The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  ‘Fucking Roger, man. Jesus fuck, he’s driving me nuts.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Really?’

  ‘Dude,’ Marissa said, shaking her head. ‘It’s like being on tour with your dad.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Bret said. ‘If he comes after us now we’re gonna have to go back to the hotel and party in a room.’

  ‘One he isn’t allowed into,’ Marissa said, evidently meaning it.

  Adam couldn’t control his grin.

  ‘Is he that bad?’ Angelina said. Her hand had moved to the small of Adam’s back as they watched the corridor.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bret said, eyes widening. ‘He’s so intense. You have no idea.’

  The little group fell silent, peering around the wall and watching.

  Just then, like the actual Terminator in the police station scene, Roger himself appeared at the far end of the corridor. Automatically, all four of them flinched back around the corner.

  Marissa and Bret turned to them, eyes wide.

  ‘Run,’ Marissa whispered.

  The group set off down the corridor at top speed. A little way down, a tough-looking woman in a yellow security jacket was seated beside a doorway.

  ‘What’s in here?’ Bret asked her.

  ‘Exit,’ she said, gum visible in her mouth.

  ‘Shit,’ Marissa said, looking nervously the way they’d come.

  ‘Go,’ Bret said. They all set off again, rounding another corner, coming to what appeared to be a separate set of dressing rooms on the far side of the venue from the ones they’d left.

  Bret tried a door, which was evidently locked.

  ‘Damn it.’

  Adam, on the edge of hysteria, was struggling not to laugh. Operation Bypass Roger, he was thinking. Mission successful! Haha! In your face, Autodidact! And in yours too, Roger, you mad-eyed robotic bastard!

  Angelina tried a door, which opened onto a darkened storage cupboard.

  ‘Yes,’ Marissa said. ‘In in in!’

  They piled in and closed the door.

  Bret ended up furthest inside. He banged into a metal shelving unit as the others moved into position, and a loud clanging rang out.

  Marissa, closest to the door, hissed, ‘Shhh!’

  Angelina was pressed up tight against Adam – tighter, in fact, than he suspected she needed to be. His heart was pounding with fear and exhilaration. He felt like a schoolboy. It was hard to decide what the implications of all this might be. Harder still, in the moment, to care.

  After half a minute, footsteps could be heard in the corridor outside.

  Marissa turned to them in the darkness, the white of her bared, clenched teeth and eyes visible within it.

  The footsteps paused, not far beyond the door.

  ‘Guys?’ they heard Roger say.

  A door handle was rattled, then went silent.

  Marissa flashed them her comedy fear-face again, and gestured for Adam to lean his weight against the door beside her.

  Sure enough, after a moment the handle turned. It rattled, stopped. Adam had just begun to release the pressure when it rattled again, more violently now. After a moment it stopped again.

  Adam turned, and doubled over towards Bret, panting, certain he could control his laughter no longer.

  Angelina placed a hand on his back.

  The door handle rattled a third time. Adam whipped around, lending his weight to Marissa’s again.

  ‘Bret?’ Roger said from outside. ‘Marissa?’

  Was it Adam’s imagination, or did he sound almost sad? A pang of sympathy took him by surprise, but quickly faded away. Fuck you, Roger, he thought, with a surge of potent glee.

  A few more door handles were tried, and then the footsteps were heard once more, receding down the corridor.

  ‘Holy fucking shit,’ Marissa whispered, her suppressed giggle coming out as a wheeze.

  ‘That was scary!’ Angelina whispered.

  ‘Has he for sure gone?’ Bret said. He was contorted into the corner of the room, half behind the shelf, trembling.

  ‘I think so.’

  Cautiously, Marissa opened the door.

  ‘OK,’ she said, looking back at them. ‘Coast is clear. Let’s find somewhere to do some fucking drugs.’

  A fire escape at the far end of the hallway allowed them to climb to the next floor. Here, a large conference room took up most of the space off the corridor they found themselves in, but there were also a number of small, comfortable dressing rooms, all of them unlocked.

  They crammed into one of these, piling onto a leather couch. There was a small drinks fridge beneath the dressing table, and Bret opened it, looked up at them and grinned.

