Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  They told me the rent, which was acceptable, pointed to various empty parts of the fridge, which were easily big enough to cope with my limited home-cooking ambitions, and showed me my tooth-mug space in a bathroom that was astonishingly free of curly hairs.

  What was more, the cleanliness was not down to any horrific communal cleaning rota but the brilliant idea of chipping in to pay the concierge, who would also iron shirts and scrape any pans that had got out of the flatmates’ control.

  It sounded like a great deal, and I was back there with my essential stuff at ten that same evening. Marie even lent me a set of sheets, which almost made me cry with gratitude.

  Life, I felt, had just become a little more merdefree.

  Silly moi.

  5

  THE DAY BEFORE the inaugural tea party I got a weird email from Alexa, wishing me luck and advising me not to work too hard.

  ‘Don’t forget to take some time for yourself,’ she told me. ‘Relax, get pampered.’

  Did that really mean what I thought it did? Was she telling me to call Virginie for some more fruity R&R?

  Not the kind of question you can ask a girl directly.

  I replied that I’d got myself well and truly pampered a few days before, and thanked her for passing on my telephone number.

  Then Jake called to pass on some very worrying information, in his uniquely uninformative way.

  ‘I don’t think your site’s branched,’ he said.

  ‘My what’s not what?’

  ‘You know, your site web. It’s not in line.’

  ‘On line?’

  ‘No. I was posting my posy . . .’

  ‘You were what?’

  ‘Posting my posy. Putting it in line. You know. I’m editing my poems en ligne, right? And, oh man, à propos, I found a super Estonian site. Like, Estonians reunited? All these women. It’s génial. You know they’re connected to the Basques?’

  He rambled on about the linguistic links between Estonians, Basques, Finns and Hungarians and the chances of sleeping with their female populations, while I started to get seriously worried about my website. It ought to have been on line already. Last time I’d spoken to the designer, everything was on schedule. Maybe Jake had got the address wrong?

  ‘Jake . . .’

  ‘So Europe should be OK, but terminating with Africa is like really dur, man.’

  ‘Jake . . .’

  ‘Like, there’s no woman in Paris from Sudan, Somalie, Eritrea. Which is like, too ironic’

  ‘Ironic?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s the horn of Africa. Horn, horny, right?’

  ‘OK, so how about, I couldn’t find girls from the Horn, so I had to make do with porn?’

  Very cruel of me, but I knew that taking the piss was the only way of stemming his flow of geo-sexual information.

  ‘Hey, man, I told you, you know, you’ve got to show un peu de respect for my posy.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, Jake. I do respect your posy. But I need to ask you about the web . . .’

  ‘Oh, damn, gotta go. Boss is arriving.’

  ‘You’re at work?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m in a course with Madame Brunerie.’

  ‘You’re in a lesson now?’

  ‘Yeah, I said it would be good for her to listen to a real English phone conversation. But my boss is arriving. At tomorrow. Ciao.’

  He hung up and I wondered what his student would have learned. The interesting verb ‘to post your posy’. Oh, and that her teacher was a sex addict.

  And still they didn’t fire him?

  He was right, though. My website wasn’t on line. And when I called the website designer she explained why. It was very simple, really – she didn’t know how to put websites on line.

  ‘But you are a website designer,’ I reminded her in my calmest French.

  ‘Yes, I design websites. But that doesn’t mean to say I can put them on line.’

  ‘But that is like a train driver saying he can drive a train but he doesn’t know how to stop it.’

  ‘No, it is not,’ she said.

  ‘Well, who will put it on line, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘But I need it to be on line when I have my official opening party.’

  ‘Well you’d better find someone really quickly, then.’

  Her logic was so dazzling, her indifference so perfect, that I had to hit myself repeatedly over the head with my phone as a kind of homage to her genius.

  6

  IT WAS SATURDAY afternoon, just before four.

