Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Yann Beaujolais Nouveau?’ Sanjeet struggled to keep a straight face.

  ‘Sorry, guys,’ Charlie said, ‘but you’re talking a load of Kerbollocks.’

  ‘Why don’t I have a look at the Paris phonebook on the Internet,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll pitch you some ideas tomorrow morning.’

  Charlie approved this. I’d already used up my five minutes of fame and he still wanted to talk about how to sell my chef to the British public.

  ‘What are his core competencies?’ he asked.

  ‘Cooking?’ I ventured. I mean, what a question.

  ‘Yes, Paul, he’s a chef. Anything else?’

  ‘He’s French. I mean, that’s why you hired him, right? He’s French and he can cook.’

  Charlie grimaced.

  Tom defended me. ‘Paul’s right. Why bother with details?’

  ‘Yes, but Jamie Oliver’s blond. That TV goddess chick can lick chocolate. What’s our man’s USP?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He can juggle courgettes,’ I said.

  ‘He can?’

  Actually, I’d made this up, but in the promo photos I’d been sent, Yann had had a pair of courgettes in his hands as if he’d been about to play the drums with them. Or juggle.

  ‘Courgettes?’ Charlie said the word as if this was not a vegetable to be taken seriously. He obviously needed to go and spend a few weeks with my ex-mother-in-law down in Corrèze.

  ‘Scope for knob gags,’ Tom said approvingly. ‘Tabloid coverage. Sounds good to me.’

  Charlie shook his head and declared the meeting over.

  As the others left the room, he pulled me aside.

  ‘You didn’t have a written flash report,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well I’m going to need one this evening.’

  ‘Right.’ I’d ask one of the others how to do that.

  ‘And a resolution plan.’

  ‘OK.’ Whatever that was.

  ‘With interim milestones.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Frankly, I understood French better than this.

  ‘And remember that as a consultant you are both the owner and resolver of any issues.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That courgette stuff was funny, but don’t think you can wing it all the time.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  ‘Good. We’re not a blame culture. But don’t screw up.’

  And all this just because I’d agreed to tuck my shirt in.

  4

  BY THE TIME I got back to my mansion that night I was bushed.

  No, I wasn’t living in the ex-Russian embassy. But it was a real mansion – a beaten-up, white-washed and grey-stained block called Boscombe Mansions that had been converted from family apartments into a hundred bedsits for immigrant Londoners like myself.

  The flats were above a parade of shops – Burger King, Starbucks, Kodak Express, a newsagent and a betting shop. This being the French ghetto, there was also a crêperie.

  In the street there was a permanent smell of fast food in the air. Inside my building it was lemon disinfectant.

  But the bedsit was only mind-numbingly expensive, as opposed to bank-breakingly expensive, and it was excellently located. You had to hand it to the French, I decided. If you’ve got to pick a place for a ghetto, South Kensington is not a bad spot. Just down the road from Harrods in one of the city’s smartest neighbourhoods.

  When I’d arrived there at the weekend, the first French tilings I’d seen were the consulate and the school, which was called, of course, the lycée Charles de Gaulle. Both were right opposite the Victoria & Albert and Natural History museums, a location that just about summed up France, I thought – style and science.

  The consulate was typically provocative. Not only was it flying a tricolor, there was also a huge European flag hanging out over the road. I was sure that a few London cabbies would have crashed in fury on seeing that.

  There was a whole street of French cafés, with a deli and a rôtisserie, and round the corner was a wonderful French patisserie with a window full of gateaux. One of these cakes had me drooling – a fluffy, creamy chocolate gateau with a wafer-thin collar of chocolate shavings. They don’t know how to make gooey cakes, I thought, but you can’t beat them at tarts and gateaux. It was like a mirror image of my tea room. The patisserie was bringing chocolate shavings to Londoners, while my tea room was taking goo to the French. I’d have to call Benoît and ask how the goo was going.

  Something else reminded me of the tea room, too. There were French restaurants dotted all over South Kensington, and none of them had been forced to translate their menus.

