This Must Be the Place (22 page)

They are, all of them, unused to the ceremony they are facing. They are all keen to display – to each other, to themselves, to the world in general – their disregard, their reluctance, the lack of store they set by such a public commitment. They all want to say: we are too young for this, we will never come to this, not us, not ever. And yet, and yet, of course, most of them will.

Todd Denham, who has spent most of the night awake, on driving duty, at the wheel of a borrowed and antediluvian Nissan, wriggles his feet further into the bearskin rug and takes a gulp of his drink. The infernal circus of photographs is over for the guests and they have been allowed back inside, where they are being plied with drink and snacks, to cover for the absence of the bride and groom, who have been whisked away by said photographer to pose beside a stone lion or the small loch or in some other equally demented situation.

Inside, the place is all corniced ceilings, cloakrooms with deep basins, polished wood bars that reek of peaty whisky, stone corridors, trays of tiny foodstuffs arranged as daring acts of balance: dill on top of salmon on top of crème fraîche on top of velouté on top of caviar on top of oatcake. It is staffed by people dressed in tartan: the men in kilts, the women in sashes, which, to Todd, who has worked in a fair number of hotels himself, look restrictive and impractical for catering. He starts to count the number of times he sees a female member of staff hoick her tartan sash back to its rightful place on her shoulder. Just take the damn thing off, he wants to whisper to the one nearest him – a lovely thing of around fifteen with a low hairline and an oval face, a schoolgirl, no doubt, doing a weekend job for extra money. No one here will give a monkey’s.

As if sensing his stare, the girl blushes, a tide of red rising from the neckline of her blouse, past her jaw and into the roots of her widow’s peak. She is conscientiously not looking at him, he sees. The tray she is holding starts to wobble. He wonders, for a moment, what she does with the money she earns. Goes up to Glasgow after school on a Friday to buy – what? Nail varnish, cheap perfume, clothing of which her nice country mother wouldn’t approve, magazines that the teachers at her probably private school would deplore, rakish shoes, coloured nylon underwear. What do teenage girls do with their money?

Todd takes a canapé from her tray without registering what it is and drops it into his mouth, still musing about the girl. He wants her to look at him, just once, just to prove he exists. He has no sexual interest in her – he’s twenty-four, for God’s sake, and even when he was fifteen he didn’t want to sleep with fifteen-year-olds – but there’s something about her stolid poise, her determined refusal of him that makes him feel dangerously insubstantial, inconsequential. No one has spoken to him for a while, here in this room, which is teeming with conversation: people chatting, exclaiming, communicating. Look at me, he wills, as he explores the canapé with his tongue – it is damp-tasting, a hint of cheese, a dash of fish. Something herby. Revolting. He has to swallow hard to stop himself gagging.

She doesn’t look but whisks away her tray and walks off towards a group of middle-aged women, who are engaged in a mass exclaim over the bride’s shoes.

Todd swallows the remains of the canapé, rinses his mouth with wine, then looks about the room to see what he can do next. He sees the bride stick her head around a door and gesture frantically to one of her bridesmaids, who assumes an expression of bewildered fear. He sees the photographer, with increasing sweaty desperation, trying to get a small boy in some hideous sailor get-up to stand next to the bride’s mother. He sees, through the window, three or four post-graduate students, like himself, cavorting on a small patch of lawn, removing their shoes and throwing them at each other. He sees his flatmate, Suki, standing in the doorway, blowing smoke over her shoulder. He sees that no one is looking at him: not a single person.

Todd feels the familiar idea grip him. The dare, the risk, the chutzpah of it. His heart trips into a faster rhythm and his hand finds its way into an inner pocket of his jacket and begins to stray through the contents. A small bottle with a safety cap, its sides invitingly cool but no good in this one-handed instance. A foil blister pack, half gone, of – something? He doesn’t recall. Two, no, three, torpedo-shaped free floaters, one with an elastic give to its surface, the others powdery. A single round pill, possibly Valium, and three paper tabs.

Todd takes drugs at times like this not so much because of the tidal push and pull of the chemical craving, although there is that, but because he likes to test if he can. If he can pull it off. He gets almost as much of a kick from seeing if he can get away with it as he does from the drug itself. Can he stand in a room of an appallingly expensive, stupendously ridiculous charade of a party, full of self-satisfied people his parents’ age – doctors, lawyers, military men, auctioneers – and pop some pharmaceutical products without one of them having the faintest inkling what he is up to?

