Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘Open it,’ he said again.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Open it.’

She did, sadly, and she looked at the ring, its glitter. And then she looked at him, and she looked away. She looked miserable.

‘Carey -’ he said. Something cold settled in his chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. ‘Carey. I want us to get married.’ He heard his voice say that. But now it felt like he was watching the scene from a long, long way away. As if he was sitting on the moon, watching his proposal of marriage stall through a telescope – its details scratchy and distant and oddly painless.

She continued looking at the ring. Her eyes were welling.

‘Can we just forget this?’ she said in a small voice. Alex was accustomed to Carey having a brisk bossiness, a confidence in her manner – but she seemed floored, lost suddenly. He was sitting at this bar with a stranger.

He took a sip of his champagne.

‘Yes,’ he said coldly. ‘Of course. So sorry.’ He reached out and went to retrieve the ring, getting as far as snapping the case shut before Carey yelped and put her hand on his, holding it there. Her knuckles were pale. Her face was contorted. The mole on the corner of her chin – where he’d kissed. It was nothing: a blemish. How suddenly and how absolutely what was familiar had become strange; someone he had imagined part of him was just another human animal.

‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she said. Alex left his hand where it was. He looked at the surface of the bar. He was conscious of the waitress not watching, polishing glasses.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. His face felt very cold. You can’t come back from this. He took his hand away and got down off his stool, not looking at her, and put the ring box back in his pocket and walked towards where they had come in without looking back at her. They hadn’t gone deep enough in for casino geography to do its work. He still knew how to get out.

He had just reached where the walkway began when he realised that he hadn’t paid for the drinks. He turned and went back, fast, feeling a burst of anger. Carey was where she had been and she was looking at him. Her face was wet, and it opened – the whole face – like she’d seen him giving her a second chance.

He ignored her, pushing up against the bar, snatching at the little silver tray with the bill on it and leaning forward to catch the attention of the waitress. Alex thrust his hand in his right-hand jeans pocket and pulled out some crumpled notes – what were these? – twenty, twenty, ten, a five, ones… not enough.

‘Alex,’ she said. She put her hand to his elbow and he jerked it away. He didn’t look at her.

He pulled his credit card out of his other pocket. ‘Waitress,’ he said with a venom that surprised him. She ignored him. ‘Waitress!’

The waitress turned round with slow ostentation, took in Carey crying, and looked up at him. If there had been a hint of a smirk, a hint of an arched eyebrow, in her expression Alex would have hit her. Her smile was bright and icy. She hated him.

‘I need to pay this bill.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Alex, please,’ said Carey – pulling this time at his forearm. Her face was imploring him. ‘Please. I’m sorry, please, don’t go – don’t be so horrible, talk to me, please, I’m sorry…’

‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake and -’ he pulled away with real violence this time – ‘get off me.’

She looked startled.

‘Don’t touch me, Carey. I’m serious. Do you know what I -’

The waitress came back with the credit-card machine. It ticked and chirred. She passed it to Alex. It was deadweight in his hands. He punched in his pin then waited, looking at the gaudy ceiling of the casino and clenching his jaw.

‘Aaaand…’ the waitress said, pulling the strip from the top of the machine with bright professionalism, hitting a button with the heel of her hand and handing card and slippery receipts to Alex. Her overlong red fingernails fanned in the air as she did it.

Alex turned round and went again, and Carey made no attempt to follow him.

He fought through the crowd that was still hanging round the end of the pirate show and walked in no particular direction up the street, and kept walking.

I detest Alex, don’t you? I didn’t want to mention it, at first, but I can’t keep quiet any longer. What sort of a hero does he think he is?

The self-pity! The petulance! And so wet. He didn’t want Carey for Carey. He wanted Carey because he couldn’t think of anything else to want. But really he didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted someone to save him from the awful monotonousness of being Alex.

I was hoping to like him, but I’ve run out of patience. Poor Carey! It’s not her fault she doesn’t want to marry her drippy English boyfriend. He could have been kind to her. Now she’s feeling wretched and he’s off in another of his self-absorbed little tantrums. And Carey did love him, enough, in her way. But she knew that if she said yes he’d think that was the end. She didn’t want to be his rescuer, his mother, the person who was to blame for his happiness, a bit part in his small life.

Bree would hate him too, I think, if she knew him. Bree, like Sherman, believes we make our own luck. She may be wrong about that. Not as wrong as Sherman, mind – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. But wrong nonetheless. At least she knows what she’s doing, though. She works. She keeps her head down. She tries to make amends. She has some discipline – now, at least, she does. She even thought she could help Jones.

Alex has none of Bree’s discipline. Carey is suffering, sitting back there in the bar in Treasure Island, crying, while the hard woman who served the champagne and didn’t even get a tip, calls her honey and asks her if she wants to talk. She wants to talk.

This is Alex’s fault. Alex made all of this happen, by doing nothing. By allowing himself to feel only what he thought he ought to feel, by faking it, by truly knowing he wanted her only when she wasn’t part of his story.

Alex made all this happen. And now he’s going to have to suffer through it.

The anger faded from Alex as he walked, and the coldness, and in it a peculiar ache took hold. He looked at all the neon and felt a loneliness that carried, somewhere at the heart of it, its own thrill.

That was that. He walked up the Strip, wondering what to do. He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to his hotel. And the Strip was so long and so full of people, the buildings so massive. Everything was heavy here.

He walked for a long time, waiting at intersections for the sign to say ‘Walk’ and then walking across, and walking to the next huge intersection and waiting for the sign to say ‘Walk’. He kept going, up out past the big hotels. A guy came forward and tried to give him a free glossy magazine. He ignored him.

On the pavement there were cigarette butts, glossy flyers for shows, glossy flyers for girls. Massage and escort. Glossy orange breasts, white smiles, gaudy typefaces, phone numbers, phone numbers, phone numbers. Fake photographs, real phone numbers.

Up ahead he could see a slim concrete tower, bone white, rising from the other side of the Strip. It seemed to go half a mile into the sky. At the top, some sort of observation deck pulsed with light, and as he looked, tiny wheels rotated and swung over the edge and back again. A red light shot up the spire above the observation deck and shuddered back down. Fairground rides, he realised – people allowing themselves a moment or two of the fear of falling, the fear of acceleration, the fear of surrendering control.