The Faithful Couple

1999

Later Neil liked to think he had sensed Farid would be a force in his life, as he was sure he knew in the hostel yard that Adam was to be. In truth his first reaction to the man was disappointment. He came out of the sarcophagal lift — cramped, slow and clad in distressingly frank mirrors, which emphasised his vampiric hairline — expecting to find a twitchy entourage, a wall of blinking data screens, the electric aura of redemptive wealth. Balding, diminutive, only modestly overweight, Farid was sitting alone at a fake-mahogany dining table, bare besides his coffee. No water, no biscuits. The venue was a rented apartment: Neil spotted a kitchen counter through one of the internal doors before Strahan quietly closed it. Farid gestured for the three of them to sit opposite him, the glare from the window at his back and in their eyes. Strahan watched from an armchair set back against the wall.

Bimal introduced Neil as an award-winning salesman (that weekend in Brighton with his dad), Jess as a designer who had worked on projects across the country (her A-levels in Hull). The executive team was supported, he said, by a panel of advisers boasting decades of experience in retail (Neil’s father) and utilities (Bimal’s).

In his head Neil ran through the pitching guidelines he had refined during his eight months with HappyFamilies. Sit, don’t stand. Keep your hands together so they don’t shake, or under the table and out of sight. Address the investor only, never speak to your colleagues, which would imply that you need back-up, and so are either weak or lying.

Look at him and we can keep it going.

After Bimal handed over, Neil raced through the requisite jargon (digital disruption, value chains), the plucked-from-thin-air projections (conversion rates, average spends), before framing the main proposal:

‘We’re a small company right now. We know that. You know that. But we are confident that we will soon be an extremely profitable company. And you — at this exciting pre-revenue stage, you can acquire thirty per cent of our company for less than a million pounds.’

Neil tried to convey urgency without desperation. HappyFamilies was seeking only the right kind of investor; they wanted Farid as much for his experience as for his money, though in fact they had no idea where Farid’s experience lay and preferred not to. When Neil finished, after a sod’s-law struggle to power up her laptop, Jess displayed a dummy version of their homepage and their hypothetical products, the families emblazoned on them immortally healthy and beautiful.

Ecstatic young mothers and their pukeless infants. A beaming middle-aged father with his teenaged daughter.

Farid sipped his coffee and regarded the table top. He wrote something down on a very small notepad, afterwards appearing to cross the jotting out. He gazed out of the window. For an infinite minute there was silence, except for the lawnmower buzz of traffic on the Edgware Road.

Bimal was about to speak but Neil cast out an arm to stop him. Submission was part of the exchange, he knew. You had to let the customer inconvenience or insult you if they felt like it. That much he had learned during his involuntary years in the shop.

In the pause Neil noticed a trio of family photos on an otherwise empty bookshelf. Wife, he presumed, though perhaps he shouldn’t; a younger and (surprisingly) fatter Farid crowded with children, two pretty girls and a younger boy; a pair of impeccably kempt toddlers who might be grandchildren.

Farid looked up. ‘Don’t sell me your company,’ he said. ‘Not one customer is buying your company, Happy whatever it is. Sell me your products. Why should I buy these trinkets?’

The accent seemed not to belong in nature, Arabic with a trace of Levantine French, coarsened by what sounded like a Slavic rasp. Beneath the paunch and his distraction Farid gave out the occasional hint of what must have made him rich in the first place, a fecund compound of rashness and caution, enthusiasm and cynicism. You glimpsed it for a second before the mask came down again.

Sell the customer what he wants to buy. Neil harvested saliva from his cheeks to lubricate his tongue. He swallowed. ‘We are selling,’ he gambled, ‘new ways to tell your family that you love them. And to tell yourself that you love them. Everybody wants to think that about themselves, don’t they? That they love their family as much as they can.’

Farid looked away.

Bimal handled the other questions, of which there were few. Farid smiled thinly, rose and walked out, not saying goodbye or shaking hands. The kitchen door swung shut behind him. Strahan ushered the three of them into the lift.

‘He gets it,’ Jess said as the coffin descended.

‘Don’t think so, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘He didn’t give us much.’

‘That’s it,’ Bimal said. ‘Guys, I’m sorry.’

They were melancholically drinking cheap wine in a chain bar on Oxford Street, the Something & Something, when Bimal took the call. It wasn’t Farid, it was Strahan. His first words, Bimal told them afterwards, mimicking the pukka drawl, were, ‘I’ll need your bank details.’

Jess was at the bar, blowing some of Farid’s investment on champagne, before Bimal could recount the rest. ‘I’ll need your bank details!’ Bimal said by way of a toast.

‘HappyFamilies!’ Neil said.

‘To HappyFamilies!’ Jess repeated.

That night, when Bimal left, she taught him how to drink flaming sambucas, the expert way, a procedure she had learned in Prague, apparently, which involved two glasses, a lighter, a napkin and a straw. Other people in the bar watched them, men especially, covetous attention that Neil, to his surprise, found he enjoyed. They were shimmering that evening, radiating luck and strength, like the aura he and Adam had projected during the karaoke in San Diego. Neil inhaled the liquoricey gas and laughed his grimacing laugh.

On the pavement outside Jess fell behind, as if considering, then strode wordlessly towards him, inclined her face and, finally, kissed his mouth. He was momentarily thrown by her approach, that determined, déjà-vu stride, so that his lips took a few seconds to respond to hers.

It’s happening, Neil thought as Jess opened the door to her flat. My real life is happening.

He was catching up with Adam. He called Adam in the morning.

Somewhere outside, in the garden of the basement flat or in the street, foxes were mating or killing each other in a coloratura frenzy. Adam opened his eyes and rolled onto his back; a strand of Claire’s hair adhered to his lips. She had slept through the yowling. Clean conscience, that was what people said, wasn’t it?

The bedside clock said six forty-four. He caressed her shoulder, her upper arm. She might be awake, Adam told himself, or almost. From her arm to her hip and then her thigh, one finger tracing an expanding arc that soon took in a buttock. She straightened her legs. He reached across her torso and gently squeezed both breasts in his palm, an encompassment that she had once told him she enjoyed. In Adam’s mental diagram of his wife this consoling micro-fetish was linked, via a dotted line, to the timing and violence of her parents’ divorce.

