Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  Everyone was staring intently out of the windows now, taking in each little detail of the place they’d be staying in for the coming fortnight. Or, knowing the French, for the next month or two.

  I say ‘everyone’, but a select group of our fellow travellers did maintain a studied indifference to the holiday scenery. Our bus was the shuttle for the daughters of the island’s rich summer residents. The girls all had golden ponytails, tight sleeveless tops and logo’d sunglasses, and were permanently hooked up to their phones or MP3 players. At pretty well every stop on the island, one or two of the girls got off, to be met by a leather-skinned parent in torn shorts and a car with a Paris region registration number, or by a bare-chested, barefoot big brother in his Mini Moke.

  Florence and I were heading almost to the far end of the island, to the wonderfully named little port of Ars, which was pronounced just as rudely as I hoped. I’d insisted on buying the bus tickets myself, purely for the thrill of getting on and asking the driver, ‘Do you go as far as arse?’ There are English cities where that would get you killed. And I was looking forward to my next Paris dinner party, when the conversation would turn to holidays and I’d be able to tell a girl, ‘I love arse.’

  All in all, a great place to buy a holiday home, if only for the postcards you could send to all your friends.

  Now, for the second day running, we were on the boneshaking bike ride from the surfing beach back to Ars.

  Clanking across the île de Ré was made even more difficult by a sidewind that was trying to use my bodyboard as a sail to blow me into the ditches. The cycle path ran beside ripening vineyards and irrigation ditches that carried seawater to and from the salt marshes. Between hedges and clumps of trees you could see small piles of white salt that had been raked up by the sauniers, or salt-collectors. Apparently they flood their chess-board fields and then block off the flow, letting the water evaporate away in the sun until they can rake up the crust of salt that is left behind.

  A young guy, naked except for a wide-brimmed straw hat and a pair of washed-out, rust-coloured shorts, stopped raking as we passed and waved to Florence. I was in too much pain to wonder who he was.

  The worst thing was that my suffering was entirely unnecessary. A minute’s walk from the house there was a cycle shop where I could have hired a brand-new machine with a saddle that would have caressed the parts that were currently getting bruised and chafed. But Florence refused to even consider changing for something more practical.

  ‘It’s OK for you, you have a little more padding in the saddle area,’ I argued. ‘Not too much padding, of course, and very picturesque padding . . .’

  ‘No, Paul. My family has always used these bikes and I don’t see why we should change just because you’re not used to cycling. Your bottom will soon acclimatize.’

  ‘If it doesn’t fall off first’

  ‘We are not changing.’ And that was final.

  I could have ignored her and hired myself a bike, but when you’re a guest in someone’s house, in someone’s country, you try to avoid snubbing them. At least until the pain gets unbearable.

  However, her attitude made me start to think that there was a basic difference between our outlooks on life. I was under the impression that my opinion was occasionally worth taking into account. Florence didn’t seem to agree.

  Of course I’d asked her why she hadn’t warned me about Henri’s field, and why she hadn’t mentioned that the party at the Salle des Fêtes was probably supposed to end in a game of bingo with my bank account as first prize.

  She just shrugged it off. Did it matter, she said, what a bunch of old farmers thought? She knew I had no intention of buying a house or a field there, so what was the point of worrying me?

  It might have saved me some embarrassment if I’d known why everyone was plying me with drink and strawberries, I said.

  And it might have saved her some embarrassment, she countered, if I hadn’t made her mum puke up all over the bathroom floor.

  Stalemate.

  At last, after a good half-hour of pedalling, with my buttocks clenched to stop the narrow saddle from trying to get too intimate with my colon, we hit the bike jam that meant we were nearing Ars.

  It was a typical Parisian traffic jam, adapted for two-wheelers and transported five hundred kilometres across country. Mountain bikes, boneshakers and Tour de France imitators had to get in line as we rolled wheel to wheel along the last few hundred yards of the cycle path and then clogged up the road that ran past the quayside restaurants and the (ahem) rent-a-bike shop.

