A Year in the Merde Page 2

  "Well, your English is so much better than my French," I told them, taking special care to look Stéphanie and Bernard, my fellow linguistic invalids, in the eye. "I've bought myself a teach-yourself-French CD-Rom and I promise I'll start teaching myself toot sweet."

  They were kind enough to laugh.

  As we were all chums together now, I decided to throw in my little idea. Nothing controversial.

  "I thought we could decide on a working name for the project," I suggested. "Just something temporary, you know, to give us an identity as a team. Something like Tea Time."

  "Oh." It was Bernard, jerking himself upright. "No, we av nem. Ma Tea Eez Reesh."

  I frowned, the others laughed. I turned to Jean-Marie for help. He was looking elsewhere.

  "My Tea Is Rich? As a brand name for the tea rooms? It's not really a name," I ventured. "It doesn't really mean anything."

  "Uh." Bernard was crap at English but clearly very good at monosyllables. "Ma Tea Eez Reesh eez funny nem. Eaties Ingleesh oomoor."

  "English humour? But we don't say that."

  "Oh." Bernard turned to Jean-Marie for support.

  "Of course it should be my tailor," Jean-Marie explained.

  "Your tailor?" I felt as if I was in the middle of a surrealist film. In a minute Salvador Dali was going to fly in through the window with a baguette sticking out of his trousers.

  "My tailor is rich," Jean-Marie said.

  "Is he?" Here comes Salvador, I thought, but all I could see out the window was the Eiffel Tower as usual.

  "My tailor is rich is a typical English expression."

  "It's not."

  "But French people think it is. It was in the old language books."

  "OK, OK, I think I'm with you," I said. The others were peering at me as if I was about to get the joke at last and laugh. "It's like my postilion has been struck by lightning."

  "Uh?" Now it was the French team's turn to look lost.

  "It's from our old language books," I said. "I get you now." I put on a eureka smile. Everyone nodded.

  Misunderstanding cleared up. Problem solved.

  "But it's still an awful name." I mean, I had to tell them for their own good. For the good of the project.

  "Oh!"

  "You absolutely want Tea Time?" Jean-Marie was not looking keen. "This is a bit flat."

  "No, not absolutely. Just as a provisional name. I suggest we get a market survey done before deciding on the definitive brand, but meanwhile let's choose a simple working title. If you don't like Tea Time, how about Tea For Two?"

  "Oh no." This was Stéphanie. "Dis is flat also. We want fonny nem. Like Bare-narr say, Ingleesh oomoor."

  "And, er, if we coll eet Tease Café?" Marc said.

  "Tease Café?" I was lost again.

  "Yuh. Tea, apostrof, s, café," Marc explained. Stéphanie nodded. Good idea.

  "Tea's Café? But that's not English either."

  "Yes," Stéphanie retorted. "You av many nems with apostrof. Arry's Bar. Liberty's Statue."

  "Brooklyn's Bridge," Marc said.

  "Trafalgar's Square," Bernard added.

  "No ..."

  "Roll's Royce," Bernard said, on a roll.

  "No!" Where did they get this crap?

  "In France this is considered very English." Jean-Marie was playing interpreter again. "There is an American café on the Champs-Elysees called Sandwich's Cafe"."

  "Yes." Stéphanie confirmed this with a prod of her finger on to the table.

  "OK, but it's not English," I had to insist. "It's like when you call a campsite 'un camping' or a car park 'un parking'. You may think it's English, but it's not."

  "Oh." Stéphanie appealed to Jean-Marie the referee. An attack on the French language? Yellow card, surely?

  "Each country adapts the culture of the other country," Jean-Marie said. "When I was in England, all the restaurants had strawberry crème brulée. But crème brulée is crème brulée. Why not have a strawberry baguette? Or a strawberry camembert?"

  The French team nodded their approval of Jean-Marie's firm but fair discipline.

  "Yes, it is like you Ingleesh you put oronge joo-eece in shompagne," Stéphanie said. "Merde alors." The others winced in sympathy at this desecration of their national treasure.

