‘They’re like that aren’t they?’
‘Et nous sommes les Indiens
.’
‘Actually, that’s been a big breakthrough for Alex.
We’re
partners. Which is a very new thing for him. A few weeks ago he came across something in Saint-Exupéry about how love means not looking
at
the other person but looking in the same direction. He’s taken to that like a religious conversion. I sometimes think we’re more like friends than . . .’
Sahra paused because Nicole appeared distracted. She was thinking about Luke and, for the first time, was troubled by the way he looked at her, the way he was so obsessed by her beauty, by having the proof of his happiness before his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nicole. ‘I was thinking about something you said. Go on.’
‘No, it was nothing. Nothing important.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you ever think about the future?’
‘Funny question. Why do you ask?’
‘Because I never do.’
‘I don’t either. I think that’s one of the things about taking E. It becomes impossible to think about the future. The present becomes all-consuming. Or at least the past extends back only as far as the weekend before.’
‘And the future as far as the weekend to come.’
‘Yes. It’s actually a stupid drug, don’t you think? You never have any thoughts at all when you’re on it, let alone interesting ones.’
‘That’s probably why the boys like it so much.’
‘No thought, only sensation.’
‘It
is
bad for your head though, don’t you think? It takes so long to get over it, and even when it’s over it’s not over. Two days later you mean to say one word and another comes out. You want to say chair and you say table.’
‘You do that anyway Nicole!’
‘That was only in English. Now I’m doing it in French too.’
‘Maybe we
should
think about the future,’ said Sahra. ‘Shall we try it now?’
‘OK.’
‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go.’ They shut their eyes and thought hard for several moments, holding hands as if at a badly attended séance.
‘Well?’ said Sahra.
‘Nothing.’
‘Me neither. Unless you count Christmas presents that we still haven’t bought.’
‘That’s better than me. When I try to think about the future I always end up thinking of the past. As if they were the same thing, as if the future had already happened.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Luke and I slept together the first night we went out and I think that’s why. Although I hardly knew him it was as if I already knew him, as if we already
had
slept together. It wasn’t like he seduced me – I don’t think he’d know how to seduce anyone – or I seduced him. It was the most unsurprising thing that has ever happened. In some ways I feel I’ve always known him.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Sahra. ‘I can’t imagine you not being with each other. Maybe it’s because I met you both at the same time.’
‘I can’t imagine not being with him either,’ said Nicole. ‘But I
can
imagine him not being with me – but I can’t imagine him being with anyone else. Whereas although I can’t imagine me not being with him, I can imagine me being with someone else. Does that make sense? I’m not sure I followed it myself.’
‘The really difficult thing to imagine is Alex without Luke.’
‘Or vice versa.’
‘It’s like: buy one and get the other free.’
‘Luke says they’re like brothers.’
‘That’s because he doesn’t
have
any brothers,’ said Sahra, more sharply than she’d intended, as Solaar came to the end of his rap:
‘
Toujours à contre-jour, c’est bien moins héroique
Dans le monde du rêve on termine par un “happy end”
Est-ce aussi le case dans ce quel l’on nomme
Le nouveau western
. . .’
The café was filling up with people and smoke. It was lunchtime.
‘What shall we do now?’ said Nicole. ‘Shop?’
‘Shall we not bother?’
‘I’d love to not bother. Let’s go to the cinema. If we see presents on the way we’ll buy them.’
They paid for their coffees and left. As they waited to cross boulevard Sébastopol a car pulled up beside them. The women were looking at the lights, waiting for the illuminated red pedestrian to turn green. The driver waved, catching Sahra’s eye. The women looked into the car: two men, young guys, both laughing. The men smiled. The women smiled back. The driver pointed at himself and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Moi?’ Nicole shook her head. He pointed across at his passenger, looked at Sahra, and raised his eyebrows again: ‘Lui?’ Sahra shook her head. ‘Non, lui,’ she mouthed silently, pointing at the green man on the lights, stepping into the road with Nicole.
