Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  This had been another of her theories – that people of different linguistic origin couldn’t be happy together because they would never truly communicate. Again she’d proved herself right by dumping me.

  As I hit send, something made me hope she wasn’t getting the chance to have bilingual problems with an English guy, although I had absolutely no right to think that. I was with Florence, wasn’t I?

  ‘So this is your last email,’ my shadow asked me, or informed me, when I opened Jake’s message. I ignored him.

  Jake was his usual self. Ever since I’d met him the previous autumn, his English had been withering away like a virus under attack from French antibodies. It took me all my knowledge of French to decipher what he was trying to say.

  ‘I’m enchaining with a new part of my poesie project,’ he’d written. He was carrying on with his poetry project. This was his ambition to sleep with a woman of every nationality living in Paris and write a poem about each encounter. Last I’d heard, he’d been trying to decide whether a girl from a Bosnian Serb refugee family would do for both Bosnia and Serbia. Could an ethnicity count as a nationality and vice versa? If not, he was going to spend the rest of his life chasing after exiles from hill tribes in Thailand. ‘But now I have decided to edit myself in line.’ He was going to self-publish on the Net. ‘Have you other ideas for titles? If not I’ll rest with mine.’ He’d originally intended to get the poems printed, and I’d suggested (not seriously, of course) the title ‘Around the World in Eighty Lays’. Well at least it was better than his (totally serious) proposal, which had been to change the first ‘o’ in ‘Controversy’ to a ‘u’. Oh yes.

  I’d asked him if he could imagine anyone going into a bookshop and ordering that.

  If they were too prudish to ask for it, they didn’t deserve to read it, he’d replied (or Franglais words to that effect). Fine, I said, but that won’t help you pay your printing bills.

  Now he was writing to tell me that he thought his title was perfect for an on-line publication because everyone who typed the c-word into a search engine would automatically access his poems. As if it was poems they were searching for.

  ‘Go for it, Jake,’ I replied. ‘But I can’t promise you a link from my café’s website.’

  I was about to sign out when I saw that Alexa had replied. She was online.

  ‘I thought that was your last email?’

  I turned to face the guy.

  ‘If you are impatient, buy a computer,’ I told him. ‘Or come before nine o’clock to wait. I am waiting fifteen minutes here before the post office was opening.’ When dealing with an impatient Frenchman, always go for the big lie, and don’t worry if he doesn’t believe you. He already hates you for making him wait.

  ‘You did not buy this computer.’ He’d taken the sunglasses off and was waving them at me as if he wished they were an empty wine bottle.

  ‘No, but I pay to use it, and I have –’ I pretended to check the counter ticking away at the bottom of the screen ‘– forty-five minutes if I want them. So if you will permit me . . .’

  French has so many ways to say ‘fuck you’ politely.

  Alexa had sent another attachment. This time it was a biggie, but my self-righteous outrage stopped me caring how long it took to download.

  I soon wished I hadn’t bothered, though. The photo that slowly materialized was of Alexa and a guy. Hunky, blond, pleased with himself, one arm draped over Alexa’s shoulder.

  She was looking more beautiful than ever. Her hair, a darker blond than the guy’s, was cut short and spiky. The nose I used to nibble on was doing its cute crinkling thing as she smiled. Her eyes were looking deep into mine, but I knew they weren’t really seeing me. Her smile was for someone else.

  ‘Yes, she is beautiful but she already has a boyfriend,’ sunglass man chipped in.

  ‘Please leave me in peace for forty-five minutes.’

  ‘You are not staying on that long. You promised to stop.’

  ‘C’est cela, oui,’ I replied. An only-just-polite way of saying ‘fuck you’.

  ‘Here are my bilingual problems,’ Alexa had written. ‘No, not bilingual. Sacha is Ukrainian, and English is his third language after Russian and Ukrainian, and it’s my second language. So in fact we have quintilingual problems. Is that a word?’

  Frankly, who cared.

  Then it hit me. Ukrainian? So this was her mum’s boyfriend’s son? That was incest, wasn’t it? At the very least it sounded every bit as screwed up as my problems with Brigitte.

