The Faithful Couple

1995

‘They should be in this afternoon.’ Neil leaned across the scratched countertop. ‘Can you come back for them? I don’t know — four-ish?’

‘Sorry,’ the young woman said. ‘Afternoon off today. Monday any good?’

‘Hope you’re doing something nice with it.’

The telephone rang in the back office. One rotary double-shriek, a second, and Brian’s muffled voice answered.

‘Such a lovely day,’ the woman said. ‘I might go up the reservoir.’

She leaned against the cash register, crossing her left leg over the standing right. Her cotton jacket rumpled open, disclosing a flash of shoulder and smooth armpit between the fabric and her sleeveless dress.

‘Neil!’ Brian called from the office.

‘All right for some,’ Neil said. ‘I won’t be here Monday, I’m afraid. Last day tomorrow.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘I could run them up to you, if you like. Might be heavy.’

The woman was a secretary at the chartered surveyors’ practice above the hi-fi shop, a business that in the past two years had been among Collins & Sons’ best customers.

‘Would you?’ She twisted a lock of hair around a finger.

‘Neil!’ Brian shouted. ‘For you!’

‘Sorry,’ Neil said. ‘Just a second, okay?’ He offered her a rueful, raised-eyebrow smile. ‘Who is it?’ he asked Brian as they crossed at the internal doorway.

‘No idea,’ Brian said, shaking his head. ‘Like a bunch of teenagers.’

Neil sat at the back office desk. A stationery supplier’s marketing calendar, illustrated with photos of envelopes in bundles and in-trays, or half-tucked into pockets, hung on the wall in front of him. Wrong month, wrong year.

‘Hello?’

‘This is the Metropolitan Police,’ the familiar voice said. ‘We’ve had a report of disorderly conduct at a pub in the Waterloo area. We would like to speak to you and an extremely handsome blond man.’

Leave the police out of it, Neil thought. But quickly he felt the reliable surge of adrenalin, the instant recharge: something to do with laughter — the muscle memory of old jokes and the anticipation of new ones — and an inchoate appreciation that this friendship was itself a kind of joke, a random jackpot.

‘Oh, hi,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

‘Don’t take that tone with me, young man,’ Adam said. ‘This is serious.’

Jokes and beaches and freedom, beamed instantaneously into the back office.

‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s just, you know, the only blond man I know doesn’t really fit your description. He’s sort of a runt, to be honest, posh as hell, you know, thinks he’s Lord Byron or something…’

‘That’ll do, Philly. I’m just checking, still on for Sunday, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah, great. I mean, if that’s still okay with you.’

‘Of course. I’m all yours, Claire’s finishing her dissertation.’

Towers of old catalogues sagged under and on top of the desk. The musty odour of decomposing paper mingled with the whiff of imperfect drainage from the water closet (chain-pull flush, grime-grooved soap). The desk, the filing cabinets and the museum-piece safe were smothered in luxuriant, Rembrandtesque dust; the entire room seemed not to have been cleaned since Neil revised for his exams there.

‘Great. After lunch?’

‘About three?’

‘Done. And, you know, thanks.’

‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

‘No, I mean, you know, the cheque.’

‘Forget it, Philly. It’s nothing.’

‘I’ve got most of it already, it’s just, I need to get a few things, and if I use the whole lot on the deposit I’ll —’

‘Listen, I’ve got a team meeting in a minute. I’ll see you Sunday, I’ve got the address.’

‘Roger that.’

Jokes and beaches and discretionary kindness. And trust. Neil hurried back into the shop, smiling privately.

Brian was sitting behind the counter, shoulders hunched, hands in his lap, thumbs twiddling. Alone.

‘She’s gone,’ he said, without looking up.

‘But she —’

‘They’re sending someone up before closing. Not her, not the woman. Office junior, she said.’

‘Right, but I was going —’

‘Neil,’ Brian said, still facing away. ‘Neil. I know you’re slinging your hook, but — don’t shit on your own doorstep.’

No one was watching him but Neil blushed anyway, cross and embarrassed at once. Sitting down at the other end of the counter he remembered how, when he was fifteen, he and an almost-forgotten friend had been chased off a bus by a posse of troublemakers, making it back to Neil’s house breathless and scared. ‘You should have smashed a bottle, you two should,’ Brian told them as they fumbled with the door chain. ‘You should have smashed it, held it up and said, “Who’s first?”’ The friend made screw-loose signs behind Brian’s back.

Don’t shit on your own doorstep: another glimpse of his father’s foreign prehistory, an obscure past that Neil knew he would never reconnoitre. He had certainly had his chance, two long years’ worth of chances, but the moment had never seemed right, he hadn’t known how to begin, and he had wasted them. They both had.

A customer came in, a man in an unseasonal mackintosh and old-timer’s Trilby. He scanned the printer inks, wrote something on a notepad and left without uttering a word, the bell on the door tinkling him in and out.

‘Time-waster,’ Brian said. ‘Price-checking, that’s all.’

Two years, give or take the few, scattered months of the short-term contracts Neil had managed to land elsewhere: telesales (insurance), market-research questionnaires (refrigerators). After a year he had written to the pharmaceutical company to ask for his pre-California job back, but his former boss had moved on and his successor said there were no vacancies. Finally Neil was leaving, to a media company near Tower Bridge and, with Adam’s help, to a rented bedsit in Burnt Oak.