They were awake now, anyway. His penis grazed her thigh — accidentally, the first time. Claire curled up and pulled the coverlet over her.

The fox sounds were disconcertingly human, long hyperventilating shrieks, like a passer-by stumbling upon a corpse.

Six fifty-two.

Adam got out of bed and slouched to the bathroom. He met himself in the mirror and breathed in. His was a nice little gut, nothing vulgar or conspicuous when clothed, but flabby enough, on exposure, to undercut his once-automatic confidence in his metabolism and physique, a faith as blithe as his ingrained assumption that he would one day inherit the Earth. The hairs encamped on his chest had dispatched reconnaissance agents to his shoulders. He was twenty-eight.

Shit shower shave aftershave deodorant teeth blast of hairdryer that woke Claire up.

Eleven minutes past seven. Adam went into the kitchen. There was a mouse in there somewhere; he had heard its scuttle, the eccentric rhythm of something alive. He should tell the landlady. He listened to the answerphone message while the kettle boiled — an invitation from Chaz, boozing with him and Archie and two or three others, always strength in numbers these days, body count replacing intimacy, a group absconsion from adulthood. Together they had passed some unmarked inflection point, Adam sensed, at which longevity began to diminish closeness rather than enhance it. They were evanescing, his student cronies, without ill-will or grudges, as old friends evidently could when there was nothing left to say.

Claire came into the kitchen in her towelling dressing gown.

‘Anything special today?’

‘Lessons Learned at three, God knows how long this one’ll go on for. You?’

‘Catalogue day.’

‘There’s a mouse in here somewhere.’

‘Risotto for dinner?’

‘I’m out tonight, remember.’

‘Where are you meeting him again?’

‘That new place by the river, you know, with the bowling.’

Not a word about the penis. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed; or possibly, for her, all that male insistence had long since become unremarkable, a familiarity Adam preferred not to contemplate. He could make out a breast inside the towelling, its convex perfection.

His coffee, her tea. Two pieces of toast. Just the one penis: a necessary quota, obviously, but also a chasm and, in a way, a sadness, that she would never get it, the urgency and then the shame.

‘Did you take out the recycling?’

Seven thirty-seven. She sipped.

Adam had observed this social attrition in older men, men of his father’s generation, how they wound up glumly fraternising at their wives’ engagements, as if the chromosomal match with other husbands were a sufficient bond. He knew his recent, second-hand male acquaintances as single traits, like supporting characters in a bad film: James, Libby’s boyfriend, always toting his dry cleaning; Paul, comes with Cherry, asks for his steak to be ‘cremated’. Poppy from the gallery and John the effete cinéaste.

‘Did you finish the mortgage form?’

‘Tomorrow night,’ he said.

‘You prom —’

‘I know, I’ll do it. I said I’ll do it.’

Neil was the exception in this cast of has-beens and monochrome newcomers. Neil gave more and demanded more, and Adam owed him more.

He swept the crumbs into his palm and brushed them into the sink. The rubbish truck was in the street, someone was shouting.

‘What is it this time?’

‘What?’

‘Your Lessons.’

‘Knife crime. The spike in the summer, you remember, that silly moral panic, lasted a fortnight.’

They would miss that evening’s chronicle of the day’s granular irks and half-imagined insults — his from the jittery open floors of the department, hers at the subterranean print gallery just off Piccadilly, the coveted art job that had turned out to involve more hard-selling than Claire had reckoned on, and many more hours standing in a basement showroom, rocking on her heels and watching dust motes spiral in the half-light from the pavement-level windows. The Dinky duet: a reciprocal compassion, like oral sex but more frequent.

D-I-N-K-Y: Dual Income, No Kids Yet. Even now, though, Adam didn’t share and show her everything. During their honeymoon, on their bed in the cabana, he had asked, ‘Is there anything I could do, or, you know, that I might have done in the past, that would make you not love me?’

Claire said, ‘Of course there is, don’t be silly. What are you trying to tell me?’

‘Nothing,’ Adam had backtracked. Even murderers told in the end, he had reflected — on their deathbeds, sometimes earlier, you read about them showing up at police stations, a decade on, turning themselves in. The next day, in the morning, the man — the father — could have given him away, easily, and that would have been the end of them, him and Neil, right there at the campsite.

We thought they were such nice boys.

Seven forty-three. The leaves on the tree outside their front window were still thick and green. It was the tallest tree in the street, its trunk reaching to the eaves of the subdivided house, the shade cast into their kitchen. Adam had imagined its strong branches saving him as he leaped from the window to escape a fire or when cornered by a burglar. He had dreamed of a burglar climbing up it, too, his face obscured by the foliage. Someone was screaming, not Adam, someone else, a woman. A woman or a girl.

‘What about the life insurance?’

He had dreamed that dream three or four times, here in the rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, with their spider plant, and the yucca plant, and the ugly, square dining table that they had bought in an auction house instead of one from Ikea, and the sofa that was from Ikea, Harriet’s sofa, sometimes, and, in the gaps between his bedsits, Neil’s. The Greeks ought to have a complex for this syndrome, Adam thought — the impulse not to usurp his parents, or to fuck them, but to be them. The headlong fast-forward to the age of dinner parties and being someone, practised little bickerings and wordless attunement, his too-real too-fast life.

He put his plate in the dishwasher. He put his book in his bag. He hung his security tag around his neck, a pre-emptive adornment that he had regarded as defeatedly gauche when he first observed it on his departmental colleagues, but had fairly soon adopted.

‘Love you,’ Claire called from the sink, not turning round.

At ten to eight Adam trotted down the stairs, past two other Dinky abodes, three piles of unclaimed post. The front door boasted geometric, stained-glass panels, relics of an Edwardian household wholeness. He stepped out onto the begrimed pavement.

Farid, Bimal, Jess: later they came to be bound up together in Neil’s internal accounting, memory shaping one of its false contiguities for his convenience. In fact he had known Bimal for ever, in the ordinary way of knowing, and in the end he concluded that he never knew Farid, not really. Of the three he was only close to Jess, and yet, looked at in a practical way, she left the shallowest indentation on his life, her mark on him swiftly filling out and disappearing, like a fingerprint on rubber.

