The Edge Page 6

  ‘Can you move down?’ someone screamed from the back.

  ‘There’s no room!’ an unseen woman replied.

  ‘Oh my God,’ someone said.

  ‘Shit,’ Scott said to Adam. ‘What are we gonna do?’

  Adam took a deep breath and forced his way through the path of least resistance, heading for the microphone. Dropping the Hugh Grant, he did his best at projecting authority with firm ‘excuse mes’.

  He reached the taco stand as another big surge hit him. A petite woman in brown sunglasses and a denim jacket lurched into him, spilling her drink onto his chest.

  ‘Ow!’ she said, trying to turn around and see what had hit her.

  Adam lifted himself onto tiptoes. He was only ten feet from the band now. If he could just get to the microphone…

  The taco chef was pushing someone away from his grill. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You gonna get burned.’ He saw Adam. ‘Too many people on this roof, man.’

  Adam nodded, trying to push his way past a tall, bearded man in aviators. The man pushed back.

  ‘What’s your problem, buddy?’ the guy asked.

  ‘This is my event,’ Adam told him. ‘I’m trying to sort out what I’d have thought is the fairly obvious problem.’

  The man went quiet, still bristling, as Adam edged around him. Almost there.

  Just then, something slammed into him from behind. The whisky in his right hand flew away from him, its contents splashing over the gas-fired grill.

  A flame reared up, and, bent by the breeze, ignited a stack of paper napkins on the grill’s shelf. Smoke billowed from them, engulfing the patch of roof around Adam and drifting rapidly towards the band.

  Someone screamed, and then suddenly lots of people did.

  ‘There’s a fire exit, head for that,’ a man yelled.

  ‘Oh my God!’ someone wailed.

  After that, as Adam remembered it, very little was voluntary. Caught in a tight bunch of human bodies, he was carried forward, doing his best to keep his footing. As the smoke cleared, he saw the band’s singer, turning, afraid, as the swarm of people surged towards him. He moved through the open gate to the short gangway between the roof and the fire escape. For a moment, he seemed frozen by indecision. Perhaps, Adam wondered later, he hadn’t thought it seemly to run? Either way, when the mass of bodies reached him, funnelled as it was into this narrow space, it simply tossed him aside.

  Adam remembered the way he grabbed for his baseball cap the moment before he realized that was the least of his worries. It really did go quite slowly. It seemed to take the singer a dreadfully long time to fall the twenty-odd feet to the concrete path below.

  When he hit it, it was clear from the way his legs were arranged – bent out each side at crazy angles – that he’d broken both of them. Thankfully, he’d missed the closest prongs of an agave by some distance.

  ‘Everybody CHILL,’ the taco chef shouted authoritatively. Adam glanced over to see him pouring a bottle of water over the napkins.

  Either side of Adam, the crowd had frozen. People in baseball caps and sunglasses and angular tattoos, chunky jewellery and beards and emphatic haircuts and denim jackets and bright, pristine designer sneakers were leaning over the railing, phones in hand, taking pictures and videos of the writhing singer, their expressions impassive. Another species, Adam thought. A newer one.

  A girl with neck tattoos and shaved platinum hair pushed her way to the front, pressing herself against him as she stood on a railing, expertly zooming her phone’s camera onto the singer. After she’d taken her shot, it froze momentarily on the device’s screen – clear, sharp and perfectly composed. When Adam recalled this image much later on, it struck him that, in very different circumstances, it might have made an excellent album cover.

  7

  If I could go back in time, Adam wondered, when would it be to? He was lying in bed, the sheets tangled around him, damp with sweat. He thought he might have slept for a couple of hours at best. When he’d woken, the past, as usual, was pressing on his mind. Competing even with the nightmare of the previous evening. For once – the present unthinkable – he took refuge in it.

