The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

‘Didn’t they tell you where to pick up the car when you reserved?’ I asked Jake.

  ‘Yes. No. Well, yes,’ he replied worryingly. I’d got him to hire the car because the rental people wouldn’t let me book in his name using my credit card. That was absurd, I argued. After all, at worst, I was just being stupidly generous. But they replied that it was policy – the name on the driving licence had to be the same as the one on the credit card. I tried to ask whether there was a gang of perverted criminals that went around paying for people’s car hire against their will, and forcing their generosity on unwilling renters, but my French let me down and the irony fell flat on its face. Anyway, the upshot was that Jake had hired the car.

  ‘I believed we would get it at the station,’ he said, ‘but maybe that was an erreur.’

  Maybe wasn’t the word.

  Luckily, all the weekenders were either getting picked up by family or walking to their seaside second homes, so we hopped unchallenged into the lone taxi waiting outside the station.

  The driver asked us if we’d had a bon voyage, and where we’d be staying, and Jake began to interrogate him about the most common nationalities of female tourists visiting this part of France, while I sat back to enjoy the start of my first mission for the Ministère. With a few phone calls, I’d set up a tasting tour of local food producers and a meeting with a local Chamber of Commerce lady – what could possibly go wrong?

  We drove for ten minutes or so through silent tree-lined streets of nineteenth-century houses, and then into a typical French edge-of-town zone with a furniture warehouse, car showroom, two chain restaurants and a DIY-garden store, the kind of place that blights even the cutest French seaside resort or historic town. The car-hire office was out here, and open, so I hung on to some of my store of optimism, even when the taxi driver jammed a receipt into my hand and accelerated away with an unnecessary squeal of his tyres. He was obviously still in shock at Jake’s over-detailed answer to the question ‘what do you do in Paris?’

  ‘Just because this is France, it doesn’t mean you can talk non-stop about sex,’ I told him.

  ‘The provinciaux are so coincés,’ Jake moaned, meaning hung-up.

  ‘No, the problem is that these conversations of yours aren’t consensual. You rape their ears.’

  ‘Hey, good one, man. Can I use that line?’ He began digging around for his notebook.

  ‘Be my guest,’ I told him. ‘But please don’t credit me for it. Now maybe we should get our car?’

  ‘Uh?’ Jake looked up from his notebook and seemed to notice for the first time that we were standing beneath a huge sign saying ‘Location de voitures’.

  Inside a prefabricated hut, the car-hire guy was like car-hire guys the world over: white shirt, tie decorated with company logo and coffee stains, and the expression of someone who can’t wait to go home. But he smiled, wished us bonsoir and asked for a reservation number.

  For a moment, Jake paled. He began tapping an empty back pocket in his crumpled jeans, and I feared the worst. But then he tried another pocket, smiled, and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  ‘Voilà,’ he announced, just as my phone began ringing. I wouldn’t have taken the call, but it was Marie-Dominique, no doubt checking that I’d managed to find Brittany. Not wanting to deafen the car-hire guy or shatter his windows, I went outside to take her call. It was beginning to drizzle.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ she yelled, and I held the phone at arm’s length.

  ‘Bonsoir, je suis en Bretagne,’ I shouted back, and a loud gust of rain confirmed the fact.

  ‘Très bien,’ she bellowed, and went on to broadcast to the whole of western France that she had set up a meeting the following morning with the director of the artists’ residence.

  ‘Excellent, so there is no problem with the unions?’

  ‘Pah,’ she roared. ‘Have you got a pen and paper? I will give you the director’s mobile number.’

  ‘Can’t you text it to me?’ I pleaded. The rain was picking up, and I was keen to get back indoors, not least because Jake seemed to be having some kind of disagreement with the car-hire man.

  ‘No, you write it down,’ Marie-Dominique ordered, and I had to rummage around in my jacket pockets for a pen and the printout of my train e-ticket. As I did so, I saw Jake performing a worrying French gesture: both arms held out, elbows bent and palms held upward as if to catch two coconuts. I’d seen it before, and it usually meant ‘what the hell do you expect me to do?’ Not a good sign.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I told Marie-Dominique. Luckily she was speaking so loudly that I could put my phone on the ground and use both hands to write.

