Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes, you know nothing about art or cinema but you say more reasonable things than anyone I know.’

  Leaving aside her barbed remark about my lack of culture, yet again the circumstances were exactly right for a full-on, lips-together-now celebration of our closeness. But all I had to suck on was the neck of a juice bottle.

  ‘It’s great when we talk,’ she went on. ‘You give me ideas. And not just ideas for a documentary . . .’ She raised an eyebrow suggestively.

  ‘No?’ Was this a chance for me to mention my current availability for any new ideas she might want to develop?

  ‘For another one of my projects,’ she went on. ‘I can’t tell you all the details yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ So this new idea I’d given her hadn’t been, for example, to go and spend the rest of the day in bed.

  ‘Don’t look disappointed. I will tell you soon. And maybe I can give you some ideas.’

  Oh, she did that all right. I just couldn’t find the right moment to tell her about them.

  ‘Now I must go back,’ she said.

  ‘Go? Already?’

  ‘Yes.’ She told me that this was her last day at the shoot – she was leaving for London the next day.

  ‘But you always call me the day before you’re leaving.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. Things are in such a hurry for me at the moment. I am organizing my exhibition, trying to start this new film, coming here to make contacts . . . Next time I will call sooner.’

  ‘Next time? When’s that?’

  ‘Soon.’

  She stood up, and leaned low to kiss me goodbye. Of course I couldn’t resist staring down her tight top at the delightful double portion of beige flesh being held captive in there. When I looked back up into her eyes, she had a half-smile on her face. She knew exactly where I’d been looking, as I guess all girls do when they wear that sort of top.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paul.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We did not have enough time together today. I have talked too much about my things. But I will see you soon, and we will talk some more. You do not look happy. You must tell me why.’

  She stroked my hand and turned away.

  I wanted to watch her go, but was distracted by a ratty dog that had started to pee on the base of the plant pot approximately three inches from my left foot. I hissed and pretended to kick out at its bony rear end.

  The canine rat snapped and growled, as did its owner who suddenly leapt to its defence.

  ‘Hey, don’t touch her, she is gentille!’ The little bitch was ‘nice’, it seemed. A middle-aged woman in designer jeans snatched the yapping beast out of my reach.

  ‘So is he, Madame,’ said a voice behind her. Alexa was calling out from a few yards further down the pavement. ‘He is very nice.’

  She blew me a kiss and jogged off towards the passage.

  What the fuck was that all about? I wondered.

  I sat there dripping the last dregs of thick pink peach juice into my mouth and tried to analyse the situation.

  Why does she call me the day before leaving Paris and then say we didn’t have enough time together? And was her happy babbling about the birthday party and the film shoot a way of avoiding more emotional subjects? Or simply a sign that she was babblingly happy with her life?

  I’m not the world’s greatest communicator, but she was sending out more contradictory messages than a schizophrenic’s video diary.

  By the time my bottle had given up its last drops of peach juice, I had come to the conclusion that there were only two things I could be pretty confident of.

  One: people are supposed to come to Paris to fall in love. But if I wasn’t careful, I was going to let any chance of amour slip away.

  And two: it was absolutely no consolation to know that if the worst came to the worst, at least I’d get hired to provide sandwiches for Alexa and Sacha’s wedding.

  4

  Liberté, Egalité, Salon de Thé

  1

  GOING TO BED with someone for the first time is like eating a Clementine. No, I don’t mean because you can spit the pips out afterwards.

  When you look at a Clementine you never know what it’s like inside. Sometimes the peel is really tight-fitting, and the fruit is pressing its curves up into the skin. But the Clementine itself can turn out to be bone-hard and juiceless.

  If the peel is loose, the fruit might be burstingly ripe, or it might be limp and uninspiring. You just never know. Clementines are much bigger teases than apples or bananas.

  Of course, one major difference between undressing someone and peeling a Clementine is that Clementines don’t talk to you while you’re doing it.

