The Faithful Couple

1993

He wanted to concentrate on the girl, but he found himself glancing at the young man in the corner of the yard. She was telling him about her course at USC, and the details, when he caught them, were reasonably interesting, but there was something about the man that was distracting. Perhaps they had met before, Neil thought, though he couldn’t place him.

‘… and after that I’m hoping for an internship in the Valley. Anyways, what do you do, Neil?’

The baseball cap. It was the baseball cap.

‘Soap,’ Neil said. ‘Soap and shampoo.’

Not just the cap: it was the cap and the shoes together. The guy was wearing suede Timberland boots, notionally designed for walking but not looking as if they had done much. The cap was from San Diego Wild Animal Park and featured several animal silhouettes roaming around the zoo’s logo. The boots belonged to a fashionable adult, well-off and image-conscious; the hat suggested a goofy adolescent.

‘Uh-huh?’

‘I mean, I used to be in soap. I worked for a pharmaceutical company before I came out here. In London. Or, you know, nearby.’

‘You’re in research?’

The man appeared to nod at him.

‘Salesman. I mean, it was a graduate scheme,’ Neil lied, realising that he should try to impress her. His heart had gone out of it. ‘I’m going to look for something else when I get back to London. Or I might, you know, start my own business.’

‘Okay, so you’re an entrepreneur?’

The hat, the boots and the eavesdropping. The man was sitting at a table in the shade. As well as the cap he was wearing green swimming shorts and a beige T-shirt. Sand matted the blondish hairs on his legs, darkening and thickening them. He was pretending to read Time, but Neil could tell that he was listening and observing from behind his sunglasses.

‘Yup. Entrepreneur. Well, you know, that’s the idea. That’s the plan.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘You know, I’m not sure yet. I haven’t really thought it through, to be honest.’

Neil laughed self-deprecatingly, aiming for a raffish nonchalance, but he could tell she wasn’t charmed. He couldn’t see the guy’s eyes but he was definitely watching them. Ordinarily, in Neil’s experience, when two young, unacquainted males appraised each other like this, there was something gladiatorial and menacing in the gaze, and they quickly looked away. On this occasion neither of them did. The man smiled. Neil smiled back.

‘That’s too bad.’

He had seen this girl on the beach the night before, had wanted to try his luck, had tried and failed to engage her around the illicit bonfire some surfers had lit after dark. She wasn’t interested, he had concluded, probably she hadn’t even noticed him. He was pleased to have manoeuvred her into this almost-private conversation, after the barbecue that the hostel had laid on for lunch. She was from Phoenix, but studying in LA, a Masters in Business Development, Neil thought she said; she had come down to San Diego for the beaches, went to Italy last summer, wanted to see more of Europe. She mentioned something about Scotch-Irish ancestry. She was staying elsewhere but had a friend who was working at the hostel (Cary, or possibly Cory, he hadn’t taken in the name). She had an arresting sharp manner and oddly unkempt eyebrows, which contrasted appealingly with her otherwise disciplined appearance. Those ideal teeth.

Now Neil had screwed it up. He and the man in the baseball cap between them.

‘Well,’ the girl said, sensing his distraction and rising, ‘good luck with it all.’

She re-tied her sarong, tilted her sunglasses from the crown of her head to her eyes and walked to the gate that led from the yard to the beach. She moved at a relaxed pace that, Neil figured, was meant to dispel any suggestion of retreat or defeat. The man in the cap watched her go, too. There was no one else in the yard; the two of them followed the girl’s departing curves in what felt to Neil like collusive appreciation.

‘Know what I think?’

He was English, too.

‘Do I want to?’

‘It’s your socks. Definitely the socks.’

Neil instinctively processed the man’s accent for class and geography, as the true-born English must. Received Pronunciation, southern but not London. Posh (those giveaway vowels): not so posh as to be alien, but unmistakably a few rungs above Neil, at the upper, genteel end of the expansive and nuanced middle. They hadn’t met before: that wasn’t what the connection had been.

‘They’re my best pair.’

‘No socks.’ The man removed his sunglasses and put down his magazine. He was handsome in a straightforward, symmetrical way, and slim, with a medium-rare English tan. He was roughly the same age as Neil. ‘Uncool. Not even with your trainers. Trust me, really. They make you look like a kid.’

Neil glanced down at his off-white, tennis-style socks, and at the man’s boots, into which his slender legs slid naked, then felt gulled and foolish for looking.

‘Thanks for the advice,’ he said. ‘Who should I make the cheque out to?’

‘Don’t mention it,’ the man said. ‘This one’s on the house.’ He laughed, loud and confidently, rocking his head back.

Neither of them found a way to graduate from one-upmanship to conversation. The man picked up his magazine, smiled and followed the girl out through the gate, watched by Neil alone.

There was a keg party in the yard that night, with all-you-can-drink beer for the guests and anyone else who wandered in from the beach. Neil came down from his shower just as the biker who supervised the entertainment was hauling in the barrel and pumping apparatus. The sandy breeze blowing in from the ocean civilised the heat. Neil already preferred the evenings in California: he could legitimately cover up the pale, unmuscular body that embarrassed him on the beach in the afternoons. His features suited the half-light: wide-set, almost-black eyes, long, feminine eyelashes, lipstick-pink lips that sometimes appeared theatrical against his luminous skin. He had a large beauty-spot mole on his left cheek, with a matching blemish on his neck. When he swivelled his eyes downwards the mole on his cheek seemed to him to loom blurrily at the edge of his vision.

He stationed himself at the side of the yard and leaned against the wall, his back to the hostel’s door. A voice behind him said, ‘Buy you a drink?’

Neil didn’t turn. ‘It’s your round, Casanova.’

The man approached the barrel and filled two plastic cups with watery American beer. He had ditched the baseball cap; he had shaggy, dirty-blond hair, in the low-rent Romantic poet style that, Neil knew, was fashionable among a certain breed of public schoolboy. They stood side by side against the wall, swigging in unison. The biker produced a microphone and a pair of thigh-high speakers, which he set up on the landward side of the yard, outside some unfortunate guests’ window.

‘Adam.’

‘Neil.’

‘I know.’

They shook hands.

Adam proved to be franker than the types of people Neil was used to, and the casual manner of his openness suggested he would have been the same if they had met at home. This wasn’t intimacy, exactly. No dark secrets were disclosed: Adam didn’t give the impression that he would have many of those, rather a clear run of frictionless and unblemished accomplishments. He was transparent in the manner of someone who doesn’t expect to lose anything by it. He had graduated from university in June — history at Durham, he said — and come out to California before starting work. I wonder who’s paying, Neil thought.

Actually he was supposed to travel with his girlfriend, Adam continued. It had been her idea, Chloe’s, she had always wanted to visit Los Angeles, see Venice Beach and the Hollywood sign. They both had. They split up just after their finals — it was mutual — but Adam had thought, fuck it, I’ll go anyway. No, he didn’t have a job waiting for him in England, but he planned to get into television: ever since he saw the footage of the Ethiopian famine, he had wanted to make documentaries and a difference. Before he flew out he sent off a load of applications and begging letters; he was hoping something would have come of them by the time he got home. His mother was keeping an eye out for any encouraging envelopes. He had landed in LA but come straight down to San Diego on the Greyhound, intending to meander back up the coast.

‘When did you go to the zoo?’

Adam took a few seconds to work it out, half-lifting a hand towards the phantom cap.

‘Yesterday. I saw it on the telly when I was a kid. Always wanted to go there.’

