‘We’re masseurs,’ Adam told the robotic, peroxide croupier. ‘On our way to North Dakota. They’re having a massage festival next week.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, sweeping the chips from her baize. ‘You boys stay out of trouble up there.’
Walking along the Strip, they talked about the future. In Neil’s mind, he said, the future was always an escape, somewhere pristine, inhabited by a revamped him.
‘It’s not like that for me,’ Adam said. ‘It’s more like, keeping what we’ve got, I mean Mum and Dad, but doing something else on top, something big. You know, people talking about you, your face in the paper. It’s like when you were young and you sort of commentated on your exploits in your head, you know, climbing a tree or whatever, scoring a try. The spotlight.’
‘I don’t remember doing that,’ Neil said. ‘In our house it was always Dan who was going to do it, the big thing, whatever it was. He was going to work on a ranch in Argentina, or once, after he dropped out of college, he had this plan to go to Australia, something about being a policeman in the Outback. When I picture it — the future — I’m trailing along, you know, watching.’
‘Watching who? Your brother?’
‘I’m not sure any more,’ Neil said. ‘You, maybe.’
Adam laughed.
Neil had never considered himself underprivileged. Compared with most of his peers at school, his family had been comfortable, and resenting everyone who had retained both parents would have been too exhausting. Adam’s better fortune grated mostly when he strained to be sensitive about it: his tact constituted an extra layer of superiority that was one too many for Neil.
As it proved when, in a bar at the Riviera, they talked about his father’s shop. Neil had worked there as a teenager, and was resigned to helping out again when he flew home, just for a few weeks, while he looked for something better and while, as would be unavoidable, he was still living with his dad. Adam planned to move in with two friends from university, Chaz and Archie, somewhere in west London, they hoped.
‘It should be useful, shouldn’t it?’ Adam offered, out of his depth but meaning to be considerate. ‘You know, dealing with the customers and all that. I mean, for whatever you do afterwards. Your business career.’
‘Not really,’ Neil said, thinking of the zoned-out, insincere retail patience that he would have to recultivate, and of his teenage runs to the bank with the takings, convinced every villain in Wembley knew by his gait that he was couriering an inch of tenners. ‘It’s a dead end, that shop. He should have closed it years ago.’
‘I’m sure it can’t be all that hopeless,’ Adam said. ‘In any case it’s a kind of anthropology, isn’t it, that sort of work?’
The waiter brought their drinks. A few seconds later, Neil felt provoked. Behind Adam’s questions and in his tone he sensed another enquiry: what do you really want to do? The tyranny of vocation among well-bred graduates. It was a form of arrogance, Neil thought, this notion that everyone ought to be a nun or a sculptor, have some urgent calling, as if they all mattered so much that there must be something in it for them beyond money. The idealism that someone else was always paying for.
Teaching in India. Anthropology!
‘You know what, yes, it is useful, in a way. Because, whatever you do, everyone’s selling something to someone in the end. Even you.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah, Adam, you are. You will be.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Adam said, laughing, his awkwardness emerging as condescension. To him the actual making of money was something someone else took care of, out of sight, like butchery or coal-mining.
Beyond the bar the slot machines kept up their perky jingles and machine-gun payouts; the ignored piano player went on playing. An illusionless discomfort, rather than plain silence, descended on them. Neil fingered the mole on his neck, a nervous tic that Adam began to notice that evening.
‘Let’s do a bunk,’ Adam said.
‘What do you —’
‘You know, leg it.’ He mouthed ‘without paying’, returning to normal volume for, ‘Haven’t you ever done that before?’
‘Sure,’ Neil said. In Sheffield, when they were skint students, he and two friends had run away from an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant. Once, when they were teenagers, he and Dan had bolted from a snooker club in Cricklewood without paying for their Cokes. Even by his parsimonious standards, the Californian road trip had been cheap: free refills, supersized fries, the bounteous quantity of America. Their shared rooms. He could afford the beer. But he saw how Adam’s ruse would reposition the two of them against the world, like their lying game, only more so, as if they were daredevil children.
‘You get up to go to the loo,’ Adam instructed, ‘but instead of coming back you wait for me by the slot machines. Got it?’
‘Roger that.’
‘Synchronise watches.’
They drained their beers and clinked their empty glasses.
It didn’t go smoothly. The toilets were in the wrong direction and to reach the entrance to the bar Neil had to double back past the low table at which Adam was sitting, which might have looked suspicious had anyone been watching. Adam stood up after a couple of minutes, pretending to yawn and stretch, then followed, eyes fixed on the floor. He picked up pace as he marched past Neil and was running before he reached the main doors, with Neil in pursuit. They ran for much longer than they needed to, racing each other as much as fleeing anyone who in theory might have been chasing them. The race was the point. To begin with Adam was faster, as he had been on the beach, and Neil experienced a fleeting, weird panic that he might have lost him, lost him for ever, an anxiety that was more acute than his receding fear of being caught. But Neil had better stamina, more grit, and overtook outside a Venetian palazzo. They came to a halt when Adam got a stitch, sat on a wall and panted, taking in the meaningless neon spectacle, the warm Vegas atmosphere that was both childish and corrupt.
They left the city early the next morning. Obeying their preconceptions, the road in Death Valley dissolved limpidly in front of them. Adam took a photo of the two of them sitting on the sizzling bonnet of the pick-up. As they drove through Fresno, resolving to do better, he asked about Neil’s mother.
‘You were — how old were you?’ He kept his eyes on the road.
‘Fourteen,’ Neil said. ‘Just fourteen. They only told us at the end, or almost, me and Dan, that was just before my birthday.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said. ‘That must have been… I can’t really imagine how that must have been.’
‘We were in the lounge,’ Neil said. ‘She told us and then she went straight into the kitchen to chop something. Chop chop chop, you know. Like she was beheading someone. Dad went up into the loft. Me and Dan went up to the park, and he threw me down this slope — I remember, it was a wet day, I got covered in mud, but I didn’t mind, because it was Dan, you know, and in those days anything to do with Dan…’
Adam said, ‘I don’t know what… I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s funny,’ Neil said. ‘I’ve never, before today, I’ve hardly ever… I don’t talk about it much, to be honest.’