A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘Las Vegas,’ Adam said.

Not Las Vegas… Neil caught his eye and Adam turned away. Look at her and we can keep it going.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Adam continued. ‘There was this croupier, Neil got talking to her. What was her name again? Daisy? She took that photo in our room.’

‘Or was it her friend?’ Neil said.

‘No, I’ve got it now, it was that bounty-hunter guy, you remember?’

‘You boys,’ Claire said. ‘You boys.’

Adam didn’t tell Neil about Gavin’s disappearance or his mishap with the consent form. That wasn’t his role in their double act, he reflected in bed that night, Claire flushed and clammy beside him, gangsta rap and sporadic laughter emanating from the sitting room. He couldn’t. Nor had he mentioned another event in Tenerife that, in a way, had distressed him more. It was a small thing, and he couldn’t explain quite why it was so preoccupying. No one else in the team was likely to remember it, Adam suspected, or not for long. These things happened, they would think, you had a laugh and a joke about them and then you forgot them. No big deal. No harm done.

He and a cameraman had gone to the beach to film some general views , pictures that would be spread across the series, helping to segue between storylines. The cameraman had panned across the black, volcanic sand, scouting for volleyball games and cavorting beauties, and doubletaked back again. He locked onto something in the middle distance that Adam couldn’t decipher without magnification, under or near a clump of yellow sun umbrellas.

‘Take a look,’ the cameraman said to him, grinning. When Adam bent his eye to the viewfinder he saw a couple locked together beneath a beach towel, unmistakably fucking.

They carried on filming, even though they knew the footage would never be used. At least, it couldn’t be broadcast. It could be used, and it was used that evening, before they went out for their night’s work, to entertain the team at the villa. You could see the two bodies much more clearly on the villa’s television; everyone gathered round to score the performances for style, stamina, physique. The producer of the week, a Scot named Alex, supplied a deadpan commentary, as if this were a horse race or a boxing match (‘… and they’re into the final furlong…’). The girl was mostly covered by the man’s torso and the towel, apart from her legs, which stuck up and out like a crab’s. Every thirty seconds or so she seemed to have a dim access of shame, trying with one hand to wrap the towel around her legs, the palm of her other hand flat on the man’s back, but the material wouldn’t stretch. On the screen her face was well-defined, but still it was hard to tell whether her slack-jawed expression implied pleasure, pain or simply far-gone inebriation.

What you could see for certain was that she was young, most likely in her late teens. After a while Adam couldn’t watch. He looked down at the terracotta tiles on the villa’s floor. He scratched his left forearm with the nails of his right hand.

Adam wanted to discuss that girl with Neil, but somehow he never found the right moment. Claire had been there that evening and he didn’t want his girlfriend to know about her, not yet, and after all there was no harm done, and probably he had left it too long. Neil might not want to be reminded of her, and anyway they were never going to see her again. Adam considered that to be important, then, actions and their invisible consequences not altogether counting, he assumed, nor liable to rebound, if the counterparties were out of sight, finished and lost for ever.

It was less than a lie, he told himself. It was an omission, a nothing about nothing, the square root of nothing.

Major? High school’s what I mean.

Later Neil liked to think he had sensed Farid would be a force in his life, as he was sure he knew in the hostel yard that Adam was to be. In truth his first reaction to the man was disappointment. He came out of the sarcophagal lift — cramped, slow and clad in distressingly frank mirrors, which emphasised his vampiric hairline — expecting to find a twitchy entourage, a wall of blinking data screens, the electric aura of redemptive wealth. Balding, diminutive, only modestly overweight, Farid was sitting alone at a fake-mahogany dining table, bare besides his coffee. No water, no biscuits. The venue was a rented apartment: Neil spotted a kitchen counter through one of the internal doors before Strahan quietly closed it. Farid gestured for the three of them to sit opposite him, the glare from the window at his back and in their eyes. Strahan watched from an armchair set back against the wall.

Bimal introduced Neil as an award-winning salesman (that weekend in Brighton with his dad), Jess as a designer who had worked on projects across the country (her A-levels in Hull). The executive team was supported, he said, by a panel of advisers boasting decades of experience in retail (Neil’s father) and utilities (Bimal’s).

In his head Neil ran through the pitching guidelines he had refined during his eight months with HappyFamilies. Sit, don’t stand. Keep your hands together so they don’t shake, or under the table and out of sight. Address the investor only, never speak to your colleagues, which would imply that you need back-up, and so are either weak or lying.

Look at him and we can keep it going.

After Bimal handed over, Neil raced through the requisite jargon (digital disruption, value chains), the plucked-from-thin-air projections (conversion rates, average spends), before framing the main proposal:

‘We’re a small company right now. We know that. You know that. But we are confident that we will soon be an extremely profitable company. And you — at this exciting pre-revenue stage, you can acquire thirty per cent of our company for less than a million pounds.’

Neil tried to convey urgency without desperation. HappyFamilies was seeking only the right kind of investor; they wanted Farid as much for his experience as for his money, though in fact they had no idea where Farid’s experience lay and preferred not to. When Neil finished, after a sod’s-law struggle to power up her laptop, Jess displayed a dummy version of their homepage and their hypothetical products, the families emblazoned on them immortally healthy and beautiful.

Ecstatic young mothers and their pukeless infants. A beaming middle-aged father with his teenaged daughter.

Farid sipped his coffee and regarded the table top. He wrote something down on a very small notepad, afterwards appearing to cross the jotting out. He gazed out of the window. For an infinite minute there was silence, except for the lawnmower buzz of traffic on the Edgware Road.

Bimal was about to speak but Neil cast out an arm to stop him. Submission was part of the exchange, he knew. You had to let the customer inconvenience or insult you if they felt like it. That much he had learned during his involuntary years in the shop.

In the pause Neil noticed a trio of family photos on an otherwise empty bookshelf. Wife, he presumed, though perhaps he shouldn’t; a younger and (surprisingly) fatter Farid crowded with children, two pretty girls and a younger boy; a pair of impeccably kempt toddlers who might be grandchildren.

Farid looked up. ‘Don’t sell me your company,’ he said. ‘Not one customer is buying your company, Happy whatever it is. Sell me your products. Why should I buy these trinkets?’

The accent seemed not to belong in nature, Arabic with a trace of Levantine French, coarsened by what sounded like a Slavic rasp. Beneath the paunch and his distraction Farid gave out the occasional hint of what must have made him rich in the first place, a fecund compound of rashness and caution, enthusiasm and cynicism. You glimpsed it for a second before the mask came down again.