Читать книгу Paris Trance - Geoff Dyer - Страница 8

When Luke came to Paris with the intention of writing a book based on his experiences of living – as he grandly and naïvely conceived it – ‘in exile’, he was twenty-six years old (‘a fine age for a man,’ according to Scott Fitzgerald). As far as I know, he made absolutely no progress with this book, abandoning it – except in moments of sudden, drunken enthusiasm – in the instant that he began leading the life intended to serve as its research, its first draft. By the time we met, at the Garnier Warehouse, this book had assumed the status of a passport or travel visa: something which, by enabling him to leave one country and pass into another, had served its purpose and could be, if not discarded, then stored away and ignored. So it’s fallen to me to tell his story, or at least the part of it with which I am familiar. Our story, in fact, for by recounting this part of my friend’s life I am trying to account for my own, for my need to believe that while something in Luke tugged him away from all that he most loved, from all that made him happiest, it is his life – and not mine – which is exemplary, admirable, even enviable.

The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those people. Especially since ‘story’ is almost certainly the wrong word. Whatever makes events into a story is entirely missing from what follows. It may well be that what urges me to preserve these events in the way I have – the only way I could – is exactly what stops them becoming a story.

Luke arrived in Paris at one of the worst possible times, in mid-July, when the city was preparing to close down for August. Parisians claim this is the best part of the year – it’s easy to park, they say (after a certain amount of time in a city the parking is all you care about) – but for someone who had just arrived it was the worst. The only people around were tourists and those forced to cater for them. Many shops and restaurants were shut and the few that were open closed far earlier than usual. Luke had rented a horrible apartment in the First arrondissement. On paper it had sounded perfect: right in the middle of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the Louvre, the Arcades, and other famous tourist sights. Unfortunately that’s all there was: museums and tourist sights. The temporal heart of the city, the part that makes it what it is today – as opposed to preserving what had been magnificent in the eighteenth century, or mythically bohemian in the 1920s – had moved east into the Eleventh, close to what had once been the edge of town.

The apartment itself was a stained place with a sad curtain separating the sleeping area from the living area and nothing to separate the living area from the smells of the cooking area (the cooker itself comprised two hot plates, electric, one of which warmed up only reluctantly). It was the kind of apartment where, if possible, you avoided touching anything. The surfaces of the cooking area – you couldn’t call it a kitchenette, let alone a kitchen – were all sticky. Even the worn linoleum floor was sticky. The fridge had never been defrosted and so the ice-box was just that: a box of furry ice in the depths of which, preserved like a thousand-year-old body in a glacier, could just be glimpsed the greenish packaging of a bag of frozen peas. Years of unventilated steam had made the paint in the bathroom bubble and peel. There was mould on the walls. Clothes hung up to dry on the cord above the bath never did. The shower curtain was grimy, the toilet seat warped, possibly dangerous. There were yellow-brown cigarette burns on the flush. To stop the taps dripping Luke had to twist them so hard he expected the pipes to snap. The window in the living area – the only window in the place – had not been washed for a long time. In a few years it would be indistinguishable from the wall. Already it was so grimed with pollution that it seemed to suck light out of the apartment like an extractor. An extent of patterned material had been stretched over the lumpy sofa but as soon as anyone sat down (Luke himself essentially), it became untucked so that the cigarette-scarred arms and blotched back were again revealed. The only stylish touch was provided by a black floor lamp with a halogen bulb and foot-adjustable dimmer switch. By keeping the light turned as low as possible Luke sought to keep at bay the simple truth that it was an ugly sofa in an ugly, sticky apartment in the middle of a neighbourhood that was really a mausoleum. At intervals he was filled with rage – immigrant’s rage – that Madame Carachos had had the nerve to rent this dump to him. On arriving in the city he had turned up at her lavish apartment and handed over a wad of bills to cover the rent for the two months they had agreed upon. They had taken a coffee together and then Madame Carachos, like everyone else, had left the city to the tourists, to those who could not afford to leave, to Luke.

He spent as little time as possible in the apartment. Mainly he walked, and everywhere he walked he glimpsed apartments where he wanted to live, restaurants where he wanted (one day) to eat, bars where he wanted to drink with friends he did not yet have. When he grew tired of walking he went to the cinema. (Ah, cinema, solace of the lonely young men and women of all great cities.) He saw a film a day, sometimes two. He became a connoisseur of the non-time that preceded the films themselves, especially in small cinemas where there were no advertisements or previews, where the audience was made up of four or five people, all of them alone. It was easy to see why, in films, fugitives and wanted men went to the cinema: not just to hide in the dark but because these intervals between performances were out of time. To all intents and purposes you might as well not have existed – and yet, simultaneously, you were acutely conscious of your existence. When the lights faded – always that same sequence of perception: the lights are fading, no they’re not, yes they are, yes – and the curtains cranked back slightly to extend the tiny screen, there was always a moment, after the studio logos had been displayed, when the blaze of projected colour lit up the screen like Eden on the first day of creation. Disappointment and boredom often set in very soon afterwards but, for a few minutes at least, Luke’s head filled with verdant images of city and sky, landscape and trees, and he believed utterly in the cinema’s loneliness-obliterating promise of brightness and colour. If this faded he tried to stay there anyway, tried to become absorbed in the simple clarity, the to-no-avail lucidity of the projected image. As he began to lose interest in the film so the idea of the city began to lure him out of the darkness of the cinema. The sun hovering over buildings, light striking walls and shutters, people moving, cars massing at bridges, the river winding through the centre of the city: all the things he had hoped for from the film he had come to see were actually to be found outside. The cinema was a dungeon from which he could escape into a world of colour and light. He sat for a while longer and then got up and pushed open the exit bar, stunned when the brightness of the street crashed into him again.

On one occasion he went to the cinema and found that he was the only person there. He was the audience. It was a Kieslowski movie, A Short Film About Love; to Luke it seemed An Interminable Film About Fuck-All and after forty minutes he left. Out in the street he wondered if the screening had been abandoned after his departure; or had the film continued even though no one was there to see it? He walked home, stopping, as he often did, in the Tuileries, which was only a few minutes from his faucet-dripping apartment. In his first month in the city he passed through there almost every afternoon. It was filled with sculptures from a time when, relatively speaking, it was easy to manufacture statues of exceptional power. One was of a naked man, walking, one hand clutching his face in despair. Another was of a man staring at the sun, his hands chained behind his back. Luke’s favourite, though, was of a centaur bearing off a woman. He did not know which biblical or mythical characters were depicted but the statues’ power was scarcely diminished by his ignorance. The theme in these sculptures was always the same: rapture, punishment, suffering. Passion.

He walked by the centaur, looked at the veins pulsing in his belly. The fingers of one hand dug into the woman’s waist, the other tugged her stone hair. His front hoofs had been broken off and she had lost a hand; her other hand grasped his arm but it was impossible to tell if this was a gesture of resistance or abandonment, if he was rescuing or abducting her, if what was being demonstrated was violation or rapture. If it was a violation then it was a rapturous one. Her missing hand – the way her fingers grasped the sky – would have provided a clue but, as things stood, only a pun remained: she was being carried away. Luke stared at the statue, the centaur rearing up on legs that bore the entire weight of stone, head tilted up to the sun, framed by blue.

Most of the other statues were also damaged in some way. Many lacked arms or legs, an unfortunate few were headless, all were being rotted by pollution. Rain soaked their naked skin, the sun scorched their backs. Pigeon shit fell on them. In the extremes of passion depicted, however, such indignities barely registered – so there was an implicit consolation in their fate. Essentially, they endured. The figure clutching his head in despair – had he been blinded? – was walking, putting one foot in front of the other. In spite of the immensity of his affliction, he kept going. Mere survival turned punishment into triumph. Condemned by the gods the statues became gods themselves. They protested their sentence even while accepting it. Always, in some way they were resisting or trying to rise above the fate to which they were condemned. The character in chains struggled against gravity, towards the tormenting sky. And yet, at the same time, the fact that they were made of stone, would never free themselves, meant that at some level they were resigned. Yearning and endurance were indistinguishable. They accepted their sentence even while protesting it. They accepted the sun that dazzled them, accepted the darkness to which blindness had condemned them.

‘O light! This is the cry of all the characters who, in classical tragedy, come face to face with their fate.’

After a week of rain the sky became solid blue. The heat was tremendous and though Luke was consoled by the statues the park itself was a source of torment. Arranged at discreet intervals, young men and women sunbathed, read, dozed. Many of the women wore swimming costumes. The park was like a beach and, as on a beach, Luke was aghast at how beautiful they were, these women. Several came for their lunch hour, stripped down to their swimming costumes, ate their sandwiches, dressed and left. Back at their desks they may have been plain, ordinary, but for that interlude of near-nakedness they were beautiful. Luke walked around the park and then, like a respectful pervert, chose a spot where he could watch a particular woman, could watch her arms, her legs, her breasts, her hair, hoping that she would catch his eye, return his gaze. The park seethed with a potent mix of sex and celibacy. No one could read for more than two pages without looking round at the other readers. Everyone was reading as displacement activity or disguise but this disguise was so effective that to violate it was inconceivable.

What hell it was, this park! It was so different from the parts of the Seine frequented by cruising gays. Walking along the river on his way to the park Luke always felt uncomfortable, obscurely offended by their stares, by the flagrant desire conveyed by their looks. They made him feel prudish, affronted. Then, when he reached the park and began looking at women with exactly the attention that, a few minutes earlier, had been focused on him, that gay world seemed nothing short of idyllic. He envied the men their common currency of glances and desire. How perfect it would have been to have caught the eye of a woman who was hoping to catch his eye, to have exchanged a few words, to have walked back to his dismal room and ripped each other’s clothes off. His thoughts were as crude as a prisoner’s but as strong as these desires – far stronger in fact – was his acceptance of the idea that it was not on to disturb a woman when she was pretending to read, that she had a perfect right to sit on her own in a park reading a sexually explicit book and not be pestered by men. A couple of times he had seen men make approaches but the women on whom they had imposed themselves had never seemed flattered or pleased by these attentions. Or almost never. On one occasion he had watched a tanned American sit next to a woman with short blonde hair and a lovely shy laugh. Luke heard that laugh a lot in the next half hour and then he saw them gather up their things and leave together.

It never happened like that for Luke. Even on days when the park was ablaze with women he left as he’d arrived, on his own. On the way out of the gates he always passed an old woman who sat patiently in a chair, holding a card on which was written ‘DITES MOI’ in thick black ink. She seemed happy enough, sitting there, announcing her wish to talk without any hint of pleading or supplication. So matter-of-fact was the announcement that it seemed as if she were not requesting conversation but providing a service: ‘If you need to speak to someone, here I am.’ Perhaps that was why no one ever took her up on her offer. Luke had never seen anyone speak to her: people were embarrassed by her loneliness because it so frankly mirrored their own. And the sign itself was strangely off-putting. Having externalised her desire for speech in this way she was left in the most complete silence imaginable. The card rendered her mute, dumb; all the language of which she was capable had been set down, framed and preserved in those two words: dites moi. Luke was fascinated by her, by the way that she had decided what she wanted, did what she could to obtain it, and then sat and waited, apparently without desire or hope. He wanted to know her story but, oddly, he never considered asking her, speaking to her. Instead he walked back to his stained apartment, lay down on the unerotic bed and masturbated – an act that left him feeling sadder than ever. If an orgasm was a petite mort then this was petite suicide.

Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French which was so poor that even the simplest tasks – deciphering menus, buying bleach to clean out the toilet, ordering sandwiches – became major exercises in pantomime diplomacy. Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty- or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change. The most efficient way to have used this money would have been to enrol in one of the many courses in French conversation and grammar but Luke persuaded himself he could absorb the language passively, by osmosis, without effort, by reading the French subtitles of American films.

Even more than learning French he should have been making progress with the book he had come to write but what in London had seemed a romantic, attractive option immediately took on the character of an arduous, pointless task that he had no idea how to go about. Which made it all the more important that he found a job – but during the summer there was no work to be had and since he was unable to find a job, incapable of learning French or getting on with his book and was, in addition, lonely, bored and consumed by sexual frustration, he seemed better off going back to England.

England: as featured from the ferry on the day he left. A rare bright day in the Channel. Breezy (to put it mildly). He had stood at the stern and looked back at the Dover cliffs, yellow in the sunlight. Then he had turned to the man next to him – a stranger – and said,

‘There you are: the teeth of England.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said “The Bowmen of Agincourt”,’ said Luke, and headed back inside the chip-smelling lounge . . .

Yes, he could go back to England – and it was that phrase that made him stay. Going back to England: it was difficult to think of four words more redolent of defeat because what they actually meant was going back to living so deeply within his limitations he would not even be aware that they were limitations: they would pass themselves off as contentment. Not that he had ever felt content in England, more like a perpetual rumbling of discontent . . . And yet, at the same time, he thought constantly about going back to England. Returning was a tormenting possibility, simultaneously to be resisted and to draw strength from. How comforting to have been forced into total exile, forbidden to return on pain of death. To know that there was no choice but to begin a new life, to learn a new language, to start over definitively and construct a mythic, idealised vision of the homeland that could never be challenged or undermined by experience.

The weeks passed and Luke stayed in Paris. More exactly, for the experience expressed itself negatively, he kept not going back to England. He stayed by increments, in exactly the same way that, until a few months previously, he had kept up a programme of boring weight training. He’d hated it, hated turning up at the gym and going through the funless routine of warming up, reps, and warming down. He’d known that at some time in the future he would give up but had forced himself to keep going in order to postpone the day when he would give up. He remained in Paris – where he made no attempt to join a gym – in the same way: putting off his return on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. In this way, although he was not happy, he was able to hold out for happiness, for the happiness promised by the city.

His knowledge of which expanded daily. Crucially, he discovered the 29 bus which ran from the Gare Saint Lazare to Montempoivre. Though impressive, the route itself – past the Opéra and the Pompidou Centre, through the Marais and round the Bastille – was less important than the design of the bus: a small balcony meant that a handful of passengers could stand at the back and watch the life of the city unfurl like a film. Luke often rode the 29 from terminus to terminus, glimpsing hundreds of little incidents whose origins (he could only see what lay behind) or consequences (the bus, in this traffic-free month, moved swiftly on) were revealed only rarely. Under the influence of Alain Tanner’s In the White City (which he had seen a few weeks earlier) Luke formed the idea of making a film comprising super-8 footage shot from the back of the 29. He would call it Route 29. All he needed was a camera and a Carte Orange.

In the meantime he received an unexpected, very welcome phone call. Andrew, the one person he (vaguely) knew who was in the city for the summer, invited him to a party. A party! This, he was sure, would prove a turning-point.

He spent a long time in the shower, shaved carefully, chose his clothes carefully, checked to see that he had a pen and paper – for phone numbers – and set off early to catch the Métro and arrive at the party in good time. He had walked down the stairs from his apartment and was out in the street when he realized he had forgotten the condoms that he had bought weeks earlier, in London. He walked back up, unlocked the door, put the packet in his pocket and set off again.

The party was in the courtyard of a house in the south of the city. Andrew welcomed him and was immediately called away to the phone. Luke scanned the women and felt immediately deflated: no one caught his eye. Nothing about his life was more depressing than the way variants of that phrase – catching his eye, catching her eye – had come to occupy a position of such prominence in it. He stood drinking. After half an hour he spotted a woman he had not seen before. She looked Brazilian, was wearing a brightly patterned dress, orange mainly. He looked for Andrew, hoping he could introduce them, but the host was nowhere to be seen. Luke manoeuvred so that he was close to her but she was cordoned off by the two men she was talking with. He was unsure what to do next: talk to someone in the vicinity and have his freedom of movement restricted, or stand on his own, feeling conspicuous, awkward and alone, but ready to move when the chance arose to introduce himself to her. He compromised in the worst possible way, by talking to another English guy who was also standing on his own: a young banker who was just beginning a six-month stint in the city. Together they gave off a double helping of solitude. One of the men talking to the Brazilian woman went to get a drink. The other was briefly distracted by an Italian in an improbable cravat. Luke abandoned his new friend and stepped in front of the Brazilian without having any idea of what he was going to say. Opting for boldness he offered her his hand and introduced himself. Somewhat startled she shook his hand and said her name, which Luke did not catch.

‘Are you Brazilian?’ he said in English.

‘I’m Italian.’

‘Ah, Italian.’

‘What about you? Are you Brazilian?’

‘Me, no . . . Though I am a great fan of that Brazilian drink: caipirinha.’

‘Excuse me?’ she said, exactly like the man on the ferry. On this occasion Luke prolonged their non-exchange for a couple more minutes until, the instant a pause afforded her the opportunity, she excused herself and moved away.

After that encounter he felt that he was treated suspiciously by the other guests, as if they regarded him as the most pitiful of individuals: a loser on the make. Already slightly drunk he made his way to the kitchen to get another beer. Going to a party to pick up women demanded a single-mindedness of purpose that he didn’t have. He relaxed, drank, talked to anyone who came his way, indiscriminately. It was easier like that, and far more enjoyable. On his way to the toilet he saw the Italian-Brazilian woman again, chatting in Spanish or Portuguese to a man with chubby fair hair and a baggy suit.

In the toilet Luke reminded himself that this party was his one chance of the summer, there would not be another like it, and admonished himself to pursue his original intention. Within minutes of coming out of the toilet his resolve had collapsed. It was futile, this self-inflicted ruthlessness. He thought about leaving and then forced himself to stay, hoping crazily that he would be able to get the phone number of the woman he had talked to earlier. One look at her told him it was impossible: she was laughing with the man in the baggy suit, liking him, and he was leaning against the wall in a way that suggested they were already on the outskirts of a kiss.

Luke left the party and walked to the Métro. The station was closing, the last train had left moments before. He began walking home. It had been his chance, the party, and he had blown it. In spite of this he felt happy to be walking, relieved to be free of the tension generated by impotent prowling. He knew that in the morning he would wake up feeling abject but now, as he walked past benches and parked cars, as he saw the yellow lights of traffic coming towards him, as he passed couples walking home and old men walking their dogs, he did not feel unhappy. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. He would stop and have a beer before he went to bed but he wanted to get near home first. He headed north, feeling neither tired nor depressed. His fingers touched the packet of condoms in his pocket. They reminded him of an evening when he had bought tickets for a concert and then, due to a catalogue of mishaps, had failed to get there. He was still miles away when the concert was due to begin. When he realized he would not make it he had thought, calmly, that it didn’t really matter because in two hours the concert would be over and everything would be the same anyway, whether he had been there or not. Ultimately, it was futile, self-defeating, this logic of negative consolation, but it was difficult to be depressed while walking. He passed another Métro station and found, to his surprise, that this line was still running. Within seconds the last train arrived. As soon as it left the station the train pulled above ground. Suddenly the train was passing over the Seine and there was a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower, its reflection lying on the water like a pier. Everyone in the train was looking across at the Tower and Luke felt his relief turning to elation.

It had been years since he had felt as wretched as he had at the party, as he had on afternoons in the Tuileries. He could not remember a time when he had felt so lonely, lost, but that isolation had now been redeemed by a simple Métro journey. The two sensations, the two states, were linked, dependent. You could not experience one without the other. He looked at the lighted windows, hoping to see a woman undressing or combing her hair in front of a dresser. He saw nothing like this but he was happy. No day was uniformly terrible. Even the worst days had moments of relative happiness. And if there were not these moments of happiness then there was always something to look forward to in the coming day. There may not be anything to get up for but there was always this urge to wake up. Like this, life went on, tolerable and intolerable, bearable and unbearable, slipping between these extremes. It was not a question of hope, it was part of the rhythm of the day, of the body. And it was part of this rhythm that tomorrow he would wake up with desolation lying over him like a thin blanket, would try to remain asleep a little longer, wanting to put off the claims of the day, to prolong the comforting sense of not yet being quite alive. But there might be a letter in the mail box and that would be enough to get him out of bed . . .

As he got off the train and stepped up into the street he was already looking forward to checking his mail, to buying a paper and ordering coffee, to sitting in the same chair he always sat in, the chair he was heading for now, where he would have one drink before going back to the sad apartment, where he would undress, splash water on his face, and climb in his bed to sleep.

The body has its own economy. Faced with extreme sexual recession Luke’s lust gradually diminished until, by the time of his birthday on 20 August, it had all but vanished. By then he had become sufficiently accustomed to loneliness that an absolute lack of birthday cards did not seem particularly demoralising. He spent the morning checking his mail box; in the afternoon he walked over to Invalides where football matches – kick-arounds, really – allegedly took place on Saturdays. The Esplanade was occupied by the usual assortment of sitters, readers and sleepers and it seemed unlikely that any kind of game ever took place on these traffic-surrounded squares of grass. He returned home, checked his mail and took a nap.

In the evening he went to see Brief Encounter. It was a tradition: on his birthday he always saw Brief Encounter in one form or another. Usually he had to settle for video; seeing it on the big screen – albeit a tiny big screen – was enough of a treat to compensate for the fact that he was spending his birthday alone. He loved everything about the film: Milford Junction, the boring hubby with his crossword in the Times and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the woman with ‘the refined voice’ who works at the station buffet, the irritating Dolly who gabbles away and blights Laura and Alec’s final moments together. He loved it because it was a film in which people went to the cinema, and because it was a film about trains. Most of all he loved Celia Johnson, her hats, her face, her cracked porcelain voice: ‘This can’t last. This misery can’t last. Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts long . . . There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more . . .’ What Luke loved more than anything, though, was Trevor Howard’s final ‘Goodbye’: the way he managed to strangle his whole life into that farewell (‘no one could have guessed what he was really feeling’), to make that last syllable weep tears of blood.

