Paris Trance (11 page)

‘Yes, kindness is a lovely quality,’ said Sara. ‘Often over-looked.’

‘Men who dance well.’

‘Tanned ankles.’

‘Men who don’t have holes in their socks.’

‘Speaking of socks,’ said Sara, ‘there are men with a foot in both camps, so to speak. Damaged men. There are women who like damaged men. That is, women go through a phase of liking damaged men. They think they can mend them, like socks. Then, hopefully, they come to their senses and realize that a damaged man is actually just a boy.’

‘Damaged,’ Luke said to Nicole, ‘is not the same as ruined.’

‘Apart from that, it’s very simple and not at all mysterious,’ said Sara. ‘Women like in men exactly the things men like in women. Attractive faces, nice bodies, intelligent, generous, sexy, funny.’

‘The most important thing,’ said Nicole, ‘is that women like men who like women.’

‘
I
like women,’ said Alex.

‘One out of six is not bad going,’ said Luke.

‘That still leaves the question of where we’re going to eat,’ said Sara.

‘Actually, we could eat here.’

‘Shall we eat here?’

‘Let’s eat here.’

‘Here is good.’

‘Let’s eat here then.’

When they had ordered, Sara told them about her work as an interpreter: French, Italian, Spanish, English; consecutive, simultaneous . . . The latter – translating into one language at exactly the same time the words you were hearing in another – seemed an unimaginable skill. Especially to Luke whose French, according to Alex, was ‘lamentable, pitiful’. This was unfair and inaccurate, though not as inaccurate as Luke’s own verdict (‘fuent’). Nicole was nearer the mark with ‘coming along’. Alex was keen to gloat because, in the language hierarchy, he was second bottom with two (including English). Nicole had four; Sara had five, six if you included the smattering of Arabic she remembered from her childhood in Libya. She had spent her childhood there (because of her father’s work) and her teens in Chicago. Singapore (where she had seen several cobras) also figured in the picture. There was a lot of information to take in, much of it confusing. Her name, for example, was not Sara but
Sahra
.

‘How long have you been in Paris?’ asked Luke, seeking clarification.

‘Three years.’

‘Do you think you’ll stay?’

‘I feel at home here.’

‘Me too,’ said Nicole.

‘But I have a great urge to go back to my roots,’ said Sahra. ‘To Libya.’

‘Ah Libya,’ said Luke.

‘El Alamein,’ said Alex.

‘Tobruk.’

‘The Desert Fox.’

‘
The Rat Patrol
.’ By mutual consent Luke and Alex abandoned this bewildering – to Sahra and Nicole – riff before it had properly got going.

‘Roots are overrated,’ said Luke, backtracking. ‘I couldn’t care less where my roots are. I’ve got no interest in them. So what if my grandfather was illegitimate? So what if he was born in Senegal?’

‘Was he?’

‘Actually he was born in Hertfordshire. But he could have been born on Mars for all I care.’

‘It’s different if you move around a lot when you are growing up,’ said Sahra. ‘You grew up in England, right?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘You see, we were always moving. My father would come home and say that he had been posted somewhere new. He’d get out the globe and we’d all sit down and look to see where we were going—’

‘Sounds fantastic.’

‘So I was always leaving my friends behind and starting at a new school in the middle of the term in some place I’d not even heard of. I’d have to stand at the front of the class while the teacher said, “This is Sahra, she is blah blah . . .”And all the kids would be looking at me and I’d have to start making friends over and over, and no one could get my name right. Not unlike now, come to think of it. . .’

‘Except we’re all new here,’ said Nicole.

‘We’re all new kids in this class, honey,’ said Luke.

‘This is the first time I’ve lived out of England and I feel totally settled here,’ said Alex. ‘So settled, in fact, that I wouldn’t mind trying somewhere else, to see if I could feel even more settled there.’

‘The paradox of nomadism,’ said Sahra. ‘You keep moving because you’re searching for a place to stay. Once you realise you
can
live in other countries you can never quite settle anywhere again. You can never feel quite content.’

‘Contentment,’ said Luke. ‘A word which should never be spoken, only spat.’

‘“Every day spent in the country you were born is a day wasted,”’ said Nicole. ‘That’s another of his favourites at the moment.’

