The main drag felt like the aftermath of a festive war, with a left-over stench of sun cream, cheap rum, deep-fat fryers and vomit. He asked at six or seven other nightspots, but the only person who admitted to knowing Gavin tried to hit him up for a debt. ‘These kids,’ the Mancunian who called himself Gavin had said to Adam, ‘they show up for work drunk, or they don’t show up at all, you give ’em the push and they expect you to hire them back the next day. And you do. You fucking do!’
On the phone this person had promised Adam unfettered access to his customers, dancefloor and erratic seasonal staff. Adam had promised all these things to Natasha, the producer.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Natasha said at the villa when he told her what had happened.
‘It’s not my —’
‘No filming, Adam. No fucking filming until you bring me a story.’
The other researcher, Will, pushed his black-rimmed glasses up his nose and smiled. This wasn’t what Adam had expected.
Adam was afraid of Natasha, because everybody seemed to be. The origins of this general fear were obscure to him, lost in the company’s sedimented prehistory, a dark chronicle of shaggings and sackings and atavistic rivalries. In London she was one of the aloof, spiky-haired women who rode their chairs around the office like chariots, to gossip, but not with him. The real, make-or-break action always seemed to Adam to be elsewhere: in the smoking room, in the lift he had just missed, at the drinks he found out about afterwards, now on the shoots from which he was disbarred.
He chased up the other holiday reps and nightclub entrepreneurs he had contacted in London. He stalked new subjects around their pools and on the fag-ash beaches during the afternoons. He had anticipated some fly-on-the-wall gravitas amid the levity: broken dreams or relationships, working-class poetics, hypocritical euroscepticism. But when he mentioned these ideas to Natasha she called him a ‘pointy head’ and pinched his cheek, slightly too hard. She, Will and the others seemed to Adam to be cultivating a coercive unseriousness, as if there were nothing left in the world for anyone to be serious about. They all went up at the end of their sentences, like characters in an Australian soap opera; in Will’s case the unenquiring interrogatory was complemented by a meaningless arch irony, ersatz rather than genuine, since it concealed and implied nothing.
The worst night came when Adam forgot to ask two podium dancers from Huddersfield to sign the release form while they were sober, an oversight he could not adequately explain to Natasha or to himself.
‘Unfuckingbelievable,’ Natasha said.
Will said, ‘I’m sure you’ll crack it next time, sport?’
All Will’s remarks came enclosed in invisible quotation marks, intoned like jokes without punchlines. He pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled.
In the end Adam found a rhythm, working most of the night, knocking off for a drink at five in the morning, sleeping until the dry heat woke him at lunchtime. He never honed Will’s knack of enlisting and coaxing the super-exhibitionists — he suspected Will might be paying them — but he had a good eye for montages and a fine ear for the voiceover script. He puffed the communal hash that the sound man had smuggled inside a pot of Marmite, but was agape at the flagrant adulteries of the production manager and one of the cameramen, with each other and later with assorted tourists. With his hard-wired manners and bedrock obedience, Adam was too well brought-up for all that. He began to worry that he was too well brought-up.
The work was titillating at first, of course it was. Still, after a few weeks the dancefloor flashers, copulators in DJs’ booths, mega-binge drinkers and doggy-style simulators became routine, then nauseating, as depredations tend to.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Adam said to Will by the pool. ‘They never come and find us the next day and ask to be cut out. The puking or fighting or whatever.’
‘That’s why they do it?’ Will said. ‘It’s for the cameras, isn’t it? It’s not in spite of them?’
‘Audiences,’ Neil had said to Adam on their return trip to the bedsit. ‘That’s your product, isn’t it? Got to give them what they want.’
They were both right, Adam saw. Televised scrutiny of ordinary people revealed that what ordinary people wanted was to be on television. The feeling was mutual, he was realising: anyone would do, in the new, cut-price, live-and-watch-die economy of scandal, so long as they were shameless or outrageous enough, and so long as it was someone else.
The main trouble with Will was that only one of him and Adam was sure to be kept on when their training contracts expired. ‘It’s a pyramid,’ Natasha explained to him one morning at dawn. ‘Lots of grunts at the bottom, a few fuckers at the top. Lots of dying along the way.’ Adam hoped he had done enough — and anyway it was all worth it, they said to each other afterwards, for the four days of Claire’s visit. She came out on one of the cheapo flights, among the early-doors drinkers and aghast middle-aged holidaymakers rapidly realising their mistake. She and Adam sniffed amyl nitrate in a bar near the one that wasn’t Gavin’s; they had well-acquainted but still urgent sex, the carnal heyday between courtesy and habit, hoping that no one in the villa overheard. She let him feel like a prince, the dauphin he had grown up believing himself to be, with a skill and alacrity that almost troubled him.
On her last morning her head was on his chest, her hair obscuring her face, when he heard it say, ‘I love you. I love you, Adam Tayler.’
He heard himself say, ‘I love you, too.’
Neil left his glass on the table and crossed the room to the payphone outside the gents. The twin aromas of piss and lemony urinal cubes leached under the door, mingling with the fug of cigarette smoke. He lifted the receiver and dialled: the call to the no-show that was the only, futile remedy of the stood-up. You could be lost for an evening, or, almost as easily, you could be lost for ever. Your friendship, your past, could be finished if you chose — as most of Neil’s prior friendships were, thinning back to mere acquaintance en route to total severance. His and Adam’s could have ended at the airport, if one of them had wanted it to.
The ten-pence piece hovered over the slot; Neil put a finger in his free ear to block the music. Just as the impatient beeps cut in, they arrived.
‘Sorry, Philly,’ Adam said. He had flown back from Tenerife at the weekend. ‘Tube’s buggered.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘How do you do?’ She had thick Iberian hair, English-rose skin, full breasts inside her angora turtleneck.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ they both said. ‘What can I get you?’ Neil added. He went to the bar for drinks: pints of lager for Adam and him, some syrupy alcopop confection for her that he pincered between the taller glasses.
‘Sixteenth-century engravings,’ Claire explained, when he asked about her dissertation. ‘Mostly German and Dutch. You know, Dürer and that lot. It was fifteen thousand words, agony. I’m waiting to hear.’
Adam kept his eyes on her, Neil noticed, grinning vapidly, like a figure-skater or a game-show host. This was more than he had anticipated, Neil saw. He felt belatedly nervous.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘That lot.’
‘I think it’s such a fascinating moment,’ Claire persisted. ‘You know, when art becomes commodified. They’re so beautiful, but, you know, capitalism is taking over.’
I think, sang the stereo, I’m gonna take me away and hide
Adam was beaming.
I’m thinking of things that I just can’t abide
Neil pictured Claire growing up on one of London’s plusher edges (Surrey, possibly Berkshire), a father in a blazer, a mother in a twinset, a sailing boat moored at a marina on the south coast, someone’s chalet in the Alps. He pegged her as the sort of girl he and his former friends had encountered on sorties to the West End, posh girls from private schools whom they had coveted in vain. He invented her, in the usual way, the misconceptions persisting in his brain, like libels in the ether, even after he knew them to be untrue. At the same time he saw himself through her invented gaze. He was ashamed of his jumper, his shoes, the two years with his father. He was ashamed of his new job, which, he knew, would seem grubby and meaningless to her. He was ashamed of his shame, the whole exhausting rigmarole of failure.