Years later Nicole told me that one of the things that had surprised her about Luke was how tender he was. But that night, in passage Beslay, I glimpsed a capacity for cruelty, for inflicting pain, that he would later turn on himself.
Matthias said we should go back and give him another helping. Everyone laughed but, beneath our exhilaration, there was some small element of shame which made itself felt more and more powerfully as the violence drained from us and left us weak. We parted, each of us a little scared of what had happened and what might happen, frightened that we had been initiated into a spiral of violence and reprisal, a vendetta from which we might be unable to extricate ourselves.
It was not a big thing morally and, looking back now, of all the things that happened to Luke and the rest of us, it would be among the very last that I would trade back if I had to start pawning the events in my life. A whole dimension of human existence opened up and became plain in those few moments. It changed us in some way; violence lost its mystery. There was a huge gulf separating the world of fighters and non-fighters and we had crossed it. We were different now. We could see the attraction of being violent men in a gang, could see the pleasure of violence and the self-respect and satisfaction it gave you — but at the same time this was tempered by a sense of how foolish and pathetic this was. It was for this reason as much as any fear of getting caught that we all agreed to tell no one else — not Nicole, not Sahra, no one — about what had happened.
I asked Luke about this incident when I saw him in London, many years later.
‘You remember when we beat that guy up that night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever tell Nicole about it?’
‘No.’
‘How come?’
‘How come what?’
‘How come you didn’t tell her?’
‘Well, we agreed didn’t we?’
‘But you know how it is. You make all sorts of promises not to tell your woman this or that — and nine times out of ten you tell her.’
‘Well. I didn’t tell her.’ He was sitting very still. Then, for the first time since we had been sitting there, I saw the life return to his eyes.
‘It was great wasn’t it?’ he said, smiling.
In the days following the fight Alex was often on the brink of telling Sahra about what had happened but always, at the last moment, he restrained himself. It was difficult to keep things from her. Partly because she was so open herself, but mainly because, for the first time in his life, Alex found that he had formed a close friendship with the woman he was going out with. In the past the women he had been involved with had never been his friends: almost, sometimes, never quite. He had liked his girlfriends, loved them, but eventually their romantic involvement had always curtailed or overridden the relationship’s potential for friendship. This simple, apparently common experience of being friends with his girlfriend was entirely new to him, so new that, for a time, he was not even aware of it, or at least was aware of it only in terms of unexpected compatibilities, a system of reckoning which actually plays no part in friendship.
She was the only woman he had ever met who, exactly like him, preferred to leave restaurants as soon as she had finished eating. They asked for the bill while they were still chewing and, ideally, left while still swallowing. In terms of the cinema they shared the same middle of the road — more accurately middle of the auditorium — taste. Going to the cinema with Luke was always something of a strain — a neck strain — for Alex because Luke insisted on sitting at the front with the screen looming over them. Alex liked to sit slap bang in the middle of the middle; Sahra was neurotically obsessed with doing so. Invariably these perfect seats were already occupied and they often had to sample four or five pairs of seats before selecting the ones — usually those they had originally opted for — that offered an acceptably compromised combination of centrality, unobstructed visibility and leg room. They also discovered that they were great cinema-leavers. Ten minutes, half an hour or an hour into a film, Sahra would gesture with her thumb towards the exit and they would be up and out. On one occasion they were within minutes of the end of a film when Alex turned towards her, moved one arm over the other and, without any hesitation, they gathered their things together and stumbled out of the darkness. There was never any disagreement: they always wanted to leave at the same time.
It wasn’t simply a question of compatibility. Even their divergences and disagreements were a source of harmony. On the subject of Luke, for example. Sahra thought he was funny, clever, good company. . What she found hard to take was Alex’s ‘need to idolise him, to make him into something more than he is’.
They were lying in bed, tipsy, after a dinner at Nicole’s.
‘I don’t idolize him.’
‘You do. It’s not enough for you to be friends with him. You have to look up to him. And to do that you have to make him into something he’s not. Which means, weirdly, that you’re not doing justice to him.’
‘I don’t idolise him but I do see him as—’
‘What about what you don’t see him as?’
‘What don’t I see him as?’
‘Look, I love them to death too, both of them. Luke is terrific. But I can also see that he’s a complete waster. You don’t notice it because he’s so thin but in many ways he’s just greedy. A consumer. He doesn’t really have emotions. Just appetites. At the moment he’s happy as a sandboy because there’s so much still to gobble down. But what’s he going to be like when he’s tried it all, when there’s nothing left to gobble, or when he gets fed up gobbling?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘He’ll be exactly like my brother.’
‘And what’s your brother like?’
‘Dead.’
‘No!’
‘No, that was a lie. He’s a fat, idle pig,’ said Sahra. ‘Honestly, he’s like a greedy only child—’
‘Your brother’s an only child? Now we’re really getting to the crux of the matter.’
Sahra laughed. ‘I mean Luke. But they’re both oblivious to everything outside their own desires. It’s like he hasn’t been weaned. The world is just a breast to be sucked.’
‘How can you say that when he’s just cooked yet another incredible meal for us?’
‘Easily. The fact that he’s very generous doesn’t stop him being totally selfish.’ Alex kissed her. Whatever he thought of his friend it was always pleasing to hear him denounced like this. He was less keen on what came next.
‘Or maybe what’s going on is that you project your own desires on to him, that you like imagining you’re him.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Maybe it’s not Luke at all,’ said Sahra, slowly. ‘Maybe it’s Nicole. You worship Luke because you want to fuck Nicole.’
‘Very clever,’ said Alex, quickly. ‘I think it all comes down to you and this only-child brother of yours. How old were you, by the way, when you first sucked his pig-dick?’ Sahra punched him on the shoulder. ‘And while we’re on the subject of selfishness,’ Alex went on, ‘you are the most selfish sleeper I’ve ever shared a bed with.’
It was true. During her waking hours Sahra was considerate, thoughtful; asleep she sprawled, hogging the duvet and mattress as if he were not there. At first, forced into the chilly fringes of the bed, he lay awake, fascinated by the sea-change that came over her. Then it became a source of irritation. He started shoving her back into her half of the bed, tugging the duvet over his way, dragging her — as he hoped he would — out of the depths of her sleep.
‘You’re always waking me up,’ she whined.
‘You’re always taking the duvet,’ he whined back.