A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘I’ll get on to Croydon,’ Sheila said.

F-A-S: Failed Asylum Seeker, the hygienic, shrinkwrapped acronym for the human beings they repatriated, or were supposed to. To begin with Adam had felt squeamish about the vocab and the role. But he took solace in the fact that these were never his policies. His job was merely to orchestrate the process as humanely and efficiently as possible, from the immigration tribunals to the detention centres to the planes. Better him than some hang-’em-and-flog-’em hatchet man ( I am a nice boy. I am ). The politicians who did make the policies might be amateurs but they weren’t monsters, not in this rainy little democracy. Nor were the uniforms who applied them. Adam had spent three days with an enforcement team from Croydon. Five men in a van, two of them unpleasant, three of them not, three of them lazy, two of them not. One borderline racist, so far as he could tell. The usual loathing for Whitehall toffs, him included.

There was a meeting that afternoon to discuss their response. Adam and Sheila needed to confect some top-notch, bullet-point braggadocio about the money that had left the Home Office and the rejected asylum-seekers who had left the country. By now he knew the form: four points on spending (always up), four on outcomes (up or down, depending).

Deputy Head of Returns. Sitting in his cubicle, Adam’s failings bled together in his head. He was scared. He was sorry. Telling would be a penance, and, in any case, if he didn’t admit everything, Neil wouldn’t understand his dread. He might go berserk — at Adam’s silence then, his silence since, or for his breaking the silence now. On the other hand, Adam tried to reassure himself, friends were always disappointing or betraying each other. Forgotten birthdays, unpaid debts, missed appointments, convenient lies, people changing wrongly as they aged, not being who you wanted them to be… Only a friend could betray you. Betrayal, he told himself, was what friends did.

He sent the text before the meeting: Come round this weekend? Drink? Something I need to say

A chalkboard menu had ousted the dartboard. A tonne of house-clearance encyclopedias lined the wall where a quiz machine had stood. The puke- and history-saturated carpet had been discarded, the floorboards underneath whitewashed: the standard-issue makeover in neighbourhoods like Adam’s and Claire’s. Pubs were the millennial gentrifiers’ first targets, like television stations during a coup. The only relic of the boozer’s past was the potman (two wings of hair on a bald crown, the skin between them marbled with liver spots, stains around his flies). He clung on, scavenging empty glasses in exchange for drink, tolerated by the new management out of kindness or indifference.

Four women were at the bar in their high heels and night-out skirts, their twenty-five-ish prime. Neil watched Adam watching them. His friend seemed to have undergone a marginally slower, domestic version of the fast-forward ageing that presidents and prime ministers went through live on television. Cartoon-dog bags beneath his eyes, a smudge of silvery grey in the hair above one ear, the regular hallmarks of parental decrepitude. Yet he was still chiselled and presentable, still emanating a cavalier glamour. Those women might not mind too much if they caught Adam admiring them.

‘What shall we be this evening?’ Neil joked. ‘Firemen? Lion tamers?’

Adam thought he recognised one of the women, but he couldn’t work out why. Perhaps it was only from a few minutes before, when he and Neil walked in, an instant memory that to his overloaded mind felt like something deeper. He knew he shouldn’t stare. You saw it on the Tube sometimes, this rash scrutiny of strangers, agog middle-aged men tracking svelte legs along the platforms and up the escalators.

They talked. Yes, she was a lovely girl, Adam allowed, utterly lovely, though he hadn’t spent all that much time with her, truth be told, his job mostly being to placate Harry while Claire nursed the baby. Also, he said, ‘she’s had this strange effect on me, I know it’s going to sound crazy, maybe it’s because she’s so wonderful, I look at her and… I haven’t told Claire about this, I can’t, but… This is what I wanted to talk about, in fact…’

‘What is?’

The potman came for their empty bottles, offering them a gappy grin that seemed to Adam both hopeless and defiant. They said ‘thanks’ and turned away, out of some joint, reflexive consideration for the man’s presumed shame.

‘Hold that thought,’ Neil said, and went to the bar for drinks. He glanced only once at the women while he waited, a rapid, practised up-and-down, but twice at his phone, Adam noticed. The barman crouched to retrieve the bottles from a fridge, dipping comically out of view.

The potman had saved him, if Adam wanted to be saved. Actually the malady seemed to be waning, burning itself out like a spiked fever. The performance of normality might soon evolve into the real thing. Even as he had been itemising his charge sheets Adam had known, some of the time — moments when he saw himself from the outside, like a patient looking down from the operating theatre’s ceiling — that Yosemite might not be able to bear the weight of all his masochistic remembrance. She might very well be fine. Almost certainly, they were fine.

Not telling his friend might be more a kindness than a lie. In a practical sense, Adam advised himself, the betrayal would only be actuated if Neil found out. He could live without knowing this; he was living perfectly happily. He was living so happily.

Neil brought the drinks and talked blithely about his work. ‘Net operating income… loan-to-value ratio… vacant possession value’ — his new, econometric vocabulary, the jagged poetry of money. Increasingly he reminded Adam of the cigar-smoking men he had met when, as a teenager, he had once or twice taken the train to London to have lunch with his father and a few of his associates: restless, distracted, with a pharaonic way of talking about their transactions that seemed at once showy and awesomely casual. These days Neil sometimes said ‘two’ for two million pounds, or ‘three-five’ for three and a half, dispensing with the tiresome zeros since millions were the only noteworthy denomination. Adam felt a dim, throwback duty to disapprove of Neil’s choices (going in with Farid, putting money first). Or rather, he felt an obligation to project disapproval, a moral condescension containing an implicit boast that he, Adam, could do and earn what Neil was doing and earning, if only he dropped his scruples and chose to. What he actually felt was pride — pride in himself, mostly, the gambler’s satisfaction at a bet that has come off.

Enough about money. Today Adam surely had the conversational prerogative, the day-release patient’s right to choose their pastime.

‘Neil,’ he said. ‘Philly. Listen, I need to ask you. Do you ever think about it?’

‘What?’

‘What happened in America. After we had that photo taken, you know, the Faithful Couple. With her. With… that girl. The girl and her father.’

Neil had raised his bottle to his mouth as Adam began speaking. He kept it there when the question had been formulated, his lips locked on the glass but not drinking, buying himself a few seconds. He tilted the bottle upward to finish his swig, closing his eyes as he swallowed. He was doubly surprised: by the out-of-the-blue allusion, and at the same time, he registered, that this had taken so long.

Adam was in some deep, abstruse distress, like a man on the parapet of a bridge. This time it was common charity to respond. In any case, Neil wasn’t ashamed. He was as sure as ever — surer — that he had nothing to be ashamed of.