Paris Trance (12 page)

‘It looks great Luke,’ said Alex. ‘But what is it?’

‘Something midway between Malaysian Reng Dang and Moroccan Tajine. Stew to a savage like you.’ By the time Luke sat down again the talk was of England, a country everyone had visited.

‘It was freezing when we were there last December,’ said Miles, opening more wine (Miles was
always
opening more wine). ‘People kept dying trying to rescue their dogs from frozen lakes. The dogs lived. The owners died. The pathos.’

‘I was fourteen when I went,’ said Sally. ‘I remember the names of pubs. The Dog and Duck. The Fox and Hounds. The White Horse. I thought it was a law that all pubs had to be named after animals.’

‘I was fifteen,’ said Sahra. ‘Everywhere seemed to be called something Hampton: Littlehampton, Minchinhampton, Wolverhampton.’

‘I had to visit my aunt in Alton,’ said Nicole. ‘She said it was exactly fifty-five minutes from London. I spoke hardly any English. So I got on my train and I waited and waited and nowhere called Alton came up. Eventually, about two hours later, the train stopped at Southampton—’

‘You see, I was right,’ said Sahra. ‘Another Hampton—’

‘Yes, exactly. So I asked the station manager and he was very kind and said the train had divided and I was on the wrong half of the train. What I had to do was go back to some other station – I forget the name, something else Hampton – and then take the train that went along the other branch. So I waited for a train back to wherever it was, went there and waited for a train to Alton. Before I got on I asked the station manager which train to get on and
he
was very kind as well and pointed me to a train and I got on. And this train went past exactly the same places as the last one and I ended up in Southampton again and saw the original station manager. “What are you doing here again?” he says. “You’re supposed to be in Alton.” I told him what happened and he said I had to do the same thing again: go back to the station where the train divides and then make absolutely sure I got on the train to Alton. By the time I got there my aunt was distraught. The police were looking for me. The fifty-five-minute journey to Alton had taken seven and a half hours.’

‘That’s England in a nutshell,’ said Alex. ‘Trains dividing, places called Hampton, kindly station managers. Simple journeys taking all day.’

‘When I was twenty-one I spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family in Hampshire,’ said Sahra. ‘We had lunch. The afternoon seemed to last all day. His mother was very polite. The father hardly said a word. Every now and again she would say to him, “Are you still with us, Trevor?” Then he’d drift off until she asked him again: “Are you still with us, Trevor?”’

‘
That’s
England,’ said Luke.

‘Deep England,’ said Alex.

‘The other thing I remember was the television,’ said Nicole. ‘Nothing but snooker.’ This got the biggest laugh of the evening: it was the first time anyone had heard of this game that rhymed with hooker.

Everyone had finished eating. Luke took the plates away and Nicole brought in a bowl of fruit. Sahra undid a banana, badly bruised, ‘just as I like it’. She has perverse taste in fruit, thought Alex. Miles asked Nicole if there might be ‘another drop of wine hidden away somewhere’. There were still two open bottles on the table but he was getting worried. Nicole was reassuring him – there was an assortment of bottles, she said, in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet – as Luke reappeared with seven lines of powder spread neatly on a CD case.

‘Dessert!’ he beamed. We didn’t earn much at the warehouse. Cocaine was an expensive luxury, the kind of thing you kept hidden away if there were lots of people around, but Luke was not like that. Either generosity was not something he had needed to learn or it was something he had learned before I met him, before he came to Paris.

Nicole didn’t want her line which was shared by Alex and Luke (‘yes, always yes’) even though coke sometimes made him jittery. Everyone started gabbling at once. Nicole turned up the music. She and Sally began dancing. Ahmed was flicking through records and when he found one he liked he got up and danced too. Sally had smoked a lot of dope in the course of the evening and had laughed often. She had said very little but she was a terrific dancer. With the music turned up loud it was necessary to shout. Luke began dancing in his seat while talking and then got up to join the others, leaving Alex and Sahra and Miles talking at the table. The music became louder. Alex and Sahra joined in the dancing and Luke turned it up again and then announced – or suggested – a change of plan. Instead of staying in and dancing and annoying the neighbours, why didn’t they go to The Select? Five minutes later he was locking up the apartment while everyone else trooped downstairs.

