The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  The sessions also gave him a good excuse to avoid travel and act largely through other people. To wear them like a glove, Adam thought. Oh God. Is the Autodidact wearing me like a glove?

  ‘Yes, well, I should probably have planned to be there anyway,’ Adam said. ‘Just lots going on here as usual.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Serena said.

  ‘I’ll book a ticket,’ Adam said.

  ‘You need to get in there with the guys themselves,’ the Autodidact said. ‘Direct action. Bypass Roger.’

  Oh Christ, Adam thought. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Yes, that makes total sense.’

  ‘Good man,’ the Autodidact said. ‘And there’s one other thing,’ he continued. ‘Serena, do you want to…’

  There was a pregnant pause. Adam closed his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, so, you know how we were talking about you needing more help there, with it being such a big job and everything?’ Serena said.

  ‘Ah, yes, I suppose so,’ Adam said.

  ‘Well, the good news is that Isa wants to come back.’

  A feeling of icy dread came over Adam, the flesh on the back of his neck crawling. He shivered. Isa. A strikingly clear series of images of her rose into his mind and blazed there. Turning to him with a complicit smile, naked, her golden-black skin damp with sweat. Her compact body and slim bare legs. The tattoo on the back of her left shoulder…

  ‘Ah…’ he said. ‘… OK.’

  ‘To be based out of your office,’ the Autodidact said. ‘In LA.’

  I know where my fucking office is, you fuckface! Adam screamed inwardly.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of an experiment,’ Serena said, in her optimistic tone. ‘But we think it’ll strengthen the office. Give you an extra set of hands. Give us more—’

  ‘Capacity,’ the Autodidact said, with barely disguised glee.

  ‘But…’ Adam said. ‘But what about her master’s?’

  Isa had left the company to go and study for an MBA.

  ‘She didn’t like it,’ Jason said.

  ‘Jason stayed in touch with her. He’s managed to get her back into the fold,’ Serena said.

  This can’t be happening, Adam thought.

  ‘OK,’ he said, slightly dizzy. ‘When is this going to happen?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Wow. Who… who will she report to?’

  ‘Me,’ the Autodidact said. ‘She’s going to report directly to me.’

  ‘Jason’s been reading a book called Remote,’ Serena said, voice swelling with pride. ‘It’s brilliant. All about how to manage staff in different places. It’s by the guy who founded Bandcamp.’

  ‘Basecamp,’ the Autodidact snapped.

  ‘Shit, yes. Sorry, mate,’ Serena said.

  ‘That… sounds great,’ Adam said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s brilliant really,’ Serena continued. ‘So many ways to make this work these days. Technology. All that… You should read it too!’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll add it to my list.’ Straight to the top, above Ten Methods for Killing Yourself in a Way That Will Upset Absolutely Everyone.

  ‘OK, well, let’s keep talking about it all,’ Serena said, evidently relieved to have broken the news. ‘Keep the discussion going.’

  ‘It wasn’t really a discussion though, was it?’ Adam ventured.

  ‘Well,’ Serena said, as though mildly hurt. ‘We just think it’s going to really strengthen the office there. It’s such a big job you do.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Autodidact said. ‘A very big job. Let us know how you get on at Red Rocks. Operation Bypass Roger.’

  ‘Will do,’ Adam said, and rang off.

  He walked out of the meeting room and quickly down to the lower floor storage cupboard, closed its door behind him, and began viciously and repeatedly kicking a giant, four-foot roll of bubble wrap, which remained there primarily for this very purpose.

  14

  ‘Adam.’

  He’d just reached the foot of the steps to his apartment when he heard a voice whispering his name.

  He glanced around, confused, but there was no one in sight. He started up the steps, but the voice whispered again, more urgent this time.

  ‘Adam!’

  ‘Stef?’ he replied.

  ‘Yeah. Down here.’ Adam looked at his feet, and saw that Stef was peering out at him from between two of the wooden steps. All he could see was a pair of big, quite pretty grey eyes. He flinched in surprise.