  I’d got all my staff in to help out at the party – Katy, Jeanne, Yannick, the two chefs, and a part-timer, Fabrice, a small Corsican guy who hadn’t been able to come on the opening day because he’d had to go and sign up for his university Polish course. Not that he intended to study the language – he just wanted cheap students’ social-security cover. The Eastern European languages faculties were apparently full of students who never attended lectures and tutors who got paid for doing nothing.

  I lined up my troops and congratulated them on a job well done. We had closed the doors after the lunchtime rush, rearranged the tables in a long L-shape, and piled every square inch of table top with quasi-English teatime treats. The counter was given over to teacups and the holy brew itself. The tea urn was decorated with good-luck cards I’d received, including one from my folks apologizing for not coming over for the party, and reminding me that they didn’t have enough money to bail me out if things went wrong. Thanks for the confidence, guys.

  All of us were kitted out in My Tea Is Rich T-shirts, and as we posed for photos behind our battlements of cakes and sandwiches, we looked a suitably young and keen band of new recruits.

  Of course, I’d originally hoped that Alexa would do the photos, but I hadn’t even dared to ask her. It would have felt so complicated, given the whole Virginie situation. So in the end I’d just got a guy from the Yellow Pages.

  One of the first guests to arrive at the party was Virginie herself. We hadn’t seen each other since that hot night, but neither of us seemed to take this as an insult. She kissed me full on the mouth with enough tongue to let all my staff know that we had shagged, and then headed off to the table where we’d set up all the cakes. Though it seemed to me that there wasn’t much room in her tight, low-cut trousers for chocolate sponge.

  My old colleague Bernard the human walrus turned up, too, and I thought it was kind of him given the tensions between us when we’d worked together. He’d been forced by Jean-Marie to speak English in all our meetings, which had been as cruel as making a real walrus run the four-hundred-metre hurdles. He’d hit every linguistic obstacle and gone sprawling.

  ‘You were in the sun,’ I said, speaking French to show him that he was on pure leisure time. His forehead and nose were scarlet, offsetting his white cheeks and bristly blond moustache, so that he now looked less like a walrus than a hairy strawberry muffin.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Norway.’ Visiting walrus relatives, I guessed.

  ‘Well, you can forget the raw fish and eat some nice English food now.’

  ‘Nice English food?’ He went off chuckling to himself at this absurd concept.

  Two more ex-workmates arrived together. Stéphanie, the aggressive blonde who was, as far as I knew, still Jean-Marie’s mistress. And Nicole, the quiet financial controller who’d had a quiet crush on me.

  As soon as she was inside the door, Stéphanie’s critical purchasing manager’s eye was on my teabags, my crockery and the sausage rolls, as if she could see from the shape of them whether I was getting ripped off.

  ‘Pas mal, pas mal,’ she conceded. ‘Let me taste your sausage.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I was flattered. That was probably one of the offers she usually reserved for Jean-Marie.

  Nicole brushed her face against mine and said how pleased she was that everything was working out for me. She then went off to the sandwich table where she timidly nibbled through three tons of
toasties.

  Next, my snooty neighbour, the clothes-shop owner, came in and told me that the tea room didn’t look English at all.

  ‘There should be a red carpet, leather sofas, butlers serving the tea.’ This, I guessed, was why her clothes shop never seemed to have any customers in it. She was stuck somewhere in the 1940s.

  ‘Butlers?’ I said. ‘You just can’t find them nowadays.’

  But lots of French people would have agreed with her. Many of them still think that all Englishmen wear bowler hats and have sex with their wives once a year before the croquet season begins.

  Luckily, those French people are fast being outnumbered by their compatriots who think of Britain as a trendy place full of pop stars, sexy young princes and carrot cake.

  A few minutes later, with the room now getting full and smoky, came a surprise. Jean-Marie’s wife, the surgically enhanced Dior wonderwoman, turned up with her son Benoît in tow. The last time I’d seen her was the night I went to blackmail Jean-Marie, when she’d quite naturally treated me as if I had just peed on her favourite Oriental rug.

