Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

‘I have one like that. I ride it along here through the forest every morning when I am not working. And I often ride it from my house to my boat, out in the main channel there.’ He pointed away to the north of Ars, where the channel to the marina met the sea. He explained that at low tide the channel was only inches deep, and he kept his boat near the sea so he would only have a few yards to push it through the mud. That way he could go fishing whenever he wanted.

  ‘You are a fisherman?’ I asked, with a little too much incredulity. He looked nothing like the jigging accordion players I’d seen. He was a thoroughly modern man in a T-shirt with a bamboo motif. No sign of a fisherman’s smock or oilskins.

  ‘In the winter. In the summer I’m usually a taxi driver.’

  ‘You live here all year?’

  ‘Oh yes. All year.’

  ‘And you have a mountain bike, not one of these old rusty things that people use here?’

  ‘Ha!’ He laughed loudly, a bellow that almost punctured his windscreen. ‘No, every two or three years I get a new mountain bike at the end of the season, when they sell off the hire bikes cheap.’

  A beautiful irony, I thought. Such a shame my hi-tech bike wasn’t equipped with a dictaphone so that I could prove to Florence that she was grating her pelvic bone for nothing. The real islanders were just as fond of soft saddles and well-oiled pedals as I was.

  ‘So where do people get these rusty old bikes?’ I asked. ‘Does someone import them from India or Africa?’

  He did his bellow again. ‘Not a bad idea. You’d make some money from the Parisians, eh?’

  ‘Or maybe you can leave last year’s hire bikes in the rain,’ I suggested. ‘They rust, and then you sell them for a big price?’

  ‘We will tell the boys at the hire shop, eh? They will start a new business. Ha!’

  Just before we reached the town, he pulled off the road into one of the lanes running towards the sea-salt pools. A large white ibis flew away in terror as the big car bumped along the track.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we’ll have a drink.’

  ‘And my bike?’

  ‘Oh, the hire shop is open late. Come.’

  He pulled up amongst several newish cars parked outside a long, white wooden hut. It had been built next to an oyster pool that a gushing tidal gate was filling up with greenish-brown water.

  Nailed above the door of the hut was a sign, ‘Amicale des anciens pêcheurs’. The ex-fishermen’s association.

  Inside, things smelled of dried shrimp and stale beer. But apart from a pile of newly repaired lobster pots it looked like a normal café. An old wooden bar with a coffee machine, beer pumps and bottles of wine and spirits. Ashtrays on each of the five or six vinyl-topped tables, three groups of men talking, drinking and smoking, their voices echoing off the unpainted walls. They were rugged outdoor types, pretty healthy-looking for their age, all except one old man who looked about a thousand years old, with wafer-thin skin over his cheekbones and long salty eyebrows. He was sitting at a large table, letting the smoke from his cigarette drift up to form a cloud over a photo of a fleet of large trawlers heading out to sea. A reminder of the days when the waters around here were full of tuna.

  ‘Salut, Albert,’ one of the smokers called as we walked in.

  Albert, my saviour, walked around the room shaking hands and introducing me as ‘an Englishman I found at the side of the road’.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ one of the guys asked, a small man with a face deeply creased by the sun. He called me tu.

  ‘Pol,’ I told him. I thought it’d save time.

  ‘You want a drink, Pol?’

  ‘Yes, a beer, s’il vous plaît, and one for my friend Albert.’

  ‘Ah non, pas de bière,’ Albert objected. ‘Get out the Pineau.’

  I’d had this before. It was Pineau des Charentes, the local fortified wine. Pretty strong stuff, a cross between wine and cognac.

  The creased-face guy got up and poured out two glasses of white Pineau on ice. We all sat around the largest table and clinked glasses, looking each other carefully in the eye.

  ‘To mountain bikes!’ Albert proposed the toast.

  He explained how he’d picked me up, and told them what I’d said about rusty bikes. This led on to a long discussion about who the ‘real’ islanders were. Some of the fishermen had originally come from the mainland, but they lived here all the year round, which, they said, made them real Rétais.

