The Mad British (30 page)

“HERE, HAVE SOME more cake."

Lassie certainly is good with mothers. I watch my mother shovel another slice of chocolate cake in front of Travis. He knows just the right compliment and wide-eyed expression to bring out the maternal smothering of a woman. My elbows are aching from leaning them on the kitchen table for so long. I pull back and rub them with my palms while pulling my feet onto the chair.

"Adelaide put your feet down. More tea?" My mother refills his cup without waiting for an answer. If I don’t stop this current tide, there will be a roast lamb in the oven in no time.

"Thanks, Mrs Queen."

My mother slides into an empty seat and cups her hands round her teacup. "What do you do, Travis? You look like a very creative person."

His eyebrows wag at the compliment. "I'm retired."

My mum laughs softly. "Oh, at such a young age. How nice."

"Indeed, Mrs Queen, but I mess around with a blog sometimes, and I buy a lot of commercial real estate. But other than that, I'm fully enjoying my permanent exit from the workforce." He slurps a mouthful of tea. "Great tea. Organic?"

I note my mother's smile is frozen in place. "Are you sure you're a friend of James’?"

"His nearest and dearest. Do you know if it's fair trade or not? No worries if it's not. But I know a guy that grows his own organic leaf in Costa Rica. I can hook you up."

The back door bangs open and Bailey enters, unhooking the dog from his leash. "You guys sure you don't want to come back with me tonight? I've got to leave soon."

"Nope, we're good," Travis says before I can get a word in. He had barely been in my house for five minutes before declaring he’s my ride back into London, despite showing up without a car.

"I'm going with you, Bailey," I say.

Travis chokes on his cake. "I thought you were coming back with me."

Now my mother is looking at me sideways. "Travis came all this way, dear."

I nearly double over. "Without. A. Car. Bailey has a car. I'm going with him."

"Adelaide." Travis says my name in the same manner as James does sometimes: a bit too brusque to be polite, but with enough gravitas to make me sit up and pay attention.

We catch each other's glances across the table and I find myself pinned under his piercing stare. I can’t look away from Travis. James’ usually flippant, carefree friend is temporarily absent, and in his place is the cutthroat businessman I’d heard all about from James.

"I need to talk with you. You know what this is about. Then I promise I will take you back with no argument."

Despite my earlier promise, I give in. "All right."

With those two words, he drops his fork and slides back into the easy grin of a lifelong chronic. "All righty. Want to take me for that walk now?"

My mother makes me take a jumper. November nights are colder now, and the streetlight pops on to blend with the front light of the house, illuminating the chalk drawings on the pavement that some child has left behind.

I breathe in the smell of fading heat and mown grass and wonder where all the butterflies have gone. They used to always be around, and now it seems they have faded away.

"Where are we going?"

Travis is craning his neck, checking out the modest houses along the street. "You lived here. You tell me."

"Then why did you. . . ? Okay, whatever." I nod up ahead at the corner. "We can go to the park. It's a couple of blocks that way."

"Let's do that. Hey." I turn to face him, shoving my hands in my pockets. In the distance, an ambulance siren blares, and a few dogs join in. Travis shifts and pulls a hand out of his pocket and scratches his nose. "Sorry I barged in on you. I figured you wouldn’t answer your phone if I’d called."

"No, I, uh, would have." The volume and pitch of my voice is too high; he will know I’m lying. But he doesn’t call me out on it, thankfully.

We reach the park right as the last natural light vanishes, revealing a shining quarter moon. It reminds me of the storybook princesses that James’ sister writes, so I force my eyes to look at the ground instead.

"We used to come here a lot," I tell him, when we cross the grass over to the swing sets, kicking dead leaves out of the way. "Bailey and I. They used to have these really heavy animal swings. They were made out of metal or something. Mine was a seahorse." I smile and settle back into a swing. Travis drops into the one next to me, and almost by instinct, we both kick slightly and start swinging. "I named mine Seahorse."

"Original."

"I know, right?" The bottom of my Chuck Taylor scrapes the sparse gravel under the swing, kicking up clouds of dust. "Bailey's was a dog, except he would call it The Wolf. I thought all dogs were wolves until I was like, eight. I told the other kids we had a baby wolf and they all laughed at me." I smile at Travis. "So Bailey came and beat them up for me."

"Hmm," Travis says. "He's a good brother. He looks out for you." The swing chains clang against the metal frame as we sway back and forth. "A lot of people do." I lower my face and remain silent. Travis is a persistent bastard. "It's okay to let them."

It feels like a swath of hot fire cuts through my heart. "You don't have to do this."

"Do what?" His feet hit the ground, skidding to a standstill, and then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small shiny object. "Wanna burn?"

"Huh?" A crumpled plastic Ziploc bag comes out next. Travis reaches inside and pinches a bud between his fingers, then breaks off a small piece and packs it into his pipe in his other hand.

I blink, incredulous. "You—you brought weed?"

"
No
. What’re you, mad?" he huffs. "You can't go through airport security checkpoints with freaking bud on you."

"So where did you—"

"I bought it at the corner shop at the end of your street, right before I came over."

"Are you kidding? Mrs Yang's store?"

He pulls a flat square out of his pocket and strikes a match. I’ve never seen anyone light a pipe that way. He takes a few quick inhaling breaths, sucking in the smoke before it can curl away, and shakes out the match.

"Yeah, Mrs Yang—" His face scrunches into a mass of crinkles, hacking out a lungful of smoke. "Has a
gardening
business on the side—
ah
." He bends slightly and coughs some more. "Sorry. My sinuses get all dry from that crappy recycled air on the plane."

