A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  It was dark when I opened my eyes to find her staring at me from a few inches away on the other pillow. I stared back, meeting her eyes for a long time, which I usually feel uncomfortable about.

  This prompted me to make a wild suggestion.

  "Tell you what, Florence. This weekend, let's go and get an Aids test."

  She lifted herself up off the pillow and leant across to kiss me. After all, these days it's about the most romantic thing a guy can say to a girl.

  Our tests were negative, though the nervous agony of tearing open the results probably gave us some terminal heart condition. We had to go and make love just to calm down.

  Well, calm down was not exactly the best description. It turned out that in her spare time, Florence gave classes in something called pilates - a cross between yoga and stretching, she said. She applied all her techniques in the bedroom, too, so after a couple of hours in bed with Florence, you ended up with aches in places you didn't know could ache. And several steps closer to Nirvana. I tore up my train ticket (well, cashed it in, anyway) and moved my stuff into her apartment. Pedro, Luis and Vasco said brief, unceremonious

  goodbyes, and we wished each other luck (I think). That little loge really was a kind of oasis for nomads struggling through the Parisian desert.

  In comparison, Florence's place was almost obscenely roomy. It was a three-roomed duplex on the top two floors of a modern building that looked out over the cemetery. There was a balcony running along the upper floor. On a fine day you could get out of bed and sit there naked waggling the soles of your feet (or anything else you wanted to waggle) down across the rooftops of Paris.

  A cynic would have said that I was just taking advantage of this amazing new sex and accommodation deal. I would have replied by asking Monsieur Da Costa to hit the cynic with a sledgehammer. And then, as I left the pulped cynic to die, I'd have wished him "bonne journée".

  One Saturday, the journalists ended their strike, even though the election campaign had droned on as boringly as ever. As with so many of these French strikes, absolutely nothing seemed to have been achieved. Stopping work really was a kind of folk art form, strike for strike's sake.

  That morning, Florence and I were sitting on a bench in the cemetery, which was not as gloomy as it sounds. Père-Lachaise is light and airy, like a miniature city. There's a grid system of wide, road-like "allées" dividing up neighbourhoods of graves. And many of the tombs look like model houses. It is, though, a quiet and green city, with stands of mature trees and no traffic jams. A pleasant place to laze away the first really summery morning of spring.

  We had a couple of takeaway beakers of coffee and a bag of croissants on the bench between us. I was reading an English music mag, and for the first time in weeks Florence had bought a French newspaper. (Front page headline: "journalists' strike over". Slightly obvious, I thought.)

  There were quite a few people in the cemetery, both flower-bearing mourners and tourists looking for Oscar Wilde, Chopin and Jim Morrison.

  "Hey, isn't that your old boss?" Florence asked.

  I looked up at the approaching group of cemetery-goers. They were young, hair in their faces, baggy jeans, small rucksacks slapping at their backsides, the two genders distinguishable only because the girls were showing more navel. They were squinting from their map of the cemetery to the signpost giving the name of the allée.

  "Not unless he's had his belly-button pierced."

  "No, here." She thrust her paper at me.

  There, on an inside page, was a photo of Jean-Marie with a delegation of grim-faced farmers. The caption said the farmers had come to Paris to fill the Trocadero fountains, just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, with rotting strawberries. Not as a modern art statement. These were Spanish strawberries that they'd hijacked at various roadblocks around the country. The short article explained that the farmers were protesting about cheap Spanish strawberries flooding the market and killing French production. It didn't mention that mid-April is too early for French strawberries, but that didn't seem to trouble the farmers or Jean-Marie.

  There he was, the farmers' champion, promising to do his utmost, at some unspecific time in the future, when he would hold some unspecified position of influence, to ban all imports of foreign food, especially the produce of the Spanish profiteers and the "Anglo-Saxon invaders".