‘Speaks the man who has lived in Paris, right next door to London, who has spent his time entirely with English-speaking people, for all of three weeks: a man called intrepid. Intrepid with a small i! God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t taken him under my wing,’ said Alex.

‘The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere,’ said Sahra.

‘Perhaps it’s a question of being at home in time as well as space,’ said Nicole.

‘That’s it,’ said Luke. ‘That’s it absolutely. Whatever it means.’

‘What
does
it mean?’

Nicole shrugged. A clock in one of the churches nearby began to strike.

‘Listen,’ said Luke. ‘That’s what it means: now, now, now!’

‘I love being alive now,’ said Sahra.

‘And me.’

‘Moi aussi,’ said the waiter, bringing their food.

‘The final thing of all,’ said Sahra as the plates were being set down. ‘To be at home in yourself.’ Already shovelling food into his face, Luke grunted.

‘It’s not just his French,’ Alex said to Sahra. ‘His manners also need a bit of fine tuning. But what does
that
mean, being at home in yourself?’

‘It means it doesn’t matter where you live or what happens to you,’ said Sahra.

Luke looked up – a rare event when he was eating – as if chewing over this idea. ‘When I came here,’ he said, ‘I felt I was inhabiting the fringes of my life because for me the centre had always been England. Now I can feel myself, almost physically, moving towards another centre. One which I chose and made – am
making
, rather – as opposed to one I was just issued with.’

‘And when you’ve made it you’ll see that it is exactly the same as the one you were issued with,’ said Sahra. Luke resumed his scoffing. After a few minutes Sahra looked at him again and said, ‘Do I remind you of your sister?’ It was a weird question.

‘No. Actually I don’t have a sister. Why?’

‘It’s just that you remind me of my brother,’ said Sahra. ‘He eats like that.’

‘Like a pig?’ said Nicole.

When the pig had finished eating – the others were still in the middle of their meals – he said he wanted to go back to something they had touched on earlier.

‘We saw that film
Homicide
a few days ago. Have you seen it?’

‘I think so,’ said Alex. ‘Years ago.’

‘Me too,’ said Sahra.

‘OK,’ said Luke. ‘Do you remember the scene at the beginning, when the Feds burst into that apartment?’

‘Not really.’

‘It doesn’t matter. But before they burst into the apartment they unscrew the light bulb in the hall. Now why do they do that? And it’s not just FBI agents. Intruders, assassins always do it too. Why not simply switch it off? Surely the noise of the click is too slight to be heard.’

‘What’s this got to do with anything we touched on earlier?’

‘It’s to stop someone – a neighbour – accidentally turning the light on again at another switch,’ said Sahra, ignoring Alex’s question.

‘Is it really as simple as that? I was hoping there was no practical reason for it. That it existed in the realm of pure convention. I love the way they always have a handkerchief for exactly that purpose.’

‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘The link is handkerchiefs.’

‘If they didn’t have a handkerchief they would use a sleeve,’ said Nicole.

‘Yes but they always
do
have a handkerchief. That’s unusual don’t you think? Like we were saying earlier: how many people do you know who carry a handkerchief now?’

‘Weird isn’t it?’ said Sahra. ‘The way the same questions keep coming up.’

‘A handkerchief seems like a leftover from another era of hygiene. Basically if someone has a handkerchief in a film they’re either with the FBI or they’re about to assassinate somebody.’

‘To whack somebody. The word is whack,’ said Alex.

‘You’re right, the word is whack,’ said Luke. ‘But have you noticed the way the bulb is always a screw rather than a bayonet fitting? That’s a factor. If it was a bayonet fitting they’d have to use two hands – thereby raising the problem of what to do with their gun. They couldn’t put it back in the holster at a moment like that. And they can’t have it dangling from their trigger finger. It would look ludicrous and, besides, it might knock against the lampshade – even though there isn’t a lampshade, of course. Essentially this is a bare-bulb scenario. And I’ll tell you another thing that bothers me: what do they do with the bulb when they’ve taken it out? Presumably they put it in a pocket but it’s still hot, of course. It could burn a hole. These little details, they’re the only things in the cinema that interest me now. Tropes, I suppose you’d call them.’

‘Ah, he does love his tropes,’ said Alex.

They paid the bill and went to a café across the road. Nicole and Luke squandered twenty francs on an apocalyptic pinball machine. It was like flipping balls into the jaws of a shrieking, flashing hell. Sahra and Alex stood at the counter, helping themselves to sugar from a silver bowl with a long silver spoon.