‘And the parking charges,’ Brian added. ‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’

Neil and Dan had spent their school holidays stacking these shelves, taking apart and reconstructing stationery displays, their private, outsized Rubik’s cubes. They scribbled rude jokes about the customers; they slunk out to play the slot machine in the café two doors away. There was painful hilarity with bulldog clips. Their mother would make jam sandwiches for their lunch; afterwards they went up to the Wimpy for cardboard chips and synthetic milkshakes. One blissful morning they found a stash of pornographic magazines in a second-hand filing cabinet.

Neither Brian nor Neil ever expected him to be back. Collins & Sons, the shopfront read, but Brian hadn’t fathered any sons when the glass was etched, and, after they were born, he never anticipated that either of them would join him behind the counter when they grew up. He had been paying Neil fifty quid a week, which Neil knew he hadn’t earned, and moreover knew they couldn’t really afford on what the shop was taking.

They sat. Brian’s chair was caught in the rhombus of sunlight refracted by the shopfront. He dozed off in the warmth, chin on chest. He was fifty-nine, and in reasonable physical condition, apart from some routine spreading, some greying and thinning on top, and a neglectful attitude to ear and nasal hair. But he napped like an older man: a worn-out man, deep-down finished, obliterating his afternoons in miniature, reversible suicides.

The bell startled him awake. A man in shiny grey trousers and a blue shirt asked, ‘Fax paper?’ Neil began to rise, but Brian sat him down with an air-pat of his hand, creaking to his feet to show the customer to the shelf.

Almost two years — his two flatlining years since California — and, if Neil were honest with himself, nothing at all to show for them, not counting his friendship with Adam. Say what you like about Dan, down in Southampton with his child, its errant mother and his booze, at least he had escaped Collins & Sons. He hadn’t made it to Argentina or Australia but he had at least managed that.

‘Thanking you,’ Brian said, handing the customer his change. The man counted the coins and left.

In the beginning Neil had tried to persuade his father to rejig their displays. He wanted to put the biggest sellers near the door, with impulse buys, such as they were (staplers, hole punches, Sellotape dispensers), beside the cash till. Sell the customer what he wants to buy; don’t waste the customer’s time: he knew that much from the pharmaceuticals job. He would move the stock and the fittings himself, Neil had offered, he would see to it one evening after closing. All he needed was his father’s say-so. Brian didn’t see the point. The megastores had taken over, was his mantra, the high streets were just as screwed as manufacturing, but retail lacked the grandeur and the romance of industry, it missed the angry unions and the picturesque strikes, so you never saw it on the news.

A day and a half to go, Neil’s final shifts before his real life began, and still he glanced at the door every half a minute: in hope (of a break in the boredom, the joint loneliness), and pre-emptive distaste (the self-effacement that some customers expected, the impression of his own invisibility, and of his father’s, which they conveyed), and, since the robbery the previous autumn (the knife held to Brian’s ribs before he could reach the panic button), a cold undertow of fear. An hour before closing Brian took the cash and the cheques from the safe and totted them up on his antique calculator. He strangled the bills into hundred-pound bundles with grubby rubber bands, put the bundles and a deposit slip into a brown envelope and gave it to Neil to run up to the bank for the last time. Neil crammed the envelope into a trouser pocket and bolted for the door, the pavement, the sunshine.

At half-past five that afternoon Neil turned the sign on the door to Closed, stepped outside and pulled the grille halfway down the shopfront. The slot in the tessellated metal for their mail was temporarily suspended at eye level, looking to Neil like the peephole of a prison cell.

‘Just going to say hello to Bimal,’ he called out.

‘Right,’ Brian replied from the back office.

‘See you at home.’

‘Righto.’

Neil paused for a few seconds, Brian’s last ever chance to object. Nothing. The bell on the door rung him out.

Bimal was one of the very few local boys Neil had kept up with: hellos in the street when they were back from university, since then a few brisk drinks, at the most recent of which Bimal tried to recruit him to his pie-in-the-sky merchandising start-up. A plausible engagement, but in fact they weren’t meeting that evening. Instead Neil went to the video store, where he shuffled the cases in the New Releases rack and tried not to eye the Adult section too conspicuously. Next, the travel agent, where he flicked through brochures for cruises and Caribbean resorts that he confidently expected never to visit (Time-waster! the shopkeeper in his head reproached). Finally, after dawdling for long enough to evade his father, he crossed the road to the bus stop.

He couldn’t face the car journey. Somehow those fifteen extra minutes at the end of the day had become too much, obeying an alternative, decelerated timescale. In the shop they had designated roles, they were functional and blessedly interrupted. The silence in the car was heavier. Two or three times a week Neil would make his excuses and either walk or catch a bus. Nipping out to see Bimal. This needs to go in the last post. Got to see a man about a dog. If Brian saw through them, Neil hoped he would likewise see the whiteness of the lies.

Two years.

The bus from Wembley to Harrow was almost full. He found a place in the middle of the upstairs deck, next to a statuesque woman in a sari. She rotated her knees to usher him into the window seat. As the bus pulled away Neil bet himself that he could close his eyes for a minute and know precisely where he was on this overfamiliar route. He tried and failed.

Five schoolgirls clattered up the stairs, one of them shrieking when she was thrown against the plastic stairwell as the bus moved off, laughing as she recovered. The girls stood in the aisle, holding onto the upright railings and the backs of seats, a few rows in front of Neil’s.

Two black, two white, one Asian. Three of them had bunched and knotted their shirts around their midriffs, exposing the skin above their short skirts. They were taking turns to listen to a slug of pop on somebody’s Walkman, two at a time, a headphone apiece.

