A day and a half later, Alex arrived where he was going. Las Vegas rose out of the desert like a mirage. Even from this distance, it looked like a place that someone had invented, or dreamed about after falling asleep with the central heating on too high and a belly full of Stilton.
Alex arrived in town early in the afternoon, and opened the windows to the dirty heat. He was wondering what the inside of the car smelled like. After the desert, where there was no direction but forwards, and no other cars on the road, he found himself again on multi-lane highways, being bullied by SUVs shouldering from lane to lane.
The movement of traffic pulled him down into the centre. He found himself travelling slowly, from stop light to stop light, down the broad, gaudy Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip: it was a place at once new to him and familiar – a place that had lived, in jumbled form, in his imagination. He’d seen it overflown endlessly, by helicopter, in the title credits of CSI – the Eiffel Tower and the Montgolfier balloon traced in blue neon, the pyramid shooting a beam of light into the sky; the burlesque monumental lions outside the MGM Grand; the anonymous coppery curve of the Wynn. He’d zoomed in on it, too, in Google Earth: monumental schematics from the air; frozen images at street level; granular, gaudy and smeared with light.
Was it as he had imagined it? He didn’t know. It seemed to come pre-imagined. But it occurred to him as he drove that he hadn’t seen it in daylight before: it wasn’t intended to be seen in daylight. The concrete and stone answered the sun with a wan brightness. It looked as worn and bleached out as Christmas tree lights discovered in the attic in summer.
He drove up to the top of town, and pulled into the stacked lot of one of the older-looking, shabbier-looking hotels on Fremont Street. He parked the car and an elevator took him to the lobby. There was an old guy wearing an honest-to-goodness cowboy hat leaning on the desk, staring past the waistcoated clerk at nothing. His face was a pained squint, and red thread veins pooled at the hinge of his jaw. Nobody was attending to him. His jaw tightened and relaxed.
Alex checked in. His room was on the eighth floor – it was shabby and small and brown everywhere and it smelled of old smoke. A double-glazed sliding window in a metal frame looked out onto a stained concrete wall gridded with identical windows, the other wing of the H-shaped hotel. Past that, the view towards the north – simmering low-rise, ribboned with tan overpasses.
He felt, at that moment, exhausted. It was another four hours before he was meeting Carey. He lay down on the coverlet of the bed, and fell asleep there without even taking his shoes off.
He woke up with a feeling close to fright. The air conditioner was roaring. His mouth was gummy, his head sore and sweat had chilled on his skin. The light outside was metallic, now, and when he went to the window the facing wall of the hotel was the colour of dirty brass in the old sun.
He should have been looking forward to seeing Carey but he was feeling, again, dislocated, unworthy, indecipherable. It made him panicky.
The problem is that when I’m alone I literally cease to believe that I exist.
He said the words to himself aloud, just to feel the air across his tongue. It was something he’d remembered from somewhere, not his own thought. He looked at his rucksack. It belonged to a stranger. He rubbed the back of his neck. His watch told him it was seven o’clock. He was probably just hungry.
They had arranged to meet in the Golden Nugget at eight. Alex had suggested meeting her flight, but Carey said that’d be a drag. She had heard that the casino contained the world’s biggest nugget of gold. ‘Let’s meet there! Just you, me and a big gold rock. It’ll be cute.’
Walking into the casino was like walking into an aquarium. The door – no, the entire wall – was permanently open to the outside. It gaped. The mouth of a whale. Not an aquarium. Not just an aquarium. An aquarium and its contents. A mechanical whale, trawling for human plankton. No need to suck: just leave the mouth open and let them wash in.
Even during the heat of a cloudless day, something seemed to stop the sunshine spilling from Fremont Street into the building: a filter in the air – an invisible baleen plate. Within a couple of steps the crisp hot light bouncing off the pavement outside would be gone. There was only the indecipherable carpet, the high ceiling, and slot machines arrayed in rows and islands under the buttery artificial light. It felt like cigarettes and acid stomach and the headachy buzz you get when you pass through tiredness into the unreal underwater feeling on the other side.
