The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  At the end of the concert, June got a standing ovation. It’s easy to get a standing ovation when the seats are so uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she deserved it. She was only twelve years old. She gave three deep bows, then my father brought her flowers.

  “Wasn’t she just magnificent?” he said.

  PART THREE

  WE EMERGED FROM OUR FRONT DOOR TO JOIN THE cleanup effort, me holding an old-fashioned broom across my chest, Garthene with a dustpan and brush, both of us carrying a dark secret, that we felt refreshed from our mini-break at the seaside.

  There were already six people out in front of the Safeway, four sweeping up small granules of glass and two dealing with big shards, kneeling on the sunny pavement in gardening gloves. A woman shattered the outsize shapes with a tiny hammer; a man wrapped them in newspaper. It looked like a satisfying job. The inside of the shop was empty, cordoned off with police tape. We hovered for a moment, hoping to feel useful, then went around the corner to the hardware store.

  The owner, the man who I’d failed to hug, was being interviewed on the forecourt, saying: “I believe most people are kind,” and the small shop was full of volunteers in old T-shirts drilling shelves and bleaching the floor, one tall, gaunt man replacing strip lights, a camerawoman tracking through the cramped aisles.

  Over at the abandoned red bus, which was still beached in the middle of the road, we saw a large group of people with brooms, some raising theirs into the sky and cheering. For a moment it seemed spontaneous and heart-warming, but then we heard the photographer asking that the shortest people come forward.

  We walked on a bit farther and saw the car with the wing mirror that Lee had kicked off. Sadly, a couple were already kneeling there on the pavement.

  “We should have come back earlier,” I said.

  “Relax,” Garthene said. “We’ll find something.”

  When we got closer we recognized the couple. It was Marie and Lee, both wearing rubber gloves and walking boots, his hair dark and greasy, hers tied tight to the scalp. We watched them for a while, their careful, quiet attention, Lee holding open the bag while Marie dropped each piece in, the glass chattering. There was a touching intimacy to their actions. Once they’d finished clearing up the glass, they held each other’s eyes for a moment, then began to kiss. It was endearing at first and then quickly not endearing. They gripped the backs of each other’s heads in a way that, if their heads had not been there, would have been an arm wrestle. Their tongues thrashed around between them. Through the rips in his jeans, Lee was bare-kneed on the rough tarmac, which must have been uncomfortable, yet he maintained absolute focus. The sexual chemistry Garthene and I had attained seemed suddenly feeble. Probably the whole city had been hard-fucking in lesser-used rooms.

  “Well, this is romantic,” Garthene said.

  They detached, looked at us, and started laughing. As we hugged them, their rubber gloves squeaked disturbingly behind our backs.

  “Shouldn’t you be killing each other?” I said.

  “We almost did,” Marie said.

  “Don’t worry,” Lee said and he kissed Marie’s cheek. “There’s still time.”

  “We haven’t forgiven each other,” she said. “He’s a total maniac.”

  “I am,” Lee said. “And yet she’s the one who found a new boyfriend in under seven days.”

  “I’m thirty-seven,” she said. “No time to waste.”

  They laughed. We enjoyed their self-awareness.

  “Well, it’s good to see you two together,” Garthene said.

  “It is,” I said. “Have you found anything that we could clean up?”

  Lee came close to my ear. “I’m not proud of what I did,” he said, with a smile in his voice, “but there might still be some damage to a gray Honda parked on the road by the primary school.”

  Both wing-mirror casings were hanging loose, the shattered glass glittering. That cheered us up and we worked in silence, triple-bagging it. I saw glimpses of my wife reflected in the shapes of mirror on the road, a patch of her forehead, a shoulder, the mystery of a nostril, and I loved it all.

  On the way home, we bumped into our downstairs neighbor, Lindsey. Though we’d been in our flat for two years, Garthene and I had hardly spoken to her, just an occasional hi as we slid past on the stairs. I only knew her name from signing for her packages. Garthene and I liked to spy on her recycling, the lonely rice-pudding pots, the breakfasts in cans. We made mean jokes about her physique, how she went beyond pear-shaped into the more obscure silhouettes of the rare-breed squashes at the farmers’ market. But that was old us. Now we were kind and open-minded nearly-parents, invested in society.

