Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  He jabbed me in the ribs, inviting me to laugh along at his philosophical joke.

  I had to admit it was the right place for stories like that. We were sitting over a couple of teatime beers in the Café de Flore, the famous Left Bank bistro where Sartre and his heavy-smoking friends used to come and philosophize.

  For such a historic monument, it was a surprisingly unpretentious place. Small, brightly lit, with discreetly art-deco décor and scarlet-covered leatherette seats. It was full, too, mainly with well-heeled Parisians. There was, I noticed, a higher than usual proportion of old guys with long grey hair in this café, all of them sitting alone. The last of the philosophers, perhaps.

  The chit-chat around us was personal stuff, though. There seemed to be less philosophical debate going on in the café these days. Mainly, I guessed, because to come here and discuss the fact that life is basically worthless, you’d have to be worth a fortune – a beer was almost triple the price of most other places I went to. I’d seen it as soon as I walked in. There were at least four or five waiters, plus a maître d’. The café had to charge top whack to pay all their salaries.

  Jean-Marie suggested we meet here because he was due to have a discreet rendezvous with a senator as soon as a debate ended. The senators never knew exactly when they would stop talking, so he had some time to kill.

  ‘It is a game,’ he said philosophically. ‘He makes me wait, but that is politics. We have so much respect for the old politicians. It is not like soixante-huit, aah . . .’

  This mention of the student revolution of 1968 sent him off into another philosophical dreamland. He even lit up a cigarette, which I’d never see him do before. Somehow I couldn’t imagine him wanting to get smoke particles on his immaculate suits.

  ‘I saw him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sartre. En soixante-huit.’

  ‘You were on the barricades?’ I failed to keep a note of intense disbelief out of my voice. Jean-Marie had risked scuffing his handmade shoes in the cause of revolution?

  ‘Oh, everyone was on the barricades. Sartre, too. He was a little man, very ugly, but always surrounded by women. I was on the barricades because all the most beautiful girls were there. Naturally, this was before I was working for my father.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have approved?’ I’d heard about Jean-Marie’s dad, the butcher who had set up his meat company and cleavered his way to the top of the industry.

  ‘Ho!’ Jean-Marie choked on a lungful of smoke. ‘No, my father detested the intellectuals,’ he said when he’d recovered. ‘Ask them what they were doing during the war, he said. Talking. In their café talking, when other men were fighting in the Résistance.’

  ‘Was your father in the Résistance?’

  ‘Oh, every Frenchman of his generation was in the Résistance,’ Jean-Marie ironized. ‘I am surprised that the Nazis occupied France for so many years, with all those millions of Frenchmen fighting against them.’

  ‘But your father was really in the Resistance?’

  ‘I don’t know. You did not ask men of his generation what they were really doing during the war. He was selling beef and horse. But to whom? Pff!’ He stubbed his cigarette out. ‘You English are lucky. You were not occupied. You did not get the opportunity to . . . how do you say? Trahir son pays?’

  ‘Betray your country.’

  ‘Yes, you are lucky. It is not a happy test.’

  His mood had changed from existentialist to half-pissed.

  While he ordered some more beers, I watched a group of middle-aged Americans who’d just walked in and were looking round as if to say, is this really the place? What’s all the fuss about?

  ‘So, Jean-Marie, about this scooter park?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Huh!’ From the tone of his voice he was as opposed to the idea as I was, which was a surprise.

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘I think it is perhaps a salopard with influence in the arrondissement who knows that I am the propriétaire of the salon de thé. Oh, Paul, my English is so bad since you leave the company. Are leaving the company?’

  ‘Left.’ Since you fired me, I could have said. ‘So you’re against the idea?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course!’ He swatted the idea away as if he was clearing the air of motorbikes. ‘A shop with this in front loses much value. It is terrible.’

  ‘Do you think you will be able to stop it?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ He raised his arms non-committally, but the grin on his face suggested that his rival wasn’t the only person in town with influence.

  I breathed a literal sigh of relief. ‘I thought you were trying to force me to sell the business,’ I said.

