Mike

by Andrew Norriss

  He felt lost, too, at school, or at least that he was somehow still not in the right place. He achieved respectable grades that were more than enough to get him on the college track, but schoolwork was never something Floyd found very satisfying. Sitting at a desk, studying, was not how he wanted to spend his life, any more than he wanted to spend it on a tennis court, and sometime during the school year he decided that he would not be applying to college. The thought of another four years spent reading books and writing essays was more than he could face.

  The main appeal of going to college of course had been the idea of going there with Charity, but that relationship had somehow gotten lost as well. He and Charity had hoped to meet up in the summer after Floyd had taken his exams, but it hadn’t happened. Charity’s planned trip to the U.K. with her mother had fallen through at the last minute, when Mrs. Lamont was hospitalized with an infection she caught while photographing a whale carcass. Charity suggested that Floyd come to America instead, and he was all set to do so until he discovered that his passport had expired and there was no time to get a new one.

  Instead, he stayed in Sheffield that summer and fell into a relationship with a girl called Sandra Drickett—someone he knew from the Sandown tennis club. He mentioned Sandra to Charity in one of his emails and, soon after that, the messages to and from America began to taper off. From writing almost every day, they switched to emails once a week, then once a month. The relationship with Sandra didn’t last very long but, by the time it was over, Charity was mailing that she had started going out with a basketball player from her physics class, and after that the messaging became even less regular and there was no more talk of a visit to the U.K.

  The one part of his life where Floyd did not feel lost, where in fact he felt completely at home, was at Waterworld. He had, on Dr. Pinner’s advice, taken the job that the Chief had offered him and, from a few hours a week at the start, the work grew into something that came to absorb almost all of his free time. It was, despite the minimal pay, without doubt the most satisfying part of Floyd’s life.

  The pay was minimal because Waterworld did not make a profit. The Chief’s real income came from various businesses he owned around Sheffield—Floyd never knew what they were—and he had set up Waterworld to indulge an enthusiasm rather than with any expectation of making money. The cost of heating and lighting the tanks, combined with the cost of buying the fish and feeding them, always meant that Waterworld ran at a loss.

  Almost the only thing Floyd knew about the Chief, apart from the fact that he came originally from somewhere in West Pakistan, was that he had a passionate interest in anything that lived in the water. The fact that Floyd shared the same enthusiasm meant that, from the start, he was treated more as a partner than an employee. Most days, as Floyd busied himself cleaning tanks or checking oxygen levels, the stooping figure of the Chief would appear at some point, wanting to show him something in a catalog or discuss a possible purchase or talk about what combination of fish in which tank would make the most effective display. Fish and the aquarium were the Chief’s great obsession and, in the two and a half years that Floyd worked for him, he could only remember one occasion when the two of them talked about anything else.

  It was a Saturday, in the Easter break before his exams, when the Chief appeared at Floyd’s shoulder, asking if he had a moment, before leading the way up to his tiny office on the second floor.

  “Wanted to show you that,” he said, pointing to a ledger lying open on the desk.

  The ledger, carefully filled in by hand, contained the details of the income and expenditure involved in running Waterworld for the last month, and Floyd was surprised to see that the business had, for the first time, made a small profit.

  “Wow,” he said. “Nearly three pounds. What are we going to spend it on?”

  “Might not be a lot,” the Chief agreed, “but … still good. And mostly thanks to you. Stuff you do with the kids.”

  It had been Floyd’s idea, some months before, to offer “tours” of the attractions in Waterworld. He had worked out a half-hour talk that showed visitors things like an electric eel stunning its prey before eating it, and demonstrating the power in the suckers of an octopus by allowing the arms to close on his fist, before peeling them off. The tour had been particularly popular with children, and recently some teachers had been bringing in classes from the local schools.

  “What you going to do, Floyd?” The Chief was sitting at his desk, looking thoughtfully up at him as he spoke. “When you leave school?”

  The question took Floyd by surprise. Not because he hadn’t thought about it, but because it was not something he had ever expected the Chief to ask.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been wondering about it myself recently, but … I don’t know.”

  The Chief nodded, as if this was no more than he had expected.

  “Could continue working here,” he said. “Glad to have you. You know that. But … not what you really want, is it?”

  The possibility of working permanently at Waterworld was something that had crossed Floyd’s mind, but the Chief was right. It was not what he really wanted, even if the pay had been raised to something more than minimal. He enjoyed the work, and he appreciated the way it had meant he was not entirely dependent on his parents, but the thought of spending the rest of his life indoors, even surrounded by tanks of fish, was almost as alarming as having to spend his life on a tennis court.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “I mean, I love working here, Chief, but, no … it’s not what I want to do forever.”

  The chief nodded thoughtfully.

  “So what is it?” he asked. “That you really want to do?”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” said Floyd. “I don’t know that either.”

  “Should think about it.” The Chief waved an admonishing finger. “Good thing to know. What you really want.”

  And Floyd could only agree that knowing what he really wanted to do in life would be a very good thing indeed.