After that it was Neil’s turn. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about himself, he feared his biography wouldn’t captivate, so he kept it short: economics at Sheffield, then the pharmaceutical sales job, which, in reality, had involved driving around the south-east for almost two years with a sinister-looking case of hand cream and tampon samples, ‘until I got totally sick of it. They offered me a marketing thing at head office, up in Birmingham, but I turned it down. Last month, that was. Yeah, crazy, I know, but I’d saved up enough to come out here, so. I’ll find something else when I get back. Or, you know, I hope I will.’

No, Neil had never been to America before. He had only been abroad a handful of times: ‘We went to Spain, once or twice, when Mum was… with Mum. Costa Brava.’ He took a swig of beer. ‘And, you know, booze cruises to Calais.’

Adam nodded unconvincingly.

‘I’m heading up to LA next week,’ Neil continued, ‘then San Francisco.’

‘Me too,’ Adam said. ‘Maybe Yosemite after that. Are you on your own?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil replied. ‘On my own. I’m on my own.’

They were quiet. Neil said, ‘Another round?’

The yard was filling up. The girl in the sarong was back, now wearing a strappy white mini-dress and chatting to another woman over by the gate. She and Neil seemed to have made an unspoken pact not to acknowledge one another, curiosity flipping into surliness through some binary logic of unconsummated flirtation. When Neil finished pumping the beer he saw that Adam was talking to two other men. He felt irrationally jealous.

‘This is Neil,’ Adam said.

‘Spilled a bit,’ Neil said. ‘Shit.’

‘Ben,’ one of the men offered in a southern American accent. Neil was tallish — my six-footer, his mother had called him, albeit before he quite got there — but this man was taller and well-built with it. ‘What are you two doing in California?’

‘We’re hairdressers,’ Neil said.

Adam turned towards him, too sharply. Don’t, Neil thought. Don’t look at me or I’ll have to laugh.

‘Cool,’ the other, shorter American said.

Look at them and we can keep it going.

Neil had played this game before, mostly in clubs, on nights when he and his friends decided it was the most fun they were likely to have with the girls they were pursuing. The aim was to see how far they could push the lie before losing either the girls or their straight faces. The funny thing was, in California, the lies they told felt almost true. Or, if not true, at least possible, as if Neil might plausibly be someone new if he and his new friend willed it.

‘Yeah,’ said Adam. ‘We finished hairdressing college in Cardiff, then we came out to work with a stylist in LA.’ He gets it, Neil thought jubilantly; he’s perfect at it. ‘When it comes to fringes,’ Adam went on, ‘England is light years behind.’

Neil bit his lip: Don’t overdo it. ‘We’re going to drive across America,’ he put in, composing himself. ‘You know, cutting hair along the way. Campsites, motel car parks, that kind of thing. We figure five bucks a pop will get us to New York. How about you guys?’

‘Graduate school,’ the shorter man said. ‘We’re engineers. On our way down to Ensenada. You two detouring to Mexico?’

‘Not this time,’ Adam replied. ‘We’re heading north.’

Afterwards Neil thought the men must have seen through it, with that courteous American acuity that Britons often miss. But the strangers played along, helping to make him and Adam feel bonded and separate, until they left to join the queue for the buffet set out on a table in the corner.

Adam and Neil low-fived and had another beer. ‘Bottoms up,’ Adam said, raising his cup.

The waves rolling onto the beach were just audible above the chatter in the yard. Before the pause could turn awkward he pressed Neil about the job he had resigned. To Neil’s surprise he seemed genuinely interested, and, though nobody else ever had been, he was: for Adam, employment was still a land of myth, populated by fabled creatures — the Secretary, the Boss — that he was yet to encounter in the flesh. Neil explained how the company had delivered crates of free samples to his father’s house in Harrow in the middle of the night; how he would shop them round to wholesalers and retailers and the occasional department store. The idea was to distribute the samples and gather orders in exchange. Half the time the orders were cancelled by the pharmacists afterwards, but that didn’t matter to the salesmen, Neil explained, because they counted towards your monthly sales figures anyway.

‘Got it,’ Adam said. ‘Of course. Any, you know, action?’ he asked, retreating from the world of kickbacks and sharp practices to more familiar territory. ‘You know, secretaries or whatever.’

‘Not really. I never went to the office much. Unless,’ Neil deadpanned, ‘you count this old woman with a beard who ran a chemist’s up in Bishop’s Stortford. She pinned me to my car once, said she wouldn’t let me go unless I gave her another crate of free shampoo. Coconut, I think it was.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I gave her the shampoo and she gave me an order. I think that was the time I won salesman of the month. I got a weekend in a hotel in Brighton.’

‘Did you take the old woman?’

‘I took my dad. Sort of had to, you know.’

They drank, the repartee checked by the mention of Neil’s father, its opaque dutifulness, but only temporarily.

‘What’s he like as a wing man?’

‘Better than you,’ Neil said.

After a few seconds they both laughed, Adam aloud, Neil almost silently, his lips drawn across his teeth in the semblance of a grimace.

They had another drink in the queue for food — almost nothing was left by the time they reached the table, a few rectangles of overcooked pizza and some token celery that no one else had fancied — and then another as they ate. The beer was cold and light and stronger than it tasted.

The biker had hooked up a karaoke machine to the speakers, and he checked that the microphone was working with the ritual taps and Testing, testing. He perched the screen on the edge of the buffet table and, without preamble, began to sing — ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, followed by ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ — in one of those affected growly voices that substitute attitude for intonation. People applauded. Next two German women did a Whitney Houston medley, and a bare-chested Australian man mutilated ‘Need You Tonight’. There were a few sarcastic whoops, and someone threw a not-quite-empty cup at him. The cup hit the man on the shin, the beer splashing his leg.

‘I will if you will,’ Adam said.

Neil looked at Adam and at the humiliated Australian. His stomach knotted, then relaxed. He knew he had to do it.

‘Together, right?’

‘Of course,’ Adam said.

They flicked through the tracks on the karaoke machine. Although neither of them especially liked the Eagles, they settled on ‘Take it Easy’ (short, and an easy tune). Somehow the music came on quicker than Neil was expecting: he almost cried out ‘Wait!’ but managed to contain the panic. He never went in for this kind of exhibitionism, always envying the unselfconsciousness of people who did. He sensed his skin warmly colouring and didn’t join in until the second line: I’ve got seven women on my mind. His voice was lower and flatter than Adam’s, his eyes locked on the miniature screen even though he knew the words, the lyrics of half the Eagles’ songs being etched in his memory, along with those of the other seventies classics he had been obliged to appreciate at school.

But the two of them grew stronger and louder, like people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a restaurant. By the second verse they were clasping the microphone together; by the end of the third their spare arms were around each other in tipsy communion.

No one threw anything. When they finished, the Mexico-bound Americans high-fived them. The girl from that afternoon in the yard came over and said ‘Good job’ to Neil. He half-expected her to solicit an introduction to Adam, but instead she swayed suggestively, as if she were willing to forgive his earlier obtuseness and dance. He ignored the hint, curtly said ‘Thanks’, and turned to Adam to discuss what they should sing next.

Somebody had given them both another beer. They were halfway through them when Adam said, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ He repeated the proposal when Neil didn’t respond, louder, shouting into his ear to be heard above ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

They went out through the gate, across the running and rollerblading path and onto the beach. Some kids were shouting somewhere along the shore, playing soccer in the dark. In the other direction, couples were giggling invisibly on the sand. Neil and Adam had the stretch of beach behind the hostel more or less to themselves. They pressed their beers into the sand, one by each of the volleyball poles, and stripped to their underwear. Adam saw that Neil had taken his advice and foresworn socks that evening, and Neil saw him notice, but neither of them commented. Adam undressed first and won the race to the surf.

