Once they were out of Hanmouth and on the road to the motorway, Mauro said, ‘I’m going to sleep. I didn’t sleep well last night.’
David hadn’t slept well either; the first time he had lain next to Mauro in a bed, and knowing nothing would or could happen after the evening. He had endured Mauro turning himself over like a dolphin in open seas, every five, every ten minutes. ‘It must have been the coke,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Mauro said. ‘It was good stuff. You had some in the end?’
‘Sam—you know Sam—he gave me some to take away,’ David said. ‘He gave me, like, half a gram.’
‘Oh, you’re lying,’ Mauro said. ‘He never gives you half a gram like that.’
‘Well, he did,’ David said. ‘It’s in my wallet.’
‘Yeah, you took it,’ Mauro said. ‘There was enough, they’ll never miss that.’
David controlled a surprisingly fierce uprise of temper. He pressed down on the indicator; the slip road for the London motorway unrolled in front of him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t steal it. You shouldn’t assume everyone’s like you.’
His meaning came across Mauro slowly, but when it came, it had to pain and insult him. ‘Fuck you, David,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to come away with you for the weekend.’
‘Yeah, well,’ David said.
‘I don’t think it was such a good idea,’ Mauro said.
‘Probably not,’ David said.
‘Hey, David,’ Mauro said. ‘If you’ve got some coke, give it to me. I’ll snort it off a key, while you drive. That’ll be fun, yeah?’
‘Forget it,’ David said.
‘Ah, you don’t have any,’ Mauro said. ‘You’re full of shit.’
‘I’ve got some,’ David said. Mauro took his sweater from his lap; rolled it up into a pillow; rested against the side window. Then, clearly, he thought of something to say.
‘Your parents, I don’t think they like me, not really,’ Mauro said. ‘I think they know we’re not together.’
David agreed, morosely.
‘I don’t think anyone would think it’s so likely,’ Mauro said.
‘I mean, those boys, the Bears—you know what they all said to me, about you? They all said to me—’
‘I can guess what they said,’ David said. ‘I can guess they said that you were fabulous, an amazing guy, so what were you doing with—yeah, I can guess. I’ve heard your stories before, Mauro.’
‘You think I make up the stories?’ Mauro said. ‘Hey, Mr Poppers. Look at yourself. You really think it’s so likely some guy like you, he’s with someone like me? What would be the sense in that, you know? You—what are you like?’
David admired the quick ear for idiom Mauro had, while recognizing that Mauro had not quite got it right: what are you like was, surely, an expression of admiration and wonder at excess, an affectionate comment that might have smoothed the way between the two of them this morning. But it would have been for David to say, ‘What are you like?’ with a shake of the head, to Mauro. In Mauro’s mouth it was a real question, and what David was like could only be answered with ‘I have no idea.’
‘I think I would like,’ David said carefully, ‘when we get back to London, I think I would like you to make a start on paying me back that two thousand four hundred pounds I lent you.’
‘That’s fine,’ Mauro said. ‘I don’t give a shit. I can pay you back now if you like.’
‘Good,’ David said. ‘Pay me back, then. It’s been fun, but, you know—’
‘I’m happy with that,’ Mauro said. ‘I want to see that guy again.’
David said nothing.
‘That guy, you know, that guy at the end. His name—he was the guy whose house it was. He was the lord. I liked him—he was the best. He was a fantastic shag. I want to see him again.’
‘Good luck,’ David said.
The motorway was clear and they did not speak. There were no lorries or coaches; there were only cars, widely separated and relaxed. On either side, green banks, planted with spindly and ineffective trees, and where the road curved round, a remote vista of moorland and high cloud revealed itself. A sign said it was hundreds of miles to London, where Mauro lived; it said nothing about David’s town. For a moment he envisaged his untidy, solitary flat, with nothing in it but detritus, as he had left it, and as he must return to it. Twenty miles of silence passed; Mauro put on a CD of dance music. It played for three or four minutes before David found he did not care for dance music of any sort, and never really had. He pressed the button and ejected the CD. Mauro said nothing, but rested his head on the side window, turning his face to the view.
