The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  ‘Yes,’ he lied, reluctant to spoil the happy mood in the car. ‘Red Rocks is incredible, apparently.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. Lucky you.’

  At the junction of Sunset and Benton Way was a towering, rotating sign advertising a foot clinic. On one side of it was a happy-looking foot, smiling and dancing and waving a hand. On the other was a sad, injured foot, its eyes red, leaning on a crutch with one of its toes in a bandage. Adam had met someone at a party who’d told him that they drove past the foot every morning and believed that whichever side they saw first would decide the way their day went.

  ‘Man,’ the guy had said. ‘I hate to see that crackhead foot.’

  Ever since, Adam had found it difficult to resist the superstition himself. This morning, the smiling foot was facing them squarely. Erica took the turn before it had rotated away. He sighed happily, and leaned back in his seat.

  When they reached Hillhurst, Erica turned north towards Los Feliz. Halfway up the street, she performed a smooth U-turn and stopped outside a place called Recess, with a patio outside a smart, low-rise building. A valet, the sleeves of his white shirt already rolled back over large forearms, welcomed them and took the car.

  In the courtyard, which was cool and bright in the new day’s light, only a few tables were taken. Two young mothers with their babies, a few older women with little dogs on leashes at their feet.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how busy this place gets at weekends,’ Erica said.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Adam replied.

  ‘Here’s the plan,’ she said. ‘You go order, I’ll get us a table.’

  ‘Perfect. What are you having?’

  ‘Pancakes and a coffee. And I think I want to drink a Bloody Mary.’

  Adam raised an eyebrow at her.

  ‘I wouldn’t usually,’ she said. ‘A little fun on my day off.’

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir,’ Adam told her happily.

  It was still only 8.30 when they were seated with their coffees. Beyond the courtyard’s edge, Hillhurst looked bright and clean in the morning light. Traffic moved along it briskly, and a storekeeper was sweeping the sidewalk across the street from where they sat. The old ladies were quieter now, digesting their breakfasts, sipping coffees and looking out into the street, absently scratching behind their dogs’ ears.

  ‘Cheers,’ Erica said, when the drinks arrived.

  ‘This beats doing emails,’ Adam said.

  ‘Will you get in trouble?’

  ‘I’ll do them on the plane.’

  The Bloody Mary was delicious, and he told her so.

  ‘I’m a connoisseur,’ she said. ‘This will sound very pretentious, but there’s one out in Topanga at this bougie hippie place that I think is the best in LA. They take it so seriously that they put a piece of dyed purple cauliflower in it, though I’m not sure that affects the taste.’

  ‘You should start a Bloody Mary Instagram,’ Adam told her. ‘It’d be a hit.’

  ‘I’d rather stick to drinking them,’ she said.

  ‘I’m just so happy you’re a drinker,’ Adam replied.

  She tossed her hair back and laughed, her beauty ringing out at him from across the table. He felt an odd pang of fear in the face of it. Already, he didn’t want to lose her.

  The food arrived, and more customers began to fill out the courtyard. There were lots of women in yoga pants and trainers, several more people with little dogs.

  ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ Adam said.

  ‘I guess so.’ Erica looked straight at him, intrigued.

  ‘When were you last in a relationship with someone?’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘A year ago.’

  ‘Right. Is it OK that I asked?’

  ‘I think so,’ she nodded.

  ‘What happened, with the guy?’

  She sipped her coffee and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Well, he was also a doctor…’ She paused.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He got a transfer to a hospital in the Bay Area. He asked me to go with him, but I could tell he didn’t want me to. I don’t think he wanted to settle, all that.’

  ‘Right,’ Adam nodded.

  ‘Why did you want to know?’

  ‘I just think you’re very lovely,’ he said. ‘The train of thought started there.’

  She smiled again, and sipped the Bloody Mary through a straw.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Histories, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how do you feel now you’ve asked your question?’

  ‘Very good,’ Adam said.