  ‘Score,’ he said, and began passing out cans of beer.

  Adam was at the far end of the couch, Angelina sitting on its arm beside him. He moved his hand beneath her top, running his fingers over the small of her back, where she was sweating slightly. She pressed her leg tight up against his shoulder.

  Harmless fun, he thought, distantly.

  ‘It’s good to meet you,’ Bret said to Angelina. ‘I’m a fan.’

  ‘Really?’ Angelina sounded girlish. ‘That’s so cool.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ Bret said. ‘We’d love to get a song in one of your Instagram videos.’

  Videos? Adam thought. What fucking videos?

  ‘Oh my God,’ Angelina said. ‘Done.’

  ‘Sorry about all that,’ Marissa told her. ‘Sometimes we just seriously need a break from the guy.’

  She’d begun pouring cocaine from a small plastic baggie onto the surface of the iPad.

  ‘So he’s really driving you nuts?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Man,’ Bret said, ‘I love him, I guess, but he’s just so full on! It’s like he’s just watching us the whole time. This is the last fucking tour he’s coming on, I’ll tell you that much.’

  ‘We have to hide from him every time we wanna party,’ Marissa said. ‘And it’s not like it’s every night. We have one night a week to kick loose a little on tour, the rest of the time it’s full-on work.’

  She began carving up lines with a silver credit card – which, Adam noted, bore the business name Falconz, Inc. and had an expensive-looking gold trim – while Bret rolled up a note.

  ‘To be honest,’ Adam said, surprising even himself, ‘he’s actually a very good manager. He certainly keeps me on my toes.’

  ‘Really?’ Bret asked, as sceptically as someone so well raised could be.

  ‘Yes. And to be honest, having a manager who discourages partying probably isn’t the worst thing in the world.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ Marissa said. Her serious expression gave way to a mischievous grin. ‘But fuck, it feels good to escape and do some drugs.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Adam said. ‘That was the most fun I’ve had at a show in a long time.’

  ‘Thank you, man,’ Bret said. Luckily, he’d failed to notice that Adam hadn’t been thinking of the actual set.

  ‘Guests first,’ Marissa said, passing the iPad along to Angelina.

  ‘Ah, thank you,’ she said. Balancing the machine on her knees, she leaned down and pushed her black hair aside – exposing a long, shapely neck – and daintily sniffed her line.

  When she passed the iPad to Adam, he held it out for Bret. ‘You guys first, I insist,’ he said.

  ‘God bless you, sir,’ Bret said. With practised efficiency, the pair of them snorted the large lines of powder.

  Finally, the iPad was on Adam’s knees, the note in his right hand, his mouth wet with anticipation.

  Just then, the door opened. Framed in the light from the corridor was the tall, slim, ramrod-straight frame of Roger.

  He looked down at Adam, then at the iPad, his eyes red-rimmed and gleaming like hard, bright little stones.

  ‘What’re you guys doing?’ he asked.

  Adam glanced down. ‘Ah,’ he said, gesturing at the cocaine. He looked back up at Roger and put on his best smile. ‘We’re just looking at
pictures of cocaine on Marissa’s iPad,’ he said.

  For a moment, there was utter silence. Then, suddenly, everyone was laughing. All except Roger, who simply turned and left the room.

  * * *

  It was 4 a.m. before Adam and Angelina left Marissa’s hotel room. The question of where Angelina was staying didn’t seem to need raising. She was burbling happily as they walked the darkened corridor towards the elevators, Adam frowning, trying to keep track of the way, of how high and drunk he was, of what Angelina was saying. Everything seemed to be at a slightly strange angle, as if he’d been slapped hard on the side of the head and hadn’t quite recovered.

  ‘We’re gonna start a band,’ she was telling him.

  ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘What’s it going to be called?’

  ‘We don’t have a name yet. It’s been about finding the right vibe between people.’

  Finally, the elevators. Adam pressed the button, impatient.

  ‘Are you going to sing?’ he asked.

  ‘Loooost in Spaaaace!’ the elevator said as its door opened.

  ‘No, but we’re gonna use my poetry as lyrics. I’m gonna do production.’