  ‘Pretend you don’t see me,’ she stage-whispered. ‘Act natural.’

  ‘… OK,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe sit on the step. Smoke a cigarette.’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said, sitting down.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Stef said, from somewhere near his bum.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam said quietly.

  ‘I’m trying to catch the guy who’s been stealing the mail,’ Stef said, her whisper containing real excitement. ‘I think he comes around this time, when I’m usually out.’

  ‘Right,’ Adam said, looking down the street.

  ‘I think it might be the crazy neighbour. You know, the one with the genocide signs?’

  ‘Yes. That might make sense.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I was gonna put a trap in there,’ she said. ‘Like a razor or something. But you can get into trouble apparently.’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Adam said, wincing at the thought. He liked to retrieve his mail by sliding his fingers into the slot rather than unlocking the box. ‘How long are you going to stay in there?’

  ‘Not too much longer,’ Stef said. ‘He might have seen you come back. And I need to crap.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Adam said. ‘How’s the writing going?’

  ‘Bad. But the insurance claim on the car came through. I love insurance claims. I make way more money out of them than I ever did from writing,’ she whisper-cackled.

  Adam laughed, as quietly as he could. ‘What are you going to do if the thief appears?’

  ‘I have pepper spray,’ Stef said. ‘I’ll take him down.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  ‘I think it is, if I tell the cops I was scared for my life.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Adam said. ‘Well, I’m going to go inside now.’

  ‘OK. If it goes down, come back out and help me get the guy.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Adam went up the steps and let himself into the apartment. There was half a bottle of white wine in the fridge, and he emptied the best part of it into an oversized glass and slumped onto the sofa.

  On the coffee table was the book he was reading: James Ellroy’s LAPD ’53, a collection of photographs of cops and crime scenes from that year, interspersed with Ellroy’s illiberal laments. There were tough men in suits, pinky rings and college ties. Bodies sprawled across dirty sidewalks. Fifties Fords and Buicks with bullet-pocked windows. He opened the book and flicked through it. One of the dead women looked a little like Stef, he thought. A creak under the house announced that she was moving around now, perhaps giving up on her vigil.

  He swigged the wine, feeling it loosen the tension in his shoulders and neck, its glow spreading within him. Perhaps, instead of lying around drinking and reading books, he should start looking for another job, he wondered. But doing what?

  Sometimes, on these lonely nights in, he thought of writing to Sofia. Maybe that way he could exorcize her. He picked up his phone and clicked through to her Instagram account. There was a new photo at the top of her feed, of her with her family. She was seated, her baby son on her lap, smiling out at the camera with her parents standing behind her. Her mother had placed a hand on Sofia’s shoulder, and was beaming with pride and happiness. Her father’s shock of unruly, curly black hair hadn’t thinned at all since Adam had known him. If they’d had a child together, he remembered now, and if it had been a boy, they’d talked about giving him her father’s name.

  God, he thought. How many
dreams die on any given day? Writing to her was a stupid idea. What would he say? Sorry, of course. But that would be no use to her now. It was a selfish idea, because what he wanted out of it was her forgiveness, or maybe even just her. He wanted to talk to her about his memories, and find out if she still recalled them too. He wanted to ask if she remembered walking on the South Downs, behind her parents’ house, during their first spring together. If she remembered the photo he’d taken of her as she moved through a patch of bright purple wildflowers, one hand in the air as she raised it to push back a strand of her long brown hair.

  Or the time one summer, with his parents, when they’d driven high up the River Barle to Cow Castle, on Exmoor, for a picnic. Adam had carried the heavy basket half a mile or so from the car, and they’d lain on a blanket together by the sun-splashed water and gorged themselves on red wine, sandwiches and cake. He and Sofia had stripped to their underwear to swim, and he’d been able to feel the mild shock in his parents when they saw her tattoos: a line of William Blake’s poetry on her ankle; a delicate spiral down her left side.

