N.W.

  ‘Yes, that must be hard,’ said Tom quietly, and took another large swig of his pint.

  After that they sat in silence, both looking out upon the street, as if only accidentally sat together.

  ‘Felix, could I maybe trouble you for one of those? Terrible roller.’

  Felix lit his own, nodded and silently started work on another. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He read the message and thrust the handset once more in Tom’s face.

  ‘Oi, Tom, you’re an advertiser – what d’you make of that?’

  Tom, who was long-sighted, drew back from the screen in order to read it: ‘“Our records indicate you still haven’t claimed compensation for your accident. You may be entitled to up to £3,650. To claim free reply ‘CLAIM’. To opt out text ‘STOP’.” ’

  ‘Scam, innit.’

  ‘Oh, I should think so, yes.’

  ‘Cos how could they know if I’d had an accident? Evil. Imagine if you were old, or ill, getting that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom, not really following, ‘I think they just have these … databases.’

  ‘Databases,’ said Felix, and shook his head in despair. ‘And you reply and five quid comes off your bill. But that’s the way people are these days. Everyone’s looking out for themselves. My girl gave me this book, Ten Secrets of Successful Leaders. You read it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Should read it. She was like, “Fee, you know who reads this book? Bill Gates. The Mafia. The royal family. Bankers. Tupac read it. Jewish people read this book. Educate yourself.” She’s a smart one. I’m not even a reader but that one opened my eyes. There you go.’

  Tom took the cigarette and lit it and inhaled with the deep relief of a man who had given up smoking entirely only a few hours before.

  ‘Listen – Felix, this is a bit of a weird one,’ said Tom, nodding at the packet of Amber Leaf between them, lowering his voice, ‘but you wouldn’t by any chance have anything stronger? Not to buy, just a pinch. I find it takes the edge off.’

  Felix sighed and leant back into his bench and began murmuring. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Tom. He cringed to the right, then somehow reversed his body and cringed to the left, ‘I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘You’re all right. My girl thinks I’ve got an invisible tattoo on my forehead: PLEASE ASK ME FOR WEED. Must have one of them faces.’

  Tom lifted his drink and finished it off. Did this mean there was weed or there wasn’t? He examined a distorted Felix through the bottom of his pint glass.

  ‘Well, she sounds sensible,’ said Tom at last.

  Felix passed him the finished fag.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘The girl you mentioned, your girlfriend person.’

  Felix smiled enormously. ‘Oh. Grace. Yeah. She is. Never been happier in my life, Tom, to tell you the truth. Changed my life. I tell her, all the time: you’re a lifesaver. And she is.’

  Tom held up his ringing phone and gave it the evil eye.

  ‘I seem to be stuck with a life-destroyer.’

  ‘Nobody can do that, Tom. Only you have the power to do that.’

  Felix was sincere, but saw he had provoked a sort of smirk in Tom, which in turn provoked in Felix a need to press his point home more strongly: ‘Listen, this girl changed my outlook totally. Globally. She sees my potential. And in the end, you just got to be the best you that you can be. The rest will follow naturally. I’ve been through it, Tom, right? So I know. The personal is eternal. Think about it.’

  How close to superfluous his job was these days! The slogans came pre-embedded, in people’s souls. A smart thought: Tom discreetly congratulated himself for having it. He nodded at Felix deeply, satirically, samurai-style. ‘Thank you, Felix,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember that. Best you that you can be. Personal equals eternal. You seem like a bloke who’s got it all figured out.’ He lifted his empty glass to clink against Felix’s, but Felix was not impervious to irony and left his own glass where it was.

  ‘Seeming ain’t being,’ he said quietly and looked away. ‘Listen –’ He drew a folded envelope from his back pocket. ‘I’ve got things to do, so …’

  The boy saw he had overstepped. ‘Of course. Look – where were we? You need to make me an offer.’

  ‘You need to give me a reasonable price, mate.’