  ‘And you were happy when the bridge was built?’ I asked them.

  ‘Ho! Yes,’ Albert said. The ancient sailor smiled in agreement. ‘We were delighted, absolutely delighted, eh?’ The others all nodded. ‘It was no wonder all the young people were leaving. You imagine, a pregnant woman in winter with complications, she had to wait for the weather to be good enough to take her to hospital in La Rochelle by helicopter, eh?’

  ‘And the kids left anyway,’ another guy chipped in. ‘If they stayed at school after fifteen, they had to go to the mainland, and they stayed there.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Albert went on, ‘it was only the Parisians who said that the bridge would spoil the character of the island. They just wanted it peaceful for the month of August. And now they are secretly glad because they can bring their Ronge Rovair to the door of their holiday home, which has multiplied in price by ten.’

  ‘And so have ours,’ the ancient guy said.

  This provoked laughs, fresh drinks, and stories about people who’d sold their fishnet sheds to be turned into holiday homes. It was the exact opposite of poor old Corrèze.

  ‘We wouldn’t leave, though, eh?’ Albert asked them. ‘No, the weather here is too good for old bones. It’s a micro-climate. It never freezes here.’

  ‘Like England,’ I said. ‘It’s always hot there.’ The French love jokes about English weather. There’s nothing that makes you more popular than joking about our reputation for 365 days of rain and fog, even though the southeast of England is drier than some parts of southern France.

  The gag earned me yet another drink. I began to wonder who was paying for this. And whether Albert had left the taxi on the meter. But Pineau doesn’t let you think morose thoughts for long.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ Albert had had an idea. ‘Do you play baby foot?’ This is the French name for table football.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Like jiving, it’s an essential social skill in France.

  ‘OK, let’s get the table out.’

  Suddenly chairs were being pushed out of the way, and a couple of men went into a room behind the bar and returned carrying a baby foot table.

  Soon we were set up for a tournament. Pairs were formed. I was in a multinational team with Albert.

  ‘We will be the most fair-play team,’ he said. ‘We have an Englishman.’

  He explained to me that when you play table football ‘properly’, without spinning the players, it is called ‘jouer à l’anglaise’.

  ‘You say we English are fair-play,’ I said. ‘But that’s only a polite way of saying we always lose.’

  More laughs, more drinks, table football, more drinks.

  Soon the sun was going down across the marshes. I thought I heard the church bell strike. Was that six or seven? Or ten?

  10

  IT’S TRUE THAT you always know when a drunk man is trying to get indoors quietly. I say ‘man’ because I’ve never heard a drunken woman trying to get indoors quietly. Either I’ve lived a sheltered life or they really are better at being quiet when they’re drunk.

  Anyway, when I’m drunk I’m physically incapable of coming home quietly. If I decided to open the door and lie on the hall carpet till the morning paper dropped on my head, maybe I’d have a chance of slipping in without waking up the whole household.

  But if you factor in getting dropped off by a loud group of equally drunk fishermen, trying to squeeze through the garden gate with a mountain bike that has suddenly turned into a giant octopus, failing to locate the lock on the house door, crashing about in the shed
in search of some source of light, remembering that the door is never locked anyway and having a fit of the giggles, tripping over the staircase that someone has inconsiderately placed in the middle of the hall, then taking off a pair of sandals at the top of the stairs and discreetly dropping them down to the ground floor like two hand grenades, well, you can be sure that the next morning will start off with a few rounds of recrimination.

  What’s more, I am one of those people that the world has treated unkindly. Maybe I didn’t eat enough bacon when I was a kid. Because something about my body, perhaps the lack of a decent layer of fat around the kidneys or liver, means that I occasionally get hit by a hangover as destructive as a tank.

