Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

‘How is it?’

‘Quite good.’

‘Not crisp enough?’

‘Too crisp. I like soft apples. The sort they give to pigs.’

‘No one likes apples like that.’

‘That’s why they give them to the pigs. But I love them.’

After they had finished chewing Alex went to the bathroom. When I get out I must kiss her, he said to himself over and over. When he got out, she had gone. Then he looked over at the bed. She was under the duvet, making exaggerated snoring noises. He looked over at the chair to see if she had taken her clothes off. He saw her trousers and top, he wasn’t sure about her underwear.

‘Nice clean sheets,’ she said. The sheets were pulled up to her neck. Only her head was visible.

‘If we’re being absolutely frank I changed them specially.’ He wasn’t sure what to do.

‘You can get in too, if you like. It’s your bed, after all.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Except that would involve me taking off my clothes, in broad daylight. Crucially, I wouldn’t know whether to take my underpants off. Are you wearing your underwear?’ It would be inappropriate, he felt, to lift her clothes off the chair to check.

‘No.’

‘Basically, not to beat about the hedge, you’re naked.’ Disseminated by Luke, Nicole’s almost correct English expressions were becoming standard.

‘Yes,’ said Sahra.

‘I see. So that would involve me taking off all my clothes in broad daylight.’

‘Yes. And I’ll watch. To see how you cope. Like this I don’t feel so nervous. In fact I don’t feel nervous at all now. How about you?’

‘Oh I’m pretty nervous, yes. So I think first I’ll draw the blinds.’ He walked over to each window in turn, lowered the blinds and tilted them so that the walls and floor were lined with gold stripes: the kind of lighting effect seen in commercials. The large window was still open, the blinds clinked in the breeze. The atmosphere in the room thickened, as if the sky had suddenly become dense with rainclouds. Sahra watched Alex take off his T-shirt and toss it on to the chair where her clothes were piled. He removed his socks.

‘Well remembered,’ said Sahra. ‘No pot belly either.’ Alex unbuttoned his jeans, climbed out of them, wobbled slightly. Without taking his boxers off he walked over to the bed and climbed in beside Sahra. She put her arms round him. ‘And no hairy back,’ she said. ‘A perfect specimen in fact.’

‘Weren’t there some other things as well?’

‘I forget.’ They lay beside each other without speaking. It was the kind of silence in which they could both feel just content enough not to speak. They kissed.

‘It will take me a while to get used to you, Alex.’ Her eyes were open, watching him.

‘And me you,’ he said.

On Tuesday we had a semi-official (i.e. floodlit) football match on a full-size pitch near Belleville. The regular players from the warehouse joined forces with some friends of Matthias’s to take on a team from the local art school. The game ended six — five (the defenders of both sides really wanted to be attackers) and afterwards a group of us went and drank at a bar in Belleville. We stayed till midnight and then walked towards the Bastille. There were five of us, slightly drunk, exhilarated rather than drunk. As we turned into passage Beslay we saw a man up ahead, walking towards us. We thought nothing of it. Then Ahmed hissed: ‘C’est lui.’

‘C’est qui?’

‘Le type qui m’a attaqué.’ We looked down the narrow passage. He had seen us, but continued towards us.

‘What shall we do?’ said Luke. The guy was drawing closer. When he was within a few paces of us we stopped walking and he stopped too.

‘Tu me cherches ou quoi?’ It took us by surprise, his speaking first, and it alerted us to the fact that, yes, perhaps we were looking for him, for trouble.

‘Tu me reconnais?’ Ahmed said

‘On aurait déjà été présenté?’ he sneered. He was drunk, heavily built, with small scars on his forehead and chin. Tough people always look like that, like they’ve spent their lives getting beaten up.

‘Disons que tu t’es fait connaître,’ Ahmed said, pointing to his nose which was still swollen. There was a small purple mark beneath his left eye.

The guy spat. ‘Pas moi.’ He was smiling, indifferent, not frightened.

‘Si. Toi.’ We were standing close to him, close enough to smell the booze on his breath over and above the beer that was on ours. Tacitly incriminating, the letters FN were scrawled on the wall behind him. He looked round and realized that he was cornered. It wasn’t that we had him cornered — we wouldn’t have known how to do such a thing — but it happened that he was cornered. He looked at us, tried to gauge our intentions, noticed that we had none. We were all hoping that the matter would be taken out of our hands, decided for us. If we thought we sensed his nervousness, fear even, that was just a magnified reflection of our own. My heart was beating harder. He smiled again, becoming more certain that, although there were five of us, we were incapable of a descent into violence. We didn’t know how to go about it. It was all down to him. We were four or five feet away and I was starting to tremble, a kind of vertigo, an awareness of being close to the edge of something. Even so, maybe nothing would have happened — I think we all realized that none of us, in spite of the loathing we felt for him, was capable of making the first move, not even Ahmed — if he had not forced it to happen. He saw us faltering and decided this was the moment to make a break for it. If he had waited for us to get closer, until we were a foot or so from him, perhaps nothing would have happened. Probably we would have ended up talking to him. But he couldn’t wait that long, his experience of fighting told him that once a group closes in on you like that you’re finished. And so he charged at us, fists flailing, trying to burst through the loose cordon we had formed.

It almost worked. Fear is the instinctive response to aggression and abruptly all our encroaching menace had been flung back at us. We flinched. Even as we tried to block his escape so, simultaneously, we were trying also to move aside. He ran at us and hit Luke in the side of the face, elbowed Matthias. He kept his knees high and dangerous like a rugby player making a lunge for the line. Daniel was directly in front of him and the guy swiped a fist at him. Daniel swayed back to avoid the blow, leaving a path clear for him. Suddenly there was no one to stop him getting away and the sense of how pathetically easy it had been made him pause, turn slightly and aim a punch at Ahmed, to show us how feeble our shuffling threat was in the face of someone who understood the reality of pain and violence. He could not only get away, he could dish out some hurt in the process. Luke grabbed his fist as he was preparing to smash it into Ahmed’s face and at that same moment Daniel dived into his back, almost knocking him over. Then we were all scrambling over each other. He was lashing out wildly, without thought, trying to remain on his feet, oblivious to the blows that caught his face and shoulders. He had his hand around Luke’s throat. Matthias hit him hard on the ear and he swung around, scattering us all. His legs and arms were flying everywhere. He was not aiming at anyone now, but was trying to create a centrifugal force of violence so great that no one could approach him. Again he almost succeeded. We had all fallen back when Daniel kicked him in the small of the back. He pitched forward, stumbled, was about to regain his balance. Then Ahmed brought his fist down on the back of his neck. He was still on his feet but suddenly we were swarming all over him, sometimes catching each other with an elbow in our eagerness to get at him. Fists and feet were flying everywhere, we were oblivious to the pain of punches. For a few seconds everything was in the balance and then, for the first time, he was on the defensive, using his arms increasingly to protect himself, allowing us to move closer to him. Able to get to him with next to no risk we all piled in. I was hit twice by glancing blows from Matthias or Luke. Less from any particular blow than the chaos of our attack, he began to go over, arms curled around his head as we flung our feet at him.