A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

"You like it?"

  "Yes," I said warily, a bit of common sense kicking in at last. Even if the asking price was ridiculously low, there was no harm in making it lower. "It is small. And..." What the hell else could I complain about? "And there is very much, er, green, to, er, brrmm." I mimed pushing a motor mower. Not that I had one.

  Monsieur Lassay nodded sympathetically. "You can ask Monsieur Augème to cut the grass, and let him keep it for his animals. Or he can let his sheep cut the lawn now and again."

  "Hmm," I said, as if I wasn't really sure I wanted a farmer or a bunch of ewes doing the boring, back-breaking work for me.

  "Why don't you rent it, for next weekend, say, and see if you enjoy it?"

  "It is rent for weekend, this house?" Strangers would be sleeping in my rustic bed before I'd even christened it with Alexa?

  "No, no. But if you are seriously considering buying it, you can rent it for a small price and test it."

  "With not guarantee for I buy it?"

  "No, of course. Until you sign, there is no guarantee."

  "OK, excellent. Next weekend, OK?"

  "Yes. Good. Here are the keys."

  "Already now?"

  "Oh, you were introduced to me by Monsieur Martin. He says you are an honest young man."

  Coming from Jean-Marie, I wondered if it was meant as a compliment or a slur.

  I couldn't really complain about Jean-Marie, though, because he was being very helpful. Élodie was away in the US, spending a term at Harvard on an exchange scheme. Twice a year, it seemed, kids from the top French business schools had to go abroad for three months to spend some more of their parents' money. So Jean-Marie gave me the keys to her car and said I could use it if I wanted to drive up the country.

  He also asked if I would mind paying all the rent on the flat while she was away, given that I now had exclusive use of the place. When I objected, or rather started to choke with disbelief, he capitulated instantly and said he'd pay me a bonus to cover the extra rent for three months. Wow, I thought, those business schools must be very expensive indeed.

  I mentioned this financial fixing to Alexa, and said he might be hoping I'd crash Élodie's car so that le could write it off and claim on the insurance, but she said I was being much too cynical about my friendly boss.

  * * *

  Alexa and I were getting on pretty well. With Élodie away, she could stay over at my place without being subjected to nude cookery displays or 3am yelping contests. We could spend an evening then a night together quite spontaneously without it causing a philosophical debate on the true nature of mixed-race male-female relationships in a post-feminist world.

  Her dad was back on an up after meeting a handsome Danish cutlery designer, so the weekend after my factfinding tour we headed out west together in Élodie's Peugeot 206. The weather was cloudier than the previous weekend, threatening to rain, and the other cars all seemed determined to stay ahead of the clouds or die in the process. It was like dodgem racing out there.

  As I drove, or rather quaked with fear while holding a steering wheel, Alexa cleaned the car out. Not because she was a hygiene freak, but because she'd found a strange pill with a skull stamped on it in the glove compartment. Her theory was, if we were stopped because of my over-careful driving, we were going to get arrested for possession of a whole recipe book of illegal substances. So anything suspicious, she threw it out the window as we travelled. A small plastic bottle, a lump of dark vegetable matter, an empty plastic envelope. After we'd stopped for a pee and a coffee near Chartres, she even got in the back and rooted around under the seats. Every few minutes I felt a rush of air

  pressure, and something else flew out the back window. If a policeman was unlucky enough to be walking a sniffer dog in the woods just outside Paris, the mutt was going to pick up our scent and not stop running for 200 kilometres.

  We'd almost arrived at the cottage when I heard Alexa swear.

  "What is it? The armrest stuffed full of heroin?"

  "You didn't hear on the radio?"

  "No." There was a news report on, but it was just a meaningless babble to me.

  "There is a strike by electricity workers."

  "Oh. We'll stop and buy some candles. And I think it's a gas cooker at the cottage."

  "Gas and electricity, it is the same workers."

  "Ah."

