The Faithful Couple Read online

  ‘I will if you will,’ Adam said.

  Neil looked at Adam and at the humiliated Australian. His stomach knotted, then relaxed. He knew he had to do it.

  ‘Together, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ Adam said.

  They flicked through the tracks on the karaoke machine. Although neither of them especially liked the Eagles, they settled on ‘Take it Easy’ (short, and an easy tune). Somehow the music came on quicker than Neil was expecting: he almost cried out ‘Wait!’ but managed to contain the panic. He never went in for this kind of exhibitionism, always envying the unselfconsciousness of people who did. He sensed his skin warmly colouring and didn’t join in until the second line: I’ve got seven women on my mind. His voice was lower and flatter than Adam’s, his eyes locked on the miniature screen even though he knew the words, the lyrics of half the Eagles’ songs being etched in his memory, along with those of the other seventies classics he had been obliged to appreciate at school.

  But the two of them grew stronger and louder, like people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a restaurant. By the second verse they were clasping the microphone together; by the end of the third their spare arms were around each other in tipsy communion.

  No one threw anything. When they finished, the Mexico-bound Americans high-fived them. The girl from that afternoon in the yard came over and said ‘Good job’ to Neil. He half-expected her to solicit an introduction to Adam, but instead she swayed suggestively, as if she were willing to forgive his earlier obtuseness and dance. He ignored the hint, curtly said ‘Thanks’, and turned to Adam to discuss what they should sing next.

  Somebody had given them both another beer. They were halfway through them when Adam said, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ He repeated the proposal when Neil didn’t respond, louder, shouting into his ear to be heard above ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

  They went out through the gate, across the running and rollerblading path and onto the beach. Some kids were shouting somewhere along the shore, playing soccer in the dark. In the other direction, couples were giggling invisibly on the sand. Neil and Adam had the stretch of beach behind the hostel more or less to themselves. They pressed their beers into the sand, one by each of the volleyball poles, and stripped to their underwear. Adam saw that Neil had taken his advice and foresworn socks that evening, and Neil saw him notice, but neither of them commented. Adam undressed first and won the race to the surf.

  The moon had clouded over and they didn’t gauge the height of the waves until they were waist deep. The water was warm. As they were jumping backwards into the crests, a few metres apart, a piece of seaweed wrapped itself around Adam’s shoulders; he caught it, raised it above his head like a banner, and let himself fall backwards into the ocean. He had a beginner’s hairy chest, a wiry knot between his pectoral muscles that heralded the full Chewbacca his genes were promising. Neil’s chest was narrower and baby-bald.

  They splashed around and shouted into the Pacific until Neil dragged Adam out in a mock rescue. Adam resisted, but submitted before the wrestling became too fierce, allowing himself to be dumped where the wet and dry sand met. The two of them scrambled up the beach and sat against the volleyball poles, finishing their beers and watching the breathing, black-and-white ocean as they dried. The karaoke was over.

  ‘Listen,’ Adam said, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I suppose we could, you know, go together.’

  ‘What do you… Go where?’

  ‘Up the coast. On the Greyhound, maybe. Or we could, you know, get one of those cars you deliver for someone else. Driveaways, I think they’re called, I read about them in the Lonely Planet. We could take it up to San Francisco. What do you reckon?’

  Neil was sober enough to catch and question his own response. He couldn’t account for the sense that he was being flattered, wonderfully flattered, and he resented Adam for this rush of gratitude. Adam wasn’t older than Neil, or more experienced (so far as he could tell), or cleverer or funnier; he outscored him mainly in the unearned virtues of luck and class and those Athena-poster looks. At the same time he had his openness, and his poise, and there was a fit or alignment between them, something unfinished and possible, that it would be a shame to waste.

  ‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘Why not?’

  All this – California, the sea, the adult, sovereign choices – was the kind of escapade that, as suburban teenagers, Neil and his brother had once fantasised about. He held out his cup for Adam to clink with his own, and he did, though the cups were plastic and noiseless and already empty.

  A pair of surfboards were draining in the shower when Adam went for a piss at dawn. A woman was in bed with the Norwegian in the bunk opposite his, both of them asleep and naked. Adam climbed up again to his mattress, lay on his back and mapped the stains and cracks on the ceiling. The sand in his bed was as dark as dirt, the sheets damp with seawater; he could hear the waves. His wasn’t a serious hangover, just dry mouth and sour breath, plus a dull ache, a sort of manifest unease, at the back of his head. Sleep was gone.

  Adam wasn’t regretful or embarrassed that he had sung and swum and persuaded this stranger to join in. Unlike Neil he was a practised exhibitionist, especially when he had been drinking: jokily synchronised dancing in clubs and at the odd countryside rave, acceptably risqué sixth-form revues, charades around the pool of the chateau that his father sometimes borrowed for a fortnight from some shipping millionaire. He was likewise used to getting people to do what he wanted them to – a dividend of being an eldest child, who had honed his will on indulgent parents before redirecting it at his idolatrous younger sister, and afterwards at what so far seemed a gratifyingly pliant universe.

