The Edge Read online

  ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘You’ll have to make some effort, you know.’

  Adam’s sister lived in Malaysia. While there’d been no open conflict between them, one appeared to have grown slowly, like a cancer. It seemed to him that she thought him a fool.

  ‘I’ll write to her.’

  ‘When are you going to come to England?’

  ‘Christmas, I think.’

  ‘To London?’

  ‘No, Mum. I’ll come to Somerset.’

  ‘What about moving back properly?’ she said. ‘Have you got it all planned?’

  The chance of his move had come at the same time her condition had been diagnosed. He’d told her it would be two years at most, and he’d meant it at the time. ‘Well, you must take the opportunity,’ she’d said. ‘That’s what they say, isn’t it?’ And she’d quoted his father. ‘“You only regret what you don’t do.”’ His father, though, hadn’t been quite as experimental in his approach to life as Adam had.

  ‘They want to keep me here a bit longer,’ he said. ‘I’m still going to come back, eventually.’

  She seemed to flinch, but that was one of the things she did whether there was a stimulus or not. How could he tell what had caused it this time?

  His fists were clenched painfully, and he relaxed them. There was a Xanax in his bathroom cabinet, he remembered. Someone at a party had given him one when he’d asked what they were like. Until now, he’d been too scared to try it.

  His mother’s face had turned downward, like a deactivated radar dish.

  ‘I’ll look forward to Christmas,’ she said, her voice slurring.

  ‘Mum?’ he said.

  ‘Hmm,’ she grunted.

  ‘Is there anything I can send?’

  ‘No, love. I’m OK. Lovely nurses here.’

  From somewhere behind her, another lady shouted something.

  ‘I’ve been making dishcloths,’ his mother said. ‘Want one?’

  ‘It’s alright, Mum.’

  For a moment, he simply watched her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  The screen went black.

  3

  He’d dreamed of Sofia, and his thoughts were choked with her when he woke on Wednesday morning. From bitter experience, he knew that there was only one solution to this: get straight out of bed and into the day’s distractions.

  Mornings in LA were beautiful, which helped. He walked through to the living room and raised the blinds, banishing the ghosts of the previous evening. Standing by the window, he took deep sips of coffee and looked out. The world beyond was bathed in a soft, hazy light that hung over the world like a golden veil, softening the lawns and sidewalks and the palm fronds high overhead.

  If I could just stand here for a while, he thought. Leave this new day as a canvas yet to be spoiled. But that was impossible. This moment of purity and calm never lasted long, because every weekday morning was ruined by a torrential downpour of emails.

  Even if he’d lately resisted the temptation to scan them in bed, on his phone, and thus delayed the panic they induced, they’d still be there, waiting. A row of a hundred or so bolded, pregnant subject lines.

  Adam worked in the music business, for a company whose head office was in London. Once, this company had been a fringe affair which had quietly but consistently released records across the spectrum of guitar music. More recently, in the words of its proud, online mission statement, it had ‘hybridized’ to become a ‘full-service, boutique musical solution-provider’, offering marketing, distribution, publishing, synchronization and campaign conceptualization to clients who remained – despite their hopeful sense of contemporary digital empowerment – musicians, pure and simple.

  Two years earlier, due to a fortuitous combination of market conditions, technology-driven consumption, depth of back catalogue and one or two minor hits, it had suddenly found itself attracting the attention of bigger concerns. After a year or so of tense wrangling, the majority of its shares had been acquired by a large Norwegian tech firm.

  This firm had made tens of millions by creating software that enabled them to automate a complex system of international publishing royalty collection. Now, with money pouring back into the business of recorded music, they wanted a piece of the gold rush. Best of all, they were happy to be silent partners – at least as long as the hits kept coming.

  The results had been twofold: the financing had become available to set up an American headquarters in Los Angeles, and things, as Adam saw them, had all got rather serious.

