A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  The spokesman's voice droned monotonously on (he was much more gifted at public copulation than public speaking), and it emerged that the actors were going on strike for two weeks because French TV's governing body had announced that it might ban porn from mainstream channels.

  "Eez terrible," Marie announced, unplugging my penis from her body. She had been sitting on my lap, casually massaging me with her ample rear end.

  The spokesman declared that this ban on televised porn would mean the end of France's "Iiberté d'expression". The woman whose face was attached to his lower body nodded in agreement. For obvious reasons she wasn't free to express herself verbally.

  The declaration ended, the screen went blank and Marie turned the TV off. She announced gravely that out of solidarity with the actors, she wouldn't watch any of the videos she'd recorded from that channel for the duration of the strike.

  To be honest, I was relieved.

  These movies were very unsexy, I thought. The problem was that, like all areas of French society, porn was a cliquey affair, so you just got the same people mechanically shagging each other all the time. You saw enough of their faces during the long, boring "acting" bits to recognize them. (Being French, they had to talk endlessly before they actually got down to action.) So after a while it was like having to watch your cousins getting it on together, which is not considered very erotic where I come from.

  All in all, I would have preferred it if the actors had kept their clothes on and made public information films about queuing and being polite to customers. That would have been very new and sexy.

  And anyway, Marie didn't need the help of porn stars to keep a man interested. One Friday, after a short bout of cinq à sept at my apartment, she took me to a Martiniquan restaurant in the Marais. Her family was from the French West Indies, and this place, she said, did real home cooking like her mum made.

  The place was highly kitsch, with a garish mural of fishing boats apparently flying across a sloping sea. There was jangly creole music playing, a sort of bouncy, hyper-fast reggae that got between your shoulders and made them jiggle about, even if you were a no-rhythm English Whiteboy like me.

  The waiter, a young Black guy, came over and made various obscene innuendoes about my going out with an Antillaise - not at all in a threatening way. It seemed to be his banter, his way of earning tips. I should eat the "boudin" - small spicy blood sausages - if I wanted to satisfy my woman, he said. And if we ordered an aperitif cocktail to go with the boudin, my manhood would stand as straight and tall as the glass it came in. (I just hoped my manhood wouldn't have a paper umbrella sticking out the top.)

  We gorged ourselves on boudins, "gratin de christophine" (a kind of baked marrow-like vegetable), "accras" (spicy cod fishcakes), red beans, rice, pork curry, fried fish and coconut ice cream, and I was just about ready to go home for some horizontal digestion when Marie announced that I was taking her dancing.

  She carried me across the Marais to the Third arrondissement's small Chinese quarter. For just a few streets, you felt as if you'd entered some kind of medieval Shanghai. Among the ancient Parisian buildings there were Chinese restaurants where the menus were only in Chinese, food shops selling almost nothing recognized as food except for the green bottles of Tsing Tao beer, and handbag wholesalers piled high with huge packing cases fresh off the aeroplane. Even at 10pm, some of the wholesalers were in there counting and unpacking stock.

  In the centre of all this, behind a fading façade of enamel tiles, was an Afro-Caribbean disco.

  Inside it was tropically hot, cramped and writhing. The music was similar to the stuff I'd heard at the restaurant. A fast, light, shuffling beat, with shrill guitars playing darting melodies. Couples were dancing, all in pairs. It was like the jiving I'd seen in the bar with Alexa, but these partners never let a chink of light get between them. Slickly dressed Black guys were thrusting their enviably tight butts at women who seemed to take no offence at all. Well, the thrusting was strictly in time with the beat, after all. The women were split about 50-50, Blacks and Whites. The men were almost all Africans. There were a few White guys, and all of them were dancing with totally babe-alicious Black women. The cynic in me said that there was probably a BMW convertible in the equation somewhere.

  Marie and I gave in our coats and then she tugged me towards the dance floor.

  "I don't know how to dance this," I pleaded.

  "Is simple, you imagine you are aving sex wiz ze music," she said, and carried on tugging.