After the film he walked across the Pont des Arts where four friends – two men, two women, French-speaking, younger than Luke – had prepared a lavish candle-lit dinner on one of the picnic tables. A lemon-segment moon hung in the blue-dark sky, glowed faintly in the river. The young people at the table were drinking wine from glasses, laughing, and when Luke had passed by he heard them singing: ‘Bon anniversaire, bon anniversaire . . .’

Luke drank a beer over the zinc at a café. A sign behind the bar read ‘Ernest Hemingway did not drink here’. Then he went to the Hollywood Canteen, a burger place where you could sit at the bar and not feel – as you did in restaurants – like you were eating conspicuously alone. The burgers were named after Hollywood stars. Luke ordered a Gary Cooper, fries and a beer. The burger, when it arrived, tasted weird, not like beef at all. He mentioned it to the guy serving.

‘Mais c’est pas du boeuf, monsieur. C’est de la dinde.’

‘Dinde? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ said Luke falteringly.

‘Turkey,’ said the grinning barman. ‘Turkey.’

And in this way, Luke’s first summer out of England – and his twenty-seventh birthday – passed.

It is impossible, obviously, to believe that anyone’s life is predestined – but who knows what is programmed into an individual’s chromosomes, into their DNA? Perhaps each of us, irrespective of class and other variables, is born with a propensity towards a certain kind of living. Each of us has a code which, in the right conditions, will be able to make itself utterly apparent; if an individual’s circumstances are far removed or totally at odds with that initial biological programming, it may hardly be able to make itself felt circumstantially – but all life long that individual will feel the undertow, the tug of a destiny rooted in biology, urging him, only slightly perhaps, away from the life he has. The dissatisfaction and pointlessness that a rich and successful man feels on contemplating all that he has achieved in life is perhaps the faint echo of an initial code that he has thwarted, evaded, but can never quite silence. But a certain way of life will enable you to get closer to that initial blurred blueprint. Perhaps this is what it means to live in truth, even a disappointed truth.

In September the city began coming back to life. Traffic and noise increased. Delivery trucks blocked the streets. Tanned women hurried to work. Restaurants opened. Office workers returned to their favourite bistros and Luke returned to Invalides where a couple of games of six- or seven-a-side were in progress. He sat behind one of the goals and watched, gauging the standard of play, checking to see he wasn’t going to be helplessly out of his depth. He asked the young Algerian who was keeping goal if he could join in. After some discussion among the older players Luke was granted permission to play on the opposing side. Many of the players were extremely skilful and apart from an ongoing skirmish between a couple of Senegalese the game was played in just the right spirit: competitive without being aggressive. The fact that the ball bounced into traffic every five minutes – and threatened, on each occasion, to cause a three- or four-car pile-up – was an added attraction. Luke concentrated on not making mistakes and learning the names of his team-mates. A few called out his name but most settled for ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ or ‘Monsieur l’anglais!’ It didn’t matter. Once he had made a couple of tackles, headed the ball and, crucially, hit the ball into the path of a passing BMW, Luke felt quite at home. After only half an hour, unfortunately, the police came and brought the game to an end.

‘C’est chaque semaine la même merde,’ Said, the little goal-keeper, explained. ‘On joue ici et puis les keufs se pointent et nous embarquent, ces bâtards!’

Luke said goodbye to his team-mates, some of whom waved back or shook hands or smiled and called out ‘À la prochaine.’ He walked home happier than he had been at any moment since arriving in Paris: for the duration of the game and the brief interlude after it had ended, as they gathered up their belongings and pulled on jeans and changed shoes, he’d had friends – from Algeria, Africa, Poland and France.

Back home he got a call from an English friend, Miles, who had lived in Paris for ten years. He had been away all summer, he said, was glad to hear that Luke was in town. He invited Luke to dinner on Monday, the first such invitation he had received in almost two months.

Miles lived in the Eleventh, a part of the city Luke had never visited before. He turned up half an hour early so that he could explore a little – and decided immediately that this was where he wanted to live.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Miles, opening another bottle of wine (he was finishing off the first as Luke stepped through the door). Ten years ago, when he and Renée, his wife, had moved here there had been nothing. They had bought this place because they needed space for their kids and this was the only part of central Paris they could afford. It was a neglected working-class area but in the last five years it had begun to change. Following the well-established trajectory of neighbourhood-enhancement the world over, artists had moved in, a few galleries had opened, then bars, clubs, restaurants, more expensive galleries, more bars, more clubs. Rents were going up. As befitted a man who had anticipated a trend Miles explained this dismissively, contemptuously, even though these developments – for which he was partly responsible – suited him nicely. He was fifty, the father of two children. He had lived in Afghanistan and claimed to have slept with his sister even though, as far as Luke recalled, he had no sister. He lived on red wine, cigarettes, coffee. He drank beer like water, to clean out his system. Food wasn’t important to him. Mainly he ate omelettes. Luke had met him in London but had not seen him for two years. If he looked only slightly worse now that was because he had long ago achieved the look of definitive decrepitude that would last him a lifetime. Luke had assumed that Renée would be around, but there was no sign of her or the kids. Come to that, there was no sign of dinner.

‘They’re off at something at the school,’ said Miles. ‘Some loony play or other. Would you like another drink, Luke?’ It was one of those houses, Luke realized, which relied on its own internally generated chaos to function happily.

‘Are we thinking of eating something?’ said Luke.

‘How about an omelette? Would you like an omelette?’

‘Perfect.’

And what an omelette it was: an egg base with everything in the fridge thrown on top, in no particular order (the onions went in last, as an afterthought) with the flame turned permanently to maximum. Miles was a messy chef. In the process of cracking the eggs he smashed the cup he was banging them into. By the time they sat down to eat, the cooker, work surfaces and floor were awash with debris.

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking the kitchen,’ said Luke sagely. Very sagely, as it happened, for at the last moment Miles had emptied half a pot of it into the pan.

‘Quite. How’s the omelette?’

‘Great,’ said Luke. ‘Almost completely inedible.’

‘Marvellous. You know, I’m so happy you’re here. Would you like some more wine?’ Luke held out his glass. His vision was becoming somewhat slurred. Miles, meanwhile, contradicting his earlier claim, said that there would be no problem finding an apartment to rent in this neighbourhood.

‘Really?’

‘We’ll find a place tomorrow. I’ll put the word around. You can get a place easily. I’ve got two or three in mind already. People are going away the whole time on some loony expedition or other.’

‘Really? That’s great because I’ve got to move out of the dump I’m in at the moment in a couple of weeks.’

‘We’ll sort it out tomorrow.’

‘And you mentioned earlier about maybe being able to get a job at some warehouse.’

‘Oh yes we’ll do that tomorrow as well.’

‘Really?’ said Luke, conscious that his side of the conversation was coming to consist entirely of ‘reallys’.

‘Yes. Really,’ said Miles. In a moment of surging clarity Luke saw his future as fixed, settled.

In the morning it looked blurred, as unsettled as his stomach. After the omelette and more wine they had gone out to a bar and drunk a few beers. Luke had walked home, not caring about anything. Now he felt awful, hung over, certain that Miles would have forgotten about both the job and the apartment. For the first time his circumstances offered a flattering reflection of how he felt. His mouth was parched, his head ached. It was a Tuesday morning and there was nothing to get up for except to wash the smell of smoke from his hair. When he had done that he dressed, checked his mail box – empty except for a menu from a new pizza pit – and went out for breakfast.

It was drizzling or not drizzling, warm. Once he had drunk his coffee he could think of nothing else to do but go back to his apartment. On the way he bought an English newspaper, a third of the size and three times the price of the non-export version. From now on, Luke resolved (as he did most mornings), I will buy French papers.

The phone was ringing when he stepped through the door of his apartment.

‘Hello?’

‘Good morning, Luke.’

‘Hi Miles.’

‘I’m not waking you am I?’

‘No. I’m kind of hung over though.’

‘Have you ever said yes to a single joy? Then, Luke, you have said yes to all woe. Besides, we hardly drank anything.’

‘I think it was the omelette.’

‘Ha! Now, Luke, I’m afraid nothing has come up yet on the apartment front but I do have the number of that loony who runs the mad warehouse. His name is Lazare Garnier. You should give him a call. He lived in America. He speaks English, or American. That’s to say, he swears in American. Have you got a pen?’

By a fluke Lazare himself answered the phone when Luke called. He was furious because Didier had once again failed to turn up on a day when there was a massive backlog of urgent orders.

‘Ah bonjour. Miles Stephens m’a dit,’ Luke began, not very impressively. ‘Excusez-moi. Parlez-vous anglais?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ah, yes. My name is Luke Barnes and I’ve been told by Miles Stephens—’

‘Who?’

‘Miles Stephens.’

‘Who the fuck is that?’

‘He—’

‘Oh that English guy. The guy who lived in Afghanistan?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And?’

‘He said that it might – that at certain times you took on people to work, packing. I wondered if there were any—’

‘Where are you phoning from?’

‘Um, the First.’

‘What time can you get here?’

‘Today?’

‘No, next year. When the hell do you think I mean?’

‘In about an hour and a half.’

‘Make it just the half,’ said Lazare. ‘And you’ve got the job.’ With that he hung up.

We were all working flat out that day. Lazare was in a temper (that is, he was in a good mood), bawling out orders, yelling at people for not having done things he hadn’t told them needed doing. When Luke knocked on the office door Lazare was shouting at a client on the phone. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and yelled at Luke to come in. Luke didn’t hear. He waited, knocked harder.

‘Oui.’ Luke opened the door. Stood there.

‘Monsieur Garnier?’

‘Vous attendez quoi là? Un visa? Entrez . . . Attendez. Non,’ he said into the phone, ‘Je parle avec une espèce de con qui vient d’entrer . . . Ne quittez pas.’ He cupped his hand over the phone again. ‘Asseyez-vous, asseyez-vous,’ he gestured to Luke and then turned his anger back to the phone. ‘Écoutezmoi. Si vous êtes con . . . Allo? Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Il a raccroché, ce con!’ With that he crunched the phone down and glared at Luke who had not yet sat down. ‘Et maintenant, pour nous monsieur c’est quoi?’

‘My name is Luke Barnes. We spoke on the phone this morning about my coming in to work.’ Luke advanced into the room and held out his hand. Lazare waved him away.

‘So get out there and start working. Bernard will tell you what to do.’ He swivelled round, picked up the phone and began jabbing numbers.