  It was only now that Tom realized he did not, after all, despise Felix’s habit of over-familiarity. On the contrary, to be called ‘mate’ at this late point in their acquaintance felt like a melancholy step down in the world. And why am I only able to enjoy things once they’ve passed, wondered Tom, and tried to place a mental finger upon a hazy quote from a French book, which made exactly this point, and helpfully gave the answer, too. Candide? Proust? Why hadn’t he kept up with his French? He thought of Père Mercer, on the phone, this morning: ‘The trouble is you don’t follow through, Tom. That’s always been your trouble.’ And of course Sophie was making essentially the same point. Some days have a depressing thematic coherence. Maybe next the cloud overhead would open up and a huge cartoon hand emerge from below, pointing at him, accompanied by a thunderous, authorial voice: TOM MERCER. EPIC FAIL. But it had already been pointed out to him – also this morning!– that this approach, too, was only another kind of trap: ‘Tom, darling, it’s really terribly narcissistic to think the whole world is against you.’ Listening to his mother’s voice down the line, he had been impressed by how calm and kind she sounded and how satisfied with her diagnosis of his personality. Thank God for his mother! She didn’t take him seriously, and laughed when he was being funny, even when she didn’t understand, as she almost never did. They were country people, his parents, and of grandparental age, for this was a second marriage for them both. They could not conceive of his daily life, did not email, had never heard of Sussex University until he attended it, had no experience of either a ‘downstairs neighbour’ or a ‘night bus’, the realities of an ‘unpaid internship’ (‘Just go in there and present a few ideas, Tom, and show them what you’re worth. At the very least Charlie will listen. We worked together for seven years, for Christ’s sake!’) or the sort of nightclub where you leave your clothes – and much else – at the door. They did not have double lives, as far as he could tell. They drank with dinner, never to excess. Where his father found Tom infuriating and inexplicable, his mother went a little gentler on him, at least allowing for the possibility that he really was suffering from some varietal of twenty-first-century intellectual ennui that made it impossible for him to take advantage of the good fortune he’d been born with. There were limits, however. One shouldn’t pretend that Brixton was any sort of place to live. ‘But Tom, if you’re feeling low, 20 Baresfield is empty until at least July. I don’t know what you have against Mayfair. And you’ll have somewhere to park the car without fear of it being burnt to a shell in some riot.’ ‘That was twenty years ago!’ ‘Tom, I refer you to the Aesop fable: leopard, spots.’ ‘That’s not a fable!’ ‘Honestly, I don’t know why you didn’t move into it in the first place.’ Because sometimes one wants to have the illusion that one is making one’s own life, out of one’s own resources. He didn’t say that. He said: ‘Mother, your wisdom surpasseth all understanding.’ To which she said: ‘Don’t be facetious. And don’t make a mess!’ But he was making a mess. With this girl. It was all a terrible mess.

  ‘A reasonable price,’ repeated Tom, and touched the side of his head, as if the strange thoughts were a misfiring synapse, and a tap to the temple might tamp them back down.

  ‘Cos you’re talking silly money,’ said Felix, and began packing away his tobacco and Rizlas and phone in a manner that seemed, to Tom, to perfectly convey disappointment, not only in the failure of the deal, but in Tom himself.

  ‘But you can’t seriously be asking me to give it to you for less than six hundred!’

  Halfway through th
is sentence Tom recognized the strange, inappropriate plea in his own voice.

  ‘Four hundred’s more like it, bruv. My lot will tow it. That’s generous! You wouldn’t get that much for scrap. You’d probably have to pay that much to get it towed.’

  The audaciousness of this made Tom smile: ‘Seriously? Come on. Let’s be serious.’

  Felix kept his poker face. Tom, still smiling, put his chin in his hand, and ‘thought’ like a cartoon of somebody ‘thinking’.

  ‘Five hundred? Then we can both go home. I really can’t go lower than that. It’s an MG!’

  ‘Four fifty. Ain’t going no higher than that.’

  Tom’s phone started up once more. He wore an inconclusive expression: he reminded Felix of the actors milling backstage after the matinee, with the evening performance still before them. Not fully in character, but not free of it either.

