Dial M for Merde (8 page)

‘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.

Her own arresting officer, sitting opposite, told her to shut up and warned us all to do the same or incur an increased fine.

The blond civilian guy was at the far end of my own bench. He kept leaning forward and making faces at me, but I ignored him.

A few seats down from me, the commando with the dimpled chin was looking impatient, but didn't seem too worried by his fate. He turned to grin at me.

‘You know, I think I have seen a sturgeon,' he said.

I gave him an ‘Oh yeah?' look.

‘Really,' he went on. ‘A couple of months ago. We were doing some beach landing exercises.'

‘Shut up,' the policeman opposite me ordered.

‘Tranquille, mon ami,' the commando told him. ‘We're only chatting to pass the time.' A little staring-down contest ensued, the commando apparently warning the gendarme telepathically not to get too uppity with guys who spend their days learning how to hurt people.

The policeman looked away, and the commando took up his story again. ‘It wasn't near here in Collioure,' he said. ‘Where was it? Where did we do that beach landing?' He nudged one of his naked colleagues, who was engrossed in making lewd faces at an undressed English girl.

‘The Camargue,' the guy grunted, and went back to his tongue aerobics.

‘Ah oui,' Dimpled Chin said. ‘You know Saintes Maries de la Mer?'

‘No,' I told him, making a mental note of all this for M. If it was true, then it was prime information.

‘The sea wasn't too clear,' he went on, ‘but I'm sure that's what it was. Long brute, half-catfish, half-shark.'

‘That's it,' I said. ‘Did you see just one?'

‘Yes, only one. But why are you so interested in them, anyway?'

Good question. What could I say to allay his suspicions?

‘Photography,' I blurted out. ‘My girlfriend, she takes photos of fish.'

Any further conversation was ruled out when the van lurched into movement, its engine rattling like a tumble dryer full of spanners, causing the seats to vibrate so much that one of the English girls said she was going to buy one for her bedroom.

We drove along the promenade, away from the phallic church. The van edged its way through the crowds of curious tourists, who took photos and filmed the seminudity through the windows as we passed by. A couple of the girls stood up to flash their boobs at the cameras. To them it was all part of the party.

 

We were unloaded in a brightly lit car park, then herded across chilly tarmac into the entrance hall of the gendarmerie. Here, we were greeted with a shocked silence. Two cops at the coffee machine stopped feeding in coins and gaped. An old lady who had come to register some kind of complaint broke off in mid-sentence and clung on to the edge of the reception desk for support.

The officer on duty barked an order at the arriving gendarmes, and we were shoved into a corridor with five or six doors leading off it and a long bench running along one wall.

‘Sit down and shut up,' a gendarme told us. Two of the soldiers and four of the women were completely naked, and perched gingerly on the edge of the seat. The blond guy was still gesturing at me. Now he was giving me the thumbs-up. Bloody hell, I thought, didn't he think we were in enough trouble already?

I tried to get talking to my sturgeon informant again, but we weren't allowed to hang around for a chat.

‘You, in there. You, in there.' An officer strode down the bench, assigning interview rooms. ‘You, you, you, you, you and you, don't sit on the chairs until someone brings paper towels.'

I went and sat in a tiny cubicle just big enough for two chairs and a desk. It was a modern plastic-and-steel space, the only decoration a large, labelled diagram giving the French names for every part of a door, a doorframe and a lock. This was presumably so that burglary victims could describe exactly how their house had been broken into. I thought it would probably be just as useful to have a similar diagram of the human body. If you were grabbed by a visiting hen party, you'd be able to give a precise medical description of your attackers. ‘I noticed that one of the girls had a very pronounced ventral cyclops, and a tattoo that ran right down to her rectal fibula …'

I was still smiling at this idea when a painful thought hit me. The computer on the desk was almost certainly going to reveal that the French police and I had had dealings before. There was the little matter of a car crash after which the guilty party had not only left the scene of the
accident but also blamed it on me. And, worse, there was the fine for refusing to translate the menu of my English tea room into French on the grounds that ‘sandwich' was already English, and if you didn't know what a ‘cup of tea' was, then you were too stupid to drink one anyway. This disdain for the French language would tie in all too neatly, I thought, with my apparent lack of respect for public decency. They'd put me down as an amoral outlaw and lock me up with lots of men, who would see the arrival of a half-naked young Englishman on the cell block as a gift from the gods.

Despite the cold, I started to sweat.

My arresting officer came in and shut the door behind him. He booted up the computer with brisk little gestures. He was very thin and clean-cut, his hair shaved to exactly one black millimetre all over, his uniform neatly pressed, even though he'd just been out on a mission. All the tags and buttons were in place, and the leather of his belt shone as if he'd painted it with nail varnish.

He asked for my name, address, age and whatnot, and then got down to the interrogation itself. I could hear voices murmuring along the corridor. We were all getting the same treatment.

‘Now tell me what happened,' he said, not at all accusingly. He had an open, almost gentle face. I found it hard to believe that he'd be good at the truncheoning and shooting parts of his job. Or interrogation, for that matter. ‘Give me the whole truth, and it'll be OK,' he told me. ‘No need to be ashamed.'

‘Well, I was having a drink on the beach …'

‘OK.' The gendarme made a sign for me to stop while he typed the beginning of my statement.

‘I was having a drink on the beach, talking to a soldier,
and then suddenly the Anglaises and the other soldiers began to …' The next bit involved a delicate choice of verb, but the gendarme nodded and told me that he was typing that I'd seen certain men and women disrobing. So far so tame.

‘And when I, er, saw this, what you said, there were suddenly maybe eight or ten people, er, you know, on the sand.'

The policeman nodded again. ‘So they were engaging in heterosexual relations in public?'

‘Oui,' I confirmed, and he typed out this sentence that could never have come from my limited linguistic repertoire.

‘And?' The policeman was looking hopeful.

‘And then the police arrived,' I said.

‘Yes, but you were not a participant,' he said.

‘Yes, please say, you know, I do not do these things on the beach with drunken women.' I left it to my interpreter to express this in decent French.

‘Exactly.' He typed a long sentence.

‘I have done other things,' I said, referring to the two misdemeanours he was going to find out about when he hooked me up to his database, ‘but I don't do that.'

‘No.' He typed some more, and then lifted his fingers from the keyboard with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Now, I'll read this back to you, and you can sign it.'

He began to read, and I began to lose consciousness.

Apparently, I'd been chatting on the beach with my boyfriend, engaging in some manly horseplay that had resulted in my torn shirt, when we were shocked to find heterosexual relations being conducted nearby. We naturally found this repulsive, and had been in the act of leaving the scene to alert the authorities when the police arrived
and arrested everyone present. As a morally upright homosexual, it was unthinkable that I could have been involved in, or approve of, the indecent acts that I'd been forced to witness on the beach today.

‘No, no,' I pleaded. ‘I am – how do you say? – happy for gays to be gay. But I am not.'

‘Listen, mon ami,' the gendarme whispered. ‘If you want to escape this charge of indecency, tell the truth and you will be OK. I guarantee it. You know, we're much more interested in discouraging these gangs of Anglaises than … anything else.'

‘But … Oh, merde.' I'd do anything to get out of here, I thought. What did a little fib about my sexual preferences matter? Besides, how could they prove anything? They weren't going to get me to shag a guy on oath. I hoped. ‘OK,' I said.

He printed out the statement and I signed.

‘Wait here a moment.' The gendarme stood up, my false confession in his clean white hand. ‘Would you like a coffee?'

‘Yes, please.' With brandy and morphine, I wanted to add.

He left me sitting there, shivering.