Paris Trance (23 page)

Words have nothing to do with happiness, they can only frame it. Happiness is a question of colours: the blue of the sea, yellow fields of rape, her hair against the sky.

In Greece Sabeth suffers a terrible accident. ‘What was the use of looking?’ Faber asks himself when he hears that Sabeth has died as a result of this accident. ‘There was nothing more to see.’ He is back at Athens airport and the film is back where it began. ‘I wished I’d never existed,’ says Faber, pale, devastated.

On the day of Nicole’s return, still haunted by the film, Luke woke early. How was he going to survive until she came? The minutes were sweating by. He could hardly breathe. He had cut his nails down to the quick and put clean sheets on the bed. It took the will-power of a saint not to masturbate. He turned up at the station early and found that the train would be an hour late. He drank a shitty café au lait at one of the station bars, enjoying the commotion of departure and arrival, the rapid flick-a-flick of the departure board, the potential for robbery and harm suggested by the hundreds of strangers milling around in a place designed with getaway in mind. There was a sense of the whole of Europe converging here, on this station, and Luke at this moment felt that he too was in the precarious centre of something: of his life, of the life he had dreamed of. No, not the life he had dreamed of: the life he had willed, the life he had achieved. An unshaven man next to him lit up a cigarette. Luke left his coffee and headed to the platform.

The train curved into view, ground to a halt. The doors opened. Passengers began spilling out of the carriages, lugging their bags, embracing relatives, hurrying for taxis. Then he saw her. She was wearing a new coat, black. Her hair was long, loose, her skin pale. She looked tired, drawn. She walked down the platform, unhurried as always. She saw him. They were smiling, waving, then kissing. He breathed in the smell of her skin, her hair. He took her bag and they walked to the Métro.

‘How was Belgrade?’

‘It was like Belgrade.’

‘And your mother, how was she?’

‘She is happy. I showed her a photograph of you. She thinks you are handsome but immature.’

‘Which picture?’

‘The one of you when you were a boy, in the cowboy hat.’

‘It doesn’t do me justice.’

Sitting next to Nicole on the Métro Luke saw his Walkman in one of the side pockets of her bag.

‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘I’d resigned myself to never seeing this again.’ To his surprise it showed no obvious sign of damage. He checked there was a cassette and pushed the headphones into his ears. ‘How was it?’

‘Fine.’

He pressed Play. Nothing happened. He tried again.

‘The batteries must be flat,’ said Nicole.

Luke spent the rest of the journey wondering what he most wanted to do when they got back to the apartment: make love immediately or check that his Walkman was working properly.

As soon as they arrived home Nicole ran a bath and undressed.

Luke knelt in front of her, his face in her pubic hair. ‘Let me lick you before you get in the bath,’ he said.

‘I’ve been on a train for ages. I need to wash.’

‘No, before you wash.’

‘I’m embarrassed. Is not too much?’

‘No, it’s beautiful.’ She raised one leg, put her foot on the edge of the bath. He squatted so that he was almost under her, pushed his tongue as far into her as he could. She reached down and held his head with both hands, pressing his face against her.

Nicole lay in the bath, reading her mail. Before Christmas she had applied for a job in an architect’s office and in this batch of mail was a letter asking her to come for an interview on the twelfth—

‘Tomorrow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Luke!’

‘Yes!’ He was in the other room, hunting for batteries.

‘I’ve got an interview for that job at the architect’s. Tomorrow.’

‘Good timing!’ He put new batteries in the Walkman and went into the bathroom. ‘The moment of truth,’ he said, sitting, cautiously, on the toilet seat (it had never been fixed). Even with new batteries the Walkman did not work. Nicole stood up in the bath, began drying herself with a white towel.

‘I’ll take it back to the shop,’ said Luke. ‘I hope Alex and Sahra have the receipt. It must have been faulty.’

‘Yes,’ said Nicole, walking, naked, into the other room. ‘Though I did get honey in it.’

In the morning she got up, showered and dressed while Luke lay in bed, watching her and her reflection in the mirror. He was always hoping that the mirror would begin to ghost but for months now it had worked completely normally.