Sixteen, Neil estimated. They probably didn’t see him at all. He felt rebuked by their uniforms and looked out of the window, into the upper floors of the pebbledash suburban houses, at the branches and defaced trunks of the city trees. Blossom ran past his window in intermittent blizzards. Something about the girls had jarred, or chimed, one of them in particular, the nearest, standing with her back towards him. Her ponytail, or — no — the way she had raised a hand to balance on her friend’s shoulder, the other hand reaching behind her to bend her heel into a buttock. She jiggled on her standing leg, the unselfconscious gestures undermining her studiedly grown-up imprecations. The shape of her as she executed that stretch unsettled Neil. His eyes closed again.

He had scarcely been able to see her in the tent, and the visual impressions he retained from inside it were static and disordered, chiaroscuro snapshots of poles and canvas folds and unerotic body parts: her knitted brow, a shoulder, her elevated knees as she pedalled back into her giveaway knickers. His strongest tactile memory of that evening was from earlier, around the campfire. After he moved to sit beside her, when Adam and some of the others were still up, he had slipped his index finger underneath her sweater, surreptitiously touching her skin above the elastic of her shorts. She bridled, just for a second, as if he had administered a mild electric shock, then tried to relax, letting his hand stay where it was. That was when Neil knew: that she had chosen him, he had won, that she might be his.

He opened his eyes. The legs in the aisle began to recede; the girls swung themselves around the railing at the top of the stairs, practised and orderly as firemen, thudded down them and skipped off the bus. The doors emitted their steam-train hiss as they closed and the driver pulled away.

Neil rarely thought about the American girl. There was no particular reason to think about her, let alone the morning-after tears, his ten-minute dread of the thunderbolt disaster. Speaking to Adam today, and the prospect of seeing him at the weekend, must have prompted this association, Neil figured, though in fact they had never talked about her in London. Not once. As an anecdote she lacked a useful classification: the episode was neither salacious nor amusing, neither wittily self-deprecating nor aggrandising. Neil had slept with three other women since, and while those English liaisons were transient and awkward in their own ways (two of them had wanted more, the other time he had), none involved any taint or shame. There was nothing to say about that night, and after all California was their golden time, their creation story. A misunderstanding. Regrettable, but accidental. No one had done anything wrong.

Neil’s stop was approaching; he leaned across the woman in the sari and pressed the buzzer. But her voice, her pure middle-American accent, was still almost audible to him, as if she were talking to him as he disembarked the bus and turned the corner of his father’s street, only through a wall or from under water.

When the doorbell rang that Sunday Neil was standing on a chair in his bedroom, retrieving a photo album from the swamp of old comics and decomposing sticker collections on the top shelf.

‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘the door!’

The bell sounded again, an effortful rusty wheeze. Neil heard indistinct voices in the hallway. He dropped off the chair and jogged down the stairs.

‘How do you do?’ Adam was saying.

‘Come in,’ Brian said. ‘Come through.’ He ushered Adam inside, flourishing his whole arm, almost bowing.

Neil caught up with them in the lounge, made to embrace his friend, but checked himself. Too intimate, somehow, in front of his father. ‘Hello,’ he said, more coldly than he meant to.

‘Hi, Neil,’ Adam said. He smiled. It’s okay, the smile seemed to Neil to say. Show me all of it. Adam had never been out to Harrow before; Neil had invited him once or twice, but half-heartedly. On Adam’s mental map this whole suburban ring, with its low-rise shopping arcades and identikit semis — the doughnut of London between the green belt and the costume-drama core — was still marked There Be Monsters.

‘This is Adam,’ Neil told Brian. ‘He’s —’

‘Yes, I know, I know, the chap from America,’ Brian said. Neil had never heard his father use the word ‘chap’ before.

They stood in the middle of the room. ‘Very nice house you have,’ Adam offered.

‘Have a seat,’ Brian said, indicating the armchair that faced the television. He retreated to the mantelpiece, resting his elbow in front of the urn.

‘Well, then,’ Brian said, looking out between the net curtains and into the driveway. ‘Come far?’

‘Maida Vale.’

‘Very nice,’ Brian said.

Twenty seconds, then Adam asked, ‘I’ve got the car, shall we…?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘Come on. Come upstairs.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Brian said.

They escaped to Neil’s room. ‘Let’s do the big one first,’ Adam suggested. He bent to pick up the box.

‘I’ll take that end,’ Neil said. ‘I know where we’re going.’ The base bulged and threatened to split. ‘Put your hands underneath. No, both of them.’

‘Okay,’ Adam said. ‘Fuck, Philly, okay.’

Neil backed out of his room and reverse-pivoted to the stairs. ‘Watch it here, it’s slippery.’

The carpet was frayed almost to nothing on the lip of the top step, a few tenacious strands of fabric stretched across the rounded edge like a bald man’s comb-over. Theirs was a womanless house: cleanish but neglected, the decor untouched since before Mrs Thatcher got in, a place of prepackaged meals rather than ingredients, brown processed food that Neil and Brian heated in the microwave and ate in front of the television, all the talking in the room done on the screen.

‘Careful,’ Brian said from the bottom of the stairs, almost too softly for them to hear. He stood by the front door, a one-man honour guard, as they edged through and deposited the box on the crazy paving in the driveway. Adam opened the boot of the car, rearranged his parents’ wellies and his father’s golf umbrella, and they loaded the box in.

‘Tea?’

‘Very kind of you, Mr Collins…’

‘Dad, we’ve got to get on with it.’

In the bedroom Adam lifted a stereo speaker. ‘Load me up, will you?’ he said to Neil, rolling his eyes towards the speaker’s twin.