Bernard introduced Luke to everyone. He was tall, confidently nervous. He was wearing jeans – which he almost never wore – and the blue work shirt which, as it grew older and softer, would be reserved for evenings when no wear and tear could be expected. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. He had that brittle friendliness of the Englishman adapting to a life larger than the one he had so far encountered. He seemed too tall to carry off the manners that he had evolved to diminish his awkwardness. Perhaps I didn’t notice these things at the time. It is hard to say, difficult to preserve those first impressions because they are being changed by second – and third and fourth – impressions even as they are registering as impressions. Even when we recall with photographic exactness the way in which someone first presented themselves to us, that likeness is touched by every trace of emotion we have felt up to – and including – the moment when we are recalling the scene. He was tall, thin. He looked English – something in the set of his mouth. His face was angular, the jawline pronounced. He was handsome, attractive; as yet his circumstances had played almost no part in determining his expression. You could not yet read his history in his face; his looks were a fact of biology. The eyes were blue, full of looking, but – how else to say it? – behind the blue (or am I amending that first meeting in the light of what came later?) there was a remoteness, almost a refusal.

We shook hands. He had the handshake of a thin person who has learned how to make a good impression by shaking hands firmly even though that strength always feels as if it is made up of bones and nerves. He knew there was a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands but he had not learned how to do it. He was one of those people who have to learn everything. I say ‘one of those people’ and I am not sure why. Perhaps because, as I got to know him better, he came to seem so emphatically himself, so individual. Perhaps it is from people like this that we come to an understanding of types. When I met him that day – or so it seems to me now – he was poised on the brink of becoming himself, as I came to know him.

‘Vas-y,’ said Bernard. ‘Je vais te dire comment qu’on fait.’ Which was to clamber up to the second tier of storage racks and catch the packages of books thrown to him by Daniel before throwing them down to Matthias who piled them on to the trolley which Ahmed trundled into the post room. There had been some debate as to whether chaining packages like this was the most efficient way of getting them from the storage racks into the post room. Possibly it was not, but for anyone who had seen footage of soldiers – of the Eighth Army ideally, wearing shorts in the blazing heat of north Africa – tossing supplies from one man to another, it had an inescapable attraction. Also, there was that slight – very slight – element of fun, of sport, of risk, which comes from throwing and catching anything, even dull packets of textbooks. On Luke’s first day, though, there was no time to relish these finer aspects of the job. A sudden rush of orders had come in, all needing to be dispatched that day. Lazare was banging on the office window constantly, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other, gesturing to Bernard to hurry, demanding to know why the order for Auxerre had not been sent out.

‘Parce que c’est pas à expédier avant jeudi.’

‘Pas celle-là merde, je te cause de la commande pour l’autre boîte. Comment elle s’appelle déjà?’

‘Ouais, celle-là elle est partie hier.’

At which Lazare would permit himself a smile before ushering Bernard back into the warehouse and calling out, ‘Et qu’est-ce que tu as fait avec celle pour Lyon?’

He was a good boss, Lazare. Once you realized that whipping himself into a froth of anger and irritation was essential to his contentment it was easy to work with him. He had two children and a sweet-tempered wife. She came by occasionally and told us how, if Lazare had expended enough angry energy in the day, he would sleep perfectly. She was able to gauge his days by his mood in the evenings. If he was cranky and short that meant it had been an easy day without problems. If he came home smiling, relaxed, a bottle of wine in hand, that meant there had been a series of deadlines, problems and escalating difficulties.

‘Le stress est son truc,’ she said.

We worked late that first day. By the time we left it was growing dark and Luke’s arms were numb with effort. We went to the Café Roma for a beer, another beer and a bowl of pasta each. We were all tired and the beer made us light-headed. Although Luke had hardly spoken to anyone he already felt that he belonged, was part of the group: an unexpected side-effect of Lazare’s abrasive ‘managerial’ style was that the staff quickly developed a group identity. Luke didn’t mention the book he had come to write. He didn’t mention anything much. He spent most of that first evening sitting quietly, smiling, laughing readily enough but not initiating conversation with anyone.

We paid for the meal, tossing a pile of notes into the middle of the table and getting up to leave before the waiter came to collect them.

Outside, the sky was turquoise, streaked black with cloud. People waved goodbye to each other, began heading home. Alex asked Luke where he lived.

‘In the First, rue de la Sourdière. For the moment.’

‘Are you taking the Métro?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, we’ll walk together. I live near there, near the Métro.’

People talk about love at first sight, about the way that men and women fall for each other immediately, but there is also such a thing as friendship at first sight. Although Luke and Alex had said little to each other there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them. Alex was shorter than Luke, strongly built. His hair was cropped army short. He walked fast, exuding energy, as if the idea of a stroll had never entered his head. Appropriately enough, he had come to Paris in March – though not, like Luke, with the idea of pursuing any kind of literary project – and had been working at the warehouse since late June. He’d been in the south of France for most of August and had only been back at work for a couple of days when Luke started.

‘What’s it like living in rue de la Sourdière?’

‘Awful. The street is OK but the neighbourhood’s not so good. And my apartment – well, it’s a sad place. It’s seen better days.’

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Almost two months.’

‘And it’s the first place you lived in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody starts out in a dump. It’s a rite of passage. You do your time in a cesspit, you’re about to kill yourself, and then, hopefully, something better comes up.’

‘What if it doesn’t?’

‘Then you go ahead and kill yourself.’

‘And no one notices.’

‘Neighbours, generally, are alerted by the stench.’

‘My place smells bad enough already. No one would notice.’

‘That’s probably the previous tenant. Where would you like to live?’

‘Round here.’

‘You should. It’s great.’

They walked in silence for a few moments, Luke hoping that Alex would suddenly remember that a friend of his was leaving an apartment just a few blocks away. Instead he asked Luke if he wanted a drink at the Petit Centre, the bar on rue Moret that is not there any more.

The Centre was crowded: overspill from a gallery opening nearby. They stood at the bar until two stools became available. Then they found themselves in the best position in the place: sitting at the end of the bar, part of the crowd but not engulfed by its pushing and shoving. Alex ordered two beers.

‘My arms are so tired I can hardly pick up my glass,’ said Luke.

‘I know what you mean. Christ, what a day!’

‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not often like that.’

‘How long have you been there, at the warehouse, I mean?’

‘Since April, but I was away for the summer. I like it.’

‘Tell me about the guys who work there. I wasn’t sure who was who.’

‘OK, Bernard is the number two, the foreman. He’s French and so is Daniel. He and Matthias—’

‘The German?’

‘Actually he’s Swiss but you wouldn’t know it. Anyway he and Daniel are great friends – that is they’re both great dope smokers. They do a lot of acid as well.’

‘At work?’

‘It has been known. Daniel deals a bit too.’

‘What? Grass?’

‘Mainly. But he’s pretty good for most things if you give him a couple of days’ notice.’

‘How convenient.’

‘It is actually. Then there’s Ahmed who’s Algerian. He’s the guy I see most, out of work. And that’s it. There’s a woman called Marie who comes in occasionally to do secretarial work but you never know when she’s going to show up. Like Didier. The guy whose job you’ve got. He was becoming less and less reliable. Today was the straw that broke the camel’s back, Lazare’s back anyway. He’s been pissed off with him for a while but his not showing today clinched it.’

‘I thought Lazare was pissed off with everybody.’

‘That’s just front. It’s not even that his bark is worse than his bite. He’s all bark, no bite.’

‘So you think I can stay?’ said Luke.

‘Sure. I don’t see why not. Where are you from anyway?’

‘I lived in London for five years.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Brixton.’

‘Me too. On Shakespeare Road.’

‘I was on Saint Matthews Road.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Just off Brixton Water Lane.’

‘I had friends who lived near there. Josephine Avenue.’

‘What number?’

‘I forget. A big shared house. They gave a lot of parties. The people I knew were called Sam and Belinda.’

‘Was it the house with the purple door?’

‘Yes.’

‘I went to a party there.’

‘Were you at the one the police raided?’

‘By mistake?’

‘Yes, exactly. They got the address wrong.’

‘Yes. So we were at the same party. I bet we knew other people too. Did you know, oh what was that guy called? The artist, he had that great name—’

‘Steranko!’

‘Exactly.’

They had known the same people, eaten in the same places, drunk in the same pubs, and now they were drinking in the same bar, in Paris. It felt like an achievement. Luke pointed at Alex’s glass which would soon be empty. ‘D’you want another drink?’

‘Ah, I see. We’re doing it English-style: ordering another drink before we’ve finished the first. Yes. Please.’

As Luke collected his change a guy came in and slapped Alex on the shoulder: an American, in his fifties, drunk. He was with a Spanish woman who was also drunk and a friend who was French. Alex introduced Luke and then began speaking French. Luke sipped his beer, understanding odd words but unable to join in. Then the American – Steve? – started talking at him in English, telling about the private view they’d just come from: paintings of people looking at paintings in a gallery, seen from the paintings’ point of view. Over their shoulders, over the shoulders of the people in the paintings, you could sometimes see some other paintings.

‘Not that you could get anywhere near the paintings,’ said the American. ‘It was far too crowded. Are you an artist?’

‘No,’ Luke smiled. People always assumed he was an artist. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why he felt so little need actually to create anything.

‘You look like an artist.’

‘Thank you. How’s that?’

‘The hair, the clothes . . . What about me? What do I look like?’

‘He looks,’ said another man who had just pushed into the corner, ‘like an overweight homosexual trying to pick up boys half his age.’

‘That is not fair. Do you think I’m overweight?’ Before Luke could reply he said, ‘Have you met Michael?’ Luke smiled and shook hands. ‘Doesn’t he look like an artist, Michael?’

‘He look very nice. Look at that shirt.’

‘You like this shirt? It’s my favourite shirt,’ said Luke.

‘His shirt is a work of art.’

‘It matches his eyes.’

‘He is a work of art.’ There was such a hubbub in the bar now it was necessary to yell things like this to get heard. Michael bought Luke a drink and began talking to someone else before Luke even had a chance to thank him. Alex had given up his stool for the Spanish woman who was actually Peruvian and who spoke neither French, Spanish nor English.

‘As far as I can make out she speaks no language whatsoever,’ Alex said, turning to Luke. ‘How’s your French?’

‘Terrible.’

‘You have to learn.’

‘I know. If only it didn’t require any effort.’ Someone else Alex knew, an English woman, Amanda, had just been to a film. Luke asked her about it and she began summarising the plot. It was as if something were at stake. She had to recount what happened, in exactly the right sequence, omitting nothing, incorporating each twist of the unfollowably complex plot. Once, realizing she had made an error in chronology, she even retraced a couple of minutes of exposition and started over from the point where the mistake had been made. After that hiccup she really got into her stride. There was no stopping her. Luke nodded. Alex was communicating, somehow, with the Peruvian woman and was apparently paying no attention to this scene-by-scene reconstruction of the film. Luke wondered if he could endure any more of it when Amanda’s attention was defected, briefly, by the guy she had been to the cinema with. Alex turned towards Luke again.

‘Quite a summary,’ he said.

‘I hate it when people do that. What makes them want to summarise plots like that?’

Alex shook his head. ‘I like submarine films.’

