Blog tour: Merde at the Paris Olympics

Welcome to the blog tour for Merde at the Paris Olympics by Stephen Clarke!

Today I have an extract for you, so sit back and enjoy…

“Monsieur Paul West?”

“Yes.”

Well, in fact the woman had said something like “Pull Vest”, but I’ve been in France long enough to say yes to anything that sounds even vaguely like my name.

“We want your ‘ead.”

“My head?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

Everything about the person who wanted to decapitate me said “young French career woman”. Her trouser suit was chic but not too chic, her blond hair styled and yet un-styled, her lipstick red but not too red, her spoken English self-assured but of unmistakably French origin.

She was accompanied by what looked like a French peasant who’d got lost in Paris during a protest march about dung prices. He was 60-ish and bald, with a huge grey moustache and a stomach that seemed to contain a whole roast pig.

“You want my head? But the French Revolution’s over,” I told them. “The guillotines are all out of action. Unless you’ve come to tell me it’s started up again?”

The man raised his already creased forehead to a new level of wrinkliness.

“What you want to say, sir?” he asked, sounding like a Frenchman torturing the English language. Which was fair enough, because that was what he was.

“No, the question is,” I said, “what do you want to say?”

The woman huffed impatiently.

“We want, we need your ‘ead,” she said.

This was beginning to sound like a bad Madonna song.

“We will pay you well,” the woman added.

“I’m not sure I want to sell my head,” I told her. “I use it quite a lot for eating and speaking.”

They looked even more confused, but I was enjoying myself. Sometimes, when you’re a Brit in France, it’s fun to see how far a misunderstanding will go. How many avenues of nonsense can you explore? How far can you stretch a lack of communication before it snaps and someone French wants to punch you?

“Ah!” The woman raised her eyebrows, which were plucked but not too plucked. She seemed to be having a moment of revelation. “Not your ‘ead. Your id.”

“My id? You want to buy my personality?”

She groaned.

The guy looked as though he was about to faint from linguistic exhaustion.

“Vous pouvez le dire en français,” I said. You can say it in French.

Now the woman clearly wanted to punch me for wasting her time.

“Votre aide,” she said, meaning my help. My aid. Which, I had to admit, was what I’d understood about two lines into our dialogue.

“My aid to do what?” I asked, risking English again.

The woman took a deep breath and told me.

“We want you to ‘elp us to make pétanque a new Olympic sport.”

Now that is a completely new avenue of nonsense, I thought. One that needs exploring.

“You’d better come into my meeting room,” I said.

To be honest, it wasn’t my meeting room. It was an empty office I’d booked when this same career woman had messaged me the previous day asking for a “rendez-vous to discuss a very delicate affair”. Despite what people say about Paris, it’s rare that I get messages from people offering me an affair, delicate or otherwise, so of course I invited her to come and see me at a start-up incubator where I was renting a part-share in a desk.