The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner (7 page)

It didn’t stay long in the shop, a dealer in Joyce taking it off my hands. I was going to write that the book returned to Ireland. But it didn’t, of course, as a physical object, hail from Dublin, although its characters did. Joyce’s thoughts were rarely in exile.

The sale’s proceeds of £400 were shared with my then business partner.

Back to Paris, and a gruff sounding George is explaining Tumbleweed Hotel’s modus operandi. He invites me to lunch
but I make my excuses and leave. Oddly enough, I don’t feel that comfortable in the bookish atmosphere and being around so many bohemian types. I also realise that there is no paid work on offer.

I get a friendly reception in Tea and Tattered Pages, a retail concept I later adopt in Montpellier. But they say, almost apologetically, that there are no jobs going.

Abbey Bookshop, a small shop specialising in Canadian books and literature, certainly doesn’t raise any expectations either.

Nearby is another shop in the vicinity of the Sorbonne which I come across by accident. I recognise its name – Attica – and inside the shop its manager explains that it is the sister business, as it were, of the shop in Rue Folie Méricourt in the eleventh arrondissement, an establishment selling foreign language textbooks in the main and teaching aids.

David is decidedly foppish with his smart linen jacket and blond hair which he is forever sweeping back from his forehead. He is in his early thirties and articulate in English while retaining a strong French accent. Holding forth is a
long-haired
, dark complexioned American student called Jan. He talks intensely about the utilitarianism of the Red Indians and David is listening with a distracted air to stories of buffalo being forced off cliffs. (I think the conversation owes its origin to the imminent release of Kevin Costner’s
Dances with Wolves
.) In ascertaining that Jan is soon to return home, I sense there may be a job opportunity. I buy some books, including
Money
by Martin Amis, which is probably a subconscious choice, and end up staying a while since David is in chatty mood. He’s pleased to hear that I’m from London. He’s quite the anglophile and I soon learn that he used to live with an
‘East End girl’. I exaggerate my city boy credentials and get offered a couple of afternoons’ work a week.

David likes to play the generous host; his benevolence extending to books.
The Road to Oxiana
by Robert Byron is one of his early gifts. It brilliantly recounts the author’s journey through the Middle East to Oxiana – the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya, which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. It stirs the wanderlust. We travel to Chartres; our travelling ambitions not extending to buying a plane ticket to Kabul. We marvel at the Gothic architecture which years later will be a comforting sight on my travels between France and the UK. The immense cathedral is visible from miles away as you approach it by road through the surrounding flat fields of wheat. Within five minutes of the town’s historical heart is the camp-site Les bords de l’Eure, situated beside the gently flowing waters of the Eure – where I will regularly stay in years to come since it conveniently breaks up the journey between Montpellier and Bangor.

Ostensibly, I make sure that the books are arranged in alphabetical order. My real task, I suspect, is to alleviate David’s boredom. The shop isn’t that busy and the only regulars are a motley crew of characters, myself included, who rarely leave with purchased books. There is a tall Irish aristocrat who could be a character straight out of a J. P. Donleavy novel. Outspoken and on the wrong side of thirty, he is considerable older than his livewire Serbian girlfriend, whose outrageous ideas mix madness and brilliance. They are scathing in their opinion of George Whitman after spending eight years as ‘tumbleweeds’ before falling out with him. Whitman’s current head honcho is Karl. Ernest and intellectual, he is a much calmer presence. When he isn’t working at Shakespeare
and Company, he is publishing books through his own press called Alyscamps. Serendipity runs through our lives and the book world is no exception. Karl publishes in 1994
A Dream in the Luxembourg
by Richard Aldington with a preface by Lawrence Durrell. The following year Richard Adlington’s daughter walks into my shop. I know that many consider the central idea in John Guare’s
Six Degrees of Separation
to be an urban myth. But my experiences suggest that its premise is plausible. That if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.