  He was looking the consummate French politician - impeccably chic suit, stiff shirt and tie, insufferably pompous smile. Liberté, égalité, vanité. The farmers stood around him, caught literally red-handed, as if they'd just murdered all his political opponents, leaving the politician himself squeaky clean.

  One of the gang of French Jim Morrison clones came over to our bench.

  "Où est... ?" he began.

  "Là-bas, a droite," Florence told him.

  "Merci, Madame," he replied politely, and the gang trooped off. One of them began singing "Radders on ze stom".

  "He's an idiot," I said. "Jean-Marie, I mean. How can he say he'll ban foreign food imports? Is France going to start growing coconuts?"

  "France does grow coconuts," Florence said.

  "What, in giant, nuclear-powered underground greenhouses?"

  "No. France includes some Caribbean islands and Pacific islands."

  "Colonies?"

  "No, some are part of France, they are departements just like Dordogne. So France grows coconuts, bananas, mangoes. And to be fair to him, even though I agree he is an idiot, he says that France and its overseas territories and its traditional friends in West Africa can be self-sufficient in food. We are not like England, you know. France does not accept that it has lost its empire. We say we are against globalization, but really we have never stopped globalizing."

  "Oh." So the guy actually had some kind of cogent plan. I had to admit that he was good. His antics with British beef proved that he didn't honestly give a bull's testicle about French farmers, attd the sheer enormity of his hypocrisy had a symmetrical beauty about it.

  But surely there had to be a chink in Jean-Marie's election campaign?

  "What about caviar? That comes from Iran or Russia, doesn't it?"

  "I think there are sturgeon farms in France now," Forence said. "His plan will never happen, of course, but it is interesting. It shows that France chose all her colonies for their food. In fact, the only thing I can think of that he couldn't get according to his plan, apart from very specific products like Russian vodka or Canadian maple syrup, is tea."

  "Tea. Of course. Logical."

  "Yes, tea comes mainly from old English colonies, doesn't it? Some is produced in Vietnam, which is one of our ex-colonies, but not enough."

  "So Élodie was right. Tea would be a drug."

  "Élodie?"

  "My boss's daughter." Florence looked curious, but there was no way she was getting any more details about Élodie. "I mean, tea would be a banned drink under President Jean-Marie. More illegal than grass. People would make tea-leaf badges and England would become a kind of Amsterdam where French junkies could go and get high on Lapsang Souchong."

  "Perhaps, but I will have my secret supply."

  "How's that?"

  "My uncle in India. He is in import-export. He can send me tea."

  MAI

  1968 and all that

  In May 1968, the students ripped up the cobblestones from the streets of Paris and bombarded the police barricades until Charles de Gaulle's ultra-conservative government fell. French people will tell you that "mai soixante-huit" changed France profoundly. Personally, I couldn't see any evidence of this. It was like Jake said - they still go with the same old flow. The students who were throwing cobblestones are now ultra-conservative bosses, the political establishment is still the political establishment, and there's even a Gaullist president in power. The only real change seems to be that most of the cobblestones are now tarmacked over.

  But May is an important month in the French calendar. Because if the French year begins in September, it ends in May.


  We had bank holidays on May 1 (the ironically named "fête du travail", as if during a "fête du vin" you did everything but drink wine), May 8 (for VE Day 1945) and May 29 (Ascension Day). They all fell on a Thursday, so each time people had what is called a "pont", a bridge, when they took the extra Friday off to make a four-day weekend. Coupled with the French 35-hour week, it meant that Florence and I had a hell of a lot of lie-ins in May.

  There wasn't much time for work in June, either. As well as having a bank holiday Monday, lots of people had to use up their year's holiday allowance by the end of the month, so they took a week or so off before their main summer vacation.

  In any case, it was nearly July, so there wasn't much point doing any work until la rentrée in September.

  Basically, in France, if you haven't done what you planned to do by April 30, you're in deep merde.

