Everyone had finished eating. Luke took the plates away and Nicole brought in a bowl of fruit. Sahra undid a banana, badly bruised, ‘just as I like it’. She has perverse taste in fruit, thought Alex. Miles asked Nicole if there might be ‘another drop of wine hidden away somewhere’. There were still two open bottles on the table but he was getting worried. Nicole was reassuring him — there was an assortment of bottles, she said, in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet — as Luke reappeared with seven lines of powder spread neatly on a CD case.
‘Dessert!’ he beamed. We didn’t earn much at the warehouse. Cocaine was an expensive luxury, the kind of thing you kept hidden away if there were lots of people around, but Luke was not like that. Either generosity was not something he had needed to learn or it was something he had learned before I met him, before he came to Paris.
Nicole didn’t want her line which was shared by Alex and Luke (‘yes, always yes’) even though coke sometimes made him jittery. Everyone started gabbling at once. Nicole turned up the music. She and Sally began dancing. Ahmed was flicking through records and when he found one he liked he got up and danced too. Sally had smoked a lot of dope in the course of the evening and had laughed often. She had said very little but she was a terrific dancer. With the music turned up loud it was necessary to shout. Luke began dancing in his seat while talking and then got up to join the others, leaving Alex and Sahra and Miles talking at the table. The music became louder. Alex and Sahra joined in the dancing and Luke turned it up again and then announced — or suggested — a change of plan. Instead of staying in and dancing and annoying the neighbours, why didn’t they go to The Select? Five minutes later he was locking up the apartment while everyone else trooped downstairs.
They walked through the crowds of young people from the suburbs who had come to the quartier for Friday night and were hysterical, drunk. Even the roads were full of people strolling. At one point Luke and Nicole found themselves on opposite sides of the road. A young guy who was walking in the middle of the street looked at Nicole. His eyes lingered on her and then he looked over at the opposite pavement, at Luke — who was yacking away to Miles — and knew, instantly, that they were together. An energy linked them even when they were not standing together or looking at each other.
Miles told Luke he was too old for dancing and slipped off to a bar before they got to the club. The others joined the queue. It was an essential part of the experience, queuing. People were frisked thoroughly. No one was allowed to bring drugs into the club; the only people not expected to were those who had taken them already. You could feel the throb of the bass outside but the music hit you as you went in, as you passed into another world, where the rules of outside ceased to exist. It was packed. The throb felt outside was not simply the bass: it was also the pulse of all the energy confined inside. Everyone began dancing. No one wanted drinks — what a relief not to have to queue for over-priced beer at the bar — and in minutes they were consumed by the music. Luke was a terrible dancer — his arms were too long, he neglected to move his hips; Nicole said he looked like a giraffe having a seizure — but in this environment it was impossible not to dance perfectly. Everyone was a spectator, everyone was a participant. Luke (thought he) was dancing like Nicole who danced wonderfully. Her eyes burned blue in the ultraviolet, her teeth cackled. Luke’s T-shirt was drenched with sweat. They knew some of the tracks, recognized, now and again, the samples that had been used to make these new tracks which were themselves segments of one enormous piece of music, endlessly mixed and remixed, lasting seven or eight hours.
Ahmed and Sally left at about four. Luke, Nicole, Alex and Sahra left later, their ears buzzing with noise. The city was at the quietest point in its day. The only people around were the garbage men and a few other strays who had been up all night. A single car circled the Bastille. It was too early and too late to go anywhere else: Lavigne’s was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside Lila’s. Sahra had to go in the opposite direction to the other three. Alex offered to walk her home but she was fine. They waved goodbye. Nicole and Luke said goodbye to Alex at his apartment.
Luke and Nicole showered and lay in bed. ‘It’s so lovely to go to bed and not have sex,’ Luke whispered. ‘Isn’t it?’ Nicole was already asleep. He lay on his back, unable to sleep, drifting. There will come a time, he thought, when I will look back on this night, when I will lie in another bed, when happiness will have come to seem an impossibility, and I will remember this night, remember how happy I was, and will remember how, even when I was in the midst of my happiness, I could feel a time when it would be gone. And I will realize that this knowledge was a crucial part of that happiness. . The same thought went through many remixes as he lay there, drifting, alert, sort of asleep.
They woke late but not late enough to feel rested. It began to rain. Nicole had to work. Luke washed up and meandered to his apartment. He passed a fountain he had not noticed before, struggling to hold its own in the rain. Alex came round in the late afternoon, miserable about Sahra.
‘I can’t work her out,’ he said to Luke.
‘Nor me.’
‘I mean, what does she want?’
‘Who knows?’
They were playing records, taking it in turns to flick through Pariscope, convinced that if they went through it one more time, there would be a film to go to.
‘This is the best city in the world for flms—’
‘Correct.’
‘—and there are still not enough films on.’
‘Also correct.’
‘In fact it’s useless for films.’
‘The truth is we probably spend too much time at the cinema. If we went less there would be more to see,’ said Luke. ‘Pass me Pariscope, could you?’
‘There’s nothing left to see,’ said Alex, handing it over. ‘We’ve reached saturation point.’
‘I can’t believe Strange Days isn’t on. Have you seen it?’
‘No.’
‘Now there’s a film for you, there’s cinema.’
‘I thought it was just a rehash of Blade Runner.’
‘Are you kidding? It’s the ultimate. The last word in cinema.’
‘Right up there with Chariots of Fire, yeah?’
‘That’s what I’m in the mood for this afternoon. Something English.’
‘You’re right, it’s the kind of afternoon that makes you wish you were back in England, watching telly.’
‘What would you watch? Ideally. Apart from Chariots of Fire, I mean.’
‘Good question.’ Alex paused. ‘Colditz, I think.’
‘Any particular episode?’
‘They were all great episodes.’
‘Basically you can’t go wrong with that genre.’
‘Albert R.N.’
‘The Wooden Horse.’
‘The One That Got Away.’
‘Which one’s that?’
‘The one about the German fighter pilot escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in England or Scotland.’
‘I remember asking my dad about that. About why so many English prisoners-of-war tried to escape and only one German. He said it was because they liked it in England. Good food, pleasant scenery.’
‘They’re always idyllic, POW camps.’
‘Especially Colditz, the TV one, I mean.’
‘The place in The Great Escape, that was the real Club Med of POW camps. There was so much to do there: tunnelling, getting rid of the sand, choir practice to cover up the noise of digging. .’