The Coincidence Engine Read online

  ‘Hey!’ Carey said again. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going? That was my drink, you dick.’

  Half past them, now, the Elvises turned round. Alex didn’t like the expression on Fat Elvis’s face.

  ‘You say to me, girlie?’

  ‘I called you a dick,’ said Carey. She pushed out her lip. When she lost her temper, Carey had a tendency to forget that she was a slightly built woman in her early twenties rather than, say, a light-middleweight boxing champion.

  ‘Don’t call him an asshole,’ said the thin Elvis in the Evel Knievel suit. ‘’S an accident.’

  ‘I’ve hit a girl before,’ said Fat Elvis. Alex believed him.

  ‘I didn’t call him an asshole,’ said Carey. ‘I called him a dick.’ Her face was flushed. Alex was petrified. ‘He smashed into me and made me spill my drink. And then he was walking off without so much as turning round to say sorry. And he’s fat, and he’s ugly, and he’s dressed like a dick. I call that dickish.’

  Fat Elvis was taking this in. He paused, swaying a bit. Then he spoke to Alex, dead-eyed.

  ‘You need to keep that mouth of hers under control.’

  He’d barely reached the end of the sentence when Carey slapped him with a report loud enough to make Alex wince. In films, scenes like this seemed to result in moments of stunned silence, but Fat Elvis moved very fast indeed. Barely had the blow landed than he lurched forward with a roar, grabbing at Carey’s wrist. He missed, just, and Carey hopped backwards.

  Alex, on instinct, bopped Fat Elvis on the head with the only thing he had to hand, which was his empty plastic funnel of drink. What impact it made was cushioned by his nylon quiff, but it knocked him slightly off balance.

  As he came back up it was immediately apparent he intended violence. Carey swung her handbag, catching him on one sideburn.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted the other thin Elvis.

  ‘Run!’ shouted Alex, and run they did, with three drunk Elvises in pursuit.

  Alex pounded along the pavement. Carey was a bit ahead of him, lifting up her knees, pistoning her arms, her baseball boots flashing red-white and caramel back at him.

  ‘Pricks! Fucking pricks!’ Carey was shouting over her shoulder between breaths.

  ‘SHUT… UP!’ said Alex, much less fit than Carey. By the end of the block they had pulled away from the Elvises but his breath was already ragged. ‘You’re going – to get – me… killed.’

  They swerved through oncoming pedestrians, dip-diving around stationary gawpers. The cross light was flashing ‘Walk’ and Alex saw Carey make the snap call to go for it. He hop-skipped through the intersection with a blare of horns.

  They gained the opposite pavement and Alex bounced off someone’s shoulder, earning a shout of indignation, and a splat of what seemed to be ice cream on the cheek, but then Alex looked up and realised they were heading into the thick of a crowd.

  Carey, ahead of him, wormed shoulder-forward between two people with cameras and ducked into the crowd.

  Behind him, Alex heard the shout of what he guessed was one of the Elvises hitting ice-cream guy head on, buying them a second or two, and then he was into the thickening mass himself.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’

  ‘Hey -’

  ‘- with my friend… sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…’

  There was music to the side, and bright lights. Some sort of show. Alex kept his head down. Behind him, the sound of further collisions.

  ‘- you, Elvis!’

  ‘- the damn way…’

  He ploughed on, keeping his head down. He popped his head up. He could see Carey, lither and pushier, extending her lead.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry…’

  The crowd was very thick, now. The whole of the pavement had been fenced in with wooden boards and netting, and the crowd was jammed into that space. There were planks underfoot and light – golden, green and red – was pulsing. Alex’s arm barked against a rough rope. A loud fusillade of bangs caused him to whip his head round – above the crowd and back from the pavement he could see what looked like a boat, its rigging scarved with multicoloured smoke. Hanging from the rigging were girls in bikinis with eyepatches and pirate hats, waggling their legs.

  Alex put his head down and plunged on, wriggling through the thickest part of the crowd. As the crowd thinned he caught up with Carey, grabbed her arm.

