‘How long have you been in Paris?’ asked Luke, seeking clarification.
‘Three years.’
‘Do you think you’ll stay?’
‘I feel at home here.’
‘Me too,’ said Nicole.
‘But I have a great urge to go back to my roots,’ said Sahra. ‘To Libya.’
‘Ah Libya,’ said Luke.
‘El Alamein,’ said Alex.
‘Tobruk.’
‘The Desert Fox.’
‘The Rat Patrol.’ By mutual consent Luke and Alex abandoned this bewildering — to Sahra and Nicole — riff before it had properly got going.
‘Roots are overrated,’ said Luke, backtracking. ‘I couldn’t care less where my roots are. I’ve got no interest in them. So what if my grandfather was illegitimate? So what if he was born in Senegal?’
‘Was he?’
‘Actually he was born in Hertfordshire. But he could have been born on Mars for all I care.’
‘It’s different if you move around a lot when you are growing up,’ said Sahra. ‘You grew up in England, right?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You see, we were always moving. My father would come home and say that he had been posted somewhere new. He’d get out the globe and we’d all sit down and look to see where we were going—’
‘Sounds fantastic.’
‘So I was always leaving my friends behind and starting at a new school in the middle of the term in some place I’d not even heard of. I’d have to stand at the front of the class while the teacher said, “This is Sahra, she is blah blah. .”And all the kids would be looking at me and I’d have to start making friends over and over, and no one could get my name right. Not unlike now, come to think of it. .’
‘Except we’re all new here,’ said Nicole.
‘We’re all new kids in this class, honey,’ said Luke.
‘This is the first time I’ve lived out of England and I feel totally settled here,’ said Alex. ‘So settled, in fact, that I wouldn’t mind trying somewhere else, to see if I could feel even more settled there.’
‘The paradox of nomadism,’ said Sahra. ‘You keep moving because you’re searching for a place to stay. Once you realise you can live in other countries you can never quite settle anywhere again. You can never feel quite content.’
‘Contentment,’ said Luke. ‘A word which should never be spoken, only spat.’
‘“Every day spent in the country you were born is a day wasted,”’ said Nicole. ‘That’s another of his favourites at the moment.’
‘Speaks the man who has lived in Paris, right next door to London, who has spent his time entirely with English-speaking people, for all of three weeks: a man called intrepid. Intrepid with a small i! God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t taken him under my wing,’ said Alex.
‘The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere,’ said Sahra.
‘Perhaps it’s a question of being at home in time as well as space,’ said Nicole.
‘That’s it,’ said Luke. ‘That’s it absolutely. Whatever it means.’
‘What does it mean?’
Nicole shrugged. A clock in one of the churches nearby began to strike.
‘Listen,’ said Luke. ‘That’s what it means: now, now, now!’
‘I love being alive now,’ said Sahra.
‘And me.’
‘Moi aussi,’ said the waiter, bringing their food.
‘The final thing of all,’ said Sahra as the plates were being set down. ‘To be at home in yourself.’ Already shovelling food into his face, Luke grunted.
‘It’s not just his French,’ Alex said to Sahra. ‘His manners also need a bit of fine tuning. But what does that mean, being at home in yourself?’
‘It means it doesn’t matter where you live or what happens to you,’ said Sahra.
Luke looked up — a rare event when he was eating — as if chewing over this idea. ‘When I came here,’ he said, ‘I felt I was inhabiting the fringes of my life because for me the centre had always been England. Now I can feel myself, almost physically, moving towards another centre. One which I chose and made — am making, rather — as opposed to one I was just issued with.’
‘And when you’ve made it you’ll see that it is exactly the same as the one you were issued with,’ said Sahra. Luke resumed his scoffing. After a few minutes Sahra looked at him again and said, ‘Do I remind you of your sister?’ It was a weird question.
‘No. Actually I don’t have a sister. Why?’
‘It’s just that you remind me of my brother,’ said Sahra. ‘He eats like that.’
‘Like a pig?’ said Nicole.
When the pig had finished eating — the others were still in the middle of their meals — he said he wanted to go back to something they had touched on earlier.
‘We saw that film Homicide a few days ago. Have you seen it?’
‘I think so,’ said Alex. ‘Years ago.’
‘Me too,’ said Sahra.
‘OK,’ said Luke. ‘Do you remember the scene at the beginning, when the Feds burst into that apartment?’
‘Not really.’
‘It doesn’t matter. But before they burst into the apartment they unscrew the light bulb in the hall. Now why do they do that? And it’s not just FBI agents. Intruders, assassins always do it too. Why not simply switch it off? Surely the noise of the click is too slight to be heard.’
‘What’s this got to do with anything we touched on earlier?’
‘It’s to stop someone — a neighbour — accidentally turning the light on again at another switch,’ said Sahra, ignoring Alex’s question.
‘Is it really as simple as that? I was hoping there was no practical reason for it. That it existed in the realm of pure convention. I love the way they always have a handkerchief for exactly that purpose.’
‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘The link is handkerchiefs.’
‘If they didn’t have a handkerchief they would use a sleeve,’ said Nicole.
‘Yes but they always do have a handkerchief. That’s unusual don’t you think? Like we were saying earlier: how many people do you know who carry a handkerchief now?’
‘Weird isn’t it?’ said Sahra. ‘The way the same questions keep coming up.’
‘A handkerchief seems like a leftover from another era of hygiene. Basically if someone has a handkerchief in a film they’re either with the FBI or they’re about to assassinate somebody.’
‘To whack somebody. The word is whack,’ said Alex.
‘You’re right, the word is whack,’ said Luke. ‘But have you noticed the way the bulb is always a screw rather than a bayonet fitting? That’s a factor. If it was a bayonet fitting they’d have to use two hands — thereby raising the problem of what to do with their gun. They couldn’t put it back in the holster at a moment like that. And they can’t have it dangling from their trigger finger. It would look ludicrous and, besides, it might knock against the lampshade — even though there isn’t a lampshade, of course. Essentially this is a bare-bulb scenario. And I’ll tell you another thing that bothers me: what do they do with the bulb when they’ve taken it out? Presumably they put it in a pocket but it’s still hot, of course. It could burn a hole. These little details, they’re the only things in the cinema that interest me now. Tropes, I suppose you’d call them.’
‘Ah, he does love his tropes,’ said Alex.
They paid the bill and went to a café across the road. Nicole and Luke squandered twenty francs on an apocalyptic pinball machine. It was like flipping balls into the jaws of a shrieking, flashing hell. Sahra and Alex stood at the counter, helping themselves to sugar from a silver bowl with a long silver spoon.