He opts for the single round pill. Maybe Valium, maybe something else. An upper, a downer, Todd doesn’t know. His hand moves in a swift swoop to his mouth; the hard casing fits beautifully into the arch of his palate. Then he swallows and it’s gone.

Undetected! Once again! Todd bares his teeth in triumph, exhaling loudly. A woman in a turquoise suit and matching hat turns and looks at him with concern and veiled fear, then away.

Todd doesn’t like to think of what he does as ‘dealing’. He has a particular dislike of that word. His cousin ‘deals’, operating out of a flat in Leeds, with a client list, a team of runners, an exclusive phone line, the works. What Todd does is small fry, by comparison. He hooks up friends. He sources particular demands, mainly from his cousin, who is always happy to help. He distributes – gently, he likes to think, carefully, selectively – throughout the university. He is known to certain people; he gets calls from friends of friends, needing something for a party or a rave or a weekend away. He supplements his paltry grant with the resulting cash: he pays his rent, he buys winter shoes, he staves off his library fines, he feeds the electricity meter, he goes to the cash-and-carry for large bags of rice, tins of beans, packets of noodles. Survival stuff, really. No flash cars and clothes for him.

Unlike his cousin, he doesn’t look like a dealer. And he has the perfect cover: he is an academic, a post-grad, a supervisor, an expert in fictive non-fiction. He looks like what he is: a person on the verge of genteel poverty, a person who spends too much time indoors, bent over books, a person much wedded to libraries. He does not, by any stretch of the imagination, look like a drug-dealer.

He also operates under the strictest of rules. No drugs during the week: Saturday nights and special occasions only. He’s not an idiot. He knows his brain is his only asset, his only means of long-term employment, and he intends to keep it in good working order. Everyone needs a place to think, as Daniel is always saying.

He feels a jab at his back, and a voice close to his ear says, ‘I saw that.’

Suki? Todd looks over to where she had been a minute ago and the place by the door is vacant.

‘Saw what?’ he says, without looking round.

‘Give me one,’ she says, jabbing him again with something sharper than one ought to be carrying at a wedding.

‘One what?’

‘Whatever it is you’re having.’

He turns. Suki is behind him and the sharp object turns out to be the corner of her clutch-bag. He shrugs at her and grins. ‘Don’t have any more.’

‘Liar.’

‘I don’t. Honest.’

‘Liar!’ she hisses, stamping her foot.

‘But if you’d like to make a different withdrawal from the Todd Denham pharmacopoeia, you’re more than welcome to step into my office.’

Suki sighs, losing interest. ‘Maybe later,’ she mutters. ‘So,’ she sifts through her bag, searching for a lighter, ‘how many of the guests here today do we think have slept with the bride?’

Todd surveys the room, speculatively. ‘Male or female?’ he asks.

Suki rolls her eyes. ‘Male. Obviously. She’s hardly the type.’

‘Really?’

She pulls her how-stupid-you-are face. ‘Of course not. Save your tawdry lesbian fantasies for another time. Now, what do we think?’ She points at a heavy-set, shaven-headed bloke, who looks vaguely familiar to Todd. ‘Him, for sure.’

Todd points at a blond man from his eighteenth-century-travelogues seminar. ‘And him.’

Suki nods sagely, then swivels her eyes around the crowd. ‘Possibly him.’

‘What about whatshisface from Anthropology?’

‘And not forgetting Daniel.’

Todd turns to look at Suki. ‘Daniel hasn’t slept with her.’

Suki raises an eyebrow.

‘He hasn’t. I’m sure he hasn’t.’

‘I heard otherwise.’ Suki tilts her head. ‘And what’s more I heard it was last week.’

‘Last week?’ Todd looks at the bride, who is patting the back of her elaborate hairdo with anxious fingers, and then at the groom, who is in his shirtsleeves, laughing at something someone is saying to him. ‘No way,’ he says. ‘He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Not now. He hasn’t been doing that lately, not since … Anyway, she’s not his type.’

‘Does he have a type?’ says Suki, opening her eyes wide. ‘I had no idea. He’s always been so
egalitarian
in his choices. Or, at least, he used to be, before the whole Nicola debacle.’ She stands on tiptoe and swivels her head from left to right. ‘Where is he, anyway?’

Todd has to stop himself answering immediately. He always knows where Daniel is. It’s a thing with Todd that he can track him, like a sniffer dog. ‘Downstairs, I think,’ he says casually. He prefers to keep this ability, this talent, private. Then adds, ‘Want to go and find him?’

