Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s like la guerre des tranchées, you know?’

  ‘Trench warfare?’

  ‘Yeah. You know, the survivants get the promotion.’

  ‘But that’s great, Jake. Congratulations. This calls for fruitcake all round.’

  The tourist woman looked up expectantly. I was tempted to say that the three pieces she already had on her plate were enough, but as she and her family were the only customers, I extended the offer to her.

  Besides, Jake with a real job, and an apartment, and in love – with a French woman? This was as big a revolution as the one back in 1789.

  And the revolution didn’t end there.

  As I was putting the slices of fruitcake on plates and telling Benoît and Katy what the celebrations were about, out of the corner of my eye I saw Benoît edge away from his tea urn and place a hand on Katy’s shoulder.

  She didn’t brush it away or ask him what he was doing. She bent down and kissed it.

  So Benoît had finally learned the difference between a woman and a water heater? I was almost paternally happy for the guy.

  And then, to cap it all, came one of those visions that stay with you all your life.

  You’re walking along a beach when you look down and find the ring that you lost there ten years before. You’re sitting in a bar in Casablanca and the love of your life walks in.

  This one was even better.

  I looked out of the tea-room window to give Katy and Benoît the chance to enjoy another secret kiss without their boss ogling at them, and I saw a small brown poodle crapping on the pavement outside. Normally I would have rushed out to kick the little beast into the next street, but this time there was no need. I watched the woman who was holding the dog’s lead – a late-middle-aged, dyed-blonde lady in a fur coat and black high heels – pull a Galeries Lafayette plastic bag out of her coat pocket, stoop down and, using the plastic bag as a kind of glove, gather up the little pile of merde. She walked in pop-video slo-mo to the nearest litter bin and dropped the bag in.

  A posh Parisienne scooping her poop?

  It had to be a sign.

  The city didn’t need me any more.

  7

  Maybe It’s Because I’m Not a Londoner

  1

  THERE ARE SOME concepts that the French don’t understand.

  Lined writing paper, for example. In France, paper that isn’t blank is squared. As if there’s always the possibility that you’ll want to break off from writing notes and design a mosaic.

  And they have no idea about office coffee mugs. If you want a coffee in a French company, you usually go to the coffee machine, which will probably have real coffee-bean coffee but will of course serve it in a plastic beaker. If you get offered non-machine coffee in a posher office, it’ll usually be in a plain white espresso cup.

  So a French worker arriving in a British company will have no idea that their whole working life from now on will be dominated by a thick, fist-sized mug with ‘Sex? I’d prefer a caramel latte!’ written on it.

  This was what occurred to me when I walked back into the offices of my old company, Waterloo Foods – or Waterloo TM as it was now known. It was here that I’d launched the Voulez-Vous Café Avec Moi chain of ‘French’ cafés, just before Jean-Marie had headhunted me.

  And the first thing I saw, after getting through the airport-style security in their new reception area, was a guy crossing a corridor with a clutch of mugs in his hand. Off to the kitchen to make tea and coffee. It’s a sight that you never see in France. I smiled as if I’d just spotted an old friend.

  Not that the guy with the mugs was an old friend at all. I didn’t recognize him.

  I didn’t recognize the corridor, either. The drab old colours had been replaced by Mediterranean blue for the walls and coral pink for the carpet. I was walking through a blackcurrant-and-raspberry yogurt.

  Everything about the place was brightness and dynamism. There was even a poster by the kitchen door reminding staff that clenching your buttocks fifty times while waiting for the kettle to boil could burn up fifty calories.

  I was burning calories twirling my rock-star backstage pass in my hand. Everyone had to wear one nowadays, it seemed, though I couldn’t quite bring myself to hang it round my neck. I was still in French ‘I’m too cool to make myself look like a dork’ mode.

  ‘You’ve got to put that on, Paul mate.’ This was Charlie, my boss, erupting out of a doorway as I passed.

  I’d called him up the previous week on the off chance that he might be able to take me back on and, much to my surprise, he had said that I could start whenever I wanted.

