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warehouse was Luke’s first stroke of luck it proved also to be his second. Nothing came of the apartment Miles had heard of but, through Matthias, he was put in touch with a photographer who was going to spend a year travelling. He had sub-let his apartment to an American but at the last moment this arrangement had fallen through and he needed to find someone else.
    The apartment was on the second floor of a shabby block only fifteen minutes walk from the warehouse, less than ten from where Alex lived. Most of the buildings in the street – and a couple of vans – were the site of turbulent political discourse: ‘Le Pen’ and ‘FN’ had been scribbled on walls, crossed out, rewritten and sprayed over. The building next door had been demolished so the outside walls were patterned with squares of wallpaper: ghost rooms where families had slept and eaten and died.
    The apartment itself was small, a studio, but there was little furniture cluttering up the place. The floorboards were stained a pale, woody colour. Some of the photographer’s photographs were on the walls. Black-and-white: street scenes. One showed a crowd of demonstrators confronting police. They were good photographs and the apartment, though small, suited Luke perfectly. He said yes on the spot and paid two months’ rent in advance. The photographer left him the key to his bicycle so that Luke could use that too. Luke bagged up his belongings and dropped off the key to his old apartment with Madame Carachos. He considered abusing her for renting such a dump to him, decided against it, and moved into his new apartment the day after going to look at it.
    Now that they were both ‘colleagues’ – as Luke put it – and neighbours, he and Alex saw a great deal of each other. They were both English, both new – or newish – to the city, and both single. With the exception of Miles and the guys at the warehouse, Luke knew almost no one. Alex knew a few people – most of whom had been at the Petit Centre that night – but, together, he and Luke were set to get a far better purchase on the city than either of them could have done alone. Meeting each other marked the beginning of the phase in their lives when all the elusive promise of the city could be realized. They flourished in each other’s company, their intimacy increased as they met more people. Things Alex said in groups were always addressed implicitly to Luke; other people were used as a way of refracting back something Luke intended primarily for Alex.
    You know what a downer it is when you meet someone for a drink or dinner and almost the first thing they say is ‘I don’t want a late night’? To Alex, Luke was the embodied opposite of that kind of remark. Evenings with him had a quality of unfettered potential. This was exactly the feeling engendered by the city in which they found themselves and many of the qualities Alex saw in Luke could just as accurately have been attributed to the shared experience of a place and time. Alex also ascribed to his new friend an exalted version of the traits which – in quieter, passive mode – Luke saw in him. Alex used Luke as a kind of probe, an extrapolated mirror of himself. Which meant that from Alex’s perspective Luke was a special person, to be admired, to measure himself against. The difference, I realize now, was that Alex had a theory – an idea – of Luke whereas Luke simply liked his friend, liked being with him. Ultimately this difference would generate another: Luke would never be disappointed by Alex.
    There was an additional incentive for playing football at passage Thiéré: the women who each day passed by, carrying books, talking or pushing bicycles. They were on their way back to offices or to lectures at the university after their lunch break, just strolling, or eating ice cream when it was hot. Men walked by too but that was just an accident whereas the girls, we liked to think, came by deliberately. Just a slight preference