‘I’ll take that one, you’ll never manage both.’

‘How much do you want to bet? Million quid?’

Neil watched his friend descend the stairs, the solid physicality of him and the bone-deep confidence. He made it.

‘I had a lady friend down there once,’ Brian said as Adam negotiated the front door, catching his knuckles on the frame. ‘Maida Vale, you know. Not far from the canal, Harrow Road side. Long time ago now, that was.’

Brian had never mentioned this woman to Neil before. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to get on, okay? It’s two trips anyway.’

‘Righto,’ Brian said, flapping his hand in a surrendering farewell.

They laid the speakers, a suitcase and a cork pinboard across the seats and got in. Adam nudged the car out of the driveway and into the road. ‘You’ll have to direct me,’ he said.

‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘No, I mean left — left here, then left again. That’s it, up to the roundabout.’ They passed a launderette, a bookie, a chippy, an Indian takeaway. A hairdresser’s and an optician’s. ‘When are you off?’

‘Wednesday. We’re all flying out together, with the cameramen and the sound guys. I’ve got to help them lug the kit.’ This would be Adam’s first location shoot: holidaymakers in Tenerife.

‘So how are they? The reps and what have you. Your contacts. All lined up?’

‘They’re sorted, I think. There’s this one guy, Gavin, he runs a bar, he’s been very helpful. It’s kind of popular sociology, you know, the country seeing itself in the mirror. That’s what Jim says.’

‘Jim? Right at the lights.’

Adam spoke about his television career with a confidence that, to Neil, hinted at some plan or agreement for his advancement that he was sadly not at liberty to disclose. A confidence that was apparently justified: after a few purgatorial months at his first job, at an unglamorous firm that made training videos, he had moved to a cutting-edge production company. Adam seemed to Neil to be carried aloft by invisible hands, like a stage-diver conveyed to safety by a well-wishing crowd.

‘Jim the executive producer. Anyway — did I tell you? — Claire might come out for a few days, if the production manager lets us. Bit of a witch.’

‘Jesus, and you’re supposed to be her boyfriend.’

‘No, I meant the production man — Fuck off.’

‘Pull up on the right. I haven’t even met her yet.’

‘When I get back. You can be my character witness.’

‘Yeah, here, that’s fine. What’s my commission?’

‘You can have her sister.’

‘Does she have a sister?’

‘No.’

They drew in alongside a brown, grimly functional modern building. There was a convenience shop on the ground floor and cage-like fortifications on the upper windows, as if the inhabitants were expecting a siege. Neil’s immediate neighbours were a pawnbroker and a Bengali women’s association. He descended a set of switchback metal steps beneath the shopfront; Adam followed, at the bottom stepping over the newspapers, chip wrappers and Fanta cans that Neil had kicked into the well of the basement. Inside he had a single room, with a cupboard kitchen and a bathless bathroom. There was an acrid smell of damp. The furnishings comprised a penitentially narrow bed, a single plastic chair and a washing-up tub in the sink.

‘It’s great, Philly,’ Adam said.

‘It’s a shit-hole,’ Neil said. ‘And you know it.’

‘Come on, I think it’s terrific,’ Adam insisted. ‘You’ll never have to say “Your place or my dad’s?” to another girl.’

‘Oh fuck off,’ Neil said, gently punching his shoulder. He opened the only window. ‘Thanks again. I mean it.’

‘No problem,’ Adam said. ‘Really. I’ve got the car for a fortnight, they’re out in Perpignan.’

‘No, I mean the deposit. I’ll pay you back. With interest.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

There was no escape from money in London, they were discovering, from its double magnetism, which drew the well-off together and drove them and the struggling apart. In the flat Adam shared with Chaz and Archie there were double beds all round, a whirlpool bath and a sun-trap roof terrace; two of them, Adam and Archie, had moved in before their first pay-check. Neil had been out with them all, once, but the graft hadn’t taken.

‘I mean it, Ad. Few months and I’ll have it.’

‘Pay me back when you make your first million.’ They both laughed. ‘You start next week, right? Break a leg.’

They carried the cargo down the stairs. Neil stood the pinboard, an improvised photo display, against the wall opposite the stair-obstructed window, in the basement’s lone oblong of natural light. Neil and Dan when they were teenagers, wearing shades and gurning. The two of them, younger, with their mother on a pebbly beach, Neil turning his face from the camera and up towards hers. A picture of Neil and Adam at the motel in Los Angeles, another of them fooling around beneath the Faithful Couple, the lip of a path running in front of the double trunk, a backdrop of lush foliage, their two conjoined figures at the base, someone else’s bare arm intruding at the frame’s left edge. Adam had made copies for Neil after they came home.

For a moment they stood in the basement, looking at the photos together in silence. Then they bounded up the stairs, instinctively racing.

‘Well,’ Neil said on the pavement, ‘I’ll miss you while you’re over there.’

‘Stay alive,’ Adam said hammily. ‘I will find you.’

There wasn’t much more to fetch: the fat body of the stereo and its black tendrils; half a dozen hangers’ worth of shirts; the tubular segments and disc-shaped base of a floor lamp; some linen; a box of plastic ornaments that Neil had collected as a child, his boyhood’s special things, some of them, Adam noticed, old promotional freebies from cereal packets.

Adam loitered in the lounge while Neil gathered his kit. A couple of china figurines sat on the mantelpiece, above them a framed floral print that his mother would without question have described as ‘ghastly’. The urn. He tiptoed across to examine it.