For all Bimal’s pursuit of Neil, the two of them hadn’t been especially tight at school. Both had been marooned in the unsatisfactory netherworld between the tough, cool kids and the bullyable pariahs, an intermediate caste whose members ought to have formed mutual-defence alliances, but didn’t. Bimal’s family lived a couple of streets from Neil’s in a near-identical semi; as a child, whenever Neil ran into Bimal’s father, he was invariably wearing a suit, because of which Neil had assumed he must be an accountant or a doctor. He learned only as an adult that the man had worked for the gas board for thirty years. Neil’s default image of Bimal was glimpsed from behind his own mother’s back, when they had both been twelve, or thereabouts: Bimal standing on the doorstep, smiling goofily as he tried to sell some tomato plants he had grown in his father’s greenhouse, his father standing in the driveway in his suit. His mother had bought one of the plants, Neil remembered, and kept it on the kitchen windowsill. Bimal had grown up tall and plausible, and wore contact lenses instead of his thick-rimmed spectacles, though he retained his throwback bowl haircut as if it were a mascot.

It was less affection that had kept them in touch than some half-acknowledged intuition that they might prove useful to each other one day — as now, at HappyFamilies, they were. The idea had come to him, Bimal confided, while he was working at a computer-software firm. A colleague had returned from a long weekend in St Petersburg with a bespoke set of matrioshka dolls, each figurine hand-painted with the image of one of his own relatives. The likenesses were creditable, and the dolls had been absurdly cheap, knocked up overnight, the colleague said, by an artist he met in a street market. People would pay proper money for these, Bimal had reflected. He had begun to think of other ways in which punters might be helped to celebrate themselves, to feel immortal and resplendent, which was how everybody wanted to feel these days. Tea towels silk-screened with family photos, snow-shakers that used the photos as a backdrop, classic film posters — Vertigo, The Italian Job — with a loved-one’s visage substituted for Jimmy Stewart’s or Michael Caine’s.

After a long courtship Neil was persuaded by the World Wide Web. In Bimal’s revised business plan, the customers would browse the products online, order online, upload their photos online, pay online. Virtually no overheads. No gravity: magic.

‘That’s less than I’m earning now,’ Neil told Bimal when they discussed terms. ‘And that’s saying something.’

‘Plus your four per cent,’ Bimal said. Bimal wanted him, Neil suspected, as much to redeem his own teenage loneliness as for his putative sales acumen.

‘Seven.’

‘Five and a half.’

‘Six.’

‘Done.’

Neil’s business card said Marketing Director, but his most valuable skill lay in what quickly became their main preoccupation. Angel investors, small-time venture capitalists, the directors of greeting-card and novelty firms: Neil proved to be good at soliciting money. Where Bimal was rambly, overenthusiastic, Neil was more focused (Don’t waste the customer’s time), less sentimental. He was learning to read the rich, their vanities and contradictions; how they tended to resist that label, referring chippily to other, slightly wealthier people whom they instead placed in that bracket, yet at the same time seemed dimly baffled that you were not already rich yourself. Six per cent of HappyFamilies was Neil’s forward-dated ticket out of subterranean bedsits; his chance to one day do something for his nephew — a tutor, maybe the odd holiday — since, heaven knew, the boy’s father never would.

He met Jess when she and her boss pitched for a contract to design their logo. At first sight he would have guessed New York rather than Hull. She was working for one of the voodoo marketing agencies that were infesting London, developing their minutely nuanced offerings in a warp-speed, boom-time corporate evolution — ‘brand’ and ‘image’ combined with ‘management’, ‘strategist’ and ‘consultancy’ in increasingly exotic combinations. She had interestingly short hair, a fancy, clingy suit, a dirty laugh and a twenty-a-day smoking habit.

When their eyes locked during that meeting Neil thought the ocular come-on was a negotiating technique. You’ll have to try harder than that, he thought. In his self-image he remained the pasty and narrow-shouldered also-ran of his adolescence, his perception fixed at the harshest moment, like a clock stopped during an earthquake, the moles on his cheek and neck still the visual magnets they had been in the bathroom in Harrow. His hair had begun to recede at the temples, giving him (he thought) an unwholesome widow’s peak, like something out of The Munsters. By his own reckoning he was still a proposition that no grown woman was likely to prefer to, say, Adam.

On the pavement afterwards Jess held onto him for longer than their handshake required.

‘You’ll hear from us.’

‘Will I?’ She laughed aloud at the pregnancy of their farewell, nervous and brassy at the same time. He like the unapologetic, male way she smoked, and, later, the taste of smoke in her mouth.

‘Fuck it, let’s hire her,’ Bimal said. ‘We need a designer anyway.’ Bimal frequently wanted to hire people, and almost as frequently to fire them, which for a time resulted in a gruesome attrition rate.

‘I’m not sure,’ Neil said. ‘Not sure we can afford her.’

Don’t shit on your own doorstep.

Bimal insisted, and Jess — on the lookout, like half of London, for her jackpot move, her dotcom apotheosis — accepted. She moved into their ramshackle single room above a shop in Camden, where there were more phone lines than employees, and more employees (six, including her) than desks. She and Neil sat opposite one another, separated by a metre and a half of table top and two fat, humming computers, emailing each other in suggestive exchanges that he found deliriously flattering, and which were much less covert than they imagined.

‘More than four thousand,’ Adam said, three hours after he closed the stained-glass front door in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Probably. No, definitely.’

‘How many more?’

‘Hard to say. Depends on the Youth Justice Boards. I suppose you could say “at least four thousand”.’

‘Okay, “at least”. Christ.’

The spin doctor made the change on screen and printed out the speech again. He sighed and mumbled inaudibly as he headed for the photocopier, honing the offhand charmlessness that was evidently considered essential in his trade. He returned with three copies of the speech in the sacrosanct double-spaced, single-sided, non-stapled format.

‘Chuck that one away,’ Adam said.

‘I have,’ the spin doctor said. ‘I will.’ This man was only a couple of years older than Adam, but he spoke to the minister every day, the Home Secretary every week.

