“Yeah.” His tone is different again: lighter, excited. “We spent a whole summer doing it. Four of us: a couple of other guys, Ben and me. I mean, we were really roughing it. Grotty trains with no air-con, blocked loos. Days, weeks, of sleeping sitting up in hard plastic seats, eating stale bread, hardly washing our clothes. And then when we did we had to use launderettes.”
He sounds thrilled. Babe, I think, if you think that’s roughing it you don’t know you’re born. I think of his minimalist apartment: the Bang & Olufsen speakers, the iMac, all that stealth wealth. I kind of want to hate him for it, but I can’t. There’s something melancholy about the guy. I remember the oxycodone I found in his bathroom.
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“All over,” he says. “We’d be in Prague one day, Vienna the next, Budapest a few days later. Or sometimes we’d just spend a whole week lying on the beach and hitting the clubs every night—like we did in Barcelona. And we lost a whole weekend to food poisoning in Istanbul.”
I nod, like I know what he’s talking about, but I’m not sure I could point to all those places on a map.
“So that’s what Ben was up to,” I say. “Sounds a long way from a one-bed in Haringey.”
“Where’s Haringey?”
I give him a look. He even pronounced it wrong. But of course a rich kid like him wouldn’t have heard of it. “North London? It’s where we come from, Ben and I. Even then he couldn’t wait to escape, to travel. Actually, it reminds me of something—”
“What?”
“My mum, she used to leave us on our own quite a lot, while she went out. She did shift work and she’d lock us in from about six, so we couldn’t get up to any trouble—it can be a rough part of town—and we’d be so bored. But Ben had this old globe . . . you know, one of those light-up ones? He’d spend hours spinning it round, pointing out the places we might go. Describing them to me—spice markets, turquoise seas, cities on mountaintops . . . God knows how he knew any of that. Actually, he probably made it all up.” I pull myself out of the memory. I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone else about all of that. “Anyway. It sounds like you had a ball. The photo on your screensaver, that was Amsterdam, right?”
I look at Nick but he’s staring out into the night. My question is left hanging in the chill autumn air.
Concierge
The Loge
I’m watching the roof terrace from my position in the courtyard. I saw the lights come on a few moments ago. Now I see someone step close to the rail. I catch the sound of voices, the faint strains of music floating down. Rather a contrast with the sounds coming from a few streets away, the whine of police sirens. I heard it just now on the radio: the riots are beginning again in earnest tonight. Not that any of them up there will know or care.
The radio was a gift from him, actually. And only a few weeks ago I watched him up there on the roof terrace, too, smoking a cigarette with the wife of the drunk on the first floor.
As the figure next to the rail turns I realize it’s her, the girl staying in his apartment. She has somehow gained access to the penthouse. Invited in? Surely not. If she is anything like her brother I can imagine she may have invited herself.
In a couple of days she has gained access to parts of this building that I have never entered, despite working here for so many years. This is only to be expected. I am not one of them, of course. In all the time I have worked here I can only recall the great Jacques Meunier looking at me twice, speaking to me once. But of course to a man like that I am barely human. I am something less than visible.
But this girl is an outsider, too. Just as much as I am—maybe more so. Also apparently given to climbing, like her brother. Insinuating herself. Does she really know what she has got herself into here? I think not.
I see another figure appear behind her. It’s the young man from the second floor. I snatch in a breath. She really is very close to the rail. I only hope she knows what she is doing. Climbing so high, so quickly: it only makes for further to fall.
Nick
Second floor
Telling Jess about it has brought it back—that thrill. The buzz of shunting between different cities, playing endless rounds of poker with a battered old deck of cards, drinking warm cans of beer. Talking shit, talking about the deep stuff—often a mixture of both. Something real. All my own. Something money couldn’t buy. It’s why I leapt at the chance to reunite with Ben, in spite of everything. It’s not the first time I’ve longed to go back there, to that innocence.
I catch myself. Talk about rose-tinted glasses. Because it wasn’t all innocent, was it?
Not when our mate Guy nearly OD-d in a Berlin nightclub and we found him pouring water into his face, had to save him from basically drowning himself.
Not when we had to pass a bribe to a Hungarian train guard, because our tickets had expired and he was threatening to dump us in the middle of a vast pine forest.
Not when we nearly got our throats slit by a gang in a back alley in Zagreb after they’d stolen all our remaining cash.
Not in Amsterdam.
I watch Jess now as she takes a drag on her cigarette. I remember Ben telling me about her in a Prague beer hall: “My half sister, Jess . . . She was the one who found Mum. She was only a kid. The bedroom door was locked, but I’d taught her how to trip a lock with a piece of wire . . . An eight-year-old should never have to see something like that. It . . . fuck—” I remember how his voice broke a little, “it eats me up, that I wasn’t there.”
I wonder what that would do to you. I study Jess, think of finding her yesterday, about to steal that bottle of wine. Or appearing in this apartment tonight, uninvited. There’s something reckless about her—it feels as though she might do anything. Unpredictable. Dangerous. And given this morning’s outing she’s clearly got issues with the police.
“I’ve never been anywhere outside the UK,” she says, suddenly. “Apart from here, of course. And look how well this is turning out.”
I stare at her. “What—this is the first time you’ve been abroad?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “Haven’t had any reason to go before. Or the cash, for that matter. So . . . what was Amsterdam like?”
I think back to it. The stink of the canals in the heat. We were a group of young guys so of course we went straight to the red-light district. De Wallen, it’s called. The neon glow of the windows: orange, fuchsia pink. Girls in lingerie, pressing themselves against the glass, signaling that there was more to see if you were happy to pay. And then a sign: Live Sex Show in Basement.
The others wanted to do it: of course they wanted to. We were basically still horny kids.
Down a tunnel, down some stairs. The light growing dimmer. Into a small room. Smell of stale sweat, stale cigarette smoke. Harder to breathe, like the air was getting thinner, like the walls were pressing closer. A door opening.
“I can’t do this,” I said, suddenly.
The others looked at me like I’d lost it.