‘All great bars are primarily neighbourhood bars.’
‘Correct.’
‘But they are not exclusively neighbourhood bars.’
‘Also correct.’
‘You don’t want to add anything?’
‘You said it all,’ said Luke, raising his glass.
Luke was back at work again the next day, sore from the previous day’s exertions, relieved to find that things would be far less frantic. This was another benefit of Lazare’s unusual managerial style: by imposing urgent, sometimes non-existent deadlines we often found ourselves with relatively little to do, especially if he was away from the warehouse, meeting clients, pitching for business. Typically we had two maniacally busy days and the other three were easy – which meant we could spend our lunch hours playing football at passage Thiéré. We had been mooting the idea for a while, had even played occasionally, but it was only after Luke began working at the warehouse that football became an established part of our week. Up until then we had spent most of our lunch hours
talking
about playing.
We took our lunch late and the playground was never crowded. If other guys were around – the Algerians from the workshop on the corner always wanted to play but it was difficult for them to get away for any length of time – we played together, four- or five-a-side. If it was just the five of us from the warehouse we volleyed and headed the ball back and forth, making sure that the ball did not touch the ground, embroidering this basic task – whenever possible – with displays of individual skill: flicking the ball from foot to foot and on to a thigh before heading it to the next person; bringing the ball under control and restoring the flow of play following a mis-kick. We kept count of how many passes and headers we could string together without letting the ball touch the ground. Sometimes we settled into a rhythm that seemed likely to continue indefinitely until one of us fluffed a simple kick and we were back to square one and had to begin the count again. I enjoyed this but it bothered me slightly that the game did not have a satisfactory name. Keepy-uppy, Headers and Volleys: neither was adequate. Alternatively – another game without a name – one of us went in goal while the others crossed and headed or let fly with palm-stinging shots.
After playing, especially if the weather was fine, we were reluctant to return to the warehouse and sat against the graffiti-mottled wall, the sun dazzling our eyes, gulping down water and chewing mouthfuls of bread and tomato, the minutes ticking by until, begrudgingly, like troops returning to the front, we tramped back up Ledru Rollin to work.
If getting a job at the warehouse was Luke’s first stroke of luck it proved also to be his second. Nothing came of the apartment Miles had heard of but, through Matthias, he was put in touch with a photographer who was going to spend a year travelling. He had sub-let his apartment to an American but at the last moment this arrangement had fallen through and he needed to find someone else.
The apartment was on the second floor of a shabby block only fifteen minutes walk from the warehouse, less than ten from where Alex lived. Most of the buildings in the street – and a couple of vans – were the site of turbulent political discourse: ‘Le Pen’ and ‘FN’ had been scribbled on walls, crossed out, rewritten and sprayed over. The building next door had been demolished so the outside walls were patterned with squares of wallpaper: ghost rooms where families had slept and eaten and died.
The apartment itself was small, a studio, but there was little furniture cluttering up the place. The floorboards were stained a pale, woody colour. Some of the photographer’s photographs were on the walls. Black-and-white: street scenes. One showed a crowd of demonstrators confronting police. They were good photographs and the apartment, though small, suited Luke perfectly. He said yes on the spot and paid two months’ rent in advance. The photographer left him the key to his bicycle so that Luke could use that too. Luke bagged up his belongings and dropped off the key to his old apartment with Madame Carachos. He considered abusing her for renting such a dump to him, decided against it, and moved into his new apartment the day after going to look at it.
Now that they were both ‘colleagues’ – as Luke put it –
and
neighbours, he and Alex saw a great deal of each other. They were both English, both new – or newish – to the city, and both single. With the exception of Miles and the guys at the warehouse, Luke knew almost no one. Alex knew a few people – most of whom had been at the Petit Centre that night – but, together, he and Luke were set to get a far better purchase on the city than either of them could have done alone. Meeting each other marked the beginning of the phase in their lives when all the elusive promise of the city could be realized. They flourished in each other’s company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of refracting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex.