The previous autumn, after they had been to a film at Marble Arch, Adam had reminisced about going to the cinema with his mother when he was very young. About how, in the intermissions between the features, she would give him and Harriet money for popcorn or a lolly (never both), sending them up to the usherette to buy their treats, the two of them waving back at her from the queue, considering this the most thrillingly grown-up privilege in the world. Adam had begun an edited account of his mother’s life: her grandfather the judge, the much-mythologised spell in Tangiers before she married, her kooky taste in jewellery, how much he loved her cooking. Standing in front of the mantelpiece in Harrow, he remembered how he had stopped himself that afternoon, and clumsily apologised.

Neil came back down the stairs. Adam said, ‘Don’t you want to…?’

‘He’s asleep. I’ll call him later.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

Neil closed the front door, depressing the latch with his finger to minimise the click, leaving almost silently, as if from a dormitory, or a wake.

At the second set of traffic lights a hunched old woman crossed the road in front of them, dragging a rectangular shopping trolley. Adam said, ‘At your house… at your dad’s place. You know, on your mantelpiece…?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘I don’t know what it is really. He can’t decide what to do with her, or can’t bring himself to, maybe. Wouldn’t happen if Mum was here!’

He gave a short choke of a laugh, louder and fiercer than his silent, grimacing, true laugh. He told Adam about the night, after his A-levels, when he freaked out some friends by tipping ash from their spliff into the urn, stoned homage disguised as bravado. Even then they hadn’t asked about her, Neil said, just averted their eyes in silence.

‘Do you cry when you think about it?’

‘You mean, did I cry then?’

‘No, I mean do you cry when you think about it now?’

Neil paused. ‘To be honest, I don’t. Cry, I mean.’

‘Never?’

‘I can’t remember the last time I cried. When I nearly do, you know, when I feel like it, the ducts or whatever gearing up, it’s always for some silly reason, over nothing, that bloke who fell over at the Olympics or something. Why, do you?’

‘Cry? Sometimes. Not that I’ve… I’ve been lucky, you know.’

They were quiet for a minute, but comfortably. The silence had a new timbre that they both heard, an ease that felt like an accomplishment.

‘Your father,’ Adam finally said. ‘Your dad. He isn’t… He wasn’t how I expected. You’re always so, I don’t know, down on him. He was really try —’

‘It was different,’ Neil said. ‘He was. You being there, it was easier.’

‘It’s just, the way you talk about them — your brother, too.’ Adam reflexively compared Neil’s father with his own, Jeremy, a man who always let him feel that all manner of things would be well — not just that they would be, in fact, but that they were already well, could never be otherwise, and that Adam’s role was simply to perpetuate and ramify the wellness he inherited. ‘It’s not what I’m used to, that’s all.’

‘You don’t have to live with him.’

‘Neither do you.’

‘No!’ Neil exclaimed. ‘Fuck.’

‘Take it easy, you can always move back.’

‘No, you idiot, we’ve gone the wrong way.’

Adam turned into a driveway and began to reverse out again, but stopped. The shirts were hanging from a strap above the rear passenger-side window, blocking his view of the traffic. Neil leaned between the seats and tried to pin them behind the stereo, but they escaped. He thrust himself backwards, clasping a headrest with one hand and reaching for the shirts with the other.

‘How’s that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘No, go on,’ Neil said. ‘I’ll call you out.’

Looking sideways Adam saw the pale, hairy calf below the hem of Neil’s jeans, an obscurely improper glimpse of skin that was ordinarily concealed. He gently tugged the trousers towards his friend’s ankles. Little by little, Neil was uncovering: his father (Adam picked up a dim genetic echo between their gummy Collins smiles), his brother and his mother. Those photos of them on the pinboard, alongside Los Angeles, the Faithful Couple.

‘Adam?’

He put the car into reverse.

‘Gavin?’

‘Que?’

‘Señor Gavin?’

‘Non.’

Adam flew to Tenerife three days after he helped Neil move. He found the place on his second afternoon. The grille was down, the pavement outside less carpeted by broken glass than were the stretches on either side. Eventually he roused a defeated-looking Spanish caretaker, who trudged round from the back of the bar carrying a mop.

‘Look, just let me…’ Adam tried to edge past the caretaker to find the rear entrance. The man blocked him off.

‘Close. No Gavin.’

‘There is, I’ve spoken… I know there is.’ He tried to steer the man out of his way, hands on shoulders, gently, he intended.

‘You fuck!’ the caretaker shouted.

‘Take it —’

‘Fuck!’

The caretaker’s spittle landed on Adam’s cheek, followed by the damp strings of his mop. Adam’s sunglasses flew into the gutter.

The main drag felt like the aftermath of a festive war, with a left-over stench of sun cream, cheap rum, deep-fat fryers and vomit. He asked at six or seven other nightspots, but the only person who admitted to knowing Gavin tried to hit him up for a debt. ‘These kids,’ the Mancunian who called himself Gavin had said to Adam, ‘they show up for work drunk, or they don’t show up at all, you give ’em the push and they expect you to hire them back the next day. And you do. You fucking do!’

On the phone this person had promised Adam unfettered access to his customers, dancefloor and erratic seasonal staff. Adam had promised all these things to Natasha, the producer.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Natasha said at the villa when he told her what had happened.

‘It’s not my —’

‘No filming, Adam. No fucking filming until you bring me a story.’

The other researcher, Will, pushed his black-rimmed glasses up his nose and smiled. This wasn’t what Adam had expected.

