Dial M for Merde Read online

  The sun had gone down behind the town, but it was still high enough to glare bright gold in the windows of the houses on the headland opposite me.

  Yellow street lights wound left out of sight, following the coast road south to Spain. Banyuls was two or three bays further down. M was due back from there at around eight. I was to meet her at the café. On the phone, she’d sounded tense, as if the talks with her fellow scientists had gone badly again.

  I felt my pocket vibrating. I’d received a couple of text messages.

  The first was from Elodie: ‘Val coming 2 Collioure 2 find u and talk. He will call. Give him kiss from me.’

  OK to all of that, I thought, except perhaps kissing her fiancé.

  The second message had been sent from a long international number starting with a plus sign.

  ‘Being on place in person maybe its easy for you to get money from strange affairs.’

  I recognized the unique style of non-verbal communication. Or rather verbal non-communication. This had to be from my friend Jake, the American who’d gone to Louisiana to try and help the Cajuns learn French again. Meanwhile, it seemed that they’d been helping him to unlearn English.

  I called him back and asked him to explain what the hell he was talking about.

  ‘Hey, Paul, it is my lunch pause,’ he said. His English, which had been polluted by ten years in France, had now had an extra layer of Frenchness grafted on. He had a Cajun twang, and said ‘lonsh pose’. Soon only a handful of Bayou swamp-dwellers would be able to understand him. And me, of course.

  After some careful questioning, I managed to ascertain what he had been trying to say. As I was in France, he had meant, I was in an ideal position to ask for funding from the French Foreign Affairs department.

  ‘Funding for what?’ I asked.

  ‘For posy,’ he said.

  This was one word that I had no trouble understanding. Ever since I’d first met him, he’d been going on about ‘posy’, his twisted pronunciation of the French word for poetry. He’d been writing a series of odes to having sex with women of all the different nationalities living in Paris. My least favourite had been the one which started something like ‘I once asked a girl from Kirkuk …’

  More recently, he’d been translating Baudelaire into what he loosely defined as ‘English’, as part of his mission to deprive Americans of their blissful ignorance of French poetry.

  ‘Now I am creating a site web to put on ligne the posy of my élèves,’ he said.

  ‘Your pupils?’

  ‘Yeah. And for all Cajuns. After that, I want to make a Cajun festival of posy. And we need some fon.’

  ‘Some fun?’

  ‘No, fon. You know, money, man. Euros, dollars. And the posy is in Frinsh, so I was thinking, maybe the francais government will pay something. They have a Francophonie minister, non? They support the Frinsh language in the world. You are in Paris, maybe you can make the demand?’

  Listening to him was such hard work that I felt like paying for the festival myself just to stop him talking about it.

  ‘I’d be happy to pass on a letter,’ I said. ‘Via Jean-Marie, maybe. You know, Elodie’s dad. He’s in politics, he has friends in the right places. I’m not in Paris right now, though. I’m down south.’ I explained about meeting up with M.

  ‘That Anglaise? But you sautéed her already, man. Why you want to sautée her again?’ He wasn’t suggesting that I’d sliced and fried her. He was using the French word ‘sauter’, to jump.

  ‘Some of us are in it for more than a tick in the atlas,’ I said. ‘We’re looking for something a bit more romantic. You know, a lifetime of love and sexual compatibility, stuff like that.’

  ‘With an Anglaise? No, man. The Anglaise I had, she was interested only in beer and, how do you say, pipes?’

  ‘Blowjobs,’ I said. ‘You think English girls are only interested in beer and blowjobs?’

  ‘I’ll send you the poem, man, you read it and learn.’

  I hung up on him. A lot of our phone calls ended that way, and it never really bothered him.

  ‘That’s awful.’ A shocked woman was staring at me from under a straggly, copper-red fringe. ‘Beer and blowjobs?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, pointing to my phone. ‘It’s this friend of—’

  ‘It’s total bollocks,’ she interrupted me. ‘When we’re in France, it’s wine and blowjobs.’

  The redhead, it turned out, was from the hen party. They were a bunch of friends from ‘sexy Sussex’, she told me. ‘You know what it means in French? Soo-sex?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Suck dick.’ She giggled.