  As if all this wasn't enough, in the May I'm talking about, the teachers went on strike just after May Day. They got nearly four months' holiday a year, but they didn't get the "ponts" and felt underprivileged. So parents took their offspring to work, and Florence's office was full of young kids photocopying their faces and punching staples through their fingers. Even less work got done than usual.

  And on the basis that striking is a kind of French folk song, everyone else decided to sing along - the post office workers, shop workers, truck drivers, actors, oyster openers, cheese ripeners, waiters, waistcoat makers, baguette lengtheners, sausage shrivellers, and every sector of French industry you could name. The police stayed at work long enough to tear-gas a few demonstrators, then they came out as well.

  Not a good climate in which to start a new venture, you might think. But this is what I did.

  I chucked in my teaching job early on in May. Most of my regular students had cancelled their classes because of their eternal weekends, anyway. So I said goodbye to my German boss Andrea (who asked if I had any friends/children/pets who might want to become English teachers) and went to see my old bedmate Marie. This was the week before the bank workers went on strike.

  Marie's boyfriend was away, but Florence assured me that I was in no danger. Just to be safe, I arranged to meet in Marie's office, which had glass walls with a view right out into the street. If anything untoward did happen, it was going to be in full view of the passing crowds.

  I flatter myself, though. From what Florence told me, Marie really had seen me as some kind of sexual literacy project. Englishmen are "coincé" (uptight, or uterally "stuck"), as I'd proved by running away after our first encounter, and she wanted to unstick me.

  Now that I was standing on my own two feet, Marie was happy for me, like a French worker who hears tha his son has gone on strike for the first time.

  ***

  I'd seen Marie in her workclothes before, or seen her taking them off anyway, but it felt strange sitting opposite her in her office, client to financial advisor. And even stranger when my financial advisor clinched the deal by kissing me full on the mouth. Even French banks don't usually extend to that service.

  She gave me a twelve-month loan, with zero collateral.

  "What if I can't pay it back?"

  She shrugged. "Don't ask stoopeed question. You will pay. You are nice English boy. And you are my fren."

  In Paris, where there's a friend there's a way. She told me that the money would be available as soon as the strike was over.

  The reason I needed the loan was, of course, to start up a tea room. With Florence's direct access to cheap tea it had suddenly become obvious. Why give up on a viable project just because the almost totally ineffectual team that I'd wanted to get rid ot is got rid of?

  Florence and I had sat down together and run through the economics. With her knowledge of accounts, she'd whipped up a convincing business plan in no time. She reckoned she'd be able to give up her boring job and join me at the tea room within a year. The ultimate accolade - a French person with a job for life was going to give it up. The idea had to be a winner.

  My one potential obstacle was Jean-Marie. I was going to be using his research, his tests. Would he try to stop me by enforcing some clause about not competing with your ex-employer? Or to be strictly legalistic, present employer? Officially I was still working for him.

  It was clear to me now that he'd only dropped the tea room idea to further his political career. He'd got some kind of promise from the right wing and farmers' parties that he could go far if he played his cards right, so he'd cleaned up his act and axed his "Anglo-Saxon" food project.

  Unluckily for him, however, if I revealed everything I knew (and could prove via emails) about the beef imports, I could put him out of action as a businessman and scupper his political ambitions.

  There was no point telling anyone about his desktop affair with Stéphanie, because accusations of adultery would only increase his score at the polls. President Mitterrand, for example, gained maximum posthumous respect after his illegitimate daughter attended his funeral. A French politician without a mistress is like a sheriff without a gun - people think he has no firepower.

  Similarly there was little point alleging that Mayor Jean-Marie was going to benefit financially from the construction of a nuclear power station in his region. That would be like "revealing" that a prostitute profits from sex. Everyone expected it.

  But I knew that if I threw the English beef at him, it would stick.

  The elections were to be held on the third Sunday in May, so I had just a few more days to apply some pressure while he was feeling vulnerable.