  ‘Just don’t get your tongues tangled up in all those languages,’ was all I could think of in reply. And what a gross image it conjured up, their tongues entwined like two mating snails.

  I got away from the computer as fast as I could and went to unpadlock the bike.

  Next confrontation of the morning – revealing my new luxury mode of transport to Florence.

  5

  FLORENCE WAS ALONE, drinking coffee and eating biscottes in the courtyard, draped along a teak lounger as if she was advertising garden furniture. The sun had burned away the morning haze, but Florence wasn’t topless, as she had been for our first breakfasts here. Dad’s influence was making itself felt before he’d even arrived.

  She was in her bikini-top-and-sarong combination, one long, smooth leg uncovered and getting some rays. I felt a few seconds of guilt, or maybe stupidity, about my recent fit of jealousy over Alexa. Florence was all flesh and blood, not a load of pixels standing next to a Ukrainian.

  ‘I got myself a bike,’ I told her.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I left it outside.’

  ‘Ah, you don’t dare show me?’

  ‘Dare?’

  I went and untethered my new mount from its lamppost.

  Its arrival in the tiny garden was a bit like an aircraft carrier pulling into a farmyard, so I excused Florence her outburst of shocked laughter. ‘Oh, Paul, take it back, it is ridiculous.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s efficient.’

  ‘I will pretend you are not with me.’

  ‘I know, it’s not what I wanted, either, but look at this.’ I plunged a finger into the padding on the saddle. ‘It would massage your bum almost as well as my fingers.’

  ‘Does it vibrate?’ she asked.

  As usual, our disagreement ended in the bedroom, then in the bathroom, then in the bedroom again.

  ‘So when’s your dad arriving?’ I asked an hour or so later, lying spreadeagled on the bed, no part of my body capable of movement except for my lips and vocal cords. I was addressing Florence’s rear end as she chose some panties from the small pile in her open suitcase. One of her buttocks still had my finger marks on it. Or were they her finger marks, I wondered idly.

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘Great, time to go to the beach before he gets here.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t want to go to the beach?’

  ‘No, these are my holidays too. I do not want to work so hard every day. Not on cycling, anyway.’ She flicked a pair of lacy panties at my leg. Well, ‘pair’ was a grand description for such a tiny piece of clothing. A pantie singular was more like it.

  ‘If you let me get you a decent bike, it wouldn’t be like work at all.’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything this morning. I just want to lie in the courtyard, read, do nothing.’

  I mulled this over while she chose a T-shirt and another sarong and laid them out on the bed, ready to put on after her shower. Just lying about all day struck me as a waste of a good beach, especially as we were going to be marooned in Paris for several months once the café was up and running. If it ever was.

  ‘You’ll have time to give notre ami Nicolas a call this morning, then, won’t you?’

  ‘Later, Paul. I didn’t even finish my breakfast, remember?’

  ‘OK, I’ll call him now, before I go to the beach. It’s, what, ten thirty? The workmen should have been at it for two hours alread
y.’

  ‘OK, you call.’ She went into the shower room. Not her problem.

  I really didn’t understand how someone who was so active and communicative in bed could be so passive about everything else. I wasn’t complaining about the sex, of course. I just thought that it might be nice if she showed the same sense of teamwork in the other parts of our relationship.

  Still, it’s very hard to feel aggrieved at someone who has just done certain things to your tingling body, so I swallowed my pride and picked up the phone.

  I was lying on the bed naked, as if to taunt Nicolas about who was sleeping with Florence these days. Petty, I know, but you need all the help you can get when dealing with French architects.

  ‘They will start Monday at the latest,’ he assured me, after needing to be reminded who I was. ‘How is Florence?’ He clearly thought that we’d said all we needed to about boring stuff like work.

  ‘How is Florence?’ I switched to English, which he understood very well. ‘Is that all you have to say? What I want to know is, how is the tea room? How is it ever going to be finished on time? That’s what you should be saying to yourself. How is it zat ah am allraidy four days late and ah aven’t e-venn start-edd yet?’ The fake French accent was going to piss him off majorly, but so what?

  His self-love won through. ‘T’inquiète pas, Paul, pas de panique,’ he crooned, telling me not to worry with the all-chums-together ‘tu’ form.