  She was right. Instead of trying to leap about to the rhythm, you just eased your weight from one toot to the other - one-two, one-two - and shoved your pelvis at your partner. The better dancers amongst us were doing more complex moves, but Marie's sex technique worked perfectly well.

  What a great club, I thought. And what a good choice to have put on my tightest boxers - this was a club where a boy needed support and control from his underwear.

  The trouble was, my spicy meal was getting shaken up into a raging tropical storm inside said boxers. After two or three numbers, it became urgent that we sit out the next dance.

  Marie got us a table and some drinks, and I dashed off to ease the mounting pressure on my waistband.

  When I got back five minutes later, the drinks were there but Marie had disappeared.

  Was Celeste her surname?, I wondered.

  No, there she was, being dry-humped by a tall, lithe Black bloke sporting a silver shirt and some more of those enviable buttocks.

  I looked around to see if there were any women who might like a pair of British buttocks thrust at them.

  No, there was not one woman sitting alone. And along the bar there was a row of guys waiting to pounce on any poor lady who might be abandoned, even just for a few seconds, by her weak-bladdered partner. This, it seemed, was my mistake. In this club, you stand by your woman. Presumably if you need to visit the men's room, you carry her over your shoulder.

  I could see Marie looking across at me, smiling, enjoying her dance, shrugging slightly (if eyebrows can shrug) about having been plucked away from me.

  I mimed my despair about the lack of female dancing partners and she seemed to nod towards the far corner of the club.

  I peered into the smoky gloom. Over in the corner, there were a few couples having a drink or a snog and, yes, a woman on her own - a Black girl with long blonde hair extensions bunched up on top of her head. She was staring blankly at the dance floor as she sucked a lurid cocktail through a stripey straw. There was no other glass on her table.

  I did my best at this long range to examine her for hints as to why she might be alone.

  She was heavily made up, with jet-black lipstick and purple-shaded eyes. Her cleavage looked too bulbous to be entirely natural, and it was stuffed precariously into a low-cut t-shirt that was straining at the seams. A hooker, maybe? But then, I didn't want to sleep with her, and she was my only chance of a dance. I wove my way between the tables towards her.

  "Voulez-vous danser avec moi?" I asked.

  She let the straw drop from her mouth, looked me up and down and nodded coolly.

  "OK."

  When she got up, I saw that she was wearing a stretch mini-skirt that was having the same problems containing her bottom half as the t-shirt was with the two masses of flesh up top. If the skirt had been any shorter, I was sure I'd have been able to read the words "for" and "hire" tattooed on each butt cheek.

  Oh well, I thought, too late now.

  She held out her hand and I escorted her as she wriggled her way theatrically to the dance floor. All the drinking couples looked up to watch her pass. It wasn't such a rare event for a White boy to ask a Black prostitute to dance, was it?

  She clung to me and we rubbed groins in time to the music. Marie was still getting hers rubbed by her smooth partner. I caught her eye and she smiled across at me, apparently amazed by my success at finding a new dancing partner.

  She wasn't the only one. A couple of the other Black guys
dancing nodded to me and smiled, as if they were praising me, a bit patronizingly, for joining in the exchanging game. It crossed my mind that maybe this was one of those swingers' clubs that Paris is so famous for. If so, I was leaving after the next dance. As a rule, I prefer to choose whom I shag.

  At the end of the number, Marie broke out of her clinch and came over. "Come, we av dreenk now."

  Rather rude to my partner, I thought.

  "Dans une minute, je danse une danse encore," I said sternly.

  And in fact I felt as if I was getting the hang of the dancing style better with the prostitute. She seemed to have higher expectations, and guided me to more intricate steps.

  Plus she was a very deft groin rubber.

  "No, we av dreenk now," Marie said. She smiled apologetically and wrenched me out of her rival's arms.

  "Au revoir," I said. My partner simply tilted her head resignedly and smiled goodbye.

