A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  I didn't get a single reply, though, so I went back home for my enforced holiday. And was shocked to discover how French I'd become.

  For a start, like my old American chum, Jake, I forgot the simplest English words. Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.

  I nipped into my parents' local branch of Marks and Spencer, and they'd changed the whole place around since my last visit at Christmas. So I went up to a young sales girl and asked her: "Where are the ...?"

  Blank. The first word that popped into the pre-speech compartment of my brain was "slip". This (pronounced "sleep") is not a petticoat. It is the French word for what I wanted, and I'd been hearing it a fair amount from Marie, as in "take off your sleep, Pol".

  The next word I thought of was "culotte", which is for women. Also used a lot by Marie, as in "did you know, Pol, that you are talking to a woman with no culotte?"

  By this time, the M&S sales assistant was sure I'd gone into a catatonic trance, and was frowning up at me as if she thought I might suddenly collapse on top of her.

  "Knickers," I wanted to say, but that wasn't it, either.

  What was the damn word?

  "Underpants!" I shouted joyfully, and the poor girl jumped back a yard.

  "First floor, on the left," she replied nervously, and went off to alert security that there was a male underwear fetishist with a long-delay stammer heading up the escalator.

  * * *

  Even when I could remember words, my parents said they detected a slight French accent. My ex-schoolmates put it more bluntly.

  "You sound like a Frog," they said.

  Down at my old local, where I hadn't been since moving up to London a couple of years earlier, sounding French was not exactly a good idea. With the war looming and France's opposition causing outrage in the tabloids, there were people there who would have taken an axe to the furniture if they'd suspected the polish on it was French.

  My old friends were much more politically correct, but I still tried my utmost to sound like a local.

  Unfortunately, I was lost. I didn't know who managed the town's football team these days (a treasonable crime punished by having to buy everyone a round of drinks).

  When they switched to more international topics, I was OK until they got into serious analysis of the motives for the imminent sequel to the Gulf War. Since when had every Englishman become an amateur UN weapons inspector? And where had they all done their crash courses in advanced diplomacy? Discussing the political games being played on all sides was as exhausting to me as a week-long seminar on the rules of cricket would be to a drunk French pig-farmer.

  The Parisians, I realized, might be proud of their anti-war stance, but they didn't analyse it much. Saying "it's all about oil" was a kind of fashion statement, like wearing a thong that showed over the top of your jeans. And I'd become like them (except for the thong, of course). 1 didn't want war, but I didn't want to spend my whole life talking about not wanting it. I wanted to dismiss talk of war with one hip statement and get back to serious subjects like sex, holiday plans and where to get good seafood.

  Ah, yes, food. That was the worst problem. When my mum put her usual salad bowl on the table - uncut lettuce leaves, whole tomatoes, cucumber slices, sticks of celery - I felt an irresistible urge to ignore the mayonnaise and salad-cream bottles and make myself some vinaigrette. There was only malt vinegar in the kitchen, though, and some cooking oil of unidentified vegetable origin. I did my best with the ingredients at hand, returned to the table with my bowl of dressing, and began tearing up some lettuce leaves with my fingers. It didn't occur to me that I was doing anything unusual until niy dad asked, "Don't they have knives and forks in Paree, then?"

  "Yes, but..." I didn't finish my explanation. Not because I'd forgotten the words but because I realized how stupid it was going to sound to say "you don't cut lettuce with a knife."

  I cut the rest of my leaves with a knife, and took a long look at the celery. I'd never seen it eaten in France - they only eat the strong-tasting root, diced up coleslaw-style. Celery sticks belong to the class of vegetables, like swede and parsnip, that the French think only just good enough to feed to horses or cattle. Crunching into the hard, stringy flesh, I now agreed with them. Where was the taste? My palate seemed to have been spoiled. One hint of blandness in my food and I started to look around for the nearest hungry horse to feed.

