But the two of them grew stronger and louder, like people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a restaurant. By the second verse they were clasping the microphone together; by the end of the third their spare arms were around each other in tipsy communion.
No one threw anything. When they finished, the Mexico-bound Americans high-fived them. The girl from that afternoon in the yard came over and said ‘Good job’ to Neil. He half-expected her to solicit an introduction to Adam, but instead she swayed suggestively, as if she were willing to forgive his earlier obtuseness and dance. He ignored the hint, curtly said ‘Thanks’, and turned to Adam to discuss what they should sing next.
Somebody had given them both another beer. They were halfway through them when Adam said, ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ He repeated the proposal when Neil didn’t respond, louder, shouting into his ear to be heard above ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
They went out through the gate, across the running and rollerblading path and onto the beach. Some kids were shouting somewhere along the shore, playing soccer in the dark. In the other direction, couples were giggling invisibly on the sand. Neil and Adam had the stretch of beach behind the hostel more or less to themselves. They pressed their beers into the sand, one by each of the volleyball poles, and stripped to their underwear. Adam saw that Neil had taken his advice and foresworn socks that evening, and Neil saw him notice, but neither of them commented. Adam undressed first and won the race to the surf.
The moon had clouded over and they didn’t gauge the height of the waves until they were waist deep. The water was warm. As they were jumping backwards into the crests, a few metres apart, a piece of seaweed wrapped itself around Adam’s shoulders; he caught it, raised it above his head like a banner, and let himself fall backwards into the ocean. He had a beginner’s hairy chest, a wiry knot between his pectoral muscles that heralded the full Chewbacca his genes were promising. Neil’s chest was narrower and baby-bald.
They splashed around and shouted into the Pacific until Neil dragged Adam out in a mock rescue. Adam resisted, but submitted before the wrestling became too fierce, allowing himself to be dumped where the wet and dry sand met. The two of them scrambled up the beach and sat against the volleyball poles, finishing their beers and watching the breathing, black-and-white ocean as they dried. The karaoke was over.
‘Listen,’ Adam said, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but I suppose we could, you know, go together.’
‘What do you… Go where?’
‘Up the coast. On the Greyhound, maybe. Or we could, you know, get one of those cars you deliver for someone else. Driveaways, I think they’re called, I read about them in the Lonely Planet. We could take it up to San Francisco. What do you reckon?’
Neil was sober enough to catch and question his own response. He couldn’t account for the sense that he was being flattered, wonderfully flattered, and he resented Adam for this rush of gratitude. Adam wasn’t older than Neil, or more experienced (so far as he could tell), or cleverer or funnier; he outscored him mainly in the unearned virtues of luck and class and those Athena-poster looks. At the same time he had his openness, and his poise, and there was a fit or alignment between them, something unfinished and possible, that it would be a shame to waste.
‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘Why not?’
All this — California, the sea, the adult, sovereign choices — was the kind of escapade that, as suburban teenagers, Neil and his brother had once fantasised about. He held out his cup for Adam to clink with his own, and he did, though the cups were plastic and noiseless and already empty.
A pair of surfboards were draining in the shower when Adam went for a piss at dawn. A woman was in bed with the Norwegian in the bunk opposite his, both of them asleep and naked. Adam climbed up again to his mattress, lay on his back and mapped the stains and cracks on the ceiling. The sand in his bed was as dark as dirt, the sheets damp with seawater; he could hear the waves. His wasn’t a serious hangover, just dry mouth and sour breath, plus a dull ache, a sort of manifest unease, at the back of his head. Sleep was gone.
Adam wasn’t regretful or embarrassed that he had sung and swum and persuaded this stranger to join in. Unlike Neil he was a practised exhibitionist, especially when he had been drinking: jokily synchronised dancing in clubs and at the odd countryside rave, acceptably risqué sixth-form revues, charades around the pool of the chateau that his father sometimes borrowed for a fortnight from some shipping millionaire. He was likewise used to getting people to do what he wanted them to — a dividend of being an eldest child, who had honed his will on indulgent parents before redirecting it at his idolatrous younger sister, and afterwards at what so far seemed a gratifyingly pliant universe.
His queasiness was neither shame nor simply alcohol. He remembered how he had propositioned Neil, and in the morning’s clarity could see that he had rushed into this, on the basis of half a day’s acquaintance, some one-liners and an out-of-tune duet. Adam saw the impetuousness, but that wasn’t what unsettled him. His fear was that Neil might have changed his mind: that he might have forgotten his pledge to drive up the coast together, or might pretend that he had forgotten.
Adam wouldn’t think the worse of him for that. The previous night had been a kind of hallucination, probably impossible to reconstitute and best consigned to pleasant memory. But he hoped otherwise. Neil was uncool, but he didn’t seem to mind, which was itself a kind of coolness; his indifference had a negative power of its own. There was something intriguing in the way he faced the world, wary and not entitled, with low expectations set to be exceeded, rather than, as with most of Adam’s acquaintances, inflated hopes that were destined to be thwarted. He was similar as well as different (they got each other’s jokes), open yet unknown: for all their mutual frankness there was a part of himself that Neil seemed to be protecting, as he shielded his moon-white skin from the sun. He had done things that Adam hadn’t. Neil was the kind of coiled person who, when you met him, you had a hunch that something interesting could happen to, and you wanted to know him long enough to find out what it might be. A person you could measure yourself by.
Adam got out of bed. The interloping woman was lying on her front, her face in the Norwegian’s armpit, her arse a bikini triangle of white encircled by chocolate tan: a road sign made flesh. He brushed his teeth, thought about shaving but decided not to, put on his shorts and shades and went out to buy a coffee at Burger King.
Neil was eating his breakfast in the hostel yard when Adam returned. He was sitting in a strange position, on a bench facing the wall, so that anyone who might want to speak to him would have to make a decision and an effort to disturb him.
‘Morning, Neil.’
He turned around and smiled. ‘Morning.’
Adam sat down next to him, astride the bench. They discussed their hangovers, as was customary, the sandiness of their sheets and the naked woman in Adam’s dormitory. They talked about the volleyball game that the blackboard announced for later that morning. They heard themselves talk about the weather. Adam saw that he would have to be the one who raised and risked it.