‘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. .’