‘Don’t mix them up.’

‘Okay. Christ.’

‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin asked. He was making the rounds in his office slippers, two empty mugs castaneting between his fingers, both of them his. Colin drew the line at washing up: the previous week he had fixed a hand-scrawled sign above the cluttered sink that said What did your last slave die of? ‘Adam, anything?’

‘No thanks. I’ll page you with anything else,’ he said to the spin doctor. ‘Page and line number, all right?’

Version control was an infamous nightmare. Adam had heard horror stories of career-ending oversights in which officials sent their minister to a podium with the wrong iteration of a speech: mangled statistics, unmeetable promises that ought to have been excised.

‘Four o’clock kick-off,’ the spin doctor said. ‘Some further education place in Bermondsey. Principal is onto me about her capital budget!’

He gave a mean little chuckle. You could already see in his mottled cheeks and tinted nose that he drank too much.

A-S-B-O: Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Or rather, son of ASBO, that was the crime directorate’s current focus, and therefore Adam’s. Quicker and harsher sentencing for the degenerates, community punishment for entry-level villains, plus some extra cash for after-school clubs and mentoring schemes: the standard carrot and stick one-two. These days wayward kids were the government’s main enemy, Rat Boy, Blip Boy and Spider Boy the new, pre-pubescent Most Wanted.

They were fourteen and fifteen, these kids. Thirteen, some of them. Returning to his desk Adam remembered how, when he was fifteen, he had drunk two-thirds of a bottle of cider in the cadets’ hut and thrown up outside the fives courts. One of the housemasters was investigating the mess, interviewing the boys one-on-one in his study, promises of immunity for informers, the works. Half-resolved to confess, Adam had phoned home for his father’s endorsement.

‘Little white lie,’ Jeremy said.

‘But —’

‘Just this once.’ That had been his introduction to the prime genteel commandment: First, get yourself off.

When Harriet was fifteen their mother had found, in the pocket of her coat, a note she had written about a boy (not to the boy, even, but about him), and had kept her in for half the Christmas holidays, enlisting Adam to disturb her weepy internal exile for meal deliveries and health checks.

Fifteen: sometimes, in the past few years, that number, that age, had seemed to Adam to be stalking him.

At twenty to one he went out to his preferred Italian deli in the narrow lane opposite the crenellated ministry. Standing in front of the glass display, watching the disembodied hands make his lunch, Adam thought they were short-changing him on chicken. He ground his jaw in disapproval; one of his fingers twitched towards the glass. The sandwich-maker (Indian or Pakistani, he guessed, tired-looking, striped apron) glanced up with an expression of abhorred pity. Adam turned sharply away from the man’s eyes and the sandwich and towards the streaked parquet beneath his feet.

Three years in the Civil Service, eighteen months in the Home Office, two or three of these cherished sandwiches a week. Adam ought to be grateful to Jim, he supposed: Jim the executive producer, with his balding crew cut and mockney accent, the man who had inadvertently landed him in Whitehall. Three and a half years before, Jim had sent his secretary to extract Adam from the open-plan grid and deliver him to the corner office. He had offered Adam a pursed, funereal smile, like the smile of the examiner who failed him at his first driving test, virtually Adam’s only other substantial failure until this one. When Jim looked out of the window as he began to speak, towards the skyscrapers across the river in the City, Adam immediately understood.

‘First of all I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for us.’ Us and you. There was an ornamental chilli plant on the windowsill.

Jim was mercifully brief, but throughout the few, tormenting minutes Adam worried that he might be sick. Everyone outside the goldfish-bowl cubicle would soon know why he was sitting there, he had realised. Or perhaps everyone knew already, Will already knew, and he was the last to find out. He half-turned his head to see if Will was watching.

‘I would keep you if I could, you know that, we could keep everyone…’

Adam’s mind flew back to Tenerife, to Gavin the chimerical bar manager — fucking Gavin! — and slid from him to the girl on the beach.

That poor girl. And the two of them. Amazing, the things you caught yourself thinking about, and when. That was the moment it struck: afterwards he thought he could trace his fifteen-o-phobia to Jim’s cubicle, one crisis summoning and eliding with another.

No, Adam told Jim, there was nothing he wanted to ask. He heard himself say ‘Thank you’ as he rose to leave, like a condemned aristocrat tipping his executioner, the indiscriminate euphoria of something happening.

The following evening, in Soho, he had indeed been sick, Neil holding his hair back from his face as if they were teenage girls. Adam pinballed between the tables on his dash to the toilets, spilling several drinks. Two of the spillees stood up — rugby types, play-acting toughs — and Neil interposed himself, his hands raised in his Don’t shoot! pose. ‘Just leave it, mate,’ Neil said to the larger man, his voice descending the social register to imply an acquaintance with violence.

Sitting on the kerb, toeing the broken glass in the gutter, Adam had tried to explain how he felt. How, for him, life was like one of those childhood line-ups in which everyone stands against a wall to be measured and ranked, except for Adam the comparison wasn’t biannual but always, and the comparators were everyone, the rankings vertical as well as horizontal, featuring all the people he had ever been to school or worked with, and his father and his grandfathers and his great-grandfather the judge, all of them eternally jostling in the eyes of some super-arbiter, his stature suddenly the lowliest.

‘I know,’ Neil said. ‘I understand. But it isn’t like that, Ants. It’s just a job. You’ll get another job, I know you will. It’s not, you know, all of you. It’s not a vital organ or something. It’s what you do for money, that’s all.’

His other, evanescing friends were useless, as if there were an asterisk in their contracts that excused them at unhilarious moments. And this was the least of it, Adam knew, the divorces and nervous breakdowns and dying parents and heartbreaking children were still to come. For the first time he could remember, his father let him down. ‘Every life needs a twist and a turn,’ Jeremy said on the phone, mysteriously affecting a Scottish brogue, as if he were quoting a song from some old Highlands musical that didn’t actually exist. Adam had expected more from him: sharper anger, sturdier protection. Claire kept her distance, treating him like a ticking bomb in an action movie, wary of pulling the wrong wire.