  “How are you, Lindsey?” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I’m surviving. How are you two?”

  “We’re also surviving.”

  “Are you going to the tea party?”

  “What tea party?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  This was it. This was community.

  There were trestle tables along one side of the street with free cake, flans, and quiche. There was calypso playing from speakers wedged in the open windows of the flat above the second-hand baby-clothes shop. Marie and Lee were in a group of people dancing and I could see no light between them. The back of Lee’s T-shirt said Detroit Techno Militia. Children laughed as they practiced hula hoop on the pavement. Two little girls were chalking We Spread Love in the space where a burning car had been; the blackened road had that almost-damp look, like when you lift up a stone in the garden. If you have a garden.

  I thought for a moment about the horrible maisonette but found it hard now to resent the cash buyers. They were not property developers. They were not the ones turning every church, school, and hospital into luxury flats. They simply wanted to carve out a little security for themselves in a dangerous world, and didn’t I want the same? It occurred to me then that we should have asked my parents for money. When we were in Lowestoft, with the BBC presenter standing outside our London flat, the priceless violin on the coffee table, that would have been the moment to ask for monetary aid.

  “At some point you just have to say,” I said quietly to Garthene, “okay, I give in, I accept that I come from a background of financial liquidity. I am willing to live with that privilege.”

  Garthene looked at me. “You just have to say that, do you, at some point?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  Coming slowly up the street was one of those billboard trucks that normally advertise strip clubs but, on this occasion, there was a row of five grainy color images of people and the words Shop a Looter beside a phone number for the local police. I looked at the photos of the looters. Four men, one woman. One of the men was wearing skate shorts—possibly Carhartt—which seemed amusing.

  I ate a yum-yum from the trestle table and took two more for Garthene and Lindsey. Yum-yums are wonderfully trashy. All the food and drink at the tea party had been supplied by Marks & Spencer. There were bowls of Percy Pigs. The big joke with Percy Pigs is that they are made with pig gelatine. It’s the honesty that people like.

  The billboard truck came to the end of the road and parked.

  Shop a Looter. It was a good line, considering they can’t have had long to design it. I gave Garthene and Lindsey their yum-yums, then walked over to take a closer look at the billboard. It was a bit embarrassing but the looter with the shorts was wearing a shirt that I own, the off-white one with tiny blue dots. Of all the suspects, he was the easiest to hate. He had a can of lager in one hand, another in his pocket. He looked picnic-ready, smiling. I wasn’t too proud to recognize a bit of myself in him and then slowly recognize all of myself in him because I was him and he was me, my own personal self.

  There had clearly been some misunderstanding, I decided. A misunderstanding so profound it was funny. Ha, I thought, without actually laughing. To see my image travel through the borough on a signboard normally reserved for gentlemen’s clubs. My own self blown
up twice my actual size and broadened—a trick with the aspect ratio—so that I looked slightly buff. I sensed the heft of an anecdote. I was a wanted man. They wanted me. It was just a shame that in the photo I looked so pleased about it. There must have been other images they could have used.

  The truck moved slowly on, disappearing behind the betting shop.

  I went back to stand beside Lindsey and Garthene, their lips now sugared, both bouncing gently to sunshine reggae.

  When we got home, I ran Garthene a bath, pouring in a large scoop of Norwegian minerals. Those crystals were so expensive that I knew she would feel duty-bound to soak for hours, giving me enough time to clarify everything with the police. Once she was in the water, I got my keys, wallet, and passport—did the police like to see a passport? I had no idea!—and quickly went out to the station at the bottom of Clapton Square. The cop shop, I thought to myself, enjoying language previously unavailable to me. I jogged there, trying to carry my sense of humor, my giggling disbelief, while it still glowed in my throat. But the station was shut, permanently, metal anti-squat cages covering the windows. I noticed a sign from a property developer with a phone number to call for off-plan sales.