You turned round and the pleasant sunshine outside was a wall of white. Reality was oversaturated. It hurt the eyes. Safer in here. The second time you turned round you couldn’t find the opening back to the outside world at all. And now, in the evening, the inside started to colonise the outside. That border was porous, after all. But the unreality inside seeped onto the street like smoke.
A shift in the current and you had turned round, lost your bearings. The direction you struck out in was wrong. The angles were wrong. That wall wasn’t that wall. It wasn’t even a wall at all. That bar was a different bar.
The slots fanned and pulsed. Through alleys of fluorescent coral, portly men in T-shirts lumbered like groupers. Some grazed on the machines, bland-faced and blissful as fish. Old women perched on stools, human spider crabs, barking their yellowed foreclaws on the panels. Cocktail waitresses moved purposefully, dartingly, alertly. Clownfish.
Alex had somehow imagined the sound in the casino would be a cacophony, but it was soothing. He had expected to hear whirring and clattering – and that was there, if you listened for it – but in aggregate it was a sort of anaesthetising white noise, like the sound of the sea.
Over the top, the bleeps and squelches of electronic noise, snatches of tunes, here and there cataracts of imaginary money pouring into imaginary metal containers, digitally simulated. Behind, the purr of a million coins flipping, a million tumblers coming to rest and then starting in motion again, a million balls settling into sockets, a million cards burring into new configurations.
Alex remembered seeing a documentary, once, about a casino in America where women bought buckets of coins and sat, all day and all night, feeding them into the slot machines. There was something devotional about the act: patiently, unsleepingly, as if in a trance, they fed the coins into slots and pressed the button to spin the reels.
With every press of the button, there came a near-imperceptible tensing in the shoulders: a tiny jolt of hope. Then, as the wheels came to rest, came a readjustment. Every few spins, the machine would cough a handful of coins into its trough, and the women would look rejuvenated, freshened: hope satisfied. The coins would be swept back into the bucket, ready to be fed in.
The machines were playing the people, rather than vice versa, it had occurred to Alex. Nearly half the time, the women would have more coins in the bucket than they had started with – but a tilt of the algorithm, the tiniest pressure of a thumb on the scales, meant that the number of coins in the bucket tended, over the long run, towards zero.
Every small score was not a win, but a rebate: a contribution to the struggle, a prolongation of the period of time in which the player was able to believe that the impossible could happen. As they fed these coins in, whittling their chances down the long curve to zero, the same process was going on in every cell in their bodies.
But here there were no buckets, no coins. The clatter of money was synthesised. Just as the blackjack players, on their fields of baize deeper in the casino, exchanged their cash for plastic chips, the slots players now fed dollar bills into machines. You could see them, out of cash, approaching the machines peevishly, feeding ragged cloth bucks into the machines’ mouths, having them whirr and spit back. Rubbing the dollars flat on the top of the machine, straightening out the bent corners, thumbing the face of the dead president, feeding them back in, hoping.
If the casino gods were smiling on them, their money would disappear and stay disappeared, and the machine would politely blurt out a white paper slip. It was this that they would feed into the machine.
Paper money was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper, which was translated into electrons, which were translated into paper money.
That made sense. This was a place where money – never something strongly tethered to reality – slipped anchor and became altogether imaginary. And the more imaginary it got, the more like itself it became. This was money in its purest, most contingent form – owned, in the perpetual instant of play, by nobody. It existed in a field of probabilities – between the hope of the impossible and the knowledge of the inevitable.
Alex walked the casino floor. His dizziness subsided and a sort of calm came over him. Seven forty-five. Fifteen minutes to kill. He found the nugget glistering in a glass box. Really quite big – nuggets, as Alex had always thought of them, were no bigger than a Tic Tac. This nugget was supposed to look a bit like a hand, but it looked more like a bit of coral. It looked gaudy. It looked like a fake nugget – as if the gold had been sprayed on from a can.
He had just sat down with a rumpled ten to worship at a nickel slot machine when a hand on his shoulder and a voice hazy with travel said: ‘Hey.’