  ‘You want to sell?’ This came out as an offer rather than a question.

  ‘No. Well, not yet’ I explained about going to England for a while, and wanting Benoît to take charge while I was away.

  Jean-Marie stared at me open-mouthed, giving me serious doubts about the wisdom of my idea. It was as if I was the pilot of a plane and had just announced that I was off for a pee and was leaving my pet rabbit at the controls.

  ‘Paul,’ he finally said, ‘this is . . .’ But he couldn’t think of the word to finish his sentence. Ridiculous? Crazy? Suicidal? ‘Benoît is . . .’ Immature? Incompetent? Incontinent? ‘You have . . .’ Lost my business? Lost my mind? Lost any hope that Jean-Marie would ever finish a sentence again?

  He grabbed my shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘I knew it,’ he said.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘You are a . . . what do you say? Model? Yes. A model for him. He is completely changed since he works . . . is working?’

  ‘Has been working.’

  ‘Ah? Has been working for you. He has found his way. Trouvé son chemin. I am very happy. No, I am in debt.’ He nodded gravely, the joyful look on his face trying to make way for the earnestness of his declaration. ‘You cannot trust a philosopher, but you can trust me. When you are in London, I will take care of him. He will not, how do you say . . .?

  ‘Fuck up?’

  ‘Yes. He will not fuck up.’

  He held out his hand and we shook on it.

  And even though he was a politician, a smooth-talker who had shafted me (metaphorically) on several occasions and tried to shaft Alexa (literally) on another occasion, I felt that I could trust him. Probably.

  ‘You know, Benoît even tells me he is in love,’ he said.

  ‘Really? That’s great.’

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was with a tea urn.

  8

  ‘I’VE GOT MY ticket. I’m arriving in London next Sunday night.’

  ‘I have a dinner with my mother.’

  I hadn’t been phoning to invite Alexa out for a night on the town, but her reply sounded like self-defence.

  ‘Look, it’s OK, Alexa, I’m planning to stay in London for a while, so we’ll be able to see each other some other time. There’s no hassle.’ The one thing I didn’t want was her thinking that I was going to set up camp in her mews and make her life a misery. If necessary I’d go to a hypnotist and have a reminder implanted in my subconscious about the inadvisability of yodelling up at her window at three in the morning.

  ‘This is a big thing,’ Alexa said.

  ‘I know, but it’s the only way for me to prove that you’re important to me.’

  ‘More important than your tea room? You’ve worked so hard for it.’

  ‘I know. And the best bit of work I’ve done is deciding to give Benoît more responsibility. He’ll keep things going while I’m away. So don’t think you’re making me throw everything down the waste disposal, because you’re not. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes.’ We both gave this idea some space. ‘You know . . .’ she said.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I’m not seeing Sacha any more.’

  ‘Oh.’

  My mood whooped with joy and went soaring up into the blue autumn sky. It
swung like Tarzan through the trees, and kissed every monkey it bumped into. It landed firmly on two feet and scored the winning goal in the last minute of the World Cup final. It was carried aloft by adoring fans through the streets of London.

  My mouth, though, just went ‘Oh.’

  ‘You sound sad,’ Alexa said.

  ‘Do I? Well, only because I guess you must be sad, too. You know, because your relationship didn’t work out.’ Diplomatic answer or what?

  ‘You think I should get back with him?’

  ‘What?’ Bugger diplomacy. ‘No, Alexa. Let’s get one thing straight. I am sorry if he’s caused you any pain, but I am deliriously happy that you’ve split up with him. It’s brilliant news. Brilliantly incredibly brilliant. I’m just too polite to go whoopee.’ Out loud, that is.

  She laughed.

  ‘Have you moved out of the house?’ I asked, crossing my fingers, toes, eyes and kidneys.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ This time my mood was in tune with my mouth.

  ‘But he has,’ she went on. ‘He’s living in the apartment above his studio.’

  ‘Can I say “Whoopee”?’

