The Merde Factor:

by Stephen Clarke

  Despite the comedy, Gwen kept enough of her Chamber of Commerce wits about her to inform me, as Jake drove us out of the pig farm, that all this fun was being had with minimal damage to the environment.

  ‘Only five microgram of nitrate per litre,’ she announced proudly.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘No merde in ze reever,’ she said. ‘So no merde in ze sea, and no toxic seaweed. Well, almost.’

  ‘Hey, let’s go for a swim,’ Jake piped up, inappropriately as ever. ‘There’s a nudist beach, n’est-ce pas?’ he asked Gwen. ‘Une plage nudiste?’

  She rather nervously admitted that there was, and I had to agree that a swim sounded a great idea. I told her we’d drop her off at her office first, and she accepted with a heart-warming show of gratitude.

  So, after thanking Gwen for her help, promising to read the reams of literature she’d printed off from websites I could have consulted myself, and begging her to keep a protective eye on Gérard the dipso director, I let Jake swerve me through the salt marshes. And despite four or five attempts to nose-dive the car into a pond, he soon had us zipping along a fragrant-smelling coast road, behind a dune crested with rustling pine trees.

  ‘Every time when I go to the ocean, I visit the nudist beaches,’ he told me.

  ‘Why do I find that so easy to believe?’ I answered.

  He was a little disappointed by this Breton beach, though, because it was almost empty of nudes. In the space of a couple of hundred metres there were only three or four stripy canvas windbreaks up, with pairs of bronzed legs protruding from behind them, and a male couple were splashing each other playfully in the waves. Personally I was delighted. It was the long, white curve of sand that we’d seen from Gérard’s window, and looked even better close up than it had from a distance.

  ‘Allez!’ Jake said, throwing his jacket on to the sand and tugging at his belt.

  Now, I was literally sleeping in his bed at the time, but we’d never seen each other naked. So I hesitated. I don’t know if girls have the same problem, but for best mates to strip off together outside the hearty male atmosphere of the sports changing room is always awkward.

  Jake, though, obviously had no reservations about getting his clothes off under any circumstances. Within seconds, he was already down to his socks.

  And, despite my doubts, I followed suit. The combination of sun, crashing surf and the need to forget that Gérard, the incapacitated director of the non-existent artists’ residence, might be getting sozzled yet again as he looked out of his window towards us, had me ripping off my clothes and sprinting for the sea. The shock of the cold water stung me all over, and no doubt had a certain area of my body shrinking like a sausage machine filmed in reverse. Though even this shrinkage didn’t protect me as I bodysurfed in on one of the waves and skidded to a halt in the shallows, giving myself a sand-burn that was going to have Marsha asking some probing questions about what I’d been up to in Brittany.

  Ah yes, Marsha. I had to call her, and soon. During the goat farm and sausage factory visits, she’d kept trying to phone me. Her first voicemail asked whether I was definitely going to be a judge in her competition, so I quickly texted back that of course I was. She replied almost immediately, asking whether I was 100 per cent sure, because she’d be ‘up merde creek’ otherwise. Again, I answered yes. But she’d called three or four times more, and I hadn’t answered. I was beginning to suspect that she might be one of those people who have to share all their organisational worries with you. The slightest thing goes wrong and they bombard you with angst. And meanwhile, I had a few of my own things to organise.

  Now, though, the thrill of the clear, cool ocean on my skin was flushing all the angst out of my system. As I crouched down and let the waves crash into my face, I even began to think that I should adopt a stance of total denial as far as Marie-Dominique and the Ministry were concerned. Problèmes? Quels problèmes? If I gave a full and frank account of the trip to Brittany, my contract might be out of the window as fast as Gérard’s empty glass. Perhaps I should just ride it all out and keep quiet? After all, I didn’t care if there was an artists’ residence or not. My job was to submit a report about potential food sourcing. I didn’t care if it was ever actually sourced. The wisest course of action was a discreet cover-up.

