At an outlet mall on the way into San Francisco Neil bought suede boots that were similar to Adam’s, somehow manly and fey at the same time. In the evening he experimented with wearing a sweater slung over his shoulders, as Adam sometimes wore his. At Adam’s urging they drove over and back across the Golden Gate Bridge three times. When they arrived at the hostel they had booked in San Francisco, they looked almost like brothers.
Rose introduced herself as they were milling around the parking lot, waiting for the minibus that would take them out to Yosemite. Adam had nudged Neil with his elbow when she arrived with her father. She was wearing tight velour shorts; her dark hair was in a ponytail; she had long, elastic legs and high breasts, and, for them, was unquestionably the group’s main attraction. Otherwise it was an eclectic yet disappointing bunch: a meek, greying couple from Yorkshire, a haughtily athletic American who always wore singlets, three sober Germans, two sixty-something hippies from New Mexico and a middle-aged gay couple from Reno, both ‘in landscape gardening’. Plus their guide, a bearded tree-hugger named Trey, who strove to project an air of primitive wisdom and harangued them all about litter. Trey would do the cooking and put up the tents they were to sleep in for three nights. Adam and Neil would arrive a day or two late in Portland because of the tour, but they figured the driveaway client was unlikely to sue. They parked the pick-up in the tour operator’s lot.
She mooched over to speak to them, distractingly bending one leg behind her as the three of them talked, leaning on their car for balance, heel pulled into her buttock as if she were limbering up for a run. Rose; from Colorado; she had come up to San Francisco with her father. She asked where else they had been in America and how long they were staying, looking them in the eyes and grinning. Her T-shirt said ‘Colorado State’. She was pleased they were there, she said, rolling her eyes in the direction of the others in a hammily exasperated gesture.
Her father came over and offered his hand. He was a large man — not tall, and not fat, exactly, but with a rectangular, troglodytic torso and powerful, tree-trunk legs. Forty to forty-five, Adam guessed, youngish for a man with a grown daughter, and with the ingratiating manner and untucked, sophomoric dress sense of a person who was keen to seem so. He had a crushing handshake but a surprisingly high voice, and a hair-trigger giggle that he tried endearingly if vainly to suppress. His name was Eric and he was a real-estate salesman. He and Rose had left his wife and son in Boulder to take this California trip together. The two of them, father and daughter, seemed gracefully at ease with each other, mutually respectful and natural in front of outsiders.
Trey rattled them out to the park in the minibus, then gave them an introductory ride around Yosemite Valley (the ground was dry as dust in the summer heat, the plants and trees magically lush); in the early evening the group meandered through a grove of sequoia trees. Neil gazed upwards, knowing that the trees were supposed to make him feel something, some ecstasy or epiphany that the others seemed to be experiencing, and sensing approximately what the feeling was — awed, inconsequential, humbly serene — but not quite managing it. When he lowered his eyes he found Rose standing next to him, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the setting sun. Down the sleeve of her bent arm Neil made out the stubble in her armpit. She said, ‘Wow’, smiled and walked away, towards her father.
Adam’s favourites trees were two monster sequoias, the deep-grooved trunks of which were fused together at the bottom: only by craning your neck could you see that, a long way up, they divided. They had been competing for space and sunlight for ever, Trey said, yet depended on each other’s succour to survive. They only existed together, in their rivalrous embrace. The plaque at their joint base said Faithful Couple.
‘Shall we have one of us lads?’ Adam asked Neil, holding up his camera.
They roped in the greying Yorkshireman to take the photo, arranging themselves beside the Faithful Couple sign. For the picture they pretended to bicker like old spouses, Neil making a fist and Adam turning up a palm as if he were remonstrating. But their other arms were around each other’s shoulders. They and the Faithful Couple were chequered in shadow from the other trees.
Adam retrieved the camera and thanked the Yorkshireman. ‘It probably won’t come out,’ the Yorkshireman said. ‘Rotten light.’ But it did.
They were in the high meadows when Rose snatched Adam’s hat. The campsite was just outside the entrance to the park; in the morning they left their tents standing and Trey drove them up a steep trail, putting them out to walk the final stretch when the path became impassable for the minibus. Adam and Neil amused the others with bravado about tracking and wrestling bears, irking the hippies and the gay couple when they kept up their wisecracks for too long. The meadows at the top were surrounded by grey-white granite hills, the horizon finished by a postcard blue sky and a few stranded clouds.
There was a meltwater lake, ringed by pine trees, which looked inviting after their uphill hike. At first only Neil and Adam braved the water, stripping down to their underwear and sprinting in, yelling, swimming in circles for warmth and ribbing each other about their retreating genitals. Once they had acclimatised to the temperature they began to harry and dunk each other, out in the middle of the lake.
Something made a splash, and a body made its way towards them in a determined front crawl, the face alternately buried in water and obscured by spray as it breathed, so that they couldn’t make out who was approaching, except, from the shape and the swimming costume, that it was a woman. For the last few metres before she reached them the swimmer submerged entirely, popping up to splash Adam from close range.
It was Rose. She was wearing a discreet but flattering purple one-piece that she must have carried in her day bag. She coughed out some water and grinned.
Adam splashed her back; Rose splashed Neil; he and Adam went for her together, pincer-style and mercilessly. ‘You guys,’ she protested, her eyes screwed closed as they converged to point-blank distance. She screamed cartoonishly as Adam dunked her — in the circumstances, reaching out to pressure the top of her head felt uncontroversial. He was alarmed when she didn’t resurface after he lifted his hand, but she came up a few seconds later and a couple of metres away, rubbing her eyes, spluttering, and sweeping back her long hair with an attention-seeking jerk of the neck and slick of her palm.
‘You guys,’ she said again, laughing. ‘You’re such bullies.’ She pushed away a final, mock-petulant splash and backstroked to the shallows. On the shore Eric extended a towel to wrap her in.
Adam had a two-tone trucker’s tan, his face and forearms browning but the rest of him less bronzed. Neil was white all over and beginning to worry about the sun. They swam back to their clothes and their matching, lined-up boots. With his back turned Adam didn’t see Rose darting across the rock to grab the baseball cap he had replaced after their swim, racing away with the trophy in her wet bathing suit and bare feet. She squealed and dropped the cap when Adam almost had her, then jogged back to her father.
‘She’s up for it,’ Adam said to Neil, panting.
‘That hat is ridiculous.’
‘She is, I’m telling you.’
‘Ad,’ Neil said. ‘We… do we need her?’
‘What are you talking about? We’re in. One of us is, anyway.’
They examined her, not very covertly, as she dried her back with the towel. Her nipples were conspicuous inside her swimsuit; a sprig of pubic hair had escaped from the crotch. She was womanly from the thigh up, and she walked like an adult, confident and unexaggerated. But there was something vulnerable and admonishing about the pigeonish angle of her standing feet, and the way her knees knocked together with the rhythm of her towelling. Adam’s gaze met Eric’s; the older man raised his chin and gave a corners-of-the-mouth smile.