  Every morning, by 7 a.m. his time, the London HQ had filled his inbox. The Brits were in the middle of their afternoons; that angriest time of the day, when lunch was a distant memory, energy was flagging, blood sugar levels were dropping, and home – or the pub – was still hours away. What could be more fun than sending moody emails to people who’d had the sheer, bloody good fortune to be sent to LA, and now the audacity to not even be online yet?

  And, he had to admit, there were signs that he might not be cut out for this bold new era. Adam’s forthright management style, dependable enough in his previous role in London, didn’t seem quite fit for purpose for professional life in Los Angeles. He’d recently discussed his troubles with a likeable, ageing crustacean of a man who managed musicians for a living.

  ‘Passive aggression, dude,’ the man had said. ‘It builds up. Email is like leaving notes for your roommate. You gotta communicate.’

  Adam told him that he was having problems managing younger people.

  The man guffawed. ‘Tell me about it,’ he’d said. ‘Little bastards, aren’t they?’

  The consultation had thus been only partly useful.

  At 7.55, Adam stuffed his laptop into his hiking pack and swung it onto his back. Peering through the front window, he checked his landlady wasn’t on her porch, and took the steps down onto the street. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his landlady. On the contrary, in fact. But the morning was no time for conversation. The earlier he got to work, the sooner he could leave.

  At the corner of Coronado Street and Kent, a tall, skinny woman was standing, her legs heavily tattooed below her tiny cut-offs, a miniature dog at the end of a lead. She was staring at her iPhone through reflective aviator sunglasses, but she looked up from it to wish Adam good morning.

  The dog stared at him with bulbous black eyes. It lowered its trembling, bony little behind towards the grass, and produced a chain of droppings as Adam approached. He picked up his speed, not wanting to see the woman reaching down to scoop them up. She, he knew from prior experience, wasn’t one of the culprits that left their dog shit uncollected on the narrow strip of grass between the stairs to Adam’s apartment and the place he parked his car.

  Most days, he walked to the office. An optimal existence in LA meant living reasonably close to the place you had to work. The sun was already hot, and he felt its blaze against his high forehead. Luckily, it was a morning on which he’d remembered to smear himself in sun cream.

  A man in a California Republic t-shirt was strapping his daughter into the back of a battered black Prius. The girl grinned at Adam, as though recognizing a favourite person, but then said, ‘Oh oh!’ and pointed at him warningly. Her father grinned and shook his head, and they, too, exchanged good mornings.

  These small acts of friendliness were one of many aspects of LA that Adam liked. In London, the rule had seemed to be that only with your very closest neighbours, only the ones you truly couldn’t plausibly pretend not to recognize, should you ever exchange a pleasantry. To wish an actual stranger good morning in the street would have come across as borderline psychotic.

  Adam turned up the hill onto Sunset Boulevard. The bear on the California Republic t-shirt had got him thinking about them again. Bears had been much on his mind of late, ever since he’d seen a pair of them while driving to a hike in Yosemite. He’d made a recent, solo vis
it to the national park and carried out a long, solitary trek to a remote peak. He’d planned to think about important things while he did so. What he actually thought about was bears. Seeing them on the way to the trailhead had lent the experience a frisson of fear.

  If I was a bear, he thought now, setting off up the hill towards Echo Park, I’d have been kicked out of the bear colony for shagging the other bears’ females and starting too many fights. I’d be one of those manky old solo bears that goes mad, and starts attacking humans, and ends up being shot dead by park rangers. Like the one that got Grizzly Man. The one they cut open and found bits of Grizzly Man and his girlfriend inside.

  Might it be such a bad way to go, he wondered? The shooting dead by park rangers bit, not the eating Grizzly Man part. If pressed to choose a method of dying, other than quietly in one’s sleep, Adam was certain that surprise sniper round would be the way to go.

  He’d often dreamed, too, of going and living by himself in the woods. The closest he’d managed was Los Angeles, which admittedly was a lot closer to nature than London had been.