  She dictated the number, and as I read it back I was relieved to see Jake give me a double thumbs-up and follow the car-hire guy through a doorway at the back of the office.

  I went indoors to finish talking to Marie-Dominique in the dry. The clouds had turned from evening grey to stormy gunmetal, and the rain was now bulleting down.

  As I put away my phone, I heard an engine growl to life somewhere outdoors. Bloody hell, I thought, he’s got us an upgrade to a sports car.

  There was a crunch of tyres on gravel, and the engine sound began to move down the side of the prefab towards the front forecourt.

  ‘It’s all I had left,’ a voice behind me said. It was the car-hire guy, coming back into the hut through the other door. ‘It’s a bit more expensive, too,’ he added.

  I opened the front door expectantly, heard a racing gear change, and saw Jake swing into view, struggling to control the large, powerful engine and wide tyres of a Ferrari-yellow … dumper.

  A dumper. Yes, a skip on wheels, the kind of vehicle that builders use to transport mounds of earth or broken bricks, a chugging, windowless, roofless, industrial tractor. A one-seater, too. Jake was perched on a sort of saddle, the lone rider of a vehicle built for one.

  ‘What the fuck?’ My question was in English, but the car-hire guy understood it and gave a shoulder-raising shrug of indifference and helplessness. This was my merde, not his.

  ‘It’s all I had left,’ he repeated.

  ‘But we hired a car,’ I protested, in French.

  ‘Not chez nous,’ he said, shrugging again.

  Jake juddered to a halt in front of the open door and called to me to throw the bags into the skip.

  I turned to the car-hire guy.

  ‘Monsieur had reserved with our competitors, not us,’ he said. ‘I called them for you, but their office is closed now. All I can give you for tonight is this brouette.’

  ‘Allez, Paul, it’s raining. Let’s get to the hotel,’ came a wet plea from outside. ‘You have remembered to reserve a hotel, n’est-ce pas?’

  There were, of course, several courses of action open to me. I could, for example, have asked the car-hire guy to phone the taxi driver and apologise on my behalf for the obscenities he’d had to put up with during our previous trip. Or simply get us any other taxi in town. I could also have begged for a lift from the car-hire guy. More satisfyingly, I could have asked to borrow a piece of car-maintenance equipment and used it on Jake’s skull.

  Instead, I grabbed our bags, threw them into the skip, and climbed in after them. I think I even waved goodbye to the car-hire guy as Jake rattled us away towards the street. The rain lashing in my face, the puddle forming in the bottom of the skip and slowly drenching my backside, the spine-wrenching jolts as the little suspension-free dumper bounced into town: they were all punishments that I fully deserved for entrusting my fate to Jake. Here was a guy who couldn’t even put together a pair of matching shoes, and I’d let him hire a car.

  ‘Follow the signs to the harbour,’ I shouted over the farting engine and the howling gale. ‘It’s the Hôtel du Port. But you can just dump me in the water. I’ll sleep with the fishes tonight.’

  II

  It was breakfast time at the hotel. At least I’d got that right. We were sitting in a sunlit room, feasting on a petit déjeuner of strong black coffee, six-inch lengt
hs of crusty baguette and unlimited little foil packs of unsalted Breton butter. My only gripe would have been that there were no miniature tubs of orange marmalade in the jam basket. Don’t the French understand the need for something tangier in the morning than bland apricot or strawberry?

  Actually, that wasn’t my only gripe – I was also pretty unhappy with Jake’s conversation.

  ‘I vote we keep it, man, it’s fun.’

  ‘No, Jake, we’re getting something with at least two seats.’ I rubbed my back as I remembered the crunching sound my coccyx had made every time it was slammed against the bare, rusty metal of the skip on the way to the hotel. Against all expectations, my body had actually come in contact with something less comfortable than Jake’s sofa bed.

  ‘But it’s amusant. It’s got a flashing light, and an alarm. You can make it go beep beep beep beep.’

  A dream – or was it a dream? – flashed into my mind.

  ‘Didn’t I hear it beeping in the night?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, it was moi. I took it for a promenade.’