  Which, as it happened, was exactly what I wished Jake would do. He was out beyond the breakers, swimming on his back, having perfected a stroke that lifted his pelvis, and all its attachments, out of the water every time he kicked his legs. Lucky for him, I thought, that Gwen’s man-eating parrots were no more than a translation mistake.

  I hated to spoil his fun, but it was time to cover ourselves up again and get back to the city.

  VI

  On the train back to Paris, I typed up my notes and cobbled together a cut-and-paste catalogue of the food producers I’d visited. All it needed was a little padding out with more suppliers from the internet, a few sample locavore menus, a linguistic going-over by a native French speaker, and I’d be able to send in my report and claim my prize money.

  I called Marie-Dominique and told her I’d like to arrange a meeting in the next couple of days. OK, she said, set one up with my secretary. Which would have been fine if the secretary ever deigned to answer her phone. So I had to content myself with leaving voicemails telling her ‘c’est très urgent’.

  My day was rounded off with a reassuringly normal reunion with Marsha that evening. Well, as near to normal as she could manage.

  She said we should meet at La Pagode, a Chinese building in the middle of the posh, and ultra-French, 7th arrondissement. It was, she told me, more than a hundred years old, and had originally been built as a gift for the wife of a Paris department-store owner. But the lady obviously wasn’t a fan of all things oriental because she ran away with her husband’s business partner, and soon after that the pagoda was sold off and turned into one of Paris’s first cinemas.

  When I arrived there, I got a bit of a shock. There aren’t many buildings in central Paris with an impenetrable bamboo plantation in the courtyard or bright red wooden monkeys grinning down at you from the rafters. It all boded very well for our night out, I thought. I was just in the mood for a comedy kung fu movie.

  Sadly, though, as soon as Marsha arrived, she dispelled my illusions. There was nothing Chinese about the films being shown here – there was an art movie festival on. So I had to sit through a French epic in which, as far as I could tell, two sophisticated French couples couldn’t decide which combination to shag each other in: husband-wife, husband-wife-mistress, husband-wife-other husband, husband-mistress-other husband, two wives, two husbands, or all together. Which wouldn’t have bothered me too much if the characters hadn’t blathered on for hours about their needs and desires and what to have for dinner.

  Even so, once we were free of the cinema, I was all for getting a bite to eat, but first Marsha wanted to show me how things were progressing at her new shop, so we cabbed across town to the Marais. As we drove, she told me how she had badgered and charmed workmen into putting up shelves in all the right places. She’d batted her eyelashes at the telecom people to get an internet account open, and she’d hooked up some kind of e-book download station so customers who were allergic to paper could get their books in digital format. She’d even snapped up the stock of a more traditional bookshop that was closing down. More amazingly yet, she’d also found time to create a buzz about the poetry competition.

  ‘Fufty intrants all-riddy!’ she gushed, her accent veering out of control with the excitement.

  We were now standing in her upstairs events space, a long, wooden-beamed room with a podium by the window, and several stacks of folding chairs leaning against one wall.

  ‘But I’m worried about Amandine,’ she told me. ‘She’s been saying she wants out.’

  ‘Why? She was totally up for it when she talked to me.’

  ‘It’s her boyfriend. He’s a possessive prick by the sound
of it. Doesn’t want her on stage in the limelight. He’s been trying to get her to give up her job with your old lech of a boss, too. Sounds like a cliché on legs.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, distractedly. I was still stuck on ‘boyfriend’. I hadn’t imagined Amandine with a bloke, even though she was more than beautiful enough to have all of Paris chasing after her, and not just her sex-mad boss. ‘Jean-Marie is a health risk,’ I said. ‘But she seems to be handling him very well. She’s not going to drop out of the jury, is she?’

  ‘No, I talked her round,’ Marsha said. ‘But we’re going to have to put a curtain up at the front of the table so her boyfriend doesn’t think anyone’s staring up her skirt. Honestly, the French say they’re against the veil, but give them a public vote and half of the guys would say yes to long skirts and baggy blouses for their own wives and girlfriends. You’re not like that, are you, Paul?’