  The crêperie offered a ‘crème de marron’ pancake, which was defined as ‘purée of sweetened marron glacé’ – what the hell was that? I’d lived in France and even I didn’t know.

  Another place had ‘œuf de canard en meurette’, which seemed to mean something like ‘dying duck’s egg’. Not a speciality I’d ever tried.

  And at the bottom of that menu there was ‘potage paysanne’, which I ought to have reported to the police. Stew of peasant girl? Were London’s Frenchies really cannibals?

  They hadn’t seemed that way on the Internet.

  There was, I’d discovered, a lively community of French expats living in London and chatting to each other on the Web. Sharing the good news that French freezer-food shops were opening up here, so they’d be able to get frozen foie gras for Christmas. Telling each other which bars to visit if they wanted to meet some of France’s famous London-based footballers. And advertising accommodation to rent.

  I’d had enough of sharing with French Friends fans, so I opted for the bedsit, which was in this ‘mansion’ building owned and run by a Parisian management company. My new home was decorated with unstainable dark colours and indestructible materials, with a ‘kitchen’ that consisted of a fridge with a microwave on top. It was as charming as a motorway service station, but it felt kind of monastic, which was the idea.

  That evening, I sat down with a takeaway ratatouille (that hadn’t been translated on the menu, either) from the French deli, and phoned Alexa.

  She emailed me a photo while we were talking. It was another of her light-saturated colour shots of me, taken when I was leaving Yuri’s house on the morning I got kidnapped by the Hulk. All you could see was my back. My hands were in my pockets, my legs looked as if I was about to kick out at a stone.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked. ‘That you were glad to see the back of me?’

  She didn’t quite understand the idiom. I had to explain it.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought you looked like a man who is just leaving the building after having sex.’

  ‘Oh. Was that a bad thing?’

  ‘No. It was flattering.’

  ‘Oh. Great. Brilliant.’ Though if she meant that our future sexual encounters would be limited to me getting shoved around by a Ukrainian bodyguard and then having coffee with her mum, I wasn’t sure how keen I was. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Well, you come to London, you find my house, and afterwards you look like you have – how do you say? – achieved something. Like having sex.’

  ‘Right. Though what I mainly achieved was making you cry.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Why did you cry, Alexa?’

  She laughed again. ‘One day I will tell you. But for now it is best that you do not know.’

  So she was going to play la femme mystérieuse, was she? I didn’t know how much of that I could take. There was a distinct danger that London would rub off on me and that I’d get used to half-naked women whose idea of mystery was shouting ‘Guess whether I’ve got any knickers on!’

  5

  I’D BEEN IN the French ghetto for only two or three days when I was warned that I ought to leave the country.

  It happened while I was trying to withdraw some cash from the local branch of a British high-street bank. The ATM recognized that my credit card was not English, and very diplomatica
lly started to talk to me in French.

  It wanted my ‘code personnel’, and asked me ‘Combien voulez-vous?’

  Everything was going fine until it came to the bit about ‘your cash is being counted’, at which point the machine told me, ‘Vos espèces sont comptées,’ which was a tragic mistranslation. Basically it means, ‘Your cash is limited.’

  So every day, this machine was telling the expat inhabitants of the ghetto, and all the French visitors to this posh area of London, ‘You’re too poor to stay here.’

  Maybe this was why the French always go on about how expensive London is. It’s because whenever they try to withdraw some cash, the British bank tells them, ‘Go home, you French pauper.’

  It was typical – we Brits and French try so hard to send out positive messages. But we always get it wrong, and preserve this notion that we hate each other.

  This was also the day when I was due to meet Yann the chef.

  If it hadn’t been for his name problem, I would have been looking forward to it. I felt a kind of affinity with him, because we were both, in our different ways, French expats here in the UK, and we were both in the business of supplying ‘foreign’ food to the masses. But we didn’t get off to a particularly good start.

  First, Charlie poked his head in the office.