  We went to the market in Trou and stocked up on food for the weekend, as well as a selection of candles and a couple of torches. I even had the brilliant idea of buying some charcoal and firewood so that we'd be able to cook no matter what.

  A candlelit, fireside weekend in the country with a sexy French girl? Who needed gas and electricity to enjoy themselves?

  The rain began as we pulled up outside the cottage. The whole valley was filling up with clouds, and the trees seemed to be holding them back so that they could pour down on our weekend retreat. But even in the damp, powerless gloom, the cottage looked wonderful. Alexa purred with delight. I was more determined than ever to buy the place.

  What I really wanted to do was throw her on the bed, but I summoned up enough self-control to make myself useful and get the barbecue going. This was a brick construction just outside the kitchen door. It was still clogged up with ash, so I had to find a small shovel in the barn and scoop it out into a plastic shopping bag (and over my jeans) before I could start the fire. The rain was getting heavier, but at least that prevented me inhaling more than a few lungfuls of ash.

  There was a sort of roof arrangement over the barbecue, but the rain was inconsiderately falling at a slight angle and killing the fire before it could take, so I spread out my arms crucifix-style and protected the flames with my anorak until they had got going. I was now inhaling plenty of smoke to go with the ash already lining my bronchial tubes.

  I emerged from a bout of coughing to see the farmer, Monsieur Augème, staring over the wall at me from five yards away. His cigarette bobbed up and down in the corner of his mouth as he gabbled ancient Egyptian at me through the beating rain.

  I could guess the basic thrust of his speech.

  "Are you nuts, or what? Don't you city-dwellers know that you're not supposed to have barbecues in the middle of winter during a torrential downpour?" I nodded gratefully for his advice and did my best to direct my coughing away from the flames, which were in danger of dying of cold. Next time I looked up he was gone.

  Alexa and I had a modest meal of steak, salad and fruit, and decided that we'd finish cooking our steaks the next day. Even Alexa didn't like meat that was totally raw except for a one-millimetre layer of ash-covered charcoal.

  We spent the afternoon in bed (what else was there to do in an unlit, unheated house?), then used our torches to get dressed again and go out into the darkness for dinner. It was still raining, as the French so picturesquely say, "like a pissing cow".

  Instead of heading all the way back into Trou, we stopped off at Monsieur Augème's house and I dashed through the rain with a map to ask him whether there was a country auberge nearby.

  He stood on his front doorstep and talked at me again for a bit before I finally got him to shut up and listen to what I needed to know. He looked at me as if was an idiot, but consented to recommend somewhere to eat. He wasn't too sure about auberges, but finally prodded at a town a few kilometres west and said that we could get a meal at the casino there.

  It sounded posher than I'd envisaged - I would have preferred a tiny country inn serving food cooked by the same family since the Romans came through here on their way to fight Asterix, where we would rediscover a divine sauce that food writers had been hunting for for years - but failing that, I guessed dinner in a smart casino was infinitely better than anything our barbecue was going to produce.

  "What did he suggest?" Alexa asked when I got back in the car and began dripping all over her.

  "You'll see. It'll be a surprise."

  It was here, I think, that I learned my lesson about the nature of mixed-race male-female relations in
a post-feminist world. It was this: don't promise anything as a surprise unless you yourself are 100% sure that the surprise will be pleasant.

  You see, Alexa, being French, would have known that almost all the casinos in France were located by the sea or in spa resorts. Don't ask me why - maybe dipping yourself in sea or spa water dulls the pain of losing all your money at roulette. But whatever the reason, Alexa would have known that we were almost certainly not headed for a casino. We were headed for a Casino. That is, a branch of the supermarket chain called Casino, which, in its larger stores, often has a cafeteria.

  She would have told me that waiting in line to have a uniformed supermarket worker shovel steak-frites on her plate was not a food ceremony that she considered particularly sexy, even if it is enjoyed by many French people.