  ‘If you want.’

  I did. ‘It gives us a chance, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘All of this?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘Ça nous donne une chance.’ She spoke to me in French for once.

  And in French, ‘chance’ has two meanings – chance and good luck.

  After this, there was only one threat to Benoît’s captaincy of the tea room, and that was from someone who really ought to have been more supportive.

  It was the day before I was due to head back to London.

  Katy was dealing with a common problem in the Eighth arrondissement – Da Vinci refugees.

  The fans of The Da Vinci Code who went on organized tours were OK, because they were shepherded from place to place by a guide. But the ones who tried to follow the book on their own inevitably got lost, because the topography in the book is, let’s say, not exactly of satellite-photo standard.

  And also because some tourists were just a little bit stupid.

  ‘The Loover was crap,’ a seven-foot-tall American teenager declared while waiting for Katy to pour him a large Coke. He was several tons overweight, an impression heightened by an inflatable ski jacket that was puffed up only marginally more than his cheeks.

  ‘We don’t use words like crap,’ his mother said by reflex. She was more interested in the cakes, and judging by the size of her rear end, which was all I could see of her – well, it was practically all I could see, period – cakes were one of her major interests in life.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the father, who was miraculously thin. An Atkins dieter, perhaps, or stomach staplee? He was draped in an olive mackintosh as if a private-eye disguise would help him follow the Da Vinci trail.

  ‘I mean, like, you’d think they’d have, like, a reconSTRUCtion? A dead guy on the FLOOR? Like, why else do we GO there? I mean, doh!’

  ‘It’s an art museum, son,’ his father said.

  ‘How many calories in those fruitcakes?’ the mother asked. She apparently thought you ordered a whole cake rather than just a slice.

  ‘Poo,’ Katy answered, having picked up the French way of expressing ignorance, which is to blow a raspberry.

  ‘And, like, the Mona Lisa wasn’t even THERE. I mean, WHAT?’

  Even I was confused at this. If there’s one thing that definitely is in the Louvre, it’s the Mona Lisa. It’s as there as Tom Cruise is there in a Tom Cruise movie.

  ‘Yes it is,’ the father said, quite calmly, as if his son talked crap all the time and just needed to be contradicted to get out of the habit. ‘It was the painting that everyone was taking photos of with their cellphones.’

  ‘What, that Jackondee thing?’ The kid grimaced. ‘NO WAY is that the Mona Lisa, Dad. Like, forGET it, OK?’

  It was here that Benoît stepped across from the till. Strictly speaking, this was one of the ‘all for one’ Musketeer moves that I disapproved of, but Katy was showing the signs of stress that you often see in sane people who have to serve idiots, most notably a trembling of the eyebrows as the brain tries to escape from the situation by gnawing its way through the front of the skull.

  A few weeks earlier, Benoît might have been suffering the same way in this situation, but now he knew how to take control.

  ‘La Joconde is the French name for the Mona Lisa,’ he said.

  ‘What? That little bald chick is HER? I mean, eew!’ The kid mimed fainting with horror.

  ‘Well, she is very old, you know,’ Benoît replied, totally deadpan.

  ‘We don’t use words like chick. What’s a scone?’ said the mother.

  ‘And it’s so SMALL, too. Like, it’s not even BIG.’

  ‘Do you mean the scone or the Mona Lisa?’ Benoît asked.

  The father opted out of the debate about art and concentrated on filling the family’s trays and getting his son’s mouth filled with something other than gibberish.

  The mother and son sat down, taking up two seats each, and as the father paid, he asked Benoît what was probably meant to be a discreet question.

  ‘Isn’t the American embassy up here somewhere?’

  ‘It’s not far,’ Benoît told him.

  ‘No, no, no!’

  This exclamation of pain and despair came from Jake who, as he often did on weekend afternoons, was sitting over a free cup of coffee, scribbling on printouts from his poetry website.

  He leapt out of his seat and went to rant in the tourist’s face. He was still wearing my suit, which was holding up really well seeing that it had probably been dragged around Paris every day for two months.

