‘Umm, well…’
Most of the people at the party were taking turns to throw things over the parapet. For a dedicatedly minimalist couple, Faye and Kul had a surprising amount of stuff they weren’t going to miss when they quit the loft: quite a lot of old kitchen bits and pieces, like bowls, plates, jars, a broken juicer, a defunct Thermos flask, some outdated goblets, a bilious green fondue set… then a handful of ornaments they’d been given by Faye’s parents, which they’d never liked or ever displayed but had kept in case the old couple ever came to visit (the ornaments were, like Faye’s parents, pretty hideous), followed by bigger stuff as Faye and Kul got into it and people started to cam-cord what was happening: an old hi-fi system, a bust TV, a misbehaving radio, and bottles; lots of bottles.
‘Me fuckin car!’ Ed wailed as half a dozen carefully released wine bottles plummeted to their destruction. A big cheer went up as they shattered, more or less simultaneously.
‘The wreckage is going nowhere near the damn car, Ed,’ I told him.
‘You can’t be fuckin sure, man. What about me tyres? Those are fuckin brand new tyres. They cost a bleedin fortune. Plob’ly.’
‘Bean bags?’ Amy laughed as one of Kul’s promoter chums heaved through the crowd clutching two of the things over his head like giant brown scrotums.
‘You have – you ever had bean bags?’ I said to Kul.
He shrugged. ‘Promise you won’t tell.’
‘What’s the point?’ somebody shouted. ‘They’re not going to shatter.’
‘Now,’ the promoter chum said (he meant ‘No’, but, like Ed, he was from Sarf Landin). ‘But I was finking that if you, like, dropped eavier stuff on top of them…’
‘Brilliant!’ I yelled, deeply impressed at such forethought.
‘Kul?’ Faye said, laughing but sounding a little unsure. ‘I thought you liked that chair.’
‘Yeah, well, not that much,’ Kul said. ‘Give me a hand here…’
We got the big metal and wood chair up onto the parapet, a whole bunch of us positioned it where it looked like it would drop onto one or both of the bean bags, then we let it go.
Very big cheer for the chair; direct hit on one of the bean bags resulting in an explosive spray of white polystyrene beads splashing out across the now fabulously wreckage-strewn car park like a giant snowy feather pointing towards the chain-link fence.
‘Hey, if we dropped this fish tank, would the fish experience weightlessness? I mean, like, double weightlessness? Just kidding.’
‘Faye, do you want this old table?’
‘I found more bottles!’
Faye looked at Kul, her eyes wide. She clicked her fingers. ‘That case of awful Cava my uncle got cheap from Tesco! Remember?’
Kul took her face in his hands and kissed her. ‘Knew it would come in useful for something. You certainly can’t drink the stuff.’ He set off towards the interior. An unsteady stream of bottles of various sizes whistled to the asphalt, each getting a small cheer as it hit. People were calling out marks for technical merit and artistic achievement.
‘I bet you started this, didn’t you, Ken?’ I turned to find Nikki perched on her crutches, all grumpy glare.
I held up my hands. ‘Guilty,’ I said, surprised at her expression. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘Throwing perfectly good food away is wrong, Ken,’ she said, shaking her head as though at a child who needed to be told that scrawling on the walls with crayons was bad.
‘It was only a few bits of fruit,’ I said. ‘It would probably have been-’
‘Oh, Ken,’ she said. She shook her head and stumped away.
Kul came back with a cardboard box full of bottles of Cava and started handing them out to the many grasping hands. ‘Just for dropping,’ he told people seriously. ‘I beg of you; whatever you do, don’t drink it.’
I half-heartedly considered trying to get to within bottle-handing-out range of him, but the press of people was too great.
I turned to Amy and held up my hands.
‘Never mind,’ she said.
We leaned back against the east-facing parapet. She put out her hand to shake. ‘Good new game, Ken.’ She looked flushed, excited.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, keeping hold of her hand. ‘I liked it more in the old days.’
‘Really?’
More big cheers as the full Cava bottles hit with satisfyingly loud thuds and booms. ‘Shake them first! Shake them up first!’ somebody was shouting.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Call me a purist, but I feel the soul kind of went out of it when we switched from fruit and lost our amateur status.’
‘You can’t live in the past, Ken.’
‘I suppose.’
‘We should be proud we were there at the start.’
‘You’re right. Was it my idea or yours?’ I asked.
‘Maybe we had it together.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Great minds.’
‘Idea; time had come.’
‘Not about ownership; about result.’
‘Destiny.’
‘-’s Child.’
‘Synchronicity.’
‘The Police,’ I said, just as my mobile went (I keep mine on vibrate, too). As I pulled it out of my jacket, Amy’s ring-tone sounded; something classical I knew but couldn’t name.
‘Ha-ha,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity indeed.’
I laughed and looked at the display on my phone; my producer, calling from the office. I heard one or two other phones going off around the place and thought I could hear the land-line in the apartment too and wondered hazily whether for some bizarre reason everybody here had something urgent they had set alarms for, a little after two o’clock on a Tuesday in September.
‘Yo, Phil,’ I said. Amy answered her call too.
‘What?’
‘What?’
‘ New York?’
‘The what?’
‘Where?’
‘The World Trade Center? Isn’t that-?’
‘A plane? What, a big plane, like a Jumbo or something?’
‘You mean, like, the two big, um, skyscrapers?’
Kulwinder was walking back through the crowd of people as more phones went off and faces started to look puzzled and the atmosphere began to change and chill around us. He was heading for the loft’s main space again, talking to somebody on his phone. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll put the TV on…’
Two. DRESS-DOWN WEDNESDAY
‘Half Man Half Limp Bizkit there. Their Mission Impossible theme-ette. Hasn’t been on the play list for a while, Phil. You attempting to make some sort of point with that title?’
‘Not me, boss.’
‘You sure, Phil?’ I looked across the desk at him. We were in our usual studio at Capital Live!. I sat surrounded by screens, buttons and keyboards like some sort of commodities dealer, because that’s the way studios have gone, even in the relatively short time that I’ve been in the wonderful world of radio broadcasting; you had to search for the two CD players – in this studio, up to my right between the e-mail screen and the callers’ details screen – to reassure yourself that you weren’t some suit playing the futures market. Only the microphone, angle-poised out from the main console, gave the game away.
‘Positive,’ Phil said, blinking behind his glasses. Phil’s glasses had thick black frames, like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, or Woody Allen as himself. Phil Ashby was a big, gentle, rumpled-looking guy with thick, unruly, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair (the grey entirely down to me, he said, though I had photographic evidence to the contrary) and a slight West-country burr to his voice; he had a relatively slow, drawly, almost sleepy delivery, which, though I’d never admit it to him, complemented my own voice. A running joke we’ve used is that he’s on permanent Valium while I’m forever speeding, and one day we’ll swap drugs and just both sound normal. Phil had been my producer for the last year here at Capital Live!. Another two months and I would have established a new on-air employment record. I rarely last more than a year before I get sacked for saying something that somebody somewhere thinks I shouldn’t have. ‘Lalo.’