Paris Trance (21 page)

It was totally dark outside. They were still high from the coke but now they were stoned as well which was much nicer. Nicole said,

‘I think it’s time Luke, don’t you?’

‘Time for what?’ said Alex.

‘For us to give you your present,’ said Luke. ‘You thought we’d forgotten didn’t you?’

‘Not for a second!’

Luke went out and came back with a bulky, badly wrapped something. Sahra tore off the paper and found a reel-to-reel tape recorder – secondhand, obviously – with only one large spool instead of two small ones. Attached to the rim of this spool was a little red light bulb and, nearer the centre, a yellow one.

‘So, what do you think?’ said Luke.

‘Well it’s great,’ said Alex. ‘But, with respect, what the fuck is it?’

‘It’s something Nicole made. One of her Put-Togethers. Watch – and prepare to be overwhelmed with gratitude.’ He turned off the main light. Nicole switched on the tape recorder. It whirred into life and soon all that could be seen in the darkness were two circles of quivering neon: a red and yellow catherine wheel.

In their bedroom that night Nicole and Luke took a series of pornographic Polaroids. They made love with the images of their passion coming to life on the bed around them: Luke’s prick, veined, swollen, in Nicole’s mouth; Luke with his face between Nicole’s legs, his nose jutting over her pubic hair; the brilliant white of the vibrator – overexposed by the flash – disappearing into a flesh-coloured smear.

After they had made love they lay in each other’s arms while, propped on the bedside table, the pictures went on developing, the colours darkening, the angles becoming more sharply defined, as if they were breathing, living.

The snow that had fallen tentatively that afternoon fell heavily in the night. The friends slept especially deeply because of the silence laid over everything by the snow. Luke dreamed of being asleep, which seemed to prove that he had slept as deeply as it was ever possible to. When he woke in the morning he was aware, first, of the silence. Not the simple absence of noise but a crisp, ringing silence. He looked at the Polaroids which, in daylight, seemed stunningly obscene. Outside, the trees were thick with snow that was still drifting past the window.

In the living room the fire had burned down almost to nothing. He raked the embers and piled on some kindling. When that began blazing he added a few small logs. He could hear the others moving around upstairs. Still groggy with sleep, Alex opened the bathroom door and saw Nicole, naked, one foot on the edge of the bath, rubbing moisturiser into her leg.

‘Whoops!’ he said, closing the door quickly. ‘Sorry!’

As soon as Alex came down Luke hustled him outside. They threw a couple of snowballs at each other and then called up to Sahra.

‘Look at the snow!’ called Luke. He was standing in front of Alex, shielding him. ‘Open the window.’ As soon as she did, Alex let fly with a snowball that fizzed past her head and disappeared behind her.

A few minutes later the door opened slightly. A snowball exploded against it immediately.

‘We’re not coming out unless you promise not to throw anything at us,’ Sahra called. There was no answer. Again there was only the silence of the snow. ‘Quick!’ said Sahra to Nicole. They dashed out of the door and were caught in a crossfire of snowballs. They cowered and screamed and then, suddenly, alliances changed. While Luke was packing snow-balls to throw at the women Alex tackled him from behind and pinned him to the ground while Sahra and Nicole, screaming, shoved handfuls of snow down his collar and trousers. Then they went inside for breakfast.

In the afternoon, when it had stopped snowing, they set out on another stoned walk. Two days earlier the forest had seemed uniformly dense; now they could see that there were large patches of open ground, swathes of untouched snow.

‘Nothing but coke,’ said Luke, ‘as far as the eye can see.’ They walked for an hour, skirting the edge of the forest, tramping through perfect snow. They had all been so terrified of getting cold that they now found themselves sweating under too many layers of clothes. At times they sank up to their knees in drifts. They all wore sunglasses. Nicole had lent Luke her Mongol hat. Hidden behind his shades, Alex remembered her as he had seen her that morning, in the bathroom, his chest as tight as the snow creaking underfoot. Apart from that there was no sound. Then Nicole thought she heard something. Almost like a scream. They stood still, listened, and a moment later they all heard the noise.

