Chapter 2 Adam “Strangers” #2
For a second, with the bright morning sunlight filtering in through the shed’s ivy-throttled windows, For Juliet almost looks like it’s glowing in my hands.
But even if I could find a way to play it, I’m still too pissed off with Jules to pay her this kind of homage.
She wanted to throw it out. Which is kind of like wanting to throw us out, right?
Everything we were. What brought us to here. The soundtrack of our lives.
I toss it back into the box instead and turn Roger Daltrey up to 9.
Stripping off to my shorts, I get going on Dad’s squeaky exercise bike. It’s only day six of my new routine, but I swear it’s getting easier already.
I think about Darius and his party as I cycle, pushing myself harder and harder.
His face is dotted all over the old photo board gathering dust on the wall.
Shots of him here in Dad’s “Aladdin’s cave” at weekends.
Dad teaching us how to build toy guns and kites as kids.
And always with that sawdust—or “man glitter,” as Mum always called it—in Dad’s hair.
Then Darius and me playing Super Mario and Sonic as teens and teaching ourselves how to code and design our first rudimentary games, after Dad started hanging out more in the pubs and betting shops on Western Road.
Twenty-five years later, me and Darius even turned this into an office for a while. Some of the ideas we came up with are still pinned to the board. Including the proto logo for Totally Sirius Games, the company that only he went on to run when he moved to the States eight years ago.
Christ, it seems impossible now that we were ever so nearly the same.
After ten minutes, I’m knackered. Standing on Mum and Dad’s crappy old analogue bathroom scales, I weigh myself.
One pound. One measly sodding pound. That’s all I’ve lost in six punishing days.
I glare down at last night’s Pronto in Tavola pizza box in the bin, on top of Wednesday’s Kambi’s grilled chicken wrapper.
I pull off my sweat-heavy shorts, hoping it’ll make another pound’s difference.
Does it hell. Maybe I’ve at least toned up instead?
I turn to the tarnished mirror on the wall.
Big mistake. The pool-ready me I’ve been hoping might put in a surprise guest appearance before Darius’s homecoming party is emphatically not staring back. Instead, it’s the usual me. With my little round belly leaving me looking like I’ve swallowed a car headrest.
Koala. My colleague Meredith gave me that cutesy nickname.
On account of my beard and the way it’s starting to gray, she says.
But no doubt because of my dad bod too. I picture her for a second, smiling across at me from where she sits in between me and Doodles in our messy little basement office at Quark Studios, with its reams of mobile role-playing-games scripts and character traits taped to the walls.
She’d no doubt find this moment funny, watching me sweat myself half to death, because she thinks I’m comfy with who I am. But I still can’t help wondering if she’ll notice the new, slimmer, fitter me, if he ever does show up.
“Knock knock,” a heavy Manchester accent calls out.
Shit. Doodles. He’s early. I nearly fall flat on my bare arse trying to snatch my shorts off the workbench as the shed door creaks open and Big D stoops in under the doorframe, wearing leather sandals, rolled-down cobra-patterned dungarees, and a faded Frankie Knuckles T-shirt.
“By all the ancient gods. What seventh level of hell and decadence is this?” He grins, peering down at me from his six-foot-three vantage point as he takes off his mirrored Wayfarer shades.
“Piss off,” I say, quickly pulling on my shorts. “I was just—”
“What, starting a one-man nudist colony? Or don’t tell me, it was a full moon last night and you’ve just woken up here naked after ripping through several flocks of baby lambs on the moor?”
“I was just weighing myself, okay?” I mumble.
“Oh, yeah, sure. Because we all, like, do that naked in our sheds.” Striding past me smirking, with his straggly long blond hair and weed-shot eyes that have always made him look like Gandalf the Grey’s stoned kid brother, he grabs a couple of cold cans of Stella from the fridge.
“Here.” He chucks me one. “Rub it on your forehead. It might help soothe your dignity.”
Jerking the dustcover off the TV, he sits down on the butt-sculpted sofa. By the time I finish getting dressed, he’s already got his headset on, has levered the back off one of the controllers, and is busy adjusting its electronic guts with a screwdriver.
“To stop your aim pulling to the right,” he explains, tossing it back to me and switching on the TV.
Me and Doodles game together most Saturdays. For just a couple of hours unless Jules is working, in which case it’s sometimes all day. It’s something we’ve been doing on and off since we first became friends back in our twenties, but more so now I’m less busy with the kids.