  Five minutes later, we turned into the lane where Florence’s dad had bought his house. It was cute, like most of the houses in the town. A two-storey, terraced fisherman’s cottage with grey-blue shutters and a tiny courtyard where a passion-fruit plant grew like a vine up a stone wall. We stowed the bikes in the shed, and I decided it was time to face up to the fact that nobody was going to answer my silent prayers that the old tetanus traps would crumble to dust during the night.

  ‘I’m sorry, Florence. Tomorrow morning I’m going to rent us some decent bikes.’

  She tutted. ‘You do not understand, do you, Paul? You have not noticed the difference between the bikes we ride and the bikes that other people ride.’

  ‘Yes, I have noticed that difference. Theirs go in a straight line and don’t clank like medieval windmills. That’s what I’m saying. I want to be the same as everyone else. I want to belong.’

  ‘Ah, no. We are the ones that belong. I will show you tonight when we go out for dinner. Now stop arguing about bicycles and come and help me get all the sand and sun cream off my body.’

  ‘OK.’ There are, after all, some things in life that are more important than bicycles.

  3

  IT WAS EARLY evening. The sun was still out and glinting off the low rooftops of Ars.

  Florence and I were strolling hand-in-hand along a flowery lane that was just yards from the town centre but silent and deserted. High garden walls were draped with creeping clematis and plants that I didn’t know the names of. Fig and apple trees hung out into the lane.

  Florence was giving me a French architecture lesson.

  ‘You see? Bright-green paint looks good here, doesn’t it?’ She tapped on the glossy window shutters of a newly renovated house.

  ‘Yes, it kind of livens up the grey of the stone.’

  ‘Hmm, but is very nouveau. And that one, oh!’ She pointed across the street. ‘White shutters are totally ignorant. Did they not want to pay for coloured paint? Do they think they are in Paris? These are much better.’ She paused to pick a tiny flake of dull green paint off an ancient, peeling shutter. ‘This green is acceptable, as long as it’s faded like this. But none of these are really the correct colour.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, no one in this street has it. The correct colour is the one my father has used. That grey-blue, that is the real colour for windows and doors on the île de Ré.’

  ‘And people really care about this stuff?’

  ‘Oh, yes, come and look at some people.’

  Time for a bit of sociology.

  The main drag from the town centre to the marina was busy with cars, bikes and pedestrians. It was a one-way street, but cyclists were ignoring the traffic signs and going against the flow. Again, just like Paris.

  We stopped on a street corner and Florence pointed out a man to me. A tall guy, about fifty, unshaven, slightly unkempt, with an air of salt incrustation, was wandering along like a round-the-world yachtsman who’s mislaid his catamaran.

  ‘I will bet you that his shutters are exactly the right colour.’

  ‘Is he a fisherman?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh, no. He is almost certainly from Paris, or maybe La Rochelle. A summer resident. Look at his watch, his shoes, the sunglasses hanging around his neck. You see, he shows discreet signs of wealth so no one thinks he really is a drunken old shrimp fisherman. But when he goes to the market, he will talk to the fishmonge
r as if they had caught the fish together. It is all snobbery. And look at this guy.’

  A handsome teenager was riding past on a rickety old bike. His loose white shirt and old Levis were creased and stained, making him look as if he’d spent the last six months living on the beach, rolling up at night in blankets of dried seaweed.

  ‘Rich kid,’ Florence snorted. ‘He will have a rusty car, too, probably even a rusty surfboard.’

  There were so many levels of inverted snobbery going on that I started to get dizzy. Here was Florence, a Parisian who looked down on people because their bikes and window shutters were too nouveau riche, looking down on people because they were doing exactly the same thing as her. Why didn’t she just give up and get herself a decent bike?

