Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  "I don't get it," I said. "You're talking as if you already know you've lost."

  "My dear Paul, don't you see?" Jean-Marie looked at me with even more bonhomie. "You were screwed, too. It was all, how do you say, une arnaque, a cheat. China is going to win. It was agreed from the start. They will win, and in return they will publicize our countries to their citizens. It is the logical result of globalization. China is the next big market. We cannot insult them by winning."

  "What?" I only just managed to squeeze the word out of my constricted throat.

  But the full horror of the situation had already sunk in. My God, I thought, I must have the stupid-twit gene. The blind, naive-dickhead gene. This was why the campaign was outsourced to India and only half organized. This was why Tyler only got interested in my progress when the kilt thing took off and looked like making some money. And this was why the bastard had linked my bonus to victory at the ceremony. To avoid paying a bonus. It was also why die show was at the Chinese Theater, and in the afternoon because they "couldn't book it for the evening." Every single detail was a sham, a scam.

  Now everyone was looking at me. Except Clint, that is. The sudden silence had convinced him that the meal was over and it was time for his show. He was looking for a door handle again.

  "You mean it was all for nothing?" I asked Tyler. His only answer was a lick of the teeth. "Starting a war in Boston, nearly getting shot in Miami, pushing the Mini halfway through a Louisiana swamp?" OK, that last one was an exaggeration, but I was owed a bit of pity.

  "Not for nothing," Tyler said. "It made you famous. And it's not a defeat. Do you know how much money Chinese tourists are going to bring into London in the next twenty years?"

  "But you might have told me, instead of letting me make a twat of myself."

  "A general never reveals his plans to the ground troops, you should know that," Tyler said.

  "No, he just sits on his fat backside while they do the fighting, and then turns up to sign the surrender."

  Tyler simply chuckled at this.

  "There was no battle, really," he said. "So there was no surrender. That reminds me—I'm going to need your tank."

  "What?"

  "The car. Suraya's posting it on a website. We'll be auctioning it straight after the ceremony. Now that it's been on TV, it'll be worth even more."

  I can't explain why, but that was the drop that overspilled my vase. I grabbed the jug of orange juice and emptied it over his head. He looked so beautifully shocked that I followed up with a pint of cranberry juice down his shirtfront and a pitcher of iced water into his gaping mouth. The ice cubes bounced off his cheeks, forcing Jean-Marie to leap out of his chair to avoid the ricochets. As usual, the fast-moving Frenchman escaped stain-free.

  Until, that is, he was hit by a trayload of fresh-fruit salad, and then the tray itself, launched in a neat surprise attack by Elodie. My splash-therapy session seemed to have inspired her, and she was screaming French swearwords at her dad and looking for new weapons.

  "Calme-toi!" Jean-Marie did his best to sound authoritative. His plain suit had now been brightened with a colorful pink-grapefruit-and-mango-chunk motif, and from the look of ecstatic fury on Elodie's face, he was going to have to run for it if he wanted to limit the damage to the expensive fabric.

  "Pardee!" Clint cheered, and upended a bowl of creme brulee over his wig.

  Jerry the car crippler was standing clear of the action, grinning at the food-splattered guests, so I gave him an unpeeled banana to chew on and jammed the neck of an opened wine bottle down the back of his jeans.

  "That'll fill your gas tank," I told him.

  "Elodie!" Jean-Marie made one last attempt at crowd control and then bolted across the lawn, with his crazed daughter running after him, playing fresh-strawberry darts with his back.

  The party seemed to have broken up, so I decided to take my leave.

  "Car keys," Tyler croaked damply as I vaulted the garden fence.

  "Fuck that," I told him. "You're not getting Thelma. I'm keeping her."

  6

  I parked the Mini by the pier and got through to Juliana. I wanted her to pass on a message to Jake, but she said that he was standing right beside her. She was visiting an apartment and had offered to put him up until he got the money together to go back to New Orleans.

  She handed the phone over to him.

  "Jake?"

  "Hey, Paul. You on your planch?" He sounded pretty happy with life.