  "But you put blackcurrant liqueur in champagne to make kir royal." I'd read this in my guidebook and now wished I hadn't. French eyebrows knitted at my English know-it-all repartee.

  Jean-Marie tried to pour some virgin olive oil on things. "We will make a market survey. We will test these names and others. We will make a list of our suggestions."

  "Right." I nodded like a plastic Alsatian in the back of a car, eager to accept this brilliant idea coming from the French diplomat.

  "Bernard can maybe organize it," Jean-Marie suggested.

  Bernard smiled. He was the man for the job. From the dull twinkle in his eye I could tell he was confident of persuading the pollsters to go with his idea.

  "OK, very constructive," Jean-Marie said. "This is a real Anglo-style meeting. Taking decisions."

  Decisions? We can't agree, so we decide to pay a consultant who's going to be bribed into agreeing with the guy with the crappest ideas. Didn't seem very constructive to me. But then it was my first ever French meeting. I had a lot to learn.

  Outside of the office, my entree into Paris society was just as depressing.

  Jean-Marie was paying for me to stay in a hotel about a kilometre west of the Arc de Triomphe, not actually in Paris at all. It was just off an eight-lane highway called, romantically, Big Army Avenue that charged out from Paris proper towards the skyscrapers of La Defense business district.

  The hotel was a nondescript modern building made of artificial stone the colour of snow that's been peed on by a dog. My room was decorated in the same colour. It was supposed to be a double but the only way for two people to stand on the floor at the same time would have been to have intercourse. Which was perhaps the idea, though there wasn't much of that kind of action going on while I was in it.

  Anyway, the hotel was in a posh suburb called Neuilly, pronounced Ner-yee, and not Newly as I called it the whole time I lived there. It was dull but had two or three shopping streets full of the kind of small stores that you don't get in the UK any more. Fishmongers, cheese shops, chocolate shops, raw-meat butchers, cooked-meat butchers, horsemeat butchers, there was even a shop selling only roast chickens.

  So when the batteries in my mini hi-fi system went into their umpteenth coma, I thought I'd go to my friendly local electrician's shop to buy a mains adapter. I wandered out one Saturday and eventually found a little painted shopfront full of radios and torches and other small electronic gizmos.

  Inside there was a long, fingerprint-marked glass counter and a chaotic shelving system stacked with everything from tiny watch batteries to hoovers and food mixers. Amongst all the boxes stood a middle-aged guy with a grey nylon overall and an equally grey face. The Addams Family's Parisian cousin.

  "Bonjour." I smiled as an advance apology for the bad French that was to come. He didn't smile back. He just stared at me from under his barbed-wire eyebrows, weighing me up and coming to unpleasant conclusions.

  I should perhaps add that I wasn't wearing my Paul Smith suit at this point. I was in an orange floral shirt that I found in the Portobello Road. It had a kind of Hawaiian-paint-factory-explosion motif that I thought made me look laid-back and friendly, especially when accompanied by long surfer shorts and fire-extinguisher-red trainers. I had noticed that not many other people in Neuilly were dressed like this, but it was a pleasantly warm autumn day, and I never dreamt that it could have any influence on my chances of buying electrical equipment.

  "Je," I began, and then suddenly realized that I didn't know the French for hi-fi system, mains lead, plug, adapter, or, to be totally honest, electricity. I mean, in the UK, if you want to buy anything electrical you just go to a superstore and help yourself. At the very worst, the most you have to
do is point.

  "J'ai un hi-fi," I ventured, giving the last word a French lilt - "ha-fa". The electrician didn't look perplexed, which was encouraging. Though he didn't look interested, either. I ventured further into the linguistic wilderness. "J'ai un ha-fa anglais." Big apologetic smile. Sorry, I'm doing my best. Please bear with me. "J'ai un ha-fa anglais, mais ici.. ." I tried to look suitably helpless, which wasn't difficult. The shop assistant still showed no signs of assisting. Bugger it, I decided, and activated the linguistic ejector seat. "I need an adapter to plug my British hi-fi into the electricity here," I explained in English, with perfect diction and copious amounts of mime.

  I always thought the French were into mime, but this bloke wasn't a Marcel Marceau fan.

