Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Cheers. And I’m really sorry about votre voiture.’

  ‘It will be OK. And call me “tu”. Hey, le petit!’ He beckoned to the waiter. ‘What was I saying? Oh yes, those Parisian snobs with their rusty old 2CVs. Hah!’ He was oblivious to the fact that several of the tables around us had fallen grimly silent.

  The waiter came over. I tried the fizzy-water ploy one more time, with no more success than before, and then gave up. What was a holiday in France for, if not to sit outdoors drinking wine while the yachts in the marina pinged their mast cables at you like so many clinking glasses?

  Each drink seemed to open up a new Pandora’s Box of provocation.

  ‘We’re all immigrants,’ was Charles’s taunt when he started the third or fourth ballon of white wine. ‘We’re all immigrants on this island.’ He let the people at the other tables know who he was talking about. ‘But I’m probably more of a local than any of them. One of my ancestors, a White Frenchman, oh yes, sailed from La Rochelle to La Réunion before the revolution. And I bet no one has a first name as French as mine!’

  ‘Charles is very French, yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘Oh no, Charles is not my real name. Not my full name. My first names are Charlemagne Napoléon Vercingétorix.’ He had a bit of trouble pronouncing the last one, which I’d never heard of anyway.

  ‘Ver . . .?’

  ‘It is the name of a Gaul. The king who resisted the Romans. I am Astérix’s Indian brother!’

  He coughed up a throatful of wine and convinced one couple nearby that it was time to go home.

  ‘And you know why my birth certificate calls me Napoléon and all that?’ he asked.

  ‘Because your father couldn’t spell Charles?’

  ‘No. Because of the marvellous French law that decides what children should be called. When you go to the town hall to register your baby’s name, the person at the counter – l’employé au guichet – can reject it. Don’t forget that l’employé au guichet is the most powerful person in France. Any guichet. Vive le guichet!’

  I raised my glass in a toast. I’d met some of these counter tyrants when trying to get my resident’s permit. I’d experienced how one person’s mood could determine your entire future.

  ‘And the employé au guichet decided that the name my father wanted was not French enough. It was an Indian name, Rajiv, like the son of the architect of Indian independence. “C’est pas français, ça,” she decided, and so my father said Charlemagne, Napoléon, Vercingétorix as a joke, and she wrote them all down and stamped the paper and voilà. She had transformed me from a future Indian president into two French kings and an emperor. Vive le roi!’

  He drained his glass and started to bellow some kind of royalist song that might well have got us chucked out if a fisherman hadn’t distracted everyone by exploding.

  8

  OVER ON A stage by the harbour, a man in a ruddy canvas smock and blue peaked cap was tapping his feet and howling a sea shanty. The microphone was amplifying every consonant into an explosive distress flare. This was bad enough, but then his three chums joined in and started scaring every shrimp on the west coast out of French territorial waters.

  Charles was either too drunk or too deaf to care. He stood up.

  ‘Let’s dance!’

  King Charlemagne wasn’t going to be argued with, and dragged me to my feet.

  Fortunately we weren’t the only people to get up. We went to join a small group of local-costumed folk dancers who were performing jigs that seemed to consist of a massive amount of effort for no result, a sort of outdoor show of shared constipation.

  I’ve been to Scottish ceilidhs where you heave your partner off their feet, or twirl each other round till the centrifugal force makes your underpants fall down. Here, though, people were gazing at their tip-tapping feet and flapping their arms with the restrained energy of a parrot that’s afraid of flying.

  Charles knew all the steps, and got admiring nods from some of the ladies in their black dirndl-type dresses as he did a loose, Bollywood version of their jigging, with an emphasis on suggestive movement of the eyebrows. He selected a grey-haired, spinsterly folk dancer and seemed to perform a fisherman’s fertility dance in her honour, with him as the trawler and her as the shoal of sea bass. It confirmed what Michel had told me about the incident with Ginette, the old farmer’s wife. When he got pissed, Charles seemed to get the hots for the aging folksy type.

  For the moment, his current victim was continuing her bobbing jig unperturbed except for the occasional worried glance at Charles’s gyrating groin. Meanwhile, I jogged on the spot and wished that the giant pink moon would come crashing down and end the party early.

  ‘Did you see her?’ Charles asked me when the jig was over and I’d managed to unclamp his fingers from the hem of the old dirndl’s petticoat. ‘Not bad, eh? Do you think I should ask for her phone number?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I think you should come home with me now.’

  ‘Not yet, look!’ Charles was pointing to the stage, where an old guy in tight jeans began yodelling a deafening French version of the da-doo-ron-ron song.

  At this point we had to join in with the French crowd’s jiving, which might have been fun if I’d had one of the cool young girls as a partner instead of Charles. I thought it best to keep hold of him, to stop him jiving off in search of some other unsuspecting pensioner.

  It was only after he’d fallen over while attempting to twirl himself above my head that I managed to drag him away from the dance floor.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ he demanded.

  ‘Home?’ I suggested.

  ‘No, it’s much too early,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s go for a drink!’ His legs wandered off in different directions as if they couldn’t decide which bar to go to.