  Now, though, she was charm itself, which I guessed was equally natural. At Dior wonderwoman finishing school, they doubtless taught future French politicians’ wives to be charming to rats and cockroaches, to get them into practice for the type of life forms they would have to schmooze if their husbands were going to succeed. Being nice to an English ex-blackmailer was kids’ stuff.

  ‘Bonjour, Paul.’ The warmth of her greeting was very convincing.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame Martin.’ I took the outstretched fingers and felt socially inadequate because I didn’t have the balls to kiss them.

  ‘Catherine,’ she said, squeezing my hand. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said she was flirting.

  She was dressed pretty sexily in her own classic way. Tight knee-length skirt hugging the smoothest of hips, crisp cotton blouse cut to accentuate her boobs, the tops of which were just visible above an undone blouse button. The boobs, like her face, showed zero signs of wrinkles despite their age. And I could have sworn she’d gone up a bust size or two since our last meeting. Surgeon’s gift vouchers for her birthday, perhaps.

  Still clutching my hand, she congratulated me for having made everything work out so ‘merveilleusement’.

  It was unnerving. None of this sounded as if she’d learned it by heart for a Chamber of Commerce garden party. I even found myself doing that thing where, while a woman’s talking to you about something totally non-sexual, you start looking for hints as to whether she wants to sleep with you. Are her pupils dilating, is she licking her lips a lot? That kind of thing. Which was just plain ridiculous with Jean-Marie’s wife. Apart from the fact that it would have been commercial and maybe physical suicide, I was only two years older than her son.

  Ah yes, the son. Benoît was standing behind and above her, smiling benignly into the crowd. He’d cut off his puny dreadlocks and slicked his hair back, so that he now looked like a younger, less tanned and a million times less self-assertive Jean-Marie. Judging by his expression of vacant curiosity, he had no idea that he was being brought here to meet his new boss.

  I escorted Madame to the tea counter, prised my fingers free at last, and poured her a cup of my finest Lapsang before rushing back to the door to confront the horrific vision that had just wandered in off the street.

  The guy’s hair had apparently been stuck on with glue, his face had been shaved three days before by a blind Parkinson’s sufferer, and he had a hopelessly DIY cigarette crumbling on his bottom lip. The only incongruity was the spanking new grey-black suit that suggested he’d just burgled a designer-clothes shop.

  ‘That’s my suit!’ I wailed as discreetly as I could.

  ‘Uh, yeah, man. I was going to demand you.’

  ‘My Paul Smith suit, Jake.’ This was, after all, a man who, if the Earth was conquered by aliens from the planet Slob, would be singled out by the invaders as a god and elected eternal ruler of the Slob empire. Letting him wear that suit was like lending your best teapot to the bull who had just demolished your china shop.

  ‘I’m trying it so I can get myself acclimated.’

  ‘To what? The rest of my clothes?’

  ‘No. For a job interview.’

  ‘What? Don’t tell me they finally fired you?’

  He took a long, morose pull on his cigarette.

  ‘No, that’s the problem. And it’s starting to press. I’m doing this job as teacher of English since four years nearly now. And I feel the toxins rising almost to my brain. So I’m postulating for a new job in relations public’

  ‘Public relations?’ I said this less to correct his English than out of pure shock. Surely no company would let Jake have any relations with the public, except maybe in their complaints department. One look at Jake and you’d realize that your problem was never going to be cleared up.

  ‘Yeah. I told you. I have this plan.’

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘Yeah. You remember.’ He leaned close, so as not to reveal it to the tea-drinking, cake-chewing masses. ‘I want to get ahead by going backwards.’

  ‘I hope you’re not putting that slogan at the top of your CV, Jake. It sounds as if you’re trying to sell rowing machines.’

  He tutted impatiently and berated me for not being able to understand his ‘limpid concept’.

  ‘I want to walk backwards out of the rat race. Get a better work from which it is easier to get fired, and then I’ll get a better chomage.’

  ‘Chômage? Dole, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s proportional to your last salary. You get fired from a good job and you get great whoosit? Dole.’

  ‘So you’re going to get a job in PR just to screw it up?’