  "Parlez français," he said, with a little "huh" at the end which seemed to be Neuilly slang for "you ignorant English twit".

  "If I could I would, you obnoxious tit," I told him, feeling marginally better because of the insult he'd never understand.

  But in reply he just gave a shrug that seemed to say "whatever your problem is, it's your problem, not mine, which is sad but rather amusing, because from the look of you, you're the type of idiot that makes a habit of getting into stupid, no-win situations like this. And by the way that shirt is totally gross." All this in one shrug.

  There was no way I was going to win a shrugging contest, or get my hands on an adapter, so I walked out.

  I'd gone no more than a yard when my whole body froze in a paralysed T'ai Chi pose, both knees bent and one foot lifted to knee height.

  There was a ginger-brown pat of dog turd trowelled on to the toe of my beautiful red trainer.

  "Shit!"

  Was it my imagination or did I hear the electrician call out: "No, you mean 'merde', you ignorant foreigner."

  Paris is, I was beginning to realize, a bit like an ocean. An ocean is a great place to live if you're a shark. There's loads of fresh seafood, and if anyone gives you shit you just bite them in half. You might not be loved by everyone, but you'll be left in peace to enjoy yourself.

  If you're human, though, you spend your time floating on the surface, buffeted by the waves, preyed on by the sharks.

  So the thing to do is evolve into a shark as quickly as you can.

  And the first item on your evolutionary agenda is to learn to speak fluent shark.

  I had my DIY French CD, but I thought Jean-Marie's assistant, Christine, might like to give me a few private lessons. After all, you might as well get yourself a shark with cute fins.

  Christine - what a bad idea that was.

  I'm not the sort of guy who thinks that love is just a tennis score. But I haven't made a great success of relationships. That was one of my reasons for jumping at the offer to leave the UK. I was with a woman in London, Ruth, but it was a mutually self-destructive thing. We'd phone, arrange to meet, then wait and see which one of us would get in first with a good reason to cancel. Finally we'd meet up for a bitchy row and/or earth-trembling sex, then stay incommunicado for two weeks, then phone, etc etc. We both agreed that my wanting to emigrate was a sign that maybe things between us weren't ideal.

  It was almost two weeks since I'd done any earth-trembling when I first got in that lift with Christine. But I didn't need the unused hormones washing about in my bloodstream to see that she was excruciatingly beautiful. Her hair was long, barely styled at all, the way lots of French girls wear their hair, and gave her the chance to make coyly seductive moves like pushing a loose lock behind an ear or sweeping it all back off her forehead. She was pretty skinny - again, the way lots of French girls are - but her slenderness didn't stop her having all the right curves and protuberances. And she had incredible eyes - almost golden-coloured - that seemed to be saying she thought I wasn't such a Quasimodo either. She fluttered her enormous (real) eyelashes at me whenever I walked into her office, which I found myself doing more than was strictly necessary for the day-to-day business of starting up a couple of tea rooms.

  My abysmal French made her laugh. And making her laugh, even if it meant humiliating myself, made me feel decidedly pleasant.

  "Tu es professeur pour moi," I garbled one day in my first week.

  She laughed. I pretended to be offended.

  "Non. Je veux parler français," I told her.

  She laughed again and replied something that I didn't understand.

  "Tu apprendre anglais avec moi?" I suggested. "Nous, er. . ." and I did my best to mime an exchange of conversation lessons with a gesture that turned out a bit more gynaecological than I'd intended.

  Still, my cervical mime didn't put her off. We went for an after-work drink that evening at a viciously expensive underground cocktail bar just off the Champs-Elysées. The kind of place where everyone sits up very straight in their Philippe Starck armchairs so that they can be seen.

  I leant low towards Christine, and we talked about life in London and Paris in a sort of fun pigeon Franglais. And like a pigeon, I spent a lot of time cooing.

  We were just getting cosy, at fingertip-brushing stage, when she suddenly did a Cinderella.

  "Mon train," she said.

  "Non, non, le metro est très brrmm brrmm," I objected, meaning that it would have her home long before she turned into a pumpkin.

  She shook her head and showed me a little fold-out map of the suburban trains. She lived miles out of town.

