by Geoff Dyer
‘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.
‘Where would we be without maps?’ Nicole asked rhetorically.
One rack held only antique reproductions, olde maps drawn in different versions of the same buried treasure aesthetic, zephyrs blowing galleons across the whale-crowded sea towards jagged coastlines of indeterminate exactness. Another held maps of the oceans, great stretches of contoured blueness; in another were maps of space: the Moon, Mars, the stars.
There was also a selection of globes which were immune to the vagaries and distortions of projection. Some were actually lights, contained their own suns, glowed from within. The Moon was uniformly grey, nothing like as nice as the Earth which was greenish and deep blue. Still, it was the Moon and, as such, they felt drawn to it.
‘The Sea of Tranquillity,’ read Luke.
‘Easter Sea.’
‘Ocean of Storms.’
‘Bay of Dew.’
‘Sea of Crises.’
‘Sea of Nectar. It makes you wish there were places on Earth with names like that,’ said Nicole, but there was no disguising the fact that, names aside, the Moon was a pretty crummy place. ‘Look,’ she said. High up on one wall was a satellite photo of the Earth seen from space. Flattened out to show the entire planet, it looked exactly like a map of the world.
‘That’s the only thing the Moon’s got going for it, really,’ said Luke. ‘You get a great view of the Earth.’
‘It’s the best planet, isn’t it? We’re so lucky to live on it.’
‘None of the others come within a million miles of it.’
They had succeeded in putting the afternoon in a massive, dwarfing context. Re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, they went down to the basement where the maps of individual countries were kept, maps showing regions within a country, states and counties, folded street plans of crowded cities – London, Rome, New York, Cairo, Moscow – that showed every avenue and street, every cul de sac and alley of the city they were in. There was even a diagram, on the wall, of the shop itself, a map of maps with a red arrow saying, ‘You Are Here.’
‘I feel better able to face the world,’ said Luke. Better able, he meant, to face the journey home – not the Ancient Egypt section of one of the city’s daunting museums.
‘Why on earth do we want to see that?’ he said.
‘It’s very interesting,’ said Nicole. ‘It was a civilisation in which nothing ever happened, a culture which consisted entirely of sitting. Very like Paris in fact.’
Fortunately (for Luke) most of the Egyptian wing was closed, for renovation; unfortunately, they found themselves in an endless collection of armour and weapons from the twelfth century onwards. The earliest guns looked like dark fossils, as if they would have been more use as clubs. Gradually the guns became more ornate with elaborate decoration on the barrels and handles. Fowling pieces, muskets, flintlocks, stand-and-deliver pistols. Then there were the swords, ‘the unbelievably boring swords’ (Nicole): halberds, pikes, sabres, broadswords so huge that they didn’t seem like instruments of violence, just totems of violent intent. That was the attacking side; on the defensive side there was the armour (‘the even more unbelievably boring armour’): tons of the stuff, row upon row of breast-plates and helmets, cleaned up to a kind of dull sheen. Suits of armour, evidently, were ten a penny in some army surplus store of museum artefacts. Taken together these paired displays of armour and weaponry foretold the entire history of the arms race: attack and defence cancelling each other out, their interaction becoming more and more elaborate until everything was raised to a level of rhetoric.
The undertow of violent intent lent this section of the museum a certain minimal fascination (for Luke, at any rate) but they soon found themselves in a wing devoted to decorative arts. Luke and Nicole were searching for an exit but all the signs directed them through mile after mile of tables, desks, carpets, chairs, bureaux and beds. They were desperate to get out of the energy-sapping heat but after the carpets and beds came the porcelain: tea-cups, plates, dishes, pots, saucers: anything that happened to have survived from the Ming or any other dynasty.
‘This is it,’ said Luke. ‘The real bargain basement, the flea-market of ancient history.’ They were moving quickly, hardly glancing at any of the meticulously labelled bits of broken crockery.
‘I’m exhausted,’ said Nicole. ‘It’s like walking across a desert.’
‘I’ve got museum knee, museum back: the works. I don’t think I can walk another inch,’ said Luke, but there were many miles of bits and pieces to trudge through before they erupted finally into the late-twentieth-century light.
‘That settles it,’ said Luke. ‘One day I am going to open a museum of boredom. A history of tedium through the ages. Global in scope, displaying the full range of boredom, all the culturally and historically specific variants.’
Nicole had claimed she was exhausted but the prospect of being back in the saddle revived her. ‘Let’s go to the mosque,’ she said, unlocking her bike. ‘We can have thé à la menthe there.’
Inside, the mosque was crowded, smoky, secular. Luke was ecstatic to be sitting down, free at last from museum-traipsing and pedal-pushing.
‘Sitting in the mosque, drinking mint tea, eating delicious harissa, already looking forward to ordering another tea: that’s what I’m doing now,’ he said. ‘That and watching the most gorgeous woman in the world eat her baklava.’ Specifically he was watching the bones in her jaw move as she chewed. There was a flake of pastry on her lip which she wiped away with a napkin. Luke did not want to tell her he loved her: they were words which, once spoken, could never again contain the feeling they had once conveyed. But the longing to tell her he loved her was overwhelming. He looked at her and said to himself, as powerfully as he could: I love you, I love you.