  ‘Is one of you getting married?’ I asked, hoping to change the subject.

  ‘No, we’re just down here on the piss and the pull,’ she slurred. ‘We’re getting some guys together for a little beach party. And you were on your own, so we figured you might like to come along.’

  ‘That’s very flattering,’ I said, ‘but no thanks.’

  ‘You scared or what?’

  ‘Frankly, yes,’ I wanted to answer. I’d noticed that two of her buddies were watching our conversation from the promenade. Both were holding supermarket bags full of wine bottles, and their evenly divided loads seemed to be the only things keeping them standing upright. All of the girls were dressed as though the airline had lost their luggage and they were having to economize on clothes. They were in bikini tops and either tight trousers or miniskirts. They were tattooed Amazons on the hunt for male flesh.

  ‘I’m waiting for my girlfriend,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ my new friend said. ‘Girls!’ She shouted over her shoulder, and the two wine-bearers clinked unsteadily over to join us. ‘He won’t come,’ the first girl told her chums.

  They dropped their shopping bags and tried to lift me out of my seat.

  ‘No, honestly, my girlfriend will be here any minute.’ I pulled my arms free. ‘You’ll only make her jealous.’

  ‘She can come as well,’ the redhead said. ‘There’ll be loads of blokes. Look.’

  I turned to see four more girls staggering along the promenade, arm in arm with a bunch of guys. I recognized the commandos, even though they’d changed out of their shorts and into a different kind of uniform – clean jeans and short-sleeved shirts that showed off their biceps.

  The redhead beckoned her pals and their male escorts over, and my table was suddenly surrounded by loud drunks, including at least five soldiers.

  ‘Hey, c’est l’Anglais!’ It was the commando with the dimpled chin, waving a beer bottle in my face.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ I said, as you must.

  ‘You know this tourist?’ another commando asked, a guy with a bulbous broken nose.

  ‘Oui.’ The dimple-chinned guy told his mates how I’d followed him up the hill to the base. He didn’t look too annoyed, though. They were all laughing about it.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the guy with the broken nose asked me.

  ‘Paul West,’ I told him. No reason to lie.

  ‘Ça n’existe pas,’ he said.

  ‘Yes it does exist,’ I protested.

  ‘Paul North yes, Paul South yes, but West? No.’

  There were loud groans, and the other soldiers laughed and slapped him on the back.

  I groaned the loudest of all. Spoken with a French accent, my name sounded like ‘West Pole’. I had spent most of the two or so years I’d been in France pouring scorn on the French love of bad puns. And now I was one.

  ‘What are they laughing at?’ the redhead asked me.

  ‘Me,’ I said.

  ‘They know you?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ I said, and suddenly realized that I’d have to go to the beach party after all. These guys were drunk enough to draw me a map of every secret base in France, never mind discuss what fish they’d bumped into while diving.

  And M couldn’t possibly object. This wasn’t going to be an interrogation – it was going to be a drunken chat
that the soldiers wouldn’t even remember in the morning.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Where’s the party, then?’

  My question was greeted with a victory whoop, and the broken-nosed soldier leaned in and breathed at me that they were taking the Anglaises to a little beach just around the headland, a very tranquil beach, he sniggered meaningfully.

  ‘I’ll just call my girlfriend and let her know where I’m going,’ I said, and walked away a few yards to make the call, while the others gathered up all the bottles and had a bit of a snog and a grope to pass the time.

  M was on voicemail, so I left a message telling her what I was doing. Then, feeling the need to let as many people as possible know where I was disappearing to, I tried Elodie. She was on voicemail, too, and I gave her the same information. If they had to send out search parties, there were now two women who could testify to my last known whereabouts.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, returning to the group and offering myself up for sacrifice.

  ‘Yeah!’ The redhead flashed her boobs in celebration.

  We wound our noisy, cheering way along the promenade and past the church tower, to a dark path that led around the base of the cliffs. Most of the guys and girls were pairing off, trying each other’s mouths for size. Male and female hands were getting busy, drawing shocked looks from families on a sedate evening stroll.

