This was a punishment, Adam sensed. For what he knew about Neil — for what he had on Neil — and for what they had done together. What Adam had done. It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You started it. That was what Neil had said on the morning after, long before he knew the whole story.
I hope you find out how this feels.
Adam pounced down the stairs and went back into the living room for his car keys.
‘What are you doing?’
He could hear the fear in her voice.
‘Adam?’
He found the keys. It was a warm dry night, not yet dark. He left his jacket behind.
‘Adam, where are you going?’
He slammed the door behind him.
Adam had turned the key in the ignition before he realised that he didn’t know Neil’s address. His seatbelt was pulled halfway across his torso, his father’s standard driving posture for several years after belts became mandatory (his mind went back to his father, even now, with an irksome canine loyalty). He had a pain in his back (sedentary work, carrying the kids, the same overconfidence regarding his chassis as he had always harboured about his weight). The sensation ran across his shoulder to his neck, then to the middle of his spine, but hurt differently in different places: sharp and neural in his neck, duller and achier lower down, as if the pain had matured or learned something along the way.
‘Fuck,’ Adam said, letting the seatbelt snap back.
He knew approximately where the building was. Neil lived in a red-brick mansion block in Bayswater, near a hotel, Adam recalled, with an elegant stairwell and an old-fashioned, sliding-grille lift. His was an internally plush but externally nondescript building, of a type Adam associated with foreign kleptocrats on the lam and their overindulged offspring or mistresses. Neil had only just moved in when Adam had visited; there was almost nothing in the flat besides an inherited bamboo bar and accompanying leather stools, screwed to the floor in the living room, fixtures that incited ribald speculation about the key parties the previous occupants might have hosted. Adam didn’t like the place much (even discounting for his instant, envious calculation of how much his friend must have paid for it, he had been fairly certain that he didn’t like it). High-ceilinged rooms, but boxy and over-regular, set off a faintly ominous corridor: the apartment felt more like a medical consulting suite than a residence, the kind of architecture that seemed designed to prevent anyone experiencing the place as home. But it was Neil’s, and Jess had left him, and Adam had discharged friendship’s duty of compassionate dishonesty, the kind lies you mixed with the dependable truths, and told him it was lovely.
He hadn’t been there since. Neil had never asked him again, let alone invited Claire and the kids, a failure that Adam inwardly resented but never mentioned. He might be able to find the building, just. But third floor? Fourth? Sitting in the car, he had a bathetic vision of himself patrolling the pavement, waiting to accost Neil as he arrived or left, or hurrying through the doors when another visitor was buzzed in — like the fare-dodgers who sometimes squeezed through the ticket barriers with you on the Tube — then pacing the corridors and madly banging on strangers’ doors. He could hardly ask Neil for the address: Dear Neil, you are a cunt, please could I have your address so I can come round and throttle you?
Two police officers, one of each sex, walked past his car, their hands clasped meditatively behind their backs, looking quaintly approachable, stab vests notwithstanding. Adam raised his buttocks from the seat to fish his phone from his trouser pocket. He would text:
Neil, Claire told me what happened today. I can’t believe you would do that to me
Or: You scumbag. You total scumbag
Or: Rape, Neil. It’s called rape. Statutory rape, but still rape. You are a rapist
Neither of them had ever applied that word aloud to what happened in California, though it had often resounded in Adam’s head when they were together, as, he expected, it had in Neil’s — the legalistic modifier mitigating the noun to a greater or lesser extent according to his mood. A seventeen-year-old boy with a fifteen-year-old girclass="underline" that was more a technical than a moral offence, towards which the law and common sense were inclined to indulgence. But Neil’s twenty-three to her fifteen were at the wrong end of the moral continuum. Neil had been a man. They both had.
So: Rape, Neil.
Or perhaps, he thought, just Goodbye
He navigated to Neil’s number in his address book. Dear Neil.
Not Dear. Just Neil. Or N.
He abandoned his message. Texting would be uncivilised. Adolescent. He would call.
It occurred to Adam that he would be less encumbered in the passenger seat; he opened the door and walked around the bonnet to the other side of the car. A supermarket delivery van had pulled up outside a house along the street, blocking the road while its driver unloaded, hazard lights flashing in the dusk. From the other direction he heard the wail of an ambulance. Two men jogged past his car, the squatter of the two straining to keep up.
Do it. His hand shook, the phone quaking in his palm as he aimed his thumb at the keys. The connection was slow — Neil might be out of range, or out of juice — but then the number was ringing. This wasn’t what he had expected. He had intended something dramatic, yes, and distressing, but less sudden, something he would have more time to think about and rehearse.
He grew stronger as he neared the safety of voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Neil’ — something gratingly American in that formulation, as if modernity required a transatlantic accent — ‘please…’
Adam hung up. Voicemail would be as undignified as texting. Hi Neil, this is Adam, you are a terrible bastard, don’t bother to call back
He caught himself untensing in relief. He dialled again.
Neil answered on the third ring.
‘Hello?’
That tone… Neil would have seen on his screen that it was Adam — everyone was pre-announced these days, like guests at a courtly reception — and yet the disingenuous innocence, that nonchalance.
Adam opened his mouth to speak, but it was dry and nothing came out, as if the nightmares he periodically suffered of muteness at a viva exam, or some uncanny capital trial, were being realised. He could feel his heart thrashing in his chest. He could hear it.
‘Hello? Ants?’
‘Neil, I… I need to talk to you.’
‘Just a second.’ The hand over the mouthpiece, Adam’s last chance to reconsider or reformulate. ‘Yup. Ads?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Charity thing at the Dorchester. You weren’t there and… It was free booze or channel-surfing, you know.’
‘Haven’t you had enough to drink?’
‘What?’
‘You had a few earlier, didn’t you? With Claire.’
‘Look, Adam, let’s talk tomorrow, all right? I’m supposed to be schmoozing. Tony’s here. I’ll give you a call in the morning, okay?’
‘I don’t give a shit about your schmoozing. Or about Tony. Fuck Tony. Christ. I want to know what the fuck you think you were doing with Claire.’
Better: he was entitled to this.
‘Hang on,’ Neil said. Again the muffle, other blurred, male conversations, once or twice a bump of the phone against Neil’s leg — Neil presumably leaving whatever banqueting suite he was stuck in, understanding that this was serious.
‘Okay. Ants. What were you saying?’
Here we go, Adam thought, the same shenanigans as with Claire: the stonewalling and lies that had to be got through, before the only-half-lies and reluctant confession. He felt like a detective, or a torturer. Onto the second prisoner, who can never be sure what his accomplice has admitted. How bored they must get of this routine.