  ‘You went out driving in the middle of the night?’ My screech of disbelief caused the other guests – all of them middle-aged French couples here for a weekend of screech-free fresh air, no doubt – to stop in mid-gulp and stare at our table.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jake said. ‘It stopped to rain, so I sortied for a moment. I hoped that maybe I could pick up a girl. It’s an original line: Bonsoir, you want to ride in my brouette?’

  Despite myself, I had to laugh.

  ‘But I thought you had the hots for Mitzi?’ I asked.

  ‘Oui, but so far, she isn’t hot for me. So, you know, I decided to try …’

  ‘And did it work?’

  ‘No. I only saw one person, an old lady who was taking her dog to shit in the jardin public. So I experimented with the lights and the beeper. It’s très amusant, this brouette.’

  ‘Well, we’re taking it back. Or rather, you’re taking it back, while I phone to try and get us the car you actually hired.’

  ‘It’s a dommage, though. I bet no one has ever wroten a poem about having sex in a brouette.’

  ‘No, and I know why,’ I said, feeling my spine twinge in sympathy.

  An hour later we were cruising along the Breton lanes in a growling Peugeot. Admittedly it was only growling because it had a knackered engine, but to me, the ride couldn’t have felt smoother. I wound down my window (no electric luxuries in this old model) and stuck my nose out to enjoy the wafting perfumes of sun-warmed pine needles and breeze-borne salt.

  Driving along the dramatically named ‘savage coast’, we passed granite cottages where generations of fishermen must have arrived home at dawn carrying freshly caught mackerel for breakfast. Now many of the houses were shuttered up, waiting for their new urban owners to arrive with their packets of smoked Norwegian salmon. All along the winding clifftop road, patios and gardens surrounding white, tile-roofed houses spoke of loungers and barbecues that would soon be pulled out of the garage for the summer to come.

  We crossed the headland and hit the salt marshes, some of them flooded, some of them dry. In the pools, long-legged water birds stuck their backsides in the air as they prodded for food. The drained areas were dotted with piles of salt that looked like the stashes of reckless cocaine dealers.

  The only problem with the place was that it looked so good I wished I’d come here with Marsha rather than a hairy poet. Which in turn reminded me of the last time I’d been in Brittany – with Alexa. A disastrous trip. We’d ended up having a huge row about, if I remembered rightly, the ethics of fish farming. The things French intellectual women find to argue with their boyfriends about …

  But I had no time for distractions from the past, least of all from Alexa. Jake and I were on our way to meet the lady from the Chamber of Commerce, who was to fill me in on the kinds of local produce I could buy for the artists’ residence. She had a very Breton name – something like Gwendolen Kergueneguenec. I’d forgotten to print it out, so as Jake drove, or rather meandered across the whole of the available road surface while mumbling to himself, I hunted my phone for the email she’d sent me. This wasn’t easy, because ever since arriving in Brittany I’d been getting about one message per minute sending me maps, restaurant phone numbers and weather reports, and offering me extra holiday minutes so I could call my friends and say what a great time I was having trying to use my phone while being interrupted every few seconds.

  Before I’d had time to find the relevant email, Jake suddenly slammed on the brakes to avoid sending a woman flying over the sea wall and on to the deck of a fishing boat moored below. She’d been standing opposite the café where we were due to meet, hugging a plastic folder to her chest. She was about forty, with short, straight hair that seemed to have been styled by two warring hairdressers: one wanted her to be bright auburn, while the other was determined to turn her into a blonde, so that her head now looked as though it belonged to an albino tiger.

  Apart from the unconventional hairdo, she was very formally turned out, in a long blue linen jacket and matching trousers, and was apparently delighted about this visit from the Parisian Englishman, despite Jake’s attempt to run her over. She was smiling broadly as I got out to say hello. Jake stayed in his driver’s seat and began scribbling in his notebook. That explained the mumbling – he was in writing mode again.

  ‘Bonjour, Paul West,’ I introduced myself.

  ‘Bonjour, Guenkerguenerguekerec,’ she said, or something like that. ‘Guelkerm.’ Great, I thought, she has a pet name that will be much easier to pronounce.

