A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

They were out of time, Prince declared.

Neil stood at the top of the bowling lane, his fingers in the furtive niches but the ball suspended by his side. Somehow, in his head, while he had grown older, advancing from the extreme edge of adolescence to the brink of his thirties, she was frozen in her Yosemite incarnation, so that when he thought about the two of them together now, the age gap yawned even more accusingly than it had done at the time. Once or twice, on the television news, he had seen melodramatic stories about teachers running off with pupils, or teenage girls eloping with Mediterranean waiters, and quickly told himself that they bore no resemblance to him. That wasn’t him at all.

Two years in San Quentin. Her Charlie Brown T-shirt. The details had been seared into his memory, saved from the routine auto-erase, by the fuss in the morning.

They bowled again. Neil’s balls dawdled to the pins, reliably taking out three or four or six. Adam urged his arm to remember its original technique, but the harder he tried, the more immediately he found the gutter. Neil’s face looked leprously white in the spotlights.

They fell back on polite enquiries, the basic mnemonic responsibility of friendship, the minimum talent that it required. Neil asked about Claire’s job, Adam’s parents, Harriet. He had danced with Harriet at the wedding, as far as possible leaving the actual movement to her, struggling to hold on to her like a boxer on the ropes; the more she had drunk that evening, the more ingenuous she seemed, and Neil remembered something Adam had told him about their childhood — how their father had wanted another boy, and when Harriet was a toddler had insisted she be dressed in a little boy’s sailor suit.

‘She’s okay,’ Adam said. ‘She’s back at home, job didn’t work out. Bit weepy, you know. How’s your old man?’

‘The same. Not opening the shop on Saturdays any more. Asked after you the other day.’

Neil mentioned Sam, and Adam said, ‘You’ve got this different tone in your voice when you talk about him, did you know that?’

‘Do I sound the same for Jess?’

‘No.’

They discussed their preliminary plans for millennium eve, the river of fire into which the Thames would supposedly be transfigured at midnight, an object of London’s revelrous self-deprecation even before the feat was attempted. They were both trying, paddling away from the edges of the whirlpool. They had two goes left when Neil gave in to it.

‘What did you bring him up for?’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t, Adam. I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like you’re trying… just when I… I mean, why did you mention him?’

‘Take it easy. You’re being ridiculous. It’s just, I think it’s because, I was at this meeting this afternoon — knife crime — they were talking about the girlfriends, for some reason it —’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Take it easy, I’m sorry. You just reminded me of him — the Millennium bug and his computers…’

‘I mean, I haven’t thought about her for years, we’ve never even talked about it… It was just a mistake, you know that.’

‘Do I?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. It’s just, like you say, we’ve never… I mean, I’ve never… Nothing.’

A man in a baseball cap from the neighbouring lane pinched Adam’s bowling ball. A familiar eighties rock song struck up, but somehow, in their heads, the music had been turned down, screened out.

‘Christ,’ Neil said. ‘You make me think…’

‘What? What do I make you think?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Go on, say what I make you think.’

‘I said, forget it. Fuck’s sake, Adam, why do we have to talk about this?’

‘Okay. Jesus.’

Neil picked up a ball but didn’t bowl. ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

‘But you’ve got another go.’

He dropped the ball into the gutter.

‘But you’re winning, Philly…’

‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘You can have this one.’

Neil raised his chin to indicate to the tourists waiting behind the partition that he and Adam were leaving. They crowded into the booth; he retrieved his phone.

Outside the giant Ferris wheel angled across the water, halfway to its upright terminus, leaning out towards Parliament as if for a crackpot siege. In the other direction, downstream, was the porcupine Dome. London at the end of history: neophile, frivolous, renovated in splotches, like the make-up on a careless old woman.

‘Looks like it might fall,’ Adam said. ‘It can’t, can it?’

Neil didn’t reply. He turned his eyes towards the wheel but didn’t appear to see it. The project’s floodlights blazed along the riverbank.

If this friendship were a proposition that crossed Adam’s desk, and he were coldly weighing the costs and benefits, he might deem himself irrational for spending so much time on it. No money, no sex; no tangible pay-off of any kind. Friendship was a luxury in any utilitarian calculus, and yet without it, without Neil, his life would be thin. ‘Maybe it can fall,’ he muttered. ‘Unbelievable.’

They shook hands and then, sensing that the formality was absurd and dangerous, managed a one-armed hug, so that they ended up standing alongside one another, facing out across the water.

After the arraignments he would muster his excuses. He tried to be objective, scrupulous, as if the inside of his head were a court, and he were the prosecutor and the defence attorney, as well as the judge and the accused, or the co-accused. He considered but discounted the weaker extenuations, such as their youth (they hadn’t been that young) and the drinking (they weren’t all that drunk, not that evening). He admitted the quicksand ambiguity of her appearance and of her demeanour: she had seemed alternately aware and oblivious of her body’s power, playfulness eliding with flirtation on a slippery adolescent continuum. He acknowledged the hypnotic momentum of the holiday, for most of which the two of them had scarcely noticed women, being too preoccupied with each other, until finally they had turned their energy outwards, looking for a mediator and a prize, and found her. Found Rose.

In the private hearings he conducted, many each day in the first, hallucinatory week — with several more each night, when he was up and jiggling the baby, or in bed, wasting his chance of sleep — he would leave the obvious argument till last. It had been Neil, he would eventually remind himself, it was Neil, and not him, who had taken the girl into the tent and fucked her. It was Neil who had actually done that, even if Adam had wanted and intended to fuck her himself.

Yet somehow that most material fact felt more like a technicality than a true exoneration. Adam was implicated, he knew that, as a man could be had up for murder though someone else wielded the knife. You wanted it too. You started it. He would have been implicated even if he hadn’t known about her age, because he was there and because of what he said about her. But he had known. I fucking told you. If there was room for a beneficial doubt before her father corrected him, there hadn’t been afterwards. Every time, always, as in some rerun disaster film that you vainly hope might turn out differently, Adam found himself guilty. He deserved the morning-after curse that at the time he barely heeded:

One day you’ll have your own. I hope you find out how this feels.

‘She’s asleep,’ Claire would whisper to him during that week. ‘She’s asleep already, Adam. Put her in the basket and come to bed. Ad, come on.’

When he tried to recall the reasons he hadn’t spoken up, either by the campfire or (his second chance) when Neil evicted him from the tent, the only motives Adam could salvage were sordid and inadequate, pique and revenge that made his conduct seem worse.