‘Above Us the Waves, Das Boot?’

‘Exactly.

‘The Hunt for Red October?’

‘No.’

‘Essentially, you’re a Second World War man?’

‘Through and through.’ They slapped hands: allies.

‘The Wolf Pack,’ said Luke.

‘The convoy.’

‘Torpedoes: tubes one and two.’

‘Depth charges.’

‘Periscope depth.’

‘The sea ablaze with oil. Survivors leaping into the blazing sea.’

‘Crash Dive!’

‘Two hundred fathoms down. Depth charges exploding all around.’

‘No one making a sound.’

‘Sonar.’

‘Or is it Asdic?’

‘I’m not sure. Sweating, unshaven.’

‘Bloodshot eyes. Worried glances at the depthometer.’

‘Well past maximum safety depth.’

‘“Take her deeper!”’

‘“She won’t stand it!”’

‘Creaking. Rivets pinging out like bullets.’

‘Every eye bloodshot and every bloodshot eye fixed on the depthometer.’

‘The hull about to be crushed by the pressure . . .’

Quite suddenly they ran out of steam. The bar had thinned out. People were still arriving, Luke thought, but more people were leaving than were arriving. Alex’s glass was empty. Amanda and Michael were saying goodbye to everyone, including each other. Alex asked Luke if he wanted another drink.

‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘Always yes.’

‘Irrespective of the question?’

‘Almost.’

Alex paid for two more beers and passed one to Luke. ‘It’s a great bar isn’t it?’ he said. ‘In fact it’s the best bar in the world, brackets: indoor category.’

‘What about outdoors?’

‘The San Calisto in Rome. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve never been to Rome.’

‘Me neither,’ conceded Alex. ‘But it’s something we could discuss.’

‘Places we haven’t been?’

‘No. What makes a great bar?’

‘Ah, a bar conversation.’

‘I have pretty strong views on the subject.’

‘And?’

‘All great bars are primarily neighbourhood bars.’

‘Correct.’

‘But they are not exclusively neighbourhood bars.’

‘Also correct.’

‘You don’t want to add anything?’

‘You said it all,’ said Luke, raising his glass.

Luke was back at work again the next day, sore from the previous day’s exertions, relieved to find that things would be far less frantic. This was another benefit of Lazare’s unusual managerial style: by imposing urgent, sometimes non-existent deadlines we often found ourselves with relatively little to do, especially if he was away from the warehouse, meeting clients, pitching for business. Typically we had two maniacally busy days and the other three were easy – which meant we could spend our lunch hours playing football at passage Thiéré. We had been mooting the idea for a while, had even played occasionally, but it was only after Luke began working at the warehouse that football became an established part of our week. Up until then we had spent most of our lunch hours talking about playing.

We took our lunch late and the playground was never crowded. If other guys were around – the Algerians from the workshop on the corner always wanted to play but it was difficult for them to get away for any length of time – we played together, four- or five-a-side. If it was just the five of us from the warehouse we volleyed and headed the ball back and forth, making sure that the ball did not touch the ground, embroidering this basic task – whenever possible – with displays of individual skill: flicking the ball from foot to foot and on to a thigh before heading it to the next person; bringing the ball under control and restoring the flow of play following a mis-kick. We kept count of how many passes and headers we could string together without letting the ball touch the ground. Sometimes we settled into a rhythm that seemed likely to continue indefinitely until one of us fluffed a simple kick and we were back to square one and had to begin the count again. I enjoyed this but it bothered me slightly that the game did not have a satisfactory name. Keepy-uppy, Headers and Volleys: neither was adequate. Alternatively – another game without a name – one of us went in goal while the others crossed and headed or let fly with palm-stinging shots.

After playing, especially if the weather was fine, we were reluctant to return to the warehouse and sat against the graffiti-mottled wall, the sun dazzling our eyes, gulping down water and chewing mouthfuls of bread and tomato, the minutes ticking by until, begrudgingly, like troops returning to the front, we tramped back up Ledru Rollin to work.

If getting a job at the warehouse was Luke’s first stroke of luck it proved also to be his second. Nothing came of the apartment Miles had heard of but, through Matthias, he was put in touch with a photographer who was going to spend a year travelling. He had sub-let his apartment to an American but at the last moment this arrangement had fallen through and he needed to find someone else.

The apartment was on the second floor of a shabby block only fifteen minutes walk from the warehouse, less than ten from where Alex lived. Most of the buildings in the street – and a couple of vans – were the site of turbulent political discourse: ‘Le Pen’ and ‘FN’ had been scribbled on walls, crossed out, rewritten and sprayed over. The building next door had been demolished so the outside walls were patterned with squares of wallpaper: ghost rooms where families had slept and eaten and died.

The apartment itself was small, a studio, but there was little furniture cluttering up the place. The floorboards were stained a pale, woody colour. Some of the photographer’s photographs were on the walls. Black-and-white: street scenes. One showed a crowd of demonstrators confronting police. They were good photographs and the apartment, though small, suited Luke perfectly. He said yes on the spot and paid two months’ rent in advance. The photographer left him the key to his bicycle so that Luke could use that too. Luke bagged up his belongings and dropped off the key to his old apartment with Madame Carachos. He considered abusing her for renting such a dump to him, decided against it, and moved into his new apartment the day after going to look at it.

Now that they were both ‘colleagues’ – as Luke put it – and neighbours, he and Alex saw a great deal of each other. They were both English, both new – or newish – to the city, and both single. With the exception of Miles and the guys at the warehouse, Luke knew almost no one. Alex knew a few people – most of whom had been at the Petit Centre that night – but, together, he and Luke were set to get a far better purchase on the city than either of them could have done alone. Meeting each other marked the beginning of the phase in their lives when all the elusive promise of the city could be realized. They flourished in each other’s company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of refracting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex.

You know what a downer it is when you meet someone for a drink or dinner and almost the first thing they say is ‘I don’t want a late night’? To Alex, Luke was the embodied opposite of that kind of remark. Evenings with him had a quality of unfettered potential. This was exactly the feeling engendered by the city in which they found themselves and many of the qualities Alex saw in Luke could just as accurately have been attributed to the shared experience of a place and time. Alex also ascribed to his new friend an exalted version of the traits which – in quieter, passive mode – Luke saw in him. Alex used Luke as a kind of probe, an extrapolated mirror of himself. Which meant that from Alex’s perspective Luke was a special person, to be admired, to measure himself against. The difference, I realize now, was that Alex had a theory – an idea – of Luke whereas Luke simply liked his friend, liked being with him. Ultimately this difference would generate another: Luke would never be disappointed by Alex.

There was an additional incentive for playing football at passage Thiéré: the women who each day passed by, carrying books, talking or pushing bicycles. They were on their way back to offices or to lectures at the university after their lunch break, just strolling, or eating ice cream when it was hot. Men walked by too but that was just an accident whereas the girls, we liked to think, came by deliberately. Just a slight preference for this route back from the café rather than another one, a simple suggestion by one of a group of friends – ‘Let’s walk past the playground at Thiéré’ – that was always approved by the others. No more than that. And even if it was not the consequence of any kind of preference, even if it was just a short-cut that extended their lunch break by five minutes, we preferred to think that they came by primarily because of us. Certainly there were other places we could have played football; even if they didn’t come by because of us, we played there because of them.

Luke noticed one woman in particular. She was tall with a mass of black hair that fell down below her shoulders. One day, when he was over that side of the yard retrieving the ball, he smiled, ‘Hi’, and she smiled back briefly before walking on. Contained in that look perhaps there was the seed of another meeting of eyes when, weeks later, undressing each other for the first time, his fingers in her hair, their eyes flicked open at exactly the same moment.

Luke watched her walk away, wondering if she would look back. Her legs were tanned, she was wearing tennis shoes, there was something floaty about the way she walked. A lightness. She didn’t look back.

As we traipsed back to work, Luke said that the next time she came by we should kick the ball to that side of the playground so that he could talk to her. Thereafter, whenever we were playing and she walked past, the rest of us gestured to Luke to let him know she was there but kept passing the ball in the other direction, luring him away from her. Either that or we eliminated him from the game completely, refusing to pass to him as he inched his way towards her side of the playground. Then, when she had walked past, then we would kick the ball over that way – ‘Go on Luke, now’s your chance!’ – leaving him to retrieve the ball and gaze after her retreating form.

One day, though, after we had got Luke running round like a dog, I relented and floated an inch-perfect pass across the yard, landing a metre or two in front of her so that Luke could catch her eye, smile, kick the ball back and wait for her to draw near. When I next looked over he was speaking to her, hanging on to the wire diamonds. We only granted him a few seconds of repose before booting the ball over his way and shouting to him to kick it back, making her conscious of the way we were all standing around, watching and waiting while Luke trotted after the ball and curled it back to us. We let them have a couple of peaceful minutes and then Matthias blasted the ball over that way again, smacking it into the wire a couple of feet from her head like a cannonball. She jumped, Luke turned round and saw us all laughing like yobs while he was obviously trying to impress on her that he was not devoid of sensitivity and actually spent a great deal of time reading, maybe even dropping a hint that he was not without literary aspirations himself. And at the same time that he was annoyed about us louting up his chances you could see he also enjoyed it, the way that we imparted a hint of the ghetto to his wooing.

There was no sign of Lazare when we got back to work and so we sat with our feet up on the packing tables, eating sandwiches, gasping after sips of Orangina, crunching chips.

‘Did you see Luke after all that running around, legs buckling—’

‘Breathing hard, unable to speak—’

‘Coughing up blood – “Just let me get my breath back, you see I’m not like the others” – then bam! the ball smacks into the fence about an inch from her face.’

‘What she say Luke?’ Matthias wanted to know. ‘What she is like?’

‘She’s nice.’

‘What is her name?’

‘Nicole.’

‘Oh Nicole! Horny name. And what does she do, horny Nicole?’ Matthias pushed his tongue into his cheek, moving his hand back and forth in front of his open mouth. Luke shook his head. Matthias belched and tossed his empty can, clattering into the bin.

We would happily have spent the whole afternoon like that, grilling Luke about his attempted courtship but, hearing Lazare’s decrepit Renault scrape through the gate ten minutes later, we leaped to our feet. By the time he walked in we were hard at it, as if we had been so busy packing orders that there had scarcely been time to grab a sandwich.

A few days later, when Nicole next passed by the playground, we decided to let Luke go over and talk quietly, without the ball thudding into the fence, like we were on our best behaviour. She was wearing a dress and a quaint mauve cardigan so that he could not see her arms which one day soon would be around his shoulders as he kissed her, which one day he would grip hard in his fists, shaking her, leaving ugly bruises. I can still see them over there, separated by the fence, wondering what each other was like. She was holding some books in front of her. The sun flashed out from a cloud, the wire fence threw angles of shadow over her face. She held up a book for him to see and he bent towards her and conceded that he had never read Nietzsche or Merleau-Ponty or whoever it was she was reading. Not that it mattered: the important thing about the book was that it served as an intermediary, a bridge between them. Luke watched her looking at him through the fence, sweat dripping from his hair, breathing hard. His sleeves were pushed up over his elbows, the veins stood out in his forearms. Strands of her hair breezed free. She fingered them back into place, over her ear, and he noticed her hands, her woman’s hands holding the large book of philosophy.