  His queasiness was neither shame nor simply alcohol. He remembered how he had propositioned Neil, and in the morning’s clarity could see that he had rushed into this, on the basis of half a day’s acquaintance, some one-liners and an out-of-tune duet. Adam saw the impetuousness, but that wasn’t what unsettled him. His fear was that Neil might have changed his mind: that he might have forgotten his pledge to drive up the coast together, or might pretend that he had forgotten.

  Adam wouldn’t think the worse of him for that. The previous night had been a kind of hallucination, probably impossible to reconstitute and best consigned to pleasant memory. But he hoped otherwise. Neil was uncool, but he didn’t seem to mind, which was itself a kind of coolness; his indifference had a negative power of its own. There was something intriguing in the way he faced the world, wary and not entitled, with low expectations set to be exceeded, rather than, as with most of Adam’s acquaintances, inflated hopes that were destined to be thwarted. He was similar as well as different (they got each other’s jokes), open yet unknown: for all their mutual frankness there was a part of himself that Neil seemed to be protecting, as he shielded his moon-white skin from the sun. He had done things that Adam hadn’t. Neil was the kind of coiled person who, when you met him, you had a hunch that something interesting could happen to, and you wanted to know him long enough to find out what it might be. A person you could measure yourself by.

  Adam got out of bed. The interloping woman was lying on her front, her face in the Norwegian’s armpit, her arse a bikini triangle of white encircled by chocolate tan: a road sign made flesh. He brushed his teeth, thought about shaving but decided not to, put on his shorts and shades and went out to buy a coffee at Burger King.

  Neil was eating his breakfast in the hostel yard when Adam returned. He was sitting in a strange position, on a bench facing the wall, so that anyone who might want to speak to him would have to make a decision and an effort to disturb him.

  ‘Morning, Neil.’

  He turned around and smiled. ‘Morning.’

  Adam sat down next to him, astride the bench. They discussed their hangovers, as was customary, the sandiness of their sheets and the naked woman in Adam’s dormitory. They talked about the volleyball game that the blackboard announced for later that morning. They heard themselves talk about the
weather. Adam saw that he would have to be the one who raised and risked it.

  ‘So are we still on? I mean, the car. You know, San Francisco. Los Angeles. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember,’ Neil said. ‘We’re on.’

  They picked up a freesheet that listed the driveaways available in San Diego and assessed the offers in the yard that evening. They circled three that seemed promising: one vehicle to be delivered to Portland, one to Seattle, one to somewhere in Montana. They called the relevant agencies; Adam did the talking, specifying their ages, nationality, the particulars of their driving licences. Neil tried to decipher the notes his friend was scribbling in the margins, his insides inexplicably fluttering. They decided that Portland would be far enough, especially since the owner would allow them several more days than the trip strictly required. On the following morning they were to go out to the suburbs, towards the Mexican border, to collect the car.

  They packed, settled their hostel bills and rode the trolleybus in the direction of the address Adam had been given. It was a warm blue day. They walked the last few, rundown blocks, sweating and joking that they might never find their destination, might search endlessly for a house that didn’t exist. But, eventually, it did: a decaying clapboard bungalow with a bleached porch and a high-volume argument in progress inside. At first they weren’t sure whether to intrude, or to give up and leave, go back to the beach, forget the whole plan. Neil pushed the buzzer, curtly, once; a young woman with tattooed biceps opened the door and called for her father, who came out, tanned, tall and overweight in serviceman-gone-to-seed style. He made them sign two copies of the paperwork, grumblingly inspected their foreign driving licences and led them to a brown pick-up truck with a covered bed. He handed over the keys and an address in Oregon and watched from the pavement, hands on hips, until they rounded a corner and headed north.

  The pick-up was a bigger vehicle than either of them was used to. It had an extra set of headlights above the windscreen, like something out of The Dukes of Hazzard, a scratched leather interior and a mysterious tarpaulin in the back, tied and chained up, under which squatted a heavy, ominous lump. (‘Gun-running,’ Adam speculated. ‘Body parts,’ Neil countered.) Parking was hairy, and on the northbound highway they were flanked by an endless sequence of outsized lorries, streaming up to Los Angeles at impossible speeds. But at other times and on smaller roads they were almost on their own. And they were in California and free.

  To save money Neil preferred to sleep in a hostel in Los Angeles, or in the back of the truck; Adam agitated for a motel. In the end they compromised on a shared room in the cheapest motel in Hollywood – Neil waiting at a phone booth, pretending to make a call, while Adam checked in alone to avoid the double occupancy charge. Neil knocked twice on the bedroom door, their needless, prearranged signal. Adam pulled him inside and stuck his head into the forecourt, scanning left and right in mock anxiety at being rumbled.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said, as Neil eyed the lone double bed, keeping hold of his rucksack as if he might reconsider. ‘You’re not my type.’