  And finish whenever I wanted, too.

  Because no one actually worked for the company any more. At least, not as employees. There were only consultants, managed by other consultants, reporting to the group of consultants who’d bought the company a few months earlier and made all two hundred employees re-apply for their old jobs. Only a small percentage had made the grade, and the total staff was now just eighty or so, most of them newcomers.

  In France a company trying to do this would have made national headlines, but here it was just another takeover.

  I wasn’t complaining, though, because the new system worked in my favour. I owned my own company, My Tea Is Rich, so I could instantly become a consultant for Charlie, with no admin hassle at all. He had, he told me, a very Anglo-French ‘problème’ that I’d be the perfect man to solve.

  So here I was, back in a suit, back in London – Paul West, international troubleshooter.

  We shook hands – no hug, thank God – and Charlie escorted me along to my new office.

  He was looking very butch. He was forty-five, grey and balding, but he’d had his hair cropped really close, and the sleeves of his purple-checked white shirt were rolled up to reveal thick, hairy wrists. He looked like an off-duty rugby player, which, judging by other guys in the offices, seemed to be the style du jour.

  These days, our executives have to look butcher than our army, I thought. I felt positively effeminate with my suit jacket still on and my hair more than half an inch long.

  This wasn’t my ‘Jake’ suit, by the way. I’d written that off. Apart from anything else, I didn’t want Jake wandering the streets of Paris in his underwear. So I’d nipped along to the Paul Smith shop in Paris and got myself a couple of grey suits that looked as conventional as a Rolls-Royce until I opened them up and showed off the psychedelic linings.

  ‘Paris too full of Parisians for you, then?’ Charlie bantered. Like so many Brits, he loved to slag off the French and spend most of his holidays in France.

  ‘Yeah, too many sexy women. My blood pressure’s gone through the roof.’

  ‘Sacré bleu, you poor sod.’

  The office doors were all glass now, letting natural light into the central corridor from the street. However, they’d been closed off with digicodes so you could see in but couldn’t get in.

  Charlie told me the code to my door, let me punch it in to get it memorized, and we entered a bright, white-walled room.

  Three of the four desks in the office had laptops on them, and the laptops were being typed on by three people I didn’t recognize – a young Indian guy, a Black woman, and a Charlie clone. All of them, like Charlie, were in suit trousers and patterned white shirts.

  ‘Guys, this is Paul.’

  I shook hands with Sanjeet, Marya and Tom.

  Sanjeet was the coolest of the bunch – he had gelled hair, and one of those micro-shaving things going on with his sideburns, which tapered down into half-millimetre-wide dagger blades on his cheek. Marya came second in the cool stakes – she had very dark skin, black lipstick, and hid a slight plumpness inside a beautifully cut black trouser suit that accentuated her curves. Tom was ten years younger than Charlie but just as bald and stocky. His bottom shirt button was undone so I could see a tiny wisp of belly hair above his belt.

  We all introduced ourselves briefly, and then the others
sat back at their computers and carried on with their frenetic typing. It was a pleasant change from the traumatic day when I walked into my French office and came up against the four people who were going to make my life hell for the next nine months. Here, at least there would be no language barrier.

  Or would there?

  ‘Tom, mate, can you walk Paul through the settling-in bullshit?’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve got to give the Beast a quick heads-up.’

  ‘Sure,’ Tom said. ‘Any news on my go-live yet?’

  ‘What’s the burning platform?’

  ‘Well, I’m holding their feet to the fire on dates, but so far I’ve only got a soft launch, and it’s February.’

  ‘Wo, showstopper.’

  What the fuck were they talking about? Didn’t everyone in the company use to speak English?

  2

  ‘WHO’S THE BEAST?’ I asked Tom when Charlie had gone.

  ‘It’s what we call the CEO. Apparently when he took over, someone gave him an extension number that ended in 666 and he went apeshit. He doesn’t look like the devil, though.’

  ‘Apart from the horns and the tail,’ Marya chipped in, without interrupting her typing.