  I grabbed him to stop him falling over again. If he collapsed now, I would have to go and get the singing fishermen to carry him home.

  ‘Oh, you are angry with me because of the woman,’ he said, looking hurt. ‘You must not be angry with me. It is not my fault. You have seen Brigitte, so you understand why we are not sexually active any more.’

  Not sexually active? That explained Brigitte’s courgette fixation and the flooded bathroom.

  ‘I am not angry.’ I began to tug Charles away from the quayside, mainly so that the people around us wouldn’t have to share the gruesome details of his inactive sex life.

  ‘We used to be active,’ he yelled above the music.

  ‘You don’t need to explain. Really.’

  ‘Very active. She had beautiful breasts. Like hers. Bonsoir, Madame!’ I pulled him out of range of his new lady love, who was in fact an obese man in a pink T-shirt. ‘She was very good at oral sex, too,’ Charles foghorned. ‘With her tongue, she used to-oo—’

  His last word was extended into a shocked gasp of pain as he collided with a concrete pillar.

  Now that I’d shut him up, I was able to seize him under one armpit and frogmarch him down the lane to the house in relative peace. He was a dead weight by the time we got there.

  ‘Here we are.’ I opened the latch gate to our courtyard and heaved him through.

  Suddenly Charles was fully conscious again.

  ‘Bonne nuit, Paul, bonne nuit. Don’t worry about the dancer women. We will have better luck tomorrow night, eh?’ He tapped me on the cheek and went meekly indoors, humming along with the song being ritually slaughtered down at the quayside.

  It was midnight. I was somehow too exhausted to go to bed. Time, I thought, for a moonlit bike ride.

  Only trouble was, my state-of-the-art bike didn’t come with lights. How is it, I wondered, that technology can make such huge leaps backwards as well as forwards? Haven’t mountain-bike designers heard of lights? And decent mudguards? When I was a kid I could go cycling after the rain and not end up looking as if I’d shat my trousers.

  There was nothing else for it but to take one of the old killer machines. I span their wheels and found a bik
e that had rusted but workable dynamo lights. Pausing only to strap one of the cushions from the lounger on to the saddle with a bungee elastic, I headed out into the noisy moonlight.

  The cycle paths were empty and spooky, and it took me at least twenty minutes to ride out of range of the music at the marina. When I stopped beside an inky-dark pool in the salt marshes, I could hear the rustle of reeds, the plop of a jumping fish, the sudden screech of a bird or animal – the hunter or the hunted, I didn’t know. I looked back towards the illuminated steeple and the strings of lights over the marina, and smelt the salt in the air. And suddenly I had to phone Alexa.

  Why was I calling, though? Especially so late. When it’s not your actual girlfriend you have to have an excuse.

  I could mention that I’d just been doing the French jive, which she’d once tried to teach me, but that’d only remind us both of the first time we broke up, when I ended a drunken evening of dancing by going off to use a condom in another girl’s bed. I could ask with false indifference about the exact nature of her relationship with the guy in the photo. No, not cool.

  Or I could just say that I wanted to talk to her.

  That was the scariest excuse of all. Because it was true. No, half true. It wasn’t so much that I fancied an idle chat with her. I had to tell her about my worries and doubts. My stay on the paradise island was getting just as flaky as my disastrous exploits in Corrèze. Was there something about me and French holidays that didn’t mix? I wanted to know what she’d say, because I respected her opinion.

  And I wanted to talk about her stuff, too, her film course, her plans. I liked sharing her energy. I liked the way she giggled when she made fun of herself, or of me.

  And when you came right down to it, I simply liked hearing her voice.

  Shit. The moon and the wine have got to you, I told myself. I speed-dialled her number before I had time to chicken out.

  My phone shone bright in the darkness, hooking itself up to her satellite.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, it’s Paul.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Alexa?’

  ‘Yes, I can’t hear you. Shut up, people, will you!’

  In the background there was a happy babble of voices. She was out on the town somewhere.

  ‘It’s Paul.’

  ‘Paul, hi! What are you doing?’

  A loud male voice rode over the wave of background noise. I couldn’t make out what he said.

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ she shouted. The words were angry but her voice was laughing. ‘Hey, Paul, we were online at the same time. Isn’t that funny?’

  ‘Yeah, but I was in a post office, I couldn’t—’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I said I was in a post office . . .’

  ‘What? It’s very noisy here. We’re in the pub.’

  ‘Yeah, so I hear. It’s OK, it wasn’t urgent. I’ll call you some other time.’

  I got on my bike and cycled out of the marsh as fast as I could without risking a broken neck. It was a combination of that ‘we’ and the pub. I felt excluded, alone.

  But you’re just being stupid, I told myself as I pedalled. You’re here on a superb island, with an incredibly sexy woman, setting up a new life in France. As an old English girlfriend of mine, Ruth, would have said, stop whingeing and start bingeing.

  9

  FLORENCE WAS ON the floor doing her pilates, a cross between yoga and aerobics. Weirdly, seeing her doing it naked was only marginally more sexy than watching a girl get a bikini wax. It took all the mystery out of her body.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said from the bed.