  There were so many choices. So many moments that might have allowed a different path to be chosen. His boss, Serena, had once told him on a train journey to sign a shoegaze band in Glasgow, her frizzy grey-black hair occasionally tickling his left ear, that life was a progressive closing down of choice. Each time you made one, she’d said, spreading her hands wide and moving them together, like a slow-motion clap, you effectively rejected many others, until eventually you were on a defined trajectory. You could always try to change it, to cut across to another one, but it would be harder the further along you were.

  Serena had studied Heidegger at university, and Adam was fairly sure that was where this had come from. He remembered a little bit of the existentialist’s philosophy himself. Being and Time. Anxiety as the state induced by being truly confronted with reality, every comforting delusion momentarily stripped away. If that was the case, Adam’s world was certainly getting realer.

  If only, like Serena, he could remember all the useful things he’d learned more clearly. The knowledge she had at her fingertips was astonishing, as was her ability to explain and impart it. More than that, it was Serena’s capacity for applying this learning to her own life that impressed Adam. It seemed to have made her path a good one. She’d spent her twenties in the London punk scene, presiding over a rotating household of interesting characters in a ramshackle terrace in Ladbroke Grove. In her early thirties, she’d decided to straighten out enough to apply herself to something, and founded the label.

  It was terrible, Adam had thought on that flight, squeezed into his seat and considering Serena’s words. With every choice you made early in life, you killed off another self, left them to rot by the wayside. Until eventually whatever was left simply ended up being you. What if one of the other yous you’d left behind had been better, more worthwhile, and more deserving of life?

  As a child, he’d been fond of Choose Your Own Adventure books. He’d often thought back to them since. If only life was as simple as keeping your finger between the pages, so that you could quickly jump back if the werewolf had got you, someone important had died, or you’d done something horrible to somebody you loved.

  The problem seemed to be that he was so bad at knowing when he was happy. Looking back, there’d been many times he’d been truly, genuinely so, and yet he’d never seemed to realize when it was happening. As a result, whenever he had found happiness he’d ended up wrecking it.

  Going back in time was something that regularly preoccupied him. The clearest point to hop back to would be the day he bumped into Sofia, in an alleyway in east London, twelve full years earlier. Then, she had still been simply the beautiful, aloof girl from university, whom he only knew to say hello to. All the history they’d made together depended on that random chance.

  It had been one of those early spring days in London, wet and newly warm – or at least no longer cold. Strong gusts of wind blowing occasional sprays of rain, and carrying a scent of defrosted rot and damp. As he remembered it, the wind lent a drama to the day, as though the world could be felt turning, the air blasting down the alleyway and blowing Sofia’s long, dark hair about her face.

  They’d greeted each other, and he’d asked her how she was, and she’d told him things weren’t going so well, actually. That in fact, they’d fallen apart a bit. She’d asked if he’d please meet her for a drink.

  And that had been the beginning. She wasn’t aloof after all. She was original, and dignified, and very fiery. She had olive skin and big chestnut eyes. On his way home after they’d met for a first drink, he’d seen a family of ducks waddling down a street near his flat, and he’d sent her a photo of them. That day had become Duck Day, to them. It was almost five years from that night that he’d gone on to break her heart.

  Duck Day wouldn’t be a bad choice to go back to. Nor would th
eir second date, when they’d got drunk in two different bars and talked for hours. When she said she’d split up with the man she’d been with for the last four years, and felt broken and run down, and was mildly offended when he’d clumsily told her she looked ‘robust’. But it was true that she always did look healthy. She was tall and large-breasted and curvy, and even the dark circles beneath her eyes, natural rather than inflicted, couldn’t seem to diminish the healthiness she exuded.

  He’d told her about the job he wanted, and looked like getting, running an esoteric punk rock record label. They said they’d both slept with too many people without using protection, and that they planned to be more careful in future. This had meant that when they went back to his flat, they gave each other oral sex instead of going all the way.