A week before Christmas, Sahra heard from her uncle: he
did
have a house, and while Sahra and her friends were welcome to use it over the holiday period it was probably best if they didn’t. It had always been in fairly bad repair and since he hadn’t been there for over a year – and, in any case, only used it in the summer – he had no idea what kind of state it was in now. He enclosed a map with instructions on how to get there and find the place where, if he remembered rightly, the key was hidden: if they were
determined
to go, that is.
Alex and Sahra were undecided. They called Luke and Nicole to see what they thought.
‘It’s perfect,’ said Luke. ‘The more decrepit the house, the more exciting the adventure. When shall we leave?’
That was another problem: Sahra’s car. She used it almost as rarely as her uncle used the house and it seemed unlikely that it would be up to such a long journey. Alex was the only person who knew anything about cars and he knew almost nothing. He ‘looked it over’ – checked the water, kicked the tyres, cleaned the windscreen – and pronounced it ‘ready to eat up the road’.
They set off early in the morning on the day before Christmas Eve. Sahra’s uncle had written that there were no shops nearby and so, on the outskirts of the city, they stopped at a hypermarket and bought enough food and wine to last a week. Everyone else was buying food and wine to last for ever. The scale of consumption defied belief. In such a place it seemed insulting to buy in multiples of less than twelve. The queues at the check-outs – and there seemed an infinite number of them – were immense. Luke waited in line while the others went off in search of Christmas accessories: fairy lights, crackers, decorations. Their receipt, when they’d paid for everything, was almost a metre long.
The boot was already loosely packed with bags, blankets and presents and to make room for this great haul of provisions everything had to be re-loaded. The back seat and the floor around the front passenger seat were crammed with pillows, coats and cartons of food.
‘There’s no room for passengers. It’s cargo only.’
‘We’ll have to eat everything now, just to make room for ourselves.’
Alex and Nicole clambered in the back. Sahra (who was driving) and Luke (who claimed he had to go in the front because of his long legs) piled stuff on top of them. Then Luke got in and Sahra piled stuff on top of him too.
The hypermarket had been on the edge of the city but this edge looked like continuing right up until the edge of the next city. When they finally hit the autoroute it began drizzling. Theirs was the slowest car on the road and everything that overtook them – cars, vans, trucks, coaches – threw up a grey spray that the wipers could only smear across the screen. The radio, likewise, proved incapable of making itself heard above the roar of the engine. They passed the time playing
Pariscope
: between them Luke and Alex had mastered the entire repertory schedule of Paris cinemas so thoroughly that if the women picked a film, ‘any flm’, they claimed, then they would give the time and place where it was showing.
‘
Jules et Jim
?’ said Sahra.
‘The Accatone, Monday, 17:55,’ said Luke.
‘Not bad,’ said Nicole, checking the magazine. ‘
Days of Heaven
?’
‘Le Champo, Thursday 13:50,’ said Alex.
‘
Paris, Texas
?’
‘14 Juillet Beaubourg, 19:30, daily.’
‘Incredible. What a waste of brains.’
‘We can do it the other way round too. Give us a cinema and time and we’ll tell you the film.’
‘Studio Galande, Friday, at four o’clock,’ said Sahra.
‘Too easy,’ said Alex. ‘
Le Mépris
.’
‘Thursday at nine fifteen, Le Grand Pavois.’
‘Now that’s a difficult one,’ said Luke. It was: there were four screens at Le Grand Pavois, showing a total of thirty or forty films a week. ‘I’m not sure but I
think
it’s
Blade Runner.
’
‘C’est incroyable,’ said Nicole, throwing
Pariscope
into the front seat.
‘Actually,’ said Alex, leaning forward, ‘I’ve got a question for you, Luke.’
‘Shoot.’
‘You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling along your arm.’
‘I’d kill it.’
‘You go into a restaurant, the entrée is boiled dog . . .’
Luke said nothing. His eyes met Alex’s in the rearview mirror.
‘Tell me,’ said Luke, ‘have you ever taken this test yourself?’
‘Within five seconds,’ said Sahra, ‘Alex will be doing his Rutger Hauer. I guarantee it.’
‘I’ve
seen
things you people wouldn’t believe,’ said Alex. ‘Attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion . . .’
Luke joined in and they did the last lines together, perfectly synchronised: ‘All of those moments will be lost . . . in time, like tears . . . in rain.’