Some sort of deal has been struck. George Whitman turns up at Attica with a couple of ‘tumbleweeds’ in tow (both American girl students) who each carry a large ‘mail’ sack. David exits the shop for a cigarette and George is soon shuffling around, nonchalantly pulling books, mostly paperbacks, from the shelves. He lets them fall to the floor and the girls obligingly bend down to pick them up. It is an astonishing sight. This bearded and elderly gentleman muttering to himself as he peruses the shelves, setting off mini avalanches of paper up and down the shop. He continues in this fashion until the girls protest at the weight of the bags.

David hovers by the till and this appears to be the signal for George to produce a thick wad of notes. It isn’t to buy my silence that, following the ‘Whitman raid’, David hands me a couple of 100 franc notes. It’s more his embarrassment, I think, at me having witnessed a transaction involving so much dosh in relation to my meagre wage. He knows that I can’t live on the hours that he gives me in the shop.

I have to do an Orwell.

Relevant experience, claimed to secure the job at La Tavern Mexicaine, is quickly exposed as the lie that it is. The manager, Jean-Pierre, however, is perversely pleased; ineptitude rendering me good haranguing material. I can be relied upon to ‘fuck up’. His unnerving presence means that there is the constant threat of a bellowed instruction. ‘Six guacamole, six nachos.
Non, non; non. J’ai dit deux, oui deux taco poulet. T’es con?
’ The question is in all likelihood directed towards me since Raja has been sent to collect meat packages from a giant refrigerator in the backyard. Apart from me, the kitchen work force is Sri Lankan, men who have fled from the turmoil afflicting their country. ‘We had to,’ is all Raja says on the matter, making it clear that he has no intention of revealing more about the nature of their exile.

In spite of his competence, Raja is especially targeted since he is able to convey a sense of irony at his slavishness. I observe the battle between the boss and the bossed. Raja smokes illicitly in the backyard, mounts food raids on the stores and furtively mocks the manager by pulling faces. But Jean-Pierre, as if in retaliation, set tasks that are designed to humiliate. Raja is required to re-stack neatly stacked buckets, wash clean plates, and he is admonished for dicing vegetables the wrong size. ‘
T’es con?
The onions, I can’t see them.’

Both are French – the manager and the chef, a man who excels not in tyranny but in propagating a mood of sullenness. So it is in the spirit of subtle rebellion that I find myself speaking to the Sri Lankans about cricket. When fed up or stressed, I find sport often to be an effective palliative. In
A Fan’s Notes
, its author Frederick Exley asks ‘Why did football bring me so to life? I can’t say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of
circumspection.’ (Incidentally,
A Fan’s Notes
always sells well despite there being quite a few copies knocking about in the Penguin edition.) He was talking about American football but the quote holds true for other sports. That’s why I am excited about our mutual interest in cricket. The Sri Lanka cricket team is touring England. The newspaper, which I buy on the morning that the first test is scheduled to start, charitably defines their threat to England as one more subtle than that posed by the West Indians. My work colleagues excitedly run through their team’s line up before their thoughts turn briefly to the opposition. The mention of Gooch and Gower causes them to nod with respectful solemnity.

Our cricket conversations (invariably mine were with Raja) strike me as incongruous amid the cacophony of kitchen sounds: knives striking marble chopping boards, the clanging clash of tray on floor and the near constant hum of an industrial dishwasher. Electing to bat first, Sri Lanka play with a carefree abandon that rules out a big innings. My colleagues are not really disappointed when England win and cricket continues to provides a focus for communication between us. Raja is awesomely accurate as a bowler, sending down unplayable deliveries between the stoves. He insists that Ragunathan, positioned in front of the dishwasher, has caught me out at third slip.

At the start of the week, Raja is in fine form, both with the imaginary ball and with life in general. He has got one over Jean-Pierre by finding employment for a cousin who has recently arrived in Paris. Raja has circumvented the manager’s authority by making his request direct to restaurant’s Head of Personnel, a woman with an easy-going disposition that I find difficult to reconcile with the atmosphere of the kitchen. After a shift, she
doesn’t mind if we stuff ourselves, almost to the point of sickness, with steaks and tostadas. Three of the Sri Lankans have been chef assistants for two years, their lithe bodies testament to the calories burnt up in the course of a hard working day. I mutilate the vegetables whereas they stroke them into slices. They have acquired an unassuming strength that rips lids noiselessly off buckets containing ingredients. I am adapting to the work but remain cack-handed in comparison to them. Going about their kitchen business with impressive efficiency, they do their best to make me feel part of the kitchen brotherhood. I am tipped off if the manager is on the warpath. I am invited to partake in covert food snacks.