He turned round and stood up and there was Carey, in the old Dead Kennedys T-shirt she used to sleep in, jeans frayed at the hip, hair down, brown-armed and smiling.
‘Hey,’ said Alex, and felt as happy as he ever had. ‘You’re early.’
‘So are you,’ said Carey. Her arms were warm on his neck as he hugged her.
He pulled back and said more or less without drawing breath: ‘It’s so good to see you. Look! Vegas! I’m playing a slot machine. What’s up? How was your flight? Enough about you, let’s talk about me. My God, I’ve had this weird road trip, I swear, every lunatic in America has tried to kill me or make friends with me. Where’s your stuff?’
Carey lifted her pink vinyl shoulder bag by its strap. ‘Travelled light. Underwear, change of T-shirt, lipstick in case I need to go hooking to earn back what I lose at poker.’
‘Want to go back to my hotel and put it in the room?’
‘Hell no! This is Las Vegas. Let’s hit the town. Waitron! Bring me… a daiquiri.’ There was no waitress anywhere in sight. She waved her arm as if twirling an invisible baton, then shouldered Alex out of the way and slammed the palm of her hand onto the fat SPIN button in the centre of the machine’s console. It quacked and blurted, shuffled its numbers.
‘I win!’ said Carey.
‘No, you don’t,’ said Alex.
‘Oh,’ said Carey. ‘No, I don’t. Does it make that noise when you lose? Imagine the noise when we win. OK. Cash out. Let’s hit the town.’
‘Hang on,’ said Alex. He pressed the button again. The reels moved. There was a simulated cascade of falling coins.
‘Magic hands,’ said Alex, waggling his fingers.
‘We won,’ said Carey. ‘Jackpot!’ Three oranges. They were thirty-five cents up.
‘We won!’ Alex repeated. ‘Go, us. OK, let’s cash out and explore the’ – his hand moved towards the CASH/CREDIT button but Carey swiped it away – ‘town -’
‘Are you crazy? We’re on a streak.’
‘There’s only ten dollars in there…’
‘Shhh.’ She pressed the button again.
An hour and a half later, having never been more than $4.85 up, and having finally gone down to zero, they left to go into town.
Carey and Alex were doing what you do in Las Vegas. They sat at one of the bars in Circus Circus – Carey had demanded that they go in, claiming without a hint of sincerity that she had been frightened of clowns as a child and that it would be good aversion therapy – and played the video poker game embedded in the actual bar. Alex had won $100 on his first go, and Carey had then spent fifteen minutes losing it while they drank their watery screwdrivers.
Then when they got hungry they looked for somewhere to eat and realised that everything was either a cheap chain restaurant or an expensive chain restaurant, so they went to a cheap chain restaurant and had fajitas. The restaurant was dimly lit and noisy with pop-punk music with Mexican lyrics. Teenagers with glow sticks round their necks hip-swayed between tables, taking orders as if they had trains to catch and returning to drop the food off with casual violence.
The meat came on lethally hot metal skillets. The tortillas came in a plastic simulacrum of a wicker basket, accompanied by a plastic simulacrum of a saucer containing a plastic simulacrum of grated cheese.
They bought long, bulbed plastic horns containing pre-mixed margaritas dispensed by a machine, which were only drinkable because they were so tooth-hurtingly cold that you couldn’t taste how sweet they were. They took the remains of them out onto the street and walked down the Strip.
When? Not now. Not now. Not now.
They continued to walk until their aimlessness started to become something palpable, an awkwardness between them.
Even ordinarily, Alex would be anxious in this situation. Nothing made him more anxious than the need or expectation of having fun. Vegas was a place devoted to the idea of fun. Everyone, everywhere you looked, was trying to have fun.
Alex had brought Carey here under the pretence of having fun. He worried he wasn’t having fun. He worried even more that Carey wasn’t having fun, or, at least, that whatever fun they were having – the food was OK, wasn’t it? They hadn’t lost all their money gambling – was deprived of sunlight and water by the enormous shadow of the fun they should have been having, by comparison with which their own meagre portion of fun was a wretched failure.