Before leaving the mosque Nicole bought some honey because she liked the elegant ‘glass tin’ that it came in.
‘Glass tin?’
‘Is that not the right word?’ she said, holding up the jar for him to see.
‘No, no. That’s absolutely right.’ Nicole also tried on a pair of pointy yellow babouches that smelt like an animal. Luke bought them for her and she wore them that night as she cooked dinner for them both at her apartment.
Luke was taken aback by the chaos in which she lived. The main space was a living room and kitchen. Yellow walls, orange book shelves. The news was on TV; the TV was on the draining board; the kettle was on the TV, on the brink of boiling. A leg of prosciutto was hanging from a hook screwed into the white-painted wooden beams that were all that remained of the wall that had once divided the space in two. Between these two beams were two filing cabinets, one black one orange. They were ugly things, filing cabinets: most people tried to hide them away in corners, but displayed prominently in the centre of the room like this, they had a kind of battered glamour. Propped against the back of one of them was an old mirror.
Luke had bought beer. The fridge was full so he broke up the pack and arranged the bottles in whatever nooks and crannies he could find and then put two glasses in the freezer. Nicole said,
‘Would you like some prosciutto?’
‘Um, no thanks.’
‘I don
’t like prosciutto either. A relative brought it from Italy. I don’t know what to do with it.’
There was a bed at the far end of the room. Her bike – which she had carried upstairs – was propped against the wrought metal of the headboard. Papers and ill-treated books were all over the floor. There was even a piano. Luke lifted the lid and asked Nicole if she could play.
‘It’s just here because it’s too heavy to move. It’s hopelessly out of tune. Let me show you the rest of the place.’ She ushered him out of the main room and along a short corridor and into the bathroom. A pale green bath and toilet, a round wooden mirror. Lotions. Shampoo. Candles. She led him out into the corridor again.
‘That was the bathroom, obviously. And this,’ she said archly, ‘is the bedroom.’ There was a single mattress on the floor, true, but it bore a closer resemblance to a vast walk-in wardrobe. Except it was almost impossible to walk in. A rail was crammed with coats and dresses. Shirts, trousers, socks lay in heaps on the floor or were piled on chairs.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘although this is officially the bedroom, we don’t sleep in here.’ (He loved that ‘we’.) ‘Mainly because there’s not actually any room.’
‘You could do with a chest of drawers.’
‘I hate drawers. I always stuff them too full and they get stuck so I have to saw them open.’ Luke followed her back into the kitchen.
‘Would you like a beer?’ he said.
‘Please.’
He rummaged in the fridge, decided that the bottles were not cold enough, took the glasses out of the freezer, crammed the bottles in there instead and found room for the glasses in the fridge.
‘Put a record on,’ she said. He played the record that was already on the turntable, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ by Serge Gainsbourg, duetting (somewhat absurdly) with Brigitte Bardot. While that was playing he looked at her LPs which were stacked on top of each other so that any dust became wedged in the grooves. He pulled out a recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – at least that’s what it said in the cover. Inside was a Chet Baker record. He put it on anyway.
‘Where’s the lid to the record player?’
‘It got broken when I tried to make cheese in it.’
‘Ah yes, of course.’ He opened the fridge, took the beer out of the freezer and poured two bottles into the chilled glasses which they clinked before drinking. Still holding her glass, Nicole crouched down and looked in the oven. Chet played some trumpet and then began singing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’.
‘Did you see that mirror by the filing cabinet?’ said Nicole.
‘Yes. It’s nice.’
‘It’s from Belgrade. Very old. So old that it doesn’t work properly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sometimes is slow to work. Like an old wireless. It takes time to warm up. Come. I’ll show you.’ They walked around the filing cabinet and stood to one side of the mirror. ‘Usually it works normally. Sometimes not. We’ll see.’ Nicole took Luke’s hand and they moved in front of the mirror which, for a second, showed only the bed. Then their reflections moved inside the frame and looked back at them. They stepped aside but, for a few moments, the mirror continued to hold their images.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Luke.
‘We were lucky. It is only very rarely that it happens.’
‘Isn’t it spooky?’
‘It’s just old.’ Luke moved back in front of the mirror, in synch with his image. He repeated the action several times and each time the mirror worked absolutely normally.
‘Did it really happen, first time?’
‘Oh, yes. Sometimes there is a very long delay. You can never tell.’
‘And you don’t think it’s scary?’
‘It’s just old,’ said Nicole. ‘We can eat soon if you like.’
‘OK,’ said Luke, stepping in front of the mirror once more: again it worked normally. Nicole put on oven gloves and began tugging the roast chicken out of the oven.
‘Oh we need some big plates. Could you get them? They’re in the – what’s it called? That thing. The cupboard that washes.’
‘The dishwasher?’
‘Dishwasher, yes.’