  Another difficulty was that I had become allergic to the idea of eating bread bought from a supermarket. How, I wondered, had I and this whole nation survived for so many years without a bakery on every street corner? It now seemed like a basic infringement of human rights. I was a foreigner.

  So I filled my bag with indigestion tablets and English underpants and headed back to a city where I could get better food and more relaxing conversation. As I passed below the English Channel I wondered how long it'd be before the French decided to brick the tunnel up as a snub to their warlike neighbours from hell.

  As I had virtually nothing to do at work, I kept up a regular stream of chit-chat with my English mates via email. Chris, my friend who'd been made redundant by a French bank, felt obliged to send me every anti-French joke doing the rounds on the internet. In just two or three days I accumulated about a hundred jokes, photos, cartoons and songs. These ranged from the mildly satirical observation that Chirac's attitude might be influenced by the way his name ended in "irac" to some highly undiplomatic visual suggestions of where the French President might like to insert the Eiffel Tower.

  Needless to say I was careful not to leave any of these lying about on the printer.

  I kept an eye out for Jean-Marie, but never saw him. The only inkling I got of his existence was that the indigestion tablets I'd left on his desk had disappeared.

  Our "comités" weren't happening any more, and everyone except Nicole and Christine was treating me as if I was a cross-channel ferry that was about to capsize under them.

  Whenever Bernard saw me, he shook my hand snd smiled mysteriously at me. As walruses aren't known for being able to smile mysteriously, he just looked as if he was trying to fart.

  Stéphanie told me (in French) that she was sure France's experienced diplomats would gain the upper hand at the UN over the "unsubtle Anglo-Saxon barbarians".

  "Probably yes” I replied (in French), "the diplomats of the Anglo-Saxons talk only Abba

  language and have wings on the head." She looked bemused. My French still wasn't good enough to convey irony.

  Marc never broached the subject of war when the others weren't there - I guessed from this that he secretly supported the US but didn't dare to say so. He knew that it was not exactly a fashionable opinion.

  Marianne the receptionist didn't mention war either, but she didn't need to. She glowered at me every time I entered or left the building, and obviously thought that I personally wanted to go and bomb Iraq. Or maybe now that I was out of favour with Jean-Marie, she was simply letting her natural unfriendliness show through. She informed me through gritted grey teeth that I shouldn't have taken holiday without filling in a holiday form, and that she wasn't altogether sure I was entitled to holiday anyway, having been at the company for less than a year.

  "OK," I told her. "I will return the holiday to you." Bugger diplomacy, I decided. This was war.

  Christine was her usual friendly, beautiful self, but was spending most of her days on the phone to her fiancé or her mum, the former to reassure him, on the hour every hour, that she still adored her "chaton d'amour" (love kitten), the latter to argue about arrangements for the wedding which was, as far as I could gather, now only a year away. It was being more thoroughly planned than our whole chain of tea rooms.

  * * *

  Nicole was the only one of my colleagues I still had meaningful conversations with. I knew that this was partly because she wanted to keep her English up to scratch, but that was OK with me.

  We started going out to lunch together a lot. The weather
was getting better, and it was sometimes good enough to sit outside. Some of the brasseries near the office had overhead heaters between their terrace tables, so if the sun was shining, it almost felt like midsummer. You just had to be careful standing up in case you inserted your head, Chinese hat style, into the gas flames.

  It was Nicole who kept me up to date on the way worsening Anglo-French relations were affecting my project. With every bitchy skirmish between governments, my tea rooms became less and less likely to come to fruition, like a hillside of vines gradually getting its buds knocked off by successive rainstorms.

  The French media repeated every anti-Chirac headline in the excitable British press, and you'd have thought we Anglos would not have been flavour du mois with Parisians in general. But outside of the office the subject rarely came up. When I bought my baguette, my atrocious accent flyng like a massive Union Jack above my head, the boulangère's only comment was "eighty cents, please".

