A Year in the Merde Read online

  There were two or three massive bateaux mouches moored here, like horizontal glass apartment buildings.

  Alexa was sitting on a bench, squinting up into the pale sun. She had her leather jacket on, but this time she actually wore a skirt - a long denim thing that hid her knees but showed off a pair of smooth, creamy-white calves. It seemed she was revealing her body inch by inch.

  I bent down and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  "You are surprised by my choice?" she said.

  I turned to look at the huge, ugly boat.

  "Yes."

  "I chose it for you. There are no dogs in the middle of the river."

  The glass-sided boat set off along the Seine. It didn't feel much like a boat. There was no rocking and rolling, even though the water was flowing fast, causing small eddies and whirlpools under the many bridges. The boat was so big that it felt like being on rails.

  But sitting up on the roof in the autumn sun, with a slight breeze blowing between the high, built-up river banks, we got a view of the city undisturbed by the urban rush.

  Alexa produced some foil-wrapped sandwiches and cracked open two small bottles of chilled beer as the recorded commentary began. First in French, then a different voice for English, German, Spanish, and finally what sounded like Russian and Japanese.

  We headed towards the city centre and Notre Dame.

  "A votre droite," the (female) tape announced, "l'Hôtel des Invalides, la tombe de l’Empereur Napoleon Bonaparte."

  "On your right," said a cheerful American male actor, "the Hôtel des Invalides, tomb of ..."

  You could tell what nationality people were by the moment they chose to turn and look right. Though Bulgarians were presumably going to spend the whole cruise staring straight ahead.

  "What's in this?" I began to unravel the foil around a long, half-baguette sandwich.

  "Normandy sausage - andouille de Vire."

  The Japanese Invalides commentary had only just time to end before the French returned with a request to look to the left and an explanation of how the gold-tipped needle in the middle of the Place Concorde was a gift from an Egyptian viceroy . . .

  The half-baguette was filled with slices of a suspicious-looking grey-brown substance.

  "Sausage?" I let the word float sceptically above the German announcement about "der Concorde-Platz".

  "Yes."

  I took one bite and spat it back in the foil.

  "It tastes - it smells - of merde!"

  Alexa thought this was hugely funny. "Oh, please. Not your favourite subject again. That is the typical andouille."

  She explained how they made it. I took a swig of beer to clean my teeth. Apparently I'd just bitten into a pig's rectum.

  "You could have chosen something a little less typical."

  "Ah, you English. Your farms are just factories where food grows in sterilized test tubes. Try a different sandwich."

  "What's in the others, then? Cowpat fume?"

  Alexa laughed. "You are scared of France, aren't you?"

  "Scared, moi? Get that sandwich open right now."

  Alexa began to unwrap another sandwich. It was filled with runny yellow cheese, and reeked. I couldn't stop myself turning away. I joined a family of Asian tourists who were looking at a tree that the Japanese commentary seemed to be calling Concorde.

  "It is Reblochon." She waved it under my nose. This had to be one of the unpasteurized cheeses that were banned in the UK, presumably because, to judge by the pong, they were scraped up off the floor of the cowshed.

  "It's good. Try it."

  "OK, no problem." I tried my best to look more Bruce Willis than Hugh Grant. Alexa laughed all the same.

  "Honestly. It is not too strong. You have not tasted Epoisse or Minister. They are smelly. We love them."

  "I really don't fit in in this country."

  Alexa gave my hand a comforting rub, and breathed cheese in my face.

  "You will adapt."

  I sat back with my beer and wondered.

  The boat had just gone past the Louvre, and now came alongside a pair of sand barges that the American voice described as the "legendary home of the Mona Lisa". There were going to be some confused photo albums in Arkansas.

  "For example," Alexa said, "you must learn to tolerate the taste if you kiss a girl who has just eaten some Reblochon."

  "Can I hold my nose?"

  She gave me a punch in the ribs but let me taste her lips. I enjoyed it so much I went back for seconds. For some reason, the idea of being a Parisian cliché - kissing as we floated down the Seine, how tacky can you get? - did not bother me at all.