That night he had almost told Neil the truth about California. Adam was incontinently grateful for his sympathy, and the secret felt like a burden too many. Neil seemed so close, there was nothing they couldn’t share, Adam would tell him and be forgiven in an instant, and then that episode would open up to them. He managed not to, cowardice or tact that afterwards he half-regretted.

‘Seriously, Neil, I don’t know what you see in him. I mean, what did you do in America, rob a bank together?’

Neil flinched. They were in her bed, two months after they met Farid, Sunday morning fornication. Jess was exploiting the post-coital amnesty, the very temporary truce.

‘The way he took the mike and walked around like that. All that “my wife” crap. And making his father his best man… What a tosser.’

Jess had lived in London for five or six years, more than enough to count as a local, but Yorkshire hung on in her vowels, an accent that to Neil’s southern ear made her jokes sound funnier and her judgements harsher. She was immune to Adam’s charm, their personalities somehow failing to intersect. On the three occasions they had met, the latest being Adam’s wedding, she had laughed when he wasn’t making a joke and missed the punchlines he intended.

‘Don’t,’ Neil said, rearranging his leg so that his thigh was no longer touching hers. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘You know what, Philly old boy, in my experience, when people say things are complicated, they never are.’

He knew Jess was onto something. For all Adam’s seigneurial confidence he thought in straight, obedient lines, was content to be defined by the government’s consoling acronyms. The wedding had obeyed its type: the adequately pretty English church, the vicar keeping the hypocritical God content to a harmless minimum, the lawn parade of tepid canapés and novelty cummerbunds, the inevitable marquee. But that wasn’t him… That was all irrelevant… The money Adam had lent him for his first deposit, the nights Neil had spent on their sofa, when he was between bedsits and couldn’t face his father’s — he and Adam staying up, giggling like imbeciles, until Claire came to shush them, hands on hips, some primitive affinity of gender trumping his friend’s allegiance to her. A week, then five days… Those favours weren’t what mattered either, they were the currency and not the feeling. The way he had felt, six years earlier, when they met on the concourse at Paddington Station, beamed back together in London, or felt when, a week before that, he took Adam’s first phone call:

It’s me, Neil. It’s Adam.

Adam? Hi — Adam! I’ve got it, Dad, I said I’ve got it…

‘What is it, a class thing?’ Jess went on. ‘Sort of, you know, a yeoman and master type arrangement? Does he get to fuck me, too?’

‘Knock it off, Jess,’ Neil said, turning away from her. ‘Me and him — you don’t understand.’

‘Don’t sulk,’ she said. ‘I was just… I’m sorry.’

After Adam and the wedding came the ritual introductions to their families. The first, Jess’s mother, was unplanned. Neil asked where she was going, whether he could go too, and she said, ‘Believe me, you don’t want to.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Your funeral.’

They were halfway to Hull before he clocked it. Contrary to all the self-parodic jokes she had made, her childhood home, a shoebox miner’s terrace, had inside plumbing and no coal scuttle. Her mother was immobilised by arthritis and older-looking than Brian, despite being five years younger.

‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he said as they stepped out of their taxi.

‘Likewise,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ She carried a cane that she mostly forgot to use. ‘You could have warned me, Jessica. Nowt in the house.’

The front room was a 3D album of Jess photos, though none of them was very recent. Jess in school uniform. A teenaged Jess glammed up for a night on the tiles. Jess wearing a mortar board at an ironic angle.

‘She’s a one,’ her mother said to Neil, when Jess went to smoke on the front step. ‘Give you much trouble?’

‘No. You?’

‘Oh yes,’ Jess’s mother said, rasping out a laugh.

She poured more tea and sat in silence with him until her daughter came back. Jess showed him no mercy, not interpreting or elaborating on the local names and legendary incidents that populated the intermittent conversation.

Harrow was the final milestone, the last museum of their prior lives. They drove out in Jess’s car at the end of the summer.

‘Are you Neil’s wife?’ Sam asked, disobediently opening the front door alone.

‘No,’ Jess said, keeping her distance. She offered the boy her hand but he ran back into the house.

Brian shuffled up. ‘Come inside,’ he said, turning away.

Tea and a plate of digestives were pre-arrayed on top of the television. Sam mounted the armchair; as Brian came in he was preparing to hurl himself onto Neil’s back.

‘Careful,’ Brian said, pointlessly.

Sam jumped. He slid down Neil’s spine, catching his hand in his uncle’s as he landed. Neil looked down at the spiral of hair on top of the child’s head, only recently thickened up from babyish thatch. The trace of a birthmark patterned his temple.

Sam wiped his nose with his finger, though it wasn’t running. ‘Are you his wife?’ he asked Jess, indicating Brian with his eyes.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, too loudly for the room.

‘Who are you?’

‘Tea?’ Brian asked.

‘My friend, Sammy,’ Neil said. ‘She’s my friend.’

‘Okay,’ Sam said. ‘Now we’re playing hide and seek.’

‘Are we?’ said Jess.

‘Milk and sugar?’

‘I’ll hide, and you count. Ready?’ Sam set off for the door. Brian pressed himself against the wall to let the boy pass.

‘One,’ said Neil.

‘Not yet!’ Sam shouted, laughing and looking back from the threshold. ‘Close your eyes!’

‘Just be careful,’ Brian repeated, resting a forearm on the corner of the mantelpiece. There was a shy tenderness buried somewhere in his father’s voice, Neil thought. Perhaps Sam picked it up more clearly than he was able to, as young ears could reputedly detect certain frequencies that adults miss.

‘Two,’ Neil said.

Jess ran her hands down her thighs, straightening her skirt. Sam’s footsteps skipped across the hallway and echoed up the stairs, the pat of feet alternating with the soft slap of hands and pad of knees, the not-yet-outgrown technique of infancy. Hurry with a hint of dance.

‘Careful,’ Brian murmured, much too softly for Sam to hear. ‘Left him here yesterday. She dumped him on Dan, apparently, he’s got something on in Poole, hotel site, he said.’

‘This is Jess.’

‘Gave me a toy giraffe and a pair of pyjamas and left him. What was I supposed to do?’