The moon had clouded over and they didn’t gauge the height of the waves until they were waist deep. The water was warm. As they were jumping backwards into the crests, a few metres apart, a piece of seaweed wrapped itself around Adam’s shoulders; he caught it, raised it above his head like a banner, and let himself fall backwards into the ocean. He had a beginner’s hairy chest, a wiry knot between his pectoral muscles that heralded the full Chewbacca his genes were promising. Neil’s chest was narrower and baby-bald.

They splashed around and shouted into the Pacific until Neil dragged Adam out in a mock rescue. Adam resisted, but submitted before the wrestling became too fierce, allowing himself to be dumped where the wet and dry sand met. The two of them scrambled up the beach and sat against the volleyball poles, finishing their beers and watching the breathing, black-and-white ocean as they dried. The karaoke was over.

‘Listen,’ Adam said, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I suppose we could, you know, go together.’

‘What do you… Go where?’

‘Up the coast. On the Greyhound, maybe. Or we could, you know, get one of those cars you deliver for someone else. Driveaways, I think they’re called, I read about them in the Lonely Planet. We could take it up to San Francisco. What do you reckon?’

Neil was sober enough to catch and question his own response. He couldn’t account for the sense that he was being flattered, wonderfully flattered, and he resented Adam for this rush of gratitude. Adam wasn’t older than Neil, or more experienced (so far as he could tell), or cleverer or funnier; he outscored him mainly in the unearned virtues of luck and class and those Athena-poster looks. At the same time he had his openness, and his poise, and there was a fit or alignment between them, something unfinished and possible, that it would be a shame to waste.

‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘Why not?’

All this — California, the sea, the adult, sovereign choices — was the kind of escapade that, as suburban teenagers, Neil and his brother had once fantasised about. He held out his cup for Adam to clink with his own, and he did, though the cups were plastic and noiseless and already empty.

A pair of surfboards were draining in the shower when Adam went for a piss at dawn. A woman was in bed with the Norwegian in the bunk opposite his, both of them asleep and naked. Adam climbed up again to his mattress, lay on his back and mapped the stains and cracks on the ceiling. The sand in his bed was as dark as dirt, the sheets damp with seawater; he could hear the waves. His wasn’t a serious hangover, just dry mouth and sour breath, plus a dull ache, a sort of manifest unease, at the back of his head. Sleep was gone.

Adam wasn’t regretful or embarrassed that he had sung and swum and persuaded this stranger to join in. Unlike Neil he was a practised exhibitionist, especially when he had been drinking: jokily synchronised dancing in clubs and at the odd countryside rave, acceptably risqué sixth-form revues, charades around the pool of the chateau that his father sometimes borrowed for a fortnight from some shipping millionaire. He was likewise used to getting people to do what he wanted them to — a dividend of being an eldest child, who had honed his will on indulgent parents before redirecting it at his idolatrous younger sister, and afterwards at what so far seemed a gratifyingly pliant universe.

His queasiness was neither shame nor simply alcohol. He remembered how he had propositioned Neil, and in the morning’s clarity could see that he had rushed into this, on the basis of half a day’s acquaintance, some one-liners and an out-of-tune duet. Adam saw the impetuousness, but that wasn’t what unsettled him. His fear was that Neil might have changed his mind: that he might have forgotten his pledge to drive up the coast together, or might pretend that he had forgotten.

Adam wouldn’t think the worse of him for that. The previous night had been a kind of hallucination, probably impossible to reconstitute and best consigned to pleasant memory. But he hoped otherwise. Neil was uncool, but he didn’t seem to mind, which was itself a kind of coolness; his indifference had a negative power of its own. There was something intriguing in the way he faced the world, wary and not entitled, with low expectations set to be exceeded, rather than, as with most of Adam’s acquaintances, inflated hopes that were destined to be thwarted. He was similar as well as different (they got each other’s jokes), open yet unknown: for all their mutual frankness there was a part of himself that Neil seemed to be protecting, as he shielded his moon-white skin from the sun. He had done things that Adam hadn’t. Neil was the kind of coiled person who, when you met him, you had a hunch that something interesting could happen to, and you wanted to know him long enough to find out what it might be. A person you could measure yourself by.

Adam got out of bed. The interloping woman was lying on her front, her face in the Norwegian’s armpit, her arse a bikini triangle of white encircled by chocolate tan: a road sign made flesh. He brushed his teeth, thought about shaving but decided not to, put on his shorts and shades and went out to buy a coffee at Burger King.

Neil was eating his breakfast in the hostel yard when Adam returned. He was sitting in a strange position, on a bench facing the wall, so that anyone who might want to speak to him would have to make a decision and an effort to disturb him.

‘Morning, Neil.’

He turned around and smiled. ‘Morning.’

Adam sat down next to him, astride the bench. They discussed their hangovers, as was customary, the sandiness of their sheets and the naked woman in Adam’s dormitory. They talked about the volleyball game that the blackboard announced for later that morning. They heard themselves talk about the weather. Adam saw that he would have to be the one who raised and risked it.

‘So are we still on? I mean, the car. You know, San Francisco. Los Angeles. Do you remember?’

‘Yeah, I remember,’ Neil said. ‘We’re on.’

They picked up a freesheet that listed the driveaways available in San Diego and assessed the offers in the yard that evening. They circled three that seemed promising: one vehicle to be delivered to Portland, one to Seattle, one to somewhere in Montana. They called the relevant agencies; Adam did the talking, specifying their ages, nationality, the particulars of their driving licences. Neil tried to decipher the notes his friend was scribbling in the margins, his insides inexplicably fluttering. They decided that Portland would be far enough, especially since the owner would allow them several more days than the trip strictly required. On the following morning they were to go out to the suburbs, towards the Mexican border, to collect the car.

They packed, settled their hostel bills and rode the trolleybus in the direction of the address Adam had been given. It was a warm blue day. They walked the last few, rundown blocks, sweating and joking that they might never find their destination, might search endlessly for a house that didn’t exist. But, eventually, it did: a decaying clapboard bungalow with a bleached porch and a high-volume argument in progress inside. At first they weren’t sure whether to intrude, or to give up and leave, go back to the beach, forget the whole plan. Neil pushed the buzzer, curtly, once; a young woman with tattooed biceps opened the door and called for her father, who came out, tanned, tall and overweight in serviceman-gone-to-seed style. He made them sign two copies of the paperwork, grumblingly inspected their foreign driving licences and led them to a brown pick-up truck with a covered bed. He handed over the keys and an address in Oregon and watched from the pavement, hands on hips, until they rounded a corner and headed north.

The pick-up was a bigger vehicle than either of them was used to. It had an extra set of headlights above the windscreen, like something out of The Dukes of Hazzard, a scratched leather interior and a mysterious tarpaulin in the back, tied and chained up, under which squatted a heavy, ominous lump. (‘Gun-running,’ Adam speculated. ‘Body parts,’ Neil countered.) Parking was hairy, and on the northbound highway they were flanked by an endless sequence of outsized lorries, streaming up to Los Angeles at impossible speeds. But at other times and on smaller roads they were almost on their own. And they were in California and free.

To save money Neil preferred to sleep in a hostel in Los Angeles, or in the back of the truck; Adam agitated for a motel. In the end they compromised on a shared room in the cheapest motel in Hollywood — Neil waiting at a phone booth, pretending to make a call, while Adam checked in alone to avoid the double occupancy charge. Neil knocked twice on the bedroom door, their needless, prearranged signal. Adam pulled him inside and stuck his head into the forecourt, scanning left and right in mock anxiety at being rumbled.

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said, as Neil eyed the lone double bed, keeping hold of his rucksack as if he might reconsider. ‘You’re not my type.’

