by A. D. Miller
‘’Fraid not,’ said Neil.
‘Too uncoordinated,’ Adam said. ‘He’d be laughed off the slopes.’
‘You two should come see us in Boulder,’ Eric went on. ‘We’ll teach you. Shouldn’t they, Rose?’
‘I guess so,’ Rose said, sweeping away a hair with a hand mittened in sleeve.
‘Any time. Love to have you. Wouldn’t we, sweetie? November to April, best skiing in America. Twenty minutes and you’re on the slopes. And, no kidding, a hot tub in the yard!’ He giggled.
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Adam said.
‘I mean it,’ Eric said. ‘It’s great to meet you guys. From England. I don’t think Rose has met someone from England before, have you, honey?’
‘Sure I have,’ Rose said, poking the ground with a marshmallow stick.
‘How did you two meet?’
‘Playing rugby,’ said Neil.
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘We were playing against each other. I was playing for Cambridge and Neil was playing for Birmingham. We had a drink in the bar afterwards. That was three or four years ago.’
‘Who won?’ Rose asked.
‘We did,’ Adam said.
The English couple whispered to each other. The Germans and the gay couple retreated to their tents. Trey went to wash up the dinner plates in a plastic tub. Eric stood, clutched his back, and wandered into the trees to pee.
‘So, Rose,’ Adam said. ‘What’s your story?’
The woman from Yorkshire turned sharply towards him, as if she were about to say something, but instead she looked away. Neil laughed at his friend’s insouciance, tried to disguise the laugh as a cough and only just kept in his beer. Rose blushed. She blushed in two stages, each discernible by the orange light of the campfire. Her face coloured, and a few seconds later darkened again, the blotch spreading down her neck as her self-consciousness kicked in, the embarrassment self-perpetuating, like a quarrel that lives on its own momentum after the original insult has been forgotten.
There was something new and grating about Adam that night, Neil thought. He had interrupted him twice; he needn’t have made that crack about Neil being too clumsy for skiing; he had hijacked their lying game, which they were supposed to play against outsiders, not versus each other. Or, there was something different about the two of them together. Up till then their rivalry had been playful and polite, like a tennis knock-up with no score, kept in check by joint enterprises, curiosity and affection. This evening it was overt and raw. Rose was the contest more than she was the prize. Somewhere else, on another night, the discipline would have been arm-wrestling or Trivial Pursuit.
‘Well,’ Rose said, recovering herself, ‘it’s pretty short.’
Neil stood, padded past Adam and the English couple and sat next to Rose in the spot that had been Eric’s. He leaned back on his elbows, and straight away began talking to her in a voice too quiet for anyone else to hear, and almost too quiet for Rose, so that, to follow him, she had to lean back too, extending her legs in front of her and crossing them at the ankles.
Eric returned from the trees, humming. He glanced at Neil and Rose and sat next to Adam, the weight of his torso rocking him back on his haunches before he righted himself.
‘When you heading home?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got these flexible tickets,’ Adam said, peering around the circle, beyond the English couple, to where Neil was reclining with Rose. He was impressed, even faintly pleased, with his friend’s ruthlessness, as well as aggrieved. ‘A week or two, probably. You?’
‘Right after Yosemite,’ Eric said. ‘Rose has to get ready for school.’
School, Adam thought. They called everything school, didn’t they? That Colorado State T-shirt. ‘Yes,’ he said absently, ‘I suppose so.’
‘Sophomore year already,’ Eric continued, shaking his head in the standard parental amazement. ‘My girl. You believe it?’
‘What’s her major?’ Adam asked, speaking American.
‘Major?’ Eric said, giggling. ‘High school sophomore’s what I mean.’ He stopped laughing and turned towards his daughter.
‘Of course,’ Adam reassured him. ‘My mistake.’
The Yorkshire couple cut in to quiz him about Cambridge – they had a nephew who had studied there, maybe Adam knew him, etcetera – and he was obliged to keep up the pretence, even though it was no fun on his own and he sensed that his act wasn’t convincing. He was telling them how he had read philosophy and been on University Challenge, how he had given up rugby after breaking his leg on tour in South Africa, all the while monitoring Neil and Rose. Neil was making her laugh, he could see that; she was making patterns in the dust with her outstretched feet. Tough luck, pal, Adam thought. Technical disqualification.
Eric stood up and announced that he was turning in. ‘Don’t stay up late, honey,’ he called to his daughter. ‘Half an hour, deal?’ He ruffled her hair as he passed her.
‘Night, Daddy,’ Rose said, smoothing it back. He waddled to their tent, looking back once over his shoulder.
Adam was about to interrupt them, but the Yorkshireman insisted on telling him about his haulage business, and then Neil was wiping a bug from Rose’s shoulder, or pretending to, the deviously tactile bastard. Now the woman was on to the Prime Minister, how he seemed a decent enough bloke but the rest of them were chancers, and Neil was laughing along with her, and, Adam asked himself, how serious was it likely to be, anyway?
