Chapter 8 Adam “The Rockafeller Skank”
Adam
“The Rockafeller Skank”
This time the landing is softer, less jarring. A glider easing down onto the runway from a clear blue sky instead of a storm-tossed fighter fireballing into the concrete.
Twenty-six-year-old Adam already being awake helps too. But it’s also like my brain—or my mind, what with my own physical brain being decades in the future—seems to have adjusted as well. Like two time trips in I’ve already got my frequent flyer badge. My chrononaut badge. Whatever.
A good thing too, because Adam here is on a mission to get things sorted before everyone else tips up at 8 p.m. to party on just like Wayne and Garth in what’s still his favorite movie of the nineties so far.
First up on his to-do list is cleaning the bathroom, like he promised Jules he would.
But he ducked out for a few beers beforehand with his new work friend, Doodles, so his first act of “cleaning” is to pee with the precision and pressure of a fire hose at the back of the pan, in the way only a young man who’s never heard the phrase “prostate the size of a grapefruit” can.
Bloody hell! Now I know where Liam gets his slapdash attitude to hygiene from.
Me.
Putting the toilet seat down, Young Adam then sets to swilling water around the washbasin and clawing toothpaste marks off with his fingernails. Because, sure, why use actual cleaning products when you can use your own body instead?
Adam feeling tipsy means I feel tipsy, but even weirder, another part of me feels stone-cold sober. Like I’m Schrodinger’s barfly or something.
Humming along to this year’s ubiquitous Lightning Seeds’s “3 Lions ’98” football World Cup anthem that’s started playing on the radio, Adam checks his reflection in the mirror—a strong Operation Desert Storm look, to say the least, consisting of a buzz cut, tan Timberlands, dark khaki jeans, and an untucked military desert shirt.
Only offset by a South Park T-shirt advertising Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls.
“Yeah, yeah, ’cause you’re drop-dead gorgeous,” teases Jules, looming into the reflection as she kisses him on the back of the neck.
His Jules. So young she blows my mind. But yep, the feeling is mutual. Because, wow. Just seeing her is still enough to give Adam a start too. Like he’s somehow still noticing her afresh. Even after it being—what?—a full three years now since they first moved into this little flat of theirs.
But while I don’t remember the last time I looked at my Jules this way and I definitely like having my own space in the shed, Adam here still delights in feeling like they’re a crew of two on a tiny boat in the middle of their own private sea.
A feeling that’s clearly mutual, because even though they’ve both got better jobs now—with her sous-cheffing at the Grand and him working over at BeJewel Games as a junior narrative producer—not once have they talked about moving.
“What?” she asks, pushing her hand back through her Liv Tyler–esque layered hair.
“Nothing. Just…you look perfect,” he says, running his eyes over her cornflower-blue dress, before pulling her into a smoky hot kiss.
Jules pulls back with a grin.
“Uh-uh. No time for that now.” Slapping a bottle of bleach and a toilet brush into his hands, she quickly pencils in her eyeliner. “I swear it’s getting bigger,” she says, glancing up.
She means the crack in the ceiling, which—bloody hell, now I remember—is destined to collapse this very night, showering plasterboard down onto Dave Scragg and Joy Chen, who’ll be right in the middle of having a cheeky quickie.
I’m tempted to impose myself. To save them from their impending humiliation. But I stop myself just in time. Because of our rule. But also because, come on, Dave and Joy, who even does that anyway, right?
Bathroom done, Young Adam answers the front door to Young Doodles—an even bigger hairball back then—who hurries in and starts setting up his decks.
Adam heads through to the kitchen to help.
Upending three bags of Doritos, Wotsits, and Pickled Onion Monster Munch into a wok, he carefully balances it on the arm of the living room sofa.
“Adam, what the hell?” Jules demands, spotting the wok, as well as Adam’s pièce de résistance, a cereal bowl of Heinz tomato sauce, dead center on the TV’s glass table. “Is that ketchup?”
“Yeah, for dipping,” he explains.
Only then he sees that she and her fellow hotel chef, Sabita, have been laying out their own offerings on the kitchen table—herb-spiced mixed nuts, beetroot hummus, pesto chicken meatballs, and curried mango salad with endives.
“See?” she tells him. “Better.”
Dumbly, he nods. Like a primitive man being presented with the wheel.
Christ. Was I really this unformed? Why is she with him? But then, am I really any more sophisticated now? In fact, shit, when did we even last have a party? Jules’s fortieth? Over ten years ago. Blimey, has it really been that long?