They undressed and got into bed, at first keeping to the edges. They talked about L.A. Law and Moonlighting. They argued about how to make the bedside fan work, but neither of them managed it. They skirted politics, Adam evincing the soft-left bias prevalent in their generation, bolstered, in his case, by an undergraduate interest in the history of protest (suffragism, Gandhi, Martin Luther King), Neil grunting along diplomatically. They heard the murmur of televisions in neighbouring rooms, a flush from a stranger’s bathroom. They talked about Chloe.

‘I’ve never had a, you know, a relationship,’ Neil said. ‘Not like that. Couple of months, max. I just didn’t… To be honest, I don’t think I know how to.’

‘It’s pretty easy,’ Adam said. ‘You get on top —’

‘No, you dickhead, I mean the… you know, the commitment’ — this last, advice-column phrase spoken by Neil in a defensively ironic falsetto.

Whereupon they made a deliciously juvenile exchange of their sexual histories, including where and with whom they had lost their virginities: Neil when he was sixteen, with a girl he never saw again, underneath the dining table at somebody’s party, Adam in a copse with a sixth-form girlfriend from the sister school near his own.

‘Pitch black,’ Adam said. ‘We could hardly see each other.’

‘Figures,’ Neil said. Adam hit him with a pillow.

After that came their general histories. Neil was two years further into adulthood, but, at twenty-three, only a year older, having gone straight from school to university, whereas Adam had spent a year desultorily teaching in India before he went to Durham. Each summarised his family, which, though they wished it otherwise, was still most of who they were. Adam’s father had done well in shipping insurance and moved them to the country, dispatching the children, he and his sister Harriet, to boarding schools in Sussex. His mother, Adam said, busied herself with local causes and campaigns (unwanted bypasses, charity fêtes, imperilled hospitals). Neil explained that his father, Brian, ran an office supplies and stationery shop in Wembley, but it was clear, Neil said, that he wasn’t naturally suited to retail. He spent too long in consoling chats with polite ladies who ultimately bought nothing, neglecting less civil but more lucrative customers. Neil’s brother, Dan, was two years older than him. Dan was living in Southampton, there was work down there, apparently; he had a baby on the way, though Neil and Brian hadn’t met the girlfriend.

‘Mum,’ Neil concluded. ‘She… Nine years ago, nine and a half… She’s dead.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ Adam said, straight away realising his response was inadequate and ridiculous. It was so long ago, he didn’t know her or the circumstances, he barely knew Neil.

‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t worry.’

The percussion of the drink and ice machines kept Neil up half the night, along with the voices and footsteps in the forecourt, the revving and subsiding of engines, the sirens out there in America. When he awoke in the morning he was alone, and, for a minute, had no idea where he was, until Adam came in with two complimentary coffees in Styrofoam cups. Adam had a camera with a time-delay function, and he insisted that they put it on the bedside table and take a picture of themselves sitting on the coverlet, the forecourt and the pick-up visible through the window behind them. They were gesticulating, their arms spread and palms open in a what-am-I-doing-here pose: here in this hired room, with this strange man, in a foreign country. In truth, they both knew. At the same time they knew — Neil with a sharp pre-emptive melancholy, Adam more serenely — that this moment was irreducible, could be felt only as it was experienced, and would not afterwards be understood through photographs, shaggy anecdotes or snapshot memories, including by their own later selves.

Adam was determined to do the sights — the Chinese Theatre, Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, all the kitsch Americana that colonised the imaginations of star-struck British kids in the seventies and eighties — which gave Neil permission to put aside his pretended indifference and go too. It was all precisely like itself, just as they expected it to be, the palm trees and convertibles, as if they were extras in a film about America that everyone all over the world had seen. Adam wanted to drive through South Central and Watts, where the riots had happened; Neil was reluctant, nervous of the invisible urban boundaries between safety and danger, but they did, and it was all fine. They calculated that they could fit in Las Vegas if they only stayed a night; driving in from the desert they saw the sails of windsurfers in the dunes, the surfers themselves out of sight, before the steamboats, pyramids, palaces and volcanoes reared up psychedelically from the dust. They blew a hundred dollars playing blackjack at the Mirage: they agreed never to mention the loss to each other again. They won the money back on a single red-black bet at a roulette wheel, followed by another hundred in profit — enough to cover a double room in one of the dowdier casinos on the old Vegas strip, with a few dollars left for a steak dinner and some drinks.

‘We’re masseurs,’ Adam told the robotic, peroxide croupier. ‘On our way to North Dakota. They’re having a massage festival next week.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, sweeping the chips from her baize. ‘You boys stay out of trouble up there.’

Walking along the Strip, they talked about the future. In Neil’s mind, he said, the future was always an escape, somewhere pristine, inhabited by a revamped him.

‘It’s not like that for me,’ Adam said. ‘It’s more like, keeping what we’ve got, I mean Mum and Dad, but doing something else on top, something big. You know, people talking about you, your face in the paper. It’s like when you were young and you sort of commentated on your exploits in your head, you know, climbing a tree or whatever, scoring a try. The spotlight.’

‘I don’t remember doing that,’ Neil said. ‘In our house it was always Dan who was going to do it, the big thing, whatever it was. He was going to work on a ranch in Argentina, or once, after he dropped out of college, he had this plan to go to Australia, something about being a policeman in the Outback. When I picture it — the future — I’m trailing along, you know, watching.’

‘Watching who? Your brother?’

‘I’m not sure any more,’ Neil said. ‘You, maybe.’

Adam laughed.

Neil had never considered himself underprivileged. Compared with most of his peers at school, his family had been comfortable, and resenting everyone who had retained both parents would have been too exhausting. Adam’s better fortune grated mostly when he strained to be sensitive about it: his tact constituted an extra layer of superiority that was one too many for Neil.

As it proved when, in a bar at the Riviera, they talked about his father’s shop. Neil had worked there as a teenager, and was resigned to helping out again when he flew home, just for a few weeks, while he looked for something better and while, as would be unavoidable, he was still living with his dad. Adam planned to move in with two friends from university, Chaz and Archie, somewhere in west London, they hoped.

‘It should be useful, shouldn’t it?’ Adam offered, out of his depth but meaning to be considerate. ‘You know, dealing with the customers and all that. I mean, for whatever you do afterwards. Your business career.’

‘Not really,’ Neil said, thinking of the zoned-out, insincere retail patience that he would have to recultivate, and of his teenage runs to the bank with the takings, convinced every villain in Wembley knew by his gait that he was couriering an inch of tenners. ‘It’s a dead end, that shop. He should have closed it years ago.’

‘I’m sure it can’t be all that hopeless,’ Adam said. ‘In any case it’s a kind of anthropology, isn’t it, that sort of work?’

The waiter brought their drinks. A few seconds later, Neil felt provoked. Behind Adam’s questions and in his tone he sensed another enquiry: what do you really want to do? The tyranny of vocation among well-bred graduates. It was a form of arrogance, Neil thought, this notion that everyone ought to be a nun or a sculptor, have some urgent calling, as if they all mattered so much that there must be something in it for them beyond money. The idealism that someone else was always paying for.

Teaching in India. Anthropology!

‘You know what, yes, it is useful, in a way. Because, whatever you do, everyone’s selling something to someone in the end. Even you.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah, Adam, you are. You will be.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Adam said, laughing, his awkwardness emerging as condescension. To him the actual making of money was something someone else took care of, out of sight, like butchery or coal-mining.

Beyond the bar the slot machines kept up their perky jingles and machine-gun payouts; the ignored piano player went on playing. An illusionless discomfort, rather than plain silence, descended on them. Neil fingered the mole on his neck, a nervous tic that Adam began to notice that evening.

‘Let’s do a bunk,’ Adam said.

