Adam’s family was meeting him at the airport. He and Neil patted each other on the shoulder, and, after a moment, embraced. Even the hug felt easier and less compromising than what they wanted to say.
‘I’m sad,’ Adam finally managed.
‘So am I.’
Walking away through the terminal, Neil turned to see Adam being enfolded by a man with greying hair and posh-pink trousers, and a girl he presumed was Adam’s sister. He watched them for a few seconds before heading down into the Tube.
1995
‘They should be in this afternoon.’ Neil leaned across the scratched countertop. ‘Can you come back for them? I don’t know — four-ish?’
‘Sorry,’ the young woman said. ‘Afternoon off today. Monday any good?’
‘Hope you’re doing something nice with it.’
The telephone rang in the back office. One rotary double-shriek, a second, and Brian’s muffled voice answered.
‘Such a lovely day,’ the woman said. ‘I might go up the reservoir.’
She leaned against the cash register, crossing her left leg over the standing right. Her cotton jacket rumpled open, disclosing a flash of shoulder and smooth armpit between the fabric and her sleeveless dress.
‘Neil!’ Brian called from the office.
‘All right for some,’ Neil said. ‘I won’t be here Monday, I’m afraid. Last day tomorrow.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘I could run them up to you, if you like. Might be heavy.’
The woman was a secretary at the chartered surveyors’ practice above the hi-fi shop, a business that in the past two years had been among Collins & Sons’ best customers.
‘Would you?’ She twisted a lock of hair around a finger.
‘Neil!’ Brian shouted. ‘For you!’
‘Sorry,’ Neil said. ‘Just a second, okay?’ He offered her a rueful, raised-eyebrow smile. ‘Who is it?’ he asked Brian as they crossed at the internal doorway.
‘No idea,’ Brian said, shaking his head. ‘Like a bunch of teenagers.’
Neil sat at the back office desk. A stationery supplier’s marketing calendar, illustrated with photos of envelopes in bundles and in-trays, or half-tucked into pockets, hung on the wall in front of him. Wrong month, wrong year.
‘Hello?’
‘This is the Metropolitan Police,’ the familiar voice said. ‘We’ve had a report of disorderly conduct at a pub in the Waterloo area. We would like to speak to you and an extremely handsome blond man.’
Leave the police out of it, Neil thought. But quickly he felt the reliable surge of adrenalin, the instant recharge: something to do with laughter — the muscle memory of old jokes and the anticipation of new ones — and an inchoate appreciation that this friendship was itself a kind of joke, a random jackpot.
‘Oh, hi,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, young man,’ Adam said. ‘This is serious.’
Jokes and beaches and freedom, beamed instantaneously into the back office.
‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s just, you know, the only blond man I know doesn’t really fit your description. He’s sort of a runt, to be honest, posh as hell, you know, thinks he’s Lord Byron or something…’
‘That’ll do, Philly. I’m just checking, still on for Sunday, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah, great. I mean, if that’s still okay with you.’
‘Of course. I’m all yours, Claire’s finishing her dissertation.’
Towers of old catalogues sagged under and on top of the desk. The musty odour of decomposing paper mingled with the whiff of imperfect drainage from the water closet (chain-pull flush, grime-grooved soap). The desk, the filing cabinets and the museum-piece safe were smothered in luxuriant, Rembrandtesque dust; the entire room seemed not to have been cleaned since Neil revised for his exams there.
‘Great. After lunch?’
‘About three?’
‘Done. And, you know, thanks.’
‘I haven’t done anything yet.’
‘No, I mean, you know, the cheque.’
‘Forget it, Philly. It’s nothing.’
‘I’ve got most of it already, it’s just, I need to get a few things, and if I use the whole lot on the deposit I’ll —’
‘Listen, I’ve got a team meeting in a minute. I’ll see you Sunday, I’ve got the address.’
‘Roger that.’
Jokes and beaches and discretionary kindness. And trust. Neil hurried back into the shop, smiling privately.
Brian was sitting behind the counter, shoulders hunched, hands in his lap, thumbs twiddling. Alone.
‘She’s gone,’ he said, without looking up.
‘But she —’
‘They’re sending someone up before closing. Not her, not the woman. Office junior, she said.’
‘Right, but I was going —’
‘Neil,’ Brian said, still facing away. ‘Neil. I know you’re slinging your hook, but — don’t shit on your own doorstep.’
No one was watching him but Neil blushed anyway, cross and embarrassed at once. Sitting down at the other end of the counter he remembered how, when he was fifteen, he and an almost-forgotten friend had been chased off a bus by a posse of troublemakers, making it back to Neil’s house breathless and scared. ‘You should have smashed a bottle, you two should,’ Brian told them as they fumbled with the door chain. ‘You should have smashed it, held it up and said, “Who’s first?”’ The friend made screw-loose signs behind Brian’s back.
Don’t shit on your own doorstep: another glimpse of his father’s foreign prehistory, an obscure past that Neil knew he would never reconnoitre. He had certainly had his chance, two long years’ worth of chances, but the moment had never seemed right, he hadn’t known how to begin, and he had wasted them. They both had.
A customer came in, a man in an unseasonal mackintosh and old-timer’s Trilby. He scanned the printer inks, wrote something on a notepad and left without uttering a word, the bell on the door tinkling him in and out.
‘Time-waster,’ Brian said. ‘Price-checking, that’s all.’
Two years, give or take the few, scattered months of the short-term contracts Neil had managed to land elsewhere: telesales (insurance), market-research questionnaires (refrigerators). After a year he had written to the pharmaceutical company to ask for his pre-California job back, but his former boss had moved on and his successor said there were no vacancies. Finally Neil was leaving, to a media company near Tower Bridge and, with Adam’s help, to a rented bedsit in Burnt Oak.
‘And the parking charges,’ Brian added. ‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’
Neil and Dan had spent their school holidays stacking these shelves, taking apart and reconstructing stationery displays, their private, outsized Rubik’s cubes. They scribbled rude jokes about the customers; they slunk out to play the slot machine in the café two doors away. There was painful hilarity with bulldog clips. Their mother would make jam sandwiches for their lunch; afterwards they went up to the Wimpy for cardboard chips and synthetic milkshakes. One blissful morning they found a stash of pornographic magazines in a second-hand filing cabinet.
Neither Brian nor Neil ever expected him to be back. Collins & Sons, the shopfront read, but Brian hadn’t fathered any sons when the glass was etched, and, after they were born, he never anticipated that either of them would join him behind the counter when they grew up. He had been paying Neil fifty quid a week, which Neil knew he hadn’t earned, and moreover knew they couldn’t really afford on what the shop was taking.