‘Cupboard that washes is much better,’ said Luke. He kissed her neck while she served the food.
‘You’re supposed to correct my English.’
‘Your English is perfect. But how come you have one of these things, whatever it’s called?’
‘A misunderstanding. The person who had the apartment before said she had a washing machine and if I wanted it I could have it. I said yes but what she called a washing machine was actually—’
‘A cupboard that washes.’
‘Yes. You see, that is why you must correct my English.’
Nicole carved, sort of, and they sat down to their plates of oven-dried chicken, raw roast potatoes and peas.
‘It’s awful isn’t it?’ said Nicole, watching Luke chew.
‘The peas are fine.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not that hungry anyway.’
‘I can’t cook.’ She looked as if she might cry.
‘You should have said. I love cooking. You can maintain the bicycles and I’ll cook.’
‘OK.’ She reached for his hand.
Luke pushed his plate away. ‘That really was fucking disgusting.’
‘Have some prosciutto,’ said Nicole. ‘There’s lots.’
They went to bed early. Nicole moved the TV to the end of the bed and they watched a thriller they had both seen before. The main segment of the film featured a famously devastating car chase. Nicole claimed that car chases took place only on film, never in print, never in books. She was wearing a green and white striped robe that made Luke think of toothpaste. A bowl of fruit was on the floor close by. Luke reached for an orange and began peeling it.
‘Don’t spurt in my bed,’ said Nicole. He passed segments to her, dripping. The car chase had come to a standstill. Half the vehicles in the city had been destroyed or damaged. Nicole’s period had started. They fucked with a towel under them, in the blue blaze of TV, their faces inches from the screen. Luke mouthed the words silently into her ear: I love you, I love you. She pulled her face away and pressed her mouth to his ear. He felt her lips moving, forming words he could not hear.
On Sunday night Luke met Alex at the Petit Centre. It was normally quiet on a Sunday but, for some reason – maybe everyone had spent the weekend with their new lovers and had been unable to get there until now – the Centre was packed. Luke was ecstatic, glowing in the way that women are said to when they are in love. He was not the only one with romantic news, though. Alex had met Sara, an interpreter.
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘At Steve’s house. The gay guy you met here that first night after work. I went there for dinner. Then I bumped into her last Thursday, just quickly, at an opening. And then I saw her again – though not to speak to – the following night.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Short hair, black. Brown eyes, dark skin. And, crucially, she doesn’t smoke.’
‘She’s not French then?’
‘American, I think.’
‘You need to move quickly. Non-smoking women in this fucking smoke-filled pit of a city are hard to come by. Have you got her phone number?’
‘I hardly need it. I keep running into her.’
‘D’you know if she’s got a boyfriend?’
‘I don’t think so.’
But when she turned up in the bar half an hour later she was with a man. She was wearing a dark sweater, leather jacket and narrow, pale trousers. The guy she was with was called Jean-Paul. To hide his disappointment at seeing Sara in the company of a man, Alex bought them both a drink. Jean-Paul may have been the same age as Luke and Alex but, since he appeared successful, had an implied sense of direction, of purposefulness, of money, he looked considerably older. They stood at the crowded bar, Alex monitoring th
e movements of Jean-Paul and Sara, trying to establish the state of their relationship. It was obvious they didn’t know each other well – and equally obvious that Jean-Paul was aiming to remedy this situation. Sara’s attitude to him was more difficult to decipher. She was friendly to everyone but she retained some essential loyalty to her date. They had been to the cinema together.
‘What did you see?’ Alex said. ‘More precisely, which Cassavetes film did you see?’ There was a Cassavetes season on. You could not move for Cassavetes films.
‘Faces.’
‘Faces? I can’t remember whether I’ve seen that one or not. It’s the one that’s exactly like all the others, right?’
‘That’s the one. Have you seen it?’
‘Yes. Or maybe it was one of the others.’
‘Actually they’re beginning to get on my nerves, Cassavetes films. I don’t think I’m going to see any more.’
‘Why’s that? I agree, but why is that? For me it’s because the characters are always wearing dinner jackets. I hate films where the characters are always wearing dinner jackets. I hate James Bond films for the same reason,’ said Alex, glad to have got a quick purchase on the conversation. Jean-Paul also wanted to get in on it but Luke, spotting Alex’s chance to engage Sara, immediately set up a conversational barricade to keep him from her. If Jean-Paul wanted to have his say about the film they’d just seen he would have to say it to Luke.
‘He’s too indoors,’ Sara said to Alex. ‘There are outdoors films and indoors films. His are indoors films. I only like outdoors films.’ Alex was stopped in his tracks. He saw immediately that she was right: all great films were outdoor films. He searched rapidly through his memory but could not think of a single exception to this rule.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That is absolutely it. It’s as simple as that. Dinner jacket-wearing is just a whatever the word is of indoorness.’
‘Metonym?’
‘I guess.’ Jean-Paul lit a cigarette. Alex could sense him monitoring their conversation: everyone, it seemed, was monitoring everyone else’s conversation. ‘Are there no exceptions?’