Beating a hasty retreat, Adam stations himself by the front door as a steady stream of guests starts to arrive—his, mainly computer nerds; hers, art-school kids and chefs.
“I still can’t believe you’re actually going to do it,” Darius tells him ten minutes later, over the house beats thumping out from where Doodles is hunched over his decks.
Darius is dressed in the same wire specs, MOR jeans, white T-shirt, and clumpy, blue-striped Reebok striders he invariably wore back then, looking like he’s been teleported in from the eighties and would rather be in a coding meeting.
What are you talking about? I want to ask him.
Only then I know. Because suddenly, it’s flashing neon right here inside Adam’s mind.
The ring in his pocket. And of course that’s why my Jules was laughing back in the shed just now when she said, “Yeah, sure,” about me forgetting this party.
Because tonight’s the night I asked her to marry me. It’s that party. This is it.
Only right now, the only person Adam’s confided in about his plans is his best mate.
“And you’re still sure?” Darius asks, but like he’s not a hundred percent convinced that Adam should go through with this.
“Positive,” Adam says. Even though he’s sick with nerves at the prospect of Jules saying no, he’s planning on asking her tomorrow down on the beach where they first kissed and has only got the ring here in his pocket tonight to keep it safe.
“Yeah, well, what would I know?” Darius grins. “I’m still living with my mum.”
Adam knows his best pal is being self-deprecating, but he still feels bad for him, because Darius has never got close to finding his own Jules. In fact, he’s never dated anyone for longer than a month.
“Anyone here you want me to, er, introduce you to?” Adam asks.
Darius rolls his eyes, glancing across at the fashionably attired Young Ngozi, who’s artily adjusting an old Kodak photo projector that’s beaming random snaps up onto the wall, but she doesn’t even register Darius or anyone else here.
And me, I now know why. It’s because she’s already having a love affair with hotshot banker Geoff up in London.
An affair that will eventually turn serious, but then Ngozi always seems to get what she wants.
“I don’t think I’m quite cool enough,” he says.
“It’s just clothes,” Adam says. “Haircuts.”
“Easy for you to say. Jules has taught you all that.”
Taught you. Adam can’t help picking up on his friend’s choice of words.
Like his life here with Jules is simply some code that Darius hasn’t yet hacked.
That it’s only Jules who’s made Adam who he now is.
But then maybe that’s true? I can’t help wondering.
Being back here, it’s impossible to miss how much hipper than me she was.
I mean, just look at her. Now holding a joint-rolling masterclass in the kitchen and making everyone laugh. Something else I guess I forgot.
“Just go and say hi,” Adam tells his friend, nodding back at Sabita, who’s now joined Ngozi. “Go on, you’re a smart, funny, good-looking guy.”
But something still holds him back.
“Do us a favor, will you?” Adam ends up asking Doodles a few minutes later instead, once Darius has retreated into the corridor to talk to James Peters and Ru Savage, two other nerdy guys they used to play Dungeons & Dragons with at school.
“What?” Doodles pushes his long Foo Fighters hair to one side.
“Can you teach Darius?”
“What, this?” Draining his lemon Hooch, Doodles stares down at his decks. “But he’s such a—and no offense, man, because I know you two go way back—dweeb. I mean, does he even know what acid techno is?”
“Um, sure,” Adam lies, not having a clue himself. “I mean, doesn’t everyone?”
He holds Doodles’s stare. Confidently. Has to. For his friend.
“Okay,” Doodles finally capitulates, “but later, when people are more wasted.”
Over the next twenty minutes, the party gets fuller and fuller and louder and louder, until it’s buzzing and every bit as good as I’d hoped.
Soon I’m loving it every bit as much as Adam, relishing every acrid swig of strawberry Bacardi Breezer and drag of his spliff, and surfing off him feeling so young with his whole life ahead of him, and no mortgage, no responsibilities—and nothing to do tonight except take Jules’s hand and dance…
Oh, except for what’s coming, of course. For what he’s going to ask her. Only maybe I won’t even be here to witness that, because how much of my time here is already gone?
Then I get my answer. Exactly half.
“Look, I made you a new tape,” Jules says, pointing to where it’s propped up on the mantelpiece. Flat Party 1998. “Only it’s a bit old school for Doodles here to use tonight.”
“Cool,” Adam says, picking it up and looking at the tracks. “You got some corkers on here. We’ll play it in a bit,” he says, smiling and kissing her, before noticing Darius is on his own again.
He goes over. “Hey, Doodles wants you to take a turn,” he shouts into Darius’s ear.
“At what?”
“The decks. And don’t pretend you don’t want to. I’ve seen you looking.”