  “The trouble is,” he told Dr. Pinner three days later as they sat having tea and cake in the Sheridan Hotel, “I have no idea. I don’t even know what sort of job I’d like, let alone whether I’d be able to get it even if I did.”

  He and the psychologist were sitting at their usual table at the hotel. They had taken to meeting there every month or so, originally to talk about Mike and to hear if he had appeared again for any reason, but these days mostly to talk about life and what Floyd was doing. He found the meetings oddly comforting, chiefly because he was able to talk to Dr. Pinner about the things that bothered him in a way that he could not talk to anyone else. Least of all his parents.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about all that at the moment,” said Dr. Pinner. “You concentrate on your exams. That’s all you have to think about for now.”

  “But I do worry,” said Floyd. His exams were in a little over three weeks and he worried a lot, not so much about the tests as about what would follow.

  “I’m not going to college, so in a couple of months I’m going to have to get a job of some sort and I don’t even know where to start looking. I can stay at Waterworld for a bit, but the Chief’s right. It’s not what I really want to do. And what sort of an idiot am I if I’ve given up tennis, which could at least have made me a lot of money even though I didn’t want to do it, so I could take a job doing something I still don’t want to do but earns me hardly anything at all?”

  “Most people your age don’t know what they want to do,” said Dr. Pinner. “It’s all right. When the time comes, something will turn up.”

  “Why? Why should you think that ‘something will turn up’?”

  “Because in my experience it always does,” said Dr. Pinner. “And you have less to worry about than most of us, don’t you? Because you have Mike.”

  “But I don’t!” Floyd protested. “Mike’s been no help at all! I haven’t seen him for over two years!”

 
“Not seeing him is a good sign, isn’t it?” argued Dr. Pinner. “I mean, if you were off track in any way, or not doing something you should be doing, I suspect he’d let you know about it in very short order.”

  “Why? Why do you think that?”

  “Because it seems to be what he does.” Dr. Pinner poured himself some more tea. “Honestly, as far as I can see, you really don’t need to worry!”

  Dr. Pinner might think there was no cause to worry and that, when it came down to it, Mike would ensure that Floyd was somehow nudged onto the right path, but Floyd himself was not convinced. More than two years had passed without any sign of his “friend,” and he privately doubted that he would ever see him again.

  But it turned out Dr. Pinner was right. Mike did come back and give another nudge, though not in quite the manner or in the direction that either Floyd or the psychologist had expected.

  The day after he finished his last exam, Floyd got an email from Charity. It was the first message he had had from her in several weeks, and it said that she and her father would be stopping over in London for a couple of days in the second week of July, on their way to a marine ecology conference in Venice, and she wondered if he might be free to meet up.

  The day she suggested, a Tuesday, was coincidentally the day Floyd’s parents were driving down to London to watch the quarterfinals of the women’s tennis at Wimbledon. Mr. and Mrs. Beresford did not normally go to Wimbledon these days, but that year they had been given tickets by a couple from the Sandown tennis club. Unexpectedly unable to travel themselves, and with a ten-year-old daughter, Sissie, who had been looking forward to the trip since before Christmas, they had asked the Beresfords to take her instead. Floyd traveled down to London with them in the car.

  The two weeks of Wimbledon were a tricky time in the Beresford household. When he was younger, Floyd’s parents would have bought tickets themselves for at least one of the days, and the family would have watched as many of the other matches as possible on television. Now, when the television was on, Floyd did his best to keep out of the way. There was, inevitably, a certain tension in the air.

  The tension was particularly high this year because Barrington Gates had just hit the big time. He had done unexpectedly well in several international tournaments and was now the U.K.’s number one seed and officially the Great British Hope. All through the first week of Wimbledon, his face was to be seen on the covers of a score of magazines, and there were pieces written about him on an almost daily basis in the papers. Any time his name was mentioned on the news there was a sort of heavy silence in the Beresford house, and although nobody said anything Floyd knew what his parents were thinking.

  Barrington Gates is number one now … and you were so much better than him … It should be you out there …

  His parents dropped Floyd off at the train station at Wimbledon and, while they made their way to the place they had booked in one of the parking lots, he caught a train into central London.

  He walked the last part of his journey to the hotel in Russell Square where Charity and her father were staying, and was slightly taken aback by the elegant figure who came forward to greet him in the hotel lobby, looking alarmingly grown-up and self-possessed.

  “Dad’s still on the phone upstairs,” said Charity. “But he said to go in and get started. He’ll be down as soon as he can.”

  She led the way into the dining room, where the waiter showed them to a table by the window. They sat opposite each other, and Floyd asked politely if she was looking forward to the conference in Venice.

  “Well, I’m looking forward to Venice,” said Charity, “but I’m not going to the actual conference. I’m just here to make sure Dad shows up at the right place and in a clean shirt. How did your exams go?”

  Floyd told her about his exams and then asked about Charity’s plans for college, and they were still at the stage of making polite conversation when Dr. Lamont appeared. His hair was a little grayer than Floyd remembered, but he shook hands briskly before turning to Charity.