  After that I caught the 488 down to the bigger station in Bow. It was difficult to maintain light-hearted incredulity for the entire bus journey and, for a few moments, as we waited in traffic on the Whitechapel Road, I put my forehead against the cool metal handrail and the idling engine’s vibrations transmitted waves of terror through my skull. I got out my phone and looked through the photos I had taken of the estate agent’s documents, then deleted them. I found Dave’s liquid drugs in the pocket of my jeans. I left the vial on the seat for some lucky traveler. I looked at my wounded hand. A little dot of red had worked its way through the gauze. I peeled it off and, underneath, my hand was completely fine.

  I got off the bus and made myself cheerful again as I approached the station, an elaborate Victorian redbrick building with wide steps bordered by gas lamps that had POLICE written in the blue-tinted glass. I let the thought of Garthene in the tub carry me up the stone stairs, a skip in my step, the casual grace of a married man coming to clear up a small misunderstanding.

  Through the booth’s plastic glass a woman of about my age was looking down at a form, her hair tightly center-parted, a clear avenue of scalp.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She didn’t look up. “How can I help?” she said.

  “I’ve come to, well, I’ve come to hand myself in,” I said, modulating my voice to signify the ridiculousness.

  When she looked up, I raised my hands in surrender.

  “What have you done?” she said.

  “Nothing, actually. I’m a journalist. And I was reporting on the disturbances—the riots.”

  She raised her eyebrows, three smooth equidistant ridges forming on her forehead, like waves taking shape out at sea.

  “But there’s obviously been some kind of mistake because I just saw my picture on a poster.” I pointed out to the street behind me and chuckled. “It said Shop a Looter, which is a great tagline, by the way. So I thought I’d better come and”—I paused for effect—“get shopped.”

  She waited to make sure I had finished speaking, then she smiled. She had a gap between her front teeth, a keyhole view into the darkness of her throat.

  “That’s very good of you,” she said.

  She rustled around in a desk drawer and brought out the poster with the five images.

  “I’m the one drinking,” I said. “I don’t even like lager.”

  She squinted from the picture to me and back again. “I’m going to have to put you under arrest, for now anyway. I hope you understand.”

  “That’s totally reasonable,” I said. “It would be wrong to just take my word for it. But I hope we can get this dealt with fairly quickly.”

  She nodded. “You’re under arrest. What you say can be used as evidence.”

  “I didn’t realize you actually had to do that bit.”

  “Oh, we do.”

  “Will you put me in handcuffs as well?” I said. “Will you cuff me?”

  “Not unless you think it’s necessary.”

  “Well, it might be,” I said. “I might be a career criminal. A lunatic.”

  She leaned forward a little. “You might be,” she said.

  It was wonderful to take part in this interaction. I made my eyes wide and vibrated my head left and right, as I imagine murderers do.

  “Okay,” she said. “Come through to the back room.”

  There’s a mug shot of Bill Gates from 1977, taken by Albuquerque police, where he is wearing yellow-tinted shades and his hair is gorgeously, goldenly coiffed, like an astronaut’s helmet glowing in the warmth of the sun. He looks happy, some of his white teeth showing, not a full-blown grin, but enough that you know he is glad the arrest has given shape to his life. His tan is mellow, the police ID board hung around his neck like a medal. He was arrested for a traffic violation. It was comforting to wonder whether he would ever have gone on to do so much good without the memory of this transgression throbbing warmly inside him. Would the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s many philanthropic projects—Senegalese family-planning clinics and women-only toilets in Indian slums—have ever existed if that state trooper had failed to pull him over on a day just before Christmas, on the interstate between Texas and New Mexico?

  My officer’s name was Dana and we were hitting it off. Her parents were Nigerian. Nigerians are one of the most high-performing immigrant groups, not that I wouldn’t have liked her if she’d had roots elsewhere. We were in a small office, a raised wooden counter dividing the room in two, me on one side, she on the other.

  “I’ve got a part-Nigerian friend,” I said. “Kamara.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. I love her. She’s great. She’s Igbo.”

  “Okay. Well, tell her I said hi.”

  There might have been a touch of sarcasm, but I let it slide. She held up the webcam.

