Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  Finally, I worked out that he was talking about his name, and the penny dropped.

  ‘Oh, excuse-moi, Yann.’ I kissed him on the cheek to show how sorry I was, and explained the situation to my fellow bollock-singers. They had to stop insulting my guest.

  ‘He’s very sensitive about his bollocks,’ I told them. ‘He used to be a bollock.’

  This didn’t calm Yann down at all. On the contrary. He started trying to strangle me, and I was forced to dodge out of his grasp and rush off in search of some more champagne to cool my aching throat.

  After a quick trip back to the bar in the function room – which was now given over to the functions of food-throwing and butt-groping – I found myself in our kitchen again. Tom was rinsing out his kettle, and I hung around to sympathize with him. I suggested that it might be time for him to come in with my coffee club, and tried to lighten things up by making a joke about how his milky kettle would be producing cappuccino from now on anyway. Instead of laughing, though, he attacked me. Fortunately his kettle was plastic, and bounced almost painlessly off my head. But I thought it best to avoid causing any more conflict between our two hot-drinks factions, and skidded along the corridor in search of a hiding place.

  In the photocopy room, I found Charlie, trousers down, showing that he hadn’t read the email we’d received from the health and safety officer, requesting all staff to ‘refrain from sitting on photocopiers in case of glass-related accidents’. Every Christmas, the message said, British A&E units were flooded with office workers who had somehow got shards of glass from broken photocopiers stuck in their buttocks.

  Charlie was not a light guy, but the photocopier had obviously been built to withstand tough love, and black-and-white pictures of his balls and hairy arsehole were sliding out into the stacker.

  He got down from the machine and, with his trousers and underpants still round his ankles, offered me the chance to flick through his artwork. Was I sure, he asked me, that I didn’t want to check out his ‘London derrière’? He found this so funny that he started to choke, then gag, and only saved himself from asphyxiation by pulling out the A3 tray and puking into it.

  Even in my slightly (well – very) intoxicated state, I wondered what exactly was going on here. Was I supposed to think, Yeah, my boss is a great guy, he can get pissed with the lads. It’ll be really funny tomorrow when people get strangely coloured 3-D bullet points on their photocopies.

  Put it this way, I couldn’t imagine Jean-Marie using that way of gaining respect.

  Though to be fair, Charlie did redeem himself somewhat, because he used one of the sterilized wipes that the health and safety people had thoughtfully (and pessimistically) left by the photocopier to swab down the glass for the next sitter. If anyone did end up in A&E, the lacerations in their backside would at least be germ-free.

  I wandered off again and homed in on the sounds of a fight outside the function-room doors. It was the old Sanjeet argument, which had now escalated. Two, no three, women – including the normally calm Marya – were bouncing off walls, ripping down posters and flattening plants as they tried to break their three-way clinch and land some decent punches. Sanjeet was standing near by, doing his sheepish schoolboy thing, but with a small dose of glee thrown in. They were fighting over him, someone told me. He had been shagging two women, and had tried to break it off with one of them by telling her he had turned Christian and wanted to become a virgin again until he got married.

  Sanjeet was suddenly pushed aside as Yann bundled his way out of the function room. He saw me and pointed an accusing finger that suggested he wanted to continue our earlier conversation about bollocks.

  I looked around for some means of escape, but fortunately, the gallant Frenchman in Yann was distracted by the sight of the snarling, flailing women. He waded bravely in to try and separate them.

  Less than a second later he was lying on the floor with a bruise swelling visibly below one eye.

  ‘Toil’ he shouted at me.

  I went over to help him up, but only offered myself as a scapegoat. ‘C’est ta faute, ça!’ he bawled. It was all my fault.

  Lying there rubbing his cheek, he started to yell at me in French above the mingled noises of vintage disco music and female swearing. How was this going to look in his publicity campaign? He was sure to have a bruise. How could he go on television? The chef with a black eye – an ‘ceil au beurre noir’ as the French call it, literally an ‘eye with black butter’.

  I thought this was meant to be a culinary joke – chef, butter – and laughed, but this seemed to enrage him even more.

  There was only one way to cool him down, I realized. I upended my bottle of champagne over his head and doused his fiery temper in fizzy French wine.

  Yann au vin it was, after all.

  8

  In the Merde for Love

  1

  WHEN I WOKE up, I was miraculously hangover-free. That’s the great thing about champagne. If you drink nothing else, next morning your head is as clear as a bell. The French even have an expression for it – rester au champagne, they call it. It was another lifestyle idea that Alexa would have to film.

  Anyway, thanks to champagne, I was perfectly sober as I made my phone calls at eight o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve.

  I told Charlie (who had already had a full English breakfast and been out mountain-biking) that I didn’t think the future celebrity chef and I would be able to work constructively together after he’d chased me through every corridor and staircase in the building with a dish of grated raw courgette salad, and forced me to hide in the basement to escape a certain vegetable death.

  Charlie agreed, and given that I was a consultant, we just had to un-sign our contract and I was free to concentrate on other things, like getting my life together.

