Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  "And if I turn the wrong way," she went on, "you will be angry and say it is my fault you are late, when it will be fundamentally your fault. And so I think that you must assume."

  "Assume?"

  "Yes, how do you say it? Accept your responsibilities. This is what feminism is about, Paul. Equal rights and respect for women, but also equal responsibilities for men. You must assume. In this case, you must assume more of the driving."

  "Oh, come on, Alexa, we're in this together, aren't we?"

  "It's your job, Paul, you're the one getting paid. Perhaps you should have come with a professional driver."

  A professional driver? I thought about this, and realized that my American journey was teaching me a hell of a lot about life. Before that conversation, I'd never imagined that there really would be occasions when you wished your girlfriend was a trucker.

  "But if I drive all night, I might kill us both," I said.

  "Well, it won't hurt me. I'll be asleep. Goodnight."

  Miami

  Go Ahead, Merde My Day

  1

  THE FIRST RAYS OF MORNING sunlight were hitting the hugest Stars and Stripes I'd seen on the trip so far, and that was saying something. This one was big enough to be the bedspread for a pair of humpback whales.

  The flag was hanging from a taut cable that stretched the length of a car sales lot. Each star was at least a foot tall, and the stripes had been elongated to give a kind of red-and-white-toothpaste effect.

  The car lot covered a whole block that ended in a set of traffic lights. As I stopped for the red, I squinted up at the glowing stars on the gigantic American flag, and even this cynical Brit was filled with a sudden desire to spread the message of democracy across the unfree world. Or at the very least buy a Chevrolet. Too bad that the cars lined up beneath the flag were all Korean.

  It was something that I hadn't yet got my head around. Americans are so patriotic when you talk to them, but offer them a Korean car that's a few dollars cheaper than an American one and they don't hesitate for an instant.

  We were in the low-rise outer suburbs of Palm Beach. I'd turned off the main highway a couple of hours earlier to avoid falling asleep in the sense-deadening twilight. This road running down the east coast of Florida seemed to have been conceived in an attempt to get into The Guinness Book of Records for having the world's longest series of traffic lights, but at least the constant stopping and starting gave me something to do.

  The lights also gave me a crick in my neck that was turning into a full-blown muscular spasm. The Mini was designed by Europeans for our low-hanging, street-level traffic lights. In the USA, home of the overhead light, the car needed to be fitted with a periscope.

  "It's green," a half-awake voice mumbled beside me. Parisians are genetically programmed to sense the microsecond the light turns green, even when they're asleep.

  "Bonjour" I said. "I was going to wait till the car in front pulled away before I accelerated, but thanks for letting me know."

  Alexa was too groggy to react to anti-Parisian irony

  "Maybe you can find a place for breakfast?" she said.

  The Stars and Stripes seemed to have had an effect on her, too. Subliminal appetite enhancement.

  "Can't you hold on till we get to Miami?" I asked. "It's only an hour or so away."

  "But your rendezvous is not before eleven. It's very early, no?"

  "True." I quite fancied a cup of coffee or five myself. I found that I needed three bladderfuls of the typical American brew to get the same hit as a double espresso.

  A mile further on, we found a mall that was decorated with the usual batch of lollipop-like signs for drive-through everything—pharmacies, doughnuts, banks. Soon there would be a drive-through plastic surgeon here. Sit back in your seat while we pump in the silicone and suck out the fat. You don't even need to undo your seatbelt.

  Though in reality this was a fairly downmarket mall. Not the kind of place for a plastic surgeon. Between a discount shoe shop and a shuttered drugstore there was a small window with signs telling people that they could pop in, cash checks, and "avoid foreclosure, keep your home." Not everyone in South Florida spent their days golfing, fishing, and getting boob jobs, it seemed.

  The parking lot was pretty empty, but like the American driver I'd become, I wanted to reduce wear and tear on my legs to a minimum. I also thought it wise to keep my eyes on our luggage while we were away from the car, sq I drove along the front line looking for a spot right outside the shops. The first available space was beside a gigantic black SUV—a dusty, flat-backed SUV with wheels almost as tall as the Mini. Standing together, the two vehicles looked as though a toddler and a basketball player were comparing shoe sizes.

