The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  I sat in the dark, uncle-scented lounge, waiting for Garthene to wake up so I could tell her the good news. I opened one of Lee’s beers to celebrate. I was on to my third by the time our bedroom door opened and Garthene shuffled out in her dressing gown, walking with the light from her phone.

  “I just got a message from Dan,” she said.

  She showed me the screen.

  Bad news, guys. Predictably, the sellers have gone with the cash. But I’ve got a killer two-bed in East Ham I really want to show you (just a smidge over budget). We march on. xx

  The phone went dark. We were lit only by the twitching of the Wi-Fi router. I could not see her expression. We listened to Lee’s juddering breath, pumping the room full of hopelessness.

  I got up, went to the window. We needed to get him out. I pulled down the blackout blanket and watched the objects of the small rented room materialize: table, chairs, kettle, toaster, bouncer, basket, condom on a cork board, two empty cans beneath my seat, pregnant wife’s face of only moderate disappointment, sad man rolling away from the light.

  Even at midday, with the windows all open, lights on, and me typing as loudly as I could, jabbing my index finger at each key in turn, I was unable to drive Lee out of bed, let alone our lives.

  I read aloud a study that shows that if one of your colleagues even tells you they are hungover it reduces your work rate as much as theirs. He had his earplugs in. After that, I did try working in the nearby coffee shop, but the glimpses of other people’s laptop screens—running Final Draft or Final Cut—all these thirtysomethings who still hadn’t given up their dreams, it was disgusting. So I came back home, where at least I didn’t have to buy a coffee in order to procrastinate. I spent my time trying to think of ways to get rid of Lee. Might I buy him a gym membership? Or help him write a misleading dating profile? Or take him to the GP for beta blockers? Finally I settled on palming him off on our other friends. That was the whole point of friends: to replace the family, welfare state and mental health services. I sent around a group message, suggesting a weekday picnic in Lee’s honor. I explained how he was finding life hard and it is at times like this that real friends come together to show how much we care and how many spare rooms we have.

  “Everyone wants to see you, pal,” I said, sitting on the end of Lee’s bed, resting my hand on his shin through the duvet.

  His eyes scrunched and then opened a fraction. It was now 5:00 PM.

  “Have you invited Marie?” he said.

  I replied in my soothing voice: “No. But I will if you want me to.”

  He sat up and uncorked his head, twisting out the earplugs. “Yes, I think I’m ready,” he said, and though he did not seem ready—speaking, as he was, from a bed in which I could see gross little tufts of claggy toilet paper protruding from where he had wedged them under the mattress—I decided to believe him.

  It was true that on the day of the picnic he started drinking at lunchtime, but he did so quietly, politely opening a can beneath the table, tapping his fingernail against the lid to ease fizz before opening. Tck tck tck. His nerves settled, we stepped outside. The sun split the high street in two, one pavement in darkness, one in light, and we chose the light. It never actually rains in London. The only people who think that don’t live here. As we crossed over into the park through the smell of aggressive barbecuing, he did a little hop in his walk to set a carefree tone. I’d returned him to the world.

  We saw them, our friends, on a tartan blanket out by the tree line. It was a testament to the sheer, preposterous luxuriousness of our lives that a Monday afternoon picnic was so well attended. I was impressed to see Marie there already, sitting in a checked dress with her legs tucked underneath her.

  She stood up when she saw him. It was clear that she did not know if a hug was appropriate or did not feel that she was in a position to initiate it. Beside her, the twins were trying to walk, tumbling over adorably, laughing as they stacked it—recasting failure as a kind of joy—and this created the perfect atmosphere. Lee bravely opened his arms and went forward. Marie raised herself up on her toes to allow clean contact. We all watched them perform their maturity. The hug lasted longer than a mere greeting but, equally, did not overextend into neediness or patronizing sympathy.

  Once Marie and Lee finished hugging, Dave clapped and we all went around, kissing one another. I don’t know when we’d started kissing on both cheeks as a greeting but probably London was to blame and if, at first, there’d been a little sarcasm in it—we were making fun of theater people—that was gone now and we were just those people.

  I knelt down on the grass to take in the babies, Lydia and Lucy, both only a quarter black yet those quarters meant a lot to us. With their mother Kamara’s half on top of that plus Garthene’s Keralan grandmother that was one and a quarter in total. More than one of my friends. It felt good. I kissed the twins’ heads, then flopped down on the grass. Marie and Lee took to opposite corners of the blanket, Dave Finlay between them, to mediate.

  Dave had tidied his beard and moustache, I noticed. There was a clear border between neck growth and chest hair, his lips cutely framed.

  Michael was helping the twins practice walking on the short grass. Both girls were wearing their Royal Guardsman sleepsuits with the gold epaulettes. Michael and Kamara had signed them up to an agency, Smaller Models, and their first gig had been for a website called TheRoyalCollection.com. Though the clothes were given to them as freebies, it was still necessary to think less of Michael and Kamara for dressing their children in the apparatus of monarchy. It was easy to feel judgmental when Garthene and I knew, instinctively, genetically, modeling would not be an option for our child.

