Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Do you want a straw?’ Simon asked.

  And to think that just the day before I’d been a fully fledged French peasant. Now I was the English bumpkin again, the outsider who couldn’t even master basic skills like eating breakfast.

  The problem is, and this sounds really obvious, that when you move to a foreign country you’re a long way from home. What I mean is, you’re a long way from your mates and your family. You’re forced to fit in with everyone else. You don’t have the comfort of knowing that later on, down the pub, you can tell everyone ‘and then she poured coffee on my cornflakes’ and get some sympathy.

  Of course, the situation is even more extreme if you have a Parisian partner. It’s not so bad meeting their friends (though, like I said, you never know how many of them are exes), but the family is a different matter altogether. You’re like a dog that has been adopted by another household, only to find that in the new family sofas are not for sitting on, bones are supposed to be eaten not buried, and everyone laughs when you start licking your backside. What’s wrong with licking my backside? you think. Everyone does it where I come from.

  6

  I WAS LOOKING forward to getting outdoors and venting my frustrations on the land. Brigitte came down to explain to me how to hold the long-handled spade and how to fill up a wheelbarrow. I accepted her advice with averted eyes, because the strengthening sunlight was shining through her nightdress and showing me outlines I really didn’t want to see.

  I then jumped into the metre-deep hole and sank six inches into the clinging clay.

  ‘Oh, and it’s very muddy in there. Be careful not to get stuck,’ Brigitte said and left me to it, shaking her head.

  Florence came for a giggle. She had every reason to. Along with my donkey hat and wellies, I was now wearing ugly trousers that were so huge I had to roll up the waist to stop them falling down, and a T-shirt that had been torn off just below the chest by someone who was determined to show off their six-pack. I looked like an eighties pop star who’s fallen on hard times and had to get a summer job shovelling shit.

  Florence, on the other hand, was looking totally gorgeous in bikini top and sarong, her long black hair bunched up on top of her head. If I’d been able to lift either of my feet I’d have scrambled up out of my hole and carried her into the barn, earth floor or no earth floor.

  ‘I’ve got to help prepare lunch,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you a drink at ten.’

  ‘Ten? What time is it now?’

  ‘Eight thirty.’

  ‘Holy shit, I must have got up at dawn.’

  In fact it was Michel who brought out a large glass of strawberry goo.

  He was wearing faded blue boxer shorts and unmatching wellies – one green, one brown, both left feet. At least I wasn’t the only one in comedy clothes.

  ‘Wow, be cool, man,’ he said in English, with a Franco-American accent. ‘Don’t dig so fast. We’ve got all the summer to finish.’

  ‘All the summer?’ No way was I getting trapped here that long.

  ‘Yeah, they will bring the new fosse septique in the fall.’ He walked down the plank that led into the shallower end of the hole and strolled over to scrape his cheek against my face. Men kissed men in the morning in this family, it seemed. Whether they’d shaved or not. Yuk.

  Michel took over from me for a while and explained why his mother was acting the way she was.

  ‘When she’s in the town she’s lost, man. It’s a major trip for her to get a haircut. She loses her credit card two times a year. But here in the country, she has decided that she knows it all. Her plants die, and she’s in a permanent panic that the house will fall on her head, but she feels in control and she tells herself she’s a farm girl. That’s why Papa refuses to come down here. Well, it’s one reason.’

  ‘He never comes here?’ I could understand why, but I was surprised.

  ‘No. The people here accept us kids because they know us since we were babies. But a real Indian? No way. They are not racist, really, they just never see a guy with dark skin who’s not, you know, emptying the . . . poubelles?’

  ‘Bins. Garbage.’

  ‘The garbage men, right. And Papa has this real complex about his class. He’s a businessman, he says, not a garbage man.’

  ‘What sort of business is he in?’ I’d never met Florence’s dad. When we’d gone to pick up his car, he’d been away in India.

  ‘He imports tissues.’

  ‘He’s a Kleenex importer?’ Good plan, I thought, in such a hypochondriac country. At my old office in Paris, they even sold packets of hankies alongside the chocolate bars in the food machines.