  We got out, stretched, and took off lots of clothes. It felt like an English midsummer dawn. As Alexa pulled off her sweatshirt, she was staring up at the giant truck.

  "Huh, the driver of that monster must stop at every single gas station on the road," she said.

  "You can ask him how many miles to the gallon he gets if you want." I nodded as discreedy as possible at a couple who were staggering straight toward us.

  They were tangle haired, ghost white, and wore jeans and sleeveless T-shirts that hung off their bony frames. Their arms were graffitied with smudgy black writing, and the man had a clumsily inked spiderweb pattern on his neck that made him look as if he'd been squirted while trying to kiss a terrified octopus.

  "Hey, wotchoo doon tar fuggen truck?" the woman shouted. She obviously couldn't see the Mini beyond her skyscraper of a vehicle.

  The man lifted his sunburned skeleton face toward Alexa and me, but didn't react.

  "They tranna steal are fuggen truck!" the woman yelled at him. She had what sounded to me like a Deep South accent, though this was no Scarlett O'Hara. Unless Scarlett had spent the last century or so on a diet of booze and smoking materials.

  "No, no, we're just parking our car." I gave her my posh-est English accent. In my experience, no American would believe that a member of the royal family could be a car thief.

  "Oh yeah?" From the aggression in her voice, I guessed she wasn't a royalist. "Well yalkan gitcher fuggen hands offenar fuggen truck thin."

  They were now within kicking distance of us, and close up they didn't look too appetizing. Dental hygiene had not been one of their priorities in life. And the whites of most people's eyes usually have some white left in them, rather than this scarlet and yellow marbling effect.

  "Putain, elle est folle" Alexa whispered, telling me in French that, fuck, the woman was nuts. Not that I needed to be told.

  "Waddat bitch jess sayda me?" the woman spat.

  I moved out from behind the Mini and, rather gallantly I thought, put myself between Alexa and her conversation partner.

  "We're just stopping for a cup of coffee, folks," I assured them. "We've been driving all night."

  "Waddat fuggen bitch jess sayda me?" The woman did not want to change the subject just yet. The man dumped a flatpack of beer in the back of their truck and came to put a comforting arm on his partner's bony shoulder.

  "C'mon babe," he cooed. " 'Sokay. She's Canadian."

  He had obviously perfected his technique for calming his wife or girlfriend over many years of confrontations. The woman's tense body relaxed almost immediately. She glowered one last time at Alexa, called her a "fuggen bitch" again, then appeared to forget her completely. They climbed up into their truck and it rattled away with a farewell belch of gray smoke.

  Alexa stood and watched them with openmouthed shock. Not because of the woman's aggression. It was the first time anyone had ever accused her of being a Quebecois, and it hurt.

  2

  Alexa was probably the first person to read the whole diner menu since the guy who wrote it. Even the printer would have glossed over most of it, but Alexa was browsing through the entire selection of goodies on offer.

  "Low-fat omelette," she read out. "Only three eggs with low-fat cheese and sour cream.
Only three eggs? With only French fries? And only a chocolate milkshake? Oh, and there is a scary kids' breakfast. Junior French toast, with eggs, fries, and blueberry-flavored pancakes. Wow. You eat that every morning and you will be obliged to buy one of those enormous trucks to carry you."

  She then undermined her social comment by ordering a breakfast twice as calorie stuffed as anything she'd just read out. A wildly misnamed "short" stack of pancakes that would probably satisfy a whole French family at Mardi Gras, one side order of fried bacon, another of whole wheat toast, and a fried egg that she ordered just for the pleasure of saying "sunny side up." I'm sure it made her feel as if we really were living out Thelma and Louise.

