Paris Trance (29 page)

Sahra and Alex had prepared dinner. As usual the table had been set in front of the house. Nicole sat down with them and Luke brought out two beers from the fridge. He tried to open one of the bottles Zimbabwe-style and, as always, failed. He passed them to Alex who flipped off the top and handed back the open bottle.

‘You’re going to break your thumb if you keep trying to do that,’ he said smugly. Luke rolled a joint and he and Sahra played a couple of games of Ping-Pong. Then they opened a bottle of wine and ate dinner. For dessert they each ate a grin of melon. Alex rolled another joint which only he and Luke smoked. The sun had sloped off somewhere else and they were waiting for the moon to show. Nicole was sitting on the floor between Luke’s legs, her eyes closed. Stoned, Alex watched Luke combing her hair with his fingers.

If you watch someone’s hands closely enough, can you feel what they have felt, touch what they have touched?

Alex became aware of a tightening in the atmosphere: an alertness. Feeling Sahra watching him, he shut his eyes, blanked off his thoughts.

The long curve of the days was marked by the movement of the sun, by the changing light. Every day was like every other: they worked on the house, ate lunch, played tennis, swam, went for cycle rides and walks, got stoned, cooked dinners. The passage of the weeks was marked by their deepening tans and the gradual improvement of the house. Luke finished cleaning out the barn. The house had been painted. Only odd jobs remained to be done. The house was still sparsely furnished but in every other respect it looked like a home.

Alex was cleaning paint drips from the floor in the living room. The window was open. Straight ahead was a view of the blue unclouded weather but the window itself reflected an angle of the exterior that he could not see directly. The reflection in the window was darker than reality, imparting a tint to the sky like a premonition of thunder. He went over to the window and opened it inward. As he did so the view in the glass panned round to reveal the gravel path leading to the barn. It was like a form of elementary surveillance and Alex felt as if he were spying. He opened the window wider, until he could see the barn itself. At the extreme edge of the window frame, he saw Nicole walking into view. With the window open as wide as possible he watched her lay a towel on the parched grass and take off her shorts and T-shirt. Underneath she was wearing her yellow swimming costume. She sat down and rubbed sun lotion on to her arms and legs and shoulders. She picked up a book but put it down again almost immediately and lay back in the sun. Alex heard the door open behind him. He glanced round as Sahra stepped into the room. She saw him silhouetted against the shock of light.

‘Hi!’ he said, moving the window slightly.

‘Alex?’

‘Yes.’ He stood up, giddy with the blood draining from his head.

‘Are you busy?’

‘Not at all.’ Sahra walked towards him, put her arms around him, kissed him. ‘What is it?’ He held her.

‘We’re still looking in the same direction aren’t we?’

‘At this moment, no. We’re looking at each other.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, of course. I mean, we are still looking in the same direction.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise. Look,’ he said, moving so that they were both facing the open window, looking out at the blaze of wheat and sky.

One night, when Alex and Sahra had gone to bed, Nicole and Luke carried their mattress and bedding out into the yard. They made love, Luke manoeuvring, selfishly, so that he was underneath and could see the sky. Nicole moved slowly, pulling away from him until he almost came out of her, then sliding back over him, taking him inside her again.

‘Shoulders,’ she said. He moved his hands up to her shoulders, stroked them.

‘Shoulders,’ he said.

‘Back,’ she said.

‘Lovely back,’ he said, moving his hands down the steps of her spine and then back up again.

Next she said, ‘Waist.’ He repeated the word and moved his hands down to her waist.

‘Hips,’ she said.

‘I love your hips,’ he said, moving his hand over the angle of bone.

‘Breasts,’ she said.

‘Breasts.’ He touched her breasts and kissed her on the mouth.

‘Lips,’ she said.

‘Lips,’ he said.

‘Tongue.’

‘Tongue.’

‘Ear.’ He kissed her ear, whispering the word in her ear.

‘Neck,’ she said, and he touched her neck as softly as he could.

‘Hair,’ she said. Her hair was falling over his face. He gathered it loosely in his hand and let it run through his fingers.

‘Hair,’ he said, gathering it in his fist.

