The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

A Welsh male voice choir started in Dave’s pocket. As he pulled out his phone—which had a thick and sticky rubber casing for people who lead extreme lives—it brought with it the contents of his right pocket: a two-euro coin and a small vial of a colorless liquid, presumably sex drugs. All my happy friends were secretly hollow. That was a calming thought.

  “Father dearest, how can I help you?” Dave said, answering the call and stepping away from the blanket.

  “You should ask William about me, Marie. Though, of course, he won’t know me as boring old Lee. To him I am,” Lee spoke in a silky voice and flicked imaginary hair from his shoulder, “Elnaz Mahroo.”

  “You can stop this now,” Marie said.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Elnaz is my alter ego. I’m a Persian human rights lawyer with a hard body and strong ethics and a passion for late-night photo sharing.” He got out his phone, tapped it a few times, then showed everyone a picture of a very attractive woman with flawless skin, wearing a white shirt, her high ponytail flowing like freshly struck oil. “William and I first got to know each other on LinkedIn. But it’s a professional network, so when we wanted to get personal we shifted the whole thing to Gchat.”

  “I’m going,” Marie said.

  “Wait,” Lee said. “Your man is really talented. I presume he’s told you about his artistic side?”

  She started putting her things into a black tote bag.

  “The man’s a genius,” Lee said, and he swiped his phone a few times, then said: “Hang on, let me find his best work,” and held it up to her.

  She squinted briefly at the screen. “I don’t know what that is.”

  Across the field, two more police vans arrived.

  Dave, on his phone, turned away from us, saying: “Oh shit . . . right now?”

  “Try this one,” Lee said, and he flicked the screen onward. “I think that is genuinely artistic. His penis is not even the dominant feature of the photo.”

  Marie glanced at the phone, then looked down, closed her eyes.

  “He’s very innovative within the genre.” Lee kept the singsong tone in his voice.

  There were more riot vans—five in total—coming along the north side of the park, sirens on, lights flashing, as though they had been asked to provide staging for Lee’s cruelty.

  Dave put his finger to his ear. “What? That’s awful.”

  “And look at this one,” Lee said, holding his phone up so we could all see the self-taken picture of a gently left-curving penis bathed in warm light, a toned body stretched out on scrubby grass, his head out of shot. “It’s clear golden hour gives William a massive rod-on. A true artist.”

  This was all very well executed. I now knew what Lee had been doing, late at night, in the darkness of our lounge.

  Marie stood up, but her balance was out so she keeled a little and took a compensatory step back, crushed a paper plate with her heel, baba ghanoush oozing from the complex grooves of her running shoe’s sole.

  “Whoopsy,” Lee said.

  Marie walked away to scuff her foot on thicker grass.

  “No way, no way, no way,” Dave said. “Those poor people.”

  I had tuned out the sound of the helicopters. Like the way you can not notice a kettle come to the boil. There were now three of them hovering beyond the estate. Three phones on the blanket, including mine, were receiving calls. They had been ringing for some time. All the calls came from the same person: Mum. I hadn’t spoken to mine in weeks.

  Lee kept on talking, raising his voice, speaking high and clear above the noise. “I sent him some pictures of me to get the ball rolling, but nothing prepared me for the quality of his composition, the play of light, sense of movement, a strong organizing principle that goes well beyond the rule of thirds into something more instinctive. I hesitate to say Cartier-Bresson, but he’s certainly there as a presiding spirit and . . . “

  Marie hid her face behind her hands. Her breathing changed.

  “Aw diddums,” Lee said.

  “Everyone,” Dave said. “We need to get inside. There’s something happening on the high street.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “It’s on the news. There’re buses on fire and my dad says it’s madness, and it’s spreading.”

  Dave’s dad lived in Pembrokeshire.

  We looked again at the helicopters and police vans and began to question the barbecue smell. It was either delicious or reprehensible.

  “What is it all about?”

  “All I know is we have to leave.”

