A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘I mean it, Ad. Few months and I’ll have it.’

‘Pay me back when you make your first million.’ They both laughed. ‘You start next week, right? Break a leg.’

They carried the cargo down the stairs. Neil stood the pinboard, an improvised photo display, against the wall opposite the stair-obstructed window, in the basement’s lone oblong of natural light. Neil and Dan when they were teenagers, wearing shades and gurning. The two of them, younger, with their mother on a pebbly beach, Neil turning his face from the camera and up towards hers. A picture of Neil and Adam at the motel in Los Angeles, another of them fooling around beneath the Faithful Couple, the lip of a path running in front of the double trunk, a backdrop of lush foliage, their two conjoined figures at the base, someone else’s bare arm intruding at the frame’s left edge. Adam had made copies for Neil after they came home.

For a moment they stood in the basement, looking at the photos together in silence. Then they bounded up the stairs, instinctively racing.

‘Well,’ Neil said on the pavement, ‘I’ll miss you while you’re over there.’

‘Stay alive,’ Adam said hammily. ‘I will find you.’

There wasn’t much more to fetch: the fat body of the stereo and its black tendrils; half a dozen hangers’ worth of shirts; the tubular segments and disc-shaped base of a floor lamp; some linen; a box of plastic ornaments that Neil had collected as a child, his boyhood’s special things, some of them, Adam noticed, old promotional freebies from cereal packets.

Adam loitered in the lounge while Neil gathered his kit. A couple of china figurines sat on the mantelpiece, above them a framed floral print that his mother would without question have described as ‘ghastly’. The urn. He tiptoed across to examine it.

The previous autumn, after they had been to a film at Marble Arch, Adam had reminisced about going to the cinema with his mother when he was very young. About how, in the intermissions between the features, she would give him and Harriet money for popcorn or a lolly (never both), sending them up to the usherette to buy their treats, the two of them waving back at her from the queue, considering this the most thrillingly grown-up privilege in the world. Adam had begun an edited account of his mother’s life: her grandfather the judge, the much-mythologised spell in Tangiers before she married, her kooky taste in jewellery, how much he loved her cooking. Standing in front of the mantelpiece in Harrow, he remembered how he had stopped himself that afternoon, and clumsily apologised.

Neil came back down the stairs. Adam said, ‘Don’t you want to…?’

‘He’s asleep. I’ll call him later.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

Neil closed the front door, depressing the latch with his finger to minimise the click, leaving almost silently, as if from a dormitory, or a wake.

At the second set of traffic lights a hunched old woman crossed the road in front of them, dragging a rectangular shopping trolley. Adam said, ‘At your house… at your dad’s place. You know, on your mantelpiece…?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil said. ‘I don’t know what it is really. He can’t decide what to do with her, or can’t bring himself to, maybe. Wouldn’t happen if Mum was here!’

He gave a short choke of a laugh, louder and fiercer than his silent, grimacing, true laugh. He told Adam about the night, after his A-levels, when he freaked out some friends by tipping ash from their spliff into the urn, stoned homage disguised as bravado. Even then they hadn’t asked about her, Neil said, just averted their eyes in silence.

‘Do you cry when you think about it?’

‘You mean, did I cry then?’

‘No, I mean do you cry when you think about it now?’

Neil paused. ‘To be honest, I don’t. Cry, I mean.’

‘Never?’

‘I can’t remember the last time I cried. When I nearly do, you know, when I feel like it, the ducts or whatever gearing up, it’s always for some silly reason, over nothing, that bloke who fell over at the Olympics or something. Why, do you?’

‘Cry? Sometimes. Not that I’ve… I’ve been lucky, you know.’

They were quiet for a minute, but comfortably. The silence had a new timbre that they both heard, an ease that felt like an accomplishment.

‘Your father,’ Adam finally said. ‘Your dad. He isn’t… He wasn’t how I expected. You’re always so, I don’t know, down on him. He was really try —’

‘It was different,’ Neil said. ‘He was. You being there, it was easier.’

‘It’s just, the way you talk about them — your brother, too.’ Adam reflexively compared Neil’s father with his own, Jeremy, a man who always let him feel that all manner of things would be well — not just that they would be, in fact, but that they were already well, could never be otherwise, and that Adam’s role was simply to perpetuate and ramify the wellness he inherited. ‘It’s not what I’m used to, that’s all.’

‘You don’t have to live with him.’

‘Neither do you.’

‘No!’ Neil exclaimed. ‘Fuck.’

‘Take it easy, you can always move back.’

‘No, you idiot, we’ve gone the wrong way.’

Adam turned into a driveway and began to reverse out again, but stopped. The shirts were hanging from a strap above the rear passenger-side window, blocking his view of the traffic. Neil leaned between the seats and tried to pin them behind the stereo, but they escaped. He thrust himself backwards, clasping a headrest with one hand and reaching for the shirts with the other.

‘How’s that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘No, go on,’ Neil said. ‘I’ll call you out.’

Looking sideways Adam saw the pale, hairy calf below the hem of Neil’s jeans, an obscurely improper glimpse of skin that was ordinarily concealed. He gently tugged the trousers towards his friend’s ankles. Little by little, Neil was uncovering: his father (Adam picked up a dim genetic echo between their gummy Collins smiles), his brother and his mother. Those photos of them on the pinboard, alongside Los Angeles, the Faithful Couple.

‘Adam?’

He put the car into reverse.

‘Gavin?’

‘ Que? ’

‘Señor Gavin?’

‘ Non. ’

Adam flew to Tenerife three days after he helped Neil move. He found the place on his second afternoon. The grille was down, the pavement outside less carpeted by broken glass than were the stretches on either side. Eventually he roused a defeated-looking Spanish caretaker, who trudged round from the back of the bar carrying a mop.

‘Look, just let me…’ Adam tried to edge past the caretaker to find the rear entrance. The man blocked him off.

‘Close. No Gavin.’

‘There is, I’ve spoken… I know there is.’ He tried to steer the man out of his way, hands on shoulders, gently, he intended.

‘You fuck!’ the caretaker shouted.

‘Take it —’

‘Fuck!’

The caretaker’s spittle landed on Adam’s cheek, followed by the damp strings of his mop. Adam’s sunglasses flew into the gutter.

The main drag felt like the aftermath of a festive war, with a left-over stench of sun cream, cheap rum, deep-fat fryers and vomit. He asked at six or seven other nightspots, but the only person who admitted to knowing Gavin tried to hit him up for a debt. ‘These kids,’ the Mancunian who called himself Gavin had said to Adam, ‘they show up for work drunk, or they don’t show up at all, you give ’em the push and they expect you to hire them back the next day. And you do. You fucking do!’

On the phone this person had promised Adam unfettered access to his customers, dancefloor and erratic seasonal staff. Adam had promised all these things to Natasha, the producer.