‘Hair.’

He pulled her hair, gently, then harder until her head was pulled backwards.

‘Hair.’

‘Hair,’ he said, threading it with starlight.

Afterwards they lay side by side, staring up at the star-drenched night. Neither of them was able to recognize the constellations. To attempt to arrange the swathe of stars into patterns, designs, shapes or outlines of objects was to diminish them, to scale down the immensity of what was seen and render it manageable. Even to look at them through your own eyes, to seek to hold the view in your head seemed compromising, belittling.

If only we could see without
being
– then we could
be
what we see.

‘How many stars do you think there are up there?’ said Nicole.

‘An astronomical number.’

They watched for shooting stars, taking it in turns to call out: ‘There’s one!’ ‘Look, there!’

‘I’ve never been happier in my life,’ said Luke.

‘Nor have I.’

‘And I never will be happier.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s a ceiling. A limit.’

‘Funny to say that now, now that there is no ceiling to be seen.’

‘You don’t think those stars are a ceiling?’

They lay still. A satellite skimmed the earth. Passing, passing.

‘What are you thinking now?’ said Nicole.

‘I’m wondering if it’s possible that happiness could become unbearable,’ he said. ‘I think I can imagine it, not being able to bear happiness any more.’

Nicole said nothing. He moved to kiss her. Her face was wet against his lips.

To see without being, to be what is seen . . .

A few days before they were due to return to the city the four friends drove to the coast. It was an hour’s drive, and when they were almost there they took Daniel’s acid. Alex had done a trip once before, years ago, and so had Sahra. After much negotiation Alex took a whole blotter while the women – Nicole having once again been persuaded and reassured by Sahra – took a half each. Luke swallowed the rest.

They parked the car and began walking. The wall beside the road was tumbled down and broken. It didn’t matter: its dereliction was part of a cycle that led ultimately to its being repaired. Everything had its season here. The road was dusty, dry. At the side of the road were stones, left over from whatever process had been used to make the road. All along the roadside was the sizzle of cicadas. They turned on to a smaller road. To the left were trees, bare and thorny as barbed wire. Leaves had been dispensed with as an unnecessary luxury. It was perfectly still but, after years in this normally windswept spot, the trees looked, even in repose, as if a gale were screaming through their spindly branches. Leaves had been sacrificed for roots, display for the more desperate task of clinging to thin soil. All energy passed down rather than out. All visual clues suggested the buffeting and howling of wind – even the grass was combed flat – but the only sound was of insects, twitching.

They found themselves walking across the very different grass of a golf course. A group of men in pastel sweaters took it in turns to tee off. Because Sahra was the only one with a watch they called her Chronos, a name she was more than happy with. Here and there they tried to give names to various land formations. Although, between them, they had many names at their disposal, no one was sure if the words corresponded to the features intended. Luke thought of rock types and forgotten processes of erosion taking millions and millions of years, proceeding, so to speak, at a glacial pace.

Unsure of the direction they were taking, they passed a car park where an old man and a woman stoically contemplated the view while drinking from a tartan-patterned flask. Odd things caught Luke’s attention: a red phone box, English-style, with blue tiles of sky showing through the square frames of windows (two broken). What was
that
doing there?

‘Hey Chronos!’ called Alex. ‘What’s the time?’

‘It’s stopped,’ said Sahra.

‘Time has run out,’ said Nicole.

‘There is no more time,’ said Sahra.

The road gave way to a path that followed the bend of the coast. Their feet moved over crumbled yellow stones. A single dark puddle – where had the water come from? – fixed Luke’s face against a glinting bowl of sky. To the left was a low wall; to the right, a taut wire fence, tufts of grey fleece hanging from the barbs. A hundred metres further on this gave way to an electrified fence that hummed quietly to itself. They began to feel hemmed in by this corridor of fences and walls which was just one strand of an elaborate web, stretched over the landscape as far as the eye could see.