  I didn’t need to be a genius to work out the correct answer to that one, so I kissed her and said that, on the contrary, right now I was thinking how nice it would be if she was even less hidden by clothing.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ she said, grabbing my shirt and pulling me towards her. ‘I was wondering,’ she went on as she undid the buttons, ‘has none of your other girlfriends ever asked you to wax?’

  ‘Wax what, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Just your chest, silly,’ she said.

  ‘No, no one’s ever mentioned it, and no one is going to be pouring hot wax anywhere near my nipples if I can help it.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed in my former girlfriends’ lack of firmness on the issue of chest hair. ‘Hey, that reminds me. I saw that ex of yours yesterday, here outside the shop again.’

  ‘What? Alexa?’

  ‘The one who was here the other day. The photographer. Bitch was taking photos of the poster in the window.’

  ‘What poster?’ I asked, deciding that it was not the time to argue about whether Alexa was a bitch or not.

  ‘The one advertising the poetry competition. I was indoors with the workmen. I noticed someone getting a shot of the shopfront, and thought, great, I’ll go and ask what it’s for. But when she saw me coming, she buggered off. She was halfway to the rue de Bretagne by the time I got out into the street. What’s she doing hanging around here? And what’s she got to be so furtive about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was all completely baffling.

  ‘Yeah, well, can you call and tell her to lay off?’

  ‘Well …’ I hadn’t talked to Alexa since we split up.

  ‘Unless you still feel some loyalty to her, of course?’ There was an edge to Marsha’s voice.

  ‘No, I don’t feel any loyalty to her at all,’ I said, wondering how true that was. ‘I’ll call her and ask what she’s up to.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Marsha showed her gratitude by resuming the undoing of my shirt buttons. ‘Bet she never asked you to wax, did she?’ she asked. ‘Too much of a hippie, by the look of her. Tell her I’ll wax her if she comes back here again.’ Which was not something I wanted to see, mainly because it reminded me too much of the film we’d just watched at La Pagode.

  Any remaining eroticism in the air went out of the window a few seconds later when my phone began buzzing in my pocket.

  ‘You’re going to answer it? Now?’ Marsha said.

  ‘Sorry, but it might be Marie-Dominique’s secretary.’

  ‘Is she that much of a hottie?’

  ‘It’s Amandine,’ I said, looking at the screen.

  ‘Oh, another hottie.’ Marsha turned away in protest.

  ‘Paul? Are you anywhere near the Champs-Élysées?’ Amandine asked. It sounded urgent.

  ‘No, I’m with Marsha, at her shop,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Yes, but I wanted to tell you in person, not on the phone.’

  ‘Can it wait till tomorrow?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Amandine said. There was a short silence, and then she began speaking softly and quickly. ‘I heard Jean-Marie talking to a low-yah.’ Like many French people, she couldn’t pronounce lawyer. ‘He was discussing whether he could force you to sell your share of the tea room. Non-respect of contract, inability to pay expenses, things like that. He wants to take over so that he can install his diner. And he told the low-yah he needs a result inside a week. I am in favour of the idea of a diner, but this isn’t fair. You’ve got to do something, Paul.’

  ‘I hope it was very urgent,’ Marsha said when I rang off.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very. I’m in the merde.’

  And for once it sounded like an understatement.

  Six

  ‘Ceux qu’on aime, on ne les juge pas.’

  You don’t judge the people you love.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously tried to love as many of his students as possible

  I

  YOU’D THINK THAT French lawyers would be cheap. The law they practise is all based on Napoleon’s 200-year-old code civil. Obviously it’s been updated a little bit to include recent innovations like the internet and equality for women, but basically it’s unchanged since l’Empereur sat down and decided how he wanted France to be managed. So surely, I thought, all a French lawyer needs to do is look up the relevant clause in the index? That must be cheaper than British law, which gets rewritten every time some loony magistrate delivers a judgment.

