‘Were you close to him?’
‘Not really. I hardly saw him after he left. He was nice when I was young but, well, he made my mother incredibly unhappy. She met someone else but I think she never really recovered from my father’s leaving like that. He ended up very twisted, bitter. An alcoholic. He was a disappointed man.’
‘Disappointed by what?’
‘By everything, I think, but himself mainly. I have a friend here, Alex. You’ll meet him. His parents are still alive but they’re old. He doesn’t see them much and he’s worried about their dying. He asked me if I wished I’d told my dad I loved him before he died.’
‘Did you?’
‘No. But I wished I’d told him I hated him.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘I know, I really missed my chance.’ She hit him on the arm, not sure if he was joking. Luke had already polished off his second plate of food; Nicole had not yet finished her first.
‘You know that picture,’ she said, ‘of me in Belgrade?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have a picture of me before we met. I’d like one of you.’
‘I don’t know if I have one.’
‘You must have.’
‘Actually, maybe I do. Does it matter when it was taken?’
‘No. As long as it’s you.’
He took the plates away and began trawling through the box file in which he kept his papers.
‘Here you are.’ He handed her the photograph. It showed a little boy wearing a cowboy hat, standing in front of a car, pointing a toy gun at the camera.
‘Is it really you?’
‘Of course.’ The picture was of Luke but it was no different from any number of pictures of little boys. There are hundreds, thousands, of pictures like this and they are all the same. From a selection of such photos there is no telling which little boy might become a famous footballer or painter, which ones will grow up to have families and take pictures like this of their own children. Then someone tells you that this photo is of a boy who died, aged twenty, in a car crash, or killed himself before he was thirty, or became a down-and-out, or a painter or a well-known footballer. And nothing changes. It remains indistinguishable from the hundreds of other pictures of little boys in shorts, hair cut straight across their foreheads, pointing toy guns at cameras.
While Nicole looked at the photo Luke lay on the bed again, his head in her lap. She stroked his head. He turned over so that he was looking up at her face. A police car wailed past. Music began in the apartment next door: five minutes of Techno, intense, pounding, then it stopped and the door slammed and there was silence. It was Friday night, the neighbours were going out.
‘What would you like to do?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Do you want to go out?’
‘I don’t mind.’
She held up his head slightly and tilted wine into his mouth, as if it were water from a canteen and he was an actor who had been shot. He moved around on to his side, facing away from her and again he caught the smell of sex which he wanted to smell more closely, more deeply. He raised his head from her lap and crawled back under her knees, his face towards her cunt.
‘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.’