  It fires heat-seeking missiles into my head, torches my mouth with its flamethrower, and rolls back and forward over my stomach for a whole day. I lie there wishing for death or at the very least a gallon of morphine milkshake. No, not a milkshake. No milk and no shaking. Just let me lie still until time drags me back to life and relative painlessness again.

  But Florence could not have known this, because at dawn the next morning she was haranguing me mercilessly, emphasizing her various points about my being a drunken lout by tapping on the mattress and making the bed buck like a rodeo horse. She was probably using words, but they felt like needles in my ears.

  I tried to apologize. My tongue didn’t seem to be working, though, and she didn’t accept ‘subby’ as an answer.

  ‘Where were you?’ she repeated for the fifth time. ‘We tried calling you from the restaurant but you weren’t answering your phone.’

  ‘Fish,’ I groaned. Not very helpful, I know.

  ‘Fish?’

  ‘Bike, taxi, fish, baby foot.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Lobster pots,’ I added, filling in some of the finer details for her.

  ‘Paul, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Pineau,’ I concluded, with the accent on the ‘oh’.

  ‘What happened?’ Was she stupid or what? Hadn’t I already explained?

  ‘I die,’ I said, in French.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, I am very tired.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Tyre, bike, fff?’

  ‘Ah, tu as crevé?’

  ‘Yes.’ For someone under attack from a female bucking bronco, I was almost happy. At last things had been cleared up.

  ‘But how did that cause you to arrive here completely drunk at midnight?’ And we were off on another round of bed rodeo.

  ‘Coffee?’ I managed to beg after being bounced halfway across Wyoming. ‘Lots? Please?’

  ‘When you have explained where you were.’

  ‘Where was I?’ The mere prospect of coffee seemed to have got my brain in focus. ‘Where were you? If you’d been with me, I would have been with you.’

  Well, maybe focus wasn’t the right word. It was my blurred way of saying that we weren’t actually spending much of our holiday together these days.

  ‘You two, will you please be quiet?’

  A grumpy Indian man with ruffled hair and dark-red silk pyjamas had materialized in the doorframe.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’ I agreed with him. There was too much noise going on.

  ‘It’s bad enough having to share my holiday home with two people who treat it like a free hotel, but I don’t appreciate getting woken up in the middle of the night by a gang of men singing ‘God Save the Queen’ in terrible French accents, and then having to listen to one of them trying to demolish my house.’

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I repeated.

  His mini-eruption over, he calmed down and left me in peace. He was so much easier to manage than Brigitte. Or Florence, for that matter.

  Next time I was conscious of anything, there was a huge white cup looming up beside my head.

  Coffee, yes.

  My numbed brain willed the nearest arm to move in the direction of the bedside table, and fingers made contact with drinking receptacle.

  The cup was cool. The coffee must have been there quite a while. No matter. A starving man does not ask for his first hunk of bread to be lightly toasted.

  The only trouble with trying to drink coffee while lying face down, though, is that the human mouth is not located on the side of the skull.

  Holding the cup tantalizingly near my mouth, I lifted my head a painful few inches off the pillow and managed to tip half the coffee in one ear. Oh well, some of it would eventually dribble into my mouth, I reasoned, or soak through my eardrum into my nervous system.

  ‘Paul! Are you listening to me or not?’

  I looked beyond the cup towards the source of sound. It was true, during my attempt at drinking coffee I had noticed someone speaking rather loudly, but it had seemed of secondary importance in comparison with my need for caffeine.

  Standing next to the bed was Florence, looking a little blurred, I thought. Maybe she was coming down with something.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Go downstairs now!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your friends have brought you a present.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘The fishermen.’

  ‘No.’ Whatever they’d brought, even if it was a brace of the finest lobsters ever caught on the Atlantic coast, it could wait.

  ‘Come now.’ Florence was pulling me towards the terrifying cliff at the edge of the bed.

  ‘No, please. I’m punctured. I just want to puncture.’

  ‘Paul!’

  This was a murderous hiss, like a cobra just before it bites you in the jugular. Something told me that it might be better to go downstairs after all.