  He’d felt so lucky he could barely believe it. The most beautiful girl from university, her long legs wrapped loosely around his neck, her heels resting lightly on his back as he went down on her, trying to do the best job he ever had. He remembered how, before they’d gone to sleep, she’d warned him she might be freaked out in the morning. How in the morning she had duly looked wide-eyed and slightly horrified, and he’d thought that would be it, game over, a one-off. But that was OK, because it was such an experience, such a high point, such a woman. And then she’d texted him telling him he was lovely, and he knew it wasn’t going to end there, and he was walking on air.

  Yes, that might have been a night to go back to.

  In July that first year, he’d invited her to go on holiday with him. When he sent the email asking her, and offering to buy the flights, he worried it was too soon into their fledgling relationship to have suggested it. They’d been together for only three months. When she replied it was clear she was delighted.

  Adam was too. He wanted a break, and a first holiday with the woman he was falling in love with. He’d got the job he’d always wanted. The future seemed full of promise.

  He researched flights he could afford, and came across Almeria. The descriptions of the place, of which he’d never heard, appealed to him; an area of Andalusia that hadn’t been fully discovered by tourists as yet. A place of desert, mountains and ocean. Good food if you knew where to look. An ancient Moorish fort, and old western movie sets dotted in the hills.

  Sofia paid for two nights in a hotel, and they hired a car at the airport. This was a new experience for Adam, and it made him nervous. Driving into the city on the first night, Sofia navigating, they made a wrong turn and he snapped at her. It was the closest they’d yet come to an argument, and he apologized. Much later, it would seem to him that this unusually long honeymoon period, in which they seemed too respectful of each other to fight, had simply stored up energy for the rows when they did come.

  The night in Almeria was hot, and smelled of cooking fish and saltwater. The hotel room was large and luxurious, better than either had expected, and they spread out their belongings and made love.

  Beneath the windows, the young people of the town had gathered, sitting on the low walls of a strip of flowerbeds, chattering and smoking, drinking cans of cola. Sofia had bought a Lonely Planet guide to the province, and she lay on the bed, intent on it, circling points of interest and labelling them in her neat cursive handwriting.

  Eventually they left the hotel to explore. There were hundreds of young people sitting or standing outside by then, laughing, swinging their legs, confiding in each other and paying Adam and Sofia no mind.

  They walked away from the hotel and the kids, heading in the direction of the port and the sea. He wore shorts, and a prized polo shirt that was the most expensive item of clothing he’d ever bought. Sofia wore a pink dress that showed off her smooth brown calves and large breasts. Adam was very skinny, young and still a smoker, his hair shaved close to his skull.

  By the port they found an art installation made of hundreds of narrow concrete pillars, no two of them the same length. They took photos of Sofia standing among them, and Adam seated, leaning against one, looking off into the night.

  A North African approached from the quiet, pooled dimness by a jetty, and asked if they wanted to buy weed.

  ‘Sure,’ Sofia said, shrugging. Adam had long since stopped smoking it, but Sofia did so daily in London.

  She paid the man twenty euros, and he took off at a run down the sea wall, disappearing out of view as he reached its corner.

  Adam was surprised at how naïve she’d been.

  ‘I don’t think he’s coming back,’ he said.

  Sofia shrugged again, smiling and laughing it off. Her big eyes – a little Eastern-looking – turned downward fractionally at their outer edges when she smiled. She had a small overbite that made her as goofy as someone very beautiful could be.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll get lucky. Even if he doesn’t come back, I’m not going to let it spoil the night.’

  Adam lit a cigarette and leaned on the harbour wall. After a few moments, the little figure came tearing around its corner again, growing larger as he zoomed down the path towards them. Sweating and breathless, he delivered Sofia a bag of perfectly satisfactory weed.

  For the next few days they walked and drove around Almeria, the city and the province. They explored the Alcazaba, the vast fortified complex built by the Moors when they’d ruled southern Spain. Sofia sat for photographs beside cascading channels of water, and they peered up at the arid brown hills and then the gleaming blue sea below.