  I tried to divert the broken-nosed guy’s attention from the nearest bikini top by asking him about his diving exploits.

  In between attempts to bite through a bikini strap, he said that they often went diving in completely uninhabited coves and bays along the coast. He had a strong southern accent, I noticed. He pronounced all this syllables very clearly, and said ‘kota’ for ‘côte’ and ‘baza’ for ‘base’. But he soon lost interest in shoptalk and started telling the girl that he was going to give her ‘a bang’.

  ‘A bang?’ she echoed. ‘Hey girls, François here says we’re going to get a bang.’

  There were renewed shouts of ‘wahay’ and more jokes about snorkels, and I wondered whether coming along had been such a good idea after all. We had now arrived on a section of beach that was practically invisible from the main part of the village, and unlit by the street lamps. I didn’t think it would be very long before clothes were being shed and Anglo-French friendships sealed with much more than a kiss.

  ‘You going to give me a bang?’ the redhead asked me.

  ‘He means a bath,’ I said, feeling like a party-pooper. ‘It’s the way he pronounces bain.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’ll do for starters,’ she said. ‘Fancy a skinny dip?’

  ‘Let’s have a drink first, shall we?’ I grabbed a bottle from a shopping bag and went over to one of the soldiers who had produced a corkscrew. It was the dimple-chinned guy.

  ‘Do you often come to the beach at night?’ I asked him in careful French. ‘To swim or dive, I mean.’

  ‘Uh?’ The sound of small waves breaking on the pebbles had drowned out part of my question, so I repeated it. ‘Oh, oui,’ he answered. ‘Day, night, anytime. But not usually with girls, uh?’

  He was having a bit of trouble aiming his corkscrew so I took it off him and got to work on my own bottle.

  ‘It is frightening, no, swimming at night?’ I asked. ‘The big fish?’

  ‘Oh, pff,’ he replied, sniffing at danger. ‘These Anglaises are more frightening, no? Are all English girls like this? Can’t they at least pretend they’re not easy? I prefer Spanish girls. They are more Catholic, they resist. You have to—’

  ‘Sharks?’ I asked quickly, before he could tell me how to break down Spanish resistance. ‘You see sharks?’

  ‘Uh? No, not here. In Martinique sometimes. In Djibouti, yes. But I’m not scared of them.’ He gripped my shoulder as if to protect me from marauding sea life.

  ‘Djibouti, that is near Iran, no?’ Before he could correct my wildly inaccurate geography, I got in with my key question. ‘Did you see esturgeon in Djibouti? Or here?’

  ‘Esturgeon? What do they look like?’

  ‘Just like those girls,’ I wanted to say, ‘white bellies and big floppy gills.’ Behind the commando’s back, several of the girls were stripping off, aided by helpful soldiers. The girls were squealing and egging each other on, and a couple of them were starting to tug at the guys’ belts. I only had a few minutes before all conversation would be at an end, I calculated, and did my best to describe the sturgeon I’d seen in M’s photos. ‘You know,’ I told the guy, ‘the fish that give caviar. I have heard that they live here, too, near Collioure.’

  ‘Near Collioure?’

  The first couple was now down on a makeshift mattress of discarded clothes and getting into some serious entente cordiale, but the guy with the dimpled chin was gazing deep into my eyes as if he might see a picture of a sturgeon, or even a tin of caviar, engraved there.

  ‘Yes, near Collioure,’ I said, trying not to whimper as his massaging thumb began to drill into my collar bone. ‘Have you seen any?’

  ‘Paul!’ An urgent female cry cut through the breaking waves. I hoped it was M, come to get mad at me for joining in at a beach orgy. Anything to escape from here.

  But suddenly my other shoulder was getting punished, and this time it was the redhead who’d come to claim her pound of flesh.

  ‘You’re missing out on the party,’ she said, tugging hard at my shirt.

  ‘Fous le camp, grognasse,’ the commando hissed at her.

  ‘What did he say to me?’ she demanded.

  I didn’t like to translate that it was ‘Go fuck the camp, silly whining woman.’

  ‘Casse-toi, pauvre conne,’ he said, tugging at the other half of my shirt. ‘Can’t you see we’re talking?’