  Michael and I watched Lydia holding a Rattle-Me scepter. He pointed to the left breast of his daughter’s sleepsuit, the Velcro medals: “She fought in both world wars and was awarded the Victoria Cross,” he said.

  “Brave little soldier,” I said.

  We watched Lydia struggle to take a step.

  “Lost the use of her lower limbs though,” Michael said. “Shrapnel severed the spine.”

  I chuckled. He was smart to make a joke out of it.

  Lydia took two quick steps then stood there, arms outstretched for balance.

  “For our tomorrow, she gave her today,” Michael said.

  I smiled but didn’t laugh. Lydia took another step then sat down. That was the end of Michael’s skit. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out a bottle in a metallic cooling sleeve. The wine had a crimped metal cap, like a beer, which Michael removed using a trick with his wedding ring. I’d never seen a wine bottle with a beer-style cap before, and I knew that it probably marked the relaxed house style of a young winemaker well beyond my budget.

  “Here, have some English champagne,” Michael said, “overpriced and disgusting.”

  It did taste disgusting but in that particular, wealthy way that made me feel it was a personal failing rather than any problem with the drink.

  “It’s unfiltered,” Michael said, then he lay back on his elbows and watched the sky. There was something unusually relaxed about him that I didn’t like. He was wearing a blue carpenter’s shirt, identical to one I owned, except his top button was sewn on with red thread, while the rest used black, and that top button had five holes so the red thread illustrated a tiny, evil pentagram. It was one of those near-imperceptible details designed to let me know that, although at first glance our shirts were identical, his was fundamentally superior.

  “Michael,” I said, “how much do the twins make as models?”

  “Not much,” he said, without looking at me.

  “Right. That’s what rich people say.”

  “Ha ha,” Michael said, and he closed his eyes.

  “But seriously,” I said. “How much?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Now I’m terrified,” I said.

  “It’s not that bad. They get around ninety an hour for a shoot, then it’s a lump sum—fi
ve figs—if they get used in a big campaign.” He said five figs in a jokey voice, but the jokey voice could not save him from having said five figs.

  Michael smiled and drank his champagne. I felt a momentary urge to drag him into the middle of the park and crush his carotid artery. I transposed that desire into raising my plastic glass and saying: “To you, to your beautiful daughters.”

  For the next half hour, the conversation stayed as light and vacuous as the ribbons of bubbles in the humiliating wine and we clapped the twins whenever they managed to string a few piddling steps together.

  “Tell them about your new boyfriend,” Kamara said and, at first, I thought she was talking to Marie, then realized she was talking to Dave. It was important never to be shocked when a friend’s sexuality took a swerve.

  “Oh, boys now, is it?” I said.

  “It’s always been boys,” Dave said.

  “Always since when?”

  “Since I was a zygote,” he said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Had he always been gay? Or had he switched? Perhaps it was one of those situations where no one had wanted to tell me, on account of how excited I would be. I lay back on the grass, feeling the weight of my body. I had never changed sexuality, not once. Some of us are locked into our straightness, no key to the closet.

  “Tell us his name,” Michael said.

  “Alan,” he said. “But spelt double el ee en, which I think makes all the difference.”

  He was right. Allen. It changed everything.

  “And he’s fit as Christ,” Kamara said, bouncing a daughter in her arms.

  “True,” Dave said. “I’m punching way above my weight.”

  I turned away to look at the sun, let my corneas burn. It felt good to have the handsome, hopeful faces of my friends replaced by a blank white dot, a hole punched where their smiles might be.

  “That’s great, Dave,” Lee said, speaking calmly to the sky, where a helicopter was hovering. “And how about you, Marie? What’s new in your world?” It could have been a strange, artificial turn in the conversation, but the tone of his voice was in keeping with the frothy atmosphere.

  I felt then that Lee would soon be reunited with Marie in the house that she owns and that Michael and Kamara’s one-year-old twins would earn enough through modeling to pay the deposit on a garden flat and that Dave and Allen would be rich in the way gay couples always are, all my friends accelerating into a higher grade of happiness, leaving me and Garthene to our moderate existence, manageable contentment, a child we work hard to love in a room we do not own.

  Marie pulled an olive stone from between her lips and flicked it high toward the cricket square. “Nothing much,” she said. “Work. How’s life on Lower Clapton Road?”

  “Yeah, good. Regressing into childhood, with Ray and Garthene my primary caregivers,” Lee said and he laughed.

  I looked at Marie, except there was a giant cigarette burn where her face should be.

  “We’re ever so proud,” I said.

  “The other day we all went to the playground just behind those trees,” Lee said.

  “He makes us feel young again,” I said. “We love each other by loving him.”

  They didn’t hear my bitterness. Really happy people don’t pick up on tone. Lee was smiling in my peripheral vision so I could not help but see it, his teeth all his own.

  “I was on the swings and I swung and swung and swung,” Lee said, his voice musical now, slightly overdone, “until I was so dizzy I could hardly see or think.”

  “He did,” I said. “He didn’t want to stop. He wouldn’t even let these two cute little girls have a go.”

  “Why should they get special treatment?” he said. “We’re only as old as we feel and I feel pre-school.”