  If only.

  ‘Guelkerm to Bretagne,’ she went on. ‘You ’ave bin ear biff ore?’

  It’s always a tricky situation. You can’t tell someone, ‘Sorry, your English is too comic for us to have a serious conversation, why don’t we speak French?’, because when a French person comes straight out with English, it means they’re longing for a chance to speak it. Denying them their pleasure would be as cruel as spitting on a slice of far breton.

  Anyway, my French is a joke at the best of times, so I soldiered on with Gwen’s English.

  ‘This is my second time here,’ I told her, as slowly as if the realisation was just dawning on me. ‘It’s very beautiful.’ And it was – a traditional Breton waterfront overlooking a glittering bay that tapered out into a horizon of rich green woodland.

  ‘Lovely weather, too,’ I said, looking up at the clear sky.

  ‘Yes, in zis bay we ’ave ze – ’ow you say? – meek rock lemur.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. A timid local mammal, it seemed.

  ‘A Mick Rock lay mate?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Macro climb eight?’

  ‘Ah, a microclimate.’ I nodded. Every French person I’d ever met had told me that their area was just that little bit warmer and drier than anywhere else around.

  ‘’Ere is never snow,’ she added.

  ‘No.’ Probably rains too much for that, I thought, although it was a gloriously refreshing spring day. No doubt just as gloriously refreshing as everywhere else along this coast, but who cared?

  ‘You know about zis Ray John?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Zis Ray John? Zis aria.’

  ‘Oh, the region. No, not much,’ I confessed.

  ‘Aaah.’ She smiled and raised her eyebrows, as if I was missing out on some major secrets. She pointed towards an island at the mouth of the bay, where gulls were circling above the frothing surf.

  ‘Long time ago,’ she said, touching my arm as if to prepare me for a shock, ‘on zis isle were living parrots.’

  ‘Parrots? Attracted here by the microclimate?’

  ‘Yes, many of zem.’

  ‘Very exotic.’

  ‘No, very dangerous. Zey kill some fishers.’

  ‘They killed fishermen? Surely not.’

  ‘Yes, yes, zey kill zem.’ She touched my arm again to press home her point. ‘An
d’, she continued, ‘zey were English.’

  ‘Man-hunting English parrots? Sorry, but … Oh, I see.’ The penny, or rather the doubloon, had finally dropped. ‘You mean pirates?’

  ‘Yes, English parrots, zey make camping on ze beach, and when zey want food, or drink or sex, zey come to ze village. Some of the people ’ere, zey descend from parrots.’

  ‘And do you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, my family come from ze interior. We are far mares.’

  ‘Farmers?’

  ‘Yes.’ She tapped the plastic file that she was still hugging in one arm. ‘You want to ’ave coffee, talk about ze far mares in zis Ray John?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  ‘’E come, your, er …?’ Gwen gazed into the car at Jake, and I understood why she was having trouble defining him. He was talking to himself while apparently trying to roll his long hair into cigarettes.

  ‘My friend will join us if he wants a coffee,’ I said, gesturing to Jake where we were going.

  Inside, there were no crusty fishermen rinsing the salt out of their gullets, just a few French tourists enjoying a coffee. Even so, the café was fully equipped to set sail for the open sea. Its walls were decorated with enough lifebelts for a crew of twenty, there was a collection of oars hanging above the bar, and the ceiling was covered in an immense piece of sail canvas. Add to this the brass compass that was mounted in an alcove and the framed charts everywhere, and the place had everything it needed to navigate its way across the Atlantic.

  Even so, the staff obviously planned on staying at least until lunchtime, because someone had written some tasty-sounding dishes up on the blackboard outside, most of them involving creatures that had very recently been swimming just offshore: bar de ligne (line-caught sea bass), sardines entières grillées (whole grilled sardines), tourteau mayonnaise (boiled crab salad) and brochettes de Saint-Jacques (scallop skewers). Every time I saw this kind of menu, it brought home to me how close to nature the French still live, even if they are doing their best to cram it all in their mouths.

  Which, of course, was why I was there.

  We sat at a table not yet laid for lunch, ordered a couple of crèmes, and Gwen opened her folder.