Free Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer Page A

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