Oh God. What was he thinking of?
He looked over at Carey to see whether it looked like she was having fun. It was impossible to tell. She wasn’t hooting with laughter and throwing her head back. She was just sort of walking down the street looking at stuff. She had a drink in her hand, at least. Good.
Alex had finished his own drink. Ever since he had started worrying about the aimlessness – that is, he had an aim, obviously, but the more he wound up to it the less he was able to communicate with the outside world, and until he had done so his companion would be left with the overwhelming impression of aimlessness – he had been sucking away on his margarita so as to be doing something even if he wasn’t saying something.
It was a margarita in a brightly coloured plastic cup, a foot long. It said so on the side of the cup. Foot-long margarita. With a foot-long straw. That was fun, surely. That was drinks plus fun. Alex felt utterly adrift.
It was probably ages since he’d said anything. Had she noticed? Was she bored?
He knew he should say something. Say something. That was the thing. But the only thing he could think of to say was ‘Will you marry me?’ and even though that was the exact thing to say the moment was wrong. You couldn’t just come out of the blue with it, could you? Just abruptly? She’d think he was a loon. Or, worse, joking.
Here? Not here. Not in the street. Yes. Why not? In the street. This is your life. This is your life, going by, and you’re going to look back on this moment as the moment when you didn’t take the decision that would have made you happy for the rest of your days on earth. With this American girl you love wholeheartedly.
You know you love her wholeheartedly. You have said so to yourself, and had you a diary you would have written it in your diary. You cannot always, when called on, feel the love as a wave of emotion – not in the way you could when you watched her sleep, before you were a couple, or the way you can when she’s somewhere else and you miss her. But you know it’s there. It’s just – it’s something you take for granted. Something you’re so quietly sure of you barely examine it.
Action. For goodness’ sake. Action. That’s all. Just do it.
Alex thought about how he used to trick himself into jumping into swimming pools. You ran up to the edge promising yourself that this was just a practice run and that you were going to stop, and then when you got to the edge you simply kept running and took the view that you would apologise to yourself later for the white lie. Always, a great body-shocking spout of cold water to the chest and crotch, bubbles of air foaming up around the ears and neck, and limbs paddling at once, spastic with surprise.
‘Carey,’ said Alex. He looked past her shoulder. There was nobody there. The Strip was empty as far as the next corner and the sky above was a perspectiveless blue-black. It was warm, and away behind him he could hear the hiss and swish and flop of the fountains outside the Bellagio dancing their exhausted dance.
‘Mmm?’ Carey was distracted. She took another sip of her margarita and Alex admired with a little wave of desperation the way her cheek pulsed inwards as she drew on her orange straw.
Alex felt the ring, in its square box, digging against his hip. He was on the verge of action. He felt a little dizzy. He remembered that once he had tried the swimming-pool trick, a little drunk, in the shallow end of a pool with submerged steps. He had driven the little toe of his right foot into the corner of the lowest step, and gulped a lungful of water. Saul had pulled him out in time for him not to drown. For the next fortnight, his broken toe had been so painful that simply hopping downstairs on the other foot had, with every step, sent an inertial throb of blood into the digit that had caused him to gasp.
He went on, anyway.
‘You know what you said about the Elvis chapel?’ he said.
‘What Elvis chapel?’ said Carey, turning her eyes to his. She brought the straw back up to her lips and pursed them around it. She had a look of blank expectation. Alex looked at his feet.
‘Well,’ said Alex. ‘I wanted to say. Look.’
Alex thought of getting onto one knee, here on the pavement, but he knew in this instant – with the certainty that he knew he would never climb Kilimanjaro, or emerge victorious from a fist fight, or play a significant role in the history of the human race, or be unconditionally adored by beautiful teenage girls, and with the faint, humming sadness that accompanied those certainties – that getting down on one knee in public was something he did not have the ability to do.
‘Carey, what I’m trying to say is -’
And he could not meet her eye. And then he could. She was still holding her margarita, in its big pink plastic yard-of-ale tube, up in front of her chest. Her arms were slim and golden from the sun, and her big Dead Kennedys T-shirt was not quite formless enough to prevent the curve of her breasts from being visible.