  "You aven't seen?" Marie asked as I watched my hooker waddle her way back to her seat.

  "Seen what?"

  "You aven't feel?"

  "Feel what?"

  In reply, Marie reached down and rubbed my groin which was still, let's say, enjoying the memory of its recent close contact with a mini-skirt.

  "Of course I felt that," I said. "But I didn't notice you trying to get out the way of that guy's thrusting pelvis."

  She laughed. "You feel but you don know."

  "Know what?"

  Marie stared over at the girl. "Ee as willy."

  "No." I watched the girl's slender legs, her slim, wiggling backside. I recalled the smoothness of her cheeks (the ones on her face, I mean).

  "A man? No way."

  "But you av feel is willy, non?"

  I thought back to the dance. I pictured the smiles on Marie's face, on the other dancers' faces. They hadn’t been approving my etiquette or admiring my footwork, they'd been watching the way I was getting a crotch massage from a transvestite.

  It now occurred to me that my partner had had rather a prominent crotch for a girl. But then I was still a novice at this genital-contact dancing.

  "You were the one who pointed her out to me," I accused.

  "As joke, stoopeed, serious Eengleeshman."

  "OK," I conceded, "from now on, the only person who's going to massage my trousers is you, Marie, OK?"

  She agreed, and didn't limit herself to the dance floor, either. Between dances, she kept up a constant, teasing assault with her hands. Especially when some African women got up to do the "helicoptere", a traditional dance in which women bend forward and quiver their backsides to give their man a stand-up lapdance. Marie saw that I found the tradition quaintly interesting, and encouraged my interest with her fingers.

  By the time we got back to my apartment, there was absolutely no way I was going to sleep straight away.

  An hour of exertion later, I finally let myself drift towards sleep as Marie ran a fingernail over my stomach. "You see, even Eengleeshman can learn amour," she said. "And février is entire month of amour."

  Lucky for me it's not a leap year, I thought, and floated away to dreams of becoming a nun.

  MARS

  The joy of suppositories

  The French may have a reputation for being two-faced, but in some ways they're more straight-talking than us "Anglo-Saxons". The way they name some things, for instance.

  A "soutien-gorge" is a bra, but literally it means "chest-supporter", which sounds like a surgical appliance to stop old ladies' boobs from chafing their knees. A firefighter is the much less dashing 'pompier" - basically a pump attendant. And the month of March is Mars, like the planet. The god of War. This year, the name turned out to be especially accurate.

  As the month of war began, I decided that it was time to name names. It was now almost six months since I’d started work in Paris. I had sample menus, prototype uniforms, job adverts. By rights, the tea rooms should have been ready to launch.

  But all we had was chat.

  This hadn't bothered me too much while I was distracted by my maison, but now when I went into work I began to sense a faint whiff of gangrene hanging over the project.

  It was symptomatic of this that I didn't manage to assemble everyone in the same room until the end of the first week in March.

  "OK, look at this checklist," I told them, passing round progress charts that illustrated in five colours the yawning gaps in our strategy.

  Marc, Bernard, Nicole and Stéphanie moved their coffee cups aside and studied the grid of ticked and empty boxes. Jean-Marie held his sheet up like a steering wheel and leaned back in his chair. He hadn't touched his coffee, I noticed. He'd just got back after a working lunch at the Ministry of Agriculture. Our machine coffee probably wasn't up to ministerial standards.

  Marc looked up. He seemed to be worried. So he should be, I thought. The blank boxes outnumbered the ticks by at least two to one.

  "Where you print dis?" he asked me.

  "Print it? If you're worried about security, there's no problem. These are the only copies."

  "Uh-huh. Look at dis." He pointed to the shameful progress of our staff recruitment plan.

  "Yes?"

  "It's vairy der-dee."

  "Der-dee?"

  "Yeah. Dis red, it is mo lahk brown dan red."

  "Maybe everyone printed out Valentine's Day hearts and used up all the red."