  * * *

  When we pulled up in the car park, she refused to get out of the car. We could have driven on from the industrial estate into the town centre, but the supermarket seemed to be the only place for miles with light. It probably had its own backup power supply to stop its freezers defrosting.

  The upside was that I persuaded Alexa to go inside, and we had a hot meal. The downside was that almost everyone else in town had had the same idea, and we had to sit at the same table as a family with one kid of food-throwing age, one of cutlery-on-table-banging (and food-throwing) age, and one sulking teenage blob who didn't know that it's impolite to jab its elbows into Englishmen's ribs every five seconds.

  Even my pet theory about "le self" being a good description of the French character didn't lighten the mood. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Needless to say we drove back to the house in silence, with me thinking it was lucky we'd gone to bed that afternoon. Night-time snuggles were not going to be on the menu.

  We sat up in bed reading by separate torches. I was reading an English translation of Emile Zola's novel Le Ventre de Paris, about life in the old food Market at Les Halles. Alexa was reading a French translation of Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Some Pig-headed Planet Where They're Told That Women Shouldn't Be Consulted About Where They're Going To Spend The Evening.

  Suddenly, a violent and incomprehensible sequence of events interrupted our bedtime reading. First, someone appeared to drive a motorbike into the barn. This somehow ended the electricity strike, and the bedroom light flashed on. A few seconds later, someone (the lost biker, presumably) started banging at our door.

  I put my jeans and a jacket on and went to investigate. The unheated air in the cottage was freezing, but now all the lights between the bedroom and the front door switched on normally. The strike was definitely over, which was excellent news. However, I could still hear the roaring of a motorbike from the barn. I opened the door to ask the rider to take his Yamaha elsewhere.

  But no, it was Monsieur Augème, wrapped up against the cold and ranting at me. I picked up one or two words. I was getting the hang of this ancient Egyptian.

  "Grange," he said. Even in normal French, that meant barn.

  But before I could ask him why he had used my "grange" as his garage, he had barged past me and gone into my kitchen. I followed him, and found him fiddling about under the sink. This puzzled rather than annoyed me. There's not much damage you can do under a sink without getting yourself wet and dirty, I figured, so why not let him get on with it.

  He stood up, walked to the cooker and set a gas ring blazing.

  "What's going on?" Alexa had arrived in the kitchen, fully dressed I'm glad to say.

  By the time Monsieur Augème had finished his explanation, I'd understood two other key expressions to go with "grange".

  When I thought back, he had used these two terms earlier in the day, mixed in with his incomprehensible patois, while I'd been trying to light the barbecue, and when I'd asked if there wasn't a place nearby to get a hot meal. They were "emergency generator" and "bottled gas".

  "OK, so I don't know much about life in the depths of rural France, but neither do you, you have to admit that."

  There was a squirming movement under the bedclothes.

  "I mean, we both should have spotted the obvious clues, shouldn't we? Like, when I went to ask Monsieur Augème for directions, how come we didn't start wondering why his house was lit up like a Bastille Day fireworks display? They've all got generators round here, haven't they?"

  The squirming figure emerged, at least down to the nose, which was wrinkling cutely as Alexa giggled, able to enjoy the joke now that there was hot morning coffee on her bedside table and hot air lifting the dust off the top of the radiators.

  Peace had broken out, and, as it always does, I breathed new life into the property market.

  "You must buy this house," she said. "It is a perfect refuge from the world. What do you do to buy a house?"

  She asked this as she sat up and gripped her steaming bowl of coffee in both hands. One of my shirts was covering her top half.

  "I don't know. Get a survey done, I suppose."

  "A survey? Like a market survey?"

  "No, like a structural survey to find out if the house is going to fall down or sink into the mud."

  "Oh," she shrugged. "It looks OK to me."

  I laughed, but I quickly found out that Alexa's attitude was almost exactly that of everyone in the French property business.

  Monsieur Lassay had told me could call him up any time during the weekend, so I did so that Sunday morning, from the bed.