Eventually the woman said good night and went to their tent, but the man hung on. Beyond his chatter (the virtues of corporal punishment), Adam caught Rose asking whether Neil had a girlfriend and Neil saying he wasn’t sure, he would know later that evening, a corny line that made her grin. Neil had beaten him, his clever little tricks had beaten him, and after all, Adam thought, this was what he wanted. He had done this to himself.
Adam finished his beer. The fire had nearly burned out, but when he stood and brushed the dust from his shorts he thought he could see that, though she wasn’t drinking anything, Rose was swallowing nervously, as daunted girls did when they had made their decision. Neil’s hand was on her knee.
The Yorkshireman was dozing off, his chin making futile anti-gravitational jerks from his chest. Adam saw the smile on his friend’s face. High-school sophomore… This wasn’t his business. When he opened his mouth, all that emerged was ‘Good night’. Rose reciprocated in a voice that tried to sound composed but came out too high. Neil lifted his hand from her leg and waved. Adam walked slowly to their tent.
For Adam that night would always be associated with itching, a fierce sensation he could almost feel if he inadvertently thought back to Yosemite. He was in the tent, in the no man’s land between waking and sleep, when he felt Neil’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Adam,’ Neil whispered. Then, louder, shaking him harder: ‘Mate, I need the tent.’
‘What?’
‘I need the tent.’
Adam tried to focus on the ghostly features before panning towards the tent flaps. Through the opening he distinguished the girl’s legs, standing in the moonlight, one of them rotating on a pointed sneaker.
He hesitated. The tent smelled of beer.
‘Neil,’ he began, ‘have you…’
‘Don’t worry,’ Neil told him. ‘Boy scout.’ He tightened his grip on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Adam, come on.’
Adam kneeled, bunched up his sleeping bag and crawled outside in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. Rose’s face as he passed her was open and eager, as if she had won her own dare. He saw her bend and enter the tent, and Neil following her in.
He should have taken himself further off, beneath the trees at the edge of the campsite or beside the expiring fire. Instead he dropped his sleeping bag a few metres from the tent, blearily considering that to be his assigned place in the world.
He was nearly close enough to touch them and thought he heard almost everything. They were whispering, and now and again he lost them, but even then he caught t
he rhythm and the gist. They bumped into and tripped over each other as they settled themselves inside. There was some strangerish apologising, followed by silence, from which Adam inferred that Neil had used the entanglement to kiss her.
Outside the night was cooler than the tent had been, but it was warm enough for Adam to spread out his sleeping bag and recline on top rather than zipping himself in. When he lay down, uncovered, he hadn’t reckoned on the midges, or whatever the insects were, some unsquashably tiny and incessant creatures that tormented his forearms and legs. When he moved to scratch or wave them away, the lining of his sleeping bag crackled, interfering with his eavesdropping and potentially alerting Neil and Rose. He lay as still and stoically as he could for as long as it lasted.
The tent was small (standard issue from the tour operator), and two or three times an elbow or other extremity stretched the fabric in a slapstick bulge. She was giggling, and Neil was shushing her, then he was giggling too. There was quiet, punctuated by rustling as clothes were shed. Neil whispered something that Adam couldn’t decipher and Rose replied inaudibly. A minute later he heard her say, ‘Sure’.
The itching was overwhelming but he didn’t move. He could hear Neil going through his bag, taking things out, putting them back. Neil swore. That’s it, Adam thought. But there was more whispering, and some panting, and it was on again.
‘That much?’ he heard Neil asking her. ‘How much?’
‘Sorry,’ Rose said.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Adam knew when it was over. He swatted helplessly at the midges and zipped up his sleeping bag. He felt a fuzzy, insomniac dread, like a person who suspects he has left the oven on (High school sophomore’s what I mean). Even so, his alarm was subordinate to another feeling: a new, disconcerting jealousy. He hadn’t expected to be beaten, he wasn’t accustomed to losing, but it wasn’t mainly that.
Adam was jealous of Rose. She had come between them. She had taken away his friend. The two of them were still in the tent together, whispering, when – just as he was sure he would never manage to – Adam fell into a brief, uncomfortable sleep.
Eric’s first instinct, his instant threat, was to call the police. They had been careless and unlucky. Rose stayed longer than she should have; she, then Neil, fell asleep. Her father woke as it started to get light, saw that she wasn’t with him and shuffled out to look for her. They heard him rummaging around the camp and she panicked, scrambled into her clothes and outside, and he caught her leaving the tent. His shouting roused Adam, along with most of the others.
‘Fifteen,’ Adam heard Eric yelling. ‘Did you know that, you asshole? Fifteen! I told you guys!’
‘Nearly sixteen,’ Rose said quietly.
‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘You just had your birthday. Jesus… And your mother!’
Neil was saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over. He was standing next to Rose in his boxer shorts, his legs pasty and thin, holding up his hands in a Don’t shoot! pose. At one point, apparently thinking of Eric’s friendliness and invitation, he added something about there having been a ‘misunderstanding’, but he quickly saw that straight apology was wiser. The hippies, two of the Germans and the gay couple were already there, hovering a few yards away, as if there were an invisible cordon holding them back.