You know what a downer it is when you meet someone for a drink or dinner and almost the first thing they say is ‘I don’t want a late night’? To Alex, Luke was the embodied opposite of that kind of remark. Evenings with him had a quality of unfettered potential. This was exactly the feeling engendered by the city in which they found themselves and many of the qualities Alex saw in Luke could just as accurately have been attributed to the shared experience of a place and time. Alex also ascribed to his new friend an exalted version of the traits which – in quieter, passive mode – Luke saw in him. Alex used Luke as a kind of probe, an extrapolated mirror of himself. Which meant that from Alex’s perspective Luke was a special person, to be admired, to measure himself against. The difference, I realize now, was that Alex had a theory – an
idea
– of Luke whereas Luke simply liked his friend, liked being with him. Ultimately this difference would generate another: Luke would never be disappointed by Alex.
There was an additional incentive for playing football at passage Thiéré: the women who each day passed by, carrying books, talking or pushing bicycles. They were on their way back to offices or to lectures at the university after their lunch break, just strolling, or eating ice cream when it was hot. Men walked by too but that was just an accident whereas the girls, we liked to think, came by deliberately. Just a slight preference for this route back from the café rather than another one, a simple suggestion by one of a group of friends – ‘Let’s walk past the playground at Thiéré’ – that was always approved by the others. No more than that. And even if it was not the consequence of any kind of preference, even if it was just a short-cut that extended their lunch break by five minutes, we preferred to think that they came by primarily because of us. Certainly there were other places we could have played football; even if they didn’t come by because of us,
we
played there because of them.
Luke noticed one woman in particular. She was tall with a mass of black hair that fell down below her shoulders. One day, when he was over that side of the yard retrieving the ball, he smiled, ‘Hi’, and she smiled back briefly before walking on. Contained in that look perhaps there was the seed of another meeting of eyes when, weeks later, undressing each other for the first time, his fingers in her hair, their eyes flicked open at exactly the same moment.
Luke watched her walk away, wondering if she would look back. Her legs were tanned, she was wearing tennis shoes, there was something floaty about the way she walked. A lightness. She didn’t look back.
As we traipsed back to work, Luke said that the next time she came by we should kick the ball to that side of the playground so that he could talk to her. Thereafter, whenever we were playing and she walked past, the rest of us gestured to Luke to let him know she was there but kept passing the ball in the other direction, luring him away from her. Either that or we eliminated him from the game completely, refusing to pass to him as he inched his way towards her side of the playground. Then, when she had walked past,
then
we would kick the ball over that way – ‘Go on Luke, now’s your chance!’ – leaving him to retrieve the ball and gaze after her retreating form.
One day, though, after we had got Luke running round like a dog, I relented and floated an inch-perfect pass across the yard, landing a metre or two in front of her so that Luke could catch her eye, smile, kick the ball back and wait for her to draw near. When I next looked over he was speaking to her, hanging on to the wire diamonds. We only granted him a few seconds of repose before booting the ball over his way and shouting to him to kick it back, making her conscious of the way we were all standing around, watching and waiting while Luke trotted after the ball and curled it back to us. We let them have a couple of peaceful minutes and then Matthias blasted the ball over that way again, smacking it into the wire a couple of feet from her head like a cannonball. She jumped, Luke turned round and saw us all laughing like yobs while he was obviously trying to impress on her that he was not devoid of sensitivity and actually spent a great deal of time reading, maybe even dropping a hint that he was not without literary aspirations himself. And at the same time that he was annoyed about us louting up his chances you could see he also enjoyed it, the way that we imparted a hint of the ghetto to his wooing.
There was no sign of Lazare when we got back to work and so we sat with our feet up on the packing tables, eating sandwiches, gasping after sips of Orangina, crunching chips.
‘Did you see Luke after all that running around, legs buckling—’
‘Breathing hard, unable to speak—’
‘Coughing up blood – “Just let me get my breath back, you see I’m not like the others” – then bam! the ball smacks into the fence about an inch from her face.’
‘What she say Luke?’ Matthias wanted to know. ‘What she is like?’
‘She’s nice.’
‘What is her name?’
‘Nicole.’
