by A. D. Miller
‘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?’