  ‘Is that why there are no phones?’ I asked. So far, my desk was still totally bare apart from my laptop bag. The only phones in the room were mobiles.

  ‘Didn’t Charlie boy tell you?’ Tom said. ‘We consultants just get a flat fee. You use your own phone. Up to you how long you spend on it.’

  ‘Right.’ It seemed sensible in an insanely puritanical way. The phones at Jean-Marie’s company had devoted half their time to weekend plans, family problems, lovers’ rendezvous and even premium-rate phone-in competitions. Well, mine had, anyway.

  ‘Round-up’s at nine. Done a flash report?’ Tom asked me.

  ‘No.’ I couldn’t have done one because I didn’t know what one was.

  ‘Oh, OK.’ Tom went back to thumping his keyboard with his butch fingers.

  And that seemed to be it. I was settled in.

  ‘You’re here for the famous frog project, right?’ Marya asked me.

  ‘Yeah. The not-famous-enough frog project.’

  ‘You broken the bad news to him yet?’

  ‘No.’

  The breaking of a certain bit of Anglo-French bad news was basically the ‘problème’ I’d been recruited for.

  When I’d called Charlie, he’d said that the company was just about to get itself a French celebrity chef, and they needed someone to liaise with him.

  ‘You’ve lived with them, you know what an awkward bunch of bastards they are,’ he said, showing that I wasn’t the only British man who was crap at diplomacy.

  Apparently, the chef was a genius with a sandwich, and Waterloo TM had signed him up as the (future) star who would bring an extra touch of class to the blue-cheese baguettes in the Voulez-Vous Café Avec Moi outlets.

  The only problème was his name.

  ‘You’re going to have to get him to change it,’ Charlie told me.

  ‘Why? What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s typically Breton.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘His first name is the Breton version of Ian.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘And his family name – well, there’s a village in Brittany with the same name.’

  ‘Which is?’

  But he wouldn’t tell me on the phone. He preferred to send it over in an email. And when I read his message, I understood why.

  My chef was called Yann Kerbolloc’h.

  Yes, spoken with a British accent, it sounded like advice on how to resist rapists.

  In French, though, it was perfectly neutral. Yann Kerbolloc’h was as innocent of any offence as a guy called Peter Burns wanting to be taken seriously in France. ‘Péter’ means fart, ‘burnes’ are bollocks. Welcome to France, Monsieur Fart-Bollocks.

  And because no one in the company had dared to tell Yann about the problem, he was under the impression that we were going to print billboard-sized posters advertising our new ‘Yann Kerbolloc’h sandwiches’. It was my first job to explain why not.

  There was, therefore, a high likelihood that in the very near future I would be fending off a violent assault with a French baguette, but it was a risk I was willing to take, because having the job meant that I could meet up with Alexa whenever she wanted to check that I was being a good boy.

  That was the deal with her. I was over here proving that I could behave – I could be there when she needed me, I could avoid trying to get my limbs wrapped round other women, and, most importantly, I could resist the compulsion to perform trios for voice and urine at three in the morning.

  I wasn’t sure whether there was going to be any sex included in the deal for the moment. But if the worst came to the worst, I could always resort to one of those lesbian-action movies.

  ‘Anyone fancy a brew before the meeting?’ I offered.

  ‘Yeah. Hey, we were forgetting the most important thing,’ Marya said. ‘What mug can we give Paul, guys?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve brought my old mug from when I worked here before.’ While I was sorting through the stuff I wanted to bring over from Paris, I’d found my old Waterloo Foods mug – plain white, with the slightly faded head of the Duke of Wellington pointing his beaked nose eastwards towards Belgium. I pulled it out of my bag and got an ironic-sounding ‘ooh’ from Tom.

  Sanjeet stood up to admire it. ‘Vintage,’ he said. ‘Look at this crap they gave us. Job lot of seconds, man.’ He picked up the mug standing next to his laptop. It was the same blue and pink as the corridor décor, inscribed with a dashing new ‘Waterloo’ logo that had a little black TM hovering at its shoulder. But it felt light and fragile compared to my hunky old Wellington mug.