They were running out of things to say. Luke asked if she would like to meet up sometime if . . . His voice trailed off, he looked to the floor, at the sun-catching grit, making it as easy as possible for her to say ‘Well, that’s difficult.’ He was still gripping the fence, separated from her like a prisoner or an animal. When he looked up again he saw her pausing, weighing things up, knowing the hurt a man has the power to inflict on you. But that pause was already giving way to a smile of assent.

She smiled at him and he looked into her eyes which, at that moment, held all the promise of happiness the world can ever offer. He suggested Tuesday which was no good for her.

‘Thursday maybe . . .’

‘Thursday I have dance class.’

‘Oh . . .’

‘I could meet you afterwards.’

‘After your dance class?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is what it means to be a man,’ said Luke, glad he was saying something clever-sounding. ‘To be a man is to meet women after classes. After dance classes, after Spanish classes, after acrobatics. Women go to classes, men meet them after their classes. After your dance class would be perfect. What time?’

‘At nine?’

‘Yes. Where shall I meet you?’

‘My class is at the Centre de Danse, in the Marais. Do you know it?’

‘Yes,’ said Luke (he didn’t). ‘Shall I meet you there?’

‘OK.’

In the road a delivery truck was holding up traffic. Cars began honking.

‘I should be going,’ she said.

‘They’re not honking at you,’ Luke said.

She smiled, turned to leave. Luke started walking back towards us. Daniel floated up the ball for him to volley, with all the force of his happiness, into the top corner of the segment of fence we called a goal.

‘And the crowd go wild,’ shouted Luke.

The Centre de Danse was in a cobbled courtyard off rue du Temple. Luke arrived at nine o’clock exactly. The building was old, soot-blackened, subsiding so badly that it looked rubbery. Such was the efficacy of dance, it seemed, that even glass and concrete were susceptible to rhythm, supple. Bicycles were lined two deep against the walls. Classes were in progress on three sides of the courtyard. Piano and tap-dancing came from one window, jazz-funk from another. The windows on one side of the courtyard held warped reflections of those on the other. Through these reflections Luke could see the lunge and surge of leotards and limbs inside rooms with huge ceilings and mirrored walls. Men and women, Luke’s age and younger, came out carrying bags over their shoulders, all looking pleased. Nicole came out at five past nine. Oh, and she was gorgeous, in a green linen dress and tennis shoes. She carried a green and yellow bag over her shoulder. It would have been impossible to dress more simply, or to have looked more beautiful. Her hair was wet, she smiled. She wore no make-up. Luke held out his hand.

‘You look lovely,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘How was your dance class?’

‘It was hard,’ she said, letting go of his hand.

‘Hard?’

‘Yes, but was OK.’

‘What kind of dance do you do?’

‘Oh, is jazz or something.’

‘Jazz?’

‘Disco.’

‘Jazz disco?’

‘Tango.’

‘Tango too?’

‘Ballet.’

‘Ballet?’

‘Techno.’

‘Flamenco?’

‘A little flamenco, yes.’

Luke could not think of another form of dance. They were standing in the courtyard. Mopeds were revving into life. Nicole waved at a man – gay, surely – who blew her a kiss as he cycled off.

‘Are we standing here for a reason?’ said Luke.

‘I am standing here because you are.’ She folded her arms: ironically determined to stand her ground.

‘Shall we go?’

‘OK. Where would you like to go?’

‘We could have a drink. Have dinner. That’s what people do isn’t it? Whatever. We can go dancing if you like.’

‘Shall we walk a little first?’

‘Yes, sure. Let’s walk.’

The traffic on rue du Temple was jammed solid, the air heavy with fumes. They turned into rue des Haudriettes which was quieter: a few restaurants, clothes shops, and a cobbler’s with a pink neon sign in the shape of a shoe, tins of polish in the window. The tables at Cohn’s were all full: Americans mainly.

‘Where are you from?’ Luke said.

‘Belgrade. Have you been there?’

‘Once. I saw the Danube. Is it the Danube in Belgrade? There was a sunset. Quick, let’s cross.’

Sometimes it is difficult for people who have only just met to cross roads together: unsure if the other person prefers to dash or wait, they somehow do both, stepping into the road and then hesitating, mid-lunge.

‘Now is my turn to ask where you are from,’ said Nicole, after they had hurried across rue de Rivoli.

‘London. Have you been there?’

‘Once. I saw the Thames. Is it the Thames?’

‘In London? No.’

‘There was a sunset too. A great sunset.’

‘Maybe that was the Danube too.’

‘Or the Nile.’

‘Perhaps the Tiber.’

‘Maybe the Mississippi.’

‘The Amazon even. The conversation is flowing.’

‘Seine, actually,’ she said, pointing because they had come to the river. A bateau-mouche was going by, throwing light at the buildings behind them. They walked to the middle of the bridge, watching the oil-black water calm itself in the wake of the boat’s passing. Lights were on in apartments that commanded beautiful views of the river. In one of them they saw a man standing on his balcony looking out: contentedly watching the river, soothed by the certainty of its being there day after day; in despair, tormented by its passing (it is no good looking to views for consolation). Luke stared at the river, his gaze passing through the quiver-glint of the surface, merging with the body of water itself.

‘Stay there. Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I can see the river in your eyes. Perfect.’ She had a way of saying ‘perfect’ that seemed perfect to Luke. ‘Can you feel it?’

‘The river?’

‘Yes.’

‘Flowing through my head, yes.’ For a moment he could: a dead weight of liquid, purposeless, pressing its way to a destination that never varied; always, eventually, the sea. Reds and greens flashed and squirmed on the surface. He looked at her, feeling as if he had stood up too quickly.

‘In Oxford, in England,’ he said, ‘students jump off a bridge and break their legs because the river is full of – guess.’

‘Trolleys from supermarkets.’

‘How did you know?’

‘It is always shopping trolleys.’ A dog padded up to them and went on its way. Nicole said, ‘Once I crossed this river fourteen times in a single day.’

‘In 1922 a pilot flew his plane underneath the central arch of this bridge that we are now standing on.’

‘On the day I crossed the river fourteen times I used six different bridges.’

‘In some century, I forget which, let’s say the fifteenth, the river, swollen with melted snow from the mountains, burst its banks and flooded the entire town – even though the region was in the midst of a terrible drought.’

‘A whale once swam up it as far as the Pont d’Austerlitz, a bridge which I did not cross on the day I crossed the river fourteen times.’

‘Is that true?’

‘About the whale?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

At a bar on the Ile St Louis they ordered a beer and a small bottle of intense apricot juice. The beer was served in a glass so slim and elegant it was almost a vase. Nicole sat very straight in her chair, tempting Luke (who managed to sprawl on his as if it were a sofa) to compliment her on her posture. A rose-seller offered him the whole bunch for thirty francs. A slight altercation between two dogs threatened to turn nasty. At the next table a woman was listening, spellbound, as an American told her about the deal he was on the brink of clinching. Nicole sipped her apricot juice.

‘You have beautiful posture,’ said Luke. ‘And the ability to sip. I admire that. I gulp.’

‘Gulp?’

‘The opposite of sipping. I don’t even try to sip anymore. I prefer to gulp and then just sit here wishing I had sipped. Is it OK like that, by the way, or would you like some ice?’

‘It’s fine. Are you comfortable, “by the way”? You don’t look it.’

‘Oh, I am, yes.’

‘It’s bad for your back to sit like that, “by the way”.’

Luke sat up and said, ‘How did you come to be called Nicole? That’s not a Serb name is it?’

‘Was my grandmother’s name. She was French.’

‘And are you studying in Paris, by the way?’

‘I came here to study.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Architecture . . .’

‘Architecture?’

‘Mathematics.’

‘Ah, maths.’

‘Philosophy. Et cetera.’

‘It sounds vague.’

‘Vague? What is that? Comme une vague? A wave?’

‘Yes. Your study sounds wavy. You study waves. I mean it sounds like a lot of study.’

‘I don’t really study anything now. I came here on a scholarship. Now I just need to finish off a dissertation I have no interest in. Is nearly finished. I just need to add a comma here and there.’

‘What is it on?’

‘The same thing all dissertations are on. Nothing at all.’

‘You don’t want to be an academic?’

‘I thought I did. Once. Now, no.’

‘What do you do for money though?’

‘Translating and other things. Like everyone in Paris. And you? Why did you come here?’

‘To become a different person. Or at least more of a person.’

‘What were you before?’

‘An Englishman living in England.’

‘Who were you before?’

‘Someone I’d lost interest in.’

‘And now you’re an Englishman living in Paris?’

‘Put like that it sounds even less interesting.’

‘How would you make it more interesting?’

‘I’m here because the bars stay open late.’

‘Are you learning French?’

‘A little.’

‘You have to. To become someone else that is essential. When I was little girl my father was very insistent that I learned other languages. He said, “The more languages you speak, the more people you can become.”’

‘I’m speechless.’

‘What is the work you do here?’

‘I work at a warehouse. Near passage Thiéré.’

‘And do you always play football?’

‘Yes, although I didn’t study it. I play every day. Rain or shine. As long as it’s not raining.’

‘My brother plays football.’

‘You have a brother? I mean how old is he, your brother?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Ah, a fine age for a brother,’ said Luke, pleased, for some reason, to hear himself say this. ‘You have just the one brother?’

‘Yes. And a sister.’

‘Did you have pets?’

‘A lovely golden retriever.’

‘You had a brother, a sister, and a golden retriever?’

‘And two cats. What about you? Do you have brothers and sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Nor pets?’

‘No. In fact I’ve just realized something crucial about myself. I was an only child. No brothers or sisters. And I had no pets. No cats or dogs. So although I had my parents’ love focused on me I had nothing to love. I loved them, of course, as little children do, but parents don’t count really. My whole experience of love was being on the receiving end of it. A present that was always being given to me. It never occurred to me that I might love something. Except my toys. I loved my toys.’

‘So, not to beat around the hedge—’

‘Bush: beat around the bush.’

‘Ah thank you. You must correct my English when I make mistakes,’ said Nicole, but Luke was already wishing he had not done so. A hedge was a much better thing to beat around than a bush.

‘So,’ Nicole went on, ‘not to beat around the bush, you are very selfish. What is the word? Spoiled?’

‘Yes, but not just spoiled. Ruined.’

‘Ruined? What is that word? What does it mean?’

