The Gap of Time (4 page)

“Xeno is your closest friend. You are in business with him.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Cameron, eh?”

“But you said yourself, you have no grounds for this suspicion.”

Leo turned back into the room. “It's not just women who have intuition, Cameron. I've known Xeno all my life.”

Xeno all my life.

They had met at boarding school at thirteen. Both boys had been sent away by fathers who had gained custody over unfit mothers. Leo's mother had left his father for another woman. Xeno's mother was alcoholic and mentally unstable. The boarding school was neither fashionable nor academic but it allowed their fathers to believe that they were bringing up their sons when in fact their sons were barely at home.

Weekends at the school were quiet because most of the boys went home. Leo and Xeno invented worlds where they could live.

“I'm in a forest,” said Xeno. “My own cabin. Rabbits come and I shoot them. Bang bang bang.”

“I'm on the moon,” said Leo. “And it's made of mozzarella.”

“How are you gonna walk on a ball of mozzarella?” asked Xeno.

“Don't have to walk,” said Leo. “No gravity.”

They listened to David Bowie's “Space Oddity” and Xeno got into country and western. Sometimes he thought he was Emmylou Harris.

They didn't want to be like the other boys and that was just as well because they weren't like the other boys.

By fifteen they were inseparable. They joined the school shooting club and competed at the target range. Xeno was more accurate because he was calmer. Leo was faster and sometimes won because he fired more shots. They invented a game: GUN BULLET TARGET. Win two rounds and you were the gun. Lose one and you were the bullet. Lose two, and you were the target. Then Xeno added MOVING TARGET and said it made him feel free. Leo didn't understand that. He just wanted to be the gun.

One night after target practice they had sex. It was a cliché. Shower. Hard-on. Three-minute handjob. No kissing. But the next day Leo kissed Xeno in the bike shed. He kissed him and he touched his face. He tried to say something but he didn't know what it was. Xeno didn't say anything. That was like him. Xeno was a bit of a girl anyway, Leo thought. He had grey eyes like a cat and soft, dark hair that fell over his eyes.

Leo was bulkier, tougher, taller, stronger. Built like a rugby player, he moved with confidence but without grace. He liked the watery quality Xeno had.

They went swimming, the sky low, the water warm, gulls patrolling the shoals. Leo was showy and noisy and fast and got tired before Xeno and his long, methodical distance swimming.

Leo waded out of the water, his feet making deep prints on the wet sand. He turned back, hands on his hips, to shout something to Xeno. The sun was in his eyes. He couldn't see his friend and for a second he felt fear.

But there he was, his head and shoulders graceful as a dolphin, swimming back to shore. The image was blurred but it seemed to Leo that Xeno moved like a wave over the water.

Xeno splashed onto the shore. Leo put his arms round him and pulled him down on the sand.

“Do you think about girls when we do it?” said Xeno.

“Yes,” lied Leo.

And then Xeno worried about being gay.

Later, in the dorm room they shared, they lay with their legs wrapped round each other watching
Rebel Without a Cause
. They both wanted to be James Dean but Xeno wanted to sleep with James Dean too.

“James Dean was gay,” said Xeno.

“Was Elvis gay?”

“No, he fucked cheeseburgers.”

“I wouldn't want mayonnaise on my dick.”

“Not even if I sucked it off?”

Leo was instantly hard. He undid his trousers. Xeno knelt down and licked his balls. Leo stroked Xeno's head. Then he started laughing. Xeno looked up.

Leo said, “I did it with a watermelon when I was a kid. Knifed a hole in the side and fucked it. It was amazing. I was always asking my mum to buy watermelons after that and never eating them. Then one day my mum came in the kitchen and I was standing there with my pants down and this fucking green watermelon stuck on my dick.”

“You twat! Did she kill you?”

“Yeah! She got my dad to give me a lecture on inappropriate objects of desire.”

“Is that me?” said Xeno.

“Don't stop,” said Leo.