  ‘Sanjeet will show you where the coffee and stuff is, won’t you, Sanjeet?’ Marya shot a teasing look at Sanjeet, who immediately changed from a self-confident PR consultant to a sheepish schoolboy.

  ‘Yeah, bloody Sanjeet here had a solo brew, didn’t he?’ Tom said, with real venom in his eyes.

  ‘Only ’cause I didn’t have one first time round, man,’ Sanjeet defended himself.

  ‘So?’ Tom said. ‘Solo brews are out of order. Anyway, you’re both forgetting something,’ he added. ‘Paul can’t make a brew.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. When I’d worked here before, refusing to let someone make tea for you was on a par with saying no to a blow job. It was just plain impolite.

  ‘We’ve hit our limit, haven’t we?’ Tom said. ‘We always said we’d put a lid on the coffee club at twenty, and we’re at twenty now. Sorry, Paul, nothing personal. You can be a visitor today, but after that you’re on your own.’

  ‘We never used to have a limit,’ I protested.

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s all changed now,’ Tom said. ‘You know what they say, work for change or change your work. Sorry, mate.’

  So it looked as though I’d be taking two cases to the European Court of Human Rights – first my request to translate ‘sandwich’ into French, and now my appeal against exclusion from the Waterloo TM second-floor coffee club. Brussels was going to be much too busy to take on any new member states.

  3

  THE DEPARTMENTAL ROUND-UP started late, which surprised me. I thought we Brits were supposed to be punctual. But no, it seemed that we were just as capable of being late for meetings as the French.

  So it was ten past nine by the time we all sat round the oval table in Charlie’s office.

  Like the room where I’d just plugged in my laptop, it was very impersonal, a temporary home. You got the impression that Charlie could have packed away the photo of his wife and kids and vacated the premises in a matter of seconds.

  He asked for, and got, two-minute reports from Tom, Sanjeet and Marya. This was what they’d been typing when I arrived.

  They were working with the marketing people on similar projects to mine – an idea to sell own-brand coffee, a study comparing Voulez-V
ous to American chains, and, most important of all it seemed, a consumer survey on whether ‘Waterloo’ was the right name for expansion across Europe. There was another logo change in the air, with all the huge outlay that that would entail.

  They discussed their problems in the same gobbledegook I’d heard them using before.

  ‘We’re not going to the in a ditch over that,’ Charlie would declare, or ‘Seems like we’re boiling the ocean.’

  Everyone got their allotted time slot and no more. Two-minute update, maximum three-minute discussion, and that was it. No one deviated from the agenda by a second. Massive problems of potential overspending and hopelessly missed deadlines were dealt with calmly and positively. No one came even close to getting as irritated as they had over who made tea.

  Finally, Charlie turned to me. I was top of the bill.

  First, we brainstormed about my chef’s new name.

  ‘Let’s start with some famous French names,’ said Charlie. ‘And Paul, can you hold off until the others have made some suggestions?’

  ‘Napoleon,’ Tom pitched in immediately.

  ‘Josephine?’ Marya added.

  ‘No, living French people, please,’ Charlie said.

  Sanjeet opened his mouth to answer.

  ‘No footballers,’ Charlie interrupted. ‘No one would buy a sandwich made by a centre forward. And let’s forget politicians, too. They’d only put the punters off their food.’

  There followed a full minute’s silence while everyone realized that they didn’t know the name of a single living French male apart from footballers and the president.

  ‘Paul, rescue us, s’il vous plait,’ Charlie pleaded.

  I listed a few French stars. Every one of them was greeted with frowns of ignorance, including Gérard Depardieu – until, that is, I said him again as ‘Dee-par-doo’.

  None of the names took Charlie’s fancy, though.

  ‘How about something food-based?’ he asked.

  ‘What, like Yann au gratin?’ Tom suggested.

  ‘Or Yann au vin?’ Marya added.