  And whenever I walked past a McDonald's or a KFC, the place was always full. Did the clients really think that "Happy Meal" was a traditionally French concept?

  If the mood was slightly sombre in Paris, it had little to do with international politics. It was because of the pharmacists' strike.

  As my trusty guidebook told me: "In Paris, there is one pharmacy approximately every ten metres, with its green neon cross flashing out a call to the French to come in and over-medicate themselves. And, to paraphrase the old song, you never see a pharmacist on his bike. The licences to set up a pharmacy cost a mint, and are bought and sold as voraciously as Monet paintings."

  Now, the pharmacy shopfronts were locked up behind iron grids. And below each forlornly unlit green cross, there stood a cluster of sneezing, moaning pharmacy addicts praying for a miracle.

  I didn't know it, but I was about to join them.

  The first blow to my health came, ironically, when a team of doctors flew back into Paris. One of them was Marie's boyfriend.

  "Boyfriend?" I asked incredulously when she announced over the phone that we wouldn't be spending the hours of darkness naked together for a change. "You have a boyfriend?"

  "Yes. He was not in Paree."

  This woman, who for the past month had been wholeheartedly engaging in every sexual act known to humankind with me, felt some sort of allegiance to another man?

  "What is he? A monk? A eunuch?" Only this could explain her unquenchable libido, surely?

  "No, ee eez doctor." She explained that her boyfriend was a member of Médecins Sans Frontières, the French medical charity. He'd been based in Baghdad, and had just been warned that British and American bombs might not be able to distinguish between French doctors and Iraqi troops. They took the hint and got out of the country.

  All sorts of questions about the doctor's sexual performance, Marie's ability to switch her affections on and off, and my role as some kind of full-size dildo, popped into my mind, but it didn't seem worth asking them.

  "You av leave some condom at my apartment. You want I send them to you?" she asked.

  "No, keep them. You might need them. You never know when your boyfriend will go out and leave you alone for the afternoon."

  "Uh?"

  "Keep them. I don't need them any more."

  "Why don you tele-fon Florence? She lahk you," Marie suggested. Florence was her half-Indian frend I'd met in the bar. "Ah av tell her you are OK for French woman now."

  What does that mean? English women do like sex, you know. Maybe it's just you personally that has to get herself shagged four times a night, every night."

  Marie laughed. "You are angry. Call Florence, she is calming you."

  "You mean her boyfriend's away for the week and she needs servicing?"

  I rang off, and breathed a few curses about screwed-up French womanhood. The only thing that could make things worse would be if Élodie came rushing home from the USA in protest at her host country's enmity towards France. But then, knowing Élodie, she would live anywhere as long as there were plentiful supplies of drugs and male models.

  One result of getting dumped by Marie was that I was calm and relaxed the day war finally broke out. I'd slept a full eight hours. I had had moments of semi-wakefulness, but as I turned over in bed, I was so relieved to find that I hadn't been woken by a hand (or, worse, mouth) tickling my nether regions that I fell instantly back into deep, dreamless slumber.

  It took a few minutes of journalists' excited babbling, and several bombardment sound effects, to pierce my consciousness as I lay in bed that morning, relishing the fact that at least one place in the world - my mattress - was a combat-free zone.

  Sex, I decided, is wonderful, but it's like champagne. If you're forced to have four glasses at every meal you start to fantasize about a glass of water.

  So it wasn't until I was actually standing under the shower, letting the blistering hot water massage some life back into my stiff muscles (which were stupidly complaining about the lack of a night-time workout) that I took in the news.

  War?

  I turned off the water and stood there dripping, the cold air gradually seeping into the cubicle and making me shiver.

  War.

  We all knew it had been coming (except, perhaps, the people who'd been obliterated in the first night's air raids), but it was still a shock.

  And it spelt a kind of death sentence for me too. Not as bad, I had to admit, as getting a bunkerbuster bomb on your head or receiving a grenade in your tank, but a blow nonetheless.