  This diner was not a movie set. The waitresses were small Hispanic women wrapped in uniforms of beige nylon. There weren't many customers at the equally beige tables, and the women spent most of their time in a huddle by the counter, chatting softly in Spanish to a pair of guys who were making pancakes and slicing meat. The only decor in the place was a row of chrome-framed posters advertising the various big-brand drinks on sale. Even the music was boring—a dim jangly sound suggested that somewhere there was a radio playing guitar music, but it was too far away to tell what style exactly, let alone what song.

  Two large white mugs of coffee arrived on our table just as the sunlight suddenly broke into the parking lot outside. Car roofs shone like colored pebbles in a pond, and even the scattering of scrawny trees "landscaping" the tarmac looked somehow more tropical and luxuriant.

  I did my best to soak up the enlivening effects of both coffee and sunlight. I knew that down in Miami I was going to need not just physical energy but diplomatic strength, too. I mean, even the Dunfermline tourist office doesn't talk about Dunfermline. It tells visitors that they've got lost and should go back to Edinburgh.

  A painful sense of foreboding took root somewhere behind my eyeballs. If I wasn't careful, the Miami Scots were going to give me as many headaches as the bolshie Boston Irish.

  "Why do they hate us so much?" I asked Alexa.

  "Who?" she said.

  "The Scots and the Irish. What have they got against the English?"

  She stopped piling bacon on her toast and looked at me as if I'd just asked her why the French love croissants.

  "You really need to ask? It's like Mike said—you starved lots of Irish people to death. And I think you massacred plenty of Scottish people and took their farms, no?"

  "True, true. But that's ancient history. These days, I think the real problem is that we English don't form clubs like they do. Why are there no Anglo-American dancing societies in Florida? We could have had a display of Morris dancing."

  "Morse dancing?" I understood why Alexa looked confused. In French, morse means "walrus."

  No, I explained, Morris dancing did not usually feature aquatic mammals. I did my best to reconstruct childhood memories of bearded men, flowery hats, bells on knees, and hey-nonny-noes around a ribbon-tressed maypole.

  Alexa chewed meditatively on her bacon sandwich, trying to picture what I had described.

  "From what you say, Paul, I personally tJiank God that there are no Morris dancing societies in Florida. I have never heard of anything less sexy in my life. If you do one of those dances, I will never have sex with you again. Ah, tJiank you."

  She held out her mug to a tiny waitress who had come by with the coffeepot. The young girl gave no sign that she'd heard—or understood—Alexa's threat to me. It was as if she was moving through a parallel universe whose only physical contact with our own cosmos was via empty coffee cups. She filled both of our mugs and resumed her slow, blank tour of the tables.

  "That reminds me," Alexa went on. "You think diey have whiffy here?"

  I smiled. One day I was going to have to tell her how to pronounce wi-fi. Not yet, though.

  "How does not having sex with me remind you that you want to check your mail?" I asked.

  She blushed. "It doesn't."

  "But you just said it did."

  "I didn't."

  "You said, 'I will never have sex with you again. That reminds me, you think they have whiffy here?' So there seems to be a link somewhere in your subconscious between the Internet and me not being shaggable. Have you become addicted to online sex?"

  I thought I was teasing, but Alexa took me seriously.

  "It was only a what do you call it? A thing of speech. Like 'by the way' or something. And I don't know why you are so aggressive with me just because I want to read my e-mail."

  I apologized. Of course I didn't think there was really a link between a lack of sex with me and her e-mails. Being on the road together, so close for so many waking hours, had made me hypersensitive to what she was thinking and feeling. I went to ask the waitresses about wi-fi.

  Unsurprisingly, our beige diner wasn't hooked up, but one of the girls told me in heavily accented English that if we went a mile down the road and parked outside a certain chain hotel, tJien we could surf for free. We wouldn't even need a password, she said. All her friends did it, so they could chat to their families back home.

  I was impressed. These new immigrants were getting the most out of modern America, just like those first pilgrims who discovered that die continent offered unlimited free turkeys.

