Merde Happens Read online

  It wasn't, and the experience was as unpleasant as ever. Sorry, ladies, but it's a law of nature that women's underwear, even a thong, cannot be squeezed inside colored nylon and stay sexy.

  "The kilt hasn't been delivered, but mine'll do for the test shots. Sorry it's only the tartan of the Marks and Spencer clan." She gave a loud snort, a kind of clearing out of her nasal passages, which I guessed was her laugh.

  At least there was to be no sex involved, just a photo of my tartan-framed knees. I pulled off my trousers and put on the skirt. Luckily—or unluckily—it had a buckle, so I had no problem adjusting it to fit, at least around the waist.

  It was only as I stood there allowing my knees to be immortalized in pixels and listening to this basket case going on about how "there'll be a real kilt for the actual brochure," that I realized this whole costume party was probably unnecessary. I hadn't come about a brochure at all. She had the wrong guy. And come to think of it, I definitely had the wrong woman. I was due to see a man called Tyler. I'd assumed this was his assistant. No, truth be told, I hadn't assumed anything, I'd just obeyed instructions and let her make a fool of me.

  "Er . . ." I tried to interrupt, but she was jabbering on as she walked back to her cardboard box.

  "Have you got your portfolio with you? You done any big campaigns recently? Oh, poo."

  Her phone was ringing. She checked out the caller's number and then picked it up, making a "sorry, I have to take this" grimace at me.

  "What? Pregnant? Again? Holy shit. Just a sec." She put her hand to the mouthpiece. "Sorry, dear, it's my sister. Can you just wait outside for a mo?" Gripping my elbow, she guided me to the door. "Who's the father?" she said into the phone. "Shit, so he was lying about the vasectomy? Bastard!"

  I found myself standing in the corridor in a miniskirt, hoping to hell that no one would come along and see me.

  "Ah, Mr. West, I presume?"

  I was sorely tempted to say no.

  4

  A plump man in a gray suit was staring at me over gold reading glasses. He was at least fifty, but he had a full head of longish, floppy gray hair. He bared his teeth at me, not in a smile but so that he could lick them as if cleaning away remnants of his breakfast.

  "Jack Tyler," he said, holding out his hand. He had obviously decided that it wouldn't be polite to draw attention to my naked legs. An old-school civil servant.

  "Paul West," I confessed. "Er, about the skir—"

  "Do go in." He gestured toward the office next door to the mad stripper.

  Tyler's office was exactly the same as the one next door, except that the shelves had been half filled with files and coffee-table books. There was also a computer on the desk. This guy had been in residence a whole day longer than his neighbor, it seemed.

  We sat down on opposite sides of his desk.

  "I should explain," I said.

  "Are you a Scot?" he interrupted again. His voice was smooth and posh sounding.

  "No."

  "You're not a transvestite, are you? Not that we have anything against them. The British government is an equal-opportunities employer." He said this as if reciting it straight from the manual.

  "No, no, it's just that your colleague next door has got my trousers."

  "I see." He looked at me indulgently, like a shrink whose patient has just explained that he's really a giant tomato.

  "Not that she's wearing them, of course. We didn't exchange clothes."

  "No?"

  "No. She asked me to take them off for some photos."

  "Really?" He stared at the wall as if he might be able to see all the kinky things that went on next door.

  "What I mean is, she needed someone to pose for photos in a kilt—some kind of tourist brochure, she said—and the model hadn't turned up, and I was in the corridor, so she asked me to step in."

  "Ah." He seemed to have got the picture at last. "So it was out of the breeks and into the breach."

  "Pardon?"

  "Breeks. Scots word for 'trousers.'"

  "Ah, yes, good one." I managed a polite laugh. "She's on the phone and asked me to wait outside. I'll get my trousers back when she's finished."

  "Yes, yes, it's all par for the course," he said, licking his teeth. "It's chaos around here. New name, new headquarters, bloody ridiculous if you ask me."

  "New name?" I asked.