  Yet French lawyers seemed to be just as keen on making money as their British counterparts. When I called the guy who had helped me with the legalities of starting up the tea room, I could almost hear the timer ticking in the brisk tone of his voice.

  He was only a little older than me, and we’d been on friendly terms, but it had been a good year or more since I’d spoken to him, and in the interim his career had obviously moved into higher financial echelons.

  ‘I can look again at your contract,’ he said in the transatlantic accent he’d picked up doing a year at some absurdly expensive American university.

  ‘How much will it cost me?’ I didn’t feel I had the time to ask in a politer, roundabout way.

  ‘I will give it an hour or two,’ he said, and then told me his current hourly rate, which made me catch my breath and wish he could deal with my problem in, say, three minutes.

  ‘But do you think Jean-Marie can do this to me?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t say without looking at the contract. Do you know the name of his lawyer? I could talk to him.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said quickly. I could just imagine the two of them comparing notes, the clock between them, like two chess players in reverse, gleeful that the minutes were mounting up.

  ‘I’m sure we can find a way to block him,’ my lawyer said dubiously. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll call you in a couple of days.’

  I hung up, unsure whether this had been a reassuring conversation or not. It was a bit like a woman at an airline counter telling you not to worry because she was sure she’d be able to get you on another flight home. If the worst came to the worst, she’d sell you a seat in first class. My problem wasn’t so much could I stop Jean-Marie shafting me? It was more a question of could I afford to stop him?

  II

  Next up, problem number two on my long list.

  ‘Bonjour, vous êtes bien sur le répondeur d’Alexa. Hi, this is Alexa’s answerphone.’

  It was spooky hearing her voice again after so long – a year or more. It was the same voicemail message, too. Hadn’t she moved on in life?

  I hung up. I had so much to say that I was bound to break the sixty-second barrier. I always find that any voicemail more than a minute long starts to feel weird.

  I was sitting in Jake’s garret, and the morning sun was heating the zinc roof about three centimetres above my head so that it felt as if I was in a space shuttle burning its way back into Earth’s atmosphere. I moved the sofa bed closer to the open window, and stuck my feet out into the fresh air.

  Keeping one eye out for any pigeons that might decide t
o use my toes as a perch, I looked Alexa up online, and found that she’d been very busy since we split up. She’d held several photo exhibitions, won a magazine’s travel picture prize, got herself a fancy new website (which included, I was flattered to see, a few of her old portraits of me), and popped up as a credit in several books. Things were going well, and I was genuinely pleased for her.

  I clicked on the contact link at her website and wrote her an email. After the usual ‘long time no see’ and ‘how are things?’ pleasantries, I asked her why she’d been taking photos of the tea room and ‘the new English bookshop in the Marais’. Was there something I should know about?

  To my surprise, she answered immediately, with a text message.

  ‘Yes, but it would take a long time.’

  I wondered if this was an invitation to phone her, but decided to stick to texting for the minute.

  ‘Best not to hang around the bookshop again,’ I told her. ‘Owner’s not happy.’

  ‘Pity,’ she replied. ‘I was thinking of going to the poetry contest.’

  I knew I had to talk her out of this.

  ‘We definitely need to talk. Can I phone in five minutes?’ I asked. I could go down into the street, or find a peaceful spot on the staircase where she wouldn’t hear any stray enculés.

  She didn’t reply. Which presumably meant no.

  I was just swearing to myself when Jake walked in.

  ‘Bonjour, man,’ he said, plonking himself down on the sofa bed beside me and staring at my computer screen. ‘Hey, is that Alexa? I brought letters. Have you got a poon-aze?’

  In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never quite got used to Jake’s surreal mind, so I answered the only bit I understood.

  ‘Yes, it’s her website,’ I said.

  ‘Cool, but you’re not bezzing her any more, right?’

  Baiser meant screwing. I didn’t bother to reply. Instead I asked what he’d meant by ‘letters’.

  ‘Ah yeah, I opened the boîte downstairs.’ He handed over two envelopes. ‘You got a poon-aze?’