  Marie laughed, though it wasn’t very funny.

  Lee waited for quiet before carrying on, now speaking more slowly. “And afterward I was so confused that I just did not know where I was. So much so that I ended up going home to the wrong house.”

  Only at that point did I realize he was telling the story about breaking into Marie’s flat. This meant Lee was in fact not totally healthy and happy. Marie didn’t know what was coming, so she just smiled and picked up an anchovy from its oil, hung it from her fingers then, timing the moment between drips, craned it into her mouth.

  “Just muscle memory, I guess,” Lee said. “But I ended up at Longford Close. Yuku let me through.”

  She chewed steadily then swallowed. She was not panicking yet.

  “That’s weird,” she said. “When was this?”

  I got up on my elbow.

  “It was like I’d completely forgotten I didn’t live with you any more,” Lee said, and he laughed. “And I still have a key to your place, so I was all like,” he cupped one hand around his mouth, calling up to the sky, above the noise of the helicopters—two of them now—slicing the air, “ho-ney, I’m home.”

  I was not the most broken person at the picnic. Lee was way more broken than me.

  “When did this happen?” Marie said.

  All other conversations subsided as her voice tightened. One of the twins took six quick consecutive steps then tumbled gorgeously but nobody applauded.

  Lee looked to me. “This was when, Ray? A week ago? It was a Sunday morning maybe? I think so, yes, Sunday, just before breakfast.”

  Marie’s jaw tensed and there was a glimpse of the spoked pattern along which her mouth would one day wrinkle.

  “You were out cold, Marie,” Lee said. “Sparko. Little rouge on your lips from that midprice wine.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “It was an accident,” he said, and he held up his hands as though at gunpoint. “And you were in bed with this absolute dreamboat. It actually made me feel better to see how good-looking William was.”

  Marie turned to look directly at the sun. Lee dug a pita strip into the mackerel pâté, reinforced it with his finger for a more powerful scoop, then ate it in one.

  Marie breathed out slowly. “Ahhh,” she said, relieved, as though everything up to that point, all the good-naturedness, had been a huge effort. “Fuck you.” The words rang loud and true.

  Lee made a show of reaching over and covering little Lydia’s ears, though Michael and Kamara felt bad words were a part of life and it would only give them a special power, the bad words, if they were forbidden.

  “I’m honestly glad he’s hot and I’m glad because he seems a decent guy, your William,” Lee said. “He could be the one.”

  “Well,” Dave said, dusting his hands together, “I think we should call time on this conversation. Who wants to play pétanque?”

  “I’ll play,” Lee said.

  Marie’s left hand was gripping the grass, tufts of it poking between her knuckles. “How do you know his name?” she said.

  “What, William’s name? The name William? Bill? Bill Garfitt? Billy G?”

  Dave stood up. “Let’s play over there,” he said, pointing to the far side of the park, near where a police van was throwing pretty blue and white lights among the trees.

  “Did you know about this, Ray?” Marie said.

  I looked down at the tartan blanket. I was a coward.

  “Every time I run myself a bath,” Lee said, his voice loud now, “I take a little moment to give thanks for the hard work of William . . . Colin . . . Garfitt.” He said the full name slowly, relished every syllable. “And, of course, the rest of the team at Thames Water.”

  There was a pause. Lee saw something in Marie’s face, then spoke in a tuneful way: “Hasn’t he, hasn’t William told you he works for Thames Water? That he has ten years’ experience in the water industry? Hasn’t he offered to give you a tour of the reservoirs?”

  Marie necked her plastic glass of wine in one clean gulp. Her lips were shiny.

  “No,” she said, “I guess we’ve been too busy having all this life-changing sex.”

  “Of course,” Lee said, an
d he clicked his fingers and pointed at her as though she had just come up with a great idea. “He must be tremendous in bed.”

  “Oh, he is,” Marie said. “He has literally no insecurities. It’s terrifying, actually.”

  “Well, you can’t look like him and not be invincible,” Lee said.

  “Absolutely,” Marie said. “He is in complete control of his orgasm. It is a matter of as and when.”

  Lee roared with laughter. The sound traveled out across the park. A couple who were power-walking along the path looked over. They were either power-walking or terribly frightened. I can never tell the difference.

  By the far trees, there were now four male civilians facing the side of the police van, their legs spread, a hint of music video choreography. An officer, using both hands, squeezed one man’s left leg from ankle to thigh. It was a surprise to note how skinny the man was beneath his jeans, skinny enough that it was necessary to retrospectively downgrade him to boy.

  “They don’t stop and search me, do they?” Michael said, standing on the cricket square with a daughter in one arm. He was trying to change the subject. “Officer, officer,” he said, raising his free hand to the police as though signaling for a waiter, “I’m an Anglo-Saxon father of twins with cocaine in my shirt pocket.”

  “Officer, officer, please arrest this man for bad satire,” Kamara said, jiggling the other daughter.

  “I confess,” Michael said. “I confess only to highlighting institutionalized prejudice. And anyway, this coke is so heavily cut it’s basically legal.”

  Marie and Lee were staring at each other.