Adam was afraid of Natasha, because everybody seemed to be. The origins of this general fear were obscure to him, lost in the company’s sedimented prehistory, a dark chronicle of shaggings and sackings and atavistic rivalries. In London she was one of the aloof, spiky-haired women who rode their chairs around the office like chariots, to gossip, but not with him. The real, make-or-break action always seemed to Adam to be elsewhere: in the smoking room, in the lift he had just missed, at the drinks he found out about afterwards, now on the shoots from which he was disbarred.

He chased up the other holiday reps and nightclub entrepreneurs he had contacted in London. He stalked new subjects around their pools and on the fag-ash beaches during the afternoons. He had anticipated some fly-on-the-wall gravitas amid the levity: broken dreams or relationships, working-class poetics, hypocritical euroscepticism. But when he mentioned these ideas to Natasha she called him a ‘pointy head’ and pinched his cheek, slightly too hard. She, Will and the others seemed to Adam to be cultivating a coercive unseriousness, as if there were nothing left in the world for anyone to be serious about. They all went up at the end of their sentences, like characters in an Australian soap opera; in Will’s case the unenquiring interrogatory was complemented by a meaningless arch irony, ersatz rather than genuine, since it concealed and implied nothing.

The worst night came when Adam forgot to ask two podium dancers from Huddersfield to sign the release form while they were sober, an oversight he could not adequately explain to Natasha or to himself.

‘Unfuckingbelievable,’ Natasha said.

Will said, ‘I’m sure you’ll crack it next time, sport?’

All Will’s remarks came enclosed in invisible quotation marks, intoned like jokes without punchlines. He pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled.

In the end Adam found a rhythm, working most of the night, knocking off for a drink at five in the morning, sleeping until the dry heat woke him at lunchtime. He never honed Will’s knack of enlisting and coaxing the super-exhibitionists — he suspected Will might be paying them — but he had a good eye for montages and a fine ear for the voiceover script. He puffed the communal hash that the sound man had smuggled inside a pot of Marmite, but was agape at the flagrant adulteries of the production manager and one of the cameramen, with each other and later with assorted tourists. With his hard-wired manners and bedrock obedience, Adam was too well brought-up for all that. He began to worry that he was too well brought-up.

The work was titillating at first, of course it was. Still, after a few weeks the dancefloor flashers, copulators in DJs’ booths, mega-binge drinkers and doggy-style simulators became routine, then nauseating, as depredations tend to.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Adam said to Will by the pool. ‘They never come and find us the next day and ask to be cut out. The puking or fighting or whatever.’

‘That’s why they do it?’ Will said. ‘It’s for the cameras, isn’t it? It’s not in spite of them?’

‘Audiences,’ Neil had said to Adam on their return trip to the bedsit. ‘That’s your product, isn’t it? Got to give them what they want.’

They were both right, Adam saw. Televised scrutiny of ordinary people revealed that what ordinary people wanted was to be on television. The feeling was mutual, he was realising: anyone would do, in the new, cut-price, live-and-watch-die economy of scandal, so long as they were shameless or outrageous enough, and so long as it was someone else.

The main trouble with Will was that only one of him and Adam was sure to be kept on when their training contracts expired. ‘It’s a pyramid,’ Natasha explained to him one morning at dawn. ‘Lots of grunts at the bottom, a few fuckers at the top. Lots of dying along the way.’ Adam hoped he had done enough — and anyway it was all worth it, they said to each other afterwards, for the four days of Claire’s visit. She came out on one of the cheapo flights, among the early-doors drinkers and aghast middle-aged holidaymakers rapidly realising their mistake. She and Adam sniffed amyl nitrate in a bar near the one that wasn’t Gavin’s; they had well-acquainted but still urgent sex, the carnal heyday between courtesy and habit, hoping that no one in the villa overheard. She let him feel like a prince, the dauphin he had grown up believing himself to be, with a skill and alacrity that almost troubled him.

On her last morning her head was on his chest, her hair obscuring her face, when he heard it say, ‘I love you. I love you, Adam Tayler.’

He heard himself say, ‘I love you, too.’

Neil left his glass on the table and crossed the room to the payphone outside the gents. The twin aromas of piss and lemony urinal cubes leached under the door, mingling with the fug of cigarette smoke. He lifted the receiver and dialled: the call to the no-show that was the only, futile remedy of the stood-up. You could be lost for an evening, or, almost as easily, you could be lost for ever. Your friendship, your past, could be finished if you chose — as most of Neil’s prior friendships were, thinning back to mere acquaintance en route to total severance. His and Adam’s could have ended at the airport, if one of them had wanted it to.

The ten-pence piece hovered over the slot; Neil put a finger in his free ear to block the music. Just as the impatient beeps cut in, they arrived.

‘Sorry, Philly,’ Adam said. He had flown back from Tenerife at the weekend. ‘Tube’s buggered.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘How do you do?’ She had thick Iberian hair, English-rose skin, full breasts inside her angora turtleneck.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ they both said. ‘What can I get you?’ Neil added. He went to the bar for drinks: pints of lager for Adam and him, some syrupy alcopop confection for her that he pincered between the taller glasses.

‘Sixteenth-century engravings,’ Claire explained, when he asked about her dissertation. ‘Mostly German and Dutch. You know, Dürer and that lot. It was fifteen thousand words, agony. I’m waiting to hear.’

Adam kept his eyes on her, Neil noticed, grinning vapidly, like a figure-skater or a game-show host. This was more than he had anticipated, Neil saw. He felt belatedly nervous.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That lot.’