  ‘Production?’

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘And creative direction.’

  ‘Cool,’ he said.

  In the elevator, one wall had been decorated with a photograph of a piece of street art which could only be described as a sort of multicultural space scene.

  ‘What does that say to you?’ Angelina asked, giggling.

  ‘The same thing all street art does. That the reason it’s on the street, and now in an elevator, is because it’s not good enough to be in a gallery. That hopefully, one day soon, some men will come and pressure jet it to oblivion.’

  ‘You’re so negative,’ Angelina said.

  As the door pinged, a question rose to the surface of Adam’s mind.

  ‘How’s it going,’ he asked her, ‘with Striker, your agent guy?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, pouting. ‘I dropped him. We had different priorities.’

  Different priorities? Adam thought, trying to unpick this.

  The doors opened onto the silent, darkened corridor that led to Adam’s room.

  Once inside, she turned to kiss him, and he pulled off her clothes without ceremony. When he removed her boots, he could smell the dull tang of her feet. He was ringing with drugs and drink, all thought obliterated. There was just desire, and Angelina. A faint worry about whether he’d get hard enough to fuck her. And a new dynamic between them, too. Previously, Adam had always been the one chasing her. She had mainly been a frustration. She had never made him come, and he had never before penetrated her.

  He had met her at a gig, when she had heard him say something about his job, and she’d reached out and pulled on his nose and grinned and said, ‘Hey you,’ and he’d found himself charmed.

  When she was naked, now, before him, he pulled off his own clothes and kissed her, on the mouth, then her neck, then her breasts and stomach. Before long he was going down on her, her legs spread wide, soft whimpers coming from somewhere a long way above him. There was something soothing about being there, in the closed world between her legs, after all the fevered socializing of the long night beforehand. A while later, Angelina’s identity began to blur and fall away. It could have been any woman, every woman. She could be Erica, he thought, feeling as though he was dreaming.

  He pushed his tongue further into her, past the metallic tint to the salty juices beyond. He let Erica’s image form in his mind, the idea that he might soon be with her sending a purer desire surging through him.

  When Angelina finally tugged at his hair, he collapsed onto the bed beside her reluctantly, crashing from the pleasant dream-state back into the gloomy, crushingly familiar surroundings of a generic hotel room. Despite the blackness that was blossoming in his mind, he was painfully hard.

  Angelina rolled over to face him.

  ‘I’m thinking of getting a tattoo,’ she said. ‘You think I should?’

  ‘No. Tattoos are for sailors and the criminal underclass,’ he told her.

  ‘You’re so negative.’

  ‘Please suck my dick,’ he said.

  As she did so, he stared up at the ceiling, fevered images of things he’d done and things he’d wanted to flickering in his head.

  ‘Turn over,’ he told her after a while. ‘On your knees.’

  He spat onto the fingers of his left hand and rubbed his saliva into her pussy. She was still very wet, though, and he pushed the tip of his penis into her.

  Her head rose before him, and she sucked in a breath. In the light of the bedside lamp, he saw the lips of her vagina fold inwards as he moved his cock into her, gripping it. He pulled it back out a fraction, gazing at the gleaming smear on his dick, looking down and searching for excitement to light in him. Instead, oncoming guilt announced itself, like the sound of a distant, unexpected vehicle approaching in the night.

  Angelina flicked her head, her hair falling back over her neck. Her back shone with sweat.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said, her voice high and thin. ‘Fuck me.’

  When he had, and Angelina had fallen asleep beside him, the sky paling beyond the imperfectly drawn curtains, he reflected how strange it was that you often came to possess something when you no longer wanted it so badly.

  26

  On the birding trip to Santa Barbara, taken with his uncle and led by a hired guide whose demeanour and appearance were that of an off-the-grid, trailer-dwelling misanthrope, and whose manic excitement for birds had stoked the flames of Adam’s burgeoning enthusiasm, they had screeched to a halt in the middle of a narrow lane between mudbanks.

  ‘Hey,’ the guide had said, mischief in his voice, ponytail whipping around and brushing the back of his army surplus jacket as he turned and gestured. ‘Take a look in that hole.’