‘What do you —’

‘You know, leg it.’ He mouthed ‘without paying’, returning to normal volume for, ‘Haven’t you ever done that before?’

‘Sure,’ Neil said. In Sheffield, when they were skint students, he and two friends had run away from an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant. Once, when they were teenagers, he and Dan had bolted from a snooker club in Cricklewood without paying for their Cokes. Even by his parsimonious standards, the Californian road trip had been cheap: free refills, supersized fries, the bounteous quantity of America. Their shared rooms. He could afford the beer. But he saw how Adam’s ruse would reposition the two of them against the world, like their lying game, only more so, as if they were daredevil children.

‘You get up to go to the loo,’ Adam instructed, ‘but instead of coming back you wait for me by the slot machines. Got it?’

‘Roger that.’

‘Synchronise watches.’

They drained their beers and clinked their empty glasses.

It didn’t go smoothly. The toilets were in the wrong direction and to reach the entrance to the bar Neil had to double back past the low table at which Adam was sitting, which might have looked suspicious had anyone been watching. Adam stood up after a couple of minutes, pretending to yawn and stretch, then followed, eyes fixed on the floor. He picked up pace as he marched past Neil and was running before he reached the main doors, with Neil in pursuit. They ran for much longer than they needed to, racing each other as much as fleeing anyone who in theory might have been chasing them. The race was the point. To begin with Adam was faster, as he had been on the beach, and Neil experienced a fleeting, weird panic that he might have lost him, lost him for ever, an anxiety that was more acute than his receding fear of being caught. But Neil had better stamina, more grit, and overtook outside a Venetian palazzo. They came to a halt when Adam got a stitch, sat on a wall and panted, taking in the meaningless neon spectacle, the warm Vegas atmosphere that was both childish and corrupt.

They left the city early the next morning. Obeying their preconceptions, the road in Death Valley dissolved limpidly in front of them. Adam took a photo of the two of them sitting on the sizzling bonnet of the pick-up. As they drove through Fresno, resolving to do better, he asked about Neil’s mother.

‘You were — how old were you?’ He kept his eyes on the road.

‘Fourteen,’ Neil said. ‘Just fourteen. They only told us at the end, or almost, me and Dan, that was just before my birthday.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said. ‘That must have been… I can’t really imagine how that must have been.’

‘We were in the lounge,’ Neil said. ‘She told us and then she went straight into the kitchen to chop something. Chop chop chop, you know. Like she was beheading someone. Dad went up into the loft. Me and Dan went up to the park, and he threw me down this slope — I remember, it was a wet day, I got covered in mud, but I didn’t mind, because it was Dan, you know, and in those days anything to do with Dan…’

Adam said, ‘I don’t know what… I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s funny,’ Neil said. ‘I’ve never, before today, I’ve hardly ever… I don’t talk about it much, to be honest.’

At an outlet mall on the way into San Francisco Neil bought suede boots that were similar to Adam’s, somehow manly and fey at the same time. In the evening he experimented with wearing a sweater slung over his shoulders, as Adam sometimes wore his. At Adam’s urging they drove over and back across the Golden Gate Bridge three times. When they arrived at the hostel they had booked in San Francisco, they looked almost like brothers.

Rose introduced herself as they were milling around the parking lot, waiting for the minibus that would take them out to Yosemite. Adam had nudged Neil with his elbow when she arrived with her father. She was wearing tight velour shorts; her dark hair was in a ponytail; she had long, elastic legs and high breasts, and, for them, was unquestionably the group’s main attraction. Otherwise it was an eclectic yet disappointing bunch: a meek, greying couple from Yorkshire, a haughtily athletic American who always wore singlets, three sober Germans, two sixty-something hippies from New Mexico and a middle-aged gay couple from Reno, both ‘in landscape gardening’. Plus their guide, a bearded tree-hugger named Trey, who strove to project an air of primitive wisdom and harangued them all about litter. Trey would do the cooking and put up the tents they were to sleep in for three nights. Adam and Neil would arrive a day or two late in Portland because of the tour, but they figured the driveaway client was unlikely to sue. They parked the pick-up in the tour operator’s lot.

She mooched over to speak to them, distractingly bending one leg behind her as the three of them talked, leaning on their car for balance, heel pulled into her buttock as if she were limbering up for a run. Rose; from Colorado; she had come up to San Francisco with her father. She asked where else they had been in America and how long they were staying, looking them in the eyes and grinning. Her T-shirt said ‘Colorado State’. She was pleased they were there, she said, rolling her eyes in the direction of the others in a hammily exasperated gesture.

Her father came over and offered his hand. He was a large man — not tall, and not fat, exactly, but with a rectangular, troglodytic torso and powerful, tree-trunk legs. Forty to forty-five, Adam guessed, youngish for a man with a grown daughter, and with the ingratiating manner and untucked, sophomoric dress sense of a person who was keen to seem so. He had a crushing handshake but a surprisingly high voice, and a hair-trigger giggle that he tried endearingly if vainly to suppress. His name was Eric and he was a real-estate salesman. He and Rose had left his wife and son in Boulder to take this California trip together. The two of them, father and daughter, seemed gracefully at ease with each other, mutually respectful and natural in front of outsiders.

Trey rattled them out to the park in the minibus, then gave them an introductory ride around Yosemite Valley (the ground was dry as dust in the summer heat, the plants and trees magically lush); in the early evening the group meandered through a grove of sequoia trees. Neil gazed upwards, knowing that the trees were supposed to make him feel something, some ecstasy or epiphany that the others seemed to be experiencing, and sensing approximately what the feeling was — awed, inconsequential, humbly serene — but not quite managing it. When he lowered his eyes he found Rose standing next to him, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the setting sun. Down the sleeve of her bent arm Neil made out the stubble in her armpit. She said, ‘Wow’, smiled and walked away, towards her father.

Adam’s favourites trees were two monster sequoias, the deep-grooved trunks of which were fused together at the bottom: only by craning your neck could you see that, a long way up, they divided. They had been competing for space and sunlight for ever, Trey said, yet depended on each other’s succour to survive. They only existed together, in their rivalrous embrace. The plaque at their joint base said Faithful Couple.

‘Shall we have one of us lads?’ Adam asked Neil, holding up his camera.

They roped in the greying Yorkshireman to take the photo, arranging themselves beside the Faithful Couple sign. For the picture they pretended to bicker like old spouses, Neil making a fist and Adam turning up a palm as if he were remonstrating. But their other arms were around each other’s shoulders. They and the Faithful Couple were chequered in shadow from the other trees.

Adam retrieved the camera and thanked the Yorkshireman. ‘It probably won’t come out,’ the Yorkshireman said. ‘Rotten light.’ But it did.

They were in the high meadows when Rose snatched Adam’s hat. The campsite was just outside the entrance to the park; in the morning they left their tents standing and Trey drove them up a steep trail, putting them out to walk the final stretch when the path became impassable for the minibus. Adam and Neil amused the others with bravado about tracking and wrestling bears, irking the hippies and the gay couple when they kept up their wisecracks for too long. The meadows at the top were surrounded by grey-white granite hills, the horizon finished by a postcard blue sky and a few stranded clouds.

There was a meltwater lake, ringed by pine trees, which looked inviting after their uphill hike. At first only Neil and Adam braved the water, stripping down to their underwear and sprinting in, yelling, swimming in circles for warmth and ribbing each other about their retreating genitals. Once they had acclimatised to the temperature they began to harry and dunk each other, out in the middle of the lake.

Something made a splash, and a body made its way towards them in a determined front crawl, the face alternately buried in water and obscured by spray as it breathed, so that they couldn’t make out who was approaching, except, from the shape and the swimming costume, that it was a woman. For the last few metres before she reached them the swimmer submerged entirely, popping up to splash Adam from close range.