  ‘But I am worried, Nicolas.’ I was back to pure, crisp English vowels now. I was the matron at the posh private school explaining why failing to wash behind his ears would get him sent to hell. ‘I am worried, and so should you be. Because if the tea room opens late, I will be paying you late. Very late. OK, mon ami?’

  6

  ‘BONJOUR, MONSIEUR BOURBON.’ I shook the proffered hand and did my best to look as if I was worthy of having sex with his daughter in his holiday home. I’d put on a clean T-shirt and my best swimming shorts.

  ‘Bonjour, Paul.’ He pronounced my name correctly, which I appreciated. So few French people bothered.

  He was a very good-looking man for his age, a kind of veteran Bollywood film star. He had perfect skin, much darker than Florence, and looked as if someone had just spent hours shaving his chin and cheeks to total smoothness. Unlike his son, he wasn’t balding, and his thick black hair was cut in a mid-nineties Hugh Grant. Artily floppy. He was fifty-something but dressed twenty years younger, in impeccably faded jeans and a loose, plum-coloured shirt that covered his affluent little paunch. He was sockless in sailing sneakers. An instantly recognizable rusty-bike rider, although he’d just arrived in a La Rochelle taxi.

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He shook my hand warmly. ‘Especially your talents with herbal tea.’

  ‘Oh oui, I’m very sorry.’ I tried to look guiltstricken.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ He chortled, as if it was the kind of thing that happened all the time to Brigitte, which it probably was.

  ‘And I’m terribly sorry about the car.’

  His laugh died as if it had been hit by a Korean off-road vehicle.

  ‘The car?’

  Oh shit, he didn’t know.

  ‘Florence?’ both of us asked.

  She gave an ‘uh’ of irritation and reeled off a brief explanation of how it happened, which, to my mind, didn’t make it clear enough that I was completely blameless.

  ‘You demolished my car?’ His dark-brown skin had turned red around the chinline.

  ‘No, a man crashed in me. To me. With me.’ I defended myself in my best approximation of lawyer’s French.

  ‘So his insurance is paying for the repairs?’

  ‘Well . . .’ If I’d known I was going to have to make this speech, I’d have prepared a short Powerpoint presentation to put my case. But my look of discomfort might as well have said, ‘No, mate, you’re paying.’

  My new father-in-law put his well-manicured hands on his hips and unleashed his fury. Coming from the volcanic island of La Réunion, he really knew how to blow his top. Everyone from the post office to the surfing beach must have heard what he thought of me and Florence – our ingratitude, incompetence, lack of respect, lack of manners, lack of driving skills, lack of anything that might raise us above the level of baby chimpanzees.

  Then just as abruptly, he stopped yelling and clomped upstairs to throw luggage and furniture around.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Florence whispered, after we had observed a minute’s silence for the passing of our peaceful holiday. ‘He will calm down very quickly. He always shouts like that, but if you don’t contradict him, he forgets all about it in a few minutes.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll forget about his car getting wrecked. Didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Noh,’ she replied, a ‘non’ with an in-built puff of indifference.

  Here was that infuriating passivity again.

  ‘What, it was like me with Henri’s field? You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?’

  ‘Oh, Paul, please, don’t start.’

  She was right, I suddenly realized. There was no point starting. Because she wasn’t really interested in what I was going to say. The crashed car was a long way away, in the past and in Corrèze, and as far as she was concerned it could stay there. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that she was incapable of facing up to problems.

  She was going to be in for quite a shock at the café, I thought. If we didn’t get things back on schedule, our problems weren’t just going to bawl us out as her dad had done, they were going to march right up and punch us in the teeth.

  7

  AS FLORENCE HAD predicted, the volcano was soon dormant again.

  Monsieur Bourbon had phoned the garagiste, got the full story, schmoozed with the local gendarmes, and was feeling refreshed and full of bonhomie by evening. He said I could call him Charles, and ‘tutoyer’ him.

  By way of apology, I paid for dinner at the chic shed. He was very gracious. He even suggested that we all go on to a bar by the quayside for a drink.

  ‘There is going to be a show, I think. Singing and dancing.’