On that final morning, Raja and myself are up to our necks in tomatoes. Since the place is going to be understaffed in the evening, two additional crates of big juicy tomatoes await dissection. I am first to complain. This makes Raja explain, by way of offering consolation, that the task is an even worse one in January. The glossy skinned tomatoes are tougher then and finger numbing cold. ‘But it’s not algebra.’ Nothing is ever as difficult as algebra.

Raja’s temperament is undergoing a transformation. The manager has spent his morning spitting his foulness with evil efficacy. ‘
Propreté and rapiditié
,’ he has bellowed. ‘
T’es con?
’ It is as if Raja’s high spirits earlier in the week have exacerbated the vindictive side to the manager’s nature. And the verbal attack is sustained further, during the heat and panic of a major lunch time rush. Raja says nothing, but beads of sweat break out upon his forehead.

Finally it happens. I am on my knees, looking for a 10-franc coin that has dropped out of my chequered chef trousers. The manager is inspecting plates before waiters whisk them away.
According to Jean-Pierre’s arbitrary system of measurement, Raja is dumping excessively copious portions of
degustacion de pacifico
on the plates. ‘You try to make us poor,’ he complains. ‘Call this plate clean, you useless fuck?’ The language doesn’t surprise me as I get to my feet, expecting another broadside, but Jean-Pierre is otherwise preoccupied. Raja has him pinned against a shelf. The steel blade of the knife is of proven sharpness, reddened with vestigial tomato skin and juice. A thrilling uncertainty reigns for a moment, the manager grimacing with fright. But in sensing that if Raja is going to strike, he would already have done so, he recovers his composure. With a sad air of contrition, Raja withdraws the knife from the fleshy throat. The manager, along with the rest of us, watches silently as Raja walks out of the kitchen and then out of the restaurant. The next day I, too, walk out after shouting abuse in his face ‘
T’es con con con con
.’ My voice is breaking up. I tremble with the nervous energy. I’ve spent 24 hours working myself up to this moment. I am expecting a big scene. But Jean-Pierre, completely unfazed, says it is good for me to go. ‘You better off teaching.’ When I return a week later for my pay cheque, Ragunathan tells me that Raja has found a job in an Indian restaurant but that the steam cooking is making him unwell.

Two days after the Raja knife incident I go to church: the American Church besides the Quai d’Orsay, or rather an annexe of it where English and Americans congregate in their quest to find accommodation and/or employment. ‘Dishwasher wanted.’ Of the human variety, I take it. Three hours a day plus meal. Dish washing – how difficult can it be? I pass the phone interview but can’t start for two weeks, which is when the ‘
plongeur
’ will leave the post at a Montparnasse creperie.

Buoyed and encouraged by some good Sunday puces (markets), I decide to open a bookshop in Montpellier. There is already an English bookshop but they do not sell second-hand books.

Anne and I scour the city for locations and plump for a road (rue du Cheval Vert) near to a cinema, which screens American and English language films. By chance, the building at No. 3 in the road is where Napoleon’s father met his maker. It says so on the plaque outside.

‘
Ici est mort le 24 Fevrier 1785 Charles Bonaparte père de Napoléon 1er
.’ Customers, thinking it somehow fitting for
un britannique
to set up shop here, occasionally allude to the plaque. Some even think that it accounts for the shop’s location.

We jump through all the hoops: applying for a Carte de Sejour, registering with Montpellier’s Chamber of Commerce, signing up to ‘
les charges sociales
’. We discover, to our dismay, that the social security contributions expected from a small business are much higher in France than in the UK.