‘Ruined. As in ruins. Ruination. It means to fall into disrepair. Through neglect perhaps. But that’s only half the story. It’s also something to be aspired to, worked towards. Buildings do not just fall into ruin. Something in them wants to achieve the condition of ruination. Any truly great building will achieve its destiny only as a ruin—’

‘You are trying to be clever.’

‘Yes, I am. It’s true. It’s a weakness. It will be my ruin.’

‘There is a good thing about only children though,’ said Nicole.

‘What is that?’

‘If you have brothers and sisters you learn to lie. If you don’t have them then you don’t know how to lie.’

‘Except to yourself.’

‘Yes, but that’s not much fun is it?’

She had finished sipping her apricot juice.

‘Shall we go?’

‘Yes.’ Nicole pulled out her spectacle-case.

‘I didn’t know you wore glasses.’

She opened the case which was full of banknotes and coins. ‘Is my purse,’ she said.

‘I’ll get this,’ said Luke. She watched him stand up to pay. He wore no jewellery. No rings, no bracelets or chains, no watch. He didn’t even carry a wallet: he kept his money screwed up in his pockets. He didn’t wear after-shave. He didn’t drum with his fingers on tables, didn’t whistle or doodle on napkins, didn’t chew gum or his finger nails. She noticed the things he didn’t do.

They came to the river again: a different bridge. A man and a woman passed. They were walking with their arms around each other. Across the river were the broken walls of old houses that were being torn down. They crossed over into the Marais, passed the corner shop where the old hand-painted sign – ‘Boulangerie’ – had been preserved even though it was now an expensive clothes shop called Le Garage. Their shoulders bumped when they walked, sometimes. A Dalmatian padded up to them while they stood looking in a shop window. Nicole patted its head and when they walked on it followed them as if it were their dog. She slipped her arm through Luke’s. Her arms were bare. There was only his shirt sleeve between their skin.

At the Bastille the streets were gridlocked with pedes trians. The Dalmatian disappeared, which was a shame.

‘Perhaps we’ll find him again.’

‘I hope so.’

‘I felt he was our dog,’ said Luke.

‘He is our dog,’ said Nicole. They had both said ‘our’. They turned into rue Duval and, in moments, were away from the crush of people. They went to the Café Saigon.

‘What would you like?’ Luke asked.

‘You choose.’

Luke ordered, in faltering French, but she liked the way he spoke to the waitress, his smile. He had nice manners.

They shared a portion of satay, followed by plates of vegetables, stir-fried. Nicole ate slowly – a slice of carrot at a time – and drank little wine.

‘You eat,’ Luke said, ‘at the speed of your hair.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Nicole.

It took an effort of will not to say, ‘It means I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to be with you when you are old, when your hair is grey . . .’ What he actually said was: ‘I don’t know. It just seems true.’ His plate was empty. He watched her eat, looked at her hair. He is in love with me, Nicole said to herself. She looked up again. Their eyes met. It felt as if they were kissing. Luke poured another glass of wine for himself.

‘Gulp,’ she said, touching his hand. ‘Gulp.’

They walked back to his apartment, holding hands. Their hands grew moist. Luke made coffee, lit a candle. Asked if she was warm enough. She studied the photograph of the demonstration.

‘Is this of Belgrade?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think it is. Do you know when it was taken?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid.’

Neon from the café opposite glowed on the walls, reddish. Nicole used the bathroom. When she came back they sat on hard chairs, drinking the coffee neither of them wanted. While they talked, their fingers touched, then their hands. Their fingers became intertwined. He spoke quietly. In order to hear she leaned her head towards him. He breathed in the smell of black hair, his breath a warm shiver in her ear, her spine. She traced the line of his jaw from his ear to his chin. He looked at her mouth, her full lips. She caught a glimpse of herself in his eyes. He ran his fingers through her hair. She touched his neck. She said something he could not hear and when she spoke again her lips were almost touching his cheek. She touched his fingers. His nails were clipped short. She felt his wrists, traced the bones and veins in his arms, his thin arms. He touched the ring on one of her fingers which, for all he knew, could have been the finger on which wedding rings were worn. He looked at her eyes, the deep, deep colour. She smelt the coffee on his breath. A breeze entered the room. The candle flame persisted. He breathed in the smell of her hair again. As she spoke a narrow strand of saliva stretched momentarily between her lips. He touched the mole on her cheek. She ran a finger along his lips. His lips touched her eyelids, the flutter of her eyelashes. Her fingers moved up his forearm until she came to the crook of his elbow. He did the same, moved his hand higher to feel the slight swell of her bicep. His fingers met round her arm. Their lips almost touched, then they did, for a second, and then, a few seconds later, they did so again. She kissed him, slightly – only the sound proved it was a kiss – then moved her lips away. Their lips touched again. They were kissing. His hand was on her back, feeling her spine, moving, bone by bone, up to her neck, under the mane of hair through which he ran his fingers, pulling it slightly, then harder, tilting her head back so that he could cover her throat with his mouth. He felt her hands on his back, on his skin, pulling his shirt free, surprised how thin he was. He moved his hand under her arms, feeling the sweat gathered there. Her breasts were very small. Her hands were on his shoulder-blades, running down his ribs, moving to the small of his back. They slid off the chairs so that they were kneeling, facing each other. She undid the top button of his shirt, then the second. He moved his hands around the hem of her dress, moving it slightly up her thighs, brushing the outside of her legs and then touching the inside, the softness, the unbelievable softness.

‘Come inside me.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘My period is tomorrow.’

They woke early, took it in turns to shower and then, enjoying the feel of each other’s clean skin, made love again. Nicole took another shower while Luke shaved. She walked out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, leaving wet footprints on the floor. In the mirror Luke watched her looking intently at the photo of the demonstration in Belgrade.

‘This is very strange,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You have no idea when this photograph was taken?’

‘No. Why?’ Luke came and stood by her. There were a couple of bloody nicks on his jaw.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing to a woman near the front of the photograph. She had long black hair.

‘No!’ said Luke. ‘Can it really be?’

‘I think it is.’

‘I think it is too,’ said Luke, looking closely, shielding his eyes to stop sunlight reflecting on the glass. ‘It is you.’

‘It’s a coincidence, isn’t it?’

‘It’s incredible.’

Luke continued staring at the picture; reflected in the glass he could see Nicole dressing behind him. When she was ready they went out for breakfast, holding hands. A group of youths parted for them. It was market day on Richard Lenoir, the boulevard given over, normally, to baggy skateboarders. Stall holders were calling out the names of fruit, filling the air with the sound of strawberries, figs, raspberries, cherries. The sky was the colour of pale stone, as if, over the centuries, it had taken on the tones of the buildings below.

They walked to the Café Rotonde which everyone always referred to as the Kanterbrau because the sign advertising beer was larger than the one displaying the name of the café. An Alsatian stood guard, that is, it lay in the doorway, on the brink of sleep. When Luke was a boy Alsatians were regarded as vicious, dangerous: the man-eaters of the dog world; now, in the wake of the savage ascendancy of the Rottweiler and pitbull, they seemed dopey, loving. The only thing you had to worry about was stepping on their tails and disturbing their rest.

The waiter took their order and came back with orange pressé, café au lait, croissants, water.

‘Drinking coffee, eating one croissant and looking forward to having a second,’ said Luke. ‘That’s what I’m doing now.’ His eyes felt taut from lack of sleep. There was a tension between his relaxed body and the strained, gritty feeling of his eyes, but mainly he was aghast at the metamorphosing power of their having made love. It changed everything. Not just him and Nicole but the world around them. The smallest actions – the garbage collectors loading poubelles on to the back of the truck, the waiter carrying trays of coffee, the guy drinking a glass of red wine at the bar – celebrated the happiness of the world as it converged on the couple who had just spent their first night together. Luke looked across at a young man busy writing in a notebook and felt sorry for him: he had only his book for company – even his coffee-cup was empty.

‘I have to go,’ Nicole said, gesturing for the waiter. She had an uncancellable appointment at the university.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Luke, touching her hair. ‘You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and last night we made love, on our first date. I can’t believe my luck.’

‘Maybe it’s not luck.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know.’ She ran the two words together, as in ‘dunno’. Luke was a little disappointed: at that moment, especially in the wake of Nicole’s finding herself in the photograph in his apartment, even a word like ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ would not have embarrassed him.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Are you leaving too?’

‘No, I’m going to stay here a little while.’

‘Then what do you do?’

‘I’m going to sit here and watch you walk away. Then I’m going to sit here and have another coffee which I shouldn’t have and which I’ll probably regret having. I’ll think about you, and then, just in case last night was a dream, I’m going to go home and lie in bed and hopefully fall asleep and dream it again.’

‘What will you dream?’

‘Of me pulling your dress over your head and seeing you naked for the first time, of you taking me in your mouth, the way you tasted when I first pushed my tongue into you, and how, as soon as you came, I came in your mouth too. Kissing you afterwards, then being inside you for the first time . . .’

‘What a rude dream!’

‘Can you come tonight as well?’

‘In a dream?’

‘No, for real. Can I see you tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll stay in. I’ll cook. We’ll go to sleep early. We’ll sleep for ten hours.’

‘OK.’

‘The code is C25E,’ said Luke. Nicole wrote down the number. Her pen was white, decorated with dots that matched exactly the dark green ink. Love someone, thought Luke, love their possessions.

‘Are you not working today?’

‘I don’t have to go in till later. There’s very little to do.’

‘No football?’

‘I’m too tired. Aren’t you tired?’

‘Yes.’

She kissed him on the mouth, stood up and slalomed through the thicket of café chairs, shoving one with her hip, only slightly, once. He watched her go. Tennis shoes. Tanned legs. Lime green dress. Bare arms. Long black hair. Her.

He would always love watching her walk away, seeing her disappear into the Métro, around a corner or becoming lost in the crowd. Her floaty walk. Even when, years later, they parted for the last time, he would be the one to watch her walk away. It would be up to her to stand, to look at him and walk away, feeling his eyes on her: a final concession.

A bicycle messenger wearing a luminous bib – Speedy Boys – came in and ordered a coffee. The sun squeezed between clouds, flooding the café terrace with hot light. A bus shuddered to a halt and passengers began spilling out. Spotting a gap in traffic, a little dog wagged across the road. Luke remembered the utter passivity of the previous night, how neither of them had needed to make the slightest move towards each other, how, instead, they had simply waited . . .

He finished his second coffee and then returned to the apartment, opening the door slowly as if not to disturb someone who was sleeping. It was exactly as he had left it but it was changed, utterly, from how it had been the morning before, from any morning except this one. The curtains were open. Sun streamed through the dust-patterned window. One of the two towels was hung over the bathroom door, the other was in a lump on the back of a chair. The coffee cups were on the floor. Nearby were his socks. Wax from the candles had solidified in a saucer. There was no sign of her clothes. She had taken them all with her. The quilt was piled up at the end of the bed. The sheets were wrinkled, the pillows still bore the dent of their heads. Luke went into the bathroom and saw, in the basin, two hair grips: hers.