  "No. Dese new prinners are no damn good." He broke off and ranted at Jean-Marie in French about returning a batch of printers to the suppliers. A pile of American merde, he called them, joining in with the prevalent anti-US sentiment in the country, even though his time in the States was probably the most prominent thing on his CV.

  This was all very interesting from a sociological and printer-technology point of view, but it wasn't exactly why I'd called the meeting.

  "Is that all you've got to say? The colours aren't bright enough?"

  Jean-Marie seemed to agree with Marc. He was grimacing at his chart as if all the colours were shades of puce.

  A strange wheezing noise started to come out of Bernard.

  "Zees," he hissed, as if he was testing out the whistling capacity of a new set of false teeth. He held up his sheet and pointed to the top, where there was a cluster of ticks showing the few things we'd actually achieved.

  "Yes?"

  "What eez zees?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What eez zees?" He mimed the writing of a tick to mid-air.

  "A tick, of course."

  "Teek?"

  "Teek?" Now Stéphanie tried out the word for size.

  "In Hingland, they use ticks for positive things," Nicole explained. "In mathematique, when the solution his good, the teacher give you a tick. When bad, a cross."

  Bernard and Stéphanie found this fascinating, and went off on a tangent of questions about what we did on forms if we had to fill in boxes - ticks or crosses? Marc asked them if they hadn't noticed that on some websites, when they confirmed something, a tick appeared in a box.

  "Ah, yes. Vairy antress-ting," Bernard concluded.

  By this time I was reaching for my imaginary Uzi and drawing tick-shaped patterns of bullet holes across their skulls.

  "Jean-Marie?" I pleaded. He was still sitting there looking vaguely pained by our conversation.

  He pondered a moment before reacting, and then began to wave my chart in the air as if he expected it to rattle.

  "This is, as Bernard says, very interesting," he declared. "But, you know, when there is war on the horizon, it is best to - how you say? - drop your head?"

  "Drop your head?"

  "Yes, you know. Push your head down."

  "What do you mean?"

  He looked even more pained than before. "I mean, France and Britain have bad relations. If we have a war, who knows if 'nice cup of English tea' will sound so nice to the French public?" He did a tired shrug of surrender.

  "Hang on, Jean-Marie, what are you saying here?"

  Every
one in the room waited for him to formulate his answer. It came slowly.

  "I am saying," he finally said, "that it is better for us if Mister Blair, Mister Bush and Mister Chirac are friends. We cannot advance until we know the answer. We must wait to see. You go on vacation, Paul. Go to England for a week or two."

  I couldn't believe this. I was being deported.

  "You mean you're putting the whole project on hold in case there's a war? Isn't that a bit short-sighted?"

  He ignored these questions, so I asked some more.

  "What will you do if there is a war? Scrap the whole project? Do you know how long the first Gulf War lasted? Barely long enough for one pot of tea to brew."

  In reply, he simply grimaced.

  "And even if there is a war, do you really think Parisians will care? It'll be spring soon - they'll be ten more interested in making sure they've got right brand of sunglasses perched on top of their heads."

  Marc, Bernard and Stéphanie understood just enough of this to let out a faint "oh" of protest. Jean-Marie ignored them, too.

  "If you go to England," he said, "can you Fedex me some indigestion tablets? I have a crise de foie."

  Crise de foie - liver crisis - is what they call feeling sick after you've had too much to eat or drink. You've been so gluttonous that your liver is having a nervous breakdown.

  "Fedex you ...?"

  "Yes, in France, the indigestion tablets are only in pharmacies, and the pharmacists have announced a strike from this evening. I will not have enough. I must have too many official meals at the moment." He rubbed his stomach. "In England, lots of medication you can buy in the supermarket," he told the others.

  The rest of my working day ticked away listening to a discussion in French of the merits of a deregulated pharmaceutical retail market. It was enough to give anyone indigestion.

  Of course I immediately sent out emails to Messrs Blair, Bush and Hussein, informing them that a new Gulf War could have catastrophic consequences on the unemployment figures amongst male British food-company workers in central Paris.