  Adam peered out of the window at a large, lateral cavity in the bank – almost a crack, rather than a hole. All he could make out was darkness.

  ‘With your binoculars, man,’ the guide said.

  Adam raised them. As ever, it took him a few seconds to orient himself within the sudden magnification. After a moment, he made out a pair of large yellow eyes, widened as though in alarm, peering out from the hole at him. They blinked, once.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Adam had said, forgetting, momentarily, that his uncle was sitting beside him.

  ‘That’s a burrowing owl, dude,’ the guide said, chuckling, his elongated, surf-bum vowels alight with pleasure.

  ‘Wow,’ Adam said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ his uncle muttered, leaning across Adam with his own, more powerful binoculars.

  ‘How did you know it was there?’ Adam had asked.

  ‘Found him the other day,’ the guide said proudly. ‘Seemed like a good spot for one to be hanging out.’

  Now, thirty thousand feet above the Rockies, the afternoon after the morning before, Adam pressed his head against the cold glass of the plane window and pulled the thin blanket over his head.

  I am a burrowing owl, he thought. Safe and warm in my dark little hole.

  ‘Sir,’ someone said. Adam swivelled his head and peered out from within his blanket. The steward was looking at him from beyond the empty seat beside him.

  ‘Drink?’

  Adam waved him away, too hungover to contemplate his gin and tonic, or even a Bloody Mary.

  As the trolley rattled onwards, Adam turned his head back to the window. I am not a burrowing owl, he thought, sadly. I am a far less noble creature. A snake, perhaps. No, meaner; a cuckoo, or a magpie.

  The comfort of the owl guise vanished, he tried to disentangle his thoughts.

  Never mind Falconz, and Roger, he decided. It was what it was, it would be what it would be. Looked at a certain way, it was mission successful. He’d got in direct with the band. Four hours of elated, loved-up chatter. Bonding time. Yes, Operation Bypass Roger had been a success.

  But he shouldn’t
have slept with Angelina. Not when all he really wanted was Erica.

  Once, this wouldn’t have bothered him at all – on the contrary, in fact. He squirmed at the realization that, once upon a time, he’d have been recalling the night before with relish, as some sort of victory. Not any more, it seemed. He had absolutely no appetite for that now.

  But he hadn’t broken any commitments, so why did he feel so guilty? He picked at the feeling until he understood. It was because he was still out of control, he realized. Didn’t that demonstrate that he hadn’t mended himself at all, and probably never would? This was exactly the sort of mistake that had once cost him everything.

  ‘Would you just fuck any nasty pussy that appeared in front of you? Would you just fuck anything?’ he heard Sofia say, her voice quiet with rage.

  Now, he knew quite suddenly, he was going to love Erica, and last night he’d slept with someone else. He’d poisoned it before it had even started.

  This old mistake, this tiresome old habit. He’d never found anything in life as exciting as the first time a new woman removed her underwear in front of him, and it had cost him dearly.

  Once, on a happier, longer flight than this one, he’d found himself in conversation with a man at the bar. When Adam had suggested that his well-spoken accent must have been popular in Los Angeles, he’d revealed that he too was originally from Bath. It turned out they’d been to school together, separated at the time by the yawning, icy chasm of two academic years.

  They were still separate. The man was an investor, and he drank his vodka tonics and acclaimed a new type of champagne designed to be drunk with ice. Adam drank his unadorned Scotch and decided it would be easiest simply to listen.

  The man told Adam that he’d loved school, but hated university. Adam wondered how that was possible. After the miserable years of school, where all but a few other outcasts had seemed to loathe him, university had been everything he’d dreamed of. He’d recast himself from his unpopular, unhappy clay into something more interesting and appealing.

  And girls had liked him. There were so many brilliant girls, he hadn’t wanted to squander any of them. He was in awe of them. Not just their bodies. Sex was as much about the mind, if it was to be worth having. It was a shared undertaking, a leaping off the ledge, hand in hand. It was fresh, unspoiled intimacy he craved. The type that came before jealousy and boredom, and the seeing the worst of each other. The type that came before someone took your possessions and threw them down a drain.