  There was a ducks’ nest on the far bank, and Sofia had swum close to it with a piece of bread, intending to feed them. When she’d thrown it in, the mother duck and her brood had all leapt out and swum off down the river, quacking in alarm. Back on the bank, as Adam and Sofia dried off in the sun, the ducks had become so tame that Adam had been able to pick one up, the moment caught in a photograph.

  There’d been five years between Duck Day and the day he lost her.

  He wanted to know if she, too, remembered the heat and light of their falling in love. If she remembered the things they’d said to each other. Her dream of making documentary films. Her fear of abandonment, because her father had left communist Hungary to commence the long process of moving his family to England.

  If she ever thought of their fucking, for long entranced hours in his basement room, or in her childhood bedroom in Lewes, or in her parents’ king-sized bed.

  He wanted to know if she’d felt the giddying pauses in her heartbeat that he had, on receiving a text from her during the day. If she’d also had a bright, warm light – like a personal sun – blazing at the back of her mind because they’d had each other.

  The thrill of it all. The sheer delight he’d felt, sitting at his desk and reading a text from her that told him how much she’d appreciated the grace and delicacy with which he’d orchestrated several moves on her, among their tangled sheets, that he was pretty certain were illegal in several states of the US. Or at an email telling him that ‘basically I put on and lose weight regularly, but you are expected to love me regardless’.

  He wanted to tell her that if only they’d met later, he’d have been better, he’d have been good. But he wasn’t better, was he? He was what he’d always been, it seemed. He was lying on a couch, feeling himself to be in trouble, drinking, tight up against his agony.

  After he and Sofia had been together a couple of years, his parents had taken them to Russia, where his sister was living. It was the last trip he’d ever make with his father. A few months later, he’d collapsed and died.

  They all took a sleeper train from St Petersburg to Moscow, and Adam and Sofia shared a wood-panelled cabin with his parents. Sofia took the bunk above his dad, and when the train got under way, they opened a bottle of Burgundy to celebrate. Sofia, typically clumsy, had spilled her glass over the knees of his father’s clean, pale slacks.

  ‘Well,’ his father had said, laughing it off in a way Adam had admired and even envied a little. ‘I suppose you two had better make a swift exit while we get them into the sink.’

  Leaving his parents in the tiny cabin, Adam and Sofia had stood with his sister and her boyfriend in the gap between carriages, drinking and smoking and laughing. The night air had roared past, sucking away the smoke. Sofia had spilled a glass of Baileys over his sister’s top.

  Then, the future had stretched ahead of them, like the endless-seeming rail tracks to Moscow. Sometimes he wondered if they were all still there, somewhere on time’s tracks, flying through the night, excited by the still-free future, preserved as if in amber by the smoky, breathless air of that black space.

  In Moscow, he’d stood beside a large brass plaque that had been indented into a public square. Surrounding it were staring homeless people.

  ‘You turn your back and toss a coin over your shoulder,’ his sister had said. ‘And make a wish. If it lands on the plaque the wish comes true.’

  Adam had done so. The coin had indeed landed on the large brass circle. The homeless people allowed it to settle before they ran and snatched over each other to grab it. The wish Adam had made had not come true.

  They didn’t, did they? he thought now. Not unless you made them.

  He had cut what he and Sofia had grown together off at the stem. He had killed off his better selves, and was left with this one. A bit less skinny, a bit sadder, a bit older.

  How, he wondered, can you go about liking yourself, when you’ve been such a total cunt?

  An image of Isa surfaced in his mind, spread out before him in a squalid hotel room. He groaned, stood up, and went back to the fridge to open a fresh bottle.

  PART TWO

  15

  On for tonight? the text from Craig said. It’s warm out, and daddy wants a brewski.

  Thursday had come, and Adam, too, was ready for a drink. Meg was back in the office, and he hadn’t dared ask her to turn off the loud hip-hop she was playing. The charm of the rap Adam had grown up on, and had once loved ardently, seemed to have vanished. The zeitgeist now was for generic beats, autotuned vocals, and the blandly diaristic lyrics of unpleasant men rambling endlessly about money and sex.

