A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  "I presume you have someone else living in the apartment now?" I asked to break the ice.

  He shrugged. That particular ice floe remained intact.

  "Just out of interest, Jean-Marie, why did you bother? I was paying the rent."

  He took a deep breath, trying to work up the inclination to tell me.

  "Sometimes, a friend has need of an apartment," he said.

  "I see." So it was all part of the politics, I guessed. Scratching someone's back. Maybe it was for the bodyguard himself. The Front National guys need to have muscle around them because France's large Arab population doesn't look kindly upon racist politicians.

  "Tell me, why do I have the pleasure of your visit?" he asked.

  "I need a favour."

  "Oh!" He laughed incredulously at my effrontery, just as my team had done when I'd dared to cast aspersions on the quality of French teabags.

  "Two favours," I said.

  "Ah?" He stopped laughing and became fascinated by his cufflink again. "What are they?"

  "I'm going to open an English tea room."

  "Ho! And who gave you this idea, uh?" He shook his head as if he was disappointed but not surprised by this betrayal. "And why am I interested?" I thought I caught a flash of anxiety in his eyes.

  "I don't want money, I have money."

  "Yes. My money. I have paid you for one year to do nothing." Somehow he combined looking outraged at my ingratitude and relieved that I hadn't come with a begging bowl.

  "It was your choice that it came to nothing, Jean-Marie. You stopped the project."

  "The war stopped the project." He put on a mournful expression, no doubt practising for future political photo opportunities.

  "Whatever. In any case, I'm borrowing enough money to start up a tea room. What I don't have yet is premises. So I want to rent one of the places you bought. At a market rate, of course."

  "They are occupied by the shoe sellers." He finished the first cuff and turned his attention to the second.

  "The one I want is empty at the moment" (as he must have known). "I want a one-year lease with an option to buy the property after the year is up. Again, at a market rate."

  I could see the pocket calculator in Jean-Marie's brain doing the sums. The result sent a brief smile nickering across his mouth. He thought I was selling myself short.

  "You would pay me? Buy from me?" he asked jovially. This time there was no anxiety in his eyes. Quite the opposite. "After what has happened between us?" He finished with his cuffs and sat back in his armchair, enjoying the conversation now.

  "Yes, you bought the best premises for an English tea room, and this one's empty. It's a logical solution."

  "No one will know that I give my property for an English tea room?"

  "I won't tell anyone."

  "It would not be in your interest, no." He examined me closely for any signs of trickery, then shrugged. "If it is empty, maybe you could hire it."

  "OK, thank you."

  "I said maybe."

  "OK. Now the second favour."

  "Ah?"

  "I want the name."

  "The name?"

  "My Tea Is Rich. You were right, Jean-Marie. The French think it's a great name."

  Jean-Marie roared with laughter, so loudly that his wife popped her head around the door to make sure I wasn't inflicting some kind of tickling torture on him.

  "You want to buy this name you hate? My name?"

  "I know, I know," I said, trying to cut through the infuriating note of self-satisfaction in his voice. "For months I did nothing but antagonize the other team members by trying to oppose the name, but I was wrong, and now I'd like to use it."

  "What will you give me for it?"

  "Nothing."

  The last traces of laughter disappeared. "Out of the question."

  "Legally, I don't really need to pay anything. Bernard never got around to registering it."

  "What? No..."

  "Yes. I warned you about him. John Lennon really did have Bernard in mind when he wrote 'I Am the Walrus'."

  "Uh?"

  "Sorry, private joke."

  "Yes, your English humour." He laughed bitterly. "You know, I will never admit it -" he leaned forward conspiratorially as if his statue wasn't to be trusted with secrets "- but sometimes I wish we could do things the Anglo-Saxon way. Someone is no good, you fire him." He snapped his fingers. "It is so simple, so wonderful."

  I brought him out of his reverie. "You mean like you fired me?"

  He just grunted, as if I'd tried to tell an old joke.

  "Or, let's say, some French product is expensive, so you secretly buy a cheaper English equivalent?"

  He shot me a warning glance, reminding me telepathically that he had people working for him who were scary enough to silence a Portuguese concierge.

  "I only mention these things, now, in confidence," I added, "because I'd like to be sure that you will grant my favours. I need your agreement."

