The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  ‘I can’t really imagine this happening again,’ Adam said. ‘It seems like some sort of awful one off.’

  He realized his mistake as soon as he’d spoken.

  ‘This is the third time something like this has happened,’ Scott said emphatically, leaping at the chance to redeem himself.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Adam said.

  The precociously young manager of a famous rapper had sent Meg explicit, wildly inappropriate texts on two separate occasions, he remembered now.

  Maybe it was LA, he thought. For all its veganism and alternativeness, it was still, at times, an unreconstructed place, apparently forever stuck in 1983. It was a place where the rich lived in the hills, literally looking down on everyone else. Where people drove purple BMWs, and you could meet a hippie who’d try to hard sell you real estate.

  ‘How was that situation resolved?’ Adam asked.

  ‘I think Jason gave Meg some tickets?’ Scott said.

  Meg reddened. ‘The tickets were nothing to do with what happened,’ she said. ‘He apologized and we made friends.’

  ‘Well, obviously this is a bit different,’ Adam said. ‘That was a friend going too far. And this was in a daytime professional situation with no, ah, reasonable excuse or claim to have misunderstood or—’

  ‘Exactly!’ Meg said.

  Adam breathed deeply.

  ‘Don’t start regretting your whole career over this idiot,’ he said. ‘You are brilliant at your job.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Meg said. ‘I don’t regret it. Actually, the only thing I regret now is not punching him in the dick.’

  ‘I can understand entirely,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll start with Alicia. We need to make an official complaint. Let me see what I can do.’

  ‘Maybe there’s, like, a support group or something, for this sort of thing?’ Scott said, sinking his chin low between his shoulders in an ‘I dunno’ shrug.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. ‘Why don’t you look into that, Scott? I’m sure you want to help too.’

  ‘Well,’ Meg said. ‘Maybe I could take some personal time next week?’

  ‘You mean some holiday?’ Adam was still confused about American terminology for this – language recently enshrined in a seventy-two-page staff handbook.

  Meg looked at him, eyes flashing. ‘You mean I have to use my own allowance?’ she said, her voice rising alarmingly.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Take some time. Take… three days?’

  Scott frowned.

  ‘OK, thanks,’ Meg said. She took a deep breath and sighed.

  ‘Well, let’s leave it there then,’ Adam said. ‘We can pick it up again whenever you’re ready.’

  ‘OK, sure,’ Meg said.

  Scott was looking meaningfully at him. Adam knew that he’d be hoping for a post-meeting debrief in which he could question his boss’s decisions.

  ‘Right, let’s call it a day,’ he said.

  * * *

  At Arturo’s, a new bar in Echo Park, which Adam favoured for its dim lighting and relative lack of pretension, Adam and Craig found a booth near the big rear window. The wooden deck beyond it was bathed in pink evening light, some of which leaked into the pints of IPA Craig slammed down.

  ‘Just this one pint,’ Adam said. ‘I’m running on empty.’

  Craig grinned, and held a finger out horizontally.

  ‘This is the edge,’ he said. With his other hand, he made two fingers into a pair of legs, one of them dangling dangerously over the ledge he’d made and trembling. ‘And this is you, you silly cunt.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Adam said. ‘That only on our little island can calling each other that be a sign of true friendship.’

  ‘Australia too. The Americans don’t know what they’re missing out on,’ Craig said. ‘Now come on. Cheer up.’ He held his glass out, and they clinked and drank deeply. Adam sighed with relief.

  ‘So, how’s your lady friend?’ Craig asked.

  ‘Haven’t heard from her since the gig. Think she only wanted me for my contacts.’

  ‘How’d she leave it?’

  ‘Something about her being crazy, and needing some time.’

  ‘Ah, screw it. She was a red frog.’

  ‘What?’ Adam said.

  ‘You know, in nature. A red frog. It’s basically telling you “I am freaking deadly. Do not eat me!” That’s her. She was telling you.’

  ‘But I did eat her?’ Adam said. Well, nibbled her anyway, he thought.