It was Rose. She was wearing a discreet but flattering purple one-piece that she must have carried in her day bag. She coughed out some water and grinned.

Adam splashed her back; Rose splashed Neil; he and Adam went for her together, pincer-style and mercilessly. ‘You guys,’ she protested, her eyes screwed closed as they converged to point-blank distance. She screamed cartoonishly as Adam dunked her — in the circumstances, reaching out to pressure the top of her head felt uncontroversial. He was alarmed when she didn’t resurface after he lifted his hand, but she came up a few seconds later and a couple of metres away, rubbing her eyes, spluttering, and sweeping back her long hair with an attention-seeking jerk of the neck and slick of her palm.

‘You guys,’ she said again, laughing. ‘You’re such bullies.’ She pushed away a final, mock-petulant splash and backstroked to the shallows. On the shore Eric extended a towel to wrap her in.

Adam had a two-tone trucker’s tan, his face and forearms browning but the rest of him less bronzed. Neil was white all over and beginning to worry about the sun. They swam back to their clothes and their matching, lined-up boots. With his back turned Adam didn’t see Rose darting across the rock to grab the baseball cap he had replaced after their swim, racing away with the trophy in her wet bathing suit and bare feet. She squealed and dropped the cap when Adam almost had her, then jogged back to her father.

‘She’s up for it,’ Adam said to Neil, panting.

‘That hat is ridiculous.’

‘She is, I’m telling you.’

‘Ad,’ Neil said. ‘We… do we need her?’

‘What are you talking about? We’re in. One of us is, anyway.’

They examined her, not very covertly, as she dried her back with the towel. Her nipples were conspicuous inside her swimsuit; a sprig of pubic hair had escaped from the crotch. She was womanly from the thigh up, and she walked like an adult, confident and unexaggerated. But there was something vulnerable and admonishing about the pigeonish angle of her standing feet, and the way her knees knocked together with the rhythm of her towelling. Adam’s gaze met Eric’s; the older man raised his chin and gave a corners-of-the-mouth smile.

‘Bit young, maybe,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘If there’s grass on the pitch…’ Adam joked, a second-hand vulgarity that he had heard but never himself uttered before.

‘In any case,’ Neil said, ‘what about her old man?’

‘Aw, he’s a sweetie,’ Adam said. ‘Look at them — not now, you idiot, he’s watching us — they’re a right-on family. Stop making excuses.’

‘Okay, Ads, okay,’ Neil said, capitulating as he had over the singing and the dip in the Pacific. ‘Let’s play.’

Eric held up the towel to shield Rose, averting his eyes as she slipped back into her clothes.

He let her have a beer that evening. At least, Rose appeared to be drinking a beer — Neil saw her gulp from the bottle and wipe her mouth with the back of her hand — though it was possible, he later realised, that she had taken one swig and passed it back to Eric. Father and daughter were sitting next to each other by the campfire that Trey had built after he served dinner. It was a warm dry night and they didn’t need the heat, but a fire was expected, and they used the flames to toast marshmallows. They could see each other sporadically in the flickering light.

Next to Rose sat one of the Germans, a woman in her late thirties with short blond hair and ropy English. Next to her were the couple from Yorkshire, and beside them were Adam and Neil. Those two were drinking — they and some of the others had bought beer in San Francisco — but they weren’t drunk that night, not really. The other Germans and the gay couple were on the far side of the fire; the elderly hippies and the solitary athlete had already retired. No one had done anything difficult or brave, no perilous climbs or punishing hikes, but there was nevertheless an air of outdoor camaraderie, a communal will to make this be or seem the frontier trip of their imaginings.

They talked about what they had seen in the meadows that day and what they were hoping to see on the next, flora and fauna and soaring rock, peering meditatively into the flames when there seemed to be nothing left to say. Rose pulled her baggy sweater down over her legs and hugged them to her body. Eric and the Yorkshireman began to discuss computers. Eric put his faith in them; the Yorkshireman used an old-fashioned word processor.

‘You wait,’ Eric said. ‘In ten years, I’m telling you, there’ll be a computer in every village in Africa. One hundred per cent easier — everything. School, business — you wait. And be sure and remember me when it happens!’

‘They can’t eat computers,’ a German man said from the other side of the fire.

‘Guess not,’ said Eric, laughing and taking no offence.

He stirred the cinders. Neil used Adam’s penknife to open two more beers.

‘Hey,’ Eric said, rallying. ‘You guys ski?’ He was looking at them.

‘Of course,’ said Adam.

‘’Fraid not,’ said Neil.

‘Too uncoordinated,’ Adam said. ‘He’d be laughed off the slopes.’

‘You two should come see us in Boulder,’ Eric went on. ‘We’ll teach you. Shouldn’t they, Rose?’

‘I guess so,’ Rose said, sweeping away a hair with a hand mittened in sleeve.

‘Any time. Love to have you. Wouldn’t we, sweetie? November to April, best skiing in America. Twenty minutes and you’re on the slopes. And, no kidding, a hot tub in the yard!’ He giggled.

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Adam said.

‘I mean it,’ Eric said. ‘It’s great to meet you guys. From England. I don’t think Rose has met someone from England before, have you, honey?’

‘Sure I have,’ Rose said, poking the ground with a marshmallow stick.

‘How did you two meet?’

‘Playing rugby,’ said Neil.

‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘We were playing against each other. I was playing for Cambridge and Neil was playing for Birmingham. We had a drink in the bar afterwards. That was three or four years ago.’

‘Who won?’ Rose asked.

‘We did,’ Adam said.

The English couple whispered to each other. The Germans and the gay couple retreated to their tents. Trey went to wash up the dinner plates in a plastic tub. Eric stood, clutched his back, and wandered into the trees to pee.

‘So, Rose,’ Adam said. ‘What’s your story?’

The woman from Yorkshire turned sharply towards him, as if she were about to say something, but instead she looked away. Neil laughed at his friend’s insouciance, tried to disguise the laugh as a cough and only just kept in his beer. Rose blushed. She blushed in two stages, each discernible by the orange light of the campfire. Her face coloured, and a few seconds later darkened again, the blotch spreading down her neck as her self-consciousness kicked in, the embarrassment self-perpetuating, like a quarrel that lives on its own momentum after the original insult has been forgotten.

There was something new and grating about Adam that night, Neil thought. He had interrupted him twice; he needn’t have made that crack about Neil being too clumsy for skiing; he had hijacked their lying game, which they were supposed to play against outsiders, not versus each other. Or, there was something different about the two of them together. Up till then their rivalry had been playful and polite, like a tennis knock-up with no score, kept in check by joint enterprises, curiosity and affection. This evening it was overt and raw. Rose was the contest more than she was the prize. Somewhere else, on another night, the discipline would have been arm-wrestling or Trivial Pursuit.

‘Well,’ Rose said, recovering herself, ‘it’s pretty short.’

Neil stood, padded past Adam and the English couple and sat next to Rose in the spot that had been Eric’s. He leaned back on his elbows, and straight away began talking to her in a voice too quiet for anyone else to hear, and almost too quiet for Rose, so that, to follow him, she had to lean back too, extending her legs in front of her and crossing them at the ankles.

Eric returned from the trees, humming. He glanced at Neil and Rose and sat next to Adam, the weight of his torso rocking him back on his haunches before he righted himself.

‘When you heading home?’ he asked.

‘We’ve got these flexible tickets,’ Adam said, peering around the circle, beyond the English couple, to where Neil was reclining with Rose. He was impressed, even faintly pleased, with his friend’s ruthlessness, as well as aggrieved. ‘A week or two, probably. You?’