In another half an hour, a sign came up for a motorway service station. ‘I’m stopping here,’ David said. Mauro said nothing. David signalled, slowed, turned off. The motorway had been quiet, but the car park was surprisingly full. He drove about, and then, not caring at all, parked the car at an angle, in the disabled bays. David considered that when the guardians came to berate the owner of the car, it would only be Mauro, who would not be getting out.
‘Do you want to get out?’ David said.
‘No,’ Mauro said. ‘I’ll stay here and sleep some. Can you leave the keys?’
‘Can I leave the keys?’
‘Yeah, so I can, you know, listen to some music while you’re gone.’
‘You must be fucking joking,’ David said. ‘You think I’m leaving the keys to my car with you?’
‘Fuck you,’ Mauro said. ‘I’m not stealing your car, David.’
David got out, nevertheless, his keys in his hand. In the old days—when he and his parents had taken a trip, when he was a child—these places had had their own identity. You would not confuse one for another: a bridge over the motorway that one boasted, the fish restaurant another was noted for, the blue plastic façade of a third. Now they were all subsumed in a general international corporatism; the sign on the motorway had been crested with a double identification, an American burger bar, a coffee chain. Whether they owned the site or not, their franchises were conspicuous to either side of the spread-open entrance; the floor-to-roof red-framed windows had been conceived as giving cheerful face-stuffing families a fine cheerful view of the car park, and indeed, some of those exact families were filling themselves up with complex interactions of sugars and fats without any reference to the time of day. To the right the coffee shop; to the left the burger bar; straight ahead the yob-symphony of the one-armed bandits and the sad CD choices of the miniature supermarket. David turned left. It seemed a long time since breakfast. Just today, he didn’t care what he ate. It hardly seemed to matter, and the burger bar’s sugary, vinegary, salt-imbued contraptions glowing in the illustrations above the servers looked like just the thing for a Sunday mid-morning comforting giga-snack.
He paid for a burger, a paper hod of chips, a catastrophic pail of vivid liquid, and sat down. Inside the box, the burger and bun had a sat-on appearance as ever, a flat grey tongue in the middle, far in appearance from the plump pillow in the photograph. He didn’t care: he ate it, feeling eyes on him. ‘Someone’s hungry,’ a Birmingham voice from the next table announced. He went on, hardly breathing between a mouthful of bun, a fistful of chips, a huge swill of fizz; he could feel in his mouth how disgusting it was, but could hardly stop filling it up; it was some lack in his mouth he was comforting by filling, and he went on, breathing heavily through his nose as he ate. He stared morosely, emptily, ahead of him, not engaging with a single gaze around him, feeling that he was making himself stupid as he stared and chomped and did not think, wanting to be ugly and gross and alone in the eyes of the world. Too soon, the burger was done, the last chips in his mouth; he felt that his mother would refuse to believe that he could make such a spectacle of himself over this gross, cheap, plebeian food at no later than eleven in the morning, and he got up, still chewing on the last of it, to buy another one.
If they had stared before, the other customers and, indeed, the servers now started t
o nudge each other as he came back with a new tray laden with another burger, chips and another huge fizzy drink. He didn’t care. Only in retrospect did it seem to him that the first burger had been delicious; he only understood that by the quick excess of this second burger, the way it formed a resistant bolus as if of cotton wool, expanding in the throat and blocking it. He made a nauseous, laborious gulp—it stuck for a moment, and he felt it would never go down, wondering for a second whether it was possible to Heimlich yourself in extremity. His face was wet with sweat after the effort of eating, his fingers greased, and gritty with salt; he felt flushed, hot fluids pumping, banging, through his limbs and joints. He hated Mauro. He never wanted to see him again. How could he have descended so low as to give such a person—such a thief, such an indiscriminate whore, such a—such a Mauro—the impression he could have been his boyfriend? He pushed more dry, heavy, fat-soaked food into his grease-and-salt-edged mouth, and thought very little of Mauro, waiting outside in the car.