  ‘Yes, but you spat her back out.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that’s exactly—’

  ‘Good fucking riddance,’ Craig interrupted.

  ‘What about Philippa?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Ah, she’s a lovely woman. A real star. We’re going to be great friends.’

  ‘I do miss Angelina,’ Adam said, eyeing his drink.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Craig said. ‘You only think you do. Stop being so English and wet.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Craig cackled. ‘Anyway, I’ve got some good news.’

  ‘Go on,’ Adam said.

  ‘You and me are off to Joel Liebowitz’s pool party.’

  ‘Joel Liebowitz…’

  ‘Oh fuck you,’ Craig said with passion. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know who he is. You do read Billboard occasionally, don’t you? You know that’s essential for you to do your actual job?’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said, dishonestly. ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘The top fifty most important people in electronic dance music?’

  I don’t like EDM, Adam thought. A distant memory surfaced. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Of course. He’s the super-agent.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Craig said, taking a deep, relieved swig of his pint.

  ‘I dunno,’ Adam said. ‘Won’t it be…’

  ‘What? Full of beautiful, influential people who could help you with your career in the music industry?’ Craig said.

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Where?’

  Craig rolled his eyes. ‘The hills, obviously. In Joel’s new super-agent’s super-house.’

  Adam sipped his beer thoughtfully.

  ‘You know there’s about ten thousand people who’d murder their own puppy to go to this party?’ Craig said. His cheeks, Adam noticed, had actually reddened.

  ‘The thing is, Craig,’ Adam said, ‘will it actually be any fun?’

  Craig leaned back in his chair, the pink light settling over one side of his face. His eyes had taken on something Adam hadn’t seen in them before. A colder look.

  ‘Don’t be such a child,’ he said. ‘It’s work, but work can be fun too, can’t it?’

  ‘It used to be.’

  ‘If you’re so tired of it all, what are you doing here?’

  Adam didn’t reply.

  ‘Do you think it’d be different in any other job? Everyone has to network if they want to make it in life. And you can have a lot of fun along the way.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Adam said. ‘It all feels a bit shameful.’

  ‘’Twas ever thus,’ Craig said. ‘A girl took me to an art gallery recently to look at a Rembrandt. The fucker painted himself endlessly, apparently, and he did so in the same style as all the greats that went before him, to make it absolutely clear he counted himself among ’em. And in one of the descriptions, it says he married a woman with art world connections.’

  ‘I see your point,’ Adam said.

  ‘The guy was a furious networker. And this is in puritanical Holland. So stop acting like it’s something new and everything’s gone to shit and it’s all so absolutely dreadful.’

  They sipped their beers. ‘Let me ask you this,’ Craig continued. ‘Your dad. What did he do for a living? If he’s retired, that is.’

  ‘My dad’s dead,’ Adam said. ‘He died of a heart attack ten years ago.’

  Craig’s eyes closed briefly. When he opened them again, his annoyance had lift
ed away like vapour. ‘I’m sorry, Adam.’

  ‘It seems a long time ago now. He was a lawyer. If your question was going to be “was your dad’s job any different?” the answer is no. He was always at it, networking.’

  ‘I see,’ Craig said. ‘But you’re not sure, understandably, that you want to be like that?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can be. He was better at it than I am. More dignified. Work seemed to matter to him more than it does to me.’

  ‘The heart attack was due to overwork?’

  ‘The heart attack was due to smoking and drinking.’

  ‘Right,’ Craig said, raising his pint to his lips. ‘Did I ever tell you about my accident?’ he asked when he’d sipped again.

  ‘No.’ Adam looked at him.

  ‘A van knocked me off my Vespa, when I was still in Glasgow. Went over me, after. It almost killed me. I was twenty-five. Was in hospital for six months.’

  ‘Jesus, I’m sorry too,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t you worry about it now? Health, I mean, with all the partying?’

  ‘No. Less so than before. When you’ve bounced back from that shit, it puts it in perspective.’

  ‘Did you think you were going to die?’

  Craig grinned, showing teeth and winking. When he made this grin – which he often did – it gave him a rodent-like appearance that was perversely appealing.

