Merde Happens

Author:Stephen Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780552773522
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Miami Twice

Dirty Dancing

1

I OPENED MY EYES and waited for it to hit me. Any second now, the hangover was going to swing down from the ceiling and land on my face like a bag of cluster bombs. I could remember when I'd started drinking but not when I'd stopped, which is always a very bad sign. Even worse, I had no idea when or how I'd got to bed.

But no, nothing hit me apart from an awareness that if I didn't start swallowing water within the next minute my tongue was going to shrivel up like a raisin and roll down the back of my throat.

I couldn't understand it. Usually if I drink a lot on an empty stomach, I'm half dead for a week. But now I felt almost zero pain. Amazing. I turned to share my relief with Alexa, and moving my head hardly hurt at all.

This, though, was when I realized that I hadn't got off scot-free.

"Come bodge." A blond guy was sitting up in bed, leaning over me. I recognized that permanently disheveled look and the tobacco deodorant. It was Jake. But what was I doing in bed with him?

"Uh?"

"Come bodge," he repeated, as if this meant something.

"What?" Did he want me to get up? Bouger is "move" in French.

"Combo chien," he said.

I closed my eyes. This was getting worse and worse. Now he was talking about a dog.

"She's combo chienne. Cherry, the Japonaise in the restaurant, man. She's not Japonaise, she's Cambodgienne. You know, of Cambodge."

"Cambodia."

"Yeah."

"So?"

"So I—you know—I foot myself. Damn, how do you say? Je m'en fous."

"You don't care about what?"

"That she has no envy to sleep with me. I already slept with a Cambodgienne. Anyway, Cherry and Gayle, they're, you know, a couple." He pronounced it "coopul."

Miraculously, without the use of alcohol, Jake had managed to bring on a vicious hangover. My temples were beginning to throb as if I'd sniffed a gallon of ice-cold vodka up my nostrils.

"What are you on about, Jake? And what is that you're smoking? It smells like donkey shit."

"Cigar, man." He grinned and puffed a cloud of animal odors into the sunlit air. "Civilized city, Miami. They love to smoke."

"But why are you smoking that in my bed? And where's Alexa?"

"Justement," he whispered. "After we met ourselves last night, Alexa went to sleep chez Cherry. Here." He held a dark object in front of my face. I dragged it into focus. It wasn't the cigar. It was a phone, my phone.

"What the fuck?"

"Alexa is on the line, man. Here." He shoved the phone half an inch closer to my nose.

"She's on the . . . ? Well why the fuck didn't you tell me before?"

"I was trying to give you the situation." Jake shrugged his despair that the world never seemed to understand his motives. "Your girlfriend passed the night chez a lesbian Cambodgienne. It's the sort of thing a man must know before he talks to her on the phone."

It suddenly struck me that he was right.

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