  "Yes, Visitor Resources: Britain was the good old Tourist Authority until some trendy twit in the government decreed that it sounded too 'yesterday's generation' or whatever. Anyway." He shuffled some papers to gather his thoughts. "Enough about us. Tell me what you've been doing recently. In France as well as England, I see."

  I took him through my time in Paris, most of which I'd spent setting up the tearoom, and gave him the bare bones of how I'd then gone to London to market a deranged French chef. Tyler asked a few questions, but none of them took me into the dangerous territory of why I'd ditched two jobs in a year.

  "OK. Good. So-o." His tongue shot over his teeth yet again, and it took all my mental resistance not to do the same. His tic was addictive. "Do you have any questions you'd like to ask me at this point?"

  "Well, yes, actually. Quite a basic one."

  "As in?"

  "As in, what is the job exactly?" I mean, the headhunters had given me enough info to get me interested, but they'd refused to be specific. Top secret, they'd said.

  "Ah!" It was a laugh, but it sounded as if he'd just been shot. "Typical," he grunted. "Outsourcing. You pay someone else to do the job and you still have to do it yourself. Visitor bloody Resources. Visitor outsources, more like. We don't even own the building, you know. Can you imagine how much of our budget goes in rent?" He'd said most of this to the ceiling, but he now came back down to earth and slurped his gums at me. "What was your question again?"

  "The job?"

  "Ah yes. How much do you know?"

  "Well, all the recruitment people would tell me is that I'd be touring the USA promoting Britain as a tourist destination, and that there was a competition involved." With, they had assured me, a fat bonus for me if Britain won.

  "Yes, that's it," he said. "In about a month's time, the first ever World Tourism Capital will be selected. And the winner of the contest will host the World Tourism Fair next year." I looked suitably impressed. "Winning would attract not only millions of extra visitors," he went on, "but also a very healthy chunk of WTO money. You know the WTO?"

  "The World Trade Organization? Yes, though I think it just changed its name to Global Business Solutions."

  "What? Really?"

  "No, I was—"

  "Ha. Good one. Exactly. Right on the ball. Or nail. Or something."

  "But you say the vote's in a month. So this job is pretty last-minute, isn't it?"

  "Yes. There have been some, er, logistical problems." He didn't seem keen to expand on this.

  "And who else is competing?" I asked.

  "Good question. Very good question. Who the hell is competing?" He scrabbled around on his desk and finally started squinting at a small booklet. "The other contestant nations for this first competition are ..." He put a finger on the page, and read, "China, France, and the USA. I know you'd have been good for France, but we already have someone on the ground over there, which is why we thought you could cover America." He waved at the window in what he probably thought was a westerly direction.

  "But doing what exactly?"

  "Ah yes. Well, some details are, I must admit, still being worked out. But basically—I do hate that word, don't you? There must be a better—"

  "In a nutshell?" I prompted.

  "Yes, in a nutshell—thank you—the successful candidate would be organizing a series of promotional events in the key cities." He smiled and licked his teeth. This time I couldn't resist a quick flick of the tongue across my own top teeth as well.

  "The key cities being?" I asked.

  "Oh. Yes. I honestly have no idea. Here, you look." He slid the booklet across to
me. I opened it at a page headed Participating Cities, USA, but all it said was "Cities subject to confirmation."

  "Have they been confirmed yet?" I asked.

  "Yes," he said. "Probably. I'll find out. We got that booklet months ago."

  "And I was told I'd be driving across America?" In my mind, I was already there, out on the open highway, one foot on the accelerator (or gas pedal), the other hanging out of the window catching the Wyoming sun. Yes, I could stick my leg out of the window as well as my arm because the car would be automatic.

  "That's right, in a Mini."

  "Pardon?" It was a shock to find myself back in a sunless English office. "A Mini? But I have legs. And I'll have luggage." Not to mention my girlfriend. "I was imagining something a bit bigger. A London taxi, maybe? There's nothing more British than a black cab."

  "No, no. We did a survey." When he licked his teeth this time, it was as if to swab away the bad taste of the word he'd just used. "And taxis were found to be too black."

  "Too black? Why not paint one?"