  This is one of the many reasons why peeling French women, or undressing them, I should say, is interesting. From the moment you first slide your fingertip into their waistband until you’re both lying there breathless, you hear lots of foreign noises.

  It must be pretty exotic for a French woman to go to bed with an English guy, too. How many Frenchmen shout out ‘Tally ho!’, ‘Bizmillah!’ or ‘Foul, ref!’ as they hit boiling point? Not that I do any of those, of course.

  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

  It was ten to eight on the third Wednesday of September. The tea room had been due to open on the first Monday of the month, though I’d always known it wouldn’t. Builders are builders, after all.

  It was light, and the streets around the Champs-Elyées were just starting to get busy. Women were clipping along in their heels on their way to the office or to open up their chic boutiques. Cars were cruising in search of newly liberated parking spaces. Furtive dog-owners were loitering while Fido chose where to poop. I was standing in the middle of my gleaming new tea room, wondering what essential things I’d forgotten to do.

  The days running up to the opening had been a bit of a bungee jump, with me heading straight for the bottom of the ravine wondering whether I was going to get the thrill of a bounce or suffer an embarrassing splat. I still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure I’d remembered to attach the elastic to my ankles.

  Would we open the doors and then find out we had no teabags? Would people buy their food and then ask why there weren’t any chairs?

  To combat my nerves, I was chomping on an apple. I was peeling it and cutting off slices as I went along, which I’d never done before I came to France. Here they seem to peel everything, including nectarines that cover you in sticky juice right up to your armpits. And as I was hacking off chunks of fruit I was thinking, I’d much rather be peeling a clementine.

  But no, I told myself, the previous few weeks had been pretty clementine-free – apart from one very fruity exception – and all the simpler for it.

  Clementines can really do your head in if you let them get to you.

  Florence had had one last crack at doing my head in.

  When she finally returned to Paris in mid August, she called me up from the apartment and asked me to come and take away the rest of my things.

  Before I got the chance to do that, though, I had to get frisked by her bodyguard. Or at least that was how it felt. When I rang at the door, I was greeted by a pair of shoulders that had probably had to turn sideways to get into the apartment. Sitting on top of them was a handsome shaven head with a tiny black beard.

  ‘Pull?’ he said, as if he wanted to do just that to various sensitive parts of my body.

  ‘Oui, Paul. Bonsoir.’ I held out a hand, which he duly squashed to the shape and consistency of a roadkill rabbit.

  ‘Jean-Philippe,’ he replied.

  Florence was lurking behind him, looking tanned and mouth-wateringly sexy, but acting ultra-cold.

  If I’d had time to bother about things like pride, I’d have dressed up a bit to come and say farewell. But when you’re doing a late-night removal after a day of shopfitting, you don’t have time to slip into anything slinkier than cut-off jeans splattered with varnish and an ancient red T-shirt that had
now turned into a pink tent.

  Florence introduced the guy as her old pilates teacher. She’d told me once that she used to go out with a pilates teacher. The mysteries of my gigantic Corrèze trousers, and why everyone in Brigitte’s village thought I was a midget, were instantly explained. This was her superhuman ex, the guy with lashings of upper-body strength but no taste in fabric design. Although this evening he was looking positively swish in jeans and an annoying silver T-shirt designed to let muscular men show off their biceps and nipples. Perhaps, I thought, he had left all his most hideous clothes down in Corrèze to be used for the ritual humiliation of Florence’s new boyfriends.

  I noticed he was looking defensive, which was satisfying. Here was a guy who could walk past a scaffolding gang and say, ‘Hey, fellas, need a hand?’ and they’d rush to find him a hard hat, and he was eyeing me as if I was some kind of Bruce Lee.

  So even guys like him can suffer from a someone-else-has-been-shagging-my-girlfriend complex, I realized. It was good to know.

  I asked, with fraternal concern, what Florence was going to do about work now. She’d packed in her big-company job to help me open the tea room.