Nicole and Sahra did a perfectly synchronised yawn.
After three hours they turned off the autoroute and stopped for petrol and lunch in a smallish town. Sahra was not a great parker. As she reversed into a space she thumped into the car behind. Luke got out and looked at the damage.
‘It’s pretty bad,’ he said.
‘Oh no!’
‘I’m afraid so. I thought it was going to be bad, from the noise,’ said Luke. ‘It was an amazing thump.’
‘Like this,’ said Alex, hitting the inside of the rear door with his fist, exactly as he had done a few seconds earlier.
‘Idiot!’
‘An English classic!’ said Luke, pressing his hand against the rear side window. Alex pressed his to the same spot on the opposite side of the glass: the prison visit handshake.
‘I’m paralysed from the neck downwards,’ said Alex as they prised him out of the back seat.
‘From the neck upwards you mean,’ said Sahra.
It was nice sitting cramped round a table, facing each other after sitting cramped in the car, in two rows of two. The menu had been translated into English of a sort. Luke ordered oeufs brouillés or ‘Scream bled Eggs’. The waitress was friendly and gave them several refills of American-style coffee. They also had a conversation about coffee which they all knew they’d had before, word for word, but this added to the pleasure of this particular rendition. They took it in turns to use the bathroom. Eager to get under way again, they paid for the meal out of the kitty (which made it seem as if no one was paying), pushed back their chairs and got up to leave.
It was raining hard outside.
Nothing in the past has any value. You cannot store up happiness. The past is useless. You can dwell on it but not in it. What good does it do anyone, knowing that they once sat with friends in a car and called out the names of cinemas and films, that they ate lunch in a town whose name they have forgotten?
Alex drove the second half of the journey. Luke again insisted that his long legs meant he had to sit in the front and so the two women arranged themselves in the back.
‘This is more like it,’ said Luke. ‘Men in the front, women in the back.’
‘So has it always been,’ said Alex.
‘So will it always be.’
‘Can we have the heater on?’ said Sahra.
‘It is on.’
‘But is it full on?’
‘Affrmative,’ said Alex.
‘How about another round of
Pariscope
?’ said Luke.
After only half an hour’s driving the four of them fell silent. Luke glanced round and saw that Sahra and Nicole were asleep. He nudged Alex’s arm. Alex looked at the sleeping women in the mirror and smiled.
‘Sitting in the front seat of a car in winter, looking at our women sleeping in the back. That’s what we’re doing now,’ said Luke.
He was supposed to be navigating but soon he fell asleep too. Alex didn’t mind. He enjoyed being the only one awake in the car. It had stopped raining. The sky was clearing. On either side of the road were fields of ploughed corduroy. The landscape became steeper, emptier, colder-seeming. Trees adjusted themselves to the gradient. There was less and less traffic.
Nicole and Sahra woke, then Luke who consulted the map.
‘Are we there yet, Dad?’ said Sahra.
‘Negative,’ said Luke. ‘About ten miles from now we get off the main road.’ The sun was disappearing. The tops of the hills showed grey-white, whiter than the grey of the sky which began glowing pink.
‘I think we’ve come the wrong way,’ said Luke, soon after they had left the main road.
Alex manoeuvred the car around. Luke suggested another turning which also proved to be a mistake.
‘Your navigating has left something to be desired,’ said Alex.
‘I’ve done . . . questionable things,’ said Luke, back in Rutger Hauer mode.
The light was fading quickly. Alex switched on the side-lights. They turned on to a minor road which climbed and curved back on itself. Trees appeared black and stark against the sky which was infused with a deeper flush of pink. Everyone in the car was looking out for signs now: it was important, Sahra said, to get to the house before dark. There was a narrow turning to the right and she shouted to turn down it: a single-lane track lined by trees, gloomy. Alex turned on the headlights. A rabbit scampered across the road.
At the end of the track they came to a house. It looked dark and unwelcoming. The sky was burning red through the trees.
Alex turned off the engine. They sat there, a little disappointed after the long drive. Luke cracked open the door and got out. The call of birds emphasised the silence. He tipped his seat forward so that Sahra and Nicole could get out.