She looked beautiful. Alex felt the moment freeze-framing into a memory. He felt as if he was looking back in time to this moment, from some point in the future. But he still didn’t know what happened next. Carey slurped her margarita.
Alex glanced nervously over her shoulder. The street was no longer empty. Three men in white suits, walking abreast, were waiting at the crosswalk ahead. Something familiar about them.
Alex put it aside, turned back to Carey, took a deep breath, closed his fist on the sharp-cornered parcel in his pocket, made himself look directly at her quizzical, almost slightly peevish face. A face saying: yup, what? Get on with it…
‘Carey. Love. Will you -’
Carey took another big slurp of her margarita. Evidently the last. The straw made a violently diarrhoeic noise in the crushed ice. Alex gave a nervous yip, and then barked with laughter. Carey looked baffled.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Just – the noise your thing made. It’s nothing. I don’t know. Silly mood, I guess. I’m just happy being here with you. Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you OK?’ she said. ‘You’ve been acting a bit – just since we ate – a bit distant.’
‘Oh, no, no. Shall we walk? No, I’m fine. I was just thinking about. What do you want to do next?’
The white-suited men were getting closer. As they approached Alex could see what was familiar about them. They were Elvis. All three of them. One fat Elvis and two thin ones. The white suits were jumpsuits. The fat one, disconcertingly, had a star-spangled V-shape from shoulders to crotch. It was hard to tell how old they were, because they were wearing identical black wigs and identical fuzzy-felt sideburns and sunglasses the size of drinks coasters. But judging by the way they were walking they were epically drunk.
The fat Elvis lurched left, inadvertently shoulder-barging the thin Elvis in the middle, which sent him into the other thin Elvis, who pushed tetchily back.
‘- even listening to me?’
‘Yes, love, sorry. Look out. Those three drunks.’
As the Elvises ambled up level with them, Alex grabbed Carey’s elbow and pulled her out of the way. Too late. Fat Elvis barged into the back of her. Carey’s drink tumbled from her hand and bounced on the sidewalk.
‘Hey!’ she exclaimed. The Elvises rolled on, oblivious.
‘Hey!’ Carey said again. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going? That was my drink, you dick.’
Half past them, now, the Elvises turned round. Alex didn’t like the expression on Fat Elvis’s face.
‘You say to me, girlie?’
‘I called you a dick,’ said Carey. She pushed out her lip. When she lost her temper, Carey had a tendency to forget that she was a slightly built woman in her early twenties rather than, say, a light-middleweight boxing champion.
‘Don’t call him an asshole,’ said the thin Elvis in the Evel Knievel suit. ‘’S an accident.’
‘I’ve hit a girl before,’ said Fat Elvis. Alex believed him.
‘I didn’t call him an asshole,’ said Carey. ‘I called him a dick.’ Her face was flushed. Alex was petrified. ‘He smashed into me and made me spill my drink. And then he was walking off without so much as turning round to say sorry. And he’s fat, and he’s ugly, and he’s dressed like a dick. I call that dickish.’
Fat Elvis was taking this in. He paused, swaying a bit. Then he spoke to Alex, dead-eyed.
‘You need to keep that mouth of hers under control.’
He’d barely reached the end of the sentence when Carey slapped him with a report loud enough to make Alex wince. In films, scenes like this seemed to result in moments of stunned silence, but Fat Elvis moved very fast indeed. Barely had the blow landed than he lurched forward with a roar, grabbing at Carey’s wrist. He missed, just, and Carey hopped backwards.
Alex, on instinct, bopped Fat Elvis on the head with the only thing he had to hand, which was his empty plastic funnel of drink. What impact it made was cushioned by his nylon quiff, but it knocked him slightly off balance.
As he came back up it was immediately apparent he intended violence. Carey swung her handbag, catching him on one sideburn.
‘Hey!’ shouted the other thin Elvis.
‘Run!’ shouted Alex, and run they did, with three drunk Elvises in pursuit.