  They undressed and got into bed, at first keeping to the edges. They talked about L.A. Law and Moonlighting. They argued about how to make the bedside fan work, but neither of them managed it. They skirted politics, Adam evincing the soft-left bias prevalent in their generation, bolstered, in his case, by an undergraduate interest in the history of protest (suffragism, Gandhi, Martin Luther King), Neil grunting along diplomatically. They heard the murmur of televisions in neighbouring rooms, a flush from a stranger’s bathroom. They talked about Chloe.

  ‘I’ve never had a, you know, a relationship,’ Neil said. ‘Not like that. Couple of months, max. I just didn’t… To be honest, I don’t think I know how to.’

  ‘It’s pretty easy,’ Adam said. ‘You get on top —’

  ‘No, you dickhead, I mean the… you know, the commitment’ – this last, advice-column phrase spoken by Neil in a defensively ironic falsetto.

  Whereupon they made a deliciously juvenile exchange of their sexual histories, including where and with whom they had lost their virginities: Neil when he was sixteen, with a girl he never saw again, underneath the dining table at somebody’s party, Adam in a copse with a sixth-form girlfriend from the sister school near his own.

  ‘Pitch black,’ Adam said. ‘We could hardly see each other.’

  ‘Figures,’ Neil said. Adam hit him with a pillow.

  After that came their general histories. Neil was two years further into adulthood, but, at twenty-three, only a year older, having gone straight from school to university, whereas Adam had spent a year desultorily teaching in India before he went to Durham. Each summarised his family, which, though they wished it otherwise, was still most of who they were. Adam’s father had done well in shipping insurance and moved them to the country, dispatching the children, he and his sister Harriet, to boarding schools in Sussex. His mother, Adam said, busied herself with local causes and campaigns (unwanted bypasses, charity fêtes, imperilled hospitals). Neil explained that his father, Brian, ran an office supplies and stationery shop in Wembley, but it was clear, Neil said, that he wasn’t naturally suited to retail. He spent too long in consoling chats with polite ladies who ultimately bought nothing, neglecting less civil but more lucrative customers. Neil’s brother, Dan, was two years older than him. Dan was living in Southampton, there was work down there, apparently; he had a baby on the way, though Neil and Brian hadn’t met the girlfriend.

  ‘Mum,’ Neil concluded. ‘She… Nine years ago, nine and a half… She’s dead.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ Adam said, straight away realising his response was inadequate and ridiculous. It was so long ago, he didn’t know her or the circumstances, he barely knew Neil.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  The percussion of the drink and ice machines kept Neil up half the night, along with the voices and footsteps in the forecourt, the revving and subsiding of engines, the sirens out there in America. When he awoke in the morning he was alone, and, for a minute, had no idea where he was, until Adam came in with two complimentary coffees in Styrofoam cups. Adam had a camera with a time-delay function, and he insisted that they put it on the bedside table and take a picture of themselves sitting on the coverlet, the forecourt and the pick-up visible through the window behind them. They were gesticulating, their arms spread and palms open in a what-am-I-doing-here pose: here in this hired room, with this strange man, in a foreign country. In truth, they both knew. At the same time they knew – Neil with a sharp pre-emptive melancholy, Adam more serenely – that this moment was irreducible, could be felt only as it was experienced, and would not afterwards be understood through photographs, shaggy anecdotes or snapshot memories, including by their own later selves.

  Adam was determined to do the sights – the Chinese Theatre, Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, all the kitsch Americana that colonised the imaginations of star-struck British kids in the seventies and eighties – which gave Neil permission to put aside his pretended indifference and go too. It was all precisely like itself, just as they expected it to be, the palm trees and convertibles, as if they were extras in a film about America that everyone all over the world had seen. Adam wanted to drive through South Central and Watts, where the riots had happened; Neil was reluctant, nervous of the invisible urban boundaries between safety and danger, but they did, and it was all fine. They calculated that they could fit in Las Vegas if they only stayed a night; driving in from the desert they saw the sails of windsurfers in the dunes, the surfers themselves out of sight, before the steamboats, pyramids, palaces and volcanoes reared up psychedelically from the dust. They blew a hundred dollars playing blackjack at the Mirage: they agreed never to mention the loss to each other again. They won the money back on a single red-black bet at a roulette wheel, followed by another hundred in profit – enough to cover a double room in one of the dowdier casinos on the old Vegas strip, with a few dol
lars left for a steak dinner and some drinks.

  ‘We’re masseurs,’ Adam told the robotic, peroxide croupier. ‘On our way to North Dakota. They’re having a massage festival next week.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, sweeping the chips from her baize. ‘You boys stay out of trouble up there.’

  Walking along the Strip, they talked about the future. In Neil’s mind, he said, the future was always an escape, somewhere pristine, inhabited by a revamped him.

  ‘It’s not like that for me,’ Adam said. ‘It’s more like, keeping what we’ve got, I mean Mum and Dad, but doing something else on top, something big. You know, people talking about you, your face in the paper. It’s like when you were young and you sort of commentated on your exploits in your head, you know, climbing a tree or whatever, scoring a try. The spotlight.’