I haven’t smoked pot since I was nineteen, but I accept the offering in slightly trembling fingers. "Don't you have a lighter?" I ask, when he passes the matchbox.

He helps relight the smouldering buds with a match. "And add more bullshit plastic to the over-capacity landfills? Screw that. There's enough micro-plastic in the ecosystem to give us birth defects for the next three generations, and it’s all added in the last half of the twentieth—"

"
Okay—
" I cough out a huge cloud of scorching smoke. My throat burns.

Travis brings the pipe to his lips again and strikes a match one-handed. He obviously has it down to a science. He takes another huge hit, holds it in, and then exhales a smoke plume the size of a small zeppelin. "Ugh. This shit's harsh. Probably grown in shitty dirt, goddamn bumpkins."

"Travis."

"What?"

I take the pipe again. "I know you're not here to assess the quality of weed in my neighbourhood."

"What? You don't know that." He twirls back and forth on his swing seat. "Maybe I'm here to specifically check out the weed in small town England. A weed tour, if you will."

Taking another hit, my head begins to inflate and fuzz away. "Travis."

"The next town over looks promising. Lots of bakery shops. You don't put those up unless you have a significant stoner population. Those and twenty-four-hour McDonald’s."

"Travis."

"What?" His eyes are beginning to get glassy. "Hey, when we're done here, we should go to Juice Me in Camden Town. They have this slushie thing called a Juicy Orange, and it tastes like a real orange." He wipes his face with the back of his sleeve. "Or we like, get a real orange. Oh, but then it's not cold. The coldness is the goodness of the Juicy Orange."

I start giggling compulsively. "Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

The giggles turn to braying laughter. "You're making—making me laugh when all I've been doing for the past two weeks is. . .” My laughter fades out, and the aching in my chest returns. "Feel sorry for myself, like a loser."

My statement partially kills the buzz we had going. Travis busies himself by scraping the ash out of the pipe with a fingernail. I wait for him to speak. There is no humour in his voice when he does. "You're just going to give up on him? You even know what you're fighting about?"

"Travis—”

"Yeah I know what he said. It’s a bullshit thing to say to the person you love and I will kick his arse if I were you, but don't put this all on him."

"What?"

"You heard me," Travis says blandly, firing up another match. He takes another hit. "Now, I don't know everything, so stop me if I'm way off-base, but you hid things from him too."

"I did not."

"Really?" Travis coughs dryly. "So why did he go for so long thinking everything was okay?"

I turn from him and pause. "I. . . "

I guess I did. . .

The buds smoulder and go out, and he doesn’t make any move to relight them. A cricket starts chirping somewhere in the dark grass, and it’s several long moments before he breaks the quiet. "Adelaide, look, I get that James doesn't always get it, you know. I've been through a lot with him."

"I know."

"I don't think you do." He sighs. "I know you know everything that went down with us in school."

"About the drugs?"

"Yeah, that. I'll spare you my unorthodox albeit correct view on our country's misguided war on drugs and just remind you that the dumb shit almost went to juvenile prison for me because. . . well, just because he's that kind of guy. But you should already know that about him."

I look at him. There is a long beat before Travis soldiers on. "It took me a long time to figure out why he did all that for me. I mean, there is nothing for him to gain. He got kicked out of Eton, his parents nearly died of shame, there are some relatives that still hide the silver when he comes over. . . not to mention the brush with getting thrown in pound-me-in-the-arse prison—"

"Travis."

"Okay, that's a bit much. Juvenile pound-me-in-the-arse prison—"

"Travis."

"Juvenile shank-me-in-the-side prison." That last one makes him snicker. "Sorry, I digress. Where was I?"

The outburst makes me smile for a second. "You were telling me why James took the fall for you."

"Oh yeah. And nearly went to juvenile make-me-your-bitch prison. Um, yeah. So that." His face goes blank for a second and then snaps back to focus. "I won't lie to you and tell you he never does thoughtless things—because, believe me, I couldn’t get his drunken arse to call me back for nearly two weeks even though he
knew
I was coming down for a visit. He does it because he cares about you, Adelaide. He cared about me when we were stupid school kids and he took the fall for me because he knew he could get out of things that I couldn’t. He didn’t want my life to be difficult when he had the power to change it positively."

I reach over and pull the pipe out of his hands. "So you're saying he can’t stand back and let me be responsible for myself."

Either that statement or his buzz makes him pull a comically hilarious expression. "What?
No.
What’re you talking about?"

"I don't know. You started this."

"Maybe I shouldn't have blazed," Travis mutters, taking the pipe back from my hands and lighting a match. "Look, Adelaide, James has wasted so much of his life on his job, which I
know
you know my feeling on investment bankers. Soulless bastards that take your money and splurge on lavish yacht parties while sending you bank statements showing your losses. I know. I was one." He pauses to take another hit off the pipe.

"This really is
schwag
. Tell Mrs Yang to stop letting the dog pee where it grows—”

“Travis, you were saying?”

“Uh, yeah, you gave him something to care about. Something to come home to other than a random hotel in some random city. The hell you didn’t change him. I can’t tell you the last time James actually lived in a home that he owned. You changed that about him and now you’re going to sit here and tell me that you don't understand why he did what he did?"

I wave away a cloud of smoke. "He lied to me. He padded my bank account after I told him I didn’t want his money, something we both agreed upon at the very beginning, and he lied for months, Travis. How can I trust him?”

"How do you guys split expenses then?" He must notice my averting eyes. "Oh
come on
. Don't tell me you guys didn’t even talk about it."