  ‘Life-destroyer on line one. You’re not easy, Felix. I can see nothing gets past Felix.’

  Felix withdrew the crumpled notes and began slowly counting them out into a neat pile.

  So the garage lent you an MG.

  Nah, dred, I bought it.

  Is it. You must be doing all right.

  Weren’t that much. Been saving. Doing it up myself as a gift for Grace project for myself. A project car.

  You know why you bought that though, don’t you? Do you know? You don’t know, do you? Do you wanna know? I’m going to impart some wisdom on you, blud, get ready. You think you know why, but you don’t know …

  Felix heard it as clearly as any actual conversation with his father: it seemed to exist on the same plane of reality. Maybe it was simply like spotting a train very early, far down the track. The boys at the garage were to pick the car up later today and have it delivered to the resident parking bays in Caldwell. To do that they would have to ask his father for a parking pass. A little after that his father would call him. The prospect of this took the shine off the triumph that should accompany purchase. The further he got down Regent Street the worse it got.

  Felix, listen: you can’t buy a woman. You can’t buy her love. She’s gonna leave you that way. Love’s gonna leave you anyway, so you might as well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious.

  Felix passed in front of the Valentine kid with his leg in the air and arrow primed. Who would be happy for him? His thumb hovered over the rollerball on his phone, moving back and forth through the various digits of his siblings, but connecting with each a potential headache that made him hesitate and finally put the handset back in his pocket. Tia would have her children underfoot, and her loneliness and boredom turned easily to jealousy, even for things she cared nothing about, like cars. Ruby would only want to know what the car could do for her – when she could borrow it, where she could drive it. She lived in her twin’s spare room, had nothing and no one, and pitied herself deeply. She expected charity always, while simultaneously wanting the best of everything. Why’d you buy that wreck? Fool. Both twins had a horror of second-hand goods. Grace, too. He wouldn’t be telling her anything about it until it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line. Devon was the only one who might be interested, but you couldn’t call him, you had to wait for him to call.

  From Felix’s pocket a digital orchestra played a piece of classical music from an aftershave advert from his childhood. He answered it joyfully, but his love sounded stressed and skipped the hellos. ‘Did you go see Ricky?’ ‘Nah, sorry – forgot. I’ll call him.’ ‘How you gonna call him? I ain’t got his number – have you?’ ‘When I go back I’ll go past.’ ‘Downstairs called. The leak’s gone through the floor.’ ‘I’ll go see him, chill.’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘At my dad’s.’ ‘You show him? What did he say? Tell him I can order some more copies off the Internet. Actually let me chat to him.’ ‘Yeah, man. He’s looking through it. He’s into it. Told a lot of stories – you know how he is. Trip down memory lane, innit. Listen, I gotta go.’ ‘Put Lloyd on –’ An ambulance passed Felix on the street. ‘I’m on the balcony – he’s in the bathroom. Listen, I’ll call you back in a bit. I gotta go.’ ‘You gotta go! I gotta work.’ ‘True!’ The conversation descended into baby talk, and then briefly turned explicit. Grace was fond of proclaiming her ‘nastiness’, although in bed she was tame, almost prudish, and in their six months together Felix had not quite managed to unite the girl on the phone and the one in his arms. ‘I love you, baby,’ she said, and Felix repeated it passionately, trying to return himself to that moment of optimism before he’d answered the phone. Weird to think she was only a few streets from him, at this moment. Her manager in the background said something about a booking for twelve at two – she was gone again without saying goodbye. Like a ghost on your shoulder and then vanished, the everyday miracle. He remembered when you turned the dial with your finger. Sometimes lines would cross and four ghosts spoke. And now Felix Jnr and his nieces spoke to videos of each other. You wait long enough, the films come true – and everybody acts like it’s nothing. Still, he was glad he got to see the future. Touch and go for a while. A comic-book reader, sci-T fan, it had always been obvious to Felix that the future would suit him. Hollywood had nothing on Felix when it came to imagining the future. He didn’t even have to go to the movies any more, he could just walk down the street like this and see the whole damn spectacular playing in his mind. Script by Felix Cooper. Directed by Felix Cooper. Starring Felix Cooper.