They walked through the crowds of young people from the suburbs who had come to the quartier for Friday night and were hysterical, drunk. Even the roads were full of people strolling. At one point Luke and Nicole found themselves on opposite sides of the road. A young guy who was walking in the middle of the street looked at Nicole. His eyes lingered on her and then he looked over at the opposite pavement, at Luke – who was yacking away to Miles – and knew, instantly, that they were together. An energy linked them even when they were not standing together or looking at each other.

Miles told Luke he was too old for dancing and slipped off to a bar before they got to the club. The others joined the queue. It was an essential part of the experience, queuing. People were frisked thoroughly. No one was allowed to bring drugs into the club; the only people not expected to were those who had taken them already. You could feel the throb of the bass outside but
the music hit you as you went in, as you passed into another world, where the rules of outside ceased to exist. It was packed. The throb felt outside was not simply the bass: it was also the pulse of all the energy confined inside. Everyone began dancing. No one wanted drinks – what a relief not to have to queue for over-priced beer at the bar – and in minutes they were consumed by the music. Luke was a terrible dancer – his arms were too long, he neglected to move his hips; Nicole said he looked like a giraffe having a seizure – but in this environment it was impossible not to dance perfectly. Everyone was a spectator, everyone was a participant. Luke (thought he) was dancing like Nicole who danced wonderfully. Her eyes burned blue in the ultraviolet, her teeth cackled. Luke’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. They knew some of the tracks, recognized, now and again, the samples that had been used to make these new tracks which were themselves segments of one enormous piece of music, endlessly mixed and remixed, lasting seven or eight hours.

Ahmed and Sally left at about four. Luke, Nicole, Alex and Sahra left later, their ears buzzing with noise. The city was at the quietest point in its day. The only people around were the garbage men and a few other strays who had been up all night. A single car circled the Bastille. It was too early and too late to go anywhere else:
Lavigne’s was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside Lila’s. Sahra had to go in the opposite direction to the other three. Alex offered to walk her home but she was fine. They waved goodbye. Nicole and Luke said goodbye to Alex at his apartment.

Luke and Nicole showered and lay in bed. ‘It’s so lovely to go to bed and not have sex,’ Luke whispered. ‘Isn’t it?’ Nicole was already asleep. He lay on his back, unable to sleep, drifting. There will come a time, he thought, when I will look back on this night, when I will lie in another bed, when happiness will have come to seem an impossibility, and I will remember this night, remember how happy I was, and will remember how, even when I was in the midst of my happiness, I could feel a time when it would be gone. And I will realize that this knowledge was a crucial part of that happiness . . . The same thought went through many remixes as he lay there, drifting, alert, sort of asleep.

They woke late but not late enough to feel rested. It began to rain. Nicole had to work. Luke washed up and meandered to his apartment. He passed a fountain he had not noticed before, struggling to hold its own in the rain. Alex came round in the late afternoon, miserable about Sahra.

‘I can’t work her out,’ he said to Luke.

‘Nor me.’

‘I mean, what does she want?’

‘Who knows?’

They were playing records, taking it in turns to flick through
Pariscope
, convinced that if they went through it one more time, there would be a film to go to.

‘This is the best city in the world for flms—’

‘Correct.’

‘—and there are still not enough films on.’

‘Also correct.’

‘In fact it’s useless for films.’

‘The truth is we probably spend too much time at the cinema. If we went less there would be more to see,’ said Luke. ‘Pass me
Pariscope,
could you?’

‘There’s nothing left to see,’ said Alex, handing it over. ‘We’ve reached saturation point.’

‘I can’t believe
Strange Days
isn’t on. Have you seen it?’

‘No.’

‘Now
there’s
a film for you, there’s cinema.’

‘I thought it was just a rehash of
Blade Runner
.’

‘Are you kidding? It’s the ultimate. The last word in cinema.’

‘Right up there with
Chariots of Fire
, yeah?’

‘
That’s
what I’m in the mood for this afternoon. Something English.’

‘You’re right, it’s the kind of afternoon that makes you wish you were back in England, watching telly.’