‘Even something as simple as dispensing sugar in cafés is not straightforward,’ said Alex. ‘As I see it, there are three main options: shaker, cubes or bowls, each with its own disadvantages and advantages.’

‘Shakers are prone to clogging.’

‘Cubes can be too big.’

‘A bowl and spoon is messy,’ said Sahra, pointing to the spray of crystals on the counter.

‘We’ve only listed disadvantages,’ said Alex. It was true.

Luke and Nicole came back from playing flipper. Luke was all for going somewhere else – another bar, a club – but the other three were sleepy, ready to leave. Luke was never tired (unless, as Sahra would later point out, he was doing something he didn’t want to do). The four of them stood outside the café, saying goodbye.

‘We’re having a dinner on Saturday,’ Nicole said to Sahra. ‘Would you like to come?’ She and Luke had hatched this plan with Alex while Sahra was in the toilet.

‘I’d love to.’

‘It’s at my apartment,’ said Nicole. ‘I’ll give you the address.’

Luke watched Nicole write it on the receipt for the coffees, which she then handed to Sahra. Love a woman, thought Luke, love her handwriting: neat (surprisingly), bold, the A a triangle, the I dotted with a small circle, the E three horizontal lines, unjoined.

Although the dinner was at Nicole’s apartment it was Luke who was doing the cooking. He was peeling, boiling, chopping and frying when first Alex and then Sahra arrived. Nicole was laying the table. Music was already playing loud. This, claimed Luke, was one of the secrets of the successful dinner: no background music but, from the start, pounding music at a volume that meant the door-bell could only be heard in the breaks between tracks. The other secret was to get everyone high and drunk as soon as possible. The final secret was that the first two weren’t secrets at all, that people knew exactly what they were in for, so that there was no question of people arriving for an evening of chatting and eating rather than a fully-fledged head bang. It worked. Even Miles – who arrived with three bottles of red wine but without his wife – claimed that the previous night he had deliberately stayed in (unusual), drunk nothing (unbelievable) and gone to bed early (unheard of) so that he could be on top form for this evening. Ahmed arrived with a new girlfriend – Ahmed always had a new girlfriend – called Sally. They were both taken aback by the leg of prosciutto hanging on a hook, still untouched. Ahmed picked up a pair of mirror sunglasses that he found on one of the filing cabinets.

‘Try them on,’ said Nicole. They turned out to be mirrored both ways. All he could see was a magnified reflection of his eyes and eyelashes and, at the edges, the distended outline of the window behind his head. There were always things like that in Nicole’s apartment: weird things, fun bits and pieces she’d come across that no one else would have bothered with. The big mirror, the one from Belgrade, had been turned against the wall. The guests took it in turns to try on the pointless glasses and to ask Luke if he wanted ‘help’ but by now the cooking had reached such a frenzy of activity that he scarcely had time to answer. If Luke was into something he was into it
totally
– and cooking was definitely one of the things he was into. Nobody cooked like him. He had pioneered an idiosyncratic version of fusion cuisine or world food, combining ingredients, herbs and spices from distinct culinary territories, flinging them into meals that were endlessly diverse but which were always immediately, recognizably his. Like many good cooks he was a kitchen fascist: weeping, Nicole chopped the odd onion, but Luke preferred to do everything himself, manufacturing incredible meals at high speed and minimal expense. Eight people, he said, could eat like kings for only twenty francs a head when he cooked.

There was only just enough room around the table for seven people. Nicole served the first dish, a green papaya salad. As they were about to eat Luke leaped up and asked if everyone was warm enough, turning up the heater before anyone had a chance to reply.

‘Have you noticed how he loves to regulate temperature?’ said Alex. ‘It’s one of those charming little idiosyncrasies that we hate about him.’

‘It’s true,’ said Nicole. ‘I’ve never noticed before but it’s true. “Would you like a little more ice in that?” “Shall I warm that up a bit?” The first time he came here he spent the entire evening rearranging beers in the fridge. All he said was, “Hmm, they’re not quite cold enough yet.”’

Luke nodded in happy acknowledgement without ceasing to trowel food into his face. Despite being the last to serve himself he was the first to finish. He got up from the table and went back to the cooker. He handed plates of the main course to Nicole who carried them to the table.