Their school was near the coast, and on Saturday afternoons when the other boys had gone home Leo and Xeno took their bikes and cycled down to the cliffs.

One Saturday Leo said, “Let's see who can cycle the fastest nearest to the edge. Like the car chase in
Rebel
.”

Xeno didn't want to. But Leo was taunting him.

They set off racing. They were both standing on the pedals, pumping as fast as they could go. Leo was on the outside. He hit a rut and slowed. Xeno surged ahead of him. Leo threw himself low over the bike and pushed forward with all his strength. He came level, pulled past, and then cut in. His back wheel grazed Xeno's front tyre.

Xeno fell. The bike separated from his body, turning and turning in slow motion down the cliff.

“XENO!”

There was no reply. Leo saw the bike hit the water.

He remembered the out-of-time feeling of the moment. His heart rate slowing after the race. The sweat on his chest. A gull circling, its lonely cry like his own cry, high-pitched and long.

“XENO!”

Leo cycled back to the school, his strength done, pedalling on fear. He was sick over the caretaker's boots. The caretaker called the police. Leo took them to the cliff path, the police Land Rover radio crackling. The helicopter circling overhead.

Xeno was unconscious on a ledge invisible from the top of the cliff. He had concussion and a broken pelvis but he had fallen into thick heather and by some miracle not rolled over the edge.

The air ambulance lifted him in a sling and took him to hospital, where he remained for the rest of the term.

Leo stopped going to lessons. He walked every day back to the spot on the cliffs.

His father came to talk to him. He made a speech that began, “I know we've never been close,” and ended with, “Try to get over it.”

Leo wanted to tell everyone that what had happened to Xeno was his fault. He went to the headmaster's door. He stood outside. He went away again. This happened several times.

At last he was able to visit Xeno in hospital. Xeno looked thin and tired. His torso was in traction. His head was bandaged. He was on a drip. Leo sat in his school uniform by the bed. Xeno took his hand.

And then Leo cried. Silent tears like a close-up in a movie. It was unreal. That this should have happened was unreal. Someone else's life, not his. He had almost killed his best friend.

Xeno came back to school the next year and sat his exams. He did well in maths, computing and English literature and badly in everything else. Leo did badly in everything. It didn't matter. His father had got him an entry-level job with Barclays Wealth Management.

Xeno turned eighteen and bought a camper van with some of the insurance money his father had accepted as an out-of-court settlement from the local authority for failing to maintain safety standards on the cliff path.

Xeno had enough to live on now for a few years. He got a dog from a rescue home, grew a retro ponytail and hit the New Age hippie 'n' rave trail, driving from festival to festival, no mobile phone, few possessions.

He was handsome with a certain vulnerability to him. He soon had more women than he needed. They liked his quiet, brooding face and that he read books and listened to off-grid music, like opera.

Leo, big boned and Valkyrie blond, with his thick, brushed-back hair and a way of talking, looked good in a suit and did well at the bank. He worked sixteen-hour days without complaining, went to the gym at six o'clock every morning and got drunk every night with no effect on his capacity to make a profit. Soon he was getting rich.

He saw Xeno only once in the first three years after they left school. He felt embarrassed by his drifting friend and his lack of success. He offered Xeno money.

Xeno looked at him with those pale grey eyes that Leo had loved and shook his head. He didn't need money. He didn't have much but he had enough for food, fuel, books, the things he wanted to do.

That upset Leo. Everybody needs money. “Come and stay in the flat for a bit,” he said. “Have a hot shower. It's November, for Christ's sake. You can't see out of the fucking van for condensation. I'll take a few days off.”

And it was in those few days that Leo discovered his friend was designing computer games.

Leo was playing Grand Theft Auto and shouting at the console when Xeno came in and threw a banana skin at the screen.

“Hey!” said Leo. “What's with you?”

“Gaming is the best technology mated with prehistoric levels of human development,” said Xeno. “It's all cars, fights, theft, risk, girls and reward.”

