Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

There was only just enough room around the table for seven people. Nicole served the first dish, a green papaya salad. As they were about to eat Luke leaped up and asked if everyone was warm enough, turning up the heater before anyone had a chance to reply.

‘Have you noticed how he loves to regulate temperature?’ said Alex. ‘It’s one of those charming little idiosyncrasies that we hate about him.’

‘It’s true,’ said Nicole. ‘I’ve never noticed before but it’s true. “Would you like a little more ice in that?” “Shall I warm that up a bit?” The first time he came here he spent the entire evening rearranging beers in the fridge. All he said was, “Hmm, they’re not quite cold enough yet.”’

Luke nodded in happy acknowledgement without ceasing to trowel food into his face. Despite being the last to serve himself he was the first to finish. He got up from the table and went back to the cooker. He handed plates of the main course to Nicole who carried them to the table.

‘It looks great Luke,’ said Alex. ‘But what is it?’

‘Something midway between Malaysian Reng Dang and Moroccan Tajine. Stew to a savage like you.’ By the time Luke sat down again the talk was of England, a country everyone had visited.

‘It was freezing when we were there last December,’ said Miles, opening more wine (Miles was always opening more wine). ‘People kept dying trying to rescue their dogs from frozen lakes. The dogs lived. The owners died. The pathos.’

‘I was fourteen when I went,’ said Sally. ‘I remember the names of pubs. The Dog and Duck. The Fox and Hounds. The White Horse. I thought it was a law that all pubs had to be named after animals.’

‘I was fifteen,’ said Sahra. ‘Everywhere seemed to be called something Hampton: Littlehampton, Minchinhampton, Wolverhampton.’

‘I had to visit my aunt in Alton,’ said Nicole. ‘She said it was exactly fifty-five minutes from London. I spoke hardly any English. So I got on my train and I waited and waited and nowhere called Alton came up. Eventually, about two hours later, the train stopped at Southampton—’

‘You see, I was right,’ said Sahra. ‘Another Hampton—’

‘Yes, exactly. So I asked the station manager and he was very kind and said the train had divided and I was on the wrong half of the train. What I had to do was go back to some other station — I forget the name, something else Hampton — and then take the train that went along the other branch. So I waited for a train back to wherever it was, went there and waited for a train to Alton. Before I got on I asked the station manager which train to get on and he was very kind as well and pointed me to a train and I got on. And this train went past exactly the same places as the last one and I ended up in Southampton again and saw the original station manager. “What are you doing here again?” he says. “You’re supposed to be in Alton.” I told him what happened and he said I had to do the same thing again: go back to the station where the train divides and then make absolutely sure I got on the train to Alton. By the time I got there my aunt was distraught. The police were looking for me. The fifty-five-minute journey to Alton had taken seven and a half hours.’

‘That’s England in a nutshell,’ said Alex. ‘Trains dividing, places called Hampton, kindly station managers. Simple journeys taking all day.’

‘When I was twenty-one I spent Christmas with my boyfriend’s family in Hampshire,’ said Sahra. ‘We had lunch. The afternoon seemed to last all day. His mother was very polite. The father hardly said a word. Every now and again she would say to him, “Are you still with us, Trevor?” Then he’d drift off until she asked him again: “Are you still with us, Trevor?”’

‘ That’s England,’ said Luke.

‘Deep England,’ said Alex.

‘The other thing I remember was the television,’ said Nicole. ‘Nothing but snooker.’ This got the biggest laugh of the evening: it was the first time anyone had heard of this game that rhymed with hooker.

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.