‘Right after Yosemite,’ Eric said. ‘Rose has to get ready for school.’

School, Adam thought. They called everything school, didn’t they? That Colorado State T-shirt. ‘Yes,’ he said absently, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Sophomore year already,’ Eric continued, shaking his head in the standard parental amazement. ‘My girl. You believe it?’

‘What’s her major?’ Adam asked, speaking American.

‘Major?’ Eric said, giggling. ‘High school sophomore’s what I mean.’ He stopped laughing and turned towards his daughter.

‘Of course,’ Adam reassured him. ‘My mistake.’

The Yorkshire couple cut in to quiz him about Cambridge — they had a nephew who had studied there, maybe Adam knew him, etcetera — and he was obliged to keep up the pretence, even though it was no fun on his own and he sensed that his act wasn’t convincing. He was telling them how he had read philosophy and been on University Challenge, how he had given up rugby after breaking his leg on tour in South Africa, all the while monitoring Neil and Rose. Neil was making her laugh, he could see that; she was making patterns in the dust with her outstretched feet. Tough luck, pal, Adam thought. Technical disqualification.

Eric stood up and announced that he was turning in. ‘Don’t stay up late, honey,’ he called to his daughter. ‘Half an hour, deal?’ He ruffled her hair as he passed her.

‘Night, Daddy,’ Rose said, smoothing it back. He waddled to their tent, looking back once over his shoulder.

Adam was about to interrupt them, but the Yorkshireman insisted on telling him about his haulage business, and then Neil was wiping a bug from Rose’s shoulder, or pretending to, the deviously tactile bastard. Now the woman was on to the Prime Minister, how he seemed a decent enough bloke but the rest of them were chancers, and Neil was laughing along with her, and, Adam asked himself, how serious was it likely to be, anyway?

Eventually the woman said good night and went to their tent, but the man hung on. Beyond his chatter (the virtues of corporal punishment), Adam caught Rose asking whether Neil had a girlfriend and Neil saying he wasn’t sure, he would know later that evening, a corny line that made her grin. Neil had beaten him, his clever little tricks had beaten him, and after all, Adam thought, this was what he wanted. He had done this to himself.

Adam finished his beer. The fire had nearly burned out, but when he stood and brushed the dust from his shorts he thought he could see that, though she wasn’t drinking anything, Rose was swallowing nervously, as daunted girls did when they had made their decision. Neil’s hand was on her knee.

The Yorkshireman was dozing off, his chin making futile anti-gravitational jerks from his chest. Adam saw the smile on his friend’s face. High-school sophomore… This wasn’t his business. When he opened his mouth, all that emerged was ‘Good night’. Rose reciprocated in a voice that tried to sound composed but came out too high. Neil lifted his hand from her leg and waved. Adam walked slowly to their tent.

For Adam that night would always be associated with itching, a fierce sensation he could almost feel if he inadvertently thought back to Yosemite. He was in the tent, in the no man’s land between waking and sleep, when he felt Neil’s hand on his shoulder.

‘Adam,’ Neil whispered. Then, louder, shaking him harder: ‘Mate, I need the tent.’

‘What?’

‘I need the tent.’

Adam tried to focus on the ghostly features before panning towards the tent flaps. Through the opening he distinguished the girl’s legs, standing in the moonlight, one of them rotating on a pointed sneaker.

He hesitated. The tent smelled of beer.

‘Neil,’ he began, ‘have you…’

‘Don’t worry,’ Neil told him. ‘Boy scout.’ He tightened his grip on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Adam, come on.’

Adam kneeled, bunched up his sleeping bag and crawled outside in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. Rose’s face as he passed her was open and eager, as if she had won her own dare. He saw her bend and enter the tent, and Neil following her in.

He should have taken himself further off, beneath the trees at the edge of the campsite or beside the expiring fire. Instead he dropped his sleeping bag a few metres from the tent, blearily considering that to be his assigned place in the world.

He was nearly close enough to touch them and thought he heard almost everything. They were whispering, and now and again he lost them, but even then he caught the rhythm and the gist. They bumped into and tripped over each other as they settled themselves inside. There was some strangerish apologising, followed by silence, from which Adam inferred that Neil had used the entanglement to kiss her.

Outside the night was cooler than the tent had been, but it was warm enough for Adam to spread out his sleeping bag and recline on top rather than zipping himself in. When he lay down, uncovered, he hadn’t reckoned on the midges, or whatever the insects were, some unsquashably tiny and incessant creatures that tormented his forearms and legs. When he moved to scratch or wave them away, the lining of his sleeping bag crackled, interfering with his eavesdropping and potentially alerting Neil and Rose. He lay as still and stoically as he could for as long as it lasted.

The tent was small (standard issue from the tour operator), and two or three times an elbow or other extremity stretched the fabric in a slapstick bulge. She was giggling, and Neil was shushing her, then he was giggling too. There was quiet, punctuated by rustling as clothes were shed. Neil whispered something that Adam couldn’t decipher and Rose replied inaudibly. A minute later he heard her say, ‘Sure’.

The itching was overwhelming but he didn’t move. He could hear Neil going through his bag, taking things out, putting them back. Neil swore. That’s it, Adam thought. But there was more whispering, and some panting, and it was on again.

‘That much?’ he heard Neil asking her. ‘How much?’

‘Sorry,’ Rose said.

‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Adam knew when it was over. He swatted helplessly at the midges and zipped up his sleeping bag. He felt a fuzzy, insomniac dread, like a person who suspects he has left the oven on (High school sophomore’s what I mean). Even so, his alarm was subordinate to another feeling: a new, disconcerting jealousy. He hadn’t expected to be beaten, he wasn’t accustomed to losing, but it wasn’t mainly that.

Adam was jealous of Rose. She had come between them. She had taken away his friend. The two of them were still in the tent together, whispering, when — just as he was sure he would never manage to — Adam fell into a brief, uncomfortable sleep.

Eric’s first instinct, his instant threat, was to call the police. They had been careless and unlucky. Rose stayed longer than she should have; she, then Neil, fell asleep. Her father woke as it started to get light, saw that she wasn’t with him and shuffled out to look for her. They heard him rummaging around the camp and she panicked, scrambled into her clothes and outside, and he caught her leaving the tent. His shouting roused Adam, along with most of the others.

‘Fifteen,’ Adam heard Eric yelling. ‘Did you know that, you asshole? Fifteen! I told you guys!’

‘Nearly sixteen,’ Rose said quietly.

‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘You just had your birthday. Jesus… And your mother!’

Neil was saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over. He was standing next to Rose in his boxer shorts, his legs pasty and thin, holding up his hands in a Don’t shoot! pose. At one point, apparently thinking of Eric’s friendliness and invitation, he added something about there having been a ‘misunderstanding’, but he quickly saw that straight apology was wiser. The hippies, two of the Germans and the gay couple were already there, hovering a few yards away, as if there were an invisible cordon holding them back.

‘Damn right you’re sorry,’ Eric said. ‘Don’t go anywhere, you asshole.’ He surveyed the other campers, as if to enlist them as sentries. ‘Where’s that fucking guide?’ He peered around for Trey. ‘Where’s the nearest phone? Jesus Christ, come here, honey.’

Eric seized Rose by a wrist and marched her away to the other side of the campsite. ‘What’s the matter with you, you asshole?’ he growled at Adam as they passed him. Adam heard Rose say ‘no’ repeatedly, her volume rising each time, the voice between a shriek and a plea, though he couldn’t make out what it was that she was rejecting — an imputation of duress, maybe, or a threat of disownment, or the call to the police.