Leo couldn't see the problem. That was his real life exactly. Why should a game be any different?

“Women don't play because it bores them,” said Xeno. “So that's half your potential market gone. And why shouldn't games be as good as books?”

Leo thought games were better than books. He didn't read. He liked movies and TV and some theatre but a book was too quiet. Reading was so quiet you could hear the pages rustle.

“Relationship-building. Moral challenge,” said Xeno.

“You have to build alliances in games,” said Leo.

“Yeah, but it's instrumental, isn't it? I use you, you use me. In any case, games are too passive. Books change the way people think about the world.”

“Not if they don't read them, they don't,” said Leo.

“Why can't games be a game-changer?” said Xeno. “Why can't a game make us understand more, see more, feel more? Don't you want to feel something other than adrenalin?”

“Are you gay?” said Leo suddenly.

Xeno shrugged. He had girlfriends but no one special. He hadn't fallen in love but he liked women. He liked real conversations.

Leo hadn't fallen in love either.

They went out for the night. Got drunk. When they came home Leo went into his bedroom and got undressed. He usually watched a bit of porn at night to get to sleep. He called out to Xeno.

“Want to watch some girls with me?”

But Xeno didn't answer.

Cameron left the office. Leo swivelled round to the window. He hated his friend for fucking his wife. Weren't there enough women out there? Everywhere he went, bars, clubs, hotels, boats, there were identical-looking women searching for men. Long hair, long legs, big sunglasses, moulded tits, vast handbag, killer heels. You could rent them for the weekend except that it wasn't called renting, but both parties knew who paid and who put out. You could collect one at the airport with the hire car if you knew what you were doing. He smiled. That would be a good business. Avis, Hertz, Budget. Choose your model. Bodywork. Engine size. Damage limitation.

Men were reluctant to get married—all his friends had put it off till they were at least forty, sometimes fifty. But if they did marry they were reluctant to get divorced. Just a bit of understanding at the airport would make all the difference. A man needs understanding because he is existentially alone. He stares into the darkness.

That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another. As though one human being could…his buzzer buzzed…know another.

“Xeno's here,” said Pauline.

“I'm busy,” said Leo.

“I'll send him in,” said Pauline.

Men in Leo's position had personal assistants who could moonlight as supermodels on their celery and cottage cheese lunch breaks. Leo had Pauline. When she had started working at his ex-bank she'd been thirty, fluent in three languages with a degree in economics, an MBA, and she had just passed her accountancy exams for fun. She was a much better educated, much better qualified, much better person than Leo, but she was never going to cut it as a trader. Detail was her strength—she could rip through two hundred pages of due diligence in an hour and give him a list of bullet points to fire at the other side. She'd saved him from the worst of a few deals more than a few times. And when he was dumped from the bank she was the only one of his colleagues who went on calling him to see how he was doing. When he had started up on his own he had asked her to come and work for him.

Leo did the deals. Pauline did the detail.

After fifteen years of knowing Leo and the fact that fifteen years had moved her from a sleek thirty to a formidable forty-five, she ran things the way she wanted them to be run and said whatever she wanted to say.

Thanks to Pauline, Sicilia was compliant, transparent, charitable and, if not exactly ethical, they had standards. Leo was OK with that.

Pauline opened the door. “I said I was busy,” said Leo.

“You're not busy,” said Pauline. “I'm busy.”

“Bitch,” said Leo.

“Grob,” said Pauline.

“What's a grob?” said Xeno.

Xeno was slimmer than Leo, easy in his creative-tech clothes: black light-wool trousers tapered to the ankle, grey lace-up suede brogues and a grey linen shirt that matched his eyes. The shirt had a pink collar and cuffs. He was too well-groomed for a straight guy, Leo thought, and Leo had always assumed there were boys somewhere on the scene.

“I'll get you a Yiddish phrasebook for Christmas—meanwhile use the audio-visual aid standing right in front of you. Hello, Leo. I've met better-behaved apes. Goodbye, Xeno. We'll miss you.”