  "Is it possible we organize an inspection of the house for problems with the structure? If it falls, you know?"

  "An inspection?" Monsieur Lassay sounded confused by my attempts at architectural French.

  "Yes, of the structure. The walls, the roof, the floor - "

  He interrupted my list of the bits of a house to tell me he got my drift.

  "There is already a certificate to say that you have no termites, and that there is no plumbing," he told me.

  "No plumbing? One moment." I covered up the phone and asked Alexa if she thought it was usual for the sinks, bath and toilet not to be included in the price. She took the phone out of my hands and had a quick, efficient chat with Monsieur Lassay, which I found slightly unsettling given that she was naked from the waist down and really ought to have been talking to no one else but me or her gynaecologist.

  She covered up the mouthpiece and explained.

  "It's not plumbing, you idiot," she told me. "You mean plomberie - all the bath and things. He means that there is no plomb in the paint."

  "Plomb?"

  "What do you call it that was in old paint? They make bullets from it."

  "Lead?"

  'Yes, when you sell a house you must have a certificate saying there is no lead in the paint. And no termites. And no amiante."

  "Ants? I've seen lots of ants in the kitchen."

  "No, amiante. The stuff that you can't burn."

  "Lettuce?"

  "No, idiot. They use it for ceilings."

  "Yes, lettuce."

  "Imbecile. You talk to him." She handed the phone back to me.

  "You must sign a promesse de vente," Lassay told me. "That is a promise to buy at a certain price."

  "I sign promise buy?"

  "You have seven days to change your mind. I can bring the promesse de vente to you to look at now, if you want."

  "Now? Oh, but. . ."

  As if to pressure me into agreeing, a band of real-estate guerrillas stationed around the house suddenly started firing artillery rounds into the garden.

  Alexa squealed.

  "Yes. Come now please," I told Monsieur Lassay. "With police quickly. Someone attack with boom boom."

  By the time we'd got up the courage to get dressed (who wants to be shot while half-naked?) and peep out the window, there was a lull in the firing. Out the bedroom window I could see a corner of the barn, most of the orchard, and the fields beyond, sloping up to the edge of the valley. The orchard seemed to have grown new trees with fluorescent-orange trunks and rifle branches.

/>   These, I gathered, were hunters. A group of six or seven men armed with pump-action shotguns were standing listening to Monsieur Augème who was waving his arms around and pointing down towards the house.

  "Why are they wearing those orange waistcoats?" I'd always thought that hunters were supposed to hide from their prey, not announce to every living thing within a kilometre that there were killers on the loose.

  "Because they shoot each other," Alexa explained. "They are known for shooting everything that moves. Cats, dogs, people who go for a walk, and other hunters. So now they wear orange. Also, it is easier to find them in the forest if they fall into an alcoholic coma."

  "Come on, let's go and see what's happening," I said, rather courageously I thought.

  Alexa and I made lots of noise unlocking the back door, and emerged talking loudly in an attempt to let the hunters know that we weren't rabbits.

  I called out "bonjour" and we strolled slowly up towards the orchard.

  Monsieur Augème was distributing cigarettes. When he saw us, he shooed the hunters away, and they began to walk back up towards the fields.

  Augème came down to meet us, shook our hands and said it was a fine morning, which it was - the sky was dull grey, the clouds low, but the air was fresh without being chilly. Now that the guns had stopped, there were birds lifting their heads from their trenches and daring to sing again.

  "What here, er, is happening why?" I asked the old farmer.

  Alexa translated the reply. "The hunters thought the house was empty. Usually they never come down here. They were trying to protect us from rabbits."

  "There are giant man-eating rabbits round here, then?" I asked her.

  "Yes, they come and devour the sheep and any vegetables you plant."

  "But we love the rabbit," I told Monsieur Augème sternly.

  Monsieur Augème seemed to agree. Alexa translated again.

  "He says he is happy to hear this and the hunters will give us two for lunch if they shoot enough."