Read Online Dial M for Merde by Stephen Clarke - Free Book Online Page A

the hell he was talking about.
    â€˜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 askfor funding from the French Foreign Affairs department.
    â€˜Funding for what?’ I asked.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Now I am creating a site web to put on ligne the posy of my élèves,’ he said.
    â€˜Your pupils?’
    â€˜Yeah. And for all Cajuns. After that, I want to make a Cajun festival of posy. And we need some fon.’
    â€˜Some fun?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜With an Anglaise? No, man. The Anglaise I had, she was interested only in beer and, how do you say, pipes?’
    â€˜Blowjobs,’ I said. ‘You think English girls are only interested in beer and blowjobs?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜That’s awful.’ A shocked woman was staring at me from under a straggly, copper-red fringe. ‘Beer and blowjobs?’ she said incredulously.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ I said, pointing to my phone. ‘It’s this friend of—’
    â€˜It’s total bollocks,’ she interrupted me. ‘When we’re in France, it’s wine and blowjobs.’
    Â 
    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.
    â€˜Is one of you getting married?’ I asked, hoping to change the subject.
    â€˜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