  “Have you told him yet?”

  “No,” said Charity. “Not yet.”

  “Told me what?”

  “Dad wants to offer you a job.” Charity was carefully studying the menu.

  “It’s not exactly a job,” her father explained. “I’m doing a project in the Gulf of Mexico for three months next year, looking at the causes of hypoxia. You know anything about that?”

  “The fall in oxygen levels that kills fish?” said Floyd.

  “That’s right.” Dr. Lamont nodded. “We’ll be working from a research vessel that the university charters, trying to find which factors cause the most damage.”

  Floyd looked across at Charity. “Are you going?”

  “Charity will be at college by then,” said Dr. Lamont. “She starts at Cornell in the fall. But she tells me you’re taking a gap year, is that right?”

  That was, Floyd admitted, one way of putting it.

  “So …” Dr. Lamont paused to ask a waiter to bring him a beer. “You need to understand it won’t be a vacation. It’s not a large ship. We have room for six scientists, and the others will all be graduates or PhD students. I’m inviting you because sometimes it’s useful to have a gofer helping out with the chores—cleaning, looking after the equipment, fetching and carrying … That’s what the job would be. Along with doing whatever anyone tells you to do.”

  “Right …”

  “Are you qualified as a scuba diver?”

  “No,” said Floyd.

  “Well, you’d need to get your Open Water Diver certificate. You wouldn’t be much use to us unless you could dive, and we couldn’t let you dive without it. And obviously you’ll have to sort out a visa. You’d need to get to that pretty soon. It can take a bit longer these days.”

  “Yes …”

  “We give you a bunk and as much food as you can eat, but no money. There isn’t the budget to pay you. Might be a few dollars in your pocket at the end, but don’t count on it.” He paused. “So … are you interested?”

  Floyd wasn’t sure he was interested in being a gofer. The idea of being on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico sounded like it might be fun, but temporary work like this was not going to solve the problem of what he was going to do for the rest of his life. He wondered why Dr. Lamont had thought he would be interested, and was about to say that it was very kind but no thanks when he glanced across at Charity.

  She was staring through the window at the street outside as if she had no particular interest in Floyd’s reply to her father’s offer, but he suddenly knew that the only reason Dr. Lamont was offering him the job was that Charity had asked him to. She was the one who had persuaded her father to make the offer and, however much she tried not to show it, she very much wanted Floyd to take it. How he knew this and why Charity had done it, he had no idea, but the realization was enough to make him decide not to turn down the offer straight off.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Would you mind if I took a bit of time to think it over? I probably ought to talk to my parents about it, as well.”

  “Of course.” Dr. Lamont took a piece of paper from his jacket. “These are the dates. If you do decide to come, I’ll need to know by the start of September and you’ll need to be in Boston by January fourth. The project finishes April second, and after that you can either fly straight back to the U.K. or you could spend a few days with us. Take a vacation.”

  “I’d be home then.” Charity was looking at him now and the smile was back. “Easter vacation. I could show you around Boston.”

  “Oh,” said Floyd. “That’d be good.”

  Dr. Lamont had to leave halfway through lunch—he was giving a lecture on algal toxins at University College—but he told Floyd and Charity to stay as long as they liked and to order whatever they wanted, and then left.

  The two of them sat and talked for nearly three hours. They talked about Bude, about going and not going to college, about Sandra Drickett and Charity’s bask
etball-playing boyfriend, and, somewhere along the line, Charity stopped being alarmingly confident and sophisticated, and became instead the girl who had walked beside him along a beach in Cornwall.

  When it was time to leave—Floyd had arranged with his parents to be back at Wimbledon by five—the last thing Charity said was that she hoped he would seriously consider taking the job with her father in January.

  And Floyd promised that he would.

  It was while waiting at the entrance to the Wimbledon parking lot, where he had arranged to meet his parents, that Floyd saw Mike.

  He was standing on the opposite sidewalk, still wearing his long black coat despite the warmth of the day and staring thoughtfully up the road. Floyd smiled at the sight, and he was about to cross over to join him when Mike held up a hand, clearly indicating that he should stay where he was. He was still looking up the road as he did so, as if waiting for someone to appear, and Floyd looked up the road as well but saw only the usual stream of traffic.

  The two of them waited like that for almost a minute, and Floyd was just thinking he would cross the road anyway when two things happened. One was that Mike vanished as suddenly and completely as he had appeared, and the other was that he heard a voice calling his name.

  “Floyd? Floyd, is that you?”

  He found himself looking down at a car that had pulled up in front of him. It was a BMW convertible with cream leather seats, driven by a girl with long blonde hair and an extremely short skirt. The speaker, however, was the young man in the passenger seat.

  “It is you, isn’t it?” The man, dressed in a pair of designer jeans and an immaculately ironed shirt, stepped out of the car. “I knew it. You haven’t changed a bit!” Smiling broadly, he took off his dark glasses and Floyd finally recognized who it was.

  It was Barrington. Barrington Gates.