  Michael and Kamara needed no more proof and they quickly began to put the twins into their double-width buggy. I liked the way the presence of these children meant we always had to assume the worst. Everything, everyone, was lethal. They made the world simple.

  I cleared the paper plates, bottles, plastic wrappers, half-finished dips, even the real cutlery and made the decision—undiscussed but clear—to forego dividing it into reuse, recycle, or landfill. I just shoved everything into a plastic bag and into the bin, all except for the coin and the drug vial, which I put in my own pocket, thinking that I would give them back to Dave later on, when things had calmed down, but also thinking that I wouldn’t. Dave whipped up the blanket, balled it under his arm. Lee did not help. He stayed close to Marie, sharing more photos.

  From the far side of the park, we saw a group of people—young people, judging by the speed with which they could run—some of whom had their faces covered, and they were sprinting our way. The park was almost empty and they were coming straight for us. Kamara and Michael stood in front of the twins’ pram, he opening his shoulders, making himself big, and she communicating with her eyes that she was ready to kill. The young people ran toward us—then straight past us, along the path in the direction of the helicopters.

  “Let’s go to mine, it’s closer,” Dave said, and we started off at pace, cutting straight over the bumpy grass. I was forced to regret all those years that I had mocked parents for their off-road-ready buggies, the ones with outsize, independently articulated wheels—Where do these pricks think they are, Everest base camp?—because I now saw that this vehicle handled well at speed over rough terrain. The twins were not even my children and I knew that I would die for them. How much stronger would these feelings be for my own child? It had been good while it lasted, this shallow, narcissistic life, but it was too late now. Soon I would be selfless.

  Kamara pushed the buggy while Michael called taxi numbers on his phone, swearing under his breath at each engaged tone. The smell of burning got stronger as we crossed the park.

  Marie and Lee were lagging. She was winding back and forth across the grass, trying to get away from him.

  “I’m just really worried about William,” I heard him say. “Let’s go and check if he’s okay. He lives in a flat above the pharmacy on Well Street.”

  Marie ran ahead, past us, falling into shadow beneath trees at the exit of the park before turning onto Amhurst Road.

  “I’ve got two baby girls here,” Michael said, yelling at the handset, holding it in front of his mouth like a police radio.

  Outside the park, the street was overrun with nonthreatening pedestrians. Everyone was looking up toward a red bus abandoned at an angle across the street and, beyond it, a vehicle on fire. Our favorite Turkish-Cypriot greengrocer was standing outside his shuttered-up shop, holding a length of banister in both hands like a baseball bat.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “They burned the best car on the street,” he said.

  There were people on their doorsteps and at their windows and standing on garden walls. The last time I’d seen the streets this busy it was the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. The twins in their Guardsman sleepsuits kicked their legs. Michael screamed into his phone: “You can’t just leave us here!”

  Just then, a row of six elegant police horses rounded the corner of Sandringham Road and came on to Amhurst. Even in the context of the wide street with its outsize Georgi
an terraces, the horses seemed huge, their neck muscles flexing, tails all combed straight and cut the same length. An atmosphere of taxes well spent.

  “Thank God for the police,” Michael said, his phone at his side. “Thank God for the police.”

  A boy on a BMX said: “What will horses do?”

  I looked ahead and saw Marie flinch as Lee threw his phone against a wall. The screen shattered but the handset remained whole. He picked up the phone and chucked it again, as though the first throw had felt insufficiently destructive, and this time the casing cracked and came apart, which was still not enough so he kicked the wing mirror off a small red car. It came away in one. Trapezoids of glass fell to the pavement. Some people turned to look but said nothing. Lee’s biceps were formidable. He kicked the space where the wing mirror had been, the colored wires hanging loose. Then he started crying and sat down on the pavement, lit by the strobe of the car’s hazards.

  “I don’t care what you do. You think I care but I don’t,” he said.

  Marie leaned against the red car.

  It was interesting to note that their drama was probably only the fifth or sixth most exciting thing to look at.