  "Viens chez moi," I offered sportingly - one of the best phrases I'd found in my CD-Rom's vocab lists. Vee-en shay mwa. Sounded like a kiss.

  She tutted, brushed her dark lips against my mouth, stroked my chin with a long finger, and left me nailed to the table by a hard-on that it would have taken a UN resolution to disarm.

  I didn't get it. Most of the English women I'd taken out for after-work drinks in London would either have made it brutally clear I was not Mr Sexy or had their calves clamped round my ears by now. But then maybe I'd been dating the ear-clamping type of gal.

  * * *

  First thing next morning, I brought her coffee in her office.

  "Ce soir, tu veux . .. ?" I left her to fill in the gap with either a conversation class or something more physical.

  "Boire un verre?" she decided. She mimed a drink. OK for starters at least.

  "On se retrouve an bar a dix-neuf heures?" she articulated.

  Meet up at the bar. Keeping it secret. Good, I thought. The previous day we'd left the office together, causing raised eyebrows in the corridor.

  When we met up at seven that evening, Christine didn't seem much into English conversation. She asked me in French if I was married and had kids back in London.

  "Mais non!" I assured her.

  "Pourquoi pas?"

  "Pfff," I explained. My French didn't stretch to a more detailed description of my disastrous relationship with Ruth.

  She did her eye-fluttering thing, and Cinderella'd off at eight on the dot.

  I really couldn't figure out French women. Were they fans of mental foreplay? Only into intellectual sex?

  Or did they want to be jumped on? (I didn't think so - I've never met any woman of any nationality who appreciated the rugby-tackle approach to seduction.)

  Or maybe this was a Frenchwoman's way of symbolizing the relationship between France and the Brits - she dangles her sexy image in front of me, but keeps her distance to avoid catching mad-cow disease.

  I looked for an explanation in a report I'd commissioned on what the French really thought of us.

  There was nothing specific in there about why Christine wouldn't sleep with me, but it still made interesting reading. Apart from mad-cow disease and hooligans, the most common things that the French associated with the word "anglais" were the Queen, Shakespeare, David Beckham, Mr Bean, the Rolling Stones (all of which were positive concepts, amazingly) and, yes, tea, which was seen as a stylish, civilized drink. The French had obviously never had milky horse piss slopped into a polystyrene beaker by a 16-year-old work-experience trainee in an English beach caff (I know a
ll about milky horse piss - I was that work-experience trainee). In French cafe's, the price of a cup of tea was on average double that of an espresso.

  Holy tea cosies, I thought, why the hell hasn't this English tea room thing been done before? And why hadn't I got a better team working on it?

  The rest of the team were supposed to be reading this and other reports as well, but whenever I asked for an opinion, all I got was a "vairy an-tress-ting". They weren't reading the bloody things at all. As far as I could tell they weren't contributing anything to the project. Autumn had hardly started and they were already dead wood.

  Looked like I'd have to talk to Jean-Marie about getting Stéphanie, Bernard and Marc transferred over to a project they actually gave a damn about. Away from my tea rooms, anyway.

  They were going to hate me, of course, but I had no choice.

  I told Jean-Marie that there was a delicate subject I wanted to discuss, and he insisted we go out to lunch together that very "midi". Very important day to go out to lunch, he said. He didn't elaborate.

  We left the building at 12.30 with "bon appétit" ringing in our ears. The people who saw us called it out like you would say "Happy Christmas". Every lunchtime, it seemed, was a celebration. And why not?

  The street was filling up with smart office people. This close to the Champs-Elysées, there was a lot of Chanel and Dior about. Sunglasses, bags, skirts. Among the middle-aged, anyway. There were also gaggles of young secretaries in designer jeans, their hair worn long and natural like Christine's, their tight tops attracting frank stares from the men in suits. Including Jean-Marie, whose eyes seemed to flicker constantly from bum to boob level as he walked.

  Two posh women went past in designer tweed. Paris clearly had its horsey set, though god knew where they kept their horses in this dense urban maze of streets - in an underground garage maybe.

  "What's so important about going out to lunch today?" I asked.