  In the end times, he thought, this will be the soundtrack. When all that’s left of civilization is the charred, smoking ruins, the only sound will be one of these songs, playing from a dying, discarded mobile phone.

  ‘She like that dick up on the whip,’ the rapper on the latest song was saying, ‘so I call her hood rat.’

  Adam frowned, trying to focus on the Expedia page he had open and the flights to Denver he was reluctantly searching for. Another song had started, a Trumpian anthem about moving commas around in large sums of money.

  Meg, seated at her desk, nodded her head and shimmied her shoulders to the song.

  ‘Sick,’ Scott said, raising two fingers in the air, pressed together to create a gun-like shape.

  ‘I know, right?’ Meg said.

  Sick-making, Adam thought. He checked the flight details and hit the button to purchase them, then picked up his phone.

  Def on, he replied to Craig. Bar first?

  Hell yes. Donnie’s. 7 p.m.

  Donnie’s Distillery was a sports bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, which for some reason Craig seemed to favour. Adam wasn’t sure if it was ironic, or whether even Craig occasionally needed a break from the tyrannical cool of the music industry.

  They were seated in a small plastic booth, surrounded by a mixture of tourists and hard-bitten local drinkers. TVs seemed to be everywhere, playing a bewildering number of American sports. A waitress, whose large, prominently displayed breasts Adam had tried and failed not to notice, had served them a pitcher of beer along with two cold plastic glasses.

  This was a different side of LA – geographically and culturally. It was tourists, boob jobs and beer pitchers. It could’ve been the bar Sarah Connor was attacked in in Terminator.

  ‘So the party,’ Adam said. ‘It’s at his house? I assume that’s completely epic?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Craig said, sipping his beer. ‘He’s made a lot of money.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Adam said. ‘Maybe I should have been a booking agent.’

  ‘You’re not cut out for it,’ Craig said, staring at a screen somewhere above Adam’s head. ‘You have to go to festivals and hang around the agents’ compound arguing about who should suck whose dick.’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Yes, there’s a
lways a payoff, thank God.’

  ‘You should’ve been a manager,’ Craig said. ‘Like me. That way you wouldn’t have to sit in a bloody office all day.’

  ‘Yes – what exactly do you do all day?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Arcane manager stuff. Dark arts.’

  ‘You sit around in your pants looking at Instagram, don’t you?’

  Craig laughed heartily. ‘I seem to be largely sitting on planes these days.’ He swung his legs out of the booth. ‘Back in a mo.’

  Adam gazed blankly at a sports screen, spinning a beer mat on the table. After a moment, the waitress reappeared, her large, tanned thighs squeezed into a pair of tight cut-offs above knee-high leather boots, the smell of her fragrance swirling in the booth’s air. She had very big lips too, Adam noticed. He wondered if they’d been somehow enhanced, how you were supposed to tell these things.

  ‘You guys doin’ OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes thanks,’ Adam said.

  Craig reappeared as she departed, and appraised her from behind. ‘Jesus wept,’ he said.

  ‘Quite,’ Adam replied.

  Craig turned to him, a devilish light playing in his eyes. ‘Go to the toilet right now,’ he said. ‘The cubicle.’

  ‘Why? What have you done in there? If it’s some sort of spectacular turd then I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘Go. Now.’

  Adam stood, and wove his way through a group of people playing with a basketball game and some others whooping and cursing around an air hockey table. At the long bar, a row of individual drinkers stared up at the TV screens.

  There was no one in the toilet cubicle. Adam entered it, closing the small door – it had a large gap at its bottom and top – and found Craig’s iPhone atop the cistern, a long line of cocaine on its screen.

  ‘Ah,’ he said to himself. ‘Lovely.’ His resolutions drifted into the mists at the back of his mind.

  Peering over the top of the cubicle door, he rolled up a twenty, turned, and snorted the line with a flourish.