  ‘No, tissus. You know, like, cotton. To make shirts and shit.’

  ‘Oh, fabrics.’

  ‘Yeah. He says he flies first-class to Bombay, but the peasants here think that he’s a garbage man. Also, he has a problem . . .’

  Michel’s voice trailed off tantalizingly.

  ‘Problem?’

  He stopped digging and grinned. ‘You know old Ginette?’ He was whispering now, as if his mum was eavesdropping from behind the barn. Which she might well have been.

  ‘Ginette? You mean old Henri’s . . .?’ I didn’t know whether to say wife or sister. Or both.

  ‘Yeah. One night, Papa drank too much wine and chased her through the fields. Henri fired his gun to try and scare him, and he killed a cow. It was a big scandal in the village.’

  I could imagine it was, in a place where they could spend half an hour discussing slugs.

  ‘And did your dad – you know – with Ginette?’

  Michel laughed and began his leisurely digging again. ‘No, he came home, he went to bed, and next day he remembered nothing. Finally he paid for the cow just to stop the scandal.’

  ‘Wow.’ I gazed down through the trees towards Henri and Ginette’s peaceful farm, the scene of such animal passion.

  ‘So Maman comes here alone in the vacation and plays the expert, but, I mean, I spend much more time here than she does.’

  ‘You live out here?’ It was hard to keep a note of incredulity out of my voice.

  ‘No, I move around depending on my work. When I have no work, often I come here.’

  ‘What kind of work do you do?’

  ‘I’m an electrician.’

  ‘An electrician and you have no work? Everyone needs electricians.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m an electrician in the movie business. So I have to wait very much between shoots. Especially because I like to work with American crews and they don’t come here so often.’

  ‘But can’t you get non-movie work between shoots? You know, fixing electrical problems in houses?’

  He laughed again, as if this was the most surreal suggestion he’d ever heard in his life.

  ‘Tell me about your salon de thé,’ he said.

  As he dug, I stretched out in the grass and gave him the long, slow director’s cut of my story. Out here, you had time to get into real detail.

  I told him how I’d been headhunted by a Parisian company, got lumbered with a set of French colleagues who included my boss’s mistress and a Hungarian-speaking walrus, and then been fired because I didn’t fit in with the political ambitions of my boss Jean-Marie, the world’s most charming hypocrite. He had won his local elections and was now rumoured, so I heard on the radio, to be a candidate in his party’s next leadership contest.

  ‘Vous parlez politique, c’est bien!’

  A red-faced man with a beige check shirt and grey rocker’s quiff was smiling down into our mudhole. A young Golden Retriever was panting happily at his side.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Ribout!’ Michel dropped the shovel and held up his wrist to shake, as French men do when their hands are dirty.

  Michel introduced Monsieur Ribout as the mayor of the village, and I went over to get my wrist shaken too.

  ‘Ah, les Anglais,’ Ribout said. ‘You’ve invaded the Dordogne and now you’re coming here, eh? You hope to go back to the days when
your King Henri Huit wanted to possess all of France?’

  My old boss Jean-Marie would have declaimed this anti-British sentiment with fire in his eyes and one hand holding open the ballot box, but Monsieur Ribout was smiling down at me as if my job in the English invasion was to bring free fruitcake for the locals.

  ‘It is true,’ I said. ‘We British all want to live in France.’

  ‘Yes, but why is it that you all go to the Dordogne?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It is puzzling why Brits have always congregated in that one département in western France. Apparently in the prehistoric cave paintings there, amongst the mammoths and the woolly rhinos, you can make out sketches of white-kneed Homo sapiens. These are prehistoric Brits, visiting the caves with a view to renovating them and renting out a side passage for bed and breakfast.

  ‘Allez, les garçons, it is time for the apéro,’ Brigitte called out.

  It was always time for the apéro.

  Michel and I washed our hands and joined the mayor, the ladies and little Simon at the teak table on the shady side of the house.

  The usual bottles were there, but this time I stuck to beer. My change over from Banyuls naturally inspired a long conversation about national drinking habits, which ended in a general agreement that France’s excellent wines and spirits produced the healthiest alcoholics in Europe.