‘I think it’s such a fascinating moment,’ Claire persisted. ‘You know, when art becomes commodified. They’re so beautiful, but, you know, capitalism is taking over.’

I think, sang the stereo, I’m gonna take me away and hide

Adam was beaming.

I’m thinking of things that I just can’t abide

Neil pictured Claire growing up on one of London’s plusher edges (Surrey, possibly Berkshire), a father in a blazer, a mother in a twinset, a sailing boat moored at a marina on the south coast, someone’s chalet in the Alps. He pegged her as the sort of girl he and his former friends had encountered on sorties to the West End, posh girls from private schools whom they had coveted in vain. He invented her, in the usual way, the misconceptions persisting in his brain, like libels in the ether, even after he knew them to be untrue. At the same time he saw himself through her invented gaze. He was ashamed of his jumper, his shoes, the two years with his father. He was ashamed of his new job, which, he knew, would seem grubby and meaningless to her. He was ashamed of his shame, the whole exhausting rigmarole of failure.

‘That’s capitalism for you,’ Neil said. ‘Can’t mind its own business, can it?’

Straight away he wanted to take it back. At the same time he wanted to scream, I voted Conservative, I voted for Major. What are you really going to do?

Claire laughed nervously. Adam did a thing with his jaw, a kind of foodless, one-side-of-the-face grinding, which Neil had learned to recognise as a sign of irritation. The worst thing was that he was entirely himself with her.

Neil made an effort. ‘So how was the island?’

‘There were some lovely parts,’ Claire said. ‘Fishing villages, you know, mountains, volcanoes, when you got away from Playa. Have you ever been?’

‘No.’

She had a way of smiling — eyes widened, head slightly projected — that to Neil suggested some unmet expectation, a graceful disappointment, as if she had offered him a hint or cue that he had failed to take.

‘I didn’t see much of them myself,’ Adam said. ‘I was up all night most of the time — you know, filming in nightclubs, sometimes the hospital, you wouldn’t believe —’

‘All that sociology, I remember,’ Neil interrupted. ‘The country in the mirror and all that.’ Again the instant regret.

‘The next project should be more serious,’ Adam said. ‘They’re talking about Yugoslavia.’

Neil saw her squeeze Adam’s knee under the table. He wondered how his friend would have briefed her about him. He wondered what they would say about him later. He isn’t normally like that… No, he was sweet. The private lights-out communion. She would be in his life now, too.

He tried again, and for a while he kept it up. He talked to her about auction houses, the prospect of her working in one. Remote, Claire said. Near their table a group of patently underage boys were playing a quiz machine, one double the others’ size, like a bullock reared on superstrength hormones.

When she went to the ladies, Neil asked, ‘So what’s she like?’

‘What do you mean?’ Adam said. ‘You can see what she’s like.’

‘No, I mean… You know what I mean, Ads.’

‘Come on, Neil. Not here.’

‘Out of ten?’

‘Don’t. She’s coming back. She’ll be back any minute. I said, don’t.’

‘Fine, but we’ve always —’

‘Don’t.’

Adam felt betrayed. He wanted his friend to endorse his choice of Claire, but he also needed Neil to vindicate her choice of him. Neil was supposed to make him seem popular and dependable, and he was flunking. At the same time he had a vague sense that Neil was entitled to his sabotage, that he should submit himself to it.

Claire tussled Adam’s hair as she slid in next to him. ‘So how’s it going?’ Adam asked. ‘The job.’

‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘Better than the shop, anyway.’

‘Claire, it’s — how would you describe it again?’

‘Media sales. Magazine publisher near Tower Bridge. Ad sales, you know. It’s a pretty cut-throat industry — the pay’s almost all commission, and the management keep raising the thresholds, you know, for the incentive scheme.’

Politely Claire asked, ‘What are your colleagues like?’

‘Well,’ Neil said, ‘to give you an idea, they’ve got this thing called the animal — it’s an ugly old cuddly toy, like a Muppet or something, totally filthy — and if you sell more space than anyone else that week you keep it on your desk till the Friday after. Everyone has to make gorilla noises when they pass you.’

Adam laughed. ‘What happened with that business thing, Philly? What was his name? Your friend.’

‘Bimal.’

‘Philly?’

‘Collins,’ Neil said, though it was a shame, almost, to let her in on it, the nickname bond, the quiddity of him and them, a pledge masquerading as humour.

‘Of course, Bimal. Have you decided?’

‘Turned him down,’ Neil said. ‘It’s a nice idea but I can’t see it working.’

Adam went to the bar. Just for a moment Neil thought there was a silent, eye-contact flicker between Claire and him, a fleeting sense of a bifurcating possibility, like those he thought he shared now and again with strangers coming down the escalators on the Tube as he rode up them. He noticed her belt, a wide leather strap with a fat metal buckle, an accessory that to him implied both chastity and availability. Valuable, locked — but look, here’s a way to open me. Probably he had imagined it, or it was a tease, part of some game with Adam or with herself in which he was only symbolically involved. They swapped mildly embarrassing anecdotes about Adam to fill the time — his lucklessness at the dog track in Walthamstow, his fondness for Dallas reruns — demonstrating their closeness to him by their licence to belittle him.

Adam distributed the drinks. ‘Did I tell you we’re going down for the weekend?’

‘What are we doing?’

‘What? No, not… I mean, Claire and me. To my parents’. I’m, you know, introducing them. Da na na naahhh’ — the cliffhanger opening of Beethoven’s fifth.

‘Congratulations,’ Neil said, turning towards the bar.