  He risked a backward glance. He couldn’t see the Elvises. He pulled her down and against the wooden barrier between the pavement and the road. They squatted there, between a thicket of legs. As he squatted, his trousers tightened at the hip, and the ring box dug in.

  Carey’s face was bright with exhilaration. She grabbed the back of his head and kissed him on the lips, then let him go.

  ‘Not funny!’ he hissed. ‘It was me they were going to beat up -’ and then he stopped momentarily as he saw what looked like three sets of white legs, trousers tellingly flared, coming through the crowd. He pushed his hand over Carey’s mouth and studied the pavement. The legs went past.

  ‘Not funny,’ he repeated, but now they weren’t actually going to be beaten up what had been scary started to seem funny. He was shaky with adrenalin.

  ‘Marry me,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  He got up, thighs creaking, from his squat and meerkatted up. There was no sign of the Elvises. A wooden walkway coming off the pavement at right angles led to the entrance to a casino. Alex pointed, steered Carey by the elbow, and jostled through into the lobby.

  ‘Drink,’ he said.

  They walked, Alex still holding Carey’s elbow, across the wide hideous carpet in the direction of a large, brassy, over-marbled bar in a thicket of slot machines and palm trees.

  Behind the bar was a girl who looked from the waist down like she was playing Dick Whittington in panto at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, and from the waist up like she was a bellhop in a pornographic movie.

  ‘Champagne,’ said Alex. ‘We’d like, please. Two glasses.’

  ‘Sir,’ she said without smiling.

  ‘Care, you are a psychopath,’ he said. Carey beamed.

  ‘Not taking shit from Elvis,’ she said.

  The woman set two tall flutes of champagne in front of them. She slipped a silver tray down between them with a paper bill face down on it. Carey picked it up.

  ‘Crap!’ said Carey. ‘That’s eighty bucks.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Alex said. ‘I won in the casino earlier, remember.’

  ‘But eighty bucks!’

  ‘Seriously.’ He made a point of looking into her face as he smiled. ‘This is a special occasion.’

  He moved his hand over hers, took the bill, replaced it face down on the silver tray. Then he dropped one leg off the bar stool so he could get into his pocket. He pulled out the box, and he put it in on the fake marble bar top between them. He looked at Carey.

  She looked at the box. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. The moment was right.

  ‘Open it,’ he said.

  Carey looked very unsure. She didn’t move at all.

  ‘It’s for you,’ Alex said. ‘Have a look.’

  The waitress behind the bar was listening with her back to them, pretending to polish some glasses. Carey fiddled with her hands. He could see that she knew what was in the box, and the expression on her face was one of shock and fear. She pushed the box away from her, no more than half an inch, with the back of her knuckles.

  ‘Open it,’ he said again.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Open it.’

  She did, sadly, and she looked at the ring, its glitter. And then she looked at him, and she looked away. She looked miserable.

  ‘Carey -’ he said. Something cold settled in his chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. ‘Carey. I want us to get married.’ He heard his voice say that. But now it felt like he was watching the scene from a long, long way away. As if he was sitting on the moo
n, watching his proposal of marriage stall through a telescope – its details scratchy and distant and oddly painless.

  She continued looking at the ring. Her eyes were welling.

  ‘Can we just forget this?’ she said in a small voice. Alex was accustomed to Carey having a brisk bossiness, a confidence in her manner – but she seemed floored, lost suddenly. He was sitting at this bar with a stranger.

  He took a sip of his champagne.

  ‘Yes,’ he said coldly. ‘Of course. So sorry.’ He reached out and went to retrieve the ring, getting as far as snapping the case shut before Carey yelped and put her hand on his, holding it there. Her knuckles were pale. Her face was contorted. The mole on the corner of her chin – where he’d kissed. It was nothing: a blemish. How suddenly and how absolutely what was familiar had become strange; someone he had imagined part of him was just another human animal.

  ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she said. Alex left his hand where it was. He looked at the surface of the bar. He was conscious of the waitress not watching, polishing glasses.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. His face felt very cold. You can’t come back from this. He took his hand away and got down off his stool, not looking at her, and put the ring box back in his pocket and walked towards where they had come in without looking back at her. They hadn’t gone deep enough in for casino geography to do its work. He still knew how to get out.

  He had just reached where the walkway began when he realised that he hadn’t paid for the drinks. He turned and went back, fast, feeling a burst of anger. Carey was where she had been and she was looking at him. Her face was wet, and it opened – the whole face – like she’d seen him giving her a second chance.

  He ignored her, pushing up against the bar, snatching at the little silver tray with the bill on it and leaning forward to catch the attention of the waitress. Alex thrust his hand in his right-hand jeans pocket and pulled out some crumpled notes – what were these? – twenty, twenty, ten, a five, ones… not enough.

  ‘Alex,’ she said. She put her hand to his elbow and he jerked it away. He didn’t look at her.

  He pulled his credit card out of his other pocket. ‘Waitress,’ he said with a venom that surprised him. She ignored him. ‘Waitress!’

  The waitress turned round with slow ostentation, took in Carey crying, and looked up at him. If there had been a hint of a smirk, a hint of an arched eyebrow, in her expression Alex would have hit her. Her smile was bright and icy. She hated him.

  ‘I need to pay this bill.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘Alex, please,’ said Carey – pulling this time at his forearm. Her face was imploring him. ‘Please. I’m sorry, please, don’t go – don’t be so horrible, talk to me, please, I’m sorry…’

  ‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake and -’ he pulled away with real violence this time – ‘get off me.’

  She looked startled.

  ‘Don’t touch me, Carey. I’m serious. Do you know what I -’

  The waitress came back with the credit-card machine. It ticked and chirred. She passed it to Alex. It was deadweight in his hands. He punched in his pin then waited, looking at the gaudy ceiling of the casino and clenching his jaw.

  ‘Aaaand…’ the waitress said, pulling the strip from the top of the machine with bright professionalism, hitting a button with the heel of her hand and handing card and slippery receipts to Alex. Her overlong red fingernails fanned in the air as she did it.

  Alex turned round and went again, and Carey made no attempt to follow him.

  He fought through the crowd that was still hanging round the end of the pirate show and walked in no particular direction up the street, and kept walking.

  Chapter 20

  I detest Alex, don’t you? I didn’t want to mention it, at first, but I can’t keep quiet any longer. What sort of a hero does he think he is?

  The self-pity! The petulance! And so wet. He didn’t want Carey for Carey. He wanted Carey because he couldn’t think of anything else to want. But really he didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted someone to save him from the awful monotonousness of being Alex.

  I was hoping to like him, but I’ve run out of patience. Poor Carey! It’s not her fault she doesn’t want to marry her drippy English boyfriend. He could have been kind to her. Now she’s feeling wretched and he’s off in another of his self-absorbed little tantrums. And Carey did love him, enough, in her way. But she knew that if she said yes he’d think that was the end. She didn’t want to be his rescuer, his mother, the person who was to blame for his happiness, a bit part in his small life.

  Bree would hate him too, I think, if she knew him. Bree, like Sherman, believes we make our own luck. She may be wrong about that. Not as wrong as Sherman, mind – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. But wrong nonetheless. At least she knows what she’s doing, though. She works. She keeps her head down. She tries to make amends. She has some discipline – now, at least, she does. She even thought she could help Jones.

  Alex has none of Bree’s discipline. Carey is suffering, sitting back there in the bar in Treasure Island, crying, while the hard woman who served the champagne and didn’t even get a tip, calls her honey and asks her if she wants to talk. She wants to talk.

  This is Alex’s fault. Alex made all of this happen, by doing nothing. By allowing himself to feel only what he thought he ought to feel, by faking it, by truly knowing he wanted her only when she wasn’t part of his story.

  Alex made all this happen. And now he’s going to have to suffer through it.

  The anger faded from Alex as he walked, and the coldness, and in it a peculiar ache took hold. He looked at all the neon and felt a loneliness that carried, somewhere at the heart of it, its own thrill.

