Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

The fat Elvis lurched left, inadvertently shoulder-barging the thin Elvis in the middle, which sent him into the other thin Elvis, who pushed tetchily back.

‘- even listening to me?’

‘Yes, love, sorry. Look out. Those three drunks.’

As the Elvises ambled up level with them, Alex grabbed Carey’s elbow and pulled her out of the way. Too late. Fat Elvis barged into the back of her. Carey’s drink tumbled from her hand and bounced on the sidewalk.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed. The Elvises rolled on, oblivious.

‘Hey!’ Carey said again. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going? That was my drink, you dick.’

Half past them, now, the Elvises turned round. Alex didn’t like the expression on Fat Elvis’s face.

‘You say to me, girlie?’

‘I called you a dick,’ said Carey. She pushed out her lip. When she lost her temper, Carey had a tendency to forget that she was a slightly built woman in her early twenties rather than, say, a light-middleweight boxing champion.

‘Don’t call him an asshole,’ said the thin Elvis in the Evel Knievel suit. ‘’S an accident.’

‘I’ve hit a girl before,’ said Fat Elvis. Alex believed him.

‘I didn’t call him an asshole,’ said Carey. ‘I called him a dick.’ Her face was flushed. Alex was petrified. ‘He smashed into me and made me spill my drink. And then he was walking off without so much as turning round to say sorry. And he’s fat, and he’s ugly, and he’s dressed like a dick. I call that dickish.’

Fat Elvis was taking this in. He paused, swaying a bit. Then he spoke to Alex, dead-eyed.

‘You need to keep that mouth of hers under control.’

He’d barely reached the end of the sentence when Carey slapped him with a report loud enough to make Alex wince. In films, scenes like this seemed to result in moments of stunned silence, but Fat Elvis moved very fast indeed. Barely had the blow landed than he lurched forward with a roar, grabbing at Carey’s wrist. He missed, just, and Carey hopped backwards.

Alex, on instinct, bopped Fat Elvis on the head with the only thing he had to hand, which was his empty plastic funnel of drink. What impact it made was cushioned by his nylon quiff, but it knocked him slightly off balance.

As he came back up it was immediately apparent he intended violence. Carey swung her handbag, catching him on one sideburn.

‘Hey!’ shouted the other thin Elvis.

‘Run!’ shouted Alex, and run they did, with three drunk Elvises in pursuit.

Alex pounded along the pavement. Carey was a bit ahead of him, lifting up her knees, pistoning her arms, her baseball boots flashing red-white and caramel back at him.

‘Pricks! Fucking pricks!’ Carey was shouting over her shoulder between breaths.

‘SHUT… UP!’ said Alex, much less fit than Carey. By the end of the block they had pulled away from the Elvises but his breath was already ragged. ‘You’re going – to get – me… killed.’

They swerved through oncoming pedestrians, dip-diving around stationary gawpers. The cross light was flashing ‘Walk’ and Alex saw Carey make the snap call to go for it. He hop-skipped through the intersection with a blare of horns.

They gained the opposite pavement and Alex bounced off someone’s shoulder, earning a shout of indignation, and a splat of what seemed to be ice cream on the cheek, but then Alex looked up and realised they were heading into the thick of a crowd.

Carey, ahead of him, wormed shoulder-forward between two people with cameras and ducked into the crowd.

Behind him, Alex heard the shout of what he guessed was one of the Elvises hitting ice-cream guy head on, buying them a second or two, and then he was into the thickening mass himself.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’

‘Hey -’

‘- with my friend… sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’

There was music to the side, and bright lights. Some sort of show. Alex kept his head down. Behind him, the sound of further collisions.

‘- you, Elvis!’

‘- the damn way…’

He ploughed on, keeping his head down. He popped his head up. He could see Carey, lither and pushier, extending her lead.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry…’

The crowd was very thick, now. The whole of the pavement had been fenced in with wooden boards and netting, and the crowd was jammed into that space. There were planks underfoot and light – golden, green and red – was pulsing. Alex’s arm barked against a rough rope. A loud fusillade of bangs caused him to whip his head round – above the crowd and back from the pavement he could see what looked like a boat, its rigging scarved with multicoloured smoke. Hanging from the rigging were girls in bikinis with eyepatches and pirate hats, waggling their legs.

Alex put his head down and plunged on, wriggling through the thickest part of the crowd. As the crowd thinned he caught up with Carey, grabbed her arm.

He risked a backward glance. He couldn’t see the Elvises. He pulled her down and against the wooden barrier between the pavement and the road. They squatted there, between a thicket of legs. As he squatted, his trousers tightened at the hip, and the ring box dug in.

Carey’s face was bright with exhilaration. She grabbed the back of his head and kissed him on the lips, then let him go.

‘Not funny!’ he hissed. ‘It was me they were going to beat up -’ and then he stopped momentarily as he saw what looked like three sets of white legs, trousers tellingly flared, coming through the crowd. He pushed his hand over Carey’s mouth and studied the pavement. The legs went past.

‘Not funny,’ he repeated, but now they weren’t actually going to be beaten up what had been scary started to seem funny. He was shaky with adrenalin.

‘Marry me,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ she said.

He got up, thighs creaking, from his squat and meerkatted up. There was no sign of the Elvises. A wooden walkway coming off the pavement at right angles led to the entrance to a casino. Alex pointed, steered Carey by the elbow, and jostled through into the lobby.

‘Drink,’ he said.

They walked, Alex still holding Carey’s elbow, across the wide hideous carpet in the direction of a large, brassy, over-marbled bar in a thicket of slot machines and palm trees.

Behind the bar was a girl who looked from the waist down like she was playing Dick Whittington in panto at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, and from the waist up like she was a bellhop in a pornographic movie.

‘Champagne,’ said Alex. ‘We’d like, please. Two glasses.’

‘Sir,’ she said without smiling.

‘Care, you are a psychopath,’ he said. Carey beamed.

‘Not taking shit from Elvis,’ she said.

The woman set two tall flutes of champagne in front of them. She slipped a silver tray down between them with a paper bill face down on it. Carey picked it up.

‘Crap!’ said Carey. ‘That’s eighty bucks.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Alex said. ‘I won in the casino earlier, remember.’

‘But eighty bucks!’

‘Seriously.’ He made a point of looking into her face as he smiled. ‘This is a special occasion.’

He moved his hand over hers, took the bill, replaced it face down on the silver tray. Then he dropped one leg off the bar stool so he could get into his pocket. He pulled out the box, and he put it in on the fake marble bar top between them. He looked at Carey.

She looked at the box. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. The moment was right.

‘Open it,’ he said.

Carey looked very unsure. She didn’t move at all.

‘It’s for you,’ Alex said. ‘Have a look.’

The waitress behind the bar was listening with her back to them, pretending to polish some glasses. Carey fiddled with her hands. He could see that she knew what was in the box, and the expression on her face was one of shock and fear. She pushed the box away from her, no more than half an inch, with the back of her knuckles.