  The stairs were much steeper than I remembered, and the walls seemed to have trouble staying vertical, but I made it down to the hall, where the floor tiles were deliciously cool beneath my feet. I wanted to lie on them.

  ‘Paul. Get up. Outside.’

  Florence was pointing into the courtyard, but the light out there was much too fierce for me to see anything. I wondered if the fishermen had brought me the lamp from the lighthouse and forgotten to turn it off.

  ‘Go on, go out and look.’

  I did so. After some violent blinking, I finally managed to drag the contents of the courtyard into view.

  ‘Ah, they’ve had babies,’ was my first thought.

  Arranged in a neat row against the door of the shed were at least seven rusty bikes. Some were missing wheels, saddles or handlebars, all the tyres were deflated and rotten, most of the chains were brown and hanging off, but they were still recognizable as bikes, or ex-bikes.

  ‘Why?’ I asked philosophically.

  ‘I came back from the boulangerie and found some men filling the courtyard. Your friend Albert said they’d looked in their gardens and boathouses, and their friends’ gardens and boathouses, and brought you all the old bikes they could find. I told them to get the hell out but they refused to take them away again. He said they were for you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Apparently you’re going into business? Selling rusty old bikes to the tourists?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is this bordel?’ Papa, dressed in tennis gear, was standing at the door and gaping at his new collection of fishermen’s rust.

  Florence gestured at me to explain.

  ‘I punctured,’ I said, pleased with myself at getting it right for once.

  King Charlemagne flew into a Napoleonic rage. After trying to poison his wife, was I hoping to kill him with a heart attack? Was I planning to take delivery of a dozen crashed cars as well, to replace the new one I’d demolished?

  His ranting only stopped when a blue minibus with red and white stripes on its roofrack pulled up outside the gate.

  We all stared as a gendarme with one of those French moustache-less beards got out of the minibus and put on his black képi. He saluted.

  ‘Monsieur Bourbon?’ he asked.

  ‘Oui,’ Charlemagne confessed warily.

/>   ‘You are the owner of a Renault Vel Satis?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘I have a complaint against you.’

  Florence and her dad both looked expectantly at me, as if this was going to be my fault. Which it wasn’t at all. Well, not entirely.

  As the gendarme explained it, the owner of a red Korean 4WD, finding himself unjustly accused of causing an accident, had finally decided to break his silence about the true circumstances of the crash. He now felt morally obliged to reveal that the Vel Satis had been travelling at an illegal speed, which explained why he had been unable to avoid the regrettable collision at the roundabout, about which he now wished to make a formal complaint, backed by his insurance company, which was refusing to accept liability.

  This was not all. Monsieur had no doubt heard, the gendarme went on, of the case of a Vel Satis reported travelling at some two hundred kilometres per hour on the autoroute near Brive that same day, allegedly because of a manufacturing fault in its accelerator. Although the reports all described a car of a different colour to Monsieur Bourbon’s, the gendarmerie was now forced to investigate the theory that it had in fact been the same Vel Satis in the two cases. The witnesses of the speeding incident were all being traced so that they could be tested for colour-blindness.

  By the time this little speech was over, Charlemagne’s face had turned a red so deep that even the most colour-blind of accident witnesses would have picked it up. His volcano was going to blow and take the whole town with it.

  He opened his mouth and let the lava flow. I didn’t attempt to contradict him, I waited for the eruption to the down, but this turned out to be his Krakatoa. I was his Pompeii.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when his outburst had turned from a general rage into a more focussed bollocking. ‘There is too much bordel here. You must leave my house.’ He was using the singular ‘tu’ form, so it was only me who was being banished.

  ‘But Papa . . .’ Florence pleaded.

  ‘That is my final word,’ Charles snapped.

  ‘It’s OK, Florence,’ I said. ‘You stay. I’ll go. I ought to get back to Paris and see what your friend Nicolas is up to.’

  I turned and walked unsteadily indoors.