  Though there was nothing rusty and rickety about Florence this evening. She’d left her old bike at home and was looking stunning, her golden skin oiled and aromatic, with a Lycra top and white trousers that left no one within fifty yards in any doubt that she was sporting top-class lingerie. Her bra straps were out, and the T of her thong arched up out of her waistband as if it was trying to tell the trousers to get the hell out of there. Her hair was loose and brushing the curve of her naked shoulders, her navel was at its most navelsome, the tiny bulge of her lower belly was achingly kissable.

  We had an apéro at a café in the church square, then headed towards the quay. I clutched Florence’s hand, mainly so that no one would try to kidnap her.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are just accompanying me. When you go to dinner, you do not try to look like a fisherman any more. You must display me, show me as if I was the first prize in the game show of life. The Kama Sutra game show. You have won me, and at the end of the evening you will be taking me home and enjoying every possible pleasure of my body.’

  ‘Well that’s true, isn’t it?’ I hoped.

  ‘Probably. But you do not look proud enough of this fact.’

  ‘OK.’ I didn’t really know what the correct protocol was for displaying your girlfriend like a sex toy, but Florence seemed to be happy with the way that I placed one arm on her waist and held her hand in the other, as if accompanying her in a Jane Austen-type dance.

  At first sight, the restaurant was a bit disappointing for two people who’d just won the Kama Sutra game show. It was a large, pale-blue shed next to a semi-abandoned garage that had an old mechanical rake dumped on its forecourt, presumably some kind of salt-gathering implement.

  The interior was a combination of white wood, fishing nets and dried flowers that would normally have sent me running to fetch the style police. Even so, three groups of casually chic diners were already queuing just inside the entrance, trying to get a table. A beautiful young waitress with a pierced belly button was frowning a refusal.

  We’d reserved, though, and she took us out into the garden, to a small table set against an olive tree. If we’d had a jar of brine with us, and a few months to spare, we could have pickled our own apéritif nibbles while we waited to order.

  Another young girl, a friendly but witheringly cool brunette, came out with a menu written on a blackboard. She perched it on a chair next to our table and left us to cogitate. As she turned away she revealed a plunging backline and a snake tattoo that spiralled up from her skirt. If the food was as tasty as the staff, we were in for a treat.

  A man at a nearby table stopped the waitress as she walked by. He was a slightly younger version of the rich-but-lost fisherman we’d seen earlier, dressed up in a Lacoste pullover and polo shirt.

  ‘We’ll have a bottle of our usual wine,’ he said.

  ‘Which is?’ the girl drawled. Ouch.

  Dinner was tasty as well as tasteful. We each had a whole roasted sea bass, or bar de ligne, the ‘de ligne’ meaning that it had been caught with hook and line and not in a drift net. This place was popular because it was good, I realized, not just because someone had decided that it was fashionable.

  But Florence managed to spoil my dessert (a strangely named but delicious ‘soupe de pêches’ – cold ‘peach soup’) by telling me that ‘Papa’ was arriving next day.

  ‘Here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, here. It is his house.’

  Though it had been more fun while it was just our house. And it meant that we’d have to go round changing the sheets on the extra beds we’d rumpled.

  ‘He says he’s very impatient to meet you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Call me a coward, but I wasn’t particularly impatient to meet the guy whose car I’d helped to crash.

  4

  NEXT MORNING I was up before Florence was awake, and decided to sort out the most pressing (literally) of my problems.

  ‘You should have come here on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning,’ the oily-handed bike-rental guy told me.

  ‘I wasn’t on the island. I was in Corrèze.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sympathized deeply with anyone who’d been in Corrèze. ‘This is all I have left.’

  He nodded his headbanded surfer hairdo towards a top-of-the-range mountain bike with enough gears to get me up Everest backwards.

  Ré is a totally flat island. An averagely tall heron could see right across without wearing high heels. So all I really needed was two gears – one to get started, one for cruising. The machine he was offering me was so hi-tech I was looking for the remote control.

