A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  "You will see," he teased, grinning at a passing navel.

  At the street corner there was a typical Parisian brasserie - six round marble-topped tables on the pavement, cane chairs, glass-fronted veranda jutting out from the building.

  Jean-Marie grabbed a chair at the last free outdoor table, ignoring the huffy complaint of the man who thought he was about to sit there.

  "We are lucky," Jean-Marie said. "In Paris, if it is sunny, all the outside tables are full. If it is a good cafe, of course."

  Two plastic-covered menus arrived on the table. The waiter was a grey-haired, harassed-looking man in the typical waiter's uniform - white shirt, black trousers, and a black waistcoat with several bulging pockets full of small change. He paused just long enough to mumble something that I didn't get about his "plat du jour". He poked his finger towards a blue Post-It stuck on the menu and charged off to attend to another table. Whatever the "plat du jour" was, I couldn't read the scrawled handwriting. Unless it really did include "crétin dauphin" (cretinous dolphin?), which I doubted.

  "What is this thing we must discuss?" Jean-Marie asked. He had glanced at the menu and put it aside.

  "Er." I tried to read the menu and collect my thoughts.

  Suddenly the waiter was there again, staring down at us. Jean-Marie smiled over at me, inviting me to order first.

  "Er," I repeated.

  The waiter huffed and was gone. He hated me already. Had my English "er" given me away?

  "The reports are very-" Jean-Marie stopped and frowned. "How you say, prometteur? Prom-?"

  "Er." We'd now been at the table for about thirty seconds.

  "Promisefull?"

  "Promising."

  "The Marks & Spencer report was very promising. They were stupid to shut their stores in France. French people like English products."

  "Yes. Er, what are you having?" I was lost.

  "Chèvre chaud," he said.

  "Chèvre?"

  "It means the female - what is it, like a mutton but with - on its head - corns?"

  "Corns on its head?"

  "Horns?"

  "Ah, goat."

  "Yes, goat."

  Hot goat?

  The waiter was there again, hovering.

  "Chèvre chaud," I said. If I got the horns, I'd give them to Jean-Marie.

  "Deux," confirmed Jean-Marie.

  "Et comme boisson?" the waiter asked. (Fish? You have to have fish with your goat?) This was why I usually lunched at the canteen. You just put what you wanted on your tray.

  "Une Leffe," Jean-Marie said. "A sort of beer," he explained.

  Of course, fish is "poisson", "boisson" is drink.

  "OK. Deux," I said, getting into the swing of things.

  The waiter grabbed the menus and left without taking any notes.

  If the Parisians really did take two-hour lunch breaks, I thought, they still had one hour fifty-nine minutes free after ordering. Who said the Americans invented fast food?

  "What is this thing we must discuss?" Jean-Marie asked again.

  "It's about your team," I began. In at the deep end. "My team..." I'd thought a lot about how to rephrase "I don't want them" and still hadn't come up with an answer.

  "I don't need them," I said, which didn't sound at all as bad as not wanting them. Did it?

  Jean-Marie gave a nervous laugh and reeled back in his chair. The waiter arrived with two sets of cutlery wrapped up in yellow paper napkins. The knives were serrated and pointed. I hoped Jean-Marie wasn't going to get his out and use it on my jugular.

  "You don't need them?"

  "Not yet. I need someone to research locations. Someone to do a consumer survey based on the reports we're all supposed to be reading - what exactly do people expect from an English tea room? What would they eat when? Someone to suggest names and logos. It's not something that Bernard, Stéphanie and the others can do."

  Jean-Marie was still reeling. He wasn't going for his blade, though. Not yet. He sighed.

  "French companies don't function like English or American companies," he said.

  The waiter came back with two large stemmed glasses of frothy beer.

  "Vous avez des frites?" Jean-Marie asked the waiter, who might or might not have heard. "You are right," he told me. "Except for Nicole, the finance director who must survey all projects, and Marc, who will be very operative when we start to implement our stock systems and et cetera. I took Bernard and Stéphanie because I do not know what to do with them. They have work, but not enough. This is not to insult your project. On the contrary. I am depending more on you. I hope you can organize them, motivate them. Or if necessary, ignore them. They will occupy themselves."