  That was that. He walked up the Strip, wondering what to do. He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to his hotel. And the Strip was so long and so full of people, the buildings so massive. Everything was heavy here.

  He walked for a long time, waiting at intersections for the sign to say ‘Walk’ and then walking across, and walking to the next huge intersection and waiting for the sign to say ‘Walk’. He kept going, up out past the big hotels. A guy came forward and tried to give him a free glossy magazine. He ignored him.

  On the pavement there were cigarette butts, glossy flyers for shows, glossy flyers for girls. Massage and escort. Glossy orange breasts, white smiles, gaudy typefaces, phone numbers, phone numbers, phone numbers. Fake photographs, real phone numbers.

  Up ahead he could see a slim concrete tower, bone white, rising from the other side of the Strip. It seemed to go half a mile into the sky. At the top, some sort of observation deck pulsed with light, and as he looked, tiny wheels rotated and swung over the edge and back again. A red light shot up the spire above the observation deck and shuddered back down. Fairground rides, he realised – people allowing themselves a moment or two of the fear of falling, the fear of acceleration, the fear of surrendering control.

  Alex kept walking. Further ahead, another blurt of neon: a pair of hearts knitting and unknitting unceasingly, a white cross: a wedding chapel. He needed to be away from here. He took one of the roads off the Strip and walked down it, away from the people and the lights, and when he saw a shabby-looking bar he went into it and sat down.

  There was a long bar, a pool table, a jukebox and a funk of smoke. The walls were entirely covered in beer mats and most of what light there was came from old neon on the walls, a green crown-cap bottle the size of a baseball bat and a red horse with a yellow cowboy on it.

  ‘What?’ said the barman.

  ‘Whiskey, please,’ said Alex, and regretted the ‘please’.

  ‘Up?’

  ‘Sorry? Oh. Yeah. Please.’

  Alex put ten dollars down, and necked the whiskey while the barman brought him his change. It was bourbon, and it gave his throat a sweet scald. He coughed. He put a single dollar bill on the bar for a tip
and asked for another.

  The barman scratched his neck, poured it, watched Alex drink the second. Alex wasn’t used to drinking shots – he didn’t normally even like whiskey much, and bourbon less – and a swimmy calm descended on him. He was playing at being someone else. Drinking hard was what you were supposed to do, he thought, in these circumstances.

  He had a third, more slowly after a moment of reflux made him gag, and then the fourth was on the house. Alex stared glassily across the bar at the bottles, and behind the mirror in which he could see his own dark reflection, and tried to think about what had happened.

  He had been shocked. Now the shock was thawing into shame. Why had he been angry at Carey? It hadn’t been her fault. He was mouthing to himself. He’d just sprung it on her. She was shocked. And then he’d reacted instantly, and in the worst way – But the pity, that was what got to him. The look of sadness on her face. That was what had humiliated him. She looked sorry for him. He couldn’t stand to be around her, and that was tough shit on her. What was she thinking of? Coming to Las Vegas with him. She’d come to dump him. That was – Christ, no wonder she’d been embarrassed. What a fucking, fucking idiot. Nice one, Smart. Simpering. The ring. The whole thing. If she’d had any sort of courage she’d have dumped him by text message.

  Even in pain, Alex noted, he was still more than capable of feeling the sting of embarrassment.

  All that remained to do was to pick up his humiliation and go home. Pay off the car. Pawn the ring – well, he couldn’t exactly recycle it, could he? He barked mirthlessly. And then he thought of going to a pawn shop and handing it over for a few dollars. He liked the hurting tawdriness of it. Or just throw it in a bin.

  But he loved her! Some small abject part of him wailed. He couldn’t get round that. And never more so, he thought, than now. Just the thought of her skin made a lump come to his throat. What if he went back? This could be just a row. They could just forget about it. He rehearsed that thought without sincerity.

  He ordered another whiskey, and was just leaving the tip on the bar when his phone leaped in his pocket and his stomach fell through the seat of his chair. Carey? He pulled it out. No. Not Carey. A text message.