  ‘To be honest with you,’ he said, pulling a fresh cigarette packet out of his jeans, opening it and knocking it on the table to raise its contents, ‘not once. Not because of anything special about me, I don’t think. Just because you don’t, do you, when you’re twenty-fucking-five?’

  He looked across the bar to the front window, beyond which a couple of other smokers were standing.

  He knows exactly who he is and what he wants, Adam thought. The bastard. I used to have that. All I know now is that I want to stay here. To not go back. To confront the past only in my memory. To disentangle myself from it, somehow.

  ‘And I don’t believe in all that shit about everything having a meaning,’ Craig continued. ‘But it all has a significance, doesn’t it? Seems it has with you. And in my case, it made me want to take over the world and party like a motherfucker.’

  He stood, cigarette and lighter in hand. ‘So that’s what we’ll do on Thursday. No arguments.’

  ‘OK,’ Adam nodded, raising a smile.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, he was walking down the hill towards Silver Lake, a little drunk and melancholy. He thought of his dad, picking at memories like painful little scabs.

  There was an argument they’d had, in the kitchen of the house he’d grown up in, which his parents had lovingly stripped of a lurid green paint, applied in the sixties, to restore to its Victorian glory.

  Exasperated at something Adam had said, his dad had stood by the kitchen sink, tall and formidable as ever, but unusually emotional. The fight had suddenly gone from him, and he looked as though Adam had hit him.

  ‘You don’t have any respect for my values or beliefs,’ he’d said, ‘so what’s the point? I’ve tried to show you the best way to live as I know it, but you don’t think I know anything about anything.’

  That’s not true, Adam wished he’d said. Even more so now. He dearly wished he was more like his father, and he dearly wished he’d been able to tell him so.

  As it was, he’d been dumbstruck and horrified by this awful moment of vulnerability. It was like a chasm cracking open in a trusted stretch of road.

  The sun had sunk low and red above the Boulevard, but the evening’s cool was yet to set in. Adam stepped through the pools of shade cast by the tall dirt banks that rose up either side of the street. High up in these, in the hollows between the trees, more homeless people lived, looking down on the sidewalks, doing whatever it was they did when evening fell.

  In the novels of one of his favourite writers, vampires lived in the trees in Los Angeles. The reality was the inverse, Adam thought now. Actually, it was people who’d had the life sucked out of them that ended up living up there.

  11

  In this age of grand stupidity, birds seemed increasingly clever to Adam. In fact, across the whole history of human folly, they had carried on doing pretty much the same thing.

  The revelation of what it meant to watch them had come to him shortly after he’d moved to LA. A favourite relative had visited, an eccentric uncle whose taste in books and wine Adam admired, but whose birdwatching habit he’d always considered faintly amusing. They’d driven to Santa Barbara to visit a distant cousin – a gentle, diffident widower who lived in an upscale apartment block on the edge of town. The three of them drove around the rolling green hills together, Adam staring up at the airy crags that jutted from their tops like exposed bone.

  ‘There’s a little wetland, by the beach,’ the cousin said. ‘You might be interested.’ He had the habit of giving a short, self-effacing chuckle after everything he said.

  ‘Oh, goody,’ Adam’s uncle, enjoying playing the Englishman abroad, had said. ‘Yes please.’

  The place turned out to be a car park for a beachside restaurant. Blond, muscled, tanned boys paraded in swimwear, throwing and catching an American football. Little groups of girls walked slowly between cars and the beach, arms folded over bikinis, expressions of practised boredom on their faces. A row of palms separated the parking lot from the sand itself, on which were beach volleyball courts. Most of the vehicles were new and expensive – Lexuses, BMWs and Audis. Even the driftwood on the sand looked upmarket, as though waiting to be turned into tasteful beach-house furniture.

  At the south side of the lot was a bank overlooking a small slough, backed by a swathe of very tall trees. Adam stared out at the scene. There were a few white birds in the water, and something with a very long beak and legs, pecking at the sand. He prepared himself for a tedious hour, and wondered if he could leave the relatives to it and go and have a drink.