‘I think it was over that way,’ said Sahra, pointing. They walked into the woods, stopped and listened again, hearing the sound more clearly this time. They saw tracks in the snow: the tracks of an animal that no one could identify.

‘Fox.’

‘Deer.’

‘Bear.’

‘Wolf.’

‘Too big for a wolf,’ said Sahra.

‘Big wolf,’ said Luke.

They followed the tracks, obliterating them with their own. A few minutes later they came upon the dying animal: a deer, caught in some kind of trap. The snow was spotted with blood. Hearing them approach, the deer thrashed around in terror, its eyes wild. The friends stopped dead. Nicole buried her head in Luke’s shoulder. Sahra was speaking to the deer, urging it to calm down but by now it was in a paroxysm of pain and terror. More blood began spraying on to the snow. The trap was self-tightening. The wire had already cut through one of its legs. The hoof lay like a wretched slipper on the blood-drenched snow. The other foreleg was almost cut through. The four friends stood where they were, hardly able to look, not knowing what to do. The deer was still thrashing around wildly. They moved back.

It was impossible to get a vet: there was no phone, they did not know if anyone lived nearby and, besides, the car had no snow chains. Alex said he had heard of something similar happening. The deer had been destroyed, he said. The only thing to do was to put the creature out of its misery but they had no idea how to do so.

‘What can we do?’ said Luke. ‘Club it to death with branches?’ Suddenly they were all laughing, shocked into hysteria. Alex suggested they cut the deer’s throat or stab it to death with Nicole’s Swiss Army knife. Their deranged laughter made the deer panic and they fell immediately silent. Blood splashed from its leg again. What seemed terrible was not the creature’s injuries – though they
were
terrible – but its tenacity, the way it was obliged to hang on to life by a thread as thin as the fur and bone that connected its hoof to its leg. Resilience, clinging to life: that was what was awful. It should have given in, should have lain down and died but instead it persisted, wounding itself more grievously with every attempt it made to release itself from the trap its life had become.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Alex, moving forward. At that point, as if sensing that Alex’s attention was focused on ending its life, the deer made a final lunge and its hoof came off. Blood sprayed over the snow. Nicole screamed and averted her eyes. The maimed creature lunged off, its two damaged legs sinking into the snow, leaving ghastly pink holes where it went. It was in agony but fear over-rode pain and it careered off through the trees. And
that
was the most terrible thing of all: to have it demonstrated so plainly that mutilation and pain were not the worst things that could be suffered, that it would endure these in order to evade whatever was represented by the four humans who watched it disappear. They were relieved to have been spared the effort of trying to kill it, horrified by the thought of the deer skidding and lurching through the snow on its ruined legs, dying later of cold and hunger. They turned away, leaving the two hoofs lying in the snow.

They walked back to the house in silence. Their footprints from earlier in the day were like evidence leading to the scene of a crime. They felt implicated in the cruelty they had witnessed. The sunset, too, dyeing the snow a delicate rose-colour, was incriminated, culpable. They saw no other animals on the way home, no birds even.

That night the four friends were quiet with each other. The deer’s agony – ‘all that shit with the deer,’ as Luke and Alex would later term it – had tainted their stay. They ate the leftovers of lunch (itself the leftovers of the previous day’s meal). Alex opened a bottle of wine but no one felt like drinking. Nicole washed up in the kitchen and stayed there when she had finished. Alex, Luke and Sahra were in the living room, sitting, not reading, not speaking. They heard Nicole moving around, putting away plates, heard her turn off the light in the kitchen. They expected her to come into the living room but there was absolute silence, as if she were standing very still. Then, after more than a minute, she walked in, quietly.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Quickly but quietly.’ They followed her out into the dark kitchen. Nicole opened the door and stepped outside. The others followed. It was very cold. The sky ached with stars. The snow was lit by the light of the porch – and standing there was a deer, smaller than the one they had seen earlier in the day. It was standing quite still, on four perfect feet, its skin a light fawn colour. Its eyes were shining with the light from the porch.