  "My what?"

  "Your surf. You know, surfboard?"

  "No. Listen. Have you won enough money to take you to New Orleans?"

  "No, not yet." He sounded slightly sheepish.

  "Well, I think I can help you out."

  "How?"

  "Come to L.A."

  "Uh?"

  I didn't blame him for sounding confused.

  "Come to L.A. and pick up the Mini." I honestly didn't think Tyler would call the cops on me. It would create too much of a stink. In any case, I was willing to bet he didn't even know the registration number. "Get the next bus here, and I'll meet you with the keys."

  "Wow." He gabbled his gratitude in a mix of French, English, and bad poetry, and I cut him off to tell him to go and buy his ticket to L.A.

  Besides, I had other calls to make.

  "Suraya?"

  "Yes. Oh, Paul, you'll never guess what."

  "What?"

  "My daddy bought me a new scooter. Isn't that wonderful?"

  "Yes it is, Suraya." What a great life, I thought, when the gift of a car or a scooter can solve all your problems. "Now I have some news for you."

  I told her all about the fixed vote, and was relieved to hear from her shocked disbelief that she was an innocent victim, too.

  "So you won't post the ad to sell the car?" I asked her. "And can you warn me if Tyler starts asking the police to track it down?"

  She agreed to both.

  "Get some cash," she told me. "Pay for a hotel in advance. He'll make me cancel the credit card, you know."

  "Thanks," I said. "I'm sorry if we got off on the wrong foot at the beginning. I probably yelled at you a bit. But I know it wasn't your fault, really. And I couldn't have been outsourced to a nicer person."

  "Oh, thank you." I thought I heard a sob from the other side of the world.

  "And I just hope your bonus wasn't at stake, too."

  "Bonus, here? Fat chance," she said. "But what about you? Why don't you sell the car and use the money to pay your fine?"

  "No," I said. "I think I might have an idea how to earn the money I need."

  I explained my plan, and she giggled.

  "You will show me the results if it works out, won't you?" she said. "I've started up your Indian fan club."

  I thanked her for this, and we said a sentimental farewell.

  "Safe scootering," I told her. "And don't forget to erase the tapes of you telling me to commit car theft."

  I crossed my fingers and opened my message inbox. And there, below a list of new weirdo spams, was what I was looking for—the professional text I'd saved. I dialed the phone number.

  "Hi," I said, introducing myself.

  "Oh wow," an excitable woman answered. "Thank you so much for getting back Are you interested?"

  "Maybe," I said. "What exactly does it involve?"

  "You, a kilt, your legs, and a brand of sneakers. A poster campaign first, maybe a TV commercial. I'd have to meet with my clients again to hammer out the details."

  "And how much are we talking about, minimum?" I asked. She told me. "How much?" I said, just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. She repeated the sum—I'd heard right the first time. "I'm very interested," I said. "You just saved my British bacon."

  So I was in an unexpectedly bulldoggish mood when I made my final call. It might have been better to be a little more vulnerable, a bit less assertive. But sometimes a dose of self-confidence can help you see your problems more clearly.

  "Alexa," I began. "
Hi, it's—" No, I couldn't say it. It was the final proof that we'd failed the "it's me" test. She was on voice mail, anyway. What did that mean? She might be in a meeting about her photo exhibition, or on a plane. She might be having a siesta. Or maybe she just didn't want to talk to me.

  Ultimately, though, it didn't matter, because I didn't know what to say to her any more. There was no point telling her that the whole coast-to-coast trip had been a sham. It would only confirm what she'd thought about me ever since the Boston tea party and the Cape May ferry. No, before that—ever since the mixup about which flag to paint on the car.

  She'd said that I needed dreams. But she wanted my dreams to be planned. It was the French way. If you want a dream, you go to dream school and get your diploma in dreams. To her, a man in a kilt was just a guy with no trousers, and a Mini driving across a continent without knowing exactly where it was going was just a car getting lost.