  "Occupy themselves? Are their salaries part of my budget?"

  Jean-Marie laughed. "You are funny. A worker is going a bit slow, you fire him. Here it is not the same. They call the inspecteur du travail, the work inspector, they complain, and you pay damages or the union makes a strike and it is the merde generale. And Bernard and Stéphanie are working for us since at least ten years. You know how much that costs for compensation if I fire them? Even if there is no strike by the other workers? And if I do have a strike, beef does not smell so good when the workers turn off the refrigerators."

  "I'm not suggesting you fire them. Just..." How should I express "make them disappear"?

  The waiter returned with two plates piled high with glistening lettuce, topped with grilled pats of white cheese on small slices of toast. No horns. If he'd got the order wrong, I wasn't going to complain.

  He put the plates down, wished us "bon appétit" and turned away.

  Jean-Marie asked for his frites.

  "Je n'ai que deux mains, Monsieur," the waiter said. He only had two hands. If I understood correctly, the waiter had just told Jean-Marie, very politely, to bugger off.

  "What about this waiter?" I asked when the man had scooted off again, "Wouldn't you fire him? He's totally obnoxious."

  "Obnoxious?"

  "Yes, you know, rude. A git."

  "Ah, a git, yes, I know this word. Yoo stoopid French git." Jean-Marie smiled at some fond memory of being insulted by an Englishman. "Oh, the waiters are always hurried at lunchtime. They know if we are not happy, we won't leave a tip."

  I'm not going to hire gits for my tea rooms, I thought. Though I had to admit this guy was fast. A hyper-git.

  "And today, he is more hurried than usually," Jean-Marie said, smiling mysteriously. He started to unwrap his cutlery.

  He really seemed to take the gittishness for granted, as he did the fact that we were about to eat in what felt like the middle of the road. There was barely a yard between us and the parked cars by the kerb. Any passer-by could have spat on our plates without turning his or her head. And if Jean-Marie made a sudden movement with his knife hand, he was going to perform a Caesarian on an innocent pedestrian.

  "Let us discuss the team later," Jean-Marie said. "Say, next month. Bon appétit."

  "Bon appétit," I replied, even though he'd just ruined mine.

  I took a tentative bite of my food and my appetite returned instantaneously. Now I understood -"chevre" was goat's cheese, not dead goat. Very good, too. Warm and creamy on the brittle toast. And the lettuce was sprinkled with crunchy walnuts and quite simply drenched in vinaigrette.

  A kind of warmth seeped into me with the salad dressing. Here I was, eating outside a street cafe in the autumn sun, oblivious to the passing cars and the people tutting because they couldn't get a table. The tall, imposing buildings, with carved gods, animals and classical plinths holding up their stone balconies, didn't seem to look down on me any more. The shop windows full of wildly expensive clothes, jeroboams of champagne or bank-breaking tubs of truffle pâté no longer seemed part of an alien universe. I felt, for a few wonderful seconds, what it was like to belong in Paris.

  "Everything else at work is OK, I hope?" Jean-Marie asked, I could see that he really hoped it, too.

  "Yes, fine. Well, ther
e is a slight problem with my business card." I'd received a box of them that morning.

  "Yes?"

  I decided not to mention the fact that it introduced me as "Paul Vest". I stuck to the bigger picture: "Well, as we couldn't decide on a provisional name, I was given some with the main company logo on them, right? VianDiffusion."

  "Yes?"

  "Well, it might be OK in France, but a big red 'VD' suggests something not very appetizing to an Englishman. And as some of our suppliers are bound to be English .. ."

  Jean-Marie looked anxious. "What does VD mean?"

  I explained.

  Jean-Marie's shocked laugh was choked off by a piece of toast lodging in his throat. He took a sip of beer and wiped a tear from his eye with the paper napkin.

  "When I went to visit your company in London, no one mentioned the problem of the name."

  No, I thought, but we all had a giggle about it.

  "It is lucky you tell me now," Jean-Marie said. "We have started to sell meat to other countries. I was going to change the logo to VD Exporters."