  This was an emergency, though, so I paid a week’s hire – approximately what it would have cost to buy a normal bike outright – and went for a test ride around the half-asleep town. Compared to one of Florence’s bikes it was like riding on a cushion of warm air. It took only two or three presses on the pedals to propel me to the church square.

  Opposite Ars’s black-and-white steeple there was a large café terrace, filling up with people who’d just been to buy their newspapers at a shop called Ars Presse, which sounded to me like an illegal wrestling move. Next to the newsagent was the post office, a grand, grey-shuttered old building that was just about to open.

  As the church bell started to strike nine, the postmistress ambled out of her house, crossed the square and unlocked the large shutter barring the main door. This revealed a sticker on the glass entrance – ‘accès internet’. I quickly padlocked my bike and nipped inside, the first customer of the day.

  ‘We’re not open yet,’ the postmistress told me. She smiled warmly, the expression of a woman who is very glad indeed not to have been put in charge of a post office in the industrial northeast.

  ‘I just want to read my emails.’

  ‘Ah.’ She pointed at a bulbous old Mac by the window. ‘Do you know how to turn it on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, go ahead. Can you open the shutter, please?’

  ‘Of course.’ I pushed back the heavy window shutters, turned on the computer and inserted my phone card in the slot. Nothing happened.

  ‘You need a special card,’ the postmistress informed me. She was now behind the counter. ‘I can sell you one.’ She held up a plastic package.

  In the few seconds it took for me to walk to the counter and complete the transaction, a thirty-something guy with sunglasses perched on top of his head strode in, saw what was happening and made a beeline for the computer.

  If I hadn’t had almost a year of practice dealing with French queues, I might have groaned and resigned myself to second place. But I was at the peak of Parisian fitness, and stepped sharply in front of him.

  ‘I was already here.’ I sat down and inserted my card before he had time to object.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘He was already here.’ The postmistress backed me up.

  The guy grumbled unhappily and slumped down on a chair against the wall behind me. I could feel his every impatient breath on my neck as I logged on.

  My list of emails included one from my American poet friend Jake, and one from Alexa. Hmm.

  I decided to save that one. I often keep the most intriguing email in the list till last. If there’d been one from the arc
hitect Nicolas with the subject field saying ‘We’ve started work on the tea room’, I’d have opened it straight away. But Alexa? Something made me want to savour her.

  There were two or three emails about the tea room, all boring workaday stuff. Creating a company had been surprisingly simple, but ever since that day I’d been receiving an endless stream of letters and emails from various social-security offices, health-insurance companies and small business organizations, all wanting me to pay them a couple of hundred euros to go away and leave me in peace. This was Florence’s department – accounts – I decided, and flagged them for follow-up.

  ‘Will you be finished soon?’ The loser of the race to read emails was leaning over my shoulder.

  ‘Two more to read,’ I told him, as if it was any of his business.

  I read Alexa’s next. The guy had spoilt the idea of saving her till last.

  She had attached a file. I heard the guy behind me groan as I clicked on it and the aged computer opened a tell-tale blank window for the download. It wasn’t my fault that the post office didn’t have broadband, I thought, but I hoped Alexa hadn’t sent any images. Even though I was now as good as a Parisian at pushing in, I still had my British guilt complex about making people wait for me.

  She’d sent an article on the interpretation of dreams about water. It reminded me of the first email she ever sent me, which included a text by some guru about how joy and sorrow were inextricably linked. And when she gave me the elbow, she’d quoted the know-it-all guru again, saying she thought I was only capable of sorrow, not joy. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, wasn’t it? Of course I wasn’t going to feel joyful about getting dumped.

  This essay on wet dreams brought back too many nightmarish memories of Correzian shower curtains and orgasming washing machines, so I clicked back into the email.

  ‘What a joy to read that I’m not the only person to be sexually harassed by water,’ I told her. ‘And talking of sexual harassment, how are you getting on with Newcastle men? Having bilingual problems?’