  OK, so it'd been anarchic. I'd set off on a simple PR consultant's job and was going to end up as a seminaked footwear model. But that was how people had found gold in California. They'd been searching for a decent place to plant potatoes and tripped over an ingot. They had probably started to panic that the desert would never end, and that the only place to plant anything would be on the piles of skunk droppings. And then they struck lucky. And so, in my own absurd, un-Parisian, unplanned way, had I.

  Against all odds, I'd wrenched my share of the tearoom out of Jean-Marie's clutches. And I'd done it without Alexa. Despite her, almost. Jake and Juliana were the ones who'd stuck by me, and they were the people she'd wanted me to leave stranded in Miami. Even Elodie, in her perverse style, had been there throughout. But Alexa had threatened to sabotage the website that was making me famous. Making her famous, too. If she got her exhibition in San Francisco, it would be a direct result of my cock-up with the kilt and my uncool dancing. The very stuff she had laughed at.

  That was it. I couldn't say "it's me" because that real "me" just made Alexa laugh.

  One for the Road

  "YOU look happy," I told the pelican.

  Actually, I was flattering it slightly. Pelicans can look pretty morose with their downturned beaks and their permanent frowns. But this one did seem content with its lot. It was perched on a post halfway along Venice pier, dripping after a successful fishing trip. Its friends and relatives were still out there, dive-bombing among the dozen or so surfers who were sitting on the swell in their black frog suits, waiting for the perfect wave.

  "You're lucky," I told it. "You just have to catch fish. You can go for a swim or a glide whenever you want. And if there ever is a giant earthquake, you'll just hover around till the shaking stops and the tsunami has passed. Sounds great, doesn't it?"

  The pelican looked silently smug about its perfect lifestyle.

  "But isn't it a bit monotonous?" I asked. "I mean, I love sushi, but not for every meal. And if you get bored, all you can do is go and poop on a surfer. It must be fun once or twice, but surely the novelty wanes after a while?"

  The pelican shook its heavy white head. It seemed to be telling me to get lost.

  I took the hint and turned toward the beach. I was level with the tide line, where a frothy collar of foam was continually forming and disappearing as each wave broke on the custard-colored sand. A tall blonde girl was walking barefoot, her shoes in her hand, her feet and ankles getting immersed every few seconds. She was the only person visible on that stretch of beach, and there was something spectacularly melancholic about seeing her walking there alone.

  My phone began buzzing in my pocket.

  It was Tyler, trying to sound diplomatic.

  "Paul, you've got to come to the ceremony. Please."

  "Why, to earn you more money?"

  "No, because people will expect it. Your country expects it."

  "Bollocks. My country expects me to lose, Tyler. You go and be the loser."

  "I've got some more events sorted out for you in L.A. Don't you want to earn that bonus?"

  "You do them. Get yourself a kilt."

  I heard him garrumph.

  "If you're not at the theater in one hour, you won't get a penny," he said. "Not a cent, not a euro."

  "Merde," I told him.

  "Pardon?"

  "Merde. It's what the French say when they've had enough, when they're getting threatened but they don't care, when they want to say fuck you and fuck everything. Merde. OK, Tyler? Meeerde."

  I rang off, thinking that Jean-Marie was wrong. French was a damn good language of negotiation.

  "Paul?"

  Someone was talking to me, and it wasn't the pelican.

  "Is that you, Paul?"

  I looked down. The girl had stopped just below me on the sand. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been gazing into an aquarium in Las Vegas.

  "Wow," I said. Suddenly the beach didn't look so melancholic. "What are you doing in L.A.?"

  "Looking for you."

  "How did you know I was at the beach?"

  "I didn't. I was planning to grab you at the ceremony."

  "Oh." I didn't know what else to say.

  She smiled up at me. "Were you really talking to that pelican?"

  FIN?

  A Note on the Author

  Stephen Clarke is a British journalist and the internationally bestselling author of A Year in the Merde and In the Merde for Love, which describe the misadventures of Paul West in France, and Talk to the Snail, a hysterical look at understanding the French. He himself has lived in France for twelve years.