A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

Actually he was supposed to travel with his girlfriend, Adam continued. It had been her idea, Chloe’s, she had always wanted to visit Los Angeles, see Venice Beach and the Hollywood sign. They both had. They split up just after their finals — it was mutual — but Adam had thought, fuck it, I’ll go anyway. No, he didn’t have a job waiting for him in England, but he planned to get into television: ever since he saw the footage of the Ethiopian famine, he had wanted to make documentaries and a difference. Before he flew out he sent off a load of applications and begging letters; he was hoping something would have come of them by the time he got home. His mother was keeping an eye out for any encouraging envelopes. He had landed in LA but come straight down to San Diego on the Greyhound, intending to meander back up the coast.

‘When did you go to the zoo?’

Adam took a few seconds to work it out, half-lifting a hand towards the phantom cap.

‘Yesterday. I saw it on the telly when I was a kid. Always wanted to go there.’

After that it was Neil’s turn. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about himself, he feared his biography wouldn’t captivate, so he kept it short: economics at Sheffield, then the pharmaceutical sales job, which, in reality, had involved driving around the south-east for almost two years with a sinister-looking case of hand cream and tampon samples, ‘until I got totally sick of it. They offered me a marketing thing at head office, up in Birmingham, but I turned it down. Last month, that was. Yeah, crazy, I know, but I’d saved up enough to come out here, so. I’ll find something else when I get back. Or, you know, I hope I will.’

No, Neil had never been to America before. He had only been abroad a handful of times: ‘We went to Spain, once or twice, when Mum was… with Mum. Costa Brava.’ He took a swig of beer. ‘And, you know, booze cruises to Calais.’

Adam nodded unconvincingly.

‘I’m heading up to LA next week,’ Neil continued, ‘then San Francisco.’

‘Me too,’ Adam said. ‘Maybe Yosemite after that. Are you on your own?’

‘Yeah,’ Neil replied. ‘On my own. I’m on my own.’

They were quiet. Neil said, ‘Another round?’

The yard was filling up. The girl in the sarong was back, now wearing a strappy white mini-dress and chatting to another woman over by the gate. She and Neil seemed to have made an unspoken pact not to acknowledge one another, curiosity flipping into surliness through some binary logic of unconsummated flirtation. When Neil finished pumping the beer he saw that Adam was talking to two other men. He felt irrationally jealous.

‘This is Neil,’ Adam said.

‘Spilled a bit,’ Neil said. ‘Shit.’

‘Ben,’ one of the men offered in a southern American accent. Neil was tallish — my six-footer, his mother had called him, albeit before he quite got there — but this man was taller and well-built with it. ‘What are you two doing in California?’

‘We’re hairdressers,’ Neil said.

Adam turned towards him, too sharply. Don’t, Neil thought. Don’t look at me or I’ll have to laugh.

‘Cool,’ the other, shorter American said.

Look at them and we can keep it going.

Neil had played this game before, mostly in clubs, on nights when he and his friends decided it was the most fun they were likely to have with the girls they were pursuing. The aim was to see how far they could push the lie before losing either the girls or their straight faces. The funny thing was, in California, the lies they told felt almost true. Or, if not true, at least possible, as if Neil might plausibly be someone new if he and his new friend willed it.

‘Yeah,’ said Adam. ‘We finished hairdressing college in Cardiff, then we came out to work with a stylist in LA.’ He gets it, Neil thought jubilantly; he’s perfect at it. ‘When it comes to fringes,’ Adam went on, ‘England is light years behind.’

Neil bit his lip: Don’t overdo it. ‘We’re going to drive across America,’ he put in, composing himself. ‘You know, cutting hair along the way. Campsites, motel car parks, that kind of thing. We figure five bucks a pop will get us to New York. How about you guys?’

‘Graduate school,’ the shorter man said. ‘We’re engineers. On our way down to Ensenada. You two detouring to Mexico?’

‘Not this time,’ Adam replied. ‘We’re heading north.’

Afterwards Neil thought the men must have seen through it, with that courteous American acuity that Britons often miss. But the strangers played along, helping to make him and Adam feel bonded and separate, until they left to join the queue for the buffet set out on a table in the corner.

Adam and Neil low-fived and had another beer. ‘Bottoms up,’ Adam said, raising his cup.

The waves rolling onto the beach were just audible above the chatter in the yard. Before the pause could turn awkward he pressed Neil about the job he had resigned. To Neil’s surprise he seemed genuinely interested, and, though nobody else ever had been, he was: for Adam, employment was still a land of myth, populated by fabled creatures — the Secretary, the Boss — that he was yet to encounter in the flesh. Neil explained how the company had delivered crates of free samples to his father’s house in Harrow in the middle of the night; how he would shop them round to wholesalers and retailers and the occasional department store. The idea was to distribute the samples and gather orders in exchange. Half the time the orders were cancelled by the pharmacists afterwards, but that didn’t matter to the salesmen, Neil explained, because they counted towards your monthly sales figures anyway.

‘Got it,’ Adam said. ‘Of course. Any, you know, action?’ he asked, retreating from the world of kickbacks and sharp practices to more familiar territory. ‘You know, secretaries or whatever.’

‘Not really. I never went to the office much. Unless,’ Neil deadpanned, ‘you count this old woman with a beard who ran a chemist’s up in Bishop’s Stortford. She pinned me to my car once, said she wouldn’t let me go unless I gave her another crate of free shampoo. Coconut, I think it was.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I gave her the shampoo and she gave me an order. I think that was the time I won salesman of the month. I got a weekend in a hotel in Brighton.’

‘Did you take the old woman?’

‘I took my dad. Sort of had to, you know.’

They drank, the repartee checked by the mention of Neil’s father, its opaque dutifulness, but only temporarily.

‘What’s he like as a wing man?’

‘Better than you,’ Neil said.

After a few seconds they both laughed, Adam aloud, Neil almost silently, his lips drawn across his teeth in the semblance of a grimace.

They had another drink in the queue for food — almost nothing was left by the time they reached the table, a few rectangles of overcooked pizza and some token celery that no one else had fancied — and then another as they ate. The beer was cold and light and stronger than it tasted.

The biker had hooked up a karaoke machine to the speakers, and he checked that the microphone was working with the ritual taps and Testing, testing . He perched the screen on the edge of the buffet table and, without preamble, began to sing — ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, followed by ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ — in one of those affected growly voices that substitute attitude for intonation. People applauded. Next two German women did a Whitney Houston medley, and a bare-chested Australian man mutilated ‘Need You Tonight’. There were a few sarcastic whoops, and someone threw a not-quite-empty cup at him. The cup hit the man on the shin, the beer splashing his leg.