  ‘Ah yes! In women and wine, we are unbeatable.’ Monsieur Ribout emptied his glass of pastis and held it out for a refill. ‘But the women in this family prefer exotic men, eh? Eh?’ Brigitte and Florence blushed. ‘We Frenchmen have no chance with these women, eh?’ Ribout pinched Brigitte’s cheek, and I imagined the two of them as teenagers in the village, playing hide-and-seek in Brigitte’s knickers. ‘That’s why, since my wife died, I have to be content with my bitch here.’ He patted his Retriever pup on the nose and gave it a cheese biscuit. ‘Though she’s English too, isn’t she, eh? A Retriever, eh? What do you think of her, Pol? Should I marry her, eh?’

  Out here in the country it might well have been a serious question.

  ‘That depends,’ I said. ‘Can she cook?’

  Before the mayor had a chance to tell me the pup’s recipe for bone bourguignon, old Henri turned up to ask if I was coming down to his field. Luckily I didn’t need to look for an excuse to say no.

  ‘I’m taking Pol for a drive around the area,’ Monsieur Ribout said.

  ‘Après la sieste,’ Brigitte decreed.

  A siesta? Yes. Things were looking up. I pressed my unpleasantly trousered leg against Florence’s thigh. She reached down and squeezed my knee.

  Lunch was leftovers of last night’s pig, with more beans, more courgettes, more lettuce, more strawberries and the second half of the giant clafoutis. We had coffee outside on the apéro table, and I managed to get ten seconds alone with Florence to ask where the siesta was going to happen.

  In our bedroom, was the answer, and Simon usually siesta’d with his grand-mere.

  I had to walk quickly to the bedroom, facing all available walls, in order to hide my delight about this good news.

  After such a long period of chastity, I was pretty keen to get straight down to business, but I remembered my manners. French women appreciate old-fashioned courtesy in a man. They still like to have doors opened for them, to be given a red rose at the restaurant, to orgasm first. Old-school stuff.

  So I pretended to wait patiently, sinking ever deeper into the mattress, as Florence closed the shutters and opened the windows, and then coyly removed her bikini top and her sarong to reveal that she had been wandering around knickerless. A chaste but knickerless French girl. It seemed such a sinful waste, like leaving a bowl of fresh raspberries to warm and ferment in the sun.

  At last she rolled down into bed beside me, and we tried to find a position where we could press our bodies together in all the right places without rupturing any ligaments.

  ‘Oh, one thing,’ she said as I was about to launch into a passionate kiss. ‘Maman says you don’t have to dig any more.’

  The mention of ‘maman’ reduced my passion levels, but not by much.

  ‘Thank God for that. This is supposed to be a holiday, after all.’

  ‘She says you haven’t been digging in the right place.’

  ‘What? It’s a hole, there is only one place to dig. In the hole.’

  ‘She says Michel can finish the hole.’

  ‘But we were digging together, so he must have been digging in the wrong place, too.’ Why I was wasting time defending my spadecraft when I could have been enjoying some foreplay I have no idea, but something compelled me to do it.

  Florence did a horizontal shrug.

  ‘She never criticizes Michel. He’s her little angel. Oh, he’s driving me and Maman to the supermarket this afternoon, and we have fixed a rendezvous to go to the garage and get our luggage.’

  ‘At last, I’ll have some of my own clothes. Whose are these clothes you gave me, anyway? Your dad’s?’

  Florence’s laugh made the bed bounce. ‘No, Papa’s as small as Maman.’

  ‘So who do they belong to, then? Simon’s dad?’

  ‘If you really want to know, it was an ex-boyfriend of mine.’ I thought I heard a tiny, defensive note of guilt. A twinge of jealousy stirred in my chest. And lower down, too.

  ‘And when you split up he got all the CDs and you kept all his clothes? You were screwed.’

  ‘No.’ She put a hand up to my mouth as if to end the conversation, but like an idiot I wasn’t finished.

  ‘Everyone remembers this giant ex-boyfriend really well. That’s why Simon was going on about me being small, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, he was physically . . . imposing.’

  ‘Imposing? What was he – a judo champion?’