Alex pounded along the pavement. Carey was a bit ahead of him, lifting up her knees, pistoning her arms, her baseball boots flashing red-white and caramel back at him.
‘Pricks! Fucking pricks!’ Carey was shouting over her shoulder between breaths.
‘SHUT… UP!’ said Alex, much less fit than Carey. By the end of the block they had pulled away from the Elvises but his breath was already ragged. ‘You’re going – to get – me… killed.’
They swerved through oncoming pedestrians, dip-diving around stationary gawpers. The cross light was flashing ‘Walk’ and Alex saw Carey make the snap call to go for it. He hop-skipped through the intersection with a blare of horns.
They gained the opposite pavement and Alex bounced off someone’s shoulder, earning a shout of indignation, and a splat of what seemed to be ice cream on the cheek, but then Alex looked up and realised they were heading into the thick of a crowd.
Carey, ahead of him, wormed shoulder-forward between two people with cameras and ducked into the crowd.
Behind him, Alex heard the shout of what he guessed was one of the Elvises hitting ice-cream guy head on, buying them a second or two, and then he was into the thickening mass himself.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’
‘Hey -’
‘- with my friend… sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’
There was music to the side, and bright lights. Some sort of show. Alex kept his head down. Behind him, the sound of further collisions.
‘- you, Elvis!’
‘- the damn way…’
He ploughed on, keeping his head down. He popped his head up. He could see Carey, lither and pushier, extending her lead.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry…’
The crowd was very thick, now. The whole of the pavement had been fenced in with wooden boards and netting, and the crowd was jammed into that space. There were planks underfoot and light – golden, green and red – was pulsing. Alex’s arm barked against a rough rope. A loud fusillade of bangs caused him to whip his head round – above the crowd and back from the pavement he could see what looked like a boat, its rigging scarved with multicoloured smoke. Hanging from the rigging were girls in bikinis with eyepatches and pirate hats, waggling their legs.
Alex put his head down and plunged on, wriggling through the thickest part of the crowd. As the crowd thinned he caught up with Carey, grabbed her arm.
He risked a backward glance. He couldn’t see the Elvises. He pulled her down and against the wooden barrier between the pavement and the road. They squatted there, between a thicket of legs. As he squatted, his trousers tightened at the hip, and the ring box dug in.
Carey’s face was bright with exhilaration. She grabbed the back of his head and kissed him on the lips, then let him go.
‘Not funny!’ he hissed. ‘It was me they were going to beat up -’ and then he stopped momentarily as he saw what looked like three sets of white legs, trousers tellingly flared, coming through the crowd. He pushed his hand over Carey’s mouth and studied the pavement. The legs went past.
‘Not funny,’ he repeated, but now they weren’t actually going to be beaten up what had been scary started to seem funny. He was shaky with adrenalin.
‘Marry me,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ she said.
He got up, thighs creaking, from his squat and meerkatted up. There was no sign of the Elvises. A wooden walkway coming off the pavement at right angles led to the entrance to a casino. Alex pointed, steered Carey by the elbow, and jostled through into the lobby.
‘Drink,’ he said.
They walked, Alex still holding Carey’s elbow, across the wide hideous carpet in the direction of a large, brassy, over-marbled bar in a thicket of slot machines and palm trees.
Behind the bar was a girl who looked from the waist down like she was playing Dick Whittington in panto at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, and from the waist up like she was a bellhop in a pornographic movie.
‘Champagne,’ said Alex. ‘We’d like, please. Two glasses.’
‘Sir,’ she said without smiling.
‘Care, you are a psychopath,’ he said. Carey beamed.
‘Not taking shit from Elvis,’ she said.
The woman set two tall flutes of champagne in front of them. She slipped a silver tray down between them with a paper bill face down on it. Carey picked it up.
‘Crap!’ said Carey. ‘That’s eighty bucks.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Alex said. ‘I won in the casino earlier, remember.’
‘But eighty bucks!’
‘Seriously.’ He made a point of looking into her face as he smiled. ‘This is a special occasion.’