The English couple arrived, the woman in an incongruous dressing gown, and they and the others spontaneously formed a loose, citizens’ semicircle around Neil, the tent hemming him in behind. Neil’s shoulders were slumped, his face bone white. He kept his eyes on the ground until, timidly, he looked up at Adam. After a few seconds Adam pushed between the Germans and joined him.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Neil nodded, smiling with his eyes.

Trey approached the tent as they were struggling into their clothes. In a hard, unfamiliar tone, he said, ‘He wants me to get the police. I mean, what the fuck, you guys? I don’t know about England, but in California you’re looking at two years in San Quentin. Jesus, this is the last thing…’

‘Is this what they teach you at Cambridge?’ the English woman said, as Trey stomped away. What? Adam thought. To her husband she said, loudly, ‘We thought they were such nice boys.’ The Yorkshireman tutted. I am a nice boy, Adam thought. I am.

The female hippy covered her eyes with a hand. The gay couple were staring, mouths open, intermittently shaking their heads. After a few, long minutes Neil said, ‘Look, I’m just stretching my legs, okay? Just over there, okay?’ Nobody stopped him. The athletic American crossed his arms imposingly on his chest but stood aside.

Adam found him leaning against a skinny tree. They were wearing their lookalike boots. Neil said, ‘Suppose I should have known.’

‘How should you?’

‘I don’t know. I just should have, to be honest. You know — her knickers.’

‘What’s wrong with her knickers?’

‘Nothing, they were just… I should have known.’

‘You know, I tried to…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

They were quiet for a moment. It was getting properly light. Adam scratched his leg.

‘You used something, right?’

Neil didn’t answer. He broke a twig from a low branch and bent it in his fist; it was too supple to snap and he threw it aside.

After a minute Adam said, ‘I guess the skiing’s off.’

‘Ad, don’t. Didn’t you hear what he said? About San wherever it was.’ Adam said nothing. ‘Who am I going to call?’

‘What?’

‘You get one call, don’t you? Or is that only on television?’

‘I don’t know,’ Adam said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

Neil pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and in a different voice, quieter but firmer, as if he had been rehearsing in his head, said, ‘It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? I mean, you wanted it too. You started it.’

Adam knew what he meant. The harmless competition, the innocent collusion, the rapt exclusion of other people’s feelings from their thoughts: all the ordinary elements of friendship that had brought them here. The words he had spoken about the girl, as well as the crucial ones he hadn’t. ‘What are you talking about?’ he replied.

They trudged back together. Flight would have been impractical, but, in any case, the idea never occurred to them — some ingrained deference to the law, and the paralysing numbness of their predicament. They stood in silence, anticipating the police, the handcuffs, Neil’s right to remain silent, Adam privately wondering whether he might be fingered as an accessory. Those two years in San Quentin.

Presently they heard raised voices at the edge of the campsite. They saw Eric gesturing at the two of them with a thumb. They saw Trey pat him on the shoulder and Eric brush off his hand. Trey walked over to them in what seemed like slow motion.

‘There’s a shuttle you can catch,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way, he tells me to hold it, now they… Just take the shuttle, there’s a bus to the city.’

‘But…’ Neil began.

‘He’s changed his mind. She must have persuaded him, how the hell should I know? Could be she told him nothing happened. Or he doesn’t want to put her through it. But he wants you out of here.’

‘Thanks,’ Adam said. ‘Really.’

Trey spat in the dirt. ‘Just get the fuck out of here, will you?’

Neil ducked into the tent to pack up his kit. Adam jogged over to the extinguished campfire, where Trey had half-arranged the breakfast things, to get some water for the journey. Three of the previous evening’s beer bottles sprawled in the ashes. He was dizzy with relief: no police, nothing to be an accessory to, the surreal peril lifting, nightmare-like, as suddenly as it had struck.

As he turned from the water cooler, Eric intercepted him. Adam looked over the broad shoulder for Neil, or for anyone. He shuffled sideways, but Eric blocked him off. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you little… It’s not for your sake, believe me… What kind of people are you?’

Not knowing what to say, Adam offered a tense smile.

‘You think this is funny?’ Eric said. ‘Big joke for you guys, isn’t it? My little girl… What did you do, make a bet or something?’

‘He said he was sorry,’ Adam managed. ‘We’re both very sorry.’

‘I want you to remember this,’ Eric said. ‘One day, you’ll have your own… You do your best, you think you’re doing right. I hope for your sake you never know how this feels.’

Eric half-turned to go, and Adam thought it was over, but he reconsidered and turned back. Briefly Adam feared Eric might punch or throttle him. ‘You know what,’ he said instead, ‘scratch that. I hope you find out exactly how this feels. I told you, you asshole. I fucking told you. I should never have let her stay up… I hope you do, and when that day comes you better remember me.’

At last he walked off, which at the time felt to Adam like a mercy, Eric’s one day being too remote and hypothetical to seem troubling.

Adam stuffed his kit into his rucksack, silently and fast, and they were almost out. At the very end, as they were heaving their bags onto their backs, Rose marched up to Neil, holding out a torn piece of paper on which she had scribbled her name and her parents’ address and phone number. She had changed into a T-shirt with a Charlie Brown motif; she inclined her face for him to kiss, her eyes red but no longer crying, chest heaving despite her visible efforts to pacify it.

Eric watched, now squatting on a tree trunk with his palms on his temples. He seemed somehow shrunken, like a terracotta statue of himself. He balled his hands into fists and let them hang beside his calves. Much later, Adam wondered whether, along with all the other emotions he must have experienced, Eric might have been proud of his daughter at that moment, as she strode across the campsite. Adam saw him avert his eyes as Neil raised a finger to Rose’s chin, gently tilted her face forward and kissed the crown of her head, like a blessing.

She controlled herself until he and Adam hurried away. As they left the campsite they heard a single sob, deeper and longer than her rollercoaster squeals at the lake. Turning back, inadvisably, as they went, Adam saw Rose sitting on her father’s knee, her face buried in his chest, his in her hair.

The odd thing was, or so it came to seem, that for all the blame they were to apportion, all the secrecy and forgiveness and revenge, they didn’t feel so very much at the time. Or perhaps it wasn’t odd, given how remorse can sometimes accumulate, the intimate sort especially; how events can take on a different complexion or valency the further they recede, or the more they seem to have happened to someone else; the more entangled they become, as Rose would, with other memories and resentments. They talked about the drama as they took that shuttle, they talked about her on the bus to San Francisco, Neil briefly studying her note in his lap, but scarcely at all as they delivered the pick-up to Portland (a long straight drive with no detours), where the grateful recipient, the man from San Diego’s older and calmer brother, took them out for a burger to thank them. This glossing-over was partly tact, and involved at least some shame, but also, that summer, a giddy, distracted sense of scale. They didn’t register the pivot in their lives, as you might notice a scratch without anticipating the infection.

They were both due to fly home from Los Angeles, and both with the same airline, but on different dates, so Neil called and changed his ticket. On the Greyhound to LA they made unwisely loud jokes about the consequences they might suffer if they ventured into the badlands at the rear of the bus. On the plane Neil fell asleep in the aisle seat with his head on Adam’s shoulder. Adam leaned across, reached into the luggage compartment for a blanket, and draped it over him.

Adam’s family was meeting him at the airport. He and Neil patted each other on the shoulder, and, after a moment, embraced. Even the hug felt easier and less compromising than what they wanted to say.

‘I’m sad,’ Adam finally managed.

‘So am I.’

Walking away through the terminal, Neil turned to see Adam being enfolded by a man with greying hair and posh-pink trousers, and a girl he presumed was Adam’s sister. He watched them for a few seconds before heading down into the Tube.