  3

  The hotel was bright pink, as if it had spent all its life lying by the highway getting sunburned. I tucked the Mini into a corner of the parking lot as far away from the reception doors as possible, alongside four other vehicles with one or two people gazing intently at their laps. It was the Internet version of Lovers' Lane.

  As if to confirm this, Alexa announced that she was going to get in the back with the luggage. I asked her why she didn't just sit beside me.

  "I will bump you with my elbows when I type," she said, and set about digging herself a foxhole in the heap of stuff back there.

  I flipped open my laptop and logged on.

  "Welcome, valued guest." The hotel's website invited me to have brunch on the poolside patio. Hypocritically, I accepted their welcome and logged on.

  My first e-mail was from Jake, a quick note telling me that he was "coming in America very soon" and asking, "Can you please pass me your coordinates for when you will be in Florida." My coordinates. It was classic Jake. I knew that he wasn't trying to find me with his satellite location system. He wanted my coordonnees, my address and contact info. He was going to need some English lessons before coming back to his homeland, I thought, otherwise no one would understand him. Except perhaps the golfing Quebecois.

  I replied, truthfully, that I had no idea where I would be staying. My contact in Miami was setting it all up. I looked at my watch. It would soon be time to call my man Jesus. I'd phoned him the previous day and he had been annoy-ingly laid back about where to meet. He said he never knew where he was going to be before he got there, making himself sound as trustworthy as a blind taxi driver.

  Next on the list was a message from Elodie in New York. She'd decided to come down to Miami to see a friend of hers who was marketing director of the local Alliance Francaise—a French language school and cultural institute. She wanted to know exactly when I would be arriving in the city and what my event was. I gave her as many details as I could.

  Finally, there was an e-mail that had me groaning as if Alexa and I had parked for a more traditional reason.

  My old boss in London, Charlie, had forwarded a link to a gay website called Men in Skirts. Why he thought I'd be interested in that, I didn't know. But his curt message said, "as dark horses go you're jet black paul my son," which made me curious enough to click further.

  A few seconds later, my groaning—along with a fair bit of swearing—began. Because there, filling the screen, was one of those photos that your best man hands out to cause maximum embarrassment during your wedding reception. The drunken idiot leers at the camera with a beer can super-glued to his penis.

  I hadn't been drunk at all, and there were no beer cans involved, but it was almo
st as bad.

  The fact that there was a perfectly logical reason why I was wearing a tartan miniskirt was no consolation. Neither was the banner headline announcing that I'd been voted the website's Undercarriage of the Month, a title I didn't understand until I looked closely and saw that the madwoman's kilt had been so short that there was a distinct bulge of white underpant hanging below my hemline. As bad luck would have it, I'd been wearing tight jockey shorts that day instead of boxers. But at least I hadn't done things the genuine Scottish way and worn nothing under the kilt.

  And the worst thing was that, judging by the list of for-wardees at the top of Charlie's message, the link was already doing the rounds of corporate England. I'd never be able to show my legs in a pub again.

  "I can explain," I wanted to reply, but it would have done no good. The evidence was there—Paul West likes to dress up as some kind of kinky Scottish waitress and flash for the camera.

  The question was, how the hell had this photo escaped from the London madwoman's camera into the wilds of the web? The site didn't elucidate. It just said that here was one Englishman who was willing to give his all for his country, and begged browsers to send in my e-mail address, or better still my phone number, so they could post them alongside the photo.

  I replied to Charlie that if he forwarded the Men in Skirts link to anyone else he would lose various key parts of his anatomy, and then fired off an e-mail to Jack Tyler begging him to have all photos of me erased from every camera and computer in the land. My laptop told me "message sent" and I slumped back, suddenly exhausted again.

  "Are you OK?" Alexa asked from the back seat.

  "Er, yeah, fine." After her jibe about unsexy Morris dancers, I didn't think the time was right to show her my knobbly-kneed alter ego. "Get any interesting messages?"

  "No. You?"

  "No, nothing."

  We'd both spent a long time reading and replying to nothing.

  4