  “Get my good side,” I said.

  She made a show of examining my face. “They’re all bad.”

  “Hey, that’s prejudice. I could have your badge for that.”

  “We don’t have badges.”

  This was brilliant. It was that same joyous feeling I get while speaking to a doctor. I always have to go shopping after a medical appointment just to ride out the adrenaline.

  “You know that other thing people always say in films after they’ve been arrested?”

  “I want my lawyer?” she said.

  “No. The other I want my. I want my . . . ?”

  “Mummy?”

  “Phone call.”

  “Oh, yeah. They say that. You don’t get a phone call though.”

  “What about a text message?” I said. “I want my SMS.”

  She smiled and shook her head. Her gappy teeth were fashionable.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “You’re tough. How long do you think all this’ll take, anyway?”

  “Why? Have you got a train to catch?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, “if by a train you mean a pregnant wife and by catch you mean provide emotional support for.”

  “Ho,” she said.

  “Will I be home for dinner is what I’m asking?”

  “No chance.”

  “Come on.”

  “We’ll need you overnight and then we decide if we’re going to charge you.”

  “Dana, that’s crazy.”

  She looked at me. I could see something in that sentence had wound her up, so I tried again.

  “Officer, that’s crazy,” I said.

  “Look. We’re taking your involvement seriously.”

  “I wouldn’t call it involvement.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Observation. Tourism. Heavy looking. The thing is, my pregnant wife is in the bath right now and soon she’ll get out and her lumbar region won’t moisturize itself.”

&nbs
p; “Is that a police problem?”

  “You haven’t met my wife!”

  It was an end-of-the-pier-type joke and Dana didn’t go for it. There was a shift in tone. I held up my hands again. “Will you at least let me text her? She’s a nurse, you know. Frontline services, just like you.”

  Dana closed her eyes. She sighed, disappeared into the back room, brought my phone through, and handed it to me. She did not avert her eyes as I typed in my unlock code. I’d been using the same number since I was fifteen and very earnest, when I’d chosen a security pin for my first bank account. Two, zero, four, six. It made the sign of the cross on the keypad, as a way to comment on society’s reverence for capital. My online banking password was abandon_hope_all_ye_who, so then you had to press Enter.

  “And just before I write this I’m going to be totally honest with you, Dana, and admit that I’ll be telling my wife a teensy little white lie.”

  Her expression did not change.

  “I don’t want her to get stressed. That’s important when you’re pregnant.”

  Dana’s eyes stayed steady. I started typing. She stood beside me so she could see the message as I wrote it. It was difficult under pressure.

  Gutted! Jake needs me to cover the launch of a new Nokia in Helsinki. :-( I’m on my way to Stansted! I didn’t want to interrupt your bath! Love you. Back tomorrow! x x x

  I handed Dana the phone.

  “Is she going to believe that?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said. “Because of how I have no track record for lying.”

  They wrote out my statement in a small, well-lit office room, Dana and a male officer named Liam, who had a childlike face. His eyelashes were remarkable, like tiny brooms.

  He said: “We appreciate your helping us.”

  She said: “Really we do.”

  It was the good cop, good cop routine.

  The desk in one corner was reassuringly messy, sheets of carbon paper loosely piled, a lidless highlighter pen drying out beneath a swing arm lamp.

  I talked them through the full day in question, trying to give a sense of journalistic thoroughness: picnic, helicopters, kids sprinting, a bus ditched in the middle of the road, a vehicle in flames, a hardware store pillaged, riot police doing a good job in difficult circumstances, a gift of beer, handset confetti, how violent disorder fits well with Carhartt’s brand of urban vigilantism, how I had stepped through shattered glass into the estate agent’s in order to get a clearer angle for a photograph of the crime in progress. That was my one lie. I allowed myself that. As I said it, I noted a small change in their expressions, so I decided to give the lie some color. I talked about how much a good news photo is worth when a story goes worldwide, like this one. I said my heavily pregnant wife the nurse and I needed the money. I went on to mention the photo of the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, how the guy who shot that image now lives off the royalties.