Luke vaulted over a gate, closely followed by Alex, as if they were the last survivors of a gruelling cross-country run. Fields rose and fell: a patchwork of yellow, khaki and green, cradling the sky. The sun became stronger, turning the sky from grey-blue to blue-grey. The sky circled the earth like a satellite. The horizon was a blue extinction of cloud. Without realizing it they had lost track of the sea: the path they were following had led imperceptibly inland and no one had taken any notice of where they were headed. They were stranded in the swelling landscape of camouflage-patterned fields. A middle-aged man and a woman in a headscarf appeared. They had the look of people who regularly reported anything suspicious to the police.

‘Excusez-moi,’ said Luke, surprised by how fluent he sounded. ‘C’est où, la mer?’

‘La mer?’

‘Oui.’

‘Vous cherchez une mer spéciale?’

‘Non,’ said Alex, glad to be wearing sunglasses. ‘La mer d’une façon générale. Vous pourriez me l’indiquer?’

The couple did as they were asked. The four friends all called out ‘merci’ and walked on. Alex pulled a banana out of his jacket pocket and chewed on it. He threw the peel over a wall, flapping like a bird as it went. The air was even stiller. Is there a negative as well as positive wind-scale? A gauge of stillness? Today was stiller than a day when smoke rises vertically into the air or a shuttlecock, dropped from a plane, falls as straight as a builder’s plumb-line. No molecule of air moved. The friends, by contrast, made their way to the cliff uncertainly like a river meandering to the sea. Not only had they drifted from their destination but they had drifted apart from each other. Luke let the landscape ripple through his head. When he looked around he saw Nicole and Sahra – was she still Chronos, now that her watch had stopped? – in a field near a patch of woodland. Still further away, Alex was lying on his back, feeling the land breathe beneath him. Fence posts cast shadows across the grey ribbon of the lane as Luke made his way towards him.

Together again, they walked past giant Swiss-rolls of hay and a farmhouse where a dog barked viciously. In a shed they glimpsed farm machinery that could mangle your arm terribly. Also a tractor with no cushion on the seat.

‘How cold that must be in winter,’ said Nicole.

‘When the skies are like ice.’

‘When the ground is like ice.’

‘When the sea itself is ice.’

‘When there is nothing but ice.’

‘Where are the cliffs?’ said Alex.

‘The sea.’

‘The coast.’

‘The edge.’

They walked on, coming eventually to a steeply rising bank which, they were sure, was all that separated them from the cliffs. For ten minutes they scrambled up the grass of the bank. Cresting it they saw a huge expanse of sky and, off to the right, a lighthouse perched on the edge of the coast. They continued across the grass that covered the last fifty metres of land. Sun poured into their faces. Luke looked at Nicole and Sahra. They had their arms round each other and were laughing hysterically at Alex who had taken off his jacket and was carrying it over one arm, walking briskly as if late for an important meeting. Sahra trotted over to him and they walked on, holding hands. Nicole ran over to Luke and kissed him, her eyes shiny with laughter.

She was speaking. Her voice took a long time to reach him. ‘Are you still with us, Trevor?’

A voice – his own, he assumed – said possibly not.

With every step they took towards the coast the light became stronger. The sky overhead burned a deep blue. The lighthouse gleamed whitely.

And then they were there. There was no more land. It stopped. They had come to the edge, could go no further. Sea and sky were lost in a luminous haze. There was no distance or direction, only the weightless flow of light. All sense of substance – of earth, weight, mass – was lost, as if they were suddenly back at the first moment of creation when this was all there was, a mingling of light and air: blue draining through gold, light dissolving into itself.

As Luke became used to the glare he could see boats floating in the blue sky. The laws of perspective melted in the intensity of the light. There was no sound of surf, no noise of wind. Overhead the shimmer of gold gave way to a deep, clear blue. He looked back at the green grass rolling away from the cliffs, cropped short by absent sheep. He lay on his back and looked up.

A military jet pulled through the sky, very high. Beyond that was the uncertain region where sky turned into space, where everything began to peter out, where distance ceased to be measured as space, only as light. The plane itself was no more than a dot, would probably have been invisible but for the vapour trail easing out behind it. He watched it race around the sky, following the curve of the earth in a long silent arc. The sound lagged behind, a rumble that was only now making itself heard in a part of the country the jet had passed over seconds before, miles inland, in one town or another.