Brian had received a health warning from his doctor a few weeks before. He looked slightly awry in scale — all the right and recognisable features, but somehow smaller than life-size. His flannel trousers ballooned clownishly around his thighs.

‘Ten!’ Sam shouted down.

‘Jessica,’ Brian said. ‘Yes.’

‘You go,’ Jess said.

‘Com… ing,’ Neil sing-songed, creaking up the stairs.

He saw Sam’s feet at the bottom of the armchair in Dan’s old room, the point of an elbow jutting out horizontally at five-year-old height, the thin arm rotating as Sam picked his nose. Neil mimed an investigation of Dan’s wardrobe, empty besides some discarded cowboy-check shirts, and, at the bottom, a pile of hoarded school exercise books defaced with obscene sketches. The giraffe lay on the bed.

‘Saa… aam, where are you?’

‘I’m here,’ Sam said, unable to wait any longer. ‘Here.’

Neil lifted Sam in the air and turned him upside down, squeezing him against his chest with one hand and tickling him with the other. You didn’t have to act with a five-year-old: that was one of Sam’s attractions. The mask could come off.

‘Stop,’ Sam laughed, not meaning it, sighing when the laughter ran out.

‘Sam,’ Brian called from the foot of the stairs. ‘Sam, come down. I’m making you a sandwich.’

Jess was sitting in the kitchen. She had a cup and saucer in front of her, an unbitten digestive biscuit (no chocolate) wedged between them. Brian was at the counter, his back turned, spreading. A tableau came back to Neil: his father frying chips, the only thing he had ever cooked for his sons, and only ever when his wife was away, or hospitalised, or otherwise prevented from dispensing the regulation beans on toast, fish finger sandwiches or pasta with supermarket sauce. The potatoes were always cut string-thin, Neil remembered, and he and Dan would sit at the table, watching, as if their preparation were an alchemic rite.

‘There you go,’ Brian said, laying the sandwich on the table.

‘Yuck,’ Sam said.

Later Neil and Jess went up together to check on him. He was splayed on Dan’s bed, one arm dangling over the side, another above his head, that hand clutching the giraffe, legs akimbo, as if he had struggled to the end, like those flailing corpses exhumed from the lava of Pompeii.

‘They’re all cute at that age, aren’t they, though?’ Jess whispered. ‘They peak at three or four, then they turn into fuck-ups and mediocrities like the rest of us.’

‘Shhh,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t.’

She invited or instructed him to move in with her while they were downstairs watching television. Brian was washing up; the urn supervised from the mantel. Neil could activate the break clause in his lease later that autumn, she said. Pointless to waste more money on a separate pad.

‘Jess,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve never… I’m not sure I can.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘I won’t marry you.’

His life was happening.

Adam was only twenty-five when Jim let him go. His tank was still full. He spanked the Civil Service exams, struck the requisite balance between showmanship and modesty at the final-round assessment centre. When he first arrived in Whitehall the atmosphere had been eerie, millenarian. The old ministers were waiting sullenly to be evicted, the bureaucrats openly anticipating new masters; grimy mesh bomb curtains, relics of the Cold War, still shrouded many of the windows. After the general election the organism of state exhaled, and Adam quickly found he liked the private lingo, the security passes and vetting, the sense of being among an elect. He and some of the other fast-streamers spent long, contented evenings in Whitehall pubs, plotting their routes to Grade 7, a rank that would confer higher pay immediately and, they knew, adumbrate future glory, Adam never seriously doubting that he would soon achieve it.

‘If I may?’ he interjected at five minutes past three, shortly after the meeting convened. ‘Might we consider reviving the amnesty?’

Nick said, ‘I’m sure we’ll get —’

‘The amnesty scheme the previous government operated? The evidence now suggests it was quite effective in reducing knife crime where we rolled it out.’

‘Thank you — it’s Adam, isn’t it? Thanks.’

Five past three: a slight violation of protocol, Adam knew. You were supposed to wait until the senior grades had their say, but he had already learned that particular lesson. Ditch the well-bred reticence in meetings. Sequester your credit from predators. Simulate teamwork but make sure you get noticed. These were the principles that his apprenticeship in television had inculcated, tenets of employment that had been as unannounced as most of adulthood’s rules and burdens (taxes, commuting, the many varieties of insurance that, in their household, Adam had somehow become responsible for procuring).

There was a pause before someone from policing, already a 7, said, ‘Stop and search…’

‘Absolutely,’ Nick said, beginning to scribble on his notepad. Two of the other men were smoking, tapping their cigarettes into shallow metallic ashtrays that appeared to have been lifted from McDonald’s.

‘Under the new guidelines…’ the 7 continued.

Actually Adam could use the extra money, the 7 money. The parental subsidies had dried up. ‘Short-term cashflow issues,’ his father had explained. He and Claire were still okay, financially, they were fine for the time being. He must remember that mortgage form.

They were three-quarters of an hour into stop-and-search, it was almost four o’clock, when the 7 said, ‘… the girlfriends too. The girls. I mean, the young women. They often carry weapons for the men. It’s easier for them at clubs and what have you — no pat downs, sometimes they let them bypass the metal detectors. Sixteen, seventeen. Fifteen, some of them.’

Fifteen again. Bad luck. You’re such bullies.

Adam remembered his father teasingly saying to him (he must have been eight or nine), ‘Lollipop, whatever you do, try not to think about pink rabbits digging for treasure at midnight.’ Of course the stricture only made the thinking inevitable. His right hand put down his pen and moved of its own accord to scratch his left forearm.

After stop-and-search Nick delineated the ‘systemic issues’ that had arisen in their external response to the summertime spike in knifings. Nick’s office personality consisted in his blue postman shirts and his martyrly hours, a regime he observed despite the moral claims made by the children in the photos pinned to the partition behind his work station. Or presumably they made such claims. Once, when Adam visited his desk late in the evening, he found Nick playing Space Invaders on his computer.

‘… roll out best practice,’ Nick was saying.

A quarter past four. People were fidgeting and twitching, turning over pages on their notepads and listlessly flicking them back again. They discussed half a dozen policies that no one thought for a microsecond would be implemented. Towards the end someone else, a woman who outranked Adam, revived his knife amnesty idea.