‘You know, I could spend my life watching you get dressed and undressed. However many times I see you naked I can never get over the shock of actually seeing you with no clothes on. And then, when I see you getting dressed again, when I see your pubic hair disappear into your knickers, when I see your breasts covered by your bra and your back by a blouse. Or when I see your legs going into your jeans . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I was going to say. It’s a simple thing but complex. Without clothes you’re naked. With them, you’re not. On the floor your clothes are just clothes, then when you put them on they’re part of you.’

‘That’s profound Luke.’

‘Maybe all I mean is I love watching you get dressed.’

‘I like you watching me.’

‘But you don’t watch me in the same way, do you?’

‘I’ve never been fast enough. You’re dressed in less than ten seconds. Also watching’s not the same as noticing. You don’t need to watch to notice. Men watch, women notice.’

‘Good distinction. Did you notice that I jerked off into your knickers while you were away?’

‘I hope you washed them afterwards. How do I look?’ She was wearing her smartest suit, green, shoes with slight heels.

‘You always look beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Though naturally I would prefer stockings to tights.’

‘Nothing if not predictable. See you later.’ She kissed him on the cheek and put on her new coat, the one she had bought in Belgrade.

She was early for her appointment. The interviewer, her prospective employer, was late. His secretary made Nicole a coffee and said she could go through and wait in his office. She picked up the photo on his desk: wife and child, smiling, happy. She was surprised by how intensely she disliked this picture. It wasn’t the people in the photo she disliked: it was the executive convention of
having
such a picture on your desk. The daily presence of the photograph, its sheer obviousness, probably meant that the executive-husband became oblivious to it. Pictures like that didn’t help you to remember people, they helped you to forget them, and having one on your desk like this was a conventionally coded declaration of status: I am in a position to have framed snaps of my wife and children on my desk. And this advertisement, she suspected, was also a come-on. I have a wife and kids, the picture declared, therefore I do not try to sleep with my secretary or colleagues. But that statement somehow enhanced the chances of his being able to contradict it, to prove it wrong. By comparison the torn centrefolds, the oil-smeared nudes that mechanics stuck up on their workshop walls were images of felicity and integrity, faithfulness. She thought of the Polaroids she and Luke had taken: his face in her pubic hair, his swollen penis in her mouth, disappearing between the blur of her buttocks . . . If she became head of a company, she decided, these were the pictures she would have on her desk. Either that or the one of Luke when he was a little boy, in his cowboy hat. She was chuckling to herself when her prospective boss came in.

‘Bonjour,’ he said. ‘Vous avez l’air tout guilleret.’

‘C’est à dire, oui, je suis en train de penser à un truc tellement drôle.’ She stood up, held out her hand. He was forty, handsome, smartly dressed, had kept himself in shape. She saw his eyes take stock of her, could almost see the thought bubble coming out of his head like in an American comic: ‘Well, get a load of
this
. . .’

From that moment on it was obvious she was going to get the job.

She started the following Monday, the day the coldest weather for fifty years swept into the city like an invading army. It was so cold that Nicole was on the brink of abandoning her bike – unheard of – and travelling to work on the Métro. The cold was unbelievable, exciting. Things stopped working. Trains became glued to the tracks. Streets were stained with the frozen piss of dogs. Soil froze hard as iron, iron became brittle. Fountains froze into meringues. News bulletins were given over almost entirely to discussing the weather (effectively, the news had been replaced by the weather). It was too cold to snow. Old people were urged to stay at home. The freezing winters of Chicago and Stalingrad were invoked constantly. Luke looked, aghast, at the electricity meter in the apartment, spinning round at the speed of a compact disc. He was better off at the warehouse, at Ice Station Zebra, as Alex had taken to calling it.

Then the warm weather – the weather that was simply cold as opposed to glacial – returned and life settled into its drab winter norm. It drizzled the whole time, as if the sky were a pipe that had frozen, burst, thawed, and was now leaking over the city.

At the beginning of March Sahra and Alex moved into a new apartment together. Alex’s sub-let had come to an end and Sahra’s place was barely large enough for her, let alone for both of them. They were getting desperate when they found the perfect apartment – at a far lower rent than they had expected. Since they were both foreigners and neither of them had salaried jobs, however, the landlord was reluctant to let it to them. Another couple were also interested and it was only by offering to pay six months’ rent, in advance, in cash, by the next morning, that Alex and Sahra were able to swing it. Luke and Nicole – who had to ask her new boss, Pierre, for an advance on her wages – lent them half the money and the rest they cobbled together with credit and bank cards.