In time, it was finished. Not caring, he wiped his fingers on his cherry-red corduroys, and got up. There was a pain in his side; just a stitch. It was an old-fashioned word, but a correct one. A needle and thread had been through his side and pulled tight. He could feel his heart thundering with the sugars and fats and stodge limping their way complainingly down his oesophagus. If he went back to the car, he knew, Mauro would suggest that they took some of Sam’s cocaine before they started again, and would probably finish it before they got back to London. David turned decisively towards the toilets.
There was nobody much about and the cubicles were the convenient sort without a gap below or above to discourage drug-taking and sexual congress. If I ever wanted to recommend to a traveller or tourist, David thought, the best place to shag, snort and shit in privacy, this would be top. It proved to have, too, a ridiculously convenient shelf above the cistern. David ran his finger along it, and it came up white; as he suspected, he was not the first person along this morning to have had the thought of a quick pick-me-up in the service-station toilet. Sam had been generous: there was a good half-gram in the little sachet. Enough for David; not enough to share. He poured out a fingernail’s breadth; hesitated, then, thinking of Mauro and his greed, poured out almost as much again, and then a little more. He fastened the sachet, returning it to his wallet—it was surprising how quickly you could get through half a gram—and then with credit card and twenty-pound note fashioned the drug into a neat, arm-long line, and snorted it in two quick motions, left nostril, right nostril.
It was good stuff, and almost at once David felt the need to shit. He unbuckled his trousers and sat down, plunging down on the seat more suddenly than he expected. It was good stuff. His heart was banging around the well-padded cage of his torso, like a volley with a wet sponge. This was good stuff. And he felt strange, cold at the extremities, though his face and head were pouring with sweat. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he really enjoyed cocaine as a drug at all. He would have to have a nice long sit-down before he got back into the car. And, actually, he wasn’t sure that he really did want a shit. If only he could have a shit, he would probably be perfectly all right. But it was good stuff, a fact that had sort of escaped him the night before. Mauro would kill, he thought, Mauro would kill to get his hands on a bit more of this coke.
34.
Mauro watched Mr Poppers go off towards the service station, stomping as he went. He would have something to eat, and his temper would improve. Anyone would see in a while that Mauro had done everything he was supposed to. The party with the Bears had been an unexpected extra, and what was David complaining about? He’d got fucked, too, hadn’t he? Mauro watched him go into the building. It was a shame he hadn’t left the keys so that he could put on Miss Platnum. He was stupid to think Mauro was going to steal the car; stupid, and insulting and rude, and not the sign of someone of education. But Mauro, who did not really care, rolled up his sweater into a wedge, placed it between his head and the window, and in a moment fell asleep.
When he looked again, twenty minutes had passed. Mr Poppers was calming himself down with food, Mauro expected. He yawned, a quick, feline motion, and shook himself, making a brisk, alert movement with all his limbs. He remembered that it was a record jackpot in the European lottery that weekend—it was 105 million—and for a few minutes, Mauro occupied himself thinking what he would spend it on. He would buy a villa on the Costa Smeralda; he would buy a jet-ski; he would have a palace in Rome; and a Ferrari, and a Rolls-Royce, and he would give his mother and father a hundred thousand euros each, and send Paolo Crichetti a thousand, too. He would have a blond German lover, who would always be twenty-four and exchanged for another on his twenty-fifth birthday, weeping. Oh, yes: Mauro would behave like a total bastard. There would be a huge red sofa curving round half a room, the one he had seen in a furniture shop in Milan once for twenty thousand euros; no, the room would be big enough for two, a double-height, double cube…
After a while, his invention ran out. ‘And I would buy a Tintoretto,’ he said to himself defeatedly. But he only knew the name and the three paintings they had had to study in school; he couldn’t really think what one you could realistically buy would look like. Mr Poppers was making too much of a point now. Mauro took out his mobile phone, and called Christian, who was on answerphone, and then he realized that for probably the first time ever he was sober and awake after eight hours in bed on a Sunday morning. There was no point in calling anyone else. He fumbled in the glove compartment. There was a bottle of water, half evaporated and warm, which he drank, and a bag of gelatinous sweets, two-thirds finished. He took the sweets out, one by one, peeling them one from another, and sorted them out in order: the red, the green, the orange, the black, the yellow, the purple. Mr Poppers hadn’t liked the black ones, of which there were seven, and he’d liked the green ones and the red ones, of which there was only one each left. Mauro tried a black one; it seemed all right. He lined them up like the material of a stained-glass artist on the dashboard. He wished David had left the coke, at least. That would have been friendly.