  Lying next to your naked girlfriend when you’re dying to make love is not a good time or place for a fit of jealousy. And for some reason this particular fit was getting worse with every idea that popped into my head.

  ‘It wasn’t Nicolas the architect, was it?’ I demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s an ex of yours, though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he also a good architect?’

  ‘Yes.’ Then, less decisively, ‘I think so.’

  ‘Florence, for Christ’s sake.’

  My chances of making love were shrinking with every second. I took a handful of Florence’s left buttock and decided to make peace.

  ‘Let’s stop talking about your family, your ex-boyfriends and our business worries,’ – my libido didn’t like that little speech, either – ‘and concentrate on more pleasant things.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Florence hummed her agreement and slipped a cool hand between my thighs.

  ‘Allez, Florence!’ Brigitte’s voice was accompanied by a loud knocking on the door. ‘We have to go now.’

  ‘Now?’ Florence sounded as surprised as I was suicidal.

  ‘Yes, you know the hypermarket shuts early today. Départ dans deux minutes.’

  ‘Two minutes,’ I whispered to Florence. In my present state of terminal frustration it sounded like a whole night-time.

  ‘Thirty seconds would be enough for you, eh?’ she teased, and managed somehow to roll uphill out of the bed before I could prove her right.

  I think France has abolished the ‘crime passionnel’ law, but I’m sure any judge in the country would have ruled that there was sufficient provocation for bludgeoning Brigitte to death with a blunt courgette.

  7

  THERE WASN’T MUCH point staying in bed alone and waiting for my backbone to set at a right angle, so I got up and wandered around the empty house. Except for our bedroom, the rooms were all laid out in a chain. You walked from the kitchen into the lounge, from there into Brigitte’s bedroom (where I kept my eyes shut to avoid catching sight of anything that might give me flashbacks later), and then into a hall with three doors off it – one to the bathroom, one to Michel’s room, another to the garden.
So basically, if I wanted to get to the bathroom, I had to go via the garden or through Brigitte’s room. It was as impractical as the floor-level dinner table.

  I went back into the living room and settled on the sofa, an immense pseudo-rustic creation with over-ornate wooden arms and rough, tasselled cushions.

  The Tour de France was on TV. I’m sure that watching the whole race would teach you more about the French than a three-year degree course.

  Every summer the French go nuts for ‘Le Tour’. They criticize cricket for being boring because it can last five days. But here’s a race (so no ball, no goals, just endless slog) that lasts three bloody weeks. Days and days of watching unnaturally thin men in Lycra pedalling up and down mountains. A commentator giving the population size and local specialities of every town they pass through. Here’s Grenouille-les-Bains, home to three thousand souls, famous in the region for its disused slate quarry and spectacular floods.

  But the crowds were loving it, and every kilometre of roadside verge seemed to be covered with spectators, some of whom had set up camp. They waved at the cameras for their five seconds of fame.

  In one of the helicopter shots I saw a huge painting on the road surface. A massive white phallus with the inscription ‘Je t’aime, Sophie.’ The route was announced months in advance, so you were sure to get your graffiti on TV if you timed it right. The commentator wasn’t fazed at all by the giant – and very detailed – penis. He just made a comment on how romantic the locals were and they cut to the next scene of sunburnt men on bikes unwrapping protein bars.

  I was almost sorry when the mayor rapped on the kitchen door and called out, “Ello, eez somm-body?’ in deliberate cod-English.

  He’d dressed up in a pink shirt and grey suit trousers, and had either bathed in or drunk a whole bottle of cologne. He put my torn-off T-shirt, grotesque trousers and smelly shoveller’s armpits to shame, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

  ‘Viens, viens, we will go for a tour,’ he said in his heavy accent.

  The engine was running in his flash Citroën, and the air-conditioning was on ice-cold, which was a blessing, because the sun was at its highest and trying to roast every piece of vegetable matter in sight. And there was a lot of vegetable matter about. Whole hillsides of neatly pruned, angular apple trees, their fruit golfball-sized and growing. High, old-fashioned hedgerows, dividing fields of grass and cereals that followed the contours of small valleys rising up either side of bullrush-lined streams.