  Jean-Marie just sat staring at me, the king weighing up the pros and cons of either laughing at the jester or having his head cut off.

  "I need to be sure that you'll let me have the premises and that you won't oppose me when I register the name, and then I can finalize my deal with the bank."

  Jean-Marie didn't move a muscle for a full ten seconds, then suddenly put up his hands as if in defeat.

  "Do we agree then?" I asked. I held out a hand to shake on the deal.

  He lowered his arms and tentatively held out one of his large, brown hands, with its bullet-like gold stud at the cuff. I took the hand and squeezed. It was limp.

  "OK," I said, "I'll fax the details to your office tomorrow morning at nine, then send a courier over at eleven to pick up the signed rental agreement."

  Jean-Marie's grip on my hand tightened, and he pulled me closer. Were we going to seal the deal with a kiss, Marie-style?, I wondered.

  But he came just near enough for me to see the veins in his eyes and get a close-up of his hair, the way it was greased tightly back in dark, dyed strands, a lot like the hair on his sculpture. Not quite as clay-coloured, though. More oil-spill coloured.

  "Nous sommes quittes, alors?" he hissed. I caught a faint tang of alcohol on his breath.

  I pulled my face away. "I don't think France and Britain are ever really quits," I said. "But we usually manage to maintain cordial working relations."

  "Ho," he scoffed, still holding on to my hand.

  Sitting there on our matching thrones, physically connected, I suddenly felt as if we were part of a chain. The chain of French businesspeople and politicians who are constantly scratching each other's backs, as opposed to stabbing them, which would be counterproductive. Jean-Marie was going to win his election, and I had proof of his total hypocrisy but was going to keep quiet if he did me a favour or two. I suppose I'd entered into some kind of web of corruption. But it felt completely natural. It was just the way France works.

  "We're friendly enemies," I said. "It's the way things have been between the Brits and the French since Napoléon, isn't it?"

  "Since you burned Jeanne d'Arc, oui," he grunted.

  He let go of my hand. I got up.

  "Bonne soirée," I wished him. "Oh, and merde."

  I left him to get ready for his dinner.

  I wasn't being insulting, by the way. When saying good luck before any kind of challenge, like an exam, a theatre performance or (I supposed) an election, the French wish each other "merde".

  Merde happens, you see, and it can even bring you luck. As long as someone else treads in it.

  Who's Stephen Clarke?

  Here’s a biography S. Clarke wrote for the Brisbane Book Festival. It kind of sums things up.

  "I grew up in Bournemouth (the Bondi Beach of England), where I played bass in some of the worst rock bands in musical history before leaving town to study French and German at Oxford.

  After university, I got a series of high-powered jobs in the wine industry (grape pi
cking), tertiary sector (washing up in a German hotel), and in international diplomacy (teaching English to bored French businessmen).

  Meanwhile I started writing novels, all of which remained unpublished due to a vast – and never before revealed – conspiracy in the global publishing industry.

  I then moved to Glasgow, where I was hired to put rude words into French dictionaries - check out my work on "motherf*cker" in the Collins Robert dictionary. As soon as I heard about the possibility of a French 35-hour week, I moved to Paris and got a job as a journalist on an English-language magazine.

  I kept writing fiction, and, despite fierce opposition from my bank manager, finally decided to self-publish Beam Me Up, Who Killed Beano? and A Year in the Merde via my own (fictional) company, redgaragebooks.com.

  I began trying to sell A Year ... first, as I was living in Paris, and after three months of humping copies around the streets in a shopping trolley, I sold the book. Not only to bookshops, but also to a major publisher who promised me that they had their own delivery service so I would not have to do any more heavy lifting. Well, in fact it was my newly-found agent, Susanna Lea, who landed the major publisher. And since she was looking to the future while I was still focussing on my lower back, she also secured a deal to write more Paul West adventures.

  I have since written the sequel, Merde Actually, the sequel to the sequel, Merde Happens, the sequel to the etc etc, a spoof thriller called Dial M for Merde, as well as Talk to the Snail, my little book that tries to describe French society according to ten “commandments” like “thou shalt not love thy neighbour”, “thou shalt be wrong” and “thou shalt not get served”. My non-fiction tome 1000 Years of Annoying the French came out in March 2010, and was followed a year later by Paris Revealed. But I still play bass if there are any really bad rock bands out there."