  Kamara and Michael were climbing into the front bench seat of a yellow van, each holding a twin tightly on their laps. In the driver’s seat there was a stodgy, hairy-necked gentleman holding a lit cigarillo, clearly not a licensed taxi driver. The traffic light was red, but he ignored it and did a huge and ostentatious U-turn in the middle of the crosshatched zone, the normal rules of society giving way to chaos. As they came back past me at a careful speed, I saw the twins were inhaling sidestream smoke, which is three times more toxic and six times more tumorigenic than what the smoker himself inhales. You save them from one thing and they are killed by another.

  Dave was on the phone. “Allen,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  With the exception of Marie and Lee, everyone was engaged in locating or saving the people they loved. I called my wife. It was too noisy for us to hear each other clearly, so I just yelled at the handset that I was scared but I loved her and I would be waiting for her after work. The accompanying sound of sirens and helicopters gave my voice gravitas.

  Garthene texted back: Fucking scary. Be careful. xxx

  Three kisses in a row. I felt like a fruit machine.

  When I turned back, Dave was running at pace down Amhurst with his phone to his cheek. I looked around for Marie and Lee but they’d gone, just the broken mirror blinking orange on the pavement.

  Two hours until I needed to meet Garthene at the hospital.

  Just off the high street, there was a small shop with its window smashed. I’d never noticed that it existed before, and couldn’t tell from the sign what it sold. A man emerged with an electric heater. A man emerged with a tool set. The owner was sitting on the edge of the pavement with his head in his hands. While the burning cars had a visual purity, this was harder to like. I wanted to offer the shopkeeper my condolences, but his proximity to the action made him untouchable. There was an invisible line I couldn’t bring myself to cross, so I stood with a group of my neighbors, watching from the opposite pavement; we all had our faces uncovered to signify neutral status. A woman in an apron crossed the road and put her arm around the shopkeeper; we all realized we could have done the same, but understood we’d missed our chance.

  Beside me was a large man with badly executed neck tattoos who had a crate of beer at his feet. He offered me a can. It was the sort of lager I considered myself too good for.

  “I’m fine, actually,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” he said.

  I chuckled because I was a little frightened, then took the can. I didn’t want to seem like a tourist. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” he said, and put another can in my coat pocket.

  I felt uncomfortable and so drifted toward the vegan café, where there was a standoff between a row of riot police and some people with bandanas and scarves wrapped around their heads, hoods up. A helicopter was circling, raising our expectations. We watched a tall boy lean over a low garden wall, pick a bottle out of a recycling box, and throw it—brown glass, an ale, probably a microbrew—and it came down short and exploded on the road at the feet of the police. They lowered their visors and charged, boots crunching on the tarmac, shields glinting, batons aloft. My neighbors and I took a step back, able to both sympathize with the young people’s frustrations while, at the same time, recognizing the police had a job to do.

  I walked down Mare Street, sipping my cold beer. I watched a young man emerge from the phone shop, his hands full of handsets. He threw them into the air and whooped as they clattered around him, batteries scudding on the pavement. Most businesses had their grates down. When I finished the first beer, I put the can in a recycling bin, enjoying my heightened lawfulness.

  Down the road, people were photographing the looting of the Carhartt outlet. Carhartt is a good transitional brand for those like me who want to take a step toward adult clothing but not lose contact with the atmosphere of skateboarding. There was a disorderly queue of people squeezing in through the lifted shutter. You couldn’t feel terrible about it. This was a discount outlet, so the clothes had, by definition, not been sold in the flagship on Carnaby Street and would probably be worth more via insurance. Plus, Carhartt was now reaching streetwise tastemakers whom they would normally pay good money to attract, the kinds of people who can jimmy shutters with a socket wrench.

