Roger Finger
By Lew Furber
Ever since I first tasted Boursin cheese, it has been my dream to move to Paris and take up smoking. My grandmother gave it to me, the Boursin, smeared on an air biscuit one sweltering day on Southend seafront. ‘This is what they eat in France,’ she said, and sang a few lines of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ while she filled her pipe with Amber Leaf. She pointed across the water. ‘That’s France – Paris, actually – over there.’
As a child you have little reason to disbelieve a pipe smoker with a knotted handkerchief on their head. I spent many days in my youth staring at Paris across the water from Southend, dreaming of its hazy mud mounds and caravan parks.
After my grandmother died I found out I had been staring at and dreaming of Kent and my grandmother had been laughing at me for nearly twenty years. I took the train to the end of Southend Pier to have a look and, sure enough, there was Kent. I felt embarrassed, so I left a review of the pier online: come to this pier only if you intend to cast your dreams off the end of it. Later I felt that was a little unfair, so I edited my review and added: excellent hot donuts – four stars. I also found out ‘air biscuit’ is a slang term for a fart, not a light cracker for eating with cheese, and there had been more than just tobacco in my gran’s pipe.
She left me some money and a Margaret Thatcher Toby Jug in her will. I’d never had spare money before and my dream of moving away had not yet materialised. I booked a trip to Paris and began practising different ways of holding a cigarette.
Smoking is much better looking in France. In Southend you look like my grandmother, a decrepit hag. Over there you are the embodiment of chic ennui. Light a ciggy in Southend and they say, ‘Why hasn’t he got any teeth, mummy?’ Light up in France and they say, ‘Right this way, professor. The president is expecting you.’ You can even smoke slims over there without being headbutted.
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I flew to Paris one day early in September. I had bought some cigarettes in the airport and lit one only when I had stepped out of Gare du Nord and into some dog shit. It was my first ever cigarette. I hated the taste, and dirtying my shoes at the same time soured the whole thing; I had wasted much of my life anticipating a moment of disappointment. I stubbed out the cigarette and pretended to smoke it until I got to the hostel. I felt like I looked cool. I imagined I was Jean Reno wheeling his suitcase through the city and that people were saying to their friends, ‘Look! It’s Jean Reno,’ only in French.
#
I walked from the hostel to the Louvre. I wanted to listen to my playlist of French music as I walked, but I’d forgotten to upload it to my phone. I only had one song saved on there, ‘Linger’ by The Cranberries. It took me over an hour to walk from the hostel to the museum. This was long enough to listen to ‘Linger’ fourteen times, including a brief stop in a café. I ordered an espresso and took an outside table, where I sat with an unlit cigarette and thought about Albert Camus and absurdism. I don’t know anything about Albert Camus or absurdism, so I found this quite boring.
My mind turned to The Cranberries. ‘Linger’ is a far more esoteric song than I’d ever noticed. In the chorus she sings, ‘You know I’m such a fool for you / you got me Roger, Roger Finger.’ Who is this Roger Finger? Where is he keeping her? In French, it would be pronounced Rogé Fingé. I imagined I was Roger Finger, celebrated smoker and philosopher extraordinaire.
My French must have been more eccentric than I’d intended because the coffee tasted awful. It was some kind of double mega espresso with undertones of gravy. I paid, reluctantly, and set off again. While I was walking I thought I saw Gerard Dépardieu, but it was just a gargoyle reflected in a bus window.
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I should not have wasted my time. Not only was the queue for the Louvre infinite, but they were charging €15 for entry. I wasn’t going to pay that. In London they let you see the stolen artifacts for free. Nobody says they have been in the Louvre, only to the Louvre, and, technically, I had been to the Louvre. Nice pyramid. Lovely gargoyles. No Gerard Dépardieu.
I was hungry. I had spotted a little supermarket on my walk and I went back there to buy Boursin and water biscuits. ‘Où sont les biscuits de l’eau?’ I asked the lady in the shop.
She looked confused. ‘Biscuits made of water?’ she said in English.
The conversation that followed wasn’t easy, but I left the shop with some gingerbread and some roquefort cheese. Perhaps it was a Parisian delicacy. I wandered back towards the Louvre to sit in Le Jardin des Tuileries.
Now that was a garden. Everyone says they have a garden because, even though it’s more accurate, it’s too time-consuming to say they’ve got a sad yard suitable only for firing squads. ‘Garden’ is shorthand, like saying ‘Number 10’ instead of ‘the British government.’ I say ‘garden’ because it is quicker than saying ‘agapanthus graveyard’. Actually, I like that. From now on I will call my garden the Agapanthus Graveyard for accuracy. The Agapanthus Graveyard for Accuracy sounds like a pressure group. While I was thinking I trod in dog shit again.