  He loved LA, actually. He loved the space and the wildness. He loved the wildlife – the skunks, coyotes, raccoons and hawks that played on the lawns, menaced the accessory-sized dogs and haunted the skies. He loved the food, the ocean and the brightness. The blue skies, white walls, lofty green palms and scarlet bougainvillea. He loved Griffith Park, with its huge, cliff-clinging wilderness, its lonely mountain lion and its Art Deco observatory. He even liked the people who wished him good morning as their dogs took a shit, they strapped their children into their Priuses, or they watered their gleaming, outrageous lawns.

  In fact, the only thing he no longer loved, he realized with an icy shudder, was his job. His entire reason for being there.

  It wasn’t the job’s fault, really. Not at all, in fact. It was certainly his. Most people would have killed to do what he did. He knew how to do it quite well, too – he just didn’t want to any more. He felt too old for it. Sitting in meeting rooms, nauseated by promotional posters, wall-sized Apple screen savers, affected accents and interrogative statements.

  He felt it ridiculous and undignified, at the age of thirty-six, to spend so much of his time discussing the rising and falling cool-stock of a set of strangely monikered young people, whose work was becoming increasingly indistinguishable to him. More and more often, he found himself feeling as though he was trapped in a TV satire about youth marketeers.

  The question was: what on earth could he do next?

  His best friend in LA was a charming Scottish maniac called Craig. Adam found Craig exciting. Craig, in turn, found Adam funny, though largely, Adam suspected, in the sense of laughing at him, rather than with him.

  ‘Your problem,’ Craig had once told him, ‘is that you got your dream too early, and now you want another one.’

  Adam thought he might have been able to content himself with the first, if it wasn’t for two things. Firstly, his boss, the company’s cerebral matriarch and founder, would soon be retiring. This had led to the rise of her right-hand man, Jason – or, in Adam’s mind, the Autodidact. An alpha male in new man’s clothing; a quoter of modish popular science, at-desk meditator and possessor of a frightening certainty and zero self-doubt.

  The Autodidact had joined the company five years earlier, from a larger, rival label. Before then, he’d had a career in finance in the City of London. It seemed to Adam that, since leaving it, he’d been making up for lost time. The independent music world was not known for its fine business brains, and the Autodidact had hit the label like a hurricane, much to the boss – Serena’s – delight.

  He had repurposed the firm and executed its acquisition, and was thus the man who had brought in the big money. Subsequently, and consequent to this shift in power, came the second problem: the company had become even more successful.

  Earlier in his career, Adam had happily worked for an esoteric punk label in London. He hadn’t made much money out of it, but he’d been younger then. Life was more exciting. And he’d had Sofia. The imprint’s music was good, and suited his contrarian instincts. It had even won a couple of prizes.

  Sadly, its lack of vacuity had been brutally punished by an equal lack of commercial success. The label had gone out of business, and Adam had been snapped up by his current employer. And there he’d been for the last nine years, steadily rising up its ranks, until one day Serena told him that his talents might be best spent setting up a North American office.

  So that was what he’d done. And in California he’d found a city he loved, and a first real taste of professional success. He just hadn’t enjoyed the latter as much as he should have. Recently, via a couple of the Autodidact’s strategic signings – or, in his language, ‘pivots’ – the label had started to compete in the commercial alternative rock market. It had done so by picking up a handful of young guitar bands who’d incorporated the high-octane drama of American electronic dance music into their sound.

  This had proved a heady combination. Young audiences were primed to fall for dance’s drops and basslines, especially if delivered via the recognizable, time-tested format of the four- or five-piece band.

  The industry felt the same way. ‘These dance guys,’ a TV booker had once told Adam. ‘It just looks like they’re making sandwiches up there.’ But even these ageing, harassed cultural gatekeepers knew that electronic music had hit America, and they were afraid they’d miss out. They just felt safer in booking bands who still wielded instruments.