  * * *

  In the car, he put his hand on her thigh and squeezed it gently. He meant the gesture to be affectionate, to tell her how good it felt to be with her, but the boozy drinks had generated an undertow of sex and this physical connection strengthened it. She gave him a quick, urgent look before turning back to the road.

  There was something more than just sex, too, that he was sure was mutual. He felt oddly raw and emotional.

  ‘Adam,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish we had more time.’ She was watching the road, speaking quietly but clearly. ‘You know?’

  ‘Me too,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘When you get back.’

  They glanced at each other. Her mischievous look had returned, and she smiled, breaking the tension.

  On the freeway, driving south towards the airport, the car was filled with a happy silence. It seemed to Adam that they were floating along the tarmac in a cloud of desire and happiness. He looked at Erica’s feet in her heels, her slim ankles and wrists. He wanted to tell her to turn the car around, so he could stay in LA.

  ‘Thank you for driving me,’ he said when she pulled up in the terminal.

  ‘You’re very welcome.’

  ‘That was an adventure.’ He wanted to shower her with praise, felt it wise to restrain himself.

  She leaned across the seat and kissed him.

  A moment later someone knocked on the car bonnet, and they both looked up in surprise. A large, unshaven airport cop was glaring through the windscreen.

  ‘Alright, folks,’ he said, already looking away. ‘Move it on.’

  Adam climbed out, pausing at the door to look at Erica.

  ‘Call me,’ she said. She glanced at her cell phone, tossed it into a cupholder and turned off her hazards, already gauging the traffic ahead.

  Adam closed the door, and felt a thud of longing as her car disappeared around a curve in the airport’s beltway. He picked up his duffel bag and walked into the terminal.

  23

  At least, he reflected as he slumped into his window seat on the plane, Falconz were nice people.

  His Platinum status with the airline had won him a Comfort Class seat, but not First. No matter. He’d boarded early, removed his book and headphones from his bag, and stashed it safely directly above his head. Plane seats, for Adam, induced instant drowsiness. Especially today, after the unexpected liaison with Erica and a strong drink first thing.

  Normally, it would simply be the sudden draining of stress, he thought: the stress of getting to the airport, going through security, and not knowing whether the preponderance of large wheelie cases would mean his bag would not end up directly above his head.

  But today, all of these obstacles had been surmounted. Now, all he had to do was stay awake until the drinks trolley appeared.

  He wished he felt more excitement for the trip, and for Falconz. Sadly, though, being a nice person wasn’t always the best qualification for being a good artist. Successful, perhaps, but not necessarily good.

  In Adam’s time in America, he’d noticed that this new breed of musician had begun to dominate. There seemed to be a whole legion of artists like Falconz, who applied to music the sort of steely diligence and frank ambition that they otherwise might have to careers in financial services, or extreme sporting feats. It was hard to think of them as arti
sts, people who made the sort of imperiously original work that changed lives.

  In Adam’s experience, the distinguishing characteristic of artists who made that sort of work was how troubled they were. Difficult, sensitive souls who made the world a more beautiful place, but whom it was often terrible to be. In fact, they were often the sort who, if it weren’t for their talent, might have ended up resident on the LA River.

  It was a long time since he’d worked with one, he reflected, peering out of the plane window. If he was honest with himself, it was getting on for a decade since he’d last truly loved a musician’s output and felt privileged and excited to work with them.

  That artist had been a maverick north London rapper, who radiated a sort of manic, attention-deficit charisma, and whose work Adam had loved deeply. The rapper’s ability to deliver fiery, extended vocal performances, littered with casually brilliant metaphors and burning with restrained anger and passion, had seemed to Adam to approach the transcendent. To Adam’s joy, a strong personal bond had developed between them, too.

  ‘You might be a white man from Bath,’ the rapper had told him, ‘but you do know your shit.’

  He was the same age as Adam, but had been raised in a broken family, partly by an aunt who brought a succession of ‘uncles’ into the house and cooked crack cocaine in her kitchen.

