“Felix, could I maybe trouble you for one of those? Terrible roller.”
Felix lit his own, nodded and silently started work on another. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He read the message and thrust the handset once more in Tom’s face.
“Oi, Tom, you’re an advertiser — what d’you make of that?”
Tom, who was long-sighted, drew back from the screen in order to read it: “Our records indicate you still haven’t claimed compensation for your accident. You may be entitled up to £3650. To claim free reply ‘CLAIM.’ To opt out text ‘STOP.’”
“Scam, innit.”
“Oh, I should think so, yes.”
“Cos how could they know if I’d had an accident? Evil. Imagine if you were old, or ill, getting that.”
“Yes, said Tom, not really following, “I think they just have these… databases.”
“Databases,” said Felix and shook his head in despair, “and you reply and five quid comes off your bill. But that’s the way people are these days. Everyone’s looking out for themselves. My girl gave me this book, Ten Secrets of Successful Leaders. You read it?”
“No.”
“Should read it. She was like, ‘Fee, you know who reads this book? Bill Gates. The Mafia. The Royal family. Bankers. Tupac read it. Jewish people read this book. Educate yourself.’ She’s a smart one. I’m not even a reader but that one opened my eyes. There you go.”
Tom took the cigarette and lit it and inhaled with the deep relief of a man who had given up smoking entirely only a few hours before.
“Listen — Felix, this is a bit of a weird one,” said Tom, nodding at the packet of Amber Leaf between them, lowering his voice, “But you wouldn’t by any chance have anything stronger? Not to buy, just a pinch. I find it takes the edge off.”
Felix sighed and leaned back into his bench and began murmuring. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
“Oh dear,” said Tom. He cringed to the right, then somehow reversed his body and cringed to the left. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re all right. My girl thinks I’ve got an invisible tattoo on my forehead: PLEASE ASK ME FOR WEED. Must have one of them faces.”
Tom lifted his drink and finished it off. Did this mean there was weed or there wasn’t? He examined a distorted Felix through the bottom of his pint glass.
“Well, she sounds sensible,” said Tom, at last. Felix passed him the finished fag.
“Come again?”
“The girl you mentioned, your girlfriend person.”
Felix smiled enormously: “Oh. Grace. Yeah. She is. Never been happier in my life, Tom, to tell you the truth. Changed my life. I tell her, all the time: you’re a lifesaver. And she is.”
Tom held up his ringing phone and gave it the evil eye.
“I seem to be stuck with a life-destroyer.”
“Nobody can do that, Tom. Only you have the power to do that.”
Felix was sincere, but saw he had provoked a sort of smirk in Tom, which in turn provoked in Felix a need to press his point home more strongly: “Listen, this girl changed my outlook totally. Globally. She sees my potential. And in the end, you just got to be the best you that you can be. The rest will follow naturally. I’ve been through it, Tom, right? So I know. The personal is eternal. Think about it.”
How close to superfluous his job was these days! The slogans came pre-embedded, in people’s souls. A smart thought: Tom discreetly congratulated himself for having it. He nodded at Felix deeply, satirically, samurai-style. “Thank you, Felix,” he said, “I’ll remember that. Best you that you can be. Personal equals eternal. You seem like a bloke who’s got it all figured out.” He lifted his empty glass to clink against Felix’s, but Felix was not impervious to irony and left his own glass where it was.
“Seeming ain’t being,” he said quietly and looked away. “Listen—” He drew a folded envelope from his back pocket. “—I’ve got things to do, so…”
The boy saw he had overstepped: “Of course. Look — where were we? You need to make me an offer.”
“You need to give me a reasonable price, mate.”
It was only now that Tom realized he did not, after all, despise Felix’s habit of over-familiarity. On the contrary, to be called “mate” at this late point in their acquaintance felt like a melancholy step down in the world. And why am I only able to enjoy things once they’ve passed, wondered Tom, and tried to place a mental finger upon a hazy quote from a French book, which made exactly this point, and helpfully gave the answer, too. Candide? Proust? Why hadn’t he kept up with his French? He thought of Pere Mercer, on the phone, this morning: “The trouble is you don’t follow through, Tom. That’s always been your trouble.” And of course Sophie was making essentially the same point. Some days have a depressing thematic coherence. Maybe next the cloud overhead would open up and a huge cartoon hand emerge from below, pointing at him, accompanied by a thunderous, authorial voice: TOM MERCER. EPIC FAIL. But it had already been pointed out to him — also this morning! — that this approach, too, was only another kind of trap: “Tom, darling, it’s really terribly narcissistic to think the whole world is against you.” Listening to his mother’s voice down the line he had been impressed by how calm and kind she sounded and how satisfied she was with her diagnosis of his personality. Thank God for his mother! She didn’t take him seriously, and laughed when he was being funny, even when she didn’t understand, as she almost never did. They were country people, his parents, and of grandparental age, for this was a second marriage for them both. They could not conceive of his daily life, did not e-mail, had never heard of Sussex University until he attended it, had no experience of either a “downstairs neighbor,” a “night bus,” the realities of an “unpaid internship” (“Just go in there and present a few ideas, Tom, and show them what you’re worth. At the very least Charlie will listen. We worked together for seven years for Christ’s sake!”) or the sort of nightclub where you leave your clothes — and much else — at the door. They did not have double lives, as far as he could tell. They drank with dinner, never to excess. Where his father found Tom infuriating and inexplicable, his mother went a little gentler on him, at least allowing for the possibility that he really was suffering from some varietal of twenty-first-century intellectual ennui that made it impossible for him to take advantage of the good fortune he’d been born with. There were limits, however. One shouldn’t pretend that Brixton was any sort of place to live. “But Tom: if you’re feeling low, 20 Baresfield is empty until at least July. I don’t know what you have against Mayfair. And you’ll have somewhere to park the car without fear of it being burned to a shell in some riot.” “That was twenty years ago!” “Tom, I refer you to the Aesop fable: leopard, spots.” “That’s not a fable!” “Honestly, I don’t know why you didn’t move into it in the first place.” Because sometimes one wants to have the illusion that one is making one’s own life, out of one’s own resources. He didn’t say that. He said: “Mother, your wisdom surpasseth all understanding.” To which she said, “Don’t be facetious. And don’t make a mess!” But he was making a mess. With this girl. It was all a terrible mess.
“A reasonable price,” repeated Tom and touched the side of his head, as if the strange thoughts were a misfiring synapse, and a tap to the temple might tamp them back down.
“’Cos you’re talking silly money,” said Felix, and began packing away his tobacco and Rizlas and phone in a manner that seemed, to Tom, to perfectly convey disappointment, not only in the failure of the deal, but in Tom himself.