Mauro looked on his mobile phone, and he’d been sitting there for three-quarters of an hour. That was too much. He was going to fetch Mr Poppers. Not much caring about the car, he got out and slammed the door without having the means to lock it. He went into the burger bar, the coffee shop, the amusement arcade, the shop. David was nowhere. For a moment he considered whether David might just have left him in some way, now on his way back to London, or wherever it was he lived. But that made no sense. He wasn’t in the toilet, either, because the toilet was closed. A man in the service-station blue trousers and white shirt, with a serious-looking colleague, was telling customers that the toilet was unfortunately out of order, and being told off angrily. ‘No, I’m sorry, but you could use the Ladies,’ he was saying.
‘What is it, then?’ a man said.
‘Someone’s been taken seriously ill,’ the man was saying.
‘My friend came in, nearly an hour ago,’ Mauro said. ‘I can’t see him anywhere.’
The two service-station staff exchanged a look. ‘What does your friend look like?’ one said.
Mauro described Mr Poppers as honestly as he could. ‘He was wearing red trousers this morning,’ he said.
‘And his name is…?’ the man said.
Mauro did not understand the man’s pause, and they stood there contemplating the silence. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘He’s called David. He’s my friend.’
‘David…’ This time Mauro really did not understand the intonation, and the man had to say, ‘I mean, David what? What is your friend’s surname?
Mauro thought. It was a question he was sure he had once known the answer to. But in practice the answer had never—hardly ever arisen. What should he say? He said in the end, ‘I don’t know. I just call him David.’
‘OK,’ the man said, and it was only then that Mauro saw that though both men were wearing dark blue trousers and a white shirt; on
e of them was, in fact, a policeman. How could he have failed to notice that immediately?
‘I don’t know his name,’ Mauro said. ‘He’s my friend. I never knew his name. I don’t think he ever said. I called him—’
‘You don’t know his name,’ the policeman said.
‘Where is he?’ Mauro said.
‘I think I’d like you to come with me.’
Mauro gave the door to the toilet a long, penetrating stare as if some solution to his situation, to his future and to his past might lie behind it; and at that exact moment a policewoman came out of the men’s toilet. Mauro caught a glimpse inside; there was a huge, lumpish shape, lying without ceremony on the floor, a blanket over what must be a face and torso, but leaving the trouser legs uncovered in their vivid and surely unique scarlet. What had Mr Poppers—what had David—But in an instant, Mauro’s thoughts went to the car keys in David’s pockets, and the responsibility he was going to have to take, and also the £2,400, which no one knew about and no one would now care about, and how the fuck he was going to get himself home, and all that che cazzo, all that how-the-hell. Then the door swung shut again behind the policewoman, and Mauro, at the top of the stairs, went into the manager’s office and started answering as best he could questions about next-of-kin. He had never heard the English expression before, and he filed it away for future use.
SECOND IMPROMPTU
TWO HUNDRED DAYS
He had his breakfast, then he washed up the dishes carefully, humming a tune as he went. It was a nice day outside. You could see three miles off, easy, from the ridge. The house was tucked away. From the lane that ran along the top of the ridge, all that presented itself was a heavy thatch, in need of redoing; its surface was mossy and green, and small animals, he knew, were living in it. The house sat like a mushroom in the earth. Few people passed along the lane. It led to nowhere very much and never had. The road in and out of Hartswell, with its one pub and its bleak central square, ran on the other side of the village. There was almost no reason for anyone to come up here. He heard a strange step on the lane outside perhaps twice a week, no more than that. After the sun set, the outside was enveloped in a thick dark. When there was no moon or stars, your eyes might have been bandaged in wool.
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