  ‘I used to wonder what they was doing in there, mate,’ the rapper had told Adam, on the train to a festival in Belgium. ‘All this steam coming out under the door.’

  He’d been stabbed twelve times, in two sets of six. While he and Adam worked together, his forearm had been deeply slashed with a Stanley knife by an older man who wanted the rapper to make a career for his talentless son.

  Adam had listened one night as he’d hosted a pirate radio show, regularly pausing the music to insult another artist he’d fallen out with. The show had ended with the studio being attacked by this newly minted rival and his crew.

  When Adam finally got hold of the rapper, and asked if he was alright, the reply came: All good mate. They slashed me but on my back they dint get my face.

  The artist was famously mercurial. He never stayed with a label for more than one record before he fell out with them explosively. But Adam had managed, somehow, to release four.

  I love you mate, the rapper texted him once. And Adam told him he loved him too.

  Sometimes he wondered if it might have been more exciting to work with very famous artists. To go to a big label and encounter some of the people with the towering egos that were, apparently, often necessary to reach the dizzying upper echelons of success.

  He’d had the chance, too. For a year or so, he’d worked in the production department of a much bigger label, assisting an A & R man with the daily travails of mixing and mastering singles. The label’s artists regularly appeared on prime-time TV shows, and Adam had once accompanied one of them. In his youthful, emphatically hip-hop morph of baggy jeans, giant t-shirt and silver chain, he had stood out like a sore thumb. He had not been happy at the label.

  One of the defining recollections of this brief stint was being driven to a studio by a junior A & R man on one of his first days.

  ‘What do you think the difference will be between working at an indie and working here?’ Adam had asked him, somewhat innocently.

  ‘Well,’ the A & R man had said, sniffing, and glancing at Adam as he drove. ‘I think it’ll be a lot more debauched.’

  But the music had been bad, and he’d gone back to the smaller world of independent labels. He’d wanted to stick to his principles, work on esoteric records he loved, try to make successes of them for the artists that made them. Somewhere, though, something had gone wrong.

  Now, the majority of his time was spent working on Falconz. They were good, untroubled people. With them, it was only the music that was the problem.

  But there was, of course, a more frightening alternative. Namely that Falconz, and their ever-expanding, numbing swathe of contemporaries, were actually good, and that Adam simply couldn’t tell.

  Perhaps he’d become too old to get it. As a youth, he’d observed a joyless, jaundiced cynicism in older music fans with a sort of disgust. Nirvana, several of them had told him, are just ripping off Pixies. So why bother with them? It was clear, then and now, that they’d been missing the point – completely failing to hear the beauty and originality in music they’d been confronted with.

  Was that what was happening to him now? Certainly, he found himself more and more often wanting to tell younger people about the antecedents of what they were listening to. Whenever he gave in to temptation and did so, they nodded noncommittally and kept listening to the new thing, the one they were into, that was happening now.

  Fuck off, Grandad; that was what he’d used to think, whenever someone did it to him.

  But might there not be some grain of truth in the idea that music was getting worse? That mavericks and visionaries and gut instinct, loose cannons and colourful characters and passion, were being replaced by data, sanitized corporatism and laser-targeted marketing?

  Adam, as a young man, had loved that there were tribes. Rockers, ravers, indie kids, metalheads, clubbers and hip-hop crews. You distinguished yourself by your clothes, your music and your friends. Other tribes were the enemy. There to be ridiculed, run from or occasionally fought. Back then, it was normal to love and hate with equal passion.

  Now, social media and a new breed of smarter, insidious brand sponsorship seemed to have dissolved the tribes into a sort of globalized, homogeneous hipster template – replete with tattoos, beards, the same haircuts and a standard set of tastes. No one dared to say they hated a given genre now – outside of Christian rock, perhaps, or Nazi punk. The tribes had been unified under the good word of a handful of music websites. Now, everyone liked the same, few, officially sanctioned artists from each main genre.