He moved his hand over hers, took the bill, replaced it face down on the silver tray. Then he dropped one leg off the bar stool so he could get into his pocket. He pulled out the box, and he put it in on the fake marble bar top between them. He looked at Carey.
She looked at the box. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. The moment was right.
‘Open it,’ he said.
Carey looked very unsure. She didn’t move at all.
‘It’s for you,’ Alex said. ‘Have a look.’
The waitress behind the bar was listening with her back to them, pretending to polish some glasses. Carey fiddled with her hands. He could see that she knew what was in the box, and the expression on her face was one of shock and fear. She pushed the box away from her, no more than half an inch, with the back of her knuckles.
‘Open it,’ he said again.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Open it.’
She did, sadly, and she looked at the ring, its glitter. And then she looked at him, and she looked away. She looked miserable.
‘Carey -’ he said. Something cold settled in his chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. ‘Carey. I want us to get married.’ He heard his voice say that. But now it felt like he was watching the scene from a long, long way away. As if he was sitting on the moon, watching his proposal of marriage stall through a telescope – its details scratchy and distant and oddly painless.
She continued looking at the ring. Her eyes were welling.
‘Can we just forget this?’ she said in a small voice. Alex was accustomed to Carey having a brisk bossiness, a confidence in her manner – but she seemed floored, lost suddenly. He was sitting at this bar with a stranger.
He took a sip of his champagne.
‘Yes,’ he said coldly. ‘Of course. So sorry.’ He reached out and went to retrieve the ring, getting as far as snapping the case shut before Carey yelped and put her hand on his, holding it there. Her knuckles were pale. Her face was contorted. The mole on the corner of her chin – where he’d kissed. It was nothing: a blemish. How suddenly and how absolutely what was familiar had become strange; someone he had imagined part of him was just another human animal.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she said. Alex left his hand where it was. He looked at the surface of the bar. He was conscious of the waitress not watching, polishing glasses.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. His face felt very cold. You can’t come back from this. He took his hand away and got down off his stool, not looking at her, and put the ring box back in his pocket and walked towards where they had come in without looking back at her. They hadn’t gone deep enough in for casino geography to do its work. He still knew how to get out.
He had just reached where the walkway began when he realised that he hadn’t paid for the drinks. He turned and went back, fast, feeling a burst of anger. Carey was where she had been and she was looking at him. Her face was wet, and it opened – the whole face – like she’d seen him giving her a second chance.
He ignored her, pushing up against the bar, snatching at the little silver tray with the bill on it and leaning forward to catch the attention of the waitress. Alex thrust his hand in his right-hand jeans pocket and pulled out some crumpled notes – what were these? – twenty, twenty, ten, a five, ones… not enough.
‘Alex,’ she said. She put her hand to his elbow and he jerked it away. He didn’t look at her.
He pulled his credit card out of his other pocket. ‘Waitress,’ he said with a venom that surprised him. She ignored him. ‘Waitress!’
The waitress turned round with slow ostentation, took in Carey crying, and looked up at him. If there had been a hint of a smirk, a hint of an arched eyebrow, in her expression Alex would have hit her. Her smile was bright and icy. She hated him.
‘I need to pay this bill.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Alex, please,’ said Carey – pulling this time at his forearm. Her face was imploring him. ‘Please. I’m sorry, please, don’t go – don’t be so horrible, talk to me, please, I’m sorry…’
‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake and -’ he pulled away with real violence this time – ‘get off me.’
She looked startled.
‘Don’t touch me, Carey. I’m serious. Do you know what I -’
The waitress came back with the credit-card machine. It ticked and chirred. She passed it to Alex. It was deadweight in his hands. He punched in his pin then waited, looking at the gaudy ceiling of the casino and clenching his jaw.
‘Aaaand…’ the waitress said, pulling the strip from the top of the machine with bright professionalism, hitting a button with the heel of her hand and handing card and slippery receipts to Alex. Her overlong red fingernails fanned in the air as she did it.
Alex turned round and went again, and Carey made no attempt to follow him.
He fought through the crowd that was still hanging round the end of the pirate show and walked in no particular direction up the street, and kept walking.