  There were slots in the external walls for archers to loose arrows. Higher up, the Christian monarchs had built a castle atop the structure, after they’d reconquered the city. Here, the arrow slits were in the shape of crosses. Their guide laughed, and told them these had the added advantage of allowing archers to fire left and right.

  They camped in a small, hot, dusty site. Their quiet corner was shared with another Brit, a man on his own, in his late thirties – a longer-term resident who seemed lonely and sad. He was chubby, perpetually sweaty, and wore little khaki shorts and greasy, wire-framed glasses. He seemed pleased to have someone to talk to, told them he was a pagan, and spent most of his time in his tiny, low tent, where he drank from a bottle of Martini.

  Adam debated the virtues of paganism with him, in a way that bordered on being unkind. Sofia gently admonished him.

  ‘There’s no reason to be mean to him,’ she said. ‘If his beliefs work for him, then let him have them.’

  Adam couldn’t imagine, then, how anyone could end up in such a state.

  In the mountains they found the old movie-set town. Sofia was wearing a white dress with brightly coloured embroidery on it, which made her look, to his mind, rather Mexican. She sat on the altar in a tiny wooden church and posed, despite his worrying that they might get told off.

  In the saloon, portly, ageing Spaniards played out a gunfight once every few hours, before disappearing somewhere unseen, returning the place to a ghost town.

  Driving through the little white villages and mountain passes, twisting slowly down a road into the foothills, they listened to the pre-masters for a record he was going to be working on. The album’s lyrics, a reaction against a period of po-faced seriousness in its genre, were focused on partying and sex. Adam told Sofia that the record was intelligent.

  ‘What makes it intelligent?’ she asked him after a while.

  He struggled to explain. ‘I think what I meant to say is it’s a good idea, rather than intelligent,’ he said.

  She nodded, satisfied.

  They took another hotel room in a town in the foothills. Outside it was a wide, tiled balcony that they could barely believe was theirs for a night, and which looked out over olive groves and vineyards. They sat at the mosaic-topped table there, drinking cheap, good red wine and watching the sun dip below the hills, shadow pooling into their valleys.

  Inside, Sofia tied his wrists and ankles to the bed with a scarf, a bra and her tights. She blindfolded him and ran her tongue over his body, the anticipation of where she’d go nex
t driving him wild.

  Eventually she straddled him, rearing above him unseen, his hands full with her breasts, their large nipples hard and hot in his palms.

  Sitting outside afterwards, at one of the few restaurant tables the tiny hotel offered, underneath the balcony they’d sat at and the room they’d made love in, they ate dinner. The conversation found its way naturally to the relationship they’d found themselves in.

  ‘Let’s just see how it goes,’ Sofia had said, leaning back in her chair, happy and relaxed. ‘Even if it doesn’t work out, we’ve had a really good time already.’

  Adam had felt a pang of sorrow and panic at the suggestion, however indirect, that he might lose her.

  ‘Well, give it a chance though, won’t you?’ he’d said, frowning. ‘Don’t give up on us yet. After all, we’ve barely got started.’

  Less than two years after that had come the last time he’d felt truly proud of himself, the last chance he’d had to stop things going wrong. He’d been twenty-seven – a very special number, in music. But for the stars, not the staff. Twenty-seven was that well-documented turning point; the age at which musicians died, and joined a very exclusive clique.

  He’d once seen an interview with Axl Rose on YouTube, in which the rock star had talked about meeting Prince.

  ‘What did you two talk about?’ the interviewer had asked.

  ‘We agreed,’ Axl replied, ‘that twenty-seven is the hardest year.’

  Adam had a theory about the twenty-seven club. Things that had been fun at twenty-five became habits a couple of short years later. Youth was slipping away. Undeniable adulthood was near at hand. Things that might have been enhancements to life and to music now became ends in themselves. Relationships were harder to mend, behaviour harder to justify by simply being young. You needed more of whatever your poison was, in the doomed quest to rediscover what had made you fall for it in the first place.