  ‘Great,’ I said diplomatically.

  ‘I am too tired, I want to go home.’ Florence yawned to prove it.

  Was this real tiredness, I wondered, or just parent fatigue? And if it was parent fatigue, why couldn’t she try to include me in on it, too?

  ‘OK, Paul and I will go to the bar,’ Charles said.

  He went for a pee, and as Florence and I stood outside in the cool ocean breeze, I begged her to come along just for one drink.

  Nothing doing. It was a repeat performance of what she did to me in Corrèze.

  ‘Just try to stop him drinking too much,’ she said. ‘He gets a little bizarre when he’s drunk.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re so tired all of a sudden? You don’t want to play nursemaid for your dad – you want me to do it for you?’

  ‘Oui,’ she admitted shamelessly. ‘You can do this little thing for me, can’t you?’ She pressed her wonderful body against me and gave me an irresistibly doe-eyed kiss. ‘Please?’ Her tongue flicked gently at my earlobe.

  ‘As you ask so politely, OK.’

  But how, I wondered, was I supposed to stop her dad drinking? I can’t stop myself drinking.

  Charles and I went to a big, touristy restaurant opposite the marina, and sat in a corner of the terrace where the tables had been cleared of cutlery and were open for drinking again.

  A brisk young waiter arrived, tanned and sure of himself after two or three weeks of his summer job.

  ‘Messieurs, qu’est-ce que je vous sers?’ He had the waiter’s patter off to a tee.

  ‘Fizzy water?’ I suggested.

  Charles looked at me as if I’d suddenly come down with mad-cow disease. ‘Deux ballons de blanc,’ he said. Two glasses of white wine.

  ‘Petits, moyens, grands?’ the waiter asked.

  I almost laughed. I didn’t realize the waiters tried t
o rip off French tourists too.

  Charles flushed lava red.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in the twenty years or so that I have been coming to my holiday home in Ars,’ he said, only just holding the lava in. ‘You’re new this season, aren’t you?’ There was a bead of sweat on Charles’s upper lip.

  ‘Oui.’ The waiter was shifting from one foot to the other.

  ‘And has the French language changed since you started working here?’

  ‘Monsieur?’

  ‘ “Un ballon” is the word for a normal-sized glass of wine, n’est-ce pas? So how can you ask if we want a big one? It would be like asking if I wanted a big litre of beer. Don’t you agree, young man?’

  The waiter was old enough to know that it was not worth arguing. He asked us what type of wine we wanted, and left.

  ‘Huh, his parents rent a house for one month a year and they think they own the island,’ Charles said. Meaning, presumably, that he was a real islander because he’d actually bought his holiday home.

  ‘And you know how much they pay to rent one of these little cottages?’ Charles turned his nose up at the people sitting around us, some of whom hadn’t noticed how dark it was and were still wearing their sunglasses.

  I didn’t know, and he told me. I was shocked.

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said. ‘And these days, if they want to buy a decent place here, one that isn’t just a prefabricated cube in an infestation of identical cubes, oh là là!’ Again, he told me the price. ‘You could buy all the farms in Corrèze for that,’ he exaggerated slightly. ‘Or three houses on the mainland, just a few kilometres away. But they have decided that this place is chic, so they pay.’

  The drinks, with a small bowl of shrimps and a couple of toothpicks as an apology, arrived.

  ‘But it is a very beautiful island,’ I said. I had noticed that some of the people at nearby tables were taking offence at Charles’s loud lecture on current trends in real estate. It is, after all, not polite to talk about money in France.

  ‘Oh, yes, it is a beautiful island. Green, fertile.’ His hand gripped my knee, as if I was the source of the fertility. ‘Sunny, sexy,’ he went on. ‘But when I bought my house, almost no one wanted to come here. There were just a few rich Parisians who came here because it was so inaccessible. Before the bridge, you had to queue for days for a car space on the little ferry. So the Parisians all kept rusty old 2CVs on the island. The most dangerous cars in Europe. The sea used to rot them away like sugar in coffee and you didn’t know when one of them was going to fall to pieces until the wheels dropped off. A bit like you with my car, huh? Cheers!’ he said in English, and his hand slapped my thigh.