  ‘You have gone to Saint Lazare and have not found the quai for Lille, didn’t you?’ he ranted.

  ‘The what?’ the tourist asked.

  ‘The quai? Dammit. The platform? You have gone to Saint Lazare railroad station and have not found the platform for Lille, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘No,’ the tourist said, bemused.

  ‘Well, you will.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Fortunately, Jake was being confusing enough to take the other guy’s mind off the fact that he was being spat at with literary fury.

  ‘You goddam Da Vinci tourists. That book is all false! You don’t take a train to Lille from Saint Lazare. It’s from the Gare du Nord! And don’t you know that the American ambassade is only a few metres from the Louvre? The car escape in the book would be half a minute if it was geographically exact. Have you not seen the big building with the American flag at la Concorde? That is the ambassade, man. It is not here on the Champs-Elysées!’

  ‘Oh, thank you for the information.’ The tourist tried to get away from the drooling madman and go to his table, but Jake wasn’t finished.

  ‘Oh yes, he is very good at codes, this Robert Langdon, but he does not know his own flag!’

  Now, Jake was a regular (very regular) customer (or charity receiver, anyway) and a friend of mine, so Benoît wasn’t sure how to deal with him. It was up to me to show him that even friends have to be kept under control.

  I went over and placed myself directly between Jake and his victim.

  ‘You must excuse him,’ I told the tourist guy. ‘He’s a writer who’s just a little bit jealous because he doesn’t sell as much as Dan Brown.’

  ‘No—’ Jake tried to correct me, but I shut him up with a pleading look.

  ‘And he’s also a bit of a geography specialist, so he takes these things to heart,’ I added, trying to usher the guy towards his table where the rest of his family were drooling with impatience.

  ‘Oh yeah, you write geography textbooks?’ the tourist unwisely asked Jake.

  ‘No, I—’

  Again I cut Jake off. The last thing I wanted was to cause this poor American family to suffer abdominal spasms after experiencing one of Jake’s explicit poems about intimate female geography.

 
‘The public’s not ready for his work yet,’ I said, and dragged Jake back to his table to lecture him about not scaring customers if he wanted to keep his free-drinks deal while I was away.

  I even offered him a free-room deal.

  ‘If whichever nationality of woman you’re living with now throws you out, you can crash at my place.

  I’ll be leaving a key here.’

  I was surprised to see Jake blush.

  ‘Yeah, well . . . merci, but . . .’

  I was even more surprised to see him lost for words. His words always came out in a bizarre mixture of languages, but they usually came out fluently enough.

  ‘What is it, Jake? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping in the street in my suit?’

  ‘No, no, au contraire, on the whoosit. On the opposite.’ He blushed again.

  ‘You’ve arranged to swap my suit for an apartment?’

  ‘No, no. I’m going to, you know, loo one.’

  ‘Loo?’

  ‘Louer, you know, rent. I’m going to rent an apartment.’

  ‘You are?’ This was a guy who’d freeloaded ever since I’d known him, and for years before that, from what he’d told me.

  ‘Yeah. With . . .’ and he clammed up again.

  ‘With? With what? Drug money?’

  ‘With, oh merde. With Virginie.’

  I almost died.

  ‘What little Virginie?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘French Virginie?’

  He blushed even redder than ever, and gave a huge existentialist shrug. Yes, it seemed to say, the absurd has happened, life is like that.

  ‘Well, you kept this a secret, didn’t you, Jake? A French girl?’

  ‘Yeah, but you know, she’s . . .’

  ‘Oh, I know she is. Very.’

  ‘And, like, I . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I . . . merde. Je l’aime.’ He said it as if it was an admission of defeat. ‘After I rencountered her at your party, I saw her again. Then I found I was writing poems about her tout le temps. I couldn’t arret to think about her. And she wants to go out of her studio. And I can loo an apartment now that I will become directeur of studies.’

  ‘What?’ This was a secret, too. ‘You’re going to be director of studies at your language school?’