  "And too old-fashioned. Don't ask me, I didn't even get to fill out the survey form. But if I remember rightly, Minis are colorful and fun, stylish but not snobbish. Something like that. You know. What did they use to call it? Cool Britannia."

  There seemed to be one little problem with this.

  "Aren't Minis German these days?" I asked.

  Tyler took off his glasses and let his fringe flop down over his eyes.

  "Do I take it," he asked, a touch of exhaustion in his voice, "that you are not convinced that this, er, mission is accomplishable?"

  "No, no, I'd love to give it a go." Correction—I had to give it a go if I wanted to pay my fine. "It sounds a little disorganized," I said, "but as you can see from my CV, I'm used to turning hopeless causes around." He didn't need to know that my last job had ended when the French chef had tried to suffocate me with a grated courgette salad.

  "OK, good. Well," Tyler groped for his mouse and clicked tiredly on his computer, "in that case, I have a few questions for you. A survey." He put on his glasses and read from the screen. "Now then, number one. 'What is your opinion of American Homeland Security?' "

  "Pardon?"

  "It's meant to reveal your attitude toward your transatlantic hosts. My advice is, try not to sound too much like a terrorist."

  "OK. Well, how about, 'I'm all in favor'?"

  "What?"

  " 'I'm all in favor of a secure homeland.'"

  "It's a bit brief."

  "But what else is there to say?" I wasn't going to blunder into a speech about what a good idea it is to stop people taking toothpaste onto airplanes.

  "If you insist." He typed it out two fingered, and began to read again. " 'What is your view of the current renaissance . . .'" He seemed to run out of energy in the middle of the question, but took a deep breath and pressed on. " 'Of the current renaissance in American religiousness?' Religiousness} Is that even a word?"

  Wow, from one trick question to the next. I shaped my reply as carefully as a French patissier molding a chocolate truffle.

  "Well, if I can quote George Michael, who I think is Greek Orthodox . . ."

  "Yes?"

  " 'You gotta have faith.'"

  "Pardon?"

  " 'You gotta have faith.' It's the words to a song."

  "You want me to write that down?"

  "Yes, please. But maybe you should leave out the George Michael bit. And make it 'got to' instead of 'gotta.'"

  Tyler simply shook his head and typed.

  "And, last one, I promise," he said. " 'What is your view of American foreign policy?'"

  He saw my look of horror and nodded. Oh yes, this was the nuke.

  " 'Like all Brits,'" I finally said, " 'I'm really grateful that the Americans came into World War Two and helped us liberate Europe.'" And my gran says thanks for the silk stockings, I thought.

  Tyler shrugged and typed my answer into the hotline to the Pentagon or wherever this was going.

  "Well, that seems to be that," he said. "If you're successful, I'll be in touch. Or someone will be. That's probably been outsourced, too. Ha!"

  I laughed, shook his hand, and leaped for the door before he could inflict any more of his manic-depressive humor on me. I had to get my trousers back.

  5

  "Inspire that atmosphere!"

  My American friend Jake suffered from what was, as far as I could tell, a unique linguistic condition, namely that he couldn't speak any languages at all.

  No, that wasn't quite true. In fact he spoke two languages simultaneously—French and English—so that you needed some kind of stereo listening system in your head to work out what he was talking about. What was worse, he often pronounced French words with an American accent and vice versa.

  So what he actually said was, "Inspire that atmos-fair." Luckily, I spoke enough French to know that inspire meant "inhale."

  Between the lank curtains of his chin-length blond hair Jake was beaming a smile of pure pleasure as he breathed in a deep lungful of the air around him. Well, I say air, but the atmosphere was mainly damp and smoke. There was precious little room for molecules of oxygen.

  It was about ten at night. I'd called Jake as soon as I'd arrived back in Paris, and he'd told me to join him on his roof. We occasionally came up here to get away from the world and talk nonsense, usually with the aid of a bottle. As long as it wasn't raining or icy, it was relatively safe to climb out of the skylight and on to the flatfish area in the center of the roof. Providing, that is, you didn't trip over one of the ridges where the zinc plates overlapped and plummet into the street six floors below.