  Hipsters had the internet. The albums Adam had dug out of record stores, had made the dread decision over which to select, to spend his meagre pocket money on, had dared to carry to the counter under the cold stare of pale young men riddled with obscure knowledge, had taken home and studied – often recoiled from – had worked to understand and often to love, had haunted and terrified and electrified him, were now torn up in a digital frenzy of recycling, before everyone moved on to the next thing.

  When Kurt Cobain had died, Adam had to wait two days for his NME and Melody Maker to arrive and tell him, in any detail, what had happened. Nowadays, Wikipedia could demythologize a band in less time than it took to listen to a song.

  And with the brands had come a total loss of romance towards independence. Adam hadn’t heard the phrase ‘selling out’ mentioned in almost a decade, and never once by anyone younger than himself. Now, if your favourite rapper worked with Maroon 5, more power (and money) to him. It was better to be on a major label. That made you the real deal – not just some chump who could only get signed to an indie.

  Yes, he believed, it was surely possible to make an argument that music was getting worse. That the Led Zeppelins, Beatles, Stones, Bowies, Nirvanas, Outkasts and Wu-Tang Clans just didn’t come around as often any more.

  And however depressing it was to believe this, to have become one of those old men, it seemed worse to be dishonest, to pretend to be excited.

  Maybe music was simply a young person’s game. Certainly, the sense of befuddlement that he’d noted, gradually settling in his once-passionate, non-industry friends, had recently come over him too. He had started to occasionally mispronounce artists’ names, to confuse second and third albums. Worse, to not care very much when he did so.

  Every day, millions of oddly named, semi-talented people uploaded their music to the internet, and the industry tried to sift through the manure to find the gem. It was a cacophony out there, and Adam’s ears were ringing.

  And that, he thought, staring at the baking runway tarmac beyond the window, might well be his undoing. This befuddlement must be hidden at all costs
. Particularly from the Autodidact.

  He’d worked himself into some anxiety when his phone beeped in his pocket. When he removed it, he saw he had an alert on Instagram.

  Reluctantly, he opened the app. How best to discourage, or even close down, this additional method of contact? he wondered. The message was from Angelina.

  Will u b in Denver for red rocks?? it said. If so c u there

  A reply wasn’t immediately forthcoming. He didn’t want to be rude, but neither too encouraging. Go away, red frog, he thought. No. Not fair. It was hardly Angelina’s fault.

  Sure thing! he wrote eventually. Hopefully see you there!

  The phone still in his hand, he thought of Erica. Before he could decide not to, he sent her a text.

  You’re lovely. I can’t wait to see you again.

  The thought of her made his stomach flutter like a teenager’s. If only she was beside me now, he thought. If only we were going somewhere together. Images of a hot place, of a beach and sunshine and Erica’s smiling face, rose into his mind and blazed there. Lying on that beach and talking to each other. Faces close together, happily drunk, bodies laced with sand and salt water.

  Her face, but also the rest of her, he thought, onwardly. Her bedroom, undressing together as they kissed. Moving his lips down her long neck and to her breasts and her stomach and everywhere else.

  He wanted to hear her speak more. The edge of mischief she had. The way she said exactly what she meant, and the way that revealed a mind that he liked very much. The precision of her speech. Her laugh and her smile.

  His penis and his heart swollen in equal proportion, he replayed the morning’s memories of her, letting them work their powers. Grinning stupidly, he put the phone back in his pocket.

  The plane had started to fill up. Adam watched the procession of travellers moving slowly down the aisle towards him. Young women in baggy sweatpants, almost like sleepwear, he thought – flight pillows attached to their wheelie cases, larger-sized iPhones in free hands. Young men in LA Dodgers baseball caps, many in shorts and vests, even flip-flops, several with big, gleaming Rolexes. Older men with comfortable slacks and smart polo shirts, moustaches, cell phone belt-clips, briefcases and the harder-earned, subtler types of Swiss watches.