‘Open your legs,’ he said, and then lay there, breathing in her smell. He breathed on her, hard enough for her to feel, enough to make her push herself towards him. He wriggled back so that she could move away from the wall, could lie with her knees steepled over him. He pushed his tongue into her. While he licked her he also pushed two fingers inside her. She was on the brink of coming for a long while and by the time she did his left arm was almost numb. He rolled on to his back. She moved around, touched his prick which was not quite hard. She masturbated him and then, as he was about to come, moved her face over him so that his semen sprang into her mouth.
She took off her blouse, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and they snuggled under the quilt, already almost asleep.
‘It’s no good,’ he said, getting up. ‘I can’t go to sleep if I haven’t brushed my teeth.’
If I were to make a film of this story I know exactly the image I would begin with. An aerial shot, from the height of the middle branches of one of the trees in the park bordering a path on which are painted the words interdit aux velos. Then, from above, we would hear the ringing of a bicycle bell and see pedestrians scattering out of the way of two cyclists speeding over those words: Luke and Nicole.
They had woken at ten, sun streaming through the window. Nicole got out of bed and looked down into the street. Luke wondered if anyone could see her there, naked, saying:
‘Do you have a bike?’
‘Sort of. The guy I’m renting this apartment from left me his. I haven’t used it. Why?’
‘We could go for a ride.’
‘We could ride the 29.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A bus. My favourite bus. But no, we can do that another day. I’d love to go for a bike ride.’ Nicole turned on the radio. A DJ was babbling about the great day that was in prospect. This is what you are meant to do in the mornings, thought Luke. You turn on the radio and receive encouragement. You wake up, turn on the radio and get out of bed. What could be simpler? Why had he never done that? Nicole found Radio Nova and began dancing: exaggerated disco dancing. Her small breasts hardly moved as she danced. You turn on the radio and watch your woman, naked, dancing her way to the bathroom. Then you get up and go for a cycle ride. .
Except the photographer’s bike turned out to be in very poor repair. It was hanging on a rack in the damp courtyard, the tyres were flat, the seat was too low, the back brake rubbed. .
‘Shit!’ Luke kicked the front wheel in disgust and disappointment. ‘No wonder he left it with me. It’s completely fucked.’
‘We can fix it.’
‘It’ll take all day. And I hate getting my hands all oily.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Nicole. ‘It takes twenty minutes.’
‘I don’t have any fucking tools.’
‘You swear too much,’ said Nicole. ‘I have tools. In my bag.’ She even had a puncture repair kit. Luke went back up to the apartment to get a bowl of water to test the inner tube for punctures. While he was there he rolled a joint. When he came down again, the bike was upside down and Nicole was taking the front wheel off.
‘What’s that in your hand?’ he said.
‘A spanner.’
‘Ah, I thought as much. Very evening class. And what are you doing with this so-called spanner? Loosening something I’ll be bound.’
‘Yes. It’s almost ready.’ Luke crouched down and watched. Nicole fixed the puncture and eased the inner tube back on to the wheel and into the tyre. Then she fitted the wheel back between the forks. She stood up and swept the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of oil on her forehead. She flipped the bike over and made some further adjustments.
‘You like fixing things,’ said Luke banally.
‘Things break.’
‘Whereupon one throws them away.’ She did not look up. ‘Bicycle maintenance,’ Luke went on. ‘It’s never been a strong point of mine.’
‘What are your strong points?’
‘That’s the thing. I don’t actually have any.’
‘The lasagna was nice.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you kiss nicely.’
‘Don’t tell me, tell your friends,’ said Luke. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Tightening something.’
‘Tightening and loosening,’ said Luke. ‘Such is the dismal life of the spanner.’
‘Sit on the saddle,’ said Nicole. ‘To check the height.’
Luke straddled the bike. ‘That’s perfect.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see, it was easy,’ said Nicole, clearing the tools away. ‘How long did it take?’
‘About two hours. And the saddle is way too high. I can hardly touch the floor.’
‘No!’
‘Joke. And the repairs only took half an hour. But your hands are covered in oil.’
She washed them in a puddle.
Her bike was a red racer, tuned to perfection, stripped to sleek essentials: thin tyres, strapless toe clips, no mud guards, rack or saddle bag. It hummed. Luke’s rattled, clanked and rubbed. Nicole said she would fix it properly next week. After they had been cycling for twenty minutes they came to the botanical gardens and sat there for a while.
‘Would you like to get stoned?’ said Luke.
‘Stoned?’
‘Smoke dope. Get high,’ he said, holding up the joint he had made.
‘OK.’
They set off again, cycling aimlessly. Nicole had taken off her suede jacket and tied it round her waist. Everywhere they went they saw green-overalled Africans cleaning up litter and dog shit. Parisians have always been terrible litterers — why bother throwing cans in a bin, or training your dog to crap in a gutter when there are all these silent Africans to tidy up after you? — but now they had an excuse: most of the litter bins in the city had been sealed in the wake of fundamentalist bomb attacks. A poster for Le Pen was overshadowed by an advertisement for the United Colours of Benetton. They were partners of a kind, it didn’t matter what either of them said or stood for: all that counted was that the names — Le Pen, Benetton — stuck in people’s minds. They spoke the same language, a language in which there were no verbs, only nouns: names and brand-names. Both were dwarfed by the billboard which displayed the global apotheosis of this tendency: ‘Coke is Coke’.
Construction work was in progress everywhere. Great swathes of the city were being demolished and redeveloped but wherever they went they saw cafés they intended, one day, to return to. Roller-bladers, solitary or in packs, roamed swiftly through the dream-time of the city. Stoned, Luke found himself looking forward to a time when not having learned to roller-blade would be one of the major regrets of his life. They followed buses, cut through parks, crossed over railway lines, annoyed drivers, skirted traffic jams and orbited churches whose names they made no attempt to establish. After two hours they were hopelessly lost.
‘Let’s go in here then,’ said Nicole, pointing at a shop specialising in maps and atlases.
‘How convenient. Like having an accident outside the hospital or getting robbed outside the police station.’
Inside, variously projected maps of the world were arranged in large V-shaped racks. They turned the polythene-protected posters as if they were choosing a picture of Che or Hendrix in an Athena shop at the dawn of the poster era. The selection was vast: maps showing population density, per capita incomes, political boundaries, mineral deposits, annual rainfall and physical features. In the standard Mercator projection the world looked swollen and robust, bursting with prosperity and confidence. Great Britain was slap bang in the middle of things, about half the size of India. In a newer, alternative projection the world looked sad and thin, dripping towards Antarctica. Little Britain on this projection was barely visible, a streak that looked hardly worth invading.