  I finished the second beer while I was standing outside our estate agent’s. I can’t deny I was gratified to see one of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been smashed and there were four young men—two on the shoulders of two more—trying to pull a flat-screen off the wall. That the TV continued to function, showing twenty-four-hour rolling news, was a decent advertisement for Sanyo. On the screen, a banner read BREAKING NEWS: London Burning as Rioters Torch Cars and Loot Shops over live footage of the young men trying to take the TV off the wall. Then the men doing the yanking saw themselves on the screen—or, rather, saw their past selves, since the footage had a delay—and seeing how unconvincing they looked, began to pull harder. The flat screen’s frame was fixed with four heavy-duty industrial bolts. They would need a special tool.

  I stepped up to one of the unsmashed windows and saw, on a backlit display stand, a photo of the horrible maisonette, marked with a red triangle as SOLD (STC). I peered through at Dan’s desk, which, as he had explained to me, he wasn’t supposed to call his desk. They hot-desked and had a “leave no trace” policy, so you weren’t allowed to keep personal items—photos, toys, snacks—anything that would suggest residence. He said that, in reality, you could still claim a desk in all sorts of subtle ways, by affixing an expensive sun guard to the monitor or, in Dan’s case, by leaving behind a box of disinfectant keyboard wipes. Not technically personal—although everyone knew they were Dan’s—but also clever in the way they implied disgust at other people’s fingers, grimy from shaking hands and handling keys. He had told me a story about two of his male colleagues who had fought a silent battle for the window desk with ‘the corner-office feel’, each getting in earlier than the other, earlier and earlier, until at some point—too early for anybody else to have been in the office to see—something happened, nobody knows what, and the victorious male was allowed everlasting dominion.

  The TV news footage was useful because I could see that I was not in view of the camera. I ducked and slipped inside through the shattered glass, crouched out of sight behind the line of desks. The English champagne and two beers had given me access to a new version of myself. The workstations were tidy, staplers squared off beside Post-it notes. I knelt behind the one with the disinfectant wipes. In the top drawer there were pens and a postcard of low-lying mist in Milford Sound on New Zealand’s South Island. In the larger, lower drawer, there were all the homes from A to Z. I found the horrible maisonette and pulled out the documents, laid them on the thin carpet. The names of the
buyers were Mr. Anders Timms and Ms. Tavi Miniano and they were not even married. Anders was a designer, Tavi a computer programmer. They had a combined annual salary of £180,000. They already owned a property in Clerkenwell. My eyes settled on three words that changed everything. Buy-to-let. I let myself fill with anger, felt it line my insides. Small-scale landlords think nobody sees their quiet evil. It was almost funny how cruel it was to prevent us from owning our family home in order to rent it back to us. You could navigate from a morality this degraded. The couple’s address was Flat 26, St John’s Court, EC1 4TH. The C in the postcode stood for central. I photographed the documents with my phone. Crawling on all fours back toward the smashed window, I cut my palm on a small sliver of glass. A bead of red rose to the surface and I thought of how I might smear DIE-TO-LET in my own blood on the windscreen of the cash buyers’ Qashqai.

  It was still only seven thirty and I didn’t want to arrive at the hospital early. I wanted to be out of breath from running when I met Garthene, give her a sense of how many threats I had overcome. I sat on the edge of the raised flower beds outside the town hall, feeling pleasantly unhinged. The sound of helicopters in the air matched the sensation in my head. I looked again at the xxx on my phone. They were kisses of fear or, rather, kisses against fear. The resilience of the human spirit. I thought of my parents, both born in 1943, just old enough that they both remember rationing, a fact they have been lording over me ever since. As the smell of burning thickened, I understood that they could never patronize me again.

  But then, in the window of a car, I saw myself. It was disappointing. I did not look like a man in history. My eye was unbruised, my stitches dissolved. My brief holiday as a damaged person was over and now I was just a tech journalist with a forgettable face, dressed for a picnic. The cut on my hand was not even bleeding any more, just a little red dot you’d hardly notice. I took my keys from my pocket and worked the wound a little to get it going again. Blood means nothing to Garthene unless in drinkable quantities. It seeped into the wrinkles on my palm.