  ‘You what?’ She looked to me for help.

  I kept silent, although I’d worked out that it was something like ‘Bugger off, you poor vagina.’ She seemed to have got the gist, though, because a bare female arm shot across my line of vision and just missed the commando’s chin.

  This violence was clearly more his kind of thing. He laughed and pushed her back. Her grasp of the basic skill of standing up must have been weakened by alcohol and the slippery pebbles, because she fell backwards, taking one sleeve of my shirt with her. Before I could complain, she was upright again, and trying to kick the commando, using my body as a shield from retaliation.

  The soldier, who still had his hand clamped to my collarbone, chortled at her drunkenly swinging feet until one of them connected with his ankle, at which point he swore and leapt backwards, a large portion of my shirt still clutched between his fingers.

  ‘Merde!’ I’d had enough of all this violent possessiveness. ‘Look, I’m not into boxing threesomes. So just give me those bits of my shirt back and I’ll say goodnight.’

  ‘Er, excuse me.’

  I felt a timid tap on my bare right shoulder, and swivelled to find a young guy grinning at me.

  ‘And you can fuck off, too,’ I told him.

  Deciding to leave my shirt to its two new co-owners, I made for the lights of the village, swigging on bad red wine and trying my best to steer a path through the maze of writhing limbs without stepping on anything vital.

  I had got temporarily stranded between a large rock and a particularly active couple when a shadow appeared a few yards in front of me and started to shout in French, ‘Police, nobody move!’

  A large group of similar shadows emerged from the gloom and began rushing towards us.

  The French are not an obedient nation, even when they’re in the services, and the commandos were on their feet in an instant and sprinting away, chased by dark-uniformed men with fluorescent ‘gendarmerie’ banners on the back of their jackets.

  I was a sitting – or standing – duck. A man in a blue pullover appeared in front of me and ordered the naked girl at my feet to stand up.

  ‘I can’t find me knickers,’ she told him.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, scanning the pebbles for
her clothes. I saw some likely-looking panties and handed them to her. ‘I wasn’t – I didn’t want to …’

  My stuttered protests were ignored by the cop, who grabbed my arm and stood waiting for the girl to wiggle into the knickers.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ she complained. ‘They’re about ten sizes too small.’

  ‘I am not with one of these drunken women,’ I protested, but the cop was watching the chases going on along the shoreline. Two canny soldiers had swum out to sea and were breast-stroking to freedom. A couple of others had been caught in the shallows and were writhing like fish trying to jump out of the net. Closer by, the young blond guy who had tapped me on the shoulder was also in the grip of a stony-faced cop. He was much too long-haired and thin, I now saw, to be a soldier. I was horrified to hear him telling his arresting officer that he wanted to talk to me.

  ‘Non, go fuck the camp,’ I shouted at him. ‘I don’t know him, honestly,’ I told my cop. ‘He just came and …’ I searched desperately for a safe way of saying that he’d accosted me. But my loss for words suggested something totally different to the gendarme, who raised one sceptical eyebrow.

  You’re wrong, I wanted to tell him, I’m not a public shagger of drunken females, or a soldier groupie, even though I have nothing against either.

  Just then, the dimple-chinned commando ran past, chortling and using my shirt-sleeve as a kind of whip to ward off the gendarme who was chasing him. My arresting officer eyed the whip, then my bare shoulder.

  ‘Oui,’ I said, ‘he tore it off. Not that … I mean, we weren’t …’

  The cop’s sceptical eyebrow was raised once again. Oh bollocks to it, I thought. It’s not a crime to be involved in a public bisexual SM orgy, is it?

  7

  There was one consolation. At least I had most of my clothes on.

  Having been escorted from the beach, I spent the next twenty or so very uncomfortable minutes in the police van rubbing shoulders with, on one side, my arresting officer, and on the other, the woman who’d been lying at my feet on the beach. She had clearly not been able to find any clothing to add to the knickers belonging to her much thinner friend. Her only conversation during the trip to the police station was to ask whether I’d got any cigarettes, so it seemed that at least she’d had enough fun to warrant a post-coital smoke.