  ‘Bonjour. How was your evening?’ Florence was flexing an arm like someone repeatedly refusing a cup of tea.

  ‘Great. We danced.’

  ‘Yes, he adores to dance, Papa.’ She lay on her back and kicked a tensed leg outwards, stretching her muscles as if her crotch was about to burst. I decided I didn’t want to see any more and concentrated my attention on the soothingly blank white ceiling.

  ‘He likes dancing with old ladies, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Oh. Did he drink a lot?’

  ‘Twice as much as me.’

  ‘You didn’t stop him, then?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. And it was lucky Michel warned me that your dad gets a bit amorous when he’s had a few.’

  ‘He told you that?’ As if Michel should have kept the warning to himself.

  ‘Yes, he did. Thank God. It was just one more thing that you might have told me yourself, Florence.’ I sat up and caught another faceful of her crotch as she stretched her thighs.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You said he got a little bizarre when he drinks. I mean, who doesn’t? But anyway, from now on, if he wants to go out and get drunk, he can do it, I’m not going to stop him. Or we’ll all go out together, and we can both stop him chatting up old folk-dancers. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ Florence thrust her rear end at me and carried on pilating.

  This whole non-communicative relationship thing really didn’t bother her at all.

  For the next three or four days, it was almost as if we were on separate vacations. I’d cycle off to catch the incoming tide while Florence would use up half the world’s supply of sunblock relaxing in the courtyard, and her dad hit the tennis courts.

  In the evenings, we’d meet up for dinner with Papa, on whom we tried some subtle sobriety control. Florence kept his water glass full of Badoit, and I made sure we never needed a second bottle of wine. This way, he showed no signs of wanting to go off and get in some exercise with the local matrons.

  A couple of times, Florence and I went on to a club. The first time it was quite an exotic experience watching sixteen-year-olds dry-humping each other while a DJ whooped ‘Shake eet, shake eet, yé!’ over the beat of bad French R’n’B. A second visit was one too many.

  I made one early-morning trip to the post office to read my emails.

  Alexa had replied, but she hadn’t picked up on my intense curiosity about The Hunk, and just made some joke about Ukrainians being a lot like us Anglo-Saxons. All mad about football and alcohol, she said. She mentioned again that she was going to be working on a film shoot, and told me about an exhibition of her photos that was going to happen in Paris soon. There was one of me she’d like me to see, she said. I couldn’t remember her ever taking my photo, though. She must have taken one while I was asleep. I just hoped I hadn’t been drooling.

  I’d now been on the island for just over a week.

  I was cycling home from the beach at the end of an afternoon workout in the waves when I felt an unusual vibration in my backside. No, I thought, I wasn’t using my phone as a suppository. It had to be a problem with the bike.

  It was. A puncture. The tyre was totally flat.

  How the hell could that happen, I moaned, with these inch-thick tractor wheels?

  I hadn’t heard a pop or felt a sudden loss of pressure, so I figured it had to be a slow puncture. I just had to pump it with enough air to last the short journey to the hire place, and I’d be OK.

  Which was when I noticed the bigger problem. The bike had a frame made of jet-fuselage aluminium, handlebars designed by a team of physiotherapists, brakes that could stop a train, but no bloody pump.

  And what’s more, the valve was so damn new and complicated that no one who cycled past me had a pump that would do more than hiss vainly when it tried to give the kiss of life to my tyre. The worst thing was when a snooty French woman on a rusty Raleigh gave me a lecture about how I ought to have stuck with good old English technology rather than trying to show off with this Formula One contraption.

  ‘Now you will have to walk all the way home with your piece of modern art,’ she said, and trundled off in a haughty trail of rust flakes.

  As it turned out, though, she was wrong.

  I’d walked only a couple of hundred yards when I saw a car driving along the road beside the cycle path. It was a la
rge green people-carrier with a taxi sign on the roof rack.

  A miracle that was not to be ignored.

  I leaped down from the path and stood in the middle of the road, waving my arms in the universal gesture for ‘If you don’t stop I’ll leave bloodstains all over your windscreen.’ The driver, a hardy-looking old guy with a freckled tan on his bald head, leaned out of his window. ‘Do you want Ars?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah oui,’ I said, the voice of a man in desperate need of Ars.

  ‘Because I’m not going any further.’

  ‘That’s perfect. I rented this bike in Ars and I must repair it. I am punctured.’

  We loaded the bike in the back and took off.

  ‘You’re English,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You made a mistake.’ As if it would have been advisable to be born French.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, you said, Je suis crevé.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That means I am very tired.’

  ‘Ah yes?’

  ‘You should have said, J’ai crevé. That means there is a hole in my tyre. Enfoiré!’

  This last word was not an expression of disgust at my misuse of French, but an insult directed at a teenager who’d just done a BMX jump off the cycle track and across the road right in front of us.

  ‘Crever also means to die. He nearly crevéd, eh?’

  We enjoyed the joke together.

  ‘Beautiful bike,’ he said, nodding over his shoulder towards my useless machine.

  ‘You like it? It is too complicated.’