Felix stopped walking, forcing the boy to stop. He looked vacantly at his unlit fag.
“Like advertising?”
“Basically, yes,” said Tom irritably, and then, when Felix didn’t follow him: “Need a light?”
“Nah. Got one here somewhere. Like advertising campaigns?”
“Well, no not really, because — it’s difficult to explain — basically we don’t see campaigns as a way forward anymore. It’s more about the integration of luxury brands into your everyday consciousness.”
“Advertising,” concluded Felix, drew his lighter out of his pocket and assumed a face of innocence.
“It’s just this next right, if you’ll…”
“Right behind you, bruv.”
They walked through a grand square, and then off into a side street, although the houses here were no less grand: white-fronted and many stories high. Somewhere church bells rang. Felix slipped his hood off.
“Here we are — here she is. I mean, obviously this is not the sort of thing where — sorry, Felix, will you excuse me a moment? I better take this.”
The boy put his phone to his ear and sat on the black-and-white tiled steps of the nearest house, dead center between two potted orange trees. Felix walked a half circle until he was standing in the road. He crouched. She was smiling at him, but they all do that, no matter what state they’re in. Frog-eye headlamps, manic grille grin. One-eyed in this case. He touched the spot where the badge should be. When the time came it would be a silver octagon, with the two letters back to back, dancing. Not plastic. Metal. It was going to be done right. He straightened up. He put his hand through the giant slash in the soft top and rubbed the fabric between his fingers: a thin, faded polyester weave. Plastic window gone anyway. The rust he didn’t need to touch, he could see how bad it was. Worst at the rear left — it was like a continent there — but also pretty drastic all round the bonnet, which meant it had likely rusted through. Stilclass="underline" the right red. The original red. Good arch on the front wheels, square as they should be at the back, and a perfect rubber bumper — all of which marked it as authentically what it claimed to be, at least. M DGET. Easily fixed, like all of this external stuff — cosmetic. Under the hood was where the real news would be. In a funny way, the worse the news the better it was for him. Barry, at the garage: “If it moves, son, you can’t afford it.” He would make it move. Maybe not this month or the one after, but finally. A little impatiently he tried a door handle. He had an urge to rip through the blown-out window, taped shut with cardboard and masking tape.
“It’s not a question of who feels more,” the boy said. He was pulling a pebble back and forth across the tile with a foot. Felix leaned against the car. “Soph? Soph? Look, I can’t talk now. Of course not! My phone was dead. No, not now. Please calm down. Soph, I’m in the middle of a thing. Soph?” The boy took the phone from his ear and looked at it curiously for a moment. He slid it back into the pocket of his coat. Felix whistled.
“Ninety-nine problems. I hear you, bruv.”
“Sorry — what?”
“The car. It’s got some problems.”
“Well, yes,” said Tom Mercer, and made an expansive gesture that meant to take in the whole vehicle. “Of course, it’s clearly a project car. This is not something you’re going to drive away in. Hence the price. Otherwise we’d be talking in the many thousands. Clearly a project car. Let me open it up, give you the full tour.”
Felix watched Tom wrestle with the key.
“I can do that if—” began Felix. The door popped.
“Just needs a wangle. Project car, as I say. But doable.” The tour turned out to be somewhat limited. “Clutch” said Tom, and “Gears,” and “Steering wheel,” brushing these objects vaguely with his hand, and then, as they both looked dolefully at the moldy, curled carpet and rusted floor, the wool and wire bursting out of the stained upholstery, the hole where the radio should be, he murmured the year of manufacture.
“Year I was born,” said Felix.
“Then it’s fate.”
Now the boy read off a series of facts from a small piece of paper he took from his pocket: “MG midget, one thousand five hundred cc Triumph 14 engine, 100,000 on the clock, manual, petrol, two-door roadster, transmission requires—”
Felix couldn’t resist: “Two doors, yeah? Got it.”
Tom blushed appealingly. “My father’s list. Not really a car man myself.”
Felix felt moved to pat him in a friendly way on his high, bony shoulders. “Just messing with you. Can we get a look under the hood?”
It creaked open. Beneath was all the bad news he could have hoped for. The battery overwhelmed by rust, the cylinder cracked. Pistons right through to the engine block.
“Salvageable?” asked Tom. Felix looked perplexed. Tom tried again: “Can it be saved?”
“Depends. What sort of money we talking about?”
Tom looked once more at his piece of paper.
“I’ve been instructed around the thousand mark.”
Felix laughed and reached his hand into the engine. He scratched at the rust with a fingernail.
“To be honest with you, Tom, I see these come in every day, in better condition than yours, much better — for six hundred. No-one’s gonna pay six hundred for this. This one you won’t be able to sell to no-one but a mechanic, I promise you.”
The sun now hit the car directly: the bonnet lit up. Radiant wreck! Tom looked up, squinting.
“Good thing you’re a mechanic, then, isn’t it?”
There was something funny about the way he said it. Both men laughed: Felix in his big gulping way, Tom into his hand like a child. The phone in his pocket started up.
“Oh Jesus — look, it’s not really any skin off my nose, but if I tell my father I took less than seven hundred I’ll never hear the end of it. Personally I’d much rather be back in my bed. Excuse me a second — Soph, I’ll call you back in one minute—” But he kept the phone to his ear and Felix heard more than he wanted to as Tom mimed apologies at him. At the end of the road, a happy roar rose up from a crowd at one of the pub’s outdoor tables. Tom raised his eyebrows quizzically at Felix and made the “lifting a pint” gesture: Felix nodded.
• • •
“What’ll you have?”
“Ginger beer, thanks.”
“Ginger beer and?”
“Nah, that’s it.”
“Look, for me it’s hair of the dog — least you can do is join me.”
“Nah, I’m all right. Just ginger beer.”
“My father says there’s only two sentences a self-respecting Englishman should accept in this situation: I’m on antibiotics and I’m an alcoholic.”
“I’m an alcoholic.”
Felix looked up from the slats of the wooden table. Tom wiped the sweat from his forehead, opened his mouth but said nothing. Felix took a moment to appreciate that his own skin could not broadcast shame so quickly nor so well. Tom’s phone started up again.
Felix rose up from the bench: “Don’t worry, mate, you take your call. I’ll go. Pint, yeah?”
Outside it was a glorious Saturday lunchtime in late summer; inside it was ten o’clock at night on a Tuesday in October. The ceiling black and carved into hexagons, the carpet light-absorbing and dark green. Coffin-wood furniture, ancient and heavy. One old man sat in the corner by the jukebox, in a shabby donkey jacket, with white papery skin and yellow hair and nails, rolling a cigarette — he looked like a cigarette. At the bar, a skinny-legged old girl perched on a stool counted and recounted four piles of twenty-pence pieces. She stopped this activity to stare frankly at Felix, who only smiled back. “All right,” he said, and turned to the barmaid. The old woman sliced suddenly at the towers of coins with the side of her palm. Felix’s reflexes were quick; he saved one pile from flying off the bar altogether. In his peripheral vision he saw Tom heading for the toilets. The barmaid mouthed “sorry” and screwed a finger into her temple. “No worries,” said Felix. He took a cold glass in each hand. He let the barmaid put a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps between his teeth.