‘What would you watch? Ideally. Apart from
Chariots of Fire
, I mean.’

‘Good question.’ Alex paused. ‘
Colditz
, I think.’

‘Any particular episode?’

‘They were all great episodes.’

‘Basically you can’t go wrong with that genre.’

‘
Albert R.N.
’

‘
The Wooden Horse
.’

‘
The One That Got Away.
’

‘Which one’s that?’

‘The one about the German fighter pilot escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in England or Scotland.’

‘I remember asking my dad about that. About why so many English prisoners-of-war tried to escape and only one German. He said it was because they liked it in England. Good food, pleasant scenery.’

‘They’re always idyllic, POW camps.’

‘Especially Colditz, the TV one, I mean.’

‘The place in
The Great Escape
, that was the real Club Med of POW camps. There was so much to do there: tunnelling, getting rid of the sand, choir practice to cover up the noise of digging . . .’

‘Forging papers, making escape suits out of blankets.’

‘Growing vegetables in the thin soil outside the hut.’

‘And football, always football.’

‘Elaborate systems of knocks, folding newspapers, whistling and tapping pipes to warn of approaching guards.’

‘Goons. Not guards, goons.’

‘Goons, right.’

‘Red Cross parcels.’

‘The commandant: basically a good sort.’

‘Studied in Oxford before the war. Hence his good English. Editions of Goethe on his bookshelf. Emphatically not a Nazi. Considers Hitler a vulgar little corporal, a man with no culture.’

‘The Geneva Convention.’

‘Simply a loyal officer of the Wehrmacht. Doing his duty but already resigned to Germany losing the war.’

‘But always, in the background, the shadow of the SS: the snake of threat in this carceral paradise.’

‘Still pretty nice though: a public school with the officers as prefects—’

‘The escape committee.’

‘And the odd Welsh—’

‘Taff!’

‘Or Scot—’

‘Jock!’

‘Or chirpy Cockney—’

‘Blimey!’

‘As fags, running errands. A little microcosm of England where everyone knows their place but all the classes, all ranks, muck in together.’

‘So why bother escaping? They’re home already.’

‘It’s the duty of every officer to escape.’

‘Thereby diverting troops that might otherwise have been used at the front.’

‘Plus the obligation to escape reinforces the pleasantness of being there. Without that there’d be nothing to do. Time would weigh as heavily on your hands as tunnel dirt. The purpose of escape is to make you cherish your time there, like last orders in a pub, to make you realize it’s not going to last for ever, this little public-school Eden.’

‘To escape. It’s an existential need.’

‘Plus it’s not
really
home. There are no women for a start.’

‘That’s not a problem. All sexuality is sublimated in the act of tunnelling. No women and no gays.’

‘There’s no boozer.’

‘Basically it’s not Civvy Street.’

‘Exactly.’

‘When I was young I used to think Civvy Street was this street in London where everyone worked and then went drinking afterwards.’

‘The border. Switzerland.’

‘Neutral Switzerland.’

‘Heading for the border, for neutral Switzerland, on the train.’

‘Sweating in your escape suit. Double-breasted, pinstripe. Trilby pulled down over your eyes, trying to hide behind your newspaper.’

‘Praying you don’t bump into that old bore Charles Bronson.’

‘Banging on about all the tunnels he’s dug. A real one track mind. Either that or throwing a tantrum about being claustrophobic.’

‘Half the passengers on the train are escaped POWs.’

‘Rush-hour on the Switzerland Express. Standing room only.’

‘The Gestapo getting on the train.’

‘Brown leather overcoats. Buttoned up. A creaking sound as they move up the carriage, checking documents, peering.’

‘Sweating even more in your escape suit, so much so that the makeshift dye is forming a small blue pool at your feet.’

‘Clutching your forged inter-rail pass.’

‘Wishing to God you hadn’t flunked German O level.’

‘And he says to you in his Rommel German: “Guten Morgen, can I see your papers?” Trying to catch you out by throwing in a bit of English.’

‘You’re about to make a run for it —’

‘Then you realize
he’s
an escaped POW as well, disguised as a member of the Gestapo, winding you up.’