Paris Trance (8 page)

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’.

Construction work was in progress everywhere. Great swathes of the city were being demolished and redeveloped but wherever they went they saw cafés they intended, one day, to return to. Roller-bladers, solitary or in packs, roamed swiftly through the dream-time of the city. Stoned, Luke found himself looking forward to a time when not having learned to roller-blade would be one of the major regrets of his life. They followed buses, cut through parks, crossed over railway lines, annoyed drivers, skirted traffic jams and orbited churches whose names they made no attempt to establish. After two hours they were hopelessly lost.

‘Let’s go in here then,’ said Nicole, pointing at a shop specialising in maps and atlases.

‘How convenient. Like having an accident outside the hospital or getting robbed outside the police station.’

Inside, variously projected maps of the world were arranged in large V-shaped racks. They turned the polythene-protected posters as if they were choosing a picture of Che or Hendrix in an Athena shop at the dawn of the poster era. The selection was vast: maps showing population density, per capita incomes, political boundaries, mineral deposits, annual rainfall and physical features. In the standard Mercator projection the world looked swollen and robust, bursting with prosperity and confidence. Great Britain was slap bang in the middle of things, about half the size of India. In a newer, alternative projection the world looked sad and thin, dripping towards Antarctica. Little Britain on this projection was barely visible, a streak that looked hardly worth invading.

‘Where would we be without maps?’ Nicole asked rhetorically.

One rack held only antique reproductions, olde maps drawn in different versions of the same buried treasure aesthetic, zephyrs blowing galleons across the whale-crowded sea towards jagged coastlines of indeterminate exactness. Another held maps of the oceans, great stretches of contoured blueness; in another were maps of space: the Moon, Mars, the stars.

There was also a selection of globes which were immune to the vagaries and distortions of projection. Some were actually lights, contained their own suns, glowed from within. The Moon was uniformly grey, nothing like as nice as the Earth which was greenish and deep blue. Still, it was the Moon and, as such, they felt drawn to it.

‘The Sea of Tranquillity,’ read Luke.

‘Easter Sea.’

‘Ocean of Storms.’

‘Bay of Dew.’

‘Sea of Crises.’

‘Sea of Nectar. It makes you wish there were places on Earth with names like that,’ said Nicole, but there was no disguising the fact that, names aside, the Moon was a pretty crummy place. ‘Look,’ she said. High up on one wall was a satellite photo of the Earth seen from space. Flattened out to show the entire planet, it looked exactly like a map of the world.

‘That’s the only thing the Moon’s got going for it, really,’ said Luke. ‘You get a great view of the Earth.’

‘It’s the best planet, isn’t it? We’re so lucky to live on it.’

‘None of the others come within a million miles of it.’

They had succeeded in putting the afternoon in a massive, dwarfing context. Re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, they went down to the basement where the maps of individual countries were kept, maps showing regions within a country, states and counties, folded street plans of crowded cities – London, Rome, New York, Cairo, Moscow – that showed every avenue and street, every cul de sac and alley of the city they were in. There was even a diagram, on the wall, of the shop itself, a map of maps with a red arrow saying, ‘You Are Here.’

‘I feel better able to face the world,’ said Luke. Better able, he meant, to face the journey home – not the Ancient Egypt section of one of the city’s daunting museums.

‘Why on earth do we want to see that?’ he said.

‘It’s very interesting,’ said Nicole. ‘It was a civilisation in which nothing ever happened, a culture which consisted entirely of sitting. Very like Paris in fact.’

Fortunately (for Luke) most of the Egyptian wing was closed, for renovation; unfortunately, they found themselves in an endless collection of armour and weapons from the twelfth century onwards. The earliest guns looked like dark fossils, as if they would have been more use as clubs. Gradually the guns became more ornate with elaborate decoration on the barrels and handles. Fowling pieces, muskets, flintlocks, stand-and-deliver pistols. Then there were the swords, ‘the unbelievably boring swords’ (Nicole): halberds, pikes, sabres, broadswords so huge that they didn’t seem like instruments of violence, just totems of violent intent. That was the attacking side; on the defensive side there was the armour (‘the even more unbelievably boring armour’): tons of the stuff, row upon row of breast-plates and helmets, cleaned up to a kind of dull sheen. Suits of armour, evidently, were ten a penny in some army surplus store of museum artefacts. Taken together these paired displays of armour and weaponry foretold the entire history of the arms race: attack and defence cancelling each other out, their interaction becoming more and more elaborate until everything was raised to a level of rhetoric.

The undertow of violent intent lent this section of the museum a certain minimal fascination (for Luke, at any rate) but they soon found themselves in a wing devoted to decorative arts. Luke and Nicole were searching for an exit but all the signs directed them through mile after mile of tables, desks, carpets, chairs, bureaux and beds. They were desperate to get out of the energy-sapping heat but after the carpets and beds came the porcelain: tea-cups, plates, dishes, pots, saucers: anything that happened to have survived from the Ming or any other dynasty.

‘This is it,’ said Luke. ‘The real bargain basement, the flea-market of ancient history.’ They were moving quickly, hardly glancing at any of the meticulously labelled bits of broken crockery.

‘I’m exhausted,’ said Nicole. ‘It’s like walking across a desert.’

‘I’ve got museum knee, museum back: the works. I don’t think I can walk another inch,’ said Luke, but there were many miles of bits and pieces to trudge through before they erupted finally into the late-twentieth-century light.

‘That settles it,’ said Luke. ‘One day I am going to open a museum of boredom. A history of tedium through the ages. Global in scope, displaying the full range of boredom, all the culturally and historically specific variants.’

Nicole had claimed she was exhausted but the prospect of being back in the saddle revived her. ‘Let’s go to the mosque,’ she said, unlocking her bike. ‘We can have thé à la menthe there.’

Inside, the mosque was crowded, smoky, secular. Luke was ecstatic to be sitting down, free at last from museum-traipsing and pedal-pushing.

‘Sitting in the mosque, drinking mint tea, eating delicious harissa, already looking forward to ordering another tea: that’s what I’m doing now,’ he said. ‘That and watching the most gorgeous woman in the world eat her baklava.’ Specifically he was watching the bones in her jaw move as she chewed. There was a flake of pastry on her lip which she wiped away with a napkin. Luke did not want to tell her he loved her: they were words which, once spoken, could never again contain the feeling they had once conveyed. But the longing to tell her he loved her was overwhelming. He looked at her and said to himself, as powerfully as he could: I love you, I love you.

Before leaving the mosque Nicole bought some honey because she liked the elegant ‘glass tin’ that it came in.

‘Glass tin?’

‘Is that not the right word?’ she said, holding up the jar for him to see.

‘No, no. That’s absolutely right.’ Nicole also tried on a pair of pointy yellow babouches that smelt like an animal. Luke bought them for her and she wore them that night as she cooked dinner for them both at her apartment.

Luke was taken aback by the chaos in which she lived. The main space was a living room and kitchen. Yellow walls, orange book shelves. The news was on TV; the TV was on the draining board; the kettle was on the TV, on the brink of boiling. A leg of prosciutto was hanging from a hook screwed into the white-painted wooden beams that were all that remained of the wall that had once divided the space in two. Between these two beams were two filing cabinets, one black one orange. They were ugly things, filing cabinets: most people tried to hide them away in corners, but displayed prominently in the centre of the room like this, they had a kind of battered glamour. Propped against the back of one of them was an old mirror.

Luke had bought beer. The fridge was full so he broke up the pack and arranged the bottles in whatever nooks and crannies he could find and then put two glasses in the freezer. Nicole said,