Two good things happened in the garden: the roquefort and gingerbread was delicious and I saw a pigeon which had all of its toes. This seemed a good omen to me. I looked at my map and plotted a route to the Panthéon via Notre Dame.
The cathedral looked grand and sad. It must have taken a long time to build those walls and buttresses, like a suit of stone armour with a wooden helmet. It reminded me of myself. My wooden roof had burnt down many times.
I took a picture of the ruined cathedral and posted it on Facebook and Instagram with the caption ‘self portrait lol’, but even when I got back to the hostel that night no one had liked it. This always happens. I know that and I still post things and no one likes them and I feel the thud of rejection. No one ever likes the things I do.
I’d had a small black fleck of something stuck in the right lens of my glasses since Le Jardin. Near me there was a woman with large eyebrows having her photo taken with the cathedral behind her. If I closed my left eye and tilted my head just so, I could position the black fleck over the woman’s face to make her look like Groucho Marx.
‘Madame,’ I called to her, ‘Tu ressembles à Groucho Marx!’
This was wrong. I had been rude. You are supposed to say ‘vous’ to strangers, not ‘tu’. Madame Roche, my French teacher, would have been disappointed if she’d been there and hadn’t died two years previously. Are you supposed to reply to get-well-soon cards? She never replied to mine.
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They were charging entry at the Panthéon too, but I thought I’d better go in instead of spending the whole trip in supermarkets and insulting tourists. The walk from Notre Dame was long enough to listen to ‘Linger’ three times in full. I must admit I was getting sick of it, particularly because I’d listened more closely and discovered she was singing ‘You’ve got me wrapped around your finger,’ and not about a mysterious man called Roger.
In the Panthéon crypt I found Marie Curie, who was dead. While I was looking at her grave a member of staff started shouting at me. I missed the first part of what he said because of The Cranberries in my ears. The gist was clear, however: I had to leave because I had traipsed dog mess throughout the building.
I left and bought some new shoes from an expensive shop. I was going to spend that money on an extravagant lunch, but at least shoes could be kept as a souvenir. I went to McDonald’s. Nothing could go wrong there. I sat in there for a long time, thinking of what to do next.
I took the Metro to Chateau Rouge. The trains are very narrow, so I imagined I was inside a sausage in the process of being made. From Chateau Rouge I walked up to Sacré-Coeur, which, to my eye, looked like a cake.
From there I saw the Eiffel Tower, which I had forgotten existed and therefore forgotten to visit. Visiting something, really, is just light bouncing off it directly into your eyes without being relayed by television or whatever. I could see the Eiffel Tower with my own unaided eyes, therefore I did visit it after all. I felt better.
I climbed down from Sacré-Coeur and went to a bar because it was evening and I was on holiday. As I was in France, I ordered a bottle of wine. The barmaid seemed uninterested in having a conversation with me. I don’t think service people smile as much in France. I said ‘bonsoir’ to a few people at the bar, but they ignored me. I found a bench and sat, glass in one hand and bottle in the other, watching people speak and smile at each other with ease.
I heard some English, an Essex accent coming from the banquette behind me. A young man was talking confidently to his friends. I took a peek and they all had big bags; they looked like daytrippers. He said something, obviously expecting them to laugh, and they did. He got up and went to the bar.
I watched him order drinks for his friends. Despite his terrible French, the barmaid smiled at him. He looked a bit ugly to me, but he didn’t seem to be thinking about that. On his way back he saw me staring and said ‘Bonsoir’, and I heard my grandmother say, ‘Don’t stare or your eyes will fall out.’ I sat and listened to them speak while I drank my wine. The young man said something stupid, but the others laughed anyway.
Someone put ‘Linger’ by The Cranberries on the jukebox. One of the friends said she loved that song. I was buoyed by the wine, so I turned around and smiled as confidently as I could. ‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘I thought this song was about Roger Finger.’ I thought they would laugh at that, but they didn’t. There was a pause and I didn’t know what to do. ‘I’m on my own. Do you mind if I join you?’
‘Ah, we’re actually just leaving,’ said the young man.
‘Oh,’ I said, smiling still, even though my ears were hot and it felt like my face was as big as the moon. ‘Well, have a good night.’
They left. I wanted to be dignified and finish my bottle of wine, but after a few minutes I went back to the hostel; the ache of self-consciousness had become unbearable.
about Lew (he/him)
Lew Furber is a writer and musician living in Cardiff. He also writes and performs comedy songs and stories, usually in an old lady wig, white face powder, and sunglasses. In 2020 he was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize.
twitter: @LewFurber