  I reached Jean-Marie at home and offered him the chance to buy a 49 per cent share in the tea room. He was delighted, and told me again that I’d made a real man of Benoît. He sounded so pleased that I thought he might even do his son the honour of not trying to sleep with Katy. What a great Christmas present that would be.

  And then I called Alexa with a song.

  ‘Come away with me.’ I didn’t dare sing it, of course, in case I scared her away for ever.

  We still hadn’t made any firm plans for the evening, apart from agreeing that we’d do something together. Now I told her that I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

  Romantic dinner in Paris, the night train south in a cabin for two, Christmas amongst the lemon trees.

  I’d already booked everything. I could hardly believe my luck at getting tickets on that night train. I seemed to be in favour with the gods again.

  There was just one catch, I added – after Christmas together, we’d stay together. A week away, then look for an apartment a deux.

  ‘You are giving me an ultimatum?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not. Well, yes I suppose I am. We’ve got to stop this messing about, Alexa. It’s doing my head in. I want you for Christmas and I’m offering you me. Presentation ceremony at the Eurostar departures board, Christmas Eve, in time for the three p.m. train.’

  ‘That’s this afternoon.’

  ‘I know. You haven’t got any other plans, have you?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘And you have a valid passport?’

  ‘I don’t need one. This is the European Union, Paul. Only you English need a passport. We French can travel with our identity cards.’

  But I didn’t want to get into a debate about the European Constitution. ‘Please be there, Alexa,’ I said.

  ‘It is a big decision.’

  ‘Yes, it is. It’s two big decisions. One each. And I’ve made mine. I want to be with you. It’s the only thing I feel at all certain about right now.’

  So there it was. Suspense.

  I could picture with perfect clarity how great it would be to see her walking towards me through the station crowd, a bag on her shoulder an
d a smile on her face. It was like hundred-metre runners who imagine themselves crossing the line and try to force the future to happen the way they want it to.

  But I’m not an Olympic sprinter, and I couldn’t stop myself envisaging what it’d be like if she didn’t come and I was left standing alone with my two railway tickets.

  I honestly did not know which of the two visions would come true.

  But then, I told myself, Christmas presents are supposed to be a surprise, aren’t they?

  2

  LIGHTS WERE FLASHING. The departures board was getting anxious.

  Travellers were herding towards the barriers, digging for passports in their pockets, holding out tickets like batons in a relay race.

  I was standing to one side with my two tickets in my hand, scanning all the latecomers’ faces and assuring the guy in the blue overcoat that I would go through the barrier as soon as my girlfriend turned up.

  I could tell from his face that he thought I’d been stood up.

  He had to be wrong.

  But her phone was on voicemail. There was no answer at the house.

  I re-checked the printout of the email I’d sent her with the travel details. It all seemed perfectly clear.

  Although – give her the benefit of the doubt – she might have thought it was check-in at three p.m. rather than departure at three p.m. She might think it was OK to turn up at two fifty-five.

  It was now two forty, ten minutes after the official end of check-in.

  The guy at the barrier gave me one last chance, but I shook my head like someone giving up at an auction, and went to the ticket office to change the time of our departure for the next train, in an hour. This gave her till three thirty.

  I left a message telling her what I’d done, carefully avoiding the question: where the hell are you?

  The horror vision was coming true. Sometimes, when someone’s late, I suddenly get this deep conviction that they’ll never turn up. I can actually see them not turning up, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.

  This time I resisted that conviction. I made myself imagine her rushing up the escalator from the Tube, or strolling along totally unaware that she was late. She’d misread the email.

  I wouldn’t even be angry with her for making me wait and doubt.

  I went to sit down at a coffee bar from where I could see the check-in barriers, and watched the minutes tick away on the big illuminated clock over the departures board.

  I forced myself to wait five minutes between phone calls, but pretty soon it was three twenty-five. Now she was seriously late.

  I only stopped trying Alexa’s number when I noticed that my phone had disappeared off the table top.

  Two kids had come by, begging for money. They’d nicked my phone.

  Fuck it, I thought. If a woman scooping up dog merde from a Paris pavement can be an omen, so can a disappearing phone.

  She wasn’t coming.

  And I’d worked out why. It was trust. She didn’t think she could trust me. After all, what had I done the night before? Got roaring drunk and tried to drown my client in champagne. As far as she knew, I’d probably tried to shag someone on top of the photocopier. And then this morning I’d chucked in my job. Was that being reliable?

  No, it wasn’t, and she’d got cold feet.

  She wasn’t coming.

  It was one minute to the end of check-in. I took a last look across at the escalators, then left Alexa’s ticket with a steward and went through.

  3

  I FELT NUMB. It’s like when you’ve bashed your head against the corner of a table, or (I guess) been punched by a woman at an office party. After a while, the actual pain becomes less acute. It settles down to a background ache, and you just sit there and let the bruise grow.

  I could feel the bruise growing inside me now, deep blue, as big as the dent in Florence’s dad’s car all those months ago. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I hardly noticed the night falling, and the tunnel taking me back to France.

  I knew the Paris metro well, so I got from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon on autopilot.