  His uncle ran his green Swarovski binoculars over the trees and water. Adam glanced at their host, who shrugged.

  ‘Very interesting,’ his uncle had said, finally.

  ‘What do you see?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Well, it’s quite a scene,’ the older man said. He chuckled, as if everyone was in for a treat.

  ‘I guess you need the binoculars,’ Adam replied, becoming irritated.

  ‘Not necessarily. Not if we wait a few minutes, and get a bit of luck.’

  ‘So what’s going on?’ Adam demanded.

  ‘Well. Down here we have a curlew.’ He gestured at the bird on stilts, which prodded the ground with its ludicrous bill. ‘Those are mergansers. A type of duck. There’s a great egret.’ He peered at Adam over his glasses. ‘The thing that looks like a white heron. You know what a heron is, don’t you?’

  Adam nodded.

  ‘And several snowy egrets, those smaller ones. In the bank below us are night herons. They’re waiting for dusk, which is when they do most of their fishing.’

  Adam peered down below him. Sure enough, there were five or six squat, furtive-looking herons lurking in the bushes. Their eyes were red, their backs a smooth grey over white flanks.

  ‘Jesus,’ Adam said. ‘They’re sort of, evil herons.’

  ‘Night herons,’ his uncle repeated, peering through the binoculars again. ‘On that power line, over the river, that’s a kingfisher perching. It’s not fishing at the moment. Just watching out. Twitchy little fella.’

  ‘Ah yes, I see it.’

  ‘And in the trees are great blue herons. The type you’ll have seen before.’

  He pointed, and Adam made out tall, grey shapes in the branches, perfectly still, their U-bend necks and stiletto beaks tucked into the trees.

  ‘And watching over the whole scene, at the heart of this story, is the thing in that tree, there,’ his uncle said, passing the binoculars. ‘That’s why some of the other birds aren’t moving around much.’

  Adam was surprised at the clarity and scale through the
viewfinders, and had to look away again to find his bearings.

  ‘Don’t adjust the focus. Just run them up that tree,’ his uncle said.

  Adam did so. After a moment, the image was filled by a pair of sharp yellow talons, the legs above them like thick, scaled cable. Adam steadied the binoculars and lifted them another fraction.

  ‘Oh wow…’ he said.

  Sitting in the tree was a muscular raptor, its breast striped grey-white. Its bill was also tinged with yellow, its wide base culminating in a sharp hook. Its eyes were what struck Adam. They were huge black orbs – big as a human’s, it seemed to him – rimmed with more yellow.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  ‘A peregrine falcon. It’s the fastest creature on earth, actually.’

  ‘Does it eat other birds?’

  His uncle chuckled. ‘Oh yes, very much so. It’s like a sparrowhawk on steroids. That’s what it’s planning now, most likely. Rich pickings, here. The herons probably know it’s there. That’s why they’re all in their trees. It’ll eat most things given half a chance. Keep watching.’

  And Adam had. A few moments later, a small flock of white birds had flown left to right across the slough.

  ‘Now, perhaps,’ his uncle said.

  The peregrine exploded from its branch, flew for a fraction of a second, and then changed shape in the air. Its wings tucked away, it became a short, stout dart that fired itself at one of the white birds, stabbing down onto it from above.

  ‘It’s a tern,’ his uncle said, his voice tight with excitement. The peregrine smacked into the smaller bird with a lethal-looking thump, and Adam saw feathers puff outwards into the sky.

  ‘Got ’im,’ his uncle said.

  The little world before them erupted. The shorebirds took off, scattering in every direction like woodchips under an axe. The ducks vectored overhead, calling out in alarm. The herons stamped and shook in the trees, their evil cousins in the bushes beneath Adam’s feet shuddering and flinching. A wave of animal fear pulsed outwards from the slough, strong enough for Adam to feel it.

  ‘Like someone shouting “shark” on a busy beach,’ his uncle mused.

  Above, the peregrine made a lazy circle, a limp white shape hanging in an inverted U beneath it, and dropped out of sight behind the trees.