He had been to the house in Somerset, once, the previous summer. It was most of what he expected, a converted farmhouse with a dry stone wall, but the rest of the family had been away. The revered father in pink trousers whom he had glimpsed at the airport, the doting mother, the blond sister… Adam’s inaccessible past. Whenever Adam mentioned his childhood, his pets, his sister falling into fish ponds, their ice-cream calamities, sacrilegious outbursts at Midnight Mass — memories that, for him, seemed too abundant to cherish — Neil had an urge to tamper the records, doctor the photos, insert himself, somehow, into the Tayler mythology, a sort of reverse Stalinism, adding rather than subtracting.

‘Separate bedrooms,’ Claire said.

‘Naturally,’ Adam said. ‘Very proper.’

She had a slow, precious way of drinking, Neil noticed, tiny sips like a monarch wary of poisoning.

‘Harriet’s going to be down,’ Adam went on. ‘She’ll probably do her possessive act, you know, sitting on my lap, making me sing our special song from Lady and the Tramp.’ Neil had slept in Harriet’s room, under a quilt with her name stitched into it, her adolescent pin-ups still fixed to the pastel walls.

‘Don’t be such a bully,’ Claire said, slapping Adam’s forearm.

Their basic imbalance wasn’t money or jobs but people. Chaz and Archie and Claire and his eternal happy family: Adam had back-up. Neil had Brian, and Dan, who had visited only a handful of times since California. Once he came alone, went out for the evening with some mates who hadn’t left the neighbourhood, and rolled home late and drunk, rattling around the kitchen and slurping water straight from the tap as if he were seventeen again. Twice he brought his child with him (never its mother); on the first occasion Neil had cradled it, feeling more than he anticipated, the baby somehow seeming a time-travel charm through which they could all go back and try again. Then the child had shat, the force of the excretion blasting the helpless body off his lap, and he passed it back.

‘Another?’ Adam said.

‘School night,’ Neil said.

A number for Dan was scribbled on a Post-it note on the fridge, but the brothers hardly ever spoke — no ill-will or diagnosable bad blood, a drift more than a rupture, but nearing the point at which awkwardness and pride would turn one into the other. In Dan, mighty Dan, Neil saw an image of what he could have become, with some bad luck and worse decisions, and could still. The fragility of life without a safety net.

Claire rescued them at the end: ‘Adam showed me your photos. You know, from America. Pretty wild by the look of things. That one of you two on the bed. Where was that again, San Francisco?’

‘Las Vegas,’ Adam said.

Not Las Vegas… Neil caught his eye and Adam turned away. Look at her and we can keep it going.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Adam continued. ‘There was this croupier, Neil got talking to her. What was her name again? Daisy? She took that photo in our room.’

‘Or was it her friend?’ Neil said.

‘No, I’ve got it now, it was that bounty-hunter guy, you remember?’

‘You boys,’ Claire said. ‘You boys.’

Adam didn’t tell Neil about Gavin’s disappearance or his mishap with the consent form. That wasn’t his role in their double act, he reflected in bed that night, Claire flushed and clammy beside him, gangsta rap and sporadic laughter emanating from the sitting room. He couldn’t. Nor had he mentioned another event in Tenerife that, in a way, had distressed him more. It was a small thing, and he couldn’t explain quite why it was so preoccupying. No one else in the team was likely to remember it, Adam suspected, or not for long. These things happened, they would think, you had a laugh and a joke about them and then you forgot them. No big deal. No harm done.

He and a cameraman had gone to the beach to film some general views, pictures that would be spread across the series, helping to segue between storylines. The cameraman had panned across the black, volcanic sand, scouting for volleyball games and cavorting beauties, and doubletaked back again. He locked onto something in the middle distance that Adam couldn’t decipher without magnification, under or near a clump of yellow sun umbrellas.

‘Take a look,’ the cameraman said to him, grinning. When Adam bent his eye to the viewfinder he saw a couple locked together beneath a beach towel, unmistakably fucking.

They carried on filming, even though they knew the footage would never be used. At least, it couldn’t be broadcast. It could be used, and it was used that evening, before they went out for their night’s work, to entertain the team at the villa. You could see the two bodies much more clearly on the villa’s television; everyone gathered round to score the performances for style, stamina, physique. The producer of the week, a Scot named Alex, supplied a deadpan commentary, as if this were a horse race or a boxing match (‘… and they’re into the final furlong…’). The girl was mostly covered by the man’s torso and the towel, apart from her legs, which stuck up and out like a crab’s. Every thirty seconds or so she seemed to have a dim access of shame, trying with one hand to wrap the towel around her legs, the palm of her other hand flat on the man’s back, but the material wouldn’t stretch. On the screen her face was well-defined, but still it was hard to tell whether her slack-jawed expression implied pleasure, pain or simply far-gone inebriation.

What you could see for certain was that she was young, most likely in her late teens. After a while Adam couldn’t watch. He looked down at the terracotta tiles on the villa’s floor. He scratched his left forearm with the nails of his right hand.

Adam wanted to discuss that girl with Neil, but somehow he never found the right moment. Claire had been there that evening and he didn’t want his girlfriend to know about her, not yet, and after all there was no harm done, and probably he had left it too long. Neil might not want to be reminded of her, and anyway they were never going to see her again. Adam considered that to be important, then, actions and their invisible consequences not altogether counting, he assumed, nor liable to rebound, if the counterparties were out of sight, finished and lost for ever.

It was less than a lie, he told himself. It was an omission, a nothing about nothing, the square root of nothing.

Major? High school’s what I mean.