Farid looked up. ‘Don’t sell me your company,’ he said. ‘Not one customer is buying your company, Happy whatever it is. Sell me your products. Why should I buy these trinkets?’
The accent seemed not to belong in nature, Arabic with a trace of Levantine French, coarsened by what sounded like a Slavic rasp. Beneath the paunch and his distraction Farid gave out the occasional hint of what must have made him rich in the first place, a fecund compound of rashness and caution, enthusiasm and cynicism. You glimpsed it for a second before the mask came down again.
Sell the customer what he wants to buy. Neil harvested saliva from his cheeks to lubricate his tongue. He swallowed. ‘We are selling,’ he gambled, ‘new ways to tell your family that you love them. And to tell yourself that you love them. Everybody wants to think that about themselves, don’t they? That they love their family as much as they can.’
Farid looked away.
Bimal handled the other questions, of which there were few. Farid smiled thinly, rose and walked out, not saying goodbye or shaking hands. The kitchen door swung shut behind him. Strahan ushered the three of them into the lift.
‘He gets it,’ Jess said as the coffin descended.
‘Don’t think so, to be honest,’ Neil said. ‘He didn’t give us much.’
‘That’s it,’ Bimal said. ‘Guys, I’m sorry.’
They were melancholically drinking cheap wine in a chain bar on Oxford Street, the Something & Something, when Bimal took the call. It wasn’t Farid, it was Strahan. His first words, Bimal told them afterwards, mimicking the pukka drawl, were, ‘I’ll need your bank details.’
Jess was at the bar, blowing some of Farid’s investment on champagne, before Bimal could recount the rest. ‘I’ll need your bank details!’ Bimal said by way of a toast.
‘HappyFamilies!’ Neil said.
‘To HappyFamilies!’ Jess repeated.
That night, when Bimal left, she taught him how to drink flaming sambucas, the expert way, a procedure she had learned in Prague, apparently, which involved two glasses, a lighter, a napkin and a straw. Other people in the bar watched them, men especially, covetous attention that Neil, to his surprise, found he enjoyed. They were shimmering that evening, radiating luck and strength, like the aura he and Adam had projected during the karaoke in San Diego. Neil inhaled the liquoricey gas and laughed his grimacing laugh.
On the pavement outside Jess fell behind, as if considering, then strode wordlessly towards him, inclined her face and, finally, kissed his mouth. He was momentarily thrown by her approach, that determined, déjà-vu stride, so that his lips took a few seconds to respond to hers.
It’s happening, Neil thought as Jess opened the door to her flat. My real life is happening.
He was catching up with Adam. He called Adam in the morning.
Somewhere outside, in the garden of the basement flat or in the street, foxes were mating or killing each other in a coloratura frenzy. Adam opened his eyes and rolled onto his back; a strand of Claire’s hair adhered to his lips. She had slept through the yowling. Clean conscience, that was what people said, wasn’t it?
The bedside clock said six forty-four. He caressed her shoulder, her upper arm. She might be awake, Adam told himself, or almost. From her arm to her hip and then her thigh, one finger tracing an expanding arc that soon took in a buttock. She straightened her legs. He reached across her torso and gently squeezed both breasts in his palm, an encompassment that she had once told him she enjoyed. In Adam’s mental diagram of his wife this consoling micro-fetish was linked, via a dotted line, to the timing and violence of her parents’ divorce.
They were awake now, anyway. His penis grazed her thigh — accidentally, the first time. Claire curled up and pulled the coverlet over her.
The fox sounds were disconcertingly human, long hyperventilating shrieks, like a passer-by stumbling upon a corpse.
Six fifty-two.
Adam got out of bed and slouched to the bathroom. He met himself in the mirror and breathed in. His was a nice little gut, nothing vulgar or conspicuous when clothed, but flabby enough, on exposure, to undercut his once-automatic confidence in his metabolism and physique, a faith as blithe as his ingrained assumption that he would one day inherit the Earth. The hairs encamped on his chest had dispatched reconnaissance agents to his shoulders. He was twenty-eight.
Shit shower shave aftershave deodorant teeth blast of hairdryer that woke Claire up.
Eleven minutes past seven. Adam went into the kitchen. There was a mouse in there somewhere; he had heard its scuttle, the eccentric rhythm of something alive. He should tell the landlady. He listened to the answerphone message while the kettle boiled — an invitation from Chaz, boozing with him and Archie and two or three others, always strength in numbers these days, body count replacing intimacy, a group absconsion from adulthood. Together they had passed some unmarked inflection point, Adam sensed, at which longevity began to diminish closeness rather than enhance it. They were evanescing, his student cronies, without ill-will or grudges, as old friends evidently could when there was nothing left to say.
Claire came into the kitchen in her towelling dressing gown.
‘Anything special today?’
‘Lessons Learned at three, God knows how long this one’ll go on for. You?’
‘Catalogue day.’
‘There’s a mouse in here somewhere.’
‘Risotto for dinner?’
‘I’m out tonight, remember.’
‘Where are you meeting him again?’
‘That new place by the river, you know, with the bowling.’
Not a word about the penis. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed; or possibly, for her, all that male insistence had long since become unremarkable, a familiarity Adam preferred not to contemplate. He could make out a breast inside the towelling, its convex perfection.
His coffee, her tea. Two pieces of toast. Just the one penis: a necessary quota, obviously, but also a chasm and, in a way, a sadness, that she would never get it, the urgency and then the shame.
‘Did you take out the recycling?’
Seven thirty-seven. She sipped.
Adam had observed this social attrition in older men, men of his father’s generation, how they wound up glumly fraternising at their wives’ engagements, as if the chromosomal match with other husbands were a sufficient bond. He knew his recent, second-hand male acquaintances as single traits, like supporting characters in a bad film: James, Libby’s boyfriend, always toting his dry cleaning; Paul, comes with Cherry, asks for his steak to be ‘cremated’. Poppy from the gallery and John the effete cinéaste.
‘Did you finish the mortgage form?’
‘Tomorrow night,’ he said.
‘You prom —’
‘I know, I’ll do it. I said I’ll do it.’
Neil was the exception in this cast of has-beens and monochrome newcomers. Neil gave more and demanded more, and Adam owed him more.
He swept the crumbs into his palm and brushed them into the sink. The rubbish truck was in the street, someone was shouting.
‘What is it this time?’
‘What?’
‘Your Lessons.’
‘Knife crime. The spike in the summer, you remember, that silly moral panic, lasted a fortnight.’
They would miss that evening’s chronicle of the day’s granular irks and half-imagined insults — his from the jittery open floors of the department, hers at the subterranean print gallery just off Piccadilly, the coveted art job that had turned out to involve more hard-selling than Claire had reckoned on, and many more hours standing in a basement showroom, rocking on her heels and watching dust motes spiral in the half-light from the pavement-level windows. The Dinky duet: a reciprocal compassion, like oral sex but more frequent.