  I was sitting on the bone-chillingly cold metal roof with my spine pressed hard against a warm chimney stack It was a popular place to hang out. The chimney was pockmarked with cigarette burns and chewing gum fossils, and there was a grinning cat graffitied on the plaster, as if to make the spot more homely.

  There was a good reason for this popularity. From my centrally heated vantage point, I had a spectacular view over the anarchic jigsaw of Paris rooftops. The apartment buildings that look so gray and uniform from the street show all their individuality at skyline level, with wildly different slopes, skylights, and illicit rooftop terraces. On one building, the top-floor residents had colonized the zinc with a square of Astroturf and a fake palm tree. Two plastic loungers faced west to catch the sunset.

  The sun was long gone, but the distant Eiffel Tower began to sparkle as if a billion sexually aroused fireflies had just jumped off the summit. Every hour on the hour, from sundown to one in the morning, the tower's illuminations go disco for five minutes, and the throbbing golden light-show that I was now watching would have made even the most blase of electrical engineers go, "Ooh!" Jake, though, wasn't interested in this display of French lighting technology. He was hugging a shiny metal tube tJiat curved up onto the roof from the central courtyard of the building. It was the outlet for the air-conditioning system in the cafe on the ground floor.

  "Inspire that," he repeated, standing on tiptoe to get his nose as close as possible to the mushroom-shaped nozzle. "Pure Paree." Yes, he was actually sniffing the waste air from a Parisian cafe, a mixture of gases only slightly less toxic than a fire at a tar refinery. And at the same time he was puffing on a Gauloise.

  This had to be the only explanation for his success with women, I thought. When he wasn't wearing the black Paul Smith suit that he'd borrowed from me three months earlier and had never returned, he looked as if he'd dressed in the dark after a scarecrows' orgy. So there had to be something irresistible about his boyish grin and his ability to behave like a total dork.

  He had recently discovered a rich new seam of dorkish behavior—France had announced that smoking was to be banned in all public places. And even though it seemed unlikely that Parisian smokers would actually obey the law, Jake wanted to get his fill before the world came to an end.

  "Virginie, she wants me to stop smoking already,"
he said. "She won't permit me to smoke in the apartment, man, like, not even with my head outside the fenetre."

  Virginie was a film student with whom Jake had been living since around the time he'd borrowed my suit. It was his longest relationship ever, and pretty well the only one he'd had with a Frenchwoman during his ten-year stay in Paris. Since arriving here, he'd been living out his project to sleep with, and then write poetry about, every nationality of woman living in die city. With Virginie, tliough, for once he actually seemed to be after sometJiing more than a poke and a poem.

  "Do you write poems about her?" I asked.

  Jake eyed me suspiciously. He often accused me of "not respecting his posy." By this he meant not flowers, but his poésie—his poetry. He was wrong, though. I respected his poems a lot, in the same way that I respected pit bull terriers—meaning that I tried my best to avoid close contact with them. Once you've had to listen to fifty unrhyming couplets about exactly what Jake did with a drunk Iranian interpreter and a jar of caviar, you're not exactly hungry for more.

  "Yeah," he said. "In fact I do. All the days I send her an erotic posy in a texto. Good, no?"

  "Yeah, wonderful." I took a long swallow from my glass of Chenin Blanc to calm my stomach.

  Jake sat down next to me.

  "You think you will accept this American proposition?" he asked.

  "I'm not sure they'll accept me." I listed a few reasons why I was likely to get a rejection letter, including my evasive answers to the trick political questions and my accidental excursion into transvestism. "It turned out that this woman was auditioning models," I told him. "It was an open audition so she didn't know who would show up, and she naturally assumed I was waiting for her."

  Jake nodded as if this was a perfectly normal misunderstanding, which was heartening. I was rehearsing my excuses for when I broke the news to Alexa, who was down south filming some kids for her documentary on the French way of fife. She wanted to ask them why it was an integral part of the lifestyle in the Marseilles suburbs to set fire to forests every summer and cars every winter.