  I’d booked a table at the Train Bleu restaurant, the big brasserie in the Gare de Lyon, where for the past century travellers have dined before getting on their night trains to the south.

  ‘Une personne?’ the air-stewardess-style hostess asked me.

  ‘Oui.’ It felt as though I was betraying Alexa by denying her existence. Should I have said I was waiting for someone else to join me? Or was it her own fault for not being there? Guilt and resentment sloshed around in my stomach like an indigestible meal.

  The hostess gathered up a menu and wine list, and escorted me to my table.

  It would have been the perfect place for a Christmas Eve tête-à-tête. This was a brasserie with style. My seat was carved wood, like a church pew, except that it had a brass overhead-luggage rack, where I slung my coat and my solitary bag. The ceiling was a magnificent travel version of the Sistine Chapel, with various angels apparently setting off on their holidays, including one naked woman who was letting every curious traveller peer up between her legs. She was probably on her way to one of the nudist beaches – the île de Ré, maybe. No, wrong railway station. The walls featured huge murals of places that you could go to from the Gare de Lyon, including the kind of Mediterranean landscape that I’d hoped to be waking up to with Alexa the next day. Every other square inch of wall and ceiling was ornately embellished with gold scrolls, chandeliers and Christmas garlands.

  The menu was just as cruelly festive. I ordered six oysters, a filet de sandre (river fish) in a caper sauce, and a bottle of champagne. Not that I had anything to celebrate. It was more a case of wanting to get painlessly drunk.

  I slurped the oysters down, remembering the night over a year ago when I’d had them for the first time at Jean-Marie’s place and thought they tasted ‘like bronchial mucus’. Now I bit through the grey-green flesh and wished that Alexa was here so that I could tell her the story about that dinner with Jean-Marie.

  I only just managed a smile when the couple at the next table raised their glasses and wished me ‘Joyeux Noël’.

  Mine wasn’t going to be joyeux, though. I was reminded yet again of that stuff Alexa told me the first time we split up – about ‘joie’ and ‘tristesse’ and how she didn’t think I was capable of real joy. Well, now I knew she was wrong. I was definitely capable of joy. I would have felt pretty damn joyful if she’d turned up at the station rather than dumping me on Christmas Eve.

  The couple at the neighbouring table were from Lyon, they told me. They had a hairdressing salon in Paris and were treating themselves here before getting on a TGV and joining the guy’s family for Christmas.

  Where was I going? they asked.

  ‘Menton,’ I told them, ‘on the Italian border.’

  ‘You have friends or family there?’

  ‘Friends.’ I didn’t want to spoil their Christmas Day with flashbacks of this lone English guy taking his depression down south for the festive season.

  4

  THE FRENCH RAILWAYS have moved the night trains out of the Gare du Lyon, and I was leaving from the Gare d’Austerlitz, a short taxi ride away.

  As I looked for the platform number on the departures board in the big, bustling station hall, I had a sudden irrational surge of hope. She might have caught a later train after all, and come straight here from the Gare du Nord. She could be here now, amongst all these people shuffling around with their bags full of Christmas presents for their families.

  But no. It was time to stop kidding myself.

  I gave Alexa’s ticket to the carriage steward, and went to crash out in my lonely little cabin.

  It wasn’t much smaller than my bedsit, where we’d so recently spent the night together. The walls were covered in beige Formica, the colour Alexa’s shoulders had been back in September. There were two bunks, a fold-out mirror, a tiny round sink, even a porcelain flask in case y
ou got caught short in the night.

  It would have been such fun, I thought. This mobile bedroom, rattling southwards through the night, the two of us making the most of the vibrations from the rails and using only one of the beds. Then, on Christmas morning, pulling back the curtains to watch the sun rise over the Med.

  When the train lurched forward, a part of my brain listened out for someone shouting, ‘Stop the train, I want to get on!’, or for a woman banging on all the cabin doors, asking if a Paul West was in there.

  But no, there was just the sound of the wheels clicking faster and faster over the rails, and a crackly voice listing all the stations we’d be stopping at before I had to get off.

  The first of these was just south of Paris, a town that was almost close enough to be a suburb of the city. The platform was dark, wet and almost deserted. No one would get off here, I thought. It would just be a pick-up stop.

  So I was surprised to see a group of five people walking away from the train. Two of them had peaked caps on – railwaymen. Two were young guys in baseball caps. And one was a girl with a leather jacket, who was struggling wildly, hanging on to a large rucksack with one hand and trying to thump one of the railwaymen with the other.

  5

  ALEXA?

  Alexa.

  ‘Alexa!’

  I was up out of my seat and shouting her name. I ran along the corridor, fought my way out of the door and tumbled down the steps on to the low platform. The cold, foggy air slapped me in the face.

  ‘Alexa!’

  I starting running towards them. I was going to look a right jerk if it wasn’t her, I realized.

  ‘Alexa!’

  I could hear what was going on now. The girl was trying to explain something in French, the railwayman were repeating ‘Oui, oui, c’est ça’ in the cynical, disbelieving drone that French people use when they don’t want to listen to you.

  ‘Alexa!’

  She turned towards me.