And so when Mhouse scratched her nails on his door that night and offered him a lodger’s discount for sex with the landlady he was both ready and happy to oblige — money no object. She came to his bed five nights in a row. On the third night he asked her to stay — he liked the idea of them sleeping together in each other’s arms but she said a full night was,£100 so he demurred. Then suddenly, after five nights, she stopped coming. He missed her, missed her lean, quick body and her uptilted, dark-nippled breasts.
He had not had sex with anyone since that ill-fated night in the cloud-chamber viewing gallery with Fairfield — and before that there was a distant, dimming memory of making love to Alexa
— her tanned body, her white bikini-shadow, her lustrous blonde hair and perfect teeth. To have Mhouse in his arms, beneath him, to be inside her, to experience orgasm, was as close to happiness as he had known, recently — for the first time since the murder of Philip Wang he felt a sense of ease, of normality, of a stirring of human affection again — of need.
After a few days’ abstinence he said to her: “I’ll give you a hundred, for a whole night.”
“I don’t think so, John. It’s not, you know, proper. Ly-on will-know.”
“How come the other five nights were ‘proper’?”
“Well, sort of slam-bam-thank-you-Mam, you know. Quick as a flash. But I think he know something’s happened.”
That was true. After the fourth night Adam had come up behind Mhouse at the sink, put his arms around her, kissed her neck and squeezed her breasts. She’d turned and slapped his face, hard. Adam recoiled and in spinning away was provided with an image of Ly-on looking up from his book, shocked and worried.
“Don’t fucking never do that again,” Mhouse hissed at him in a fury. “This is business. Pure and simple.”
But was it? Adam wondered. That first night she had come into his room she had said she was ‘lonely’. He was lonely too
— sometimes he thought he was the loneliest man on the planet. And he had so liked holding her small, lithe body, feeling the warmth of her breath on his neck and cheek, feeling her squirm and rub herself against him. As the days went by and nothing further happened, Adam — growing richer — began to find living in the flat a near intolerable frustration. He resumed his visits to the Church of John Christ, choosing to eat his evening meal there in the company of Vladimir, Turpin and Gavin Thrale, happy to endure Bishop Yemi’s interminable sermons. But he still came back to The Shaft and lay on the mattress in his room, listening through the wall to Ly-on now reading simple stories to his mother. When all went quiet he would lie in the dark, willing Mhouse to slip out of bed and come and tap on his door, but it didn’t happen again.
Adam thought — vaguely — about leaving: why torment himself in this way? But something kept him there. The flat in The Shaft was a kind of home, after all, and he felt safe, for once. And Ly-on liked him — strange, listless Ly-on who turned out to be a quick learner — and if he left he wouldn’t see Mhouse any more, wouldn’t be in her company, watching television, eating bad meals together, laughing, talking. He wondered if he were becoming unhealthily obsessed with her…
♦
Adam sat in his room counting out £500 and then looped a rubber band around the thick wad of notes. That left him a float of almost £300 but he was beginning to feel uneasy about carrying such a large amount of money around with him. Luckily he’d thought of somewhere secure where he could bank it.
On the way out of The Shaft he heard a call.
“Hey. Sixteen-oh-three.”
He looked round to see Mr Quality loping towards him, hand held out in greeting. They had met a couple of times before when he had called round at the flat, delivering small packets to Mhouse — pills for her problems, Mhouse said. They slapped hands and gripped thumbs.
“You still here, man?” Mr Quality said.
“Yeah, keeping busy.”
“Like little Mhousey, yeah?”
“We get on OK. And little Ly-on — nice little bloke.”
“You stay, you have to pay me rent. £100 a month.”
“I pay Mhouse rent.”
“Not her apartment, man. It mine.”
“I’ll pay you tomorrow,” Adam said, “OK?” The wad of notes in his pocket felt as heavy as a brick.
“You make me very happy, Sixteen-oh-three.”
♦
Adam took the long bus journey to Chelsea, happy to have the chance to think. He thought about Mhouse and Ly-on and the strange new life he was living with them. And he rather marvelled at himself — at his ability to adapt, almost to thrive in this hostile and unforgiving world. He wondered what Alexa would have made of this new Adam; he wondered what his father and his sister would think. He deliberately didn’t bring his family to mind, if he could help it — better to keep them parked on the rim of consciousness. He was sure he was never out of their minds; what must they imagine had become of him? Son and brother lost for ever. He could think calmly about this because he felt he had changed in some paradigmatic way: the old Adam Kindred was being ousted and overwhelmed by the new one — shrewder, more worldly and capable of survival. It was like Homo sapiens brushing aside the Neanderthals…This gave him pause, this notion: perhaps he wasn’t quite so happy to wave goodbye to the old Adam, after all. He shouldn’t have thought of Alexa, he realised, as image after image of her came swimming uninvited into his mind, and he could hear her husky, throaty voice in his ear. In fact it had been her voice that attracted him initially — as if she were recovering from laryngitis — and was the first thing about her he had become aware of when he had telephoned her office to enquire about an apartment for sale not far from the university in Phoenix. She had been the realtor when he eventually bought it. The physical presence of Alexa — the thick blonde hair, the tan, the briskness, the teeth, the glossy lips — almost contradicted what her vocal chords seemed to infer. It was as if he had been expecting some stout, heavy-smoking lounge-singer and instead had been presented with this glowing prototype of American pulchritude. But the disparate juxtaposition of voice and persona had its own telling appeal. There had been problems with the sale that necessitated further meetings, cell-phone numbers had been exchanged, and when the sale had gone through they had gone to a bar together to have a celebratory drink. They had shared a bottle of champagne, Adam walked her to her car, they kissed. That was the beginning: swift courtship, society marriage, the new house gifted by widower Dad, the talk of a family.
The end came, suddenly, unexpectedly, two years later, when Fairfield had called Alexa up, two days after the sex in the cloud chamber, sobbingly declaring her eternal love for Adam, begging Alexa to let her husband go free. Covertly Alexa had read the undeleted texts on Adam’s cell-phone and printed them off. Brookman Maybury himself had stood beside the attorney when the divorce proceedings were initiated and when Adam learnt how the baleful course of events had unfolded. Alexa was not present, her father acting as cold, stern proxy for his shattered, ill, medicated daughter, his eyes glowering at Adam beneath the folded strata of his acropachydermous brows. Adam tried to stop thinking — but the memory of his last meal with Fairfield elbowed its way remorselessly into his mind.
Three days after the cloud-chamber moment, they met on campus and had gone downtown in Phoenix to a large, anonymous mid-scale restaurant for supper. This restaurant had an open-air courtyard and was popular, therefore, with smokers. It served copious surf and turf, all the shrimps you can eat in a bucket, whole chickens with free fries — and, after they had eaten (Adam wasn’t hungry, barely touched his food), Adam had tried to put his ‘damage limitation’ plan into first gear. The more he made the reasonable case — a moment of madness, inexcusable behaviour on his part, let’s be friends — the more Fairfield said she loved him, wanted to spend her life with him, bear his children.