  ‘Yeah. Brilliant, huh?’

  I had to close my eyes and lean against the doorpost for a moment. This guy’s life was so exhausting. It was like an American football match, an endless series of short sprints against brick walls. Except that he never felt the slightest impact.

  ‘Go and eat some cake, Jake. And try not to get any on my suit.’

  I was about to go and mingle when I caught sight of Jean-Marie crossing the street. He was in deep conversation with a tall, classy woman in a long leather coat, who was letting him grasp her by the elbow. Was he really mad enough to bring one of his mistresses to a tea party where his wife was waiting? I wondered. And where his other mistress, Stéphanie, was making risqué comparisons between English and French sausages? Though this was France, so maybe it was the done thing as long as you didn’t actually start humping the new lover in front of everyone.

  I beckoned to the photographer to get ready for action and held out my arms in the pose of the delighted host.

  ‘Ah, Paul!’ Jean-Marie gripped my hand and turned instinctively towards the camera. He looked as stylish as ever, as if he’d come straight from a Karl Lagerfeld fitting room. ‘Let me present Nathalie. She is a reporter. She is preparing a portrait about me for the television.’

  I turned and got hit by a pair of eyes even more hypnotic than Jean-Marie’s. They were curaçao blue and apparently back-lit. I felt as though they could see right inside my head. ‘He certainly knows how to pick women,’ was the thought she would have seen in there.

  She was about thirty-five, almost as tall as me in her sexy heeled boots, with a slender face, dark-red lipstick, and blond hair in a loose ponytail that was folded up at the back of her head and held in place with a pencil. She had a gold ring on her wedding finger, but that didn’t seem to bother Jean-Marie.

  ‘Enchanté,’ I told her, using the word almost literally for once.

  ‘I was just telling Nathalie that the tea room was my idea originally.’ Jean-Marie the shameless self-publicist. ‘Is that not correct, Paul?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘But Paul has taken it to its . . . fruition.’ He relished the last word as if it had been a slice of foie gras.

  The journalist tilted her head and smiled a
t me. ‘It must not be easy for you, an English businessman in France?’ She had a slightly posh accent when she spoke English, as many French people do when they’ve been taught by the generation of teachers who think that all Englishmen wear bowler hats and shag their wives once a year, etc.

  ‘Well, no, but Jean-Marie helped me.’

  The photographer got another shot of a grateful tearoom proprietor shaking hands with a benevolent politician.

  Jean-Marie pulled me to one side. ‘Have you talked to Benoît?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Well, I cannot stay long here. I will speak to him quickly’ With a last smile for the lens, he went inside, and the crowd naturally parted for him.

  This left me alone with the lady journalist. Most of my past meetings with Jean-Marie had had far less pleasant outcomes, I thought.

  ‘So you’re making a report about him?’ I asked, and groaned inwardly. This had been explained to me approximately thirty seconds earlier. ‘I mean, just him and not, uh, all politicians?’ From bad to worse.

  She smiled warmly, as if to forgive me for stepping in my own conversational merde.

  ‘There is enough of him for a television portrait, do you not agree? Or a series, if you let him write it.’ She laughed loudly. If she was his mistress, she wasn’t just a starry-eyed fan.

  ‘He mentioned that we could film in your café,’ she said. ‘You know, you talking with him and saying how you created the concept together?’

  I got the picture. Jean-Marie, man of the community, friend of the small businessman. But why not? As he said, I wasn’t going to shoo the TV cameras out of the tea room.

  ‘Yes, that would be great.’

  ‘Do you have a card?’

  ‘Of course. Even better, take one of our office-delivery menus. Maybe we can bring you some lunch one day?’

  She nodded, and those eyes burned right into me again. It struck me that what I’d said could have been interpreted as a chat-up line. Not a bad one, for once.

  Oh merde, I thought. What was my brain up to? Surely I wasn’t coming on to Jean-Marie’s wife and his new mistress? With one of my own recent bedmates standing just a few feet behind me in the tea room.