‘One to consider,’ Nick said, and wrote something down. ‘Thanks, Pamela.’

But… Adam opened his mouth but restrained himself. Two weeks before he had been sent up to Manchester for an event at a community centre. He had checked the backdrop for images or slogans that might be embarrassing if cropped by some unscrupulous photo editor; he was helping to marshal the local worthies, party ringers and bored journalists in the audience. The minister was standing nearby, and Adam, proud of his tradecraft and of his vocation, wished him a collegial ‘Good afternoon’. The minister said, ‘Good to see you’, a formula in which Adam had strained to hear a personal recognition, rather than a bet-hedging, not-sure-if-I’m-supposed-to-know-you fob-off.

It was past five when they left the meeting room, as smoked-through as after a night in a pub. Adam returned to his desk and opened the document he was writing on youth justice. He could sense his less ambitious colleagues eyeing each other across the open-plan expanse, the clockwatchers’ stand-off, bags and umbrellas poised for the exit.

‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin said. ‘Last orders. Adam?’

Two hours later, six weeks after Neil took Jess to Harrow, he and Adam were leaning against the booth at the back of their allotted lane, while the people before them finished their game. They were talking about the serial-killing doctor, talking fast, since there was always more to say than their time together allowed, even when it had just begun.

‘Expect he’ll top himself,’ Neil said.

‘You think so?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Neil raised his voice against the techno, the fusillades of the shoot-em-ups, the gunned engine of the life-sized sports car. ‘I said, if you’d done that — all those people, I mean even if you hadn’t been caught — wouldn’t you top yourself?’

‘I suppose so. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it?’

To both of them this subterranean playground felt dimly illicit. Not just the adults wielding children’s toys, pint glasses in one hand, air-hockey pucks in the other. The whole place was somehow unBritish in its high-spec levity.

‘Haven’t you ever thought about it? Suicide, I mean.’

Adam laughed above the music. ‘No. Never. It would be, you know, giving up. It would mean you’d lost. Why, have you?’

‘Once or twice, maybe,’ Neil said. ‘Yeah. When I was younger, not seriously or anything. In the end it always seemed to me sort of arrogant. Ostentatious, do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’m really worth killing.’ The mass-murdering doctor made him think of his mother — the nagging fear that someone had somehow been to blame, that someone could have done something differently, a fear that was also, he knew, a kind of disguised hope, an abashed fantasy of redress or resurrection.

‘Of course you’re worth it,’ Adam said.

‘I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

‘But if anyone’s going to kill you,’ Adam said, ‘I think it should be me.’

The group bowling before them — two men in replica football shirts and a younger, better-dressed woman — came out of the booth, laughing. Someone had spilled a drink; Neil wiped the low, screwed-down table with a serviette and laid his mobile phone on top of it. They took off their jackets.

‘Shall I?’ Adam said.

‘Be my guest.’

Adam selected a purple bowling ball, the heaviest in the chute, and unleashed it in a swift picturesque motion that knocked down all the pins. He raised his fists above his head in celebration, the fluorescent lights illuminating his teeth and the whites of his eyes.

‘Beginner’s luck,’ Neil said.

‘Do you play this game for money?’

Neil threw from an ungainly, erect posture. His ball dribbled to the end, knocking out a single pin. Adam whooped.

‘I’ll give you the early rounds,’ Neil said. As the contraption righted itself, he asked, ‘So the Millennium bug — is it going to be, you know, a meltdown? I think we should wait till afterwards — the launch, I’m talking about — but Bimal wants to go ahead in December.’

‘They’re working on it,’ Adam said.

‘But is it real? Is it, you know, dangerous?’

‘I could tell you,’ Adam said, ‘but you know what I’d have to do next.’

‘I’m serious, what do they think?’

‘I… I suppose I don’t know.’

‘Right. Okay. I just thought… Never mind.’

Adam sat in the booth while Neil bowled again. That mobile phone… Sometimes, when he went out for the afternoon, with a minister or on a visit, he borrowed a phone from the depository, a weighty black slab with a government serial number and the phone’s own telephone number stencilled on the back. This one was sleek and metallic, and Adam was confident Neil wouldn’t have to return it in the morning.

There was still a puddle of beer at the table’s lip. It occurred to Adam that he could slide the phone into it. Ridiculous!

With his second go Neil knocked over two more pins. His face shone ghoulishly in the overhead lights.

‘He’s a ballsy fucker,’ Neil said. ‘Bimal. You wouldn’t have thought it. We haven’t earned a penny yet and he’s talking about floating. Serious Nasdaq cowboy.’

Adam’s friend Archie was loaded, properly loaded, or his family was, a house in Miami and trust funds all round. Adam remembered another boy, from his boarding school, Philip, whose father had owned and then sold a company that manufactured plastic chairs; the sale price, eighteen million pounds, had been disclosed in a business round-up in The Times. Two or three days of jokes and everyone had forgotten about it. Inherited money was relatively harmless, Adam had always felt. You might resent it, but only as you might resent your friend’s superior height, or his better looks, or some other accidental advantage that he blamelessly held. Self-made wealth, the kind that Neil seemed poised to come into, might be trickier. Your friend’s inheritance was merely an injustice; Neil’s earned wealth might feel like a defeat.

Adam retrieved his purple ball from midway along the chute, and hurled it fast and dramatically into the gutter a couple of feet short of the pins.

‘Listen,’ Neil said as they crossed between the lane and the table, ‘you should join us. Seriously. After the launch, we’ll be hiring — copywriters, business-development people, I’m sure there’s something you could do.’

‘I’ve got a job,’ Adam said.

Neil had been dutifully enthusiastic when Adam first mentioned the Civil Service, even though he hadn’t known what Fast Stream meant. He had envisaged Adam and his leonine hair behind the defensive plastic screen of a benefits office. In his heart he was sceptical about these grass-is-greener switches, these poor-me-I’m-bored lurches from law to teaching, or teaching to law, manoeuvres that, as he saw it, only substituted one whim for another.

‘I know, and I know you’re doing fine where you are, the government. Brilliantly. I’m just saying, think about it. I could speak to Bimal.’