  I put my arm round her, pulled her head on to my shoulder, and thought, you lucky bastard. I've been using the worst chat-up lines known to man and still she likes me.

  We stayed like this as the boat sailed beneath the towering gothic buttresses of Notre Dame cathedral.

  "What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon?" I asked.

  "Oh, I must see my father."

  "Your father? Again? I mean, what - ?"

  "Yes. He has problems."

  "What sort of problems?" Pretty damn major problems, I hoped. Bankruptcy or a dicky prostate at the very least.

  "Oh, problems of the heart. My parents are divorced, because he has discovered he is gay. And now his boyfriend has left him."

  "And you have to go and console him?"

  "Yes, it would not be very diplomatic if he asked my mother. And anyway, she is in Moscow, making a documentary about the gangsters. Who knows when she will come back."

  "Right." Sometimes, I thought, it felt quite pleasant to be a boring, middle-class Englishman.

  We sailed past the modernistic, glass-fronted Arab art institute, which the Germans frowned at sceptically when it was referred to as a "gothische Kathedral".

  "But we can meet tomorrow evening," she said. "We will do something other than eat."

  I dived in for some more second-hand cheese.

  We floated under a bridge and a kid whistled down at us. He didn't think we were a cliché.

  In the office, too, things began flowing more smoothly.

  Until now, I'd found it totally infuriating that we never came to any decisions. Every week, the team had a "committee" (every meeting was called a committee), for which I wrote an agenda reminding people of what decisions needed to be taken. And every committee consisted of one of the others in the team talking about whatever idea they'd had in the loo before coming to the meeting. Why not dress all the waiters in kilts? Or: I went to an Irish pub and they had an old bicycle hanging from the wall - why don't we get some old bicycles?

  At one committee, Marc suggested that the waiters should all wear bowler hats and carry umbrellas like "Monsieur Stid" in "Melon Hat and Boots of Laid Air" (Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir - bowler hat and leather boots - was the French name for The Avengers, apparently). Everyone went off on a long verbal tour of what to do with your umbrella while carrying a trayload of salmon sandwiches. Stéphanie even stood up and used a ruler to mime the opening credits to the TV series. She was wearing tight trousers that showed very un-Avenger-like bobbles of cellulite on the outer thighs.

  In my early, heavy-footed days, I would have been tempted to fetch an umbrella and show them where I'd like to stick it, but now I felt able to sit back and let them have their fun.

  Jean-Marie also seemed unconcerned about this time-wasting. He even joined in when they lapsed into French, and greeted the end of the conversation with an almost sexual sigh of satisfaction. Only the French, I thought, could attain orgasm by listening to themselves. It was self-inflicted oral sex. A DIY blowjob.

  "Bernard, when exactly will you get the results of your study about the brand name?" I asked genially.

  "Oh. Ah." Bernard's blond moustache seemed to blush. He was definitely flustered.

  "Which 'cabinet d'études` did you consult?" I'd asked Christine how you said market-research company.

  "Uh .. ." Bern
ard appealed to Jean-Marie for help.

  "It is my fault," Jean-Marie said, now looking much less as if he had a vibrator stuffed up his backside. "I told Bernard not to continue with the study to find a new name. I'm sorry, Paul. I should have told you. But. . ."

  "You thought I'd take it personally. Not at all. I'm English. We accept defeat with a stiff upper lip." This is a lie about the British that the French believe. Fortunately they never see news film of English football fans weeping when their team gets relegated, or CCTV footage of road-rage attacks caused by someone pushing into the queue for a supermarket parking space.

  "So you ordered those My Tea Is Rich business cards yourself, did you, Jean-Marie?"

  Everyone except me was looking uncomfortable. So they'd all been in on the deception.

  "Yes. This is true," Jean-Marie confessed. "But you are advancing well with other matters, so I thought the name is a minor thing. You see, Paul, My Tea Is Rich was my idea. And it really is a good name for France. You don't think it is funny or English, but you are not French." The team looked at me to see how I'd take this crushing blow. Not French? The ultimate insult.