The door-bell jolted him out of his sleep. He opened the door. Her hair was tied up. She held a bike light in each hand. She was wearing a suede jacket, a loose skirt.

‘Did you dream there was someone at the door?’

‘As it happens, yes.’

He stood aside to let her in, closed the door behind them. She put her arms round him, kissed him, pressed the rear light to his left ear and the front to his right. Then she turned them on, like electrodes.

‘Bzzzzzzz!’

‘You cycled.’

‘It was a little chilly. I should have worn trousers.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t. Would you like the heating on?’

‘No, I’m OK.’

‘How are you?’

‘Tired.’

‘Me too. I was asleep when you rang the door. I fell asleep, I mean. I’m still waking up.’

‘I brought some nice wine.’

‘How kind. Would you like a glass?’

‘Yes.’ She kissed him on the mouth. ‘Your mouth tastes sleepy,’ she said.

‘Not nice?’

‘Yes, is nice. Nice and sleepy.’ He had his hands on her hips. She kissed him again and he kissed her back. He undid the buttons of her blouse. She was wearing a bra. He unclipped it and pushed her against the wall. She tossed the bike lights on to the bed. They were turned on still. She reached between her legs, moved her knickers aside and guided his fingers into her, kissing him hard.

They felt bewildered afterwards, by this fundamental breach of etiquette: screwing before they’d even unwrapped the wine – let alone opened it – while the lasagna was still baking. Nicole took off her wet knickers and they lay on the bed, not speaking until Luke said:

‘Would you like some wine now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Stay there. I’ll get it.’ His jeans were around his ankles. He took off his socks as well, turned down the oven and came back with wine, glasses, a corkscrew, olives and a bowl to put the pits of the olives in. She was still wearing her suede jacket.

‘What about the heating? Would you like the heating on?’

‘Is OK.’ Luke opened the wine. They clinked glasses and sat with their legs entwined. The light was fading. Occasionally there were shouts from the street. There was a silence in the room. She was at the centre of the silence, he was at its edge, constantly on the brink of saying things: It’s lovely wine. It’s a lovely evening. You look lovely. If he could have thought of a sentence which did not have the word ‘lovely’ in it he would have said something. Instead, he waited for her, watched her chew away the olive and then, discreetly, put the stone in a bowl. After a while, she said:

‘It’s lovely wine.’

When it had grown dark he put on a light and took the lasagna from the oven. He served it and brought it to the bed where they ate off their knees. Nicole had half a plate left when Luke served himself a second portion.

‘What do your parents do?’ he asked.

‘My mother was a professor. Now she is retired. My father was a doctor. He’s dead.’ Immediately, instinctively, Luke thought, she is the first woman I’ve been to bed with whose father is dead. This seemed to explain everything even though he was unsure what it explained. ‘He died when I was eleven.’

‘What happened?’ said Luke, unsure, even as he asked, if this was a question he should have avoided.

‘He had a heart attack.’ Matter-of-factly. ‘What about your parents?’

‘They split up when I was sixteen. My mother remarried but it was my father who left.’

‘He met someone else?’

‘No. That’s the strange thing. He went to live on his own. He died when I was twenty-two.’

‘Were you close to him?’

‘Not really. I hardly saw him after he left. He was nice when I was young but, well, he made my mother incredibly unhappy. She met someone else but I think she never really recovered from my father’s leaving like that. He ended up very twisted, bitter. An alcoholic. He was a disappointed man.’

‘Disappointed by what?’

‘By everything, I think, but himself mainly. I have a friend here, Alex. You’ll meet him. His parents are still alive but they’re old. He doesn’t see them much and he’s worried about their dying. He asked me if I wished I’d told my dad I loved him before he died.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. But I wished I’d told him I hated him.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘I know, I really missed my chance.’ She hit him on the arm, not sure if he was joking. Luke had already polished off his second plate of food; Nicole had not yet finished her first.

‘You know that picture,’ she said, ‘of me in Belgrade?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have a picture of me before we met. I’d like one of you.’

‘I don’t know if I have one.’

‘You must have.’

‘Actually, maybe I do. Does it matter when it was taken?’

‘No. As long as it’s you.’

He took the plates away and began trawling through the box file in which he kept his papers.

‘Here you are.’ He handed her the photograph. It showed a little boy wearing a cowboy hat, standing in front of a car, pointing a toy gun at the camera.

‘Is it really you?’

‘Of course.’ The picture was of Luke but it was no different from any number of pictures of little boys. There are hundreds, thousands, of pictures like this and they are all the same. From a selection of such photos there is no telling which little boy might become a famous footballer or painter, which ones will grow up to have families and take pictures like this of their own children. Then someone tells you that this photo is of a boy who died, aged twenty, in a car crash, or killed himself before he was thirty, or became a down-and-out, or a painter or a well-known footballer. And nothing changes. It remains indistinguishable from the hundreds of other pictures of little boys in shorts, hair cut straight across their foreheads, pointing toy guns at cameras.

While Nicole looked at the photo Luke lay on the bed again, his head in her lap. She stroked his head. He turned over so that he was looking up at her face. A police car wailed past. Music began in the apartment next door: five minutes of Techno, intense, pounding, then it stopped and the door slammed and there was silence. It was Friday night, the neighbours were going out.

‘What would you like to do?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Do you want to go out?’

‘I don’t mind.’

She held up his head slightly and tilted wine into his mouth, as if it were water from a canteen and he was an actor who had been shot. He moved around on to his side, facing away from her and again he caught the smell of sex which he wanted to smell more closely, more deeply. He raised his head from her lap and crawled back under her knees, his face towards her cunt.

‘Open your legs,’ he said, and then lay there, breathing in her smell. He breathed on her, hard enough for her to feel, enough to make her push herself towards him. He wriggled back so that she could move away from the wall, could lie with her knees steepled over him. He pushed his tongue into her. While he licked her he also pushed two fingers inside her. She was on the brink of coming for a long while and by the time she did his left arm was almost numb. He rolled on to his back. She moved around, touched his prick which was not quite hard. She masturbated him and then, as he was about to come, moved her face over him so that his semen sprang into her mouth.

She took off her blouse, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and they snuggled under the quilt, already almost asleep.

‘It’s no good,’ he said, getting up. ‘I can’t go to sleep if I haven’t brushed my teeth.’

If I were to make a film of this story I know exactly the image I would begin with. An aerial shot, from the height of the middle branches of one of the trees in the park bordering a path on which are painted the words interdit aux velos. Then, from above, we would hear the ringing of a bicycle bell and see pedestrians scattering out of the way of two cyclists speeding over those words: Luke and Nicole.

They had woken at ten, sun streaming through the window. Nicole got out of bed and looked down into the street. Luke wondered if anyone could see her there, naked, saying:

‘Do you have a bike?’

‘Sort of. The guy I’m renting this apartment from left me his. I haven’t used it. Why?’

‘We could go for a ride.’

‘We could ride the 29.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A bus. My favourite bus. But no, we can do that another day. I’d love to go for a bike ride.’ Nicole turned on the radio. A DJ was babbling about the great day that was in prospect. This is what you are meant to do in the mornings, thought Luke. You turn on the radio and receive encouragement. You wake up, turn on the radio and get out of bed. What could be simpler? Why had he never done that? Nicole found Radio Nova and began dancing: exaggerated disco dancing. Her small breasts hardly moved as she danced. You turn on the radio and watch your woman, naked, dancing her way to the bathroom. Then you get up and go for a cycle ride . . .

Except the photographer’s bike turned out to be in very poor repair. It was hanging on a rack in the damp courtyard, the tyres were flat, the seat was too low, the back brake rubbed . . .

‘Shit!’ Luke kicked the front wheel in disgust and disappointment. ‘No wonder he left it with me. It’s completely fucked.’

‘We can fix it.’

‘It’ll take all day. And I hate getting my hands all oily.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Nicole. ‘It takes twenty minutes.’

‘I don’t have any fucking tools.’

‘You swear too much,’ said Nicole. ‘I have tools. In my bag.’ She even had a puncture repair kit. Luke went back up to the apartment to get a bowl of water to test the inner tube for punctures. While he was there he rolled a joint. When he came down again, the bike was upside down and Nicole was taking the front wheel off.

‘What’s that in your hand?’ he said.

‘A spanner.’

‘Ah, I thought as much. Very evening class. And what are you doing with this so-called spanner? Loosening something I’ll be bound.’

‘Yes. It’s almost ready.’ Luke crouched down and watched. Nicole fixed the puncture and eased the inner tube back on to the wheel and into the tyre. Then she fitted the wheel back between the forks. She stood up and swept the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of oil on her forehead. She flipped the bike over and made some further adjustments.

‘You like fixing things,’ said Luke banally.

‘Things break.’

‘Whereupon one throws them away.’ She did not look up. ‘Bicycle maintenance,’ Luke went on. ‘It’s never been a strong point of mine.’

‘What are your strong points?’

‘That’s the thing. I don’t actually have any.’

‘The lasagna was nice.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And you kiss nicely.’

‘Don’t tell me, tell your friends,’ said Luke. ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Tightening something.’

‘Tightening and loosening,’ said Luke. ‘Such is the dismal life of the spanner.’

‘Sit on the saddle,’ said Nicole. ‘To check the height.’

Luke straddled the bike. ‘That’s perfect.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see, it was easy,’ said Nicole, clearing the tools away. ‘How long did it take?’

‘About two hours. And the saddle is way too high. I can hardly touch the floor.’

‘No!’

‘Joke. And the repairs only took half an hour. But your hands are covered in oil.’

She washed them in a puddle.

Her bike was a red racer, tuned to perfection, stripped to sleek essentials: thin tyres, strapless toe clips, no mud guards, rack or saddle bag. It hummed. Luke’s rattled, clanked and rubbed. Nicole said she would fix it properly next week. After they had been cycling for twenty minutes they came to the botanical gardens and sat there for a while.

‘Would you like to get stoned?’ said Luke.

‘Stoned?’

‘Smoke dope. Get high,’ he said, holding up the joint he had made.

‘OK.’

They set off again, cycling aimlessly. Nicole had taken off her suede jacket and tied it round her waist. Everywhere they went they saw green-overalled Africans cleaning up litter and dog shit. Parisians have always been terrible litterers – why bother throwing cans in a bin, or training your dog to crap in a gutter when there are all these silent Africans to tidy up after you? – but now they had an excuse: most of the litter bins in the city had been sealed in the wake of fundamentalist bomb attacks. A poster for Le Pen was overshadowed by an advertisement for the United Colours of Benetton. They were partners of a kind, it didn’t matter what either of them said or stood for: all that counted was that the names – Le Pen, Benetton – stuck in people’s minds. They spoke the same language, a language in which there were no verbs, only nouns: names and brand-names. Both were dwarfed by the billboard which displayed the global apotheosis of this tendency: ‘Coke is Coke’.