Sometimes, when he remembered Adam, he would feel a pain in the region of his liver, a sharp ache like the cramp he sometimes got if he drank too much coffee.
He let Roxanna know he was on the way. Theirs was a queer kind of closeness, he thought as he texted. He had seen her with her legs in the stirrups, wailing in her own shit and blood. He had licked her clitoris and tasted her breast milk (sweeter than he anticipated, with a hint of caramel). They were into the mature phase now, the time when the childishness started, struggling for dominion, picking fights, gaming each other, banking favours and concessions as he and Jess once had. Yet for all the proximity he hadn’t yet assimilated basic Roxanna facts — the temperature at which she liked her bath, her allergies, her preferred orders in restaurant chains and coffee shops.
They were obscenely intimate strangers. On rare occasions when Neil’s birth family came up in conversation she would ask polite but desultory questions, as if they were discussing characters from history. Who shot Franz Ferdinand? Who was Henry VIII’s third wife? What colour was Neil’s mother’s hair? To her, his family was dead and buried, and she, Leila and Neil comprised a pristine new reality. She was kind about Sam, but she didn’t see how, for Neil, he was the lone survivor, whom he had plucked for himself from the wreckage. She didn’t know Adam, knew nothing of what had happened with Adam, neither what happened between Neil and Adam and Claire nor between Neil and Adam and Rose. Once, rummaging in the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen, she had stumbled on the photo of the two of them beneath the Faithful Couple. ‘An old friend,’ Neil had told her, and they had both left it at that.
He would love her properly in the end, Neil thought, as he ducked out of the taxi at the corner of his street. He was almost there. He stepped out distractedly to cross the road; a blue, by-the-hour bicycle swerved to avoid him (between the bikes and the susurrating electric cars, aural intuition no longer sufficed for London pedestrians). When he reached his building he raised his hand to punch in the entry code, but paused. He stood alone on the pavement for a few minutes before he went upstairs.
Roxanna was watching a box set, all charismatic psychopaths and impenetrable accents. When he bent to kiss her she ruffled his hair, asked if he was all right and was there anything she could do? Leila was in her cot, asleep. He ought to be anxious for her by association, but the two universes felt too disconnected — the unjust Sam universe and Leila’s prelapsarian version — for Sam to be a warning for Leila or Leila a consolation for Sam.
He went into the under-used room they affectedly called the study. Outside, on the pavement, he had decided to go through Claire: a risk, obviously, since he couldn’t be sure that she would cooperate, nor how Adam would respond to her mediation. Still, Claire might know whether Adam was amenable; whether the timing was bad; whether Neil had been forgiven, or could be. He didn’t have an email address for her but the internet soon furnished one, from the contact page of what was evidently her new company: Claire@windinyourhair.com.
Good for you, Neil thought, with a small admixture of regret. One of them had been an entrepreneur after all.
He logged onto his email. He tried to keep it short (Don’t waste the customer’s time), deciding not to mention his father, or Leila and Roxanna, but to explain only about Sam. He wrote in a hurry and pressed Send before he had a chance to reconsider. No xxx below the sign-off this time:
Claire
To be honest I can still hardly believe that I’m writing this. I mean, not that I am writing to you now but what happened in the first place. I know its probably too late but I wanted to say again to you and Adam that I am sorry. Please tell Adam this if you think that would be appropriate.
I’ve tried too many times to figure out that evening and all I can think of is that somehow you end up with grudges against the people you care about most. You end up not being able to tell them apart, your failures and the witnesses to them, your friends and why you need them. Anyway I take all the blame on myself. All of it. Please tell Ad that. Tell him it was always my fault and I should have seen that earlier.
Obviously I don’t know how things are with you and the kids although I would love to. I dont even know where youre living. I can see that you’re in business now and I hope that it is prospering. I am getting in touch because I wanted Adam to know about something thats happened. I am sure that he remembers Sam, my nephew, I expect that you remember him too. He and Harry played together once or twice. Seventeen now, amazing.
The thing is that Sammy is ill. I mean very ill. He might be okay but we don’t know yet. Ive always felt responsible for him and now I feel that more than ever. I don’t know why exactly but I needed to tell Adam about it. I think he will understand.
Its a funny thing, isn’t it, that you start off wanting nothing from each other and that is almost the whole point, the freedom that we had, and then you do want things and youre happy to give them, time and all the rest. And then you find there are some things that its too much to give or sometimes to take.
Please tell him that he doesn’t have to do anything or answer this message if he doesnt want to. But I would love it if he did. Tell him I know we can’t put everything right but we can still do this. Tell him I’m pleased the American man was at home that day.
Sending love to you all
Neil
She didn’t reply. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after that. Two days was a decade in this instantaneous age. You got twitchy if clients didn’t respond within an hour, knowing that they, like you, were bound to their lesser lives by the beeps and permanent-emergency throbs of their supposedly liberating gadgets. After two days, Neil began to abandon hope.
The apparition was joltingly surreaclass="underline" two human faces frowning at the glass, thirteen floors and a couple of hundred feet up. It always took Adam a moment to remember the man-bucket, the cords and the sponges. Then the dilemma over whether to acknowledge them — with some tough-guy nod, blokeish cock of the head or ingratiating smile — a sharp example of the moral discomfort routinely inflicted by London, a place in which you were always rubbing up against less fortunate neighbours, importunate strangers. If he nodded or smiled at the men through the window, he and they would lock eyes in the shared knowledge that he was sitting in an ergonomic chair on the cushy side of the glass, while, a metre away and on the other, they were dangling from the roof. If he didn’t, he would imply that they had no human claim on his attention.
The trying etiquette of inequality. The whole routine, Adam knew, must be wearyingly familiar to the less equal. He went for a pursed smile and raised-eyebrow combination. One of the window-cleaners, the older of the two, gaunt and wearing a hoodie although it was a warm, clear morning, whispered something to the other; Adam thought he saw the younger man smirk as they heaved themselves out of view.
He shook his head at his own involutions. This would never be his city.
Laurel materialised beside his desk. ‘Leisure Services?’
‘Yup. Twenty minutes,’ Adam said. ‘Just need to spell-check it.’
‘I need to syndicate,’ Laurel said. ‘Adam, I really do.’