The apartment was over a watchmaker’s. Right outside their window was a large clock which kept perfect time. Across the road was a cinema, so near, Alex insisted, that it was possible to check the time on the clock, see that the film was about to start and still get to your seat without missing anything. It was a good cinema but, over the years, many of the letters used to display the films that were showing had been lost. Substitutes were used – W (upsidedown) for M, N (sideways) for Z – but Alex and Sahra suspected that the programme was determined, principally, by the availability of letters. It seemed a good omen: the contingent letters of the cinema echoed the message Alex had constructed on the door of the fridge.

Nicole and Luke helped them move in and arrange the apartment (pride of place was given to Nicole’s catherine wheel light) but, for them, the big event in March was the arrival of Spunk. Nicole liked her new job and had settled quickly into the routine of going to an office. It brought an element of stability and purpose into her life with Luke, creating the conditions in which they could think about acting on one of their longest-held wishes: to get a dog. They both wanted a dog but neither could face the responsibilities of looking after it. They wanted a dog that didn’t smell, moult, eat or – heaven forbid – shit. No such breed existed. Then, in the aftermath of their worst quarrel, Luke found the perfect specimen.

It was a Sunday. They had been cooking lunch together: curry. Nicole was wearing the sweater she had bought for him at Christmas. Luke loved seeing her in it. He picked up a jar of pickle by the lid. The jar crashed to the floor and smashed.

‘You know, one day I’m going to draw up a list of all the things you haven’t put the tops back on,’ Luke said as he began clearing up the mess. ‘Maybe even sub-divide it, for ease of classification, into jars – glass tins, I mean – pots, bottles and tubes. Under bottles, for example, we would have: olive oil, mineral water, shampoo et cetera. Under tubes, toothpaste . . .’

‘You can’t think of anything else that comes in a tube can you?’ said Nicole. She was leaning against the cooker.

‘Actually I can’t, but the general point still applies. Put a lid on it.’

‘Why don’t you pick things up properly? That only smashed because you picked it up by the lid.’

‘I’ll tell you what Nicole. Put a fucking lid on it.’

‘You put a fucking lid on it.’ She had still not got the hang of swearing convincingly in English.

Luke kissed her. ‘You know, the things I love about you are absolutely the things that drive me out of my mind with irritation too. I don’t want you to put lids on things because I love the way you don’t put lids on things.’

‘But you wish I did put lids on things?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And it never occurs to you that I might be irritated by things you do?’

‘Actually, now you come to mention it, no. Are there?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Like what?’

‘The way you always splash in the bathroom, for example.’

‘When I’m pissing?’

‘No, when you’re
wash
ing. You splash everywhere. You don’t wash, you splash.’

‘To wash is to splash. To wash brackets verb: to splash water on one’s face. What’s that smell? Is something burning?’

‘I think so.’ She turned away from the cooker to check what was burning and Luke saw immediately that it was his sweater. In flames. He grabbed the washing bowl out of the sink and emptied the soapy water over her. Water and cutlery sloshed and clattered to the floor. They stared at each other. She was soaking. The kitchen floor was drenched. The curry they had been cooking was awash with grey suds.

‘You did that deliberately,’ she said.

‘You were on fire.’ It was true but he had thrown the water over her out of anger as well as alarm.

‘You didn’t need to do that.’ She was on the brink of tears.

‘You ruined my fucking sweater,’ Luke yelled, suddenly livid. ‘You ruin everything you touch.’

‘No. You do.’ She pushed him away. He gripped her arms.

‘You’re hurting me. Let go of me.’ He tightened his grip, dug his fingers into her arms as hard as he could.

‘You fucking bastard!’ She spat in his face, kicked at his shin. He let go of her arms and she grabbed a handful of his hair with one hand and clawed at his face with the other. It was agony. He felt like his scalp would come off in her hand. He yanked her hand free, shoved her away. She banged into the cooker and up-ended the frying pan of curry which slopped on to the already soaking floor. She grabbed the pan, threateningly, ludicrously, but by now the scene was too diluted by curry and washing-up water to sustain anger.