  Adam’s company had offered them a solution. But it wasn’t stopping there. The very latest crop of signings still featured guitars in their live or televised shows, but their use was little more than symbolic.

  And the music was unremittingly awful; a sort of lowest common denominator mulch that Adam loathed. It was a soundtrack for the lives of the wilfully generic; sterile, market-ready, laser-targeted. Cynical and sappy all at once. A populist glut that bypassed the arbiters of the mainstream media and appealed directly to the public’s worst instincts. It was music for people who never read books and spent most of their lives staring at pictures on social media platforms.

  With the conquering of this lucrative niche had come a need for a new breed of staff. People who had once worked at major record labels; people who actually liked the musical mulch. People who would say ‘cool’, and mean it, when a narcissistic twenty-two-year-old with a silly hairdo said he wanted Mick Hucknall to feature on his album. The price of success, it seemed, was terrible music, and worse people.

  The problem with success, Adam thought, resettling his backpack on his shoulders and wiping the sweat from his brow, was that it raised the stakes. It raised you. It lifted you too far off the ground, too quickly. It made you dizzy, which was no good, not when you’d abruptly found yourself with much further to fall.

  Here, close to the company’s top, he felt precarious. There was one person even closer to that narrowing pinnacle. He was the Autodidact, and his kicking legs threatened to break Adam’s grip and send him tumbling.

  Here in LA, his first dream had died. It wasn’t the last life had to offer though, he was sure of that. There was still birding, and walking in the mountains. There were novels to read. There were women and wine. There was even Angelina.

  He wasn’t sure that counted as love though, at least not yet.

  One thing he was sure of was that he had to keep the job he no longer loved. If he didn’t, he’d have to go back to London, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. London was a graveyard for his former life. A city full of angry ghosts. And beyond London was the far-flung west. Home was the word that came to him, making him shiver despite the heat. Home, and duty.

  He spent the rest of the short, steep walk trying to decide if bears did actually live in colonies. By the time he’d reached the bridge across Glendale Boulevard, and the final stretch to the office, he was sweating freely. When will I learn to walk slowly? he asked himself. He’d done it again. It
was no good walking like a Londoner, not here, in this heat. Now he was going to arrive at the office covered in sweat, again, shirt plastered to his back and already looking like he’d been wearing it for a whole day. He really must remember to slow his pace.

  It was barely considered normal to walk in LA, let alone to do so at such speed. Adam knew this because everyone he passed on his way to work – from lumbering bums to slow female joggers – flinched as he drew close to them, certain that his looming, speedy approach could only bode ill.

  Still, he thought, there was no point slowing down now. Might as well get into the air-conditioning. Maybe he’d have time to nip home after work. Grab another shirt before the evening’s horrors.

  Tonight, there would be no slow saunter down the LA River. No chance. There was going to be an industry showcase on the office bloody roof.

  And there was the office now, towering above him, and everything else in this patch of Los Angeles. Originally an architect-designed, four-storey home, it was situated a little way down Echo Park Avenue, a stone’s throw from the park itself. Adam had overseen its purchase, making use of the generous funding injected by the company’s new overlords. The house had cost almost three million dollars.

  From street level, a double-fronted garage with frosted glass windows rose into a large, forbidding concrete wall. Above this, what looked like a series of massive, pale-grey Portakabins sprouted from each other. The upper floor was made of a symmetric pair, whose frontages leaned out at an angle, each featuring a wide, horizontal window that gazed down at the street like a malevolent robot’s eyes.

  Topping it all off was a bright steel railing, which surrounded the large roof garden and elevator tower and gave the robot building a spiky, lopsided hairdo.

  Behind the concrete wall, hidden from the street, was a steeply sloping cactus garden. Adam occasionally stood at the window near his desk, looking down at its lethal spikes and spines and imagining a doomed escapee tumbling down the bank, avoiding the robot building’s lasers only to be impaled on the vicious, indifferent prong of a giant agave.