  "Very lucky," I agreed. "So don't you think we need something genuinely English on the business cards? Like Tea Time or Tea For Two?"

  "Hmm, or My Tea Is Rich?"

  Now I was the one choking on my toast.

  The waiter came back and tucked a bill under our little condiment set. He said something that I didn't understand, and went away.

  Jean-Marie grinned and wiped his mouth on his napkin.

  "This is it," he said.

  "This is what?"

  He explained that the waiter wanted to cash up now because, like all the other unionized waiters in Paris - that is, most of the blokes in black waistcoats, and they are, strangely enough, almost all male - he was going on strike as of now, "thirteen hours". The middle of lunchtime, just to be awkward. They were striking because, although French bills almost always included a 15 per cent service charge, waiters also needed tips to make a decent wage, and since the arrival of the euro, tips had gone down. Before the euro, a standard lunchtime tip was a ten-franc piece, but many people were now leaving a one-euro piece, which was only worth 6.5 francs. The fact that almost all café prices had been rounded up during the conversion into euros didn't seem to compensate.

  The waiter came back, looking for his money.

  "But we haven't finished," Jean-Marie complained, suddenly looking aggrieved. "We want a dessert and a coffee."

  The waiter repeated something about being on strike, "en grève".

  Jean-Marie did the hugest shrug I'd ever seen, even outdoing the man in the electrical shop. His shoulders, arms, his whole ribcage took off vertically in a gesture of infinite indifference.

  "This is not our problem," Jean-Marie said, the Parisian mantra, and seemed to inquire why the waiter was on strike for serving but not when it came to collecting his cash.

  The waiter wasn't into intellectual debate. He scowled as he weighed Jean-Marie up.

  "OK, what dessert do you want?" He listed them at Concorde speed. The only ones I recognized were "crème brulée" and "mousse au chocolat". I quickly chose the latter. Jean-Marie opted for some kind of tart. The waiter eyed us malevolently and turned away.

  "Et deux cafes," Jean-Marie called out to his back.

  We got what we'd ordered, too, approximately 20 seconds later. And the waiter got his money and a tip. A one-euro piece, of course. People at other tables tried to get the same deal as Jean-Marie but the waiter shouted them down or ignored them.

  I saw that I was witnessing an important lesson in Parisian life: I mustn't try to make people like me. That's much too English. You've got to show them that you don't give a shit what they think. Only then will you get what you want. I'd been doing it all wrong, trying to win people over. If you smile too much, they think you're retarded.

  So if I couldn't get rid of my team, I had to get tough.

  The only difficulty with being tough on everyone was that they were all so damned polite, almost ritually so. Marc and Bernard always shook my hand the first time they saw me in the day. They all said "bonjour" every morning, and asked if "ça va", and when we parted, they wished me "bonne journée" - have a nice day - or if it was the afternoon, "bonne après-midi", or if it was later on, "bonne fin d'après-midi" - have a nice rest-of-the-afternoon. If we met for the first time after about 5pm, they said "bonsoir" instead of "bonjour". And if one or other of us was on our way home, we separated with "bonne soirée" - have a good evening. This was without all the "bon weekend" stuff on Fridays, and Monday's "bonne semaine" (have a good week). It was Oriental in its complexity.

  Once we'd greeted each other, there was hardly any time left in the day to broach the subject of why reports weren't being read and decisions not being made.

  So I took an executive decision designed to show them that the laissez-faire days were over.

  One morning I went down to see my human resources rep. This was apparently where I could sort out getting some new business cards with my name spelt as my father's forefathers had decided, and with a "Tea Time" brand instead of the company's sexually transmitted logo.

  Christine wasn't allowed to order cards, she told me. It was centralized at human resources.

  I found the HR office and knocked on the door, its smoked glass made opaque by a blind that stretched down to knee level.

  "Entrez," moaned a female voice.

  Inside, I discovered Marianne the bristly-haired receptionist sitting behind a desk that was clear except for a computer and a small pot of what looked like deadly nightshade but was probably some kind of violet.

  "Oh, vous êtes human resources, aussi?" I said.