  No problem, she said. The unions had forced the company to stop laying people off, and she’d asked to be reinstated.

  It figures, I thought. She was going back to her old life, as if I’d never been there to disrupt it.

  Our conversation had just breathed its last when Jake, my poet and life counsellor, arrived at the front door. He was helping me with the move. He was going to store, and no doubt use, my excess clothes and my collection of bizarre French cooking implements, and had been parking my hired van while I went up to say hello and goodbye to Florence.

  One dilemma, though. Did French etiquette dictate that you kiss your lost love goodbye?

  She hadn’t come forward to do the cheek-rubbing thing when I walked in, and she’d even crossed her arms as if to keep me away. She seemed to be angry with me, although all I’d done as far as I could see was knuckle down to the work I’d always said I’d do. Oh, and fall out of love or lust or whatever with her. But we were quits there.

  I decided to invent my own French etiquette. Announcing a loud ‘Au revoir, Florence,’ to make it clear to everyone in the room that I was not intending to carry her on to the balcony for one last bout of nude pilates, I walked towards her. She didn’t back off, and even uncrossed her arms. I bent forward from the waist to keep any risk of genital contact to a minimum, and said ‘mwa’ on each side of her face. She did the same, even putting a fleeting hand on my shoulder, which wasn’t strictly compulsory.

  She smelled, as usual, of sweet coconut, and I suffered a moment of weak-kneed regret that this was my last breath of her, before remembering that my coconut days were best behind me. I had Cheddar and fruitcake and toasted ham sandwiches to think of now.

  2

  ‘IS THE WATER boiling, Katy?’ I asked. ‘It has to be boiling to make decent tea.’

  ‘Yes, if the urn doesn’t let off steam soon, I think it’s going to explode.’

  ‘I know how it feels.’

  Katy was an English girl supposedly working as a language assistant at a lycée, but who was free most days because the teachers were too scared to have a real English-speaker in their classes. She reminded me a bit of when I first met Alexa. You could tell that she wasn’t a professional in the café business but you didn’t care. She was bubbly, smiled a lot and wouldn’t assume that customers were there to be ignored or insulted. I hoped.

  Katy was standing by the huge stainless-steel urn in the centre of the food counter that ran along the right-hand wall. In front of her was a clutch of small stoneware teapots with ‘My Tea Is Rich’ stencilled on the side. These were arranged to be the first things you set eyes on as you walked into the place. I wanted it to be clear that this was a salon de thé anglais, even if it wasn’t all oak, pot pourri and frilly aprons, as the French might expect it to be.

  The idea was that after taking in the teapots, your eye would move naturally on to the rest of the gleaming food counter. It was glass-topped, so that you could stare down at all the British gastronomic delights on offer as you queued (assuming there would be enough people to form a queue).

  Standing expectantly behind these delights were two decidedly non-British people.

  There was a girl from Madagascar whose real name had about fourteen syllables, so she told everyone to call her Jeanne. She spoke perfect French and passable English, and her gestures as she spoke were some of the gentlest movements I’d ever seen performed by a hand. She was a trainee dentist who had come to France hoping to get her qualifications recognized, but had got bogged down in a squabble between the two countries’ Ministries of Health. She was doing odd jobs and starting her dentistry degree over again. Unfortunately for her, she was perfect for the tea room.

  Next to Jeanne was Yannick, a French version of Bill Gates, with a lank fringe and metal-framed glasses that made you want to say ‘science student’ as soon as you looked at him.

  In fact, very few of the gastronomic delights that Jeanne and Yannick were going to dish up were a hundred per cent British. That would have sent the customers screaming out the door. So our curried potato salad was made with the best French mayonnaise. All our other salads came with the least English vinaigrette in Europe. And the ingredients for our toasted sandwiches – cheese, cheese and ham, cheese and tomato, or, if you were feeling especially adventurous, cheese, ham and tomato – had never crossed a national border.