  I phoned his office a week before the election and persuaded Christine to put me through. She said she'd probably get yelled at for doing so, but took the risk "because I was always such a gentleman with her". So not sleeping with a girl can have its upside after all.

  "Yes?" was all Jean-Marie growled at me.

  "I need to talk to you."

  "I do not need to talk to you."

  "Perhaps not, but I need to talk to you."

  Luckily he didn't say "I do not need to talk to you" again or we could have carried on till one of us died of starvation.

  "Talk," he said, and rustled some papers as if to say he wasn't necessarily going to listen.

  I didn't want to resort to overt threats of blackmail over the phone. Well actually I did, but I thought Jean-Marie would put me down as a crude amateur and tell me to get lost. So, without mentioning English beef, I just made it clear that I was determined to meet him on the Monday or, at the very latest, the Tuesday morning.

  We agreed to meet at his Neuilly apartment at 7pm on the Wednesday.

  "I have a dinner that evening," he told me, stressing that this was in no way an invitation for a cosy night in.

  "So do I," I told him. At a cheap south Indian place with Florence and Marie, to celebrate our new start. Unless Jean-Marie had had me thrown off his balcony by then.

  On that Wednesday, the general strike hit its peak, and the city attained a level of dirty, angry, traffic-jammed, blacked-out, fresh-baguetteless chaos that was, everyone said, worse than May 1968.

  At which time, having broken their previous record for disruption, the strikers all went back to work so they could use up the rest of their annual holiday allowance.

  Jean-Marie's wife answered the door. She looked as perfectly maintained as ever. Roots dyed, check. Tan freshly topped up, check. This season's Dior bracelet, check. Breasts perched at exactly 80 degrees south, check check.

  She shook my hand and led me into the lounge, without bothering to make small talk or even give me a a smile of recognition. Unless she'd been hitting the Botox, I was persona non exista in the household these days.

  ***

  The lounge was as breathtaking as ever, with its amazing vista over the Bois de Boulogne (how many top-floor apartments in a capital city have a view of only trees?). But the room had changed in one telling way since my last visit. Over the fireplace, on the marble mantelpiece, there was now a dramatic clay bust of Marianne.
Not Jean-Marie's receptionist. No one would want her staring at them from their mantelpiece, poor girl, even if she was covered in clay. This was Marianne the revolutionary heroine, the French equivalent of Uncle Sam. This being France, instead of a bearded old uncle who looks as if he should be advertising fried chicken, they have a semi-naked woman.

  To my untrained eye, Jean-Marie's bust was beautifully sculpted. The name Marianne had been written by hand into the clay in a curly old script. You could even see the fingermarks of the sculptor where he had perfected the swell of that patriotic cleavage. This was a one-of-a-kind antique work of art. Jean-Marie was investing heavily in his new political career.

  If I'd been any kind of serious blackmailer I'd have lifted it off the mantelpiece, threatening to drop it and symbolically shatter his future if my demands were not met. But I contented myself with admiring it in close-up and risking the tiniest fingertip touch of one of the remarkably hard nipples.

  "You are not the first," Jean-Marie said, almost causing me to swipe his statue off its shelf. He’d appeared in the room behind me, in royal-blue shirtsleeves, his collar still tieless for the moment. "If you look, there is a minor, how you say, dark place, where people have touched her breasts. They prefer the right one, I think." He chuckled to himself at his piece of political satire. He seemed positively jolly compared to how he'd been on the phone. It crossed my mind that he might have asked his lock-breaking bodyguard chum to prepare an amusingly violent death for me after our chat.

  He stood his ground, waiting for me to cross the room towards him, and shook my hand tersely. It was in marked contrast to the first time I came here, when I almost felt as if he was going to whip out the adoption papers and declare that I was now his sole son and heir.

  We sat on opposite golden-armed antique chairs in the centre of the room and he took some chunky cufflinks out of his trouser pocket. He began to fold back his cuffs as we spoke. He was playing Monsieur Indifferent.