  I took it like a man. "OK. Fine, Jean-Marie. You know France better than I do. And you're the boss. But if I may say so, coming from outside the company, it doesn't look very professional if the head of a team is not told about a key decision relating to his project. It's not the way an efficient team is run. I think I see trouble up ahead if we carry on like this."

  I topped this off with a Parisian-style shrug. If you make cock-ups, it's your lookout, my body language was telling them. You're mistaking me for someone who gives a merde. And it worked. The five French faces in front of me were looking anything but triumphant about my supposed humiliation. They were staring blankly into the future, fearful of the traps that might lie ahead.

  Applied to daily life, this is the key to keeping your shoes clean on the pavements of Paris. As you walk, your subconscious scans the pavement ahead. It learns to spot the tiniest bump on the horizon, and prepares your feet to step instinctively around it. Ask a Parisian how they manage, against all the odds, to keep their feet clean. They don't know. It's an instinct that is part of being Parisian. Those 650 people a year who go to hospital after slipping on merde - I bet they're tourists, or provincials, or the old and infirm suffering from depleted instincts.

  * * *

  My instincts, meanwhile, were just starting to fire on all cylinders.

  On the evening I was due to go out with Alexa, I stayed late in my office, reading the business profiles of France's most successful food brands. It must have been about 7.30pm. I'd been silently sitting there in my office, working with just a desk lamp, for maybe two hours.

  There had, I was dimly aware, been voices coming from the office next door, Jean-Marie's. Nothing unusual in that. I'd taken no notice. The first unusual sound I heard was a gasp. Like someone who's just got the bill in a terriiyingly expensive restaurant. Or someone who is approaching the critical point in an office ooh-la-la session.

  I stared at the partition wall as if that might help me hear more clearly. Yes, there was a very faint, regular creaking. An office chair being bounced upon, maybe. Or a desk taking the strain.

  There was that gasp again. And then a female voice urging Jean-Marie not to stop quite yet. Who was the mystery mistress? Not Christine, I hoped. And not Marc doing a falsetto, surely?

  There was a bit more gasping, a grunt or two, and then the creaking stopped. It would all have been a major turn-on if I hadn't been battling against the idea of imagining Jean-Marie semi-naked. I really did not want to go there.

  The voices became louder. Buttoning and zipping-up time. They obviously thought they were alone on this floor, because one of them opened the door and the woman's voice suddenly became clearer. Bloody hell, it was Stéphanie. Doing a bit more meat procurement than was called for in her job description.

  I couldn't understand everything she said, but she mentioned something about "vache folle" - mad-cow disease. And "importer du boeuf anglais" - importing English beef, which was still illegal at this point. Jean-Marie seemed to pooh-pooh what she was saying with a remark about no one finding out. Then he shooshed her and I heard the clang of his glass door being pushed shut. The voices got louder, though, so I could still hear. Jean-Marie growled something about "boo-jay" - budgets. Stéphanie said, "Merde, what about our public image?" Even with my limited French, I could tell that the conversation had turned from post-coital banter into a full-blown row between the head of "poor-chassing" and her boss about illegally buying cheap English meat.

  On a scale of one to ten, this particular merde was an eleven. I didn't think Bernard's French rugby chum in the ad would look quite so orgasmic if he knew what he was biting into.

  I left my desk lamp on, my door open, and padded silently away to the stairs and my date with Alexa.

  We were in the Eleventh, in the Oberkampf district, walking arm-in-arm up the street of the same name.

  It was past its best as the city's trendy bar district, Alexa said, but this made it more fun. The kind of person who only came to a place because it was fashionable had gone, and left the neighbourhood (her neighbourhood) with a great selection of new places to spend an evening.

  We went and sat in a bar with a South American jungle theme - an air-conditioned jungle, luckily - and ordered some outrageously expensive Mexican beers.

  The place had long sofas, so we were able to snuggle up cosily, alternating talking, drinking and other more intimate mouth activities.

