like Wagner’s Ring cycle, which, in case you didn’t already know, consists of four operas lasting a total of fifteen hours. That’s fifteen hours with your phones turned off, people.’ He got the jeers and oohs he probably wanted. ‘Which is why,’ he continued, ‘I’ve written a new, short version of the Ring cycle. It’s all about everyday objects that will soon be things of the past. I call it my Thing cycle.’
He held up a printout and the room fell silent.
‘Phoning without Skype,’ he intoned. ‘It’s a ring of the past.’ He got a laugh.
‘Paying for music – it’s a sing of the past …’ More laughter and a few groans.
‘Paying for absolutely anything on the internet – it’s a sting of the past.’
I thought I detected a pattern emerging.
‘Genuine low-cost flights – they’re a wing of the past.’
‘Oh come on,’ I said, more loudly than I’d intended, into my microphone.
On stage, Laurie froze in disbelief, his mouth open.
‘Paul, you’re not allowed to interrupt, remember?’ Marsha said into her mic.
‘I’m sorry, but come on, Laurie.’ This provoked an ironic cheer and I saw what I’d done. ‘Pardon the accidental poem, but what are you going to say next? Doorbells, they’re a ding of the past?’
This earned me a mixture of laughs and howls from the crowd, and a scornful puff from Laurie.
‘No one says doorbells are going to disappear,’ he scoffed.
‘But I wish you would, mate, sorry,’ I told him, this time getting more cheers than disapproval, the two of them joining in an eruption of noise. And suddenly I understood. Oh, the feeling of power. Pouring scorn on someone’s work without having to do better yourself. This judging lark was positively orgasmic. I knew what it was like to be a dictator and, believe me, it felt good.
Marsha wasn’t happy, though.
‘We’re not on TV, Paul. You have to let them finish. Sorry, Laurie. Did you have any more?’
‘Unprotected sex – it’s a fling of the past?’ he said, but the spell was gone, and everyone groaned.
And suddenly I felt like a total shit. The poor bloke had had the balls to get up on stage and I’d ruined it all. How did those TV judges sleep at night?
‘Well, Laurie’ – Marsha cut through the hubbub of audience chatter – ‘despite what Paul says and his feeble attempt to imitate you, I liked it, so you get my vote. What about you, Amandine?’
??
?Yes, very modern, very spirituel – witty. I vote yes,’ Amandine said.
‘You’re the first one through!’ Marsha roared. People cheered, Laurie flipped me a playful finger, and I shrugged my acceptance of defeat, relieved that I didn’t have to feel like a shit any more.
Second up was a punky woman called Suzie, a gap-year student whose face was pinched and aggressive but whose poem was anything but a rant. It was a melancholic series of Parisian sketches that had everyone listening in respectful silence. She described a poor African cashier working in a posh Latin Quarter supermarket. Back home in her shitty suburb, her five kids can’t do their homework because …
‘Their two-room apartment doesn’t have enough chairs,
For them all to sit down and learn Baudelaire.’
The eldest daughter dreams of becoming a lawyer, but
‘The teachers tell her don’t be so dumb,
This is a school for what the president calls scum,
The best you can hope for is the same job as your mum.’
It was delivered deadpan, in a composed, quiet voice, and earned a huge cheer and three yes votes.
The third candidate was just plain weird. A tall gangly English bloke, an ugly version of the young Hugh Grant, who nervously introduced himself as Richard from Bristol, and then launched into the sort of poem that only an Englishman could write after having too many cucumber sandwiches at teatime. He recited from memory, his eyes closed and his large white Adam’s apple bobbing:
‘Richard is a name that doesn’t rhyme,
Richard thinks about this all the time,
How he’s afflicted with a poetic curse,
He can never star at the end of a verse.’
This wackiness got wackier, accompanied by titters from the audience, but I have to admit that I drifted off to the sound of his Sunday-afternoon, tea-on-the-lawn voice, and only returned to consciousness when he got a big final laugh and a round of applause.
Guiltily, I voted for him. Marsha and Amandine didn’t agree. They thought he was too old-school and irrelevant, but Richard didn’t care, and from the way he bunched his fists in victory, it looked like the first thing he’d won since getting an algebra prize at primary school.