They descend one of the three staircases – the medium-sized, twisting one that gives onto a low-ceilinged hallway with fringed lamps and peeved-looking grouse in glass cabinets. They pass an alcove where a woman in a flesh-coloured frock is locked in a frenzied grapple with a man in a white shirt. Suki glides by but Todd leans in and gives a theatrical cough, startling them out of their embrace, forcing them to look up at him with dazed, mascara-smeared faces.

At the bottom of the staircase a gaggle of children in party clothes is being ineffectually herded by a harassed mother in a sweat-darkened dress. She turns to Todd and Suki and, seemingly without seeing them, shrieks, ‘I warned them about serving ice-cream! But did they listen?’

In answer, Suki puts a cigarette into her mouth and lights it, all in one hand movement. The mother stares, first at Todd, then at Suki, as if she can’t believe her eyes. Todd starts to laugh, gently at first, then finds he can’t stop. He has to lean on Suki and, when she removes herself outside his reach, he has to resort to a handy bookcase. Is this the first effects of the Valium? Hard to say. Something is silting up his veins, that’s for sure, rolling through his brain. It feels like a missed night’s sleep but with softer edges. His limbs have a pleasing weight to them and the lights around the hallway have acquired refracting penumbras.

‘Penumbra,’ he says, possibly aloud, to the books in the bookcase. ‘Pen. Um. Bra.’

Suki removes her cigarette. ‘Shut up, Todd,’ she says briskly.

The gaggle of children turn suddenly, like startled cattle, and stampede through a doorway, the mother running after them. Todd is repeating her words over and over, inside his head, trying to get the exact pitch and register of her Scottish accent. I
warrr
ned them about
serrrr
ving
ice
-cream. But did they listen? Said more like
lus-un
.

In front of them is a display of stags’ heads. Daniel is nowhere to be seen. He has momentarily fallen off Todd’s radar, wandered out of range. Todd takes a thistle from a floral arrangement and places it in the mouth of the largest stag. Suki strikes up a conversation with an earnest-faced bearded boy.

Where is Daniel? Todd feels an unspecified, nibbling anxiety. He headed this way a quarter of an hour ago – maybe more. He said he needed some air. Or was it a drink? Something like that.

Todd is just about to reach out and touch Suki’s arm, to tell her he doesn’t know where Daniel is and should they go and find him, when he becomes conscious that he is twisting his head to look at the door. Someone is entering. Later, he will recall that he heard her before he saw her: that clack-clack of her boots, the jangling metalware of her bag.

Nicola Janks is moving through the hallway. Or someone who closely resembles her. This person has her glossy, clipped hair, her heavy fringe, the crimson startle of her lipstick, but it is as if she herself is a candle that has been left burning too long. The flesh has melted off her in – what? – a matter of weeks. Her clever fox face is hollowed out at the cheeks, under the eyes: skin stretched over skull. Her hands, clutching that bag of hers with multiple zips, are reduced to wizened claws, marbled with blue. Her sternum sticks up as a ridged spur from the neckline of her dress.

She passes them with a tilt of her head and a grimace, as if simultaneously to acknowledge and dismiss their shock.

‘Hello, sidekicks,’ she says, from the corner of her poppy-red mouth.

She doesn’t alter her stride. Todd and Suki swivel their heads to watch her go.

‘Did you see?’ Suki is hissing as Nicola Janks ascends the stairs, at precisely the same moment as Todd is whispering, ‘What’s happened to her?’

Todd stands up. He sits down. He stands up again. He says, ‘We have to find Daniel. We have to warn him.’

Suki says, ‘Fuck.’ Then she says, ‘Did you know she was invited? How come she was invited?’ She screws up her face and moves it close to Todd’s. ‘You stay here,’ she says, pushing him down to a convenient tweed stool. ‘Keep a look-out for Daniel. If you see him, make sure you keep him with you.’

She disappears up the stairs, two at a time.

Todd watches the comings and the goings of the hallway. The earnest-faced boy goes into a room, then comes out again surprisingly quickly. More children in party dresses or possibly the same ones. The bride’s mother, walking fast in her aubergine court shoes, her mouth set in a grim line. A couple, not the ones from the alcove, the man’s hand inside the woman’s dress. The mother of the ice-cream comment: she wanders through the hall, glances at Todd, then away, her face tense and alarmed. Suki, in her dragon jacket, gives him a sidelong look as she passes.