  It wasn’t until you got halfway along the savoury foods, and were well acclimatized by now, that things started to get a bit more British. I had bought in some genuine Bradford chicken tikka and real Somerset sausages (well browned to stop them looking limp and inadequate compared to French saucisses).

  Only the sweets had no complexes about their nationality. The French love English desserts. Parisian cafés often do crumble (which they eat cold for some unfathomable reason), and carrot cake has plenty of fans on the Gallic side of the Channel. These and our selection of teatime goodies would have tempted a French supermodel to forget her sparrow’s-kidney-a-day Atkins diet.

  And at the far end of this garden of earthly pleasures, I would be waiting by the till, getting a chance to touch all the lovely money tinkling (or preferably, folding) into the coffers to pay off my staggering builders’ bill.

  Only when the customers had got all their food and paid their dues, could they go and sit at one of the fifteen industrial-strength Formica tables that I’d had sent over from the UK.

  However, all of this was pure theory so far, because it was just before eight and the doors were still closed.

  ‘OK, everyone ready?’ I threw my mutilated apple in the bin and looked around one last time. Too late to worry now.

  I got a bright ‘Yup!’ from Katy, who was clearly feeling much perkier and happier than me. She had her short hair up in two little pigtails that looked like antennae channelling energy into her smile.

  Jeanne looked as calm as I would have done if given the choice between making a pot of tea and poking my fingers around in people’s mouths.

  Gilles, the taller of my two student chefs, grinned encouragingly from the top of the staircase leading down to the kitchen. He and his friend Julien, both of them in their last year at cooking school, were going to alternate in the kitchen. They had seen Jamie Oliver on Cuisine TV and thought the idea of working in an English café was as cool as riding a scooter through the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

  Only Yannick was as nervous as me, and fiddling with his name badge.

  We all had name badges. I wanted the customers to feel that the staff were potential friends, and not enemies, as the French service sector often tries to make you think.

  All we needed now were customers.

  But when I unlatched the door, the first thing I saw was my ex-boss.

  Jean-Marie Martin, chairman of VianDiffusion (aka VD) Foods and mayor of the Nor
man town of Trousur-Mayenne, had been waiting in his double-parked car on the opposite side of the road. He now strode across, ignoring the traffic and defying anyone to knock him over. Nobody dared take up the challenge. Men with his natural authority don’t have to wait for cars to stop, even in France.

  He entered and looked around the place as if he owned it. Which he did. Well, the walls and floor space, anyway. He’d originally bought these premises and six or seven others in Paris when he’d hired me to open up a chain of tea rooms for his company. After he changed his mind and sacked me, he hung on to the shops and rented them out. When I decided to go it alone, I persuaded him to give me a year’s lease with the option of buying the property at market price once the lease was up.

  ‘Hello and congratulations,’ Jean-Marie declared in his excellent English. ‘Hello,’ he repeated on catching sight of Katy. He hadn’t lost his habit of trying to hypnotize women.

  ‘Welcome, Jean-Marie.’ I shook his hand, which was, as usual, poking out of a superbly tailored suit. Today he was in a pewter-grey creation with a lining the colour of recently sliced smoked salmon. His tie was royal-violet silk and had been knotted by a precision engineer. The perfectionist had slicked his thin, dyed-brown hair back across his perfectly tanned forehead.

  Here was a man obsessed with details, so it was reassuring to see him nod his approval when he looked around the tea room. Almost as reassuring as the hygiene inspector the week before.

  ‘What will you have?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled for the gallery. ‘Perhaps the charming young Katy can serve me with a cup of English tea?’

  ‘Of course, Sir, what sort would you prefer?’ Like all women, even those a third his age, Katy was gazing into his eyes as if she couldn’t wait to be asked for a blowjob. I don’t know where he buys his charm, but it’s not from the aftershave counter of any shop I’ve ever managed to find.