‘Oh Nicole! Horny name. And what does she do, horny Nicole?’ Matthias pushed his tongue into his cheek, moving his hand back and forth in front of his open mouth. Luke shook his head. Matthias belched and tossed his empty can, clattering into the bin.
We would happily have spent the whole afternoon like that, grilling Luke about his attempted courtship but, hearing Lazare’s decrepit Renault scrape through the gate ten minutes later, we leaped to our feet. By the time he walked in we were hard at it, as if we had been so busy packing orders that there had scarcely been time to grab a sandwich.
A few days later, when Nicole next passed by the playground, we decided to let Luke go over and talk quietly, without the ball thudding into the fence, like we were on our best behaviour. She was wearing a dress and a quaint mauve cardigan so that he could not see her arms which one day soon would be around his shoulders as he kissed her, which one day he would grip hard in his fists, shaking her, leaving ugly bruises. I can still see them over there, separated by the fence, wondering what each other was like. She was holding some books in front of her. The sun flashed out from a cloud, the wire fence threw angles of shadow over her face. She held up a book for him to see and he bent towards her and conceded that he had never read Nietzsche or Merleau-Ponty or whoever it was she was reading. Not that it mattered: the important thing about the book was that it served as an intermediary, a bridge between them. Luke watched her looking at him through the fence, sweat dripping from his hair, breathing hard. His sleeves were pushed up over his elbows, the veins stood out in his forearms. Strands of her hair breezed free. She fingered them back into place, over her ear, and he noticed her hands, her woman’s hands holding the large book of philosophy.
They were running out of things to say. Luke asked if she would like to meet up sometime if . . . His voice trailed off, he looked to the floor, at the sun-catching grit, making it as easy as possible for her to say ‘Well, that’s difficult.’ He was still gripping the fence, separated from her like a prisoner or an animal. When he looked up again he saw her pausing, weighing things up, knowing the hurt a man has the power to inflict on you. But that pause was already giving way to a smile of assent.
She smiled at him and he looked into her eyes which, at that moment, held all the promise of happiness the world can ever offer. He suggested Tuesday which was no good for her.
‘Thursday maybe . . .’
‘Thursday I have dance class.’
‘Oh . . .’
‘I could meet you afterwards.’
‘After your dance class?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is what it means to be a man,’ said Luke, glad he was saying something clever-sounding. ‘To be a man is to meet women after classes. After dance classes, after Spanish classes, after acrobatics. Women go to classes, men meet them after their classes. After your dance class would be perfect. What time?’
‘At nine?’
‘Yes. Where shall I meet you?’
‘My class is at the Centre de Danse, in the Marais. Do you know it?’
‘Yes,’ said Luke (he didn’t). ‘Shall I meet you there?’
‘OK.’
In the road a delivery truck was holding up traffic. Cars began honking.
‘I should be going,’ she said.
‘They’re not honking at you,’ Luke said.
She smiled, turned to leave. Luke started walking back towards us. Daniel floated up the ball for him to volley, with all the force of his happiness, into the top corner of the segment of fence we called a goal.
‘And the crowd go wild,’ shouted Luke.
The Centre de Danse was in a cobbled courtyard off rue du Temple. Luke arrived at nine o’clock exactly. The building was old, soot-blackened, subsiding so badly that it looked rubbery. Such was the efficacy of dance, it seemed, that even glass and concrete were susceptible to rhythm, supple. Bicycles were lined two deep against the walls. Classes were in progress on three sides of the courtyard. Piano and tap-dancing came from one window, jazz-funk from another. The windows on one side of the courtyard held warped reflections of those on the other. Through these reflections Luke could see the lunge and surge of leotards and limbs inside rooms with huge ceilings and mirrored walls. Men and women, Luke’s age and younger, came out carrying bags over their shoulders, all looking pleased. Nicole came out at five past nine. Oh, and she was gorgeous, in a green linen dress and tennis shoes. She carried a green and yellow bag over her shoulder. It would have been impossible to dress more simply, or to have looked more beautiful. Her hair was wet, she smiled. She wore no make-up. Luke held out his hand.