‘I was sitting in the kitchen, eating an orange,’ whispered Nicole. ‘And I looked up and it was standing there, looking in.’

Sahra reached for Alex’s hand. Luke put his arm around Nicole’s shoulders. The deer stood in the snow, breathing, twitching.

Then, unhurriedly, it turned and swayed off, picking its way through the snow, disappearing into the trees.

I want to tell now, as quickly as possible, a little of what happened later, much later. It should come after everything else, but I find that I don’t want things to end like that, as they did. Perhaps that is what led me to tell this story that is not a story: the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently.

The four of us remained extremely close for another year but we did not go away together again as we did that Christmas or the following summer (I will come to that later). Sahra and I began to see less of Luke and Nicole. There had been a time when all four of us had wanted the same things, had wanted to do the same things. We rarely noticed who proposed something and who went along with it. Then an element of give and take entered into our dealings; we became conscious of saying ‘no’ to each other. Sahra and I, for example, stopped taking E – we felt it was fucking up our heads but the more we took the less easy it became to tell how – which meant that there was a peak of intimacy, of rapture, the four of us could never reach together again. Saying no to E – or anything else for that matter – was like saying no to Luke. Especially as what had seemed so vital and affirming about him (‘yes, always yes’) became, exactly as Sahra, half-jokingly, had claimed, simply greedy (‘more, always more’). He fell for the easy part of the Rimbaud myth, the prolonged and systematic derangement of the senses, but – like many before him – he had none of the discipline or drive of the genuine artist and ended up with nothing to show for it, except what he’d done to himself.

By then I was seeing very little of him. He was too out of it too often. We’d begun to want different things. It was inevitable, I suppose: we had wanted the same thing for too long. There had been a couple of quarrels between us, nothing serious, ostensibly repaired – ‘Forget it,’ he’d said, quoting Nicole, ‘life is too long’ – but by then it didn’t really make much difference either way. We were growing apart. Whenever we were together we were aware of how many things we no longer shared. Instead of great nights out we settled for those non-evenings that pass without incident because they were better than evenings that ended in argument, animosity or embarrassment. Sahra saw Nicole more often than I saw Luke but, according to Sahra, their meetings began to have the feel of diplomatic initiatives. She was worried about Nicole and had begun, almost, to despise Luke for her sake.

Not that he would have cared. He had changed, hardened. His idea of happiness became petrified. He was grabbing happiness, snatching at it. The feelings of euphoria and empathy which had marked our relationship from the beginning – and which had then been chemically intensified – had begun to turn into their opposites. Luke’s happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it. He was still aching after a possible future, some yet-to-be-achieved ideal, some crowning moment of happiness; then he realized – and this, I think, is what was so hard for him – that, far from being an intimation of the future, such a moment, a moment that had lasted for more than a year, was actually a part of his past, was already a memory.

He left Paris. He wrote from time to time, usually a postcard: a few lines, just about legible. We heard from him when he was living in America, and, later, in Mexico. Eventually he ended up back in London, which is where he was living the one time we met after he left Paris.

I was in England for the funeral of a relative. I had an address for him but did not want to turn up without calling. Directory Enquiries had no record of a Luke Barnes at the address I gave them. Feeling sure that it was pointless, that he would no longer be living there, I decided to go to the address anyway. I took a cab but asked the driver to stop a few streets away, by an Allied Carpets warehouse. I walked past a row of shops: a newsagent, a takeaway kebab place, an off-licence, the Taj Mahal Curry House, a small supermarket, a betting shop, a minicab office that had the look of a place under siege. The sky was full of dead light.

The address I had was for a block of flats. I pressed 5 on the entryphone and recognized the voice as soon as he answered. Just one suspicious word: ‘Yeah?’

‘Luke, it’s Alex. Alex Warren.’ I could hear the clunk of the phone being moved and that weird electronic hum that makes it seem as if an intercom has some kind of intermittent existence of its own. The pause went on long enough for me to try another question: ‘How are you?’

‘I’m OK. It’s a surprise.’

‘For me too actually. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was in London. If I’d had a number I’d have called.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing. I just thought I’d see if I could see you.’