‘So are we still on? I mean, the car. You know, San Francisco. Los Angeles. Do you remember?’
‘Yeah, I remember,’ Neil said. ‘We’re on.’
They picked up a freesheet that listed the driveaways available in San Diego and assessed the offers in the yard that evening. They circled three that seemed promising: one vehicle to be delivered to Portland, one to Seattle, one to somewhere in Montana. They called the relevant agencies; Adam did the talking, specifying their ages, nationality, the particulars of their driving licences. Neil tried to decipher the notes his friend was scribbling in the margins, his insides inexplicably fluttering. They decided that Portland would be far enough, especially since the owner would allow them several more days than the trip strictly required. On the following morning they were to go out to the suburbs, towards the Mexican border, to collect the car.
They packed, settled their hostel bills and rode the trolleybus in the direction of the address Adam had been given. It was a warm blue day. They walked the last few, rundown blocks, sweating and joking that they might never find their destination, might search endlessly for a house that didn’t exist. But, eventually, it did: a decaying clapboard bungalow with a bleached porch and a high-volume argument in progress inside. At first they weren’t sure whether to intrude, or to give up and leave, go back to the beach, forget the whole plan. Neil pushed the buzzer, curtly, once; a young woman with tattooed biceps opened the door and called for her father, who came out, tanned, tall and overweight in serviceman-gone-to-seed style. He made them sign two copies of the paperwork, grumblingly inspected their foreign driving licences and led them to a brown pick-up truck with a covered bed. He handed over the keys and an address in Oregon and watched from the pavement, hands on hips, until they rounded a corner and headed north.
The pick-up was a bigger vehicle than either of them was used to. It had an extra set of headlights above the windscreen, like something out of The Dukes of Hazzard, a scratched leather interior and a mysterious tarpaulin in the back, tied and chained up, under which squatted a heavy, ominous lump. (‘Gun-running,’ Adam speculated. ‘Body parts,’ Neil countered.) Parking was hairy, and on the northbound highway they were flanked by an endless sequence of outsized lorries, streaming up to Los Angeles at impossible speeds. But at other times and on smaller roads they were almost on their own. And they were in California and free.
To save money Neil preferred to sleep in a hostel in Los Angeles, or in the back of the truck; Adam agitated for a motel. In the end they compromised on a shared room in the cheapest motel in Hollywood — Neil waiting at a phone booth, pretending to make a call, while Adam checked in alone to avoid the double occupancy charge. Neil knocked twice on the bedroom door, their needless, prearranged signal. Adam pulled him inside and stuck his head into the forecourt, scanning left and right in mock anxiety at being rumbled.
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said, as Neil eyed the lone double bed, keeping hold of his rucksack as if he might reconsider. ‘You’re not my type.’
They undressed and got into bed, at first keeping to the edges. They talked about L.A. Law and Moonlighting. They argued about how to make the bedside fan work, but neither of them managed it. They skirted politics, Adam evincing the soft-left bias prevalent in their generation, bolstered, in his case, by an undergraduate interest in the history of protest (suffragism, Gandhi, Martin Luther King), Neil grunting along diplomatically. They heard the murmur of televisions in neighbouring rooms, a flush from a stranger’s bathroom. They talked about Chloe.
‘I’ve never had a, you know, a relationship,’ Neil said. ‘Not like that. Couple of months, max. I just didn’t… To be honest, I don’t think I know how to.’
‘It’s pretty easy,’ Adam said. ‘You get on top —’
‘No, you dickhead, I mean the… you know, the commitment’ — this last, advice-column phrase spoken by Neil in a defensively ironic falsetto.
Whereupon they made a deliciously juvenile exchange of their sexual histories, including where and with whom they had lost their virginities: Neil when he was sixteen, with a girl he never saw again, underneath the dining table at somebody’s party, Adam in a copse with a sixth-form girlfriend from the sister school near his own.
‘Pitch black,’ Adam said. ‘We could hardly see each other.’
‘Figures,’ Neil said. Adam hit him with a pillow.
After that came their general histories. Neil was two years further into adulthood, but, at twenty-three, only a year older, having gone straight from school to university, whereas Adam had spent a year desultorily teaching in India before he went to Durham. Each summarised his family, which, though they wished it otherwise, was still most of who they were. Adam’s father had done well in shipping insurance and moved them to the country, dispatching the children, he and his sister Harriet, to boarding schools in Sussex. His mother, Adam said, busied herself with local causes and campaigns (unwanted bypasses, charity fêtes, imperilled hospitals). Neil explained that his father, Brian, ran an office supplies and stationery shop in Wembley, but it was clear, Neil said, that he wasn’t naturally suited to retail. He spent too long in consoling chats with polite ladies who ultimately bought nothing, neglecting less civil but more lucrative customers. Neil’s brother, Dan, was two years older than him. Dan was living in Southampton, there was work down there, apparently; he had a baby on the way, though Neil and Brian hadn’t met the girlfriend.
‘Mum,’ Neil concluded. ‘She… Nine years ago, nine and a half… She’s dead.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Adam said, straight away realising his response was inadequate and ridiculous. It was so long ago, he didn’t know her or the circumstances, he barely knew Neil.
‘It’s okay,’ Neil said. ‘Don’t worry.’
The percussion of the drink and ice machines kept Neil up half the night, along with the voices and footsteps in the forecourt, the revving and subsiding of engines, the sirens out there in America. When he awoke in the morning he was alone, and, for a minute, had no idea where he was, until Adam came in with two complimentary coffees in Styrofoam cups. Adam had a camera with a time-delay function, and he insisted that they put it on the bedside table and take a picture of themselves sitting on the coverlet, the forecourt and the pick-up visible through the window behind them. They were gesticulating, their arms spread and palms open in a what-am-I-doing-here pose: here in this hired room, with this strange man, in a foreign country. In truth, they both knew. At the same time they knew — Neil with a sharp pre-emptive melancholy, Adam more serenely — that this moment was irreducible, could be felt only as it was experienced, and would not afterwards be understood through photographs, shaggy anecdotes or snapshot memories, including by their own later selves.
Adam was determined to do the sights — the Chinese Theatre, Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, all the kitsch Americana that colonised the imaginations of star-struck British kids in the seventies and eighties — which gave Neil permission to put aside his pretended indifference and go too. It was all precisely like itself, just as they expected it to be, the palm trees and convertibles, as if they were extras in a film about America that everyone all over the world had seen. Adam wanted to drive through South Central and Watts, where the riots had happened; Neil was reluctant, nervous of the invisible urban boundaries between safety and danger, but they did, and it was all fine. They calculated that they could fit in Las Vegas if they only stayed a night; driving in from the desert they saw the sails of windsurfers in the dunes, the surfers themselves out of sight, before the steamboats, pyramids, palaces and volcanoes reared up psychedelically from the dust. They blew a hundred dollars playing blackjack at the Mirage: they agreed never to mention the loss to each other again. They won the money back on a single red-black bet at a roulette wheel, followed by another hundred in profit — enough to cover a double room in one of the dowdier casinos on the old Vegas strip, with a few dollars left for a steak dinner and some drinks.