  "Non, je suis réceptionniste aussi." Marianne launched into a slow rant, something about how she was receptionist from nine till eleven in the morning and for part of the afternoon, and, I think, how someone qualified in human resources shouldn't be forced to do reception work. After the first volley of grievances, my mind gave up bothering to translate. She complained that something or other was scandalous and intolerable, but it all turned into a general sing-song whine, a sort of symphony in B moaner.

  Why don't you just get a job with a company that needs a full-time whingeing cow, I wanted to ask, but I suspected that this wouldn't speed up the process of getting new cards.

  I wrote my name and "Tea Time" down for her in crystal-clear capitals.

  "You won't have them before the end of next week," Marianne said.

  "Next week?" I groaned.

  "The end of next week," she stressed.

  "OK, I come Friday."

  "Oh, wait till the following Monday, just to be sure," Marianne said, almost gleeful about this inefficiency.

  Partial success, though. In ten days I'd have the cardboard proof that I was determined to win the logo war. We Brits were not to be trifled with.

  Next on the list to experience my new respect-me regime was Christine. The following morning I was in early, as Christine always was. I marched into her office, put a coffee on her desk and a slobbery kiss on her lips. Not a rugby-tackle approach, more a little spot of compulsory mouth tango.

  It was like waking Frankenstein's monster. Her tongue began probing my palate like a dentist's finger. This was a genuine French French kiss. Christine sighed hotly.

  "Viens," she said, tugging me across the corridor and into the ladies' washroom.

  She locked the door and we were suddenly rubbing our clothed bodies together and doing the full tonsil exploration thing.

  I just had time to think, damn, why don't you carry condoms in your jacket pocket, before she broke off the kiss and grabbed my face between her hands.

  "Oh!" She kissed me again - hard - on the lips and took a step back, a look of deep regret on her lovely face. What are you regretting?, I wondered. We haven't done anything silly yet.

  "What's the problem?" I asked.

  "We must stop."

  "Why?"

  "J'ai un petit ami," she said.

 
; A small friend? What's that, I wondered, a euphemism for an undersized vagina?

  She saw my confusion. "Un fiancé'," she added.

  "No problem," I wanted to say, "I'm not the jealous kind. Let's get on with it." But how did you say all that in French? Instead I just stepped towards her again.

  "Non, ça ne va pas," she said, looking all regretful again, holding her arms out as if to push me away.

  This was "folie", she explained. She was 25, she wanted to get married. She wanted kids. Her fiancé was a good man and she didn't want to lose him because of an affair with an "Anglais" who was only in Paris for a year.

  "Mais ..." I tried to think of arguments more convincing than "surely un peu de sexe anglais wouldn't hurt your relationship" or "don't worry, I won't tell him."

  "Mais, pourquoi ... ?" I finally asked, flailing my hands about in the general direction of my bruised lips.

  She gave me one of her painfully kissable looks.

  "C'était une erreur," she said. A terrible erreur, She wanted me to pardon her. "Et merci," she added.

  "Merci pourquoi?" Even I'm not vain enough to imagine that one lick of my tonsils is enough to provoke instant orgasm.

  "Thank you for being so English. You are a gentleman. You let me kiss you without..."

  No, I'm not a bloody English gentleman, I wanted to tell her. If she meant gentleman in the not-wanting-to-sleep-with-you-immediately sense of the word, the only English gentlemen I knew of were pre-pubescents who were just waiting until their pubic hair started to grow. Christine didn't know that we Brits had come a long way since Jane Austen's heroines could be sure that they wouldn't get a good rogering as soon as they said yes to a walk in the woods. Even Princess Di used to do it up against a tree with her riding instructor, didn't she? And now there was nothing at all gentlemanly going on in my brain or my boxer shorts.

  "Pardonne-moi, mon Englishman," she said fondly, and left me standing there in the ladies, alone with yet another useless erection. Lucky hard-ons are bio-degradable, I thought, because I was throwing a lot of them away.

  "Fuck you, Mr Darcy," I told the ceiling. "Fuck you, Hugh Grant. How can you expect a Brit to get his end away if you go around being so bloody polite all the time?"