Instead of answering, Adam held up his hands, palms out, as if he were a celebrity at an awards ceremony, or a politician at a rally, false-modestly shushing applause. He considered for a moment and decided not to say what he was thinking.

Neil’s phone beeped. He pushed some buttons and frowned. ‘Bimal,’ he said. ‘Workaholic.’

The memory forced its way out. ‘It’s like what’s-his-name predicted,’ Adam said, his tone aiming for guilelessness, though he could perfectly well recall the name he had omitted.

‘Who?’

‘You know, the American guy.’

‘What American guy?’

‘Eric. That’s right.’

Party like it’s 1999 boomed out, an anthem that seemed to be playing on a loop across the Western world.

‘Eric who?’ Neil asked, instantly knowing who his friend was referring to. The promiscuous giggle and the balled fists. He reached for the mole on his neck.

‘You know, Neil. Come on. You remember. Eric from California.’

On the stereo Prince announced that the party was over.

‘He wasn’t from California,’ Neil said. ‘They were from Colorado. So what’s he got to do with anything?’

‘You remember, he went on about how computers were going to take over our lives and none of us believed him. Every village in India would have one, he said. We were around the campfire, it was that evening, you know… You have to.’

‘Sorry,’ Neil said, ‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You must, it was the same night, before you —’

‘No.’

Eric had said, Remember me when it happens… It would be too much to say that she insisted, at that moment when she became serious and resolute and the games had ended. But Neil hadn’t needed to press or convince her, either. ‘Sure,’ she had said. ‘I want it to be you.’ At first, Adam forced him to recall, Neil had thought she meant, or wanted her to mean, I want it to be you tonight, Neil: I want it to be you and not Adam. But a few minutes later he realised that her ‘it’ had meant something else entirely, an event specific to her and nothing to do with him and Adam.

They were out of time, Prince declared.

Neil stood at the top of the bowling lane, his fingers in the furtive niches but the ball suspended by his side. Somehow, in his head, while he had grown older, advancing from the extreme edge of adolescence to the brink of his thirties, she was frozen in her Yosemite incarnation, so that when he thought about the two of them together now, the age gap yawned even more accusingly than it had done at the time. Once or twice, on the television news, he had seen melodramatic stories about teachers running off with pupils, or teenage girls eloping with Mediterranean waiters, and quickly told himself that they bore no resemblance to him. That wasn’t him at all.

Two years in San Quentin. Her Charlie Brown T-shirt. The details had been seared into his memory, saved from the routine auto-erase, by the fuss in the morning.

They bowled again. Neil’s balls dawdled to the pins, reliably taking out three or four or six. Adam urged his arm to remember its original technique, but the harder he tried, the more immediately he found the gutter. Neil’s face looked leprously white in the spotlights.

They fell back on polite enquiries, the basic mnemonic responsibility of friendship, the minimum talent that it required. Neil asked about Claire’s job, Adam’s parents, Harriet. He had danced with Harriet at the wedding, as far as possible leaving the actual movement to her, struggling to hold on to her like a boxer on the ropes; the more she had drunk that evening, the more ingenuous she seemed, and Neil remembered something Adam had told him about their childhood — how their father had wanted another boy, and when Harriet was a toddler had insisted she be dressed in a little boy’s sailor suit.

‘She’s okay,’ Adam said. ‘She’s back at home, job didn’t work out. Bit weepy, you know. How’s your old man?’

‘The same. Not opening the shop on Saturdays any more. Asked after you the other day.’

Neil mentioned Sam, and Adam said, ‘You’ve got this different tone in your voice when you talk about him, did you know that?’

‘Do I sound the same for Jess?’

‘No.’

They discussed their preliminary plans for millennium eve, the river of fire into which the Thames would supposedly be transfigured at midnight, an object of London’s revelrous self-deprecation even before the feat was attempted. They were both trying, paddling away from the edges of the whirlpool. They had two goes left when Neil gave in to it.

‘What did you bring him up for?’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t, Adam. I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like you’re trying… just when I… I mean, why did you mention him?’

‘Take it easy. You’re being ridiculous. It’s just, I think it’s because, I was at this meeting this afternoon — knife crime — they were talking about the girlfriends, for some reason it —’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Take it easy, I’m sorry. You just reminded me of him — the Millennium bug and his computers…’

‘I mean, I haven’t thought about her for years, we’ve never even talked about it… It was just a mistake, you know that.’

‘Do I?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. It’s just, like you say, we’ve never… I mean, I’ve never… Nothing.’

A man in a baseball cap from the neighbouring lane pinched Adam’s bowling ball. A familiar eighties rock song struck up, but somehow, in their heads, the music had been turned down, screened out.

‘Christ,’ Neil said. ‘You make me think…’

‘What? What do I make you think?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Go on, say what I make you think.’

‘I said, forget it. Fuck’s sake, Adam, why do we have to talk about this?’

‘Okay. Jesus.’

Neil picked up a ball but didn’t bowl. ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

‘But you’ve got another go.’

He dropped the ball into the gutter.

‘But you’re winning, Philly…’

‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘You can have this one.’

Neil raised his chin to indicate to the tourists waiting behind the partition that he and Adam were leaving. They crowded into the booth; he retrieved his phone.

Outside the giant Ferris wheel angled across the water, halfway to its upright terminus, leaning out towards Parliament as if for a crackpot siege. In the other direction, downstream, was the porcupine Dome. London at the end of history: neophile, frivolous, renovated in splotches, like the make-up on a careless old woman.

‘Looks like it might fall,’ Adam said. ‘It can’t, can it?’

Neil didn’t reply. He turned his eyes towards the wheel but didn’t appear to see it. The project’s floodlights blazed along the riverbank.

If this friendship were a proposition that crossed Adam’s desk, and he were coldly weighing the costs and benefits, he might deem himself irrational for spending so much time on it. No money, no sex; no tangible pay-off of any kind. Friendship was a luxury in any utilitarian calculus, and yet without it, without Neil, his life would be thin. ‘Maybe it can fall,’ he muttered. ‘Unbelievable.’

They shook hands and then, sensing that the formality was absurd and dangerous, managed a one-armed hug, so that they ended up standing alongside one another, facing out across the water.