Today, it’s Baldur’s Gate 3. We’ve teamed up with a gang of fellow berserker, half-elf warrior druids, clerics, and thieves to kick ass across the fictional world of the Forgotten Realms. A bunch of nonsense, of course. But fun nonsense. The kind that lets you leave all your troubles behind.
“Adam,” shouts Jules from somewhere outside an hour later, breaking the spell.
“Sounds like someone’s in trouble,” Doodles intones, before cutting off our online chat with a bunch of twentysomethings who’ve been quizzing us for cheats for a couple of old-school nineties games they’re really into.
“Adam!” Jules shouts louder. “The car. You promised.”
She means Mum’s old ?koda. I promised her I’d change the spark plugs. Plugs I haven’t even got round to ordering yet.
“All right, all right,” I yell back. “I’m coming. For God’s sake,” I mutter under my breath.
“Everything okay?” Doodles asks.
“Huh?”
“Between you two?” Me and Jules have been a couple since before he met us. We’re probably like furniture to him.
“What? Oh, yeah. Just, you know. Married bullshit,” I tell him, shrugging it off.
He shrugs back. Being a bachelor, he doesn’t have a clue.
—
Even though I’ve been praying for rain so that the whole “pool” bit of the “pool party” gets called off, two hours later the sun is still blazing down hotter than a chicken vindaloo from a clear blue sky, as our Uber drops us off outside the electric gates of Darius’s pseudo-antebellum mansion on Tongdean Avenue, the most expensive road in town.
“Wah-hey, A-Hole and Jules! Now the party can officially begin,” Darius whoops, all grinning white teeth, as he answers the videocam to buzz us in.
“Come on, it’s still funny. Always will be,” Jules says, giving my hand the same comforting squeeze Dad used to if I’d lost one of my toys as a kid.
A-Hole. The unavoidable nickname that’s dogged me my entire life. Thanks to my parents being unaware of the otherwise universally known American phrase.
“Yeah, but at least I was born an arsehole and didn’t choose to marry one,” I counter with my standard retort, noticing she’s wearing an old dress of hers and looking great in it—only it’s too late to tell her.
Another hand squeeze. From me this time.
Married Morse code for putting our earlier rows behind us.
As we walk past a sparkling red Ferrari parked on the flint-cobbled drive, Darius appears, arms outstretched in his pillared doorway, dressed in designer swim shorts, a white linen shirt, and black Havaianas.
For a second my heart sinks, wondering what I must look like next to him in my shitty old T-shirt and shorts. Especially since, blessed with natural Greek good looks anyway, Darius Angelopoulos has now built himself a Greek-hero body to match.
But then he hugs me. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Ads.” He grins. And suddenly he’s just Darius, my old best friend.
I smile as I watch him hug Jules, seeing the way his fingertips still roam self-consciously over his old acne pockmarks and that other, deeper scar on his chin from when he fell off his BMX back in ’85 and banged both his face and his balls on a bin.
“I still can’t believe you’re throwing a party just two days after you got back home,” Jules says, as Darius leads us inside and past what looks like a private cinema room, with unopened moving boxes stacked up against its back wall.
“Yeah, well, you know me. I hate wasting time.” He smiles.
“Plus, I did have help,” he admits, nodding at a super-tall, super-confident-looking young woman with bright red hair, who’s directing a phalanx of waiters carrying canapés from the kitchen into the garden.
“Anastasija, my PA,” he explains. “She flew in early to get everything ready.”
Grabbing us each a glass of champagne, Darius ushers us outside. Blimey, there’s got to be nearly a hundred people here already, milling around the manicured lawns overlooking the city and the wide blue sea below.
“So, are you flipping out yet,” Jules says, “about leaving your whole life out there behind?”
“Not really. Especially not now Mum’s dementia has got so much worse.”
He pats my back affectionately. These last years since she got diagnosed, I’ve been checking in on Eleni every couple of months and reporting back. I can see that same sad look in Darius’s eyes that he got in school after his dad died; we both know it won’t be long.
“Of course, the money made it a hell of a lot easier,” he jokes.
The fortune he exited with. Half of which could have been mine, if I’d only moved out there to work with him, after we both came up with the idea for Totally Sirius in my shed all those years ago.
Something everyone else here knows about too.
Making me what? The Darius that never was? A failure? A fool?
I feel my stomach twist.
“You okay?” he asks, his green eyes narrowing as he looks into mine.