He went on, anyway.
‘You know what you said about the Elvis chapel?’ he said.
‘What Elvis chapel?’ said Carey, turning her eyes to his. She brought the straw back up to her lips and pursed them around it. She had a look of blank expectation. Alex looked at his feet.
‘Well,’ said Alex. ‘I wanted to say. Look.’
Alex thought of getting onto one knee, here on the pavement, but he knew in this instant – with the certainty that he knew he would never climb Kilimanjaro, or emerge victorious from a fist fight, or play a significant role in the history of the human race, or be unconditionally adored by beautiful teenage girls, and with the faint, humming sadness that accompanied those certainties – that getting down on one knee in public was something he did not have the ability to do.
‘Carey, what I’m trying to say is -’
And he could not meet her eye. And then he could. She was still holding her margarita, in its big pink plastic yard-of-ale tube, up in front of her chest. Her arms were slim and golden from the sun, and her big Dead Kennedys T-shirt was not quite formless enough to prevent the curve of her breasts from being visible.
She looked beautiful. Alex felt the moment freeze-framing into a memory. He felt as if he was looking back in time to this moment, from some point in the future. But he still didn’t know what happened next. Carey slurped her margarita.
Alex glanced nervously over her shoulder. The street was no longer empty. Three men in white suits, walking abreast, were waiting at the crosswalk ahead. Something familiar about them.
Alex put it aside, turned back to Carey, took a deep breath, closed his fist on the sharp-cornered parcel in his pocket, made himself look directly at her quizzical, almost slightly peevish face. A face saying: yup, what? Get on with it…
‘Carey. Love. Will you -’
Carey took another big slurp of her margarita. Evidently the last. The straw made a violently diarrhoeic noise in the crushed ice. Alex gave a nervous yip, and then barked with laughter. Carey looked baffled.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Just – the noise your thing made. It’s nothing. I don’t know. Silly mood, I guess. I’m just happy being here with you. Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you OK?’ she said. ‘You’ve been acting a bit – just since we ate – a bit distant.’
‘Oh, no, no. Shall we walk? No, I’m fine. I was just thinking about. What do you want to do next?’
The white-suited men were getting closer. As they approached Alex could see what was familiar about them. They were Elvis. All three of them. One fat Elvis and two thin ones. The white suits were jumpsuits. The fat one, disconcertingly, had a star-spangled V-shape from shoulders to crotch. It was hard to tell how old they were, because they were wearing identical black wigs and identical fuzzy-felt sideburns and sunglasses the size of drinks coasters. But judging by the way they were walking they were epically drunk.
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.