  Anflex, my darling, how will you be getting home?

  Particle transfer. See you in a second, my dear Gracian. In a nanosecond.

  Shit like that. Just rolling in his brain. Sometimes he went and told a whole film in words to Grace, and she was totally into it, and it wasn’t just because she loved him: the fact was the films in Felix’s mind were blatantly better than anything people paid good money to see. Now Felix collided with a real live young man leaving a glass-walled video emporium, walking backwards through the double doors while waving goodbye to his friends still wrestling with their joysticks. Felix touched the guy gently on the elbows, and the stranger, with equal care, reached back and held Felix where his waist met his back; they both laughed lightly and apologized, called each other ‘Boss’ before separating quickly, the stranger striding back towards Eros and Felix onwards to Soho.

  On her street he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone and typed: On yr st. U free? The answer came back: Door open. He had not stood on this street for three months. His phone buzzed again: Five mins please. Why not pick up cigs? This addition was annoying: it put him back in the wrong position. He made his way over to the unventilated corner shop and spent a hot ten minutes in the queue, trying to finesse the brief speech he thought he had decided on, realizing in fact that he had decided on very little. Why did he need to come down here and say anything at all? She didn’t matter any more. News of her irrelevance should reach Soho without any effort on his part; she should just walk out of her front door and sniff it in the air. ‘Don’t need this,’ said the woman at the counter. She handed him back fifty pence. Someone behind him sighed; he moved aside quickly with the shame of a Londoner who has inconvenienced, even for a moment, another Londoner. The box of fags was in his pocket. Here was the change in his hand. He couldn’t remember anything about the transaction. He was sweating like a fool.

  Outside he tried to calm himself and realign with the exuberant mood in the street. The sun was an incitement, collapsing day into night. Young bluds had stripped to their bare chests as if in a nightclub already. The white boys wore flip-flops and cargo shorts and drank import beers from the bottle. A small gang danced mildly in the doorway of G-A-Y, on autopilot from the night before. Felix chuckled into his chest and leant against a lamp post to roll a fag. He had the sense that someone was watching and taking it all down (‘Felix was a solid bloke, with his heart in the right place, who liked to watch the world go by’) but when that fancy was finished there was nothing else for him to do. A car with tinted windows rolled by. It took a moment to
put together the fearful child in the passing reflection with what he knew of his own face. He looked up and over to her door. It was open; two of the girls stood on the doorstep chatting amiably with the Somali drivers one doorway along. Felix squared his shoulders, put a cheerful limp in his walk. (‘Sometimes you got to do what you got to do!’) But there was no kind of smile you could bring to these girls that would make them go easy on you. Chantelle was cutting her eyes at him when he was still twenty yards away. By the time he reached her she had already, as far as she was concerned, dispensed with greetings; she got a grip of his thin hooded top between two fingers, examined its material briefly and then released it again, like a filthy thing picked up off the floor.

  ‘You look summery. Jesus Christ. Mr Sunshine.’

  ‘This ain’t hot to me tho. I’m skinny – I need the layers.’

  ‘Long time,’ said the white one with the sour face, Cherry.

  ‘Been busy.’

  ‘Wouldn’t bother with Her Majesty upstairs, if I were you: get better down here.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Felix, and showed his gold teeth, but he had

  never been sure if upstairs truly was a separate world. Her Majesty upstairs swore it was. They used to argue about it. It didn’t matter now.

  ‘Can I go?’

  They were both big girls and it was their evergreen joke not to move for him, he had to squeeze between them. Felix led with his bony shoulders.

  ‘Like a chicken bone!’

  ‘Pure rib!’

  Cherry pinched his backside – three floors up he could still hear cackling. He rounded the last banister. Classical violins were going at it, you could hear taps running hard in the bathroom. At the threshold he was wreathed in steam.

  ‘Felix? Darling, is that you? Door’s open! Is Karenin out there? Bring the bastard in.’