A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘Tea, coffee?’ Colin said. ‘Last orders. Adam?’

Two hours later, six weeks after Neil took Jess to Harrow, he and Adam were leaning against the booth at the back of their allotted lane, while the people before them finished their game. They were talking about the serial-killing doctor, talking fast, since there was always more to say than their time together allowed, even when it had just begun.

‘Expect he’ll top himself,’ Neil said.

‘You think so?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Neil raised his voice against the techno, the fusillades of the shoot-em-ups, the gunned engine of the life-sized sports car. ‘I said, if you’d done that — all those people, I mean even if you hadn’t been caught — wouldn’t you top yourself?’

‘I suppose so. Difficult to imagine, isn’t it?’

To both of them this subterranean playground felt dimly illicit. Not just the adults wielding children’s toys, pint glasses in one hand, air-hockey pucks in the other. The whole place was somehow unBritish in its high-spec levity.

‘Haven’t you ever thought about it? Suicide, I mean.’

Adam laughed above the music. ‘No. Never. It would be, you know, giving up. It would mean you’d lost. Why, have you?’

‘Once or twice, maybe,’ Neil said. ‘Yeah. When I was younger, not seriously or anything. In the end it always seemed to me sort of arrogant. Ostentatious, do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’m really worth killing.’ The mass-murdering doctor made him think of his mother — the nagging fear that someone had somehow been to blame, that someone could have done something differently, a fear that was also, he knew, a kind of disguised hope, an abashed fantasy of redress or resurrection.

‘Of course you’re worth it,’ Adam said.

‘I think that might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

‘But if anyone’s going to kill you,’ Adam said, ‘I think it should be me.’

The group bowling before them — two men in replica football shirts and a younger, better-dressed woman — came out of the booth, laughing. Someone had spilled a drink; Neil wiped the low, screwed-down table with a serviette and laid his mobile phone on top of it. They took off their jackets.

‘Shall I?’ Adam said.

‘Be my guest.’

Adam selected a purple bowling ball, the heaviest in the chute, and unleashed it in a swift picturesque motion that knocked down all the pins. He raised his fists above his head in celebration, the fluorescent lights illuminating his teeth and the whites of his eyes.

‘Beginner’s luck,’ Neil said.

‘Do you play this game for money?’

Neil threw from an ungainly, erect posture. His ball dribbled to the end, knocking out a single pin. Adam whooped.

‘I’ll give you the early rounds,’ Neil said. As the contraption righted itself, he asked, ‘So the Millennium bug — is it going to be, you know, a meltdown? I think we should wait till afterwards — the launch, I’m talking about — but Bimal wants to go ahead in December.’

‘They’re working on it,’ Adam said.

‘But is it real? Is it, you know, dangerous?’

‘I could tell you,’ Adam said, ‘but you know what I’d have to do next.’

‘I’m serious, what do they think?’

‘I… I suppose I don’t know.’

‘Right. Okay. I just thought… Never mind.’

Adam sat in the booth while Neil bowled again. That mobile phone… Sometimes, when he went out for the afternoon, with a minister or on a visit, he borrowed a phone from the depository, a weighty black slab with a government serial number and the phone’s own telephone number stencilled on the back. This one was sleek and metallic, and Adam was confident Neil wouldn’t have to return it in the morning.

There was still a puddle of beer at the table’s lip. It occurred to Adam that he could slide the phone into it. Ridiculous!

With his second go Neil knocked over two more pins. His face shone ghoulishly in the overhead lights.

‘He’s a ballsy fucker,’ Neil said. ‘Bimal. You wouldn’t have thought it. We haven’t earned a penny yet and he’s talking about floating. Serious Nasdaq cowboy.’

Adam’s friend Archie was loaded, properly loaded, or his family was, a house in Miami and trust funds all round. Adam remembered another boy, from his boarding school, Philip, whose father had owned and then sold a company that manufactured plastic chairs; the sale price, eighteen million pounds, had been disclosed in a business round-up in The Times . Two or three days of jokes and everyone had forgotten about it. Inherited money was relatively harmless, Adam had always felt. You might resent it, but only as you might resent your friend’s superior height, or his better looks, or some other accidental advantage that he blamelessly held. Self-made wealth, the kind that Neil seemed poised to come into, might be trickier. Your friend’s inheritance was merely an injustice; Neil’s earned wealth might feel like a defeat.

Adam retrieved his purple ball from midway along the chute, and hurled it fast and dramatically into the gutter a couple of feet short of the pins.

‘Listen,’ Neil said as they crossed between the lane and the table, ‘you should join us. Seriously. After the launch, we’ll be hiring — copywriters, business-development people, I’m sure there’s something you could do.’

‘I’ve got a job,’ Adam said.

Neil had been dutifully enthusiastic when Adam first mentioned the Civil Service, even though he hadn’t known what Fast Stream meant. He had envisaged Adam and his leonine hair behind the defensive plastic screen of a benefits office. In his heart he was sceptical about these grass-is-greener switches, these poor-me-I’m-bored lurches from law to teaching, or teaching to law, manoeuvres that, as he saw it, only substituted one whim for another.

‘I know, and I know you’re doing fine where you are, the government. Brilliantly. I’m just saying, think about it. I could speak to Bimal.’

Instead of answering, Adam held up his hands, palms out, as if he were a celebrity at an awards ceremony, or a politician at a rally, false-modestly shushing applause. He considered for a moment and decided not to say what he was thinking.

Neil’s phone beeped. He pushed some buttons and frowned. ‘Bimal,’ he said. ‘Workaholic.’

The memory forced its way out. ‘It’s like what’s-his-name predicted,’ Adam said, his tone aiming for guilelessness, though he could perfectly well recall the name he had omitted.

‘Who?’

‘You know, the American guy.’

‘What American guy?’

‘Eric. That’s right.’

Party like it’s 1999 boomed out, an anthem that seemed to be playing on a loop across the Western world.

‘Eric who?’ Neil asked, instantly knowing who his friend was referring to. The promiscuous giggle and the balled fists. He reached for the mole on his neck.

‘You know, Neil. Come on. You remember. Eric from California.’

On the stereo Prince announced that the party was over.

‘He wasn’t from California,’ Neil said. ‘They were from Colorado. So what’s he got to do with anything?’

‘You remember, he went on about how computers were going to take over our lives and none of us believed him. Every village in India would have one, he said. We were around the campfire, it was that evening, you know… You have to.’

‘Sorry,’ Neil said, ‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You must, it was the same night, before you —’

‘No.’

Eric had said, Remember me when it happens … It would be too much to say that she insisted, at that moment when she became serious and resolute and the games had ended. But Neil hadn’t needed to press or convince her, either. ‘Sure,’ she had said. ‘I want it to be you.’ At first, Adam forced him to recall, Neil had thought she meant, or wanted her to mean, I want it to be you tonight, Neil: I want it to be you and not Adam . But a few minutes later he realised that her ‘it’ had meant something else entirely, an event specific to her and nothing to do with him and Adam.