  "Please, one thing for this evening," Alexa said, waving away a tequila rep who was trying to get everyone in the bar to wear huge sombreros. "Don't talk about your favourite subject, OK, Mr Obsessed Englishman?"

  "OK, but it's not really an English philosophy. I never used to think about it at all until 1 came here."

  "You call an obsession with dogs' bottoms a philosophy." Alexa giggled. She was now on her second beer, with nothing solid except tortilla chips to soak it up. She ducked out the way of the tequila rep who was holding a straw hat the size of Mexico just above her head.

  "Well, yes, it kind of sums up the French philosophy of life. You only ever think about yourselves. So instead of getting together to stop dogs from pooping on pavements, you just learn how not to step in the merde." I accepted a sombrero just to get rid of the guy. "OK, OK, stop now, please," Alexa begged. "Ay ay ay!"

  "Andale!" The tequila rep joined in the Mexican sound charades and jammed a sombrero over Alexa's eyes.

  Out in the street, we frisbeed our Mexican headgear on to a mound of rubbish and moved on to a moodily lit bar with a DJ playing moody lounge music and a moody waitress serving cocktails at prices that put you in the mood for a second mortgage. Then we walked a few doors down to a cheaper place that was jammed solid with people, disco music and smoke.

  I crawled over the moshpit at the bar to get two beers and joined Alexa in a corner that was relatively quiet because it was over five feet from a loudspeaker and at least a yard from the nearest drunk dancer.

  It was too smoky to breathe, too noisy to talk, so we drank, people-watched, danced, sweated, drank some more, kissed and laughed, as everyone else seemed to be doing.

  The dancing was weird. Everyone bopped about normally enough to the dance and disco records, but then the DJ put on some punk. I went out there ready to pogo and found myself in the middle of an Elvis movie. There was Joe Strummer spitting about a white riot, and all the Frenchies were jiving. Alexa swung me around at arm's length, and told me they call it "le rock", and dance it to any fast record.

  I thought it wasn't such a bad idea. The only physical contact you get with your "partner" during a punk record in the UK is a punch in the kidneys.

  At some point during the dancing, Alexa and I agreed to lay off alcohol before we got too drunk.

  But this was like agreeing to bung up the hole in your bateau mouche when your passengers were already up to their necks in ri
ver water. I remember shouting in someone's ear - not Alexa's - about being "rollock-titted" which didn't (I realized vaguely even after so much booze) actually mean anything to me, and probably meant even less to the Black French girl I'd shouted it at.

  After that, I recall Alexa telling me to get down off the table, and a shaven-headed barman gently but firmly - well, firmly, anyway - putting her suggestion into practice.

  I have a faint memory of tasting salty blood in my mouth and of seeing a lot of feet with dancing legs sprouting upwards out of them. And there my evening ended.

  Next morning my ringtone howled at me to wake up.

  "Voulez-vous coucher 'avec moi", it shrieked, a hangover (and hangover was the operative word here) from my London days.

  I opened my eyes to blinding white. White ceiling, white light, white noise. Either I'd been buried in a warm avalanche or I was in someone else's apartment. (My hotel room was a muddy sea of beige.)

  Oh yeah, I remembered. We went back to her place. There she was beside me in her bed, hidden beneath her blinding white duvet, still covering up her beauty.

  Brilliant. Apart from the headache and the scorched dryness of my palate, my main centre of physical awareness was a distinct sogginess down at willy level. A result at last, even if I couldn't remember it.

  The phone was still singing at me. I reached down to the floor and managed to tug the noisy lump of plastic out of my jacket pocket.

  "Hi, it's Alexa."

  I laughed painfully. "Very clever."

  "What?"

  I looked across at her and stroked the duvet where her headlump was.

  "Your alarm call," I said to phone and duvet. "But if you wanted to wake me up, you should have just reached across and tickled me. It never fails."

  "What did you say? Tickled you?"

  "Yeah."

  There was a groan from under the duvet and a hand emerged.