  I took my time getting into work. I gave Marianne my brightest "bonjour". She replied with a grunt, which I thought was promising. If she'd already prepared my redundancy notice, I'd have got a charming grey smile.

  I went up to Christine's office and asked her straight out.

  "Alors?"

  "Alors quoi?" she pulled a paper tissue from the large flowery pack on her desk and blew her nose. "Oh, la guerre? Oui, les pauvres enfants." She shook her head and broke off our conversation to call her mum and ask if she had any spare cough medicine and make sure that hostilities in the Middle East would not disrupt supplies of silk for wedding dresses.

  I threw my bag onto my desk and called Nicole.

  "Alors?" I asked her.

  "Qui est-ce?" Of course, she didn't recognize my French voice. People's voices change a lot when they speak in a different language.

  "Paul."

  "Ah, Paul, ello. Hit is offal this oo-ah, no?"

  "Yes, you're right. War is offal. What er-?" It sounded preposterous, but there was no other way of putting it. "What impact do you think the war will have on our tea rooms?"

  "Ah yes." She thought for a moment. "I don't know. You must talk with Jean-Marie."

  "But he's not here. He's never here."

  "Yes. Then I suppose you continue has normal."

  I pondered the idea of continuing to do nothing except email friends, read anti-French jokes and drink coffee. It didn't sound too unpleasant a prospect, hut it wasn't what I'd had in mind as a career.

  Jean-Marie didn't turn up that day, or the next. Or the next. It was like the phoney war in 1939, when France carried on living almost normally for months. And then the enemy came and stomped all over them.

  It was difficult to judge what the others thought about the tea rooms. Mainly because it's difficult to judge what someone thinks if you never see them.

  That's not quite true. I did see the other members of my "team". I bumped into Bernard by the coffee machine, reading the instructions on a tube of muscle relaxant cream that he'd just borrowed from a colleague. Stéphanie popped up to inquire how London was looking (she still had fond memories of her trip with Jean-Marie), and to ask if by any chance I didn't have any painkillers. Marc came round trying to swap his nicotine patches for some fungicidal cream. I didn't dare ask what it was for.

  If my colleagues were anything to go by, the pharmacists' strike was bringing out half-forgotten ailments and slowly edging the whole nation towards its collective deathb
ed.

  Finally Jean-Marie rolled in one afternoon, looking breezy, as if he'd bought shares in Kalashnikov just before the war broke out. He saw me through my open office door, and hardly broke his stride. He knocked, unnecessarily, and came in. I clicked away the anti-French cartoon I was looking at and stood up to take it like a man.

  He shook my hand and said a bright "hello".

  "How are you feeling?" I asked. He didn't get it, so I rubbed my stomach. I hadn't seen him since my enforced holiday.

  "Ah yes, very good, thank you. You do not have more indigestion tablets by any chance?"

  "No, sorry."

  "It's OK. I am very grateful." I wondered if his gratitude to the British would extend to letting me keep my project alive.

  "So, what are your conclusions about the war, then?"

  "The war, yes . . . Let me put down my affairs and we will talk." He held up his case. "Come to my office in five minutes." It didn't sound good.

  Five and a half minutes later - never be exactly on time for a French meeting - I knocked at his office door and found him pouring out coffees. Christine was there, too.

  "Sit down, Paul," he said, and pushed a white cup and saucer towards me.

  I sat down and ignored the cup. I smiled as if to say, get on with it then.

  He gave a long speech about the war, politics, fluctuating prices on the world market, employers national insurance contributions, the state of his upper bowel (well, he may not have mentioned that, but I'd stopped listening by then, waiting for the punchline).

  "So," he concluded, "what I suggest is that you continue until the end of your contract, or at least until the end of the war, as our English teacher." He smiled as if he was a magician who'd just produced a live iguana from his coffee cup.

  "Pardon?"

  "It will be excellent for us. We already send some people to English lessons. Now they can come to you. You will maintain your salary, of course."