Hari Kunzru - Transmission

She got up and slid the door open on to the balcony. Sophie followed, and they looked over the river, at the costume-drama ripple and glint of Chelsea reflected in the water.

‘It’s a good view,’ Sophie snorted. ‘But is that enough? I mean, what else is Mr Swift bringing to the table?’

So Gabriella sat in Sake-Souk listening to Guy chewing his main course and thinking about what he was bringing to the table and eventually found herself staring back at the man on the other side of the room. He looked familiar, an actor maybe.

Guy followed her eyeline. ‘Do you know him?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘I don’t think so.’

Guy took a moment to revel in her voice, the way her beautiful mouth turned th into f, her bored elongated i. He heard in it the generic European female tone of techno records, a voice made to say, ‘Oh baby, you make me feel so good.’ The untapped erotics of Gaby’s accent diverted him from the problem of the man at the far end of the restaurant, and he forgot the icy look he was about to flash him and instead made an attempt to bridge the gap which had opened up during dinner.

‘Sweetie, I thought maybe we could try out Thailand this summer.’

‘Try it out? Why? Do you want to buy it?’

She was looking at him with an expression of unfathomable scorn. He began to think he had said something wrong. Gaby was a great girl but she did have her moods.

When Chris’s alarm went in the morning, she stumbled out of the bedroom to find the couch vacant and the spare quilt neatly folded up on top. A note was propped up on the coffee table thanking her without punctuation or capital letters for a nice evening, and as Nicolai groaned and called out plaintively for coffee a momentary stab of unease penetrated her nausea. Did she do something last night? Later, from her desk at Virugenix, she sent Arjun mail. He did not reply. That week she was swamped by work, and the silence lengthened into several days, a weekend. The following Monday she spotted him in the cafeteria and went over to say hi. He said hi back and carried on eating. She asked if he still wanted to go on with the lessons. She meant it as a joke. He nodded hesitantly but wouldn’t make eye contact, shuffling his feet under the Formica table as if he couldn’t wait for her to go away.

‘Arjun, did I piss you off the other day?’

‘Pardon? Oh, no, not at all.’

‘So why are you acting like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘You know what I mean.’

He grimaced and shrugged his shoulders petulantly. ‘I’m not pissed off; I’m very happy. Yes, let’s have a driving lesson. Email me, OK?’

‘Come on, don’t be an asshole. Was it Nicolai?’

‘Who?’

‘I told you I lived with someone.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ There was a long uneasy pause, as he struggled for words. ‘Well you did, but I thought you just meant — that is — you didn’t tell me you were married.’

‘Not married, Arjun, just living together. And we — well, it’s not like we’re exactly traditional — look, why am I even explaining this? All I’m saying is I’m sorry, OK, for whatever it is. I want us to be friends.’

‘So do I,’ he said.

This was Chris’s cue to say great absolutely see you some time and walk off. When they start to get weird on you, it’s a prelude to one thing only. Mr Arjun Mehta was turning into trouble. He would have to go somewhere else for driver ed. For some reason what came out of her mouth was ‘Good, so why don’t we act like friends and hang out for an evening? We could do something — I don’t know — we could catch one of your movies.’

Arjun looked confused. ‘My movies? You mean Indian movies? You want to see a Hindi movie?’

‘Sure.’

He looked surprised.

‘Great,’ he said uncertainly ‘I’m not sure you’ll like it.’

‘Why not let me try? How about tomorrow night?’

‘Uh, OK.’

Which is how they ended up driving to a mall in Kirkland to see a movie that involved two boys and two girls who took three and a half hours to persuade their parents to let them marry each other in the correct combination. Chris was bored. Was the guy in the see-through organdie shirt really supposed to be cool? He had a mullet, for chrissakes. And how precisely did they make it to the pyramids? Since it was shown without subtitles, Arjun had to whisper the important plot points to her, and while he sat entranced, she drifted in and out of the story, following trains of thought about the reality or otherwise of the older guy’s beard, the stones in the mother’s necklace, the vaguely Dynasty salmon-pink palace where much of the action took place. Finally the nuptials were completed, and the audience spilled out into the muted evening lighting-scheme of the mall. Chris looked around at the young Asian couples and single-sex clusters of teenagers and saw that everyone was animated, smiling. Arjun had the same look. Satisfied. Emotionally replete.

‘That,’ he said, humming one of the tunes from the film, ‘was just too too good.’

Chris spotted three other white faces, a man and two women, each half of a couple, each looking as mystified as she felt. Quickly she devoted her attention to rustling up some kind of critical response; Arjun was going to ask her what she thought, and she was going to have to come up with something better than the real-beard-real-rocks-real-palace conundrum or he would be offended. This was supposed to be about the two of them making up, after all.

She was prevented from giving an opinion by one of those sudden and unexpected encounters that can be given a positive spin only by reminding yourself that it would have been worse if you were with your mother. What Tori and the girl-bar crew were doing staggering around at midnight in the Totem Lake Mall was anyone’s guess. The first Chris knew about it was when her hair was jerked back and a pierced tongue was rammed down her throat as the centrepiece of a very wet French kiss.

‘Hey there, you little piece of chicken,’ growled Tori, releasing Chris’s face and playfully pinching her nipple. ‘How you doing?’ Six-one in her socks and worked-out some way beyond the call of duty, Tori (the joke went) was born too late. Had she been on the scene before 1989, she could have found work as a monument in an Eastern bloc town square. Ordinarily she was a handful, but tonight, whacked up on this week’s c.n.s. stimulant of choice, sweating profusely and surrounded by her adoring biker-jacketed fan club, her name would head any list Chris could compile of people not to introduce to shy heterosexual men from countries with conservative moral codes.

‘Who’s your buddy?’ asked Tori, eyeing Arjun like a particularly dubious fast-food menu item.

‘Christ, Tori,’ seethed Chris. All around them, the South Asian film fans of Kirkland were reacting to their first lesbian kiss. Tutting parents scooped up their children. Gap-clad teens experienced a sudden broadening of their horizons. Arjun looked as if someone had rewired him, badly. Chris was pissed off. Tori’s friends were making eyes at her and sniggering at Arjun. Luckily the crew were on their way to a party, and once Chris had made it clear she wouldn’t be tagging along, they headed off in a tramp of engineer boots and ripped cotton. She watched them, relieved that nothing involving more nudity had taken place.

Next she had to deal with Arjun, whose system appeared to have hung.

‘You. Bar. Now. We need to talk.’

And so Arjun was led to a Mexican-theme place with a plastic bandito figure outside it where the staff served them even though they were stacking chairs and wiping the tables and there he was made to down two shots of tequila and given a crash course in contemporary American sexual mores. Chris, it seemed, lived and slept with Nicolai, and, though they were not married, this arrangement had been their default setting for the last two years. Though Nicolai could correctly be called Chris’s boyfriend, the two of them (here was where it got complicated) also slept with other people, on a basis described as open but limited, the limit being defined by the degree of emotional involvement with the outside partner. As Chris explained all this, Arjun experienced a turbulent flow of emotions including (but not limited to) disappointment, jealousy, hope, intrigue, sexual arousal and guilt. Blushing furiously, he tried to bury them all. He put it to Chris (perceptively, he thought) that her limit-definition was unsound, and a less vague system for running her relationship would be to use measurable criteria like time spent away from the partner or the performance of particular sex acts. Chris told him to concentrate on what she was saying. Arjun started to argue that this was precisely what he had been doing, but something in her expression stopped him. He had a question.