  ‘Paul, your raison d’être’s here.’ He’d taken to using French phrases whenever he talked to me, and getting most of them wrong. Like, he’d been asking for my flash report by saying, ‘Come on, Paul, when are you going to donnez moi le flash?’

  ‘Pardon?’ I asked.

  ‘Your chef is in reception,’ he said. ‘They’ve been trying to call you. Haven’t you got your phone switched on?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Though I’d been texting Alexa, so I’d ignored the incoming call.

  I found Yann marching along the corridor, reading the office numbers out loud in French, incensed that none of them was the one he was looking for.

  ‘Monsieur Kerbolloc’h,’ I called out, pronouncing the name in as un-English a way as I could. ‘Welcome to Waterloo.’ OK, that didn’t sound too diplomatic when said to a Frenchman, but I don’t think the historical reference even registered, because he was spitting mad about the way he had been treated down in reception.

  ‘Ze girl, she is dronk,’ he said.

  ‘Dronk?’

  ‘Yes, she laugh non-stop. She as dronk too much beer.’

  Oh shit, I thought. And now she’s probably photocopying his ID and sending it to all her mates. I’d have to call and put a stop to that.

  ‘I tell her she is dissing me and must geev me respect. This is right, no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She ought to have shown you some respect.’ Though Yann would have to learn that not all the English-speaking world operated exactly like a rap video.

  To placate him, I offered to make a cup of coffee.

  ‘Oh, not ze Eengleesh-style piss,’ he groaned.

  I assured him that no, this was not piss, it was real espresso.

  I’d started my own breakaway coffee club, buying an espresso machine that took one-dose capsules, and pinning up a notice welcoming anyone who wanted to join. Mine was going to be a simplified club, I announced. Even though I was a tea-room owner, my new club would be strictly no tea, no milk except for little catering capsules of cream like you get on aeroplanes, and no obligation to make a cup for everyone. You could either have it in your own mug (with DIY washing-up) or a recycled paper cup.

  So far I had ten members, and I’d already had to go out to get a new box of espresso doses.

  Yann refused to contemplate the indignity of drinking from a paper cup.

  ‘The papp-air is for ze reading, not for ze drinking,’ he decreed.

  He wasn’t much happier with the Waterloo TM mug I found him – ‘You English, you drink from ze bidets?’ – but at least he agreed to use it.

  ‘Zis is good, no?’ he asked as we watched the coffee drizzle out. ‘I say ze coffee is piss, I say you drink from ze bidet. Zis is Eengleesh humoor. You insult everysing, no?’

  So this explained it. He wasn’t an arrogant git, he was trying to be English.

  He seemed to be the type of guy who was generally trying just a little too hard. He had long, thick black hair, pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were football-star casual – enormous sports anorak, superimposed sweatshirts, designer jeans, limited-edition trainers – but he walked more like a matador, as if a bull was permanently watching him for signs of weakness.

  A handsome guy, though. He would look perfect on TV with his hair tied back and a chef’s smock wrapped around his slim torso. Promoting him was going to be a doddle.

  Once we’d changed his name.

  Charlie had said I could use his office, to get a bit of privacy when I broached the thorny problème. So we sat on opposite sides of the oval table, and I totally avoided the subject.

  Instead, I explained that English humour was impossible for non-Brits to do. We Brits can insult ourselves, but if anyone else does it, we think they’re a jumped-up, know-nothing foreigner. If he wanted to please the Brits, I said, he should make some anti-French jokes.

  ‘OK, no problème,’ Yann said, without batting a eyelid. It seemed he really wanted to succeed over here. He’d given up trying to be a celebrity chef in France, he told me, because they don’t really have them.

  ‘Ze chefs in Fronce, zey just do ze cooking and collect ze stars of Michelin.’

  What he meant, I thought, was that they don’t have time to prance about in front of the camera explaining to the punters how to fry onions.

  ‘And so zere is not much celebrity cooking books. Ze French pooblishair, zey don want my book. And ze cooking television, it is only for ze satellite.’

  ‘So you want to bring authentic French cuisine to the UK?’ I didn’t really like to tell him that that was exactly what all our British celebrity chefs were trying to do already.

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Real French Food by Yann Kerbolloc’h.’

  ‘Right.’

  This was my cue to tell him the bad news about his name, wasn’t it? No chickening out. I took a swig of coffee, swilled it round my gums to summon up the required energy, and gave it to him straight.

  He was understandably taken aback.

  ‘Pull ze testicle?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, tug on the ball, tweak the gonad. It’s not your fault, though. It’s just like a Brit called Peter Burns . . .’

  But he wasn’t listening. He was clearly watching a film of his life flashing by, with all the incomprehensible situations in English-speaking countries suddenly making sense.

  ‘Just now, at ze entrance . . .’ He pointed over his shoulder towards the stairs.

  ‘I will speak to the receptionist,’ I promised him. ‘Now, I have some suggestions for you.’

  I gave him the list of names that I’d brainstormed with the PR team, and within seconds his look of despair had been replaced by a new determination.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, placing a fingertip near the top of my list. ‘Zis is perfect. Real French Food by Yann Lebreton. Perfect.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘You know, some pipple say I am not real Breton because I av black air? Zey say ze Bretons av all orange air, like ze Celts. But I am real Breton. Now I am Le Breton. Yes.’

  He held up his hand for me to do a high five. We were back in a rap video again. I made the effort to stretch across the table and give him his handslap, though. Le client est roi, after all.

  We went to the office so I could introduce him to the other guys.

  Sanjeet and Marya were at their desks, and dealt perfectly with Yann’s new name. It was as if Kerbolloc’h had never existed.

  ‘OK. Who’s got my mug?’ Tom had burst into the office. His head swivelled in search of his prey, and he pointed down at my desk. ‘Paul! Bastard!’

  I asked him whether he was implying that I had accidentally lent his mug to my guest and client, the chef Yann Lebr
eton.

  ‘Yes. Hi, Yann, enchanté to meet you. Have you finished with my mug?’

  Yann forced a hearty laugh, then stifled it, wondering what the hell was going on. Was this an example of English humour, he seemed to be thinking. But no, Tom was deadly serious.

  ‘How can you tell it’s yours?’ I asked. ‘It’s just a new Waterloo mug, same as all the others.’

  ‘No, look, the handle’s a totally different shape. Much flatter. As your nose will be if you outsource it to your clients again.’

  ‘Here, use mine,’ I begged him.

  ‘I don’t want to use your smeggy mug. I don’t know what disgusting germs you brought back from France. Present company excluded, of course,’ he added tactfully.

  ‘Well, use a paper cup, then.’

  ‘What? For tea? You really are a foreigner, Paul. Have you finished?’ He smiled at Yann, peered down into the mug and, deciding that the remaining centimetre of coffee no longer constituted an actual drink, relieved him of the burden of finishing it. ‘Anyone want a brew?’ he offered. ‘Yann? Like to try some real English tea?’ Now that Tom had his mug back, he was benevolence itself.

  ‘No, sank you,’ Yann said, still slightly confused by the complexity of this English tea ceremony.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve got to go downstairs,’ I said. ‘To the design studio.’ Yann was due to look at some poster mock-ups and give us a signature to scan.

  ‘OK, less go.’ Yann stood up, relieved at the chance to escape.

  The design studio was the temporary home of a bunch of young, Mac-using music fans with an attitude. Putting them all together in one room had been a mistake, I thought. They had melded into a single organism of merciless cool.

  Today, two of them were rocking to the deafening beat as they light-pencilled their creations on to screen, and Yann did not get off to a good start by asking them to ‘pliz put down ze museek’.

  I was going to wait and let them take the initiative themselves, but Yann had got in there first, and I wished he hadn’t.

  Paula, the graphic artist we’d come to see, was a denim-wearing Northerner who’d told me that she thought all Southerners were ‘basically ponces’. She now eyed Yann as if she was counting exactly how many miles further south France was, before getting up slowly and turning the music down to background level.