‘Damn right you’re sorry,’ Eric said. ‘Don’t go anywhere, you asshole.’ He surveyed the other campers, as if to enlist them as sentries. ‘Where’s that fucking guide?’ He peered around for Trey. ‘Where’s the nearest phone? Jesus Christ, come here, honey.’
Eric seized Rose by a wrist and marched her away to the other side of the campsite. ‘What’s the matter with you, you asshole?’ he growled at Adam as they passed him. Adam heard Rose say ‘no’ repeatedly, her volume rising each time, the voice between a shriek and a plea, though he couldn’t make out what it was that she was rejecting – an imputation of duress, maybe, or a threat of disownment, or the call to the police.
The English couple arrived, the woman in an incongruous dressing gown, and they and the others spontaneously formed a loose, citizens’ semicircle around Neil, the tent hemming him in behind. Neil’s shoulders were slumped, his face bone white. He kept his eyes on the ground until, timidly, he looked up at Adam. After a few seconds Adam pushed between the Germans and joined him.
‘Morning,’ he said.
Neil nodded, smiling with his eyes.
Trey approached the tent as they were struggling into their clothes. In a hard, unfamiliar tone, he said, ‘He wants me to get the police. I mean, what the fuck, you guys? I don’t know about England, but in California you’re looking at two years in San Quentin. Jesus, this is the last thing…’
‘Is this what they teach you at Cambridge?’ the English woman said, as Trey stomped away. What? Adam thought. To her husband she said, loudly, ‘We thought they were such nice boys.’ The Yorkshireman tutted. I am a nice boy, Adam thought. I am.
The female hippy covered her eyes with a hand. The gay couple were staring, mouths open, intermittently shaking their heads. After a few, long minutes Neil said, ‘Look, I’m just stretching my legs, okay? Just over there, okay?’ Nobody stopped him. The athletic American crossed his arms imposingly on his chest but stood aside.
Adam found him leaning against a skinny tree. They were wearing their lookalike boots. Neil said, ‘Suppose I should have known.’
‘How should you?’
‘I don’t know. I just should have, to be honest. You know – her knickers.’
‘What’s wrong with her knickers?’
‘Nothing, they were just… I should have known.’
‘You know, I tried to…’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
They were quiet for a moment. It was getting properly light. Adam scratched his leg.
‘You used something, right?’
Neil didn’t answer. He broke a twig from a low branch and bent it in his fist; it was too supple to snap and he threw it aside.
After a minute Adam said, ‘I guess the skiing’s off.’
‘Ad, don’t. Didn’t you hear what he said? About San wherever it was.’ Adam said nothing. ‘Who am I going to call?’
‘What?’
‘You get one call, don’t you? Or is that only on television?’
‘I don’t know,’ Adam said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Neil pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and in a different voice, quieter but firmer, as if he had been rehearsing in his head, said, ‘It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? I mean, you wanted it too. You started it.’
Adam knew what he meant. The harmless competition, the innocent collusion, the rapt exclusion of other people’s feelings from their thoughts: all the ordinary elements of friendship that had brought them here. The words he had spoken about the girl, as well as the crucial ones he hadn’t. ‘What are you talking about?’ he replied.
They trudged back together. Flight would have been impractical, but, in any case, the idea never occurred to them – some ingrained deference to the law, and the paralysing numbness of their predicament. They stood in silence, anticipating the police, the handcuffs, Neil’s right to remain silent, Adam privately wondering whether he might be fingered as an accessory. Those two years in San Quentin.
Presently they heard raised voices at the edge of the campsite. They saw Eric gesturing at the two of them with a thumb. They saw Trey pat him on the shoulder and Eric brush off his hand. Trey walked over to them in what seemed like slow motion.
‘There’s a shuttle you can catch,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way, he tells me to hold it, now they… Just take the shuttle, there’s a bus to the city.’
‘But…’ Neil began.
‘He’s changed his mind. She must have persuaded him, how the hell should I know? Could be she told him nothing happened. Or he doesn’t want to put her through it. But he wants you out of here.’
‘Thanks,’ Adam said. ‘Re
ally.’
Trey spat in the dirt. ‘Just get the fuck out of here, will you?’
Neil ducked into the tent to pack up his kit. Adam jogged over to the extinguished campfire, where Trey had half-arranged the breakfast things, to get some water for the journey. Three of the previous evening’s beer bottles sprawled in the ashes. He was dizzy with relief: no police, nothing to be an accessory to, the surreal peril lifting, nightmare-like, as suddenly as it had struck.
As he turned from the water cooler, Eric intercepted him. Adam looked over the broad shoulder for Neil